Macro Models, the Grapes of Wrath, and COVID-19

With the COVID-19 pandemic in the background, I have been trying to think of how all the social orders have been upset and what the post pandemic world will look like. In parallel, I have been revisiting some fiction I read when I was younger. The whole thing has made me more distractible and narrowed my bandwidth, but I started Piketty’s new book the week it came out, but the problem was that it coincided with the rise of the pandemic into full blow consciousness of something that was happening here. All of the pre-pandemic economic texts will also have to be evaluated with the lens of the pandemic. And we still are in the process of whatever it might be. It looked initially that there might be a sense of solidarity that grew out of this, but it soon has devolved that the best we can do is survive in spite of all those who would want us to not survive. We have to hope that the institutions are not too degraded.

It has made me more melancholy, and this is most likely not helped by my choices of fiction to get through all time at home. I started with Camus’s the Plague and have been reading the Grapes of Wrath. Camus brought to mind the need for survival, and how capricious and random that survival is. We can do what we can to limit our exposure, but the plague comes for us all. Steinbeck has in many ways felt more relevant than our Algerian friend since what the Grapes of Wrath is about first and foremost is the death of the American Dream in two different senses. In the first sense, it is about community and the sense of place you have by growing crops on your land and losing that to the banks and other forces out of your control but then it is also about the false Edens that we are presented with. California of the Joads was supposed to be a place that they would get to at the end of the road and be able to eat grapes falling at them from the left and right.

But there is no garden of Eden in California or elsewhere. What the Joads find is hundreds of thousands of people just like them, wanting to do work and everyone else in the same boat. The people thus fight for scraps and sheer survival. But we also see the attitude of the California natives, themselves only a generation or two removed from their own migration. They hate the Okies. They hate the Okies because their suffering shows in stark light the immiseration that their own lifestyles depend on to be supported. There’s hate for the outsiders going way back in America. Their poverty brings us disgust and hate because we do not admit to ourselves that we are very close to having that suffering brought upon us. Steinbeck has a character say that he is able to live on fifteen dollars a day, then what is stopping the bosses from offering an Okie twelve dollars an hour? The worry about the race to the bottom is real.
This does not happen in a vacuum though. We see it today not just in anti-Hispanic racism, but also the urge to open the economy quickly. It is not about the need to work, but the desire to increase the suffering of those seen as lesser. If you are poor or a minority or working class in the service industry, your humanity is discounted by overweight people in shiny late model Ford pick up trucks.

Photo by Max Andrey from Pexels

This is how it always has been. If you look at the models we have examined in this class, the implication is that individual militancy is destructive. In Grapes of Wrath, there is a scene where a labor contractor comes into an impromptu camping site where a lot of families are gathered on the edge of a town, colloquially called a “Hooverville”. The contractor tells the assembled mass that there is work and they should all come. One of the men stands up and asks to sigh a contract for promise of work and a set pay rate, asking for his basic rights as a man to be respected. Then the contractor goes back to the car and aa deputy sheriff comes out and is prepared to arrest the man who stood up for his rights if ever so briefly. Steinbeck wrote fiction but the scene made me think of all those scenes in labor history that do not make the pages of the history books that are taught in school – from Haymarket Square to Ludlow Colorado. What is a common denominator in these situations is that agents of the state either directly took part or were neutral as the Rockefeller or Carnegie sent thugs at workers who stood up for their rights?

The bias of the state towards capital was not just in the past. More recent research shows that you only get your way in the statehouse or in Washington if your preferences align with those of the rich. There may be direct influence because of need of politicians to keep their jobs thus the money spigot needs to stay turned on, or it may simply be affinity of those in power to either be of the upper classes or to want to be part of that crew sometime. We live in a democracy but are ruled by millionaires. Simultaneously to this, we have seen demonization of minorities to an ongoing propaganda campaign to make sure people do not look at structural factors but remain atomized. Success or failure in America is seen as a personal and moral judgment on the person and the rules of the game that are being played are ignored. As Warren Buffet has said, there is a class war in America, and his class is winning.

What is to be done then? We see in economic models from Goodwin, Beveridge, Marx, Robinson, and Blanchard that show individual militancy either will just increase inflation like Blanchard or will decrease the average rate of employment like Goodwin. Working as an individual or a singular bargaining unit or setting up a cooperative organization does not transcend the logic of capitalism because you are still working under these rules. Ultimately if we remain in thrall of capitalism as an economic system we need to go back to the words Marx and Engels wrote in 1848, “Workers of all lands unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”. The question then comes if we can accomplish all that, so we end up with the best solution in the game theoretic outcome Mehrling outlines, why is the working class happy to allow the existence of a capitalist class? It sets the stage for a move beyond these models and into a post capitalism.

The problem is in creating that worker unification. So many people of the working class have bought into the idea that the current system is the best of all possible systems, even if they are directly victimized by the system. It takes an act of political imagination to move beyond the existing ideology and into one where they can take power. In America it ranges from an allegiance to the state since the idea of America has been so successfully wedded to the existing economic structure, and combined with a distrust of all bureaucracies that the idea of a worker organization would just relocate all the bad things about the existing state. This is where I get back to my melancholy. The Okies in California were white Americans, and they were still able to be seen as an other. They were outsiders by creation, and by necessity as in crisis there was an us and a them – artificial identities that became very real. We are in the midst of our own crisis, one making the last one seem quaint. From the ashes of that one rose the Tea Party and Trumpism in America. I know what needs to be done, but I don’t know how to make it so, and that’s what frightens me, as destruction and hate seem to be much easier than solidarity and building a new world. This is especially true when the state is not neutral