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Worker and citizen maybe… consumer is more appropriate for the billionaire class as well.
Eh, I would describe the average student of today as consumers as well… I am one of em, and I do lit my consumption, but some of my friends are all day gamers, energy drinkers and Netflix hogs…
The word you’re looking for is citizen. Consumer has replaced it to take away political agency and replace it with capitalism.
I like consumer in this context because commodification and consumption are how people achieve this false solidarity with billionaires, as well as being a ground for exploitation. Even notions of personal identity are achieved through consumption of the associated products (and displaying you consume them).
Citizen is just a subject of a state, the entire class structure is composed of citizens of different positions in the political economy with competing interests. The worker and employer are both citizens but the relationship between them isn’t captured by that term.
I see your perspective and that you’ve thought through it. Makes sense to me!
Citizen definitely works for distinctions between state and it’s subjects
Steinbeck said it best when he said all Americans thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Good old American dream.
(before I begin my ramble, I understand this is pedantic as hell and nitpicky af. Please know that I’m not calling this meme bad, I’m only looking for someone who is willing to be pedantic about definitions with me for a few rounds or so.)
What exactly does “false solidarity” mean? What exactly is this particular understanding of solidarity either? To my knowledge (aka, I googled it to ensure my vibe check of what solidarity meant was about right), solidarity is something you feel and are essentially motivated to solidarity actions by. To feel it is to experience it, which means, by my understanding of what solidarity is, the term “false solidarity” seems nonsensical.
Like I know what you’re saying, I agree, the effect is that the worker works against his own interest for the betterment of the upper classes, but this phrasing seems… I don’t know exactly how to put it, but like inexact in a way that can probably be and should probably be fixed.
I would just call it poisonous solidarity (intentionally avoiding virus/illness words though) or something that simultaneously implies that it’s externally put there by an external actor, it’s bad for you, it can hurt things and people around you, but it still is legitimate solidarity. Those actions those workers are taking, those votes that they’re casting, those are all real actions caused by real feelings. Implying the feelings themselves are false seems to me to be lazy and irrational at this point… If this were the late 1800s, that probably would be the best phrasing we had for this at the time, but language evolves and I don’t think this language is illustrative/metaphorical enough to accurately portray the mechanics that our current culture allows us to portray about subjects like this.
But again, I’m not the arbiter of what’s true, correct, or what actually should happen, so what do you people think?
