Michael Lind on how to restore worker power

In today’s episode I’m talking to Michael Lind. He is a writer and academic and the author of many books, such as The New Class War: saving democracy from the metropolitan elite (Portfolio 2020), which I highly recommend. His latest book just came out and it’s called Hell to pay: How the Suppression of Wages Is Destroying America (Portfolio 2023). It’s a damning book of the last decades of neoliberalism and the myths that turned out to be lies, and of promises never kept.

Today we mainly discuss the themes of these two books: how a democratic pluralism has been replaced by technocratic neoliberalism, about the overclass which comprises around 15 percent of the population but amass almost all power today, how come there are so many working poor in the United states and why welfare isn’t helping the problem. We also talk about why automation can’t explain the offshoring of American, and European, manufacturing industries, and how identity politics and immigration has been weaponized to curtail workers bargaining power.

We also talk about his Swedish heritage from Småland and how his Swedish ancestors ended up as cotton-pickers and cowboys in Texas. 

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