Gavin Mueller: Chicken Littles of the Right.

I don't know if this has happened to you, but often pieces others wrote make me feel jealous. Gavin Mueller's piece at Jacobin magazine (h/t David Ruccio) is a good example.

Commenting on The American Spectator (here and here) June issue (see below), Mueller makes many points I myself have made here and he adds many more I haven't made.

Poor rich people, how they suffer.

Among other things, Mueller mentions the so-called bourgeois morality, so popular of late. For personal reasons, however, I found this particularly noteworthy:

"When Marx undertook his analysis of capitalism, he sought to describe its internal laws and tendencies independent of any malice, greed, or hatred among individual owners. But the class system on which capitalism depends (unlike Piketty, Marx didn't argue that capitalism produced inequality, but that it started from it) produces a real loathing, and fear, of the poor on whom it relies." (here)

I've written about this. Indeed, Marx chose to leave malice, greed and hatred out of his analysis of the capitalists and capitalism itself (see here). But the truth is that same malice, greed and hatred are there and we (see here, or here) and ironically, Marx himself (see here, or here), are their targets.

Mueller concludes:

"Remember this: no matter how many country clubbers flip through Piketty's book, at bottom, the rich hate us. They disdain us. They mock us. And they fear us, even though the current balance of forces favors them overwhelmingly and sometimes 'common ruin of the contending classes' seems like an optimistic outcome.
"Yet I have to fall back on some advice I got as a kid: If the American Spectator wants to cry about class warfare, we should give them something to cry about."

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As if intended to prove Mueller right, The American Spectator scornfully replies: "Jacobin Magazine is the Best (Marxist) Show in Town"