Workers internalize capitalist values and accept precarity as deserved

Evidence

Capitalism’s ubiquity today can make criticizing or even observing capitalism seem quaint. Aft er all, we have internalized its teachings to the point that our values and beliefs are largely aligned with those that are functional to capital accumulation. It is all so embedded that today a majority of American workers can live paycheck to paycheck with little to no social insurance and still largely accept that their position is one they deserve; the country’s wealthy, meanwhile, benefi t from a seeming national allergy to any form of even mild tax reform that would shift more tax burden to the wealthy. Th e current landscape is quite diff erent from the one technocrats were confronting in 1919, but the two are most certainly connected. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 63

Categorization

• XREF: Strong direct link to modern austerity/neoliberalism — exactly the reader’s stated bridging purpose. — connects to: Capitalism calibrates incentives to make workers risk death for subsistence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 194; Burning Man’s radical values were co-opted into justifications for precarious labor — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 140; Marx’s general intellect can empower capital’s appropriation of social life, not only liberate workers. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 794 (+10 more)
• SEED: Potential essay: how the internalization of capitalist values is the endpoint of the technocratic project begun in 1919.

Broader Connections

• Workers accept precarity as natural because dismissal feels synchronous and arbitrary #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 756
• Working class people rationalize the status quo through meritocratic beliefs #expands (0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2232
• Late capitalist life forces individuals to identify with the power that oppresses them #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 116