Suzanne Kryder Interviews Dr. Tina Wright, Sociology, LA Southwest College

SK: Is there conflict in the U.S. among classes and if so, how would you describe that conflict?

TW: There is definitely social class conflict in the United States and everywhere around the globe actually. I’m not sure who believes that there is no conflict. When we look at objective reality, social facts, it plays out in many different ways.

I would say it comes down to who controls; who has control of resources of systems of structures. They’re able to make the rules and usually make the rules to benefit themselves.

In sociology, we discuss a lot about social facts and there is research for decades that shows the different kinds of ways social class plays out in our lives and class conflict.

SK: Let me give you three possibilities of how this conflict is experienced. It could be felt internally only, or it could be expressed externally, or it could be both internal and external. What do you think?

TW: Well class conflict is felt and expressed in both external and internal ways.

In sociology, we would call it internalization; people becoming stuck in situations and not really knowing how to get out of them and not having the resources. In that way, it can be considered internal, but I would focus much more on the external ways that we see social class affected in our lives. We see it every day when we see poverty and homelessness. We see it with those not having to worry about material resources versus those that can barely sustain themselves day to day.

It plays out in other ways. The system of scapegoating and trying to maintain the situation... where blame is put on certain groups instead of really the structure systems that have created it.

There are different ways that class conflict plays out. We can see it in violent conflicts, we can see it in internalization (as I said before). We can see it in really the way that most people are experiencing their material reality.

SK: I’m not seeing people fighting on the street, that kind of violence. Do you think that’s going to happen?

TW: I do think that it’s always a possibility if people get desperate enough. Basically, conflict theory, social conflict theory discusses competition over resources and in this case, resources that are controlled and hoarded by a very small percentage can lead to an unsustainable underclass. It is always possible.

I’ve been reading and researching and seeing a lot of think tanks looking for alternatives because they know that the system as it is right now in terms of inequality is unsustainable. They’re looking at things like worker cooperatives and ways to make the economic and social systems more equitable and controlled by more people instead of just the 1% or very few.

SK: Tina, is it natural to have these kinds of conflicts among classes? It seems natural to have different classes.

TW: I would say that it’s not natural. I do believe that there is a self-interest aspect of society that you could call “natural” where people have survival instincts and take care of themselves and the people around them, but class itself is what we would call a “social construct.” Having an economic system is a social construct. It’s something that we’ve created and in creating it, we have created systems that basically are inherently unequal.

For example, capitalism is a system of people/owners versus people who work for them and that is an unequal relationship, an unequal control of resources. Those are all social constructs. I would never call them “natural.” I do think that people have tendencies to take care of themselves and have self-interests and that part would be natural, but all the systems and structures we’ve created are basically social constructs that could have been created differently.

SK: How could they have been created?

TW: Well, we could look to what our values are. Do we want to value a cultural with ecology, equitability, a sustainable society and environment over things like wealth, riches in terms of money and those types of things? It really comes down to values and what we value in society. We could create something very different if we switch our priorities and value things differently.

SK: I know you’re not an economist, you’re a sociologist, but I’m curious, is it possible to really create economic equality?

TW: Yes. It’s very difficult in more complex societies where you have so many different interests and you have to have people doing different types of works and doing jobs that don’t always seem equal.

For example, a lot of times sociologists will discuss what doctors do and how they have to be trained versus a job that doesn’t have the same amount of training. There you get some inequality, but at the same time, the system itself can reward people that do different jobs similarly. The fact that doctors or entertainers or whoever makes so much money is really something that could be changed and created more equitably so that it’s not all concentrated in the hands of a few but spread out throughout society.

When we look at different countries, the level of inequality can be very different. In some companies, corporate managers and CEOs don’t make nearly as much as they do in comparison to the U.S. compared to their workers.

One way that it can be changed is that we can have workers making as much or similar to the amount of money as the CEO of the company. Those are things that are value systems. Are we going to put the effort into making those types of equitable decisions?

SK: Are there other things that individuals can do? I’m thinking about our listeners. Is there anything that they can do to bring about solutions?

TW: Absolutely! In my college class, I’ve developed an applied learning portfolio where I am teaching students advocacy skills. For every listener, advocacy is critical, and you can do it in many different ways.

Also, supporting what supports you and what supports the kind of system that you want to see and divesting from those that don’t is also critical. Organize, organize, organize! If you’re not part of some organization, join one and make sure you follow the organization and support the work that they do because that’s where we’re going to see the transformation of social structures and systems that aren’t benefitting everyone and that exasperate social inequality and class conflict.

SK: I know there’s lot of intersectionality, Dr. Wright, with class, ethnicity, gender. It’s a confusing topic. I sat next to a guy on a plane a few weeks ago and I was reading a book called White Fragility and he said, “I hate identity politics because that really pushes us apart and creates conflict.” What’s your response?

TW: That is actually not what pushes us apart. Those that control everything and have others basically just surviving trying to make ends meet is what pushes us apart. Racism pushes us apart. Sexism pushes us apart. Homophobia pushes us apart.
I would say that everyone has an identity but sometimes the mainstream, those that have been centered don’t actually see their identity. If anything, when I look at politics now, a lot of white identity is being used in the way of white nativism, they just don’t call it identity politics because they’ve had the benefit of being centered.

What I would say is that basically, everyone has some identity and if you look at intersectionality, it makes sense to understand that, for example, a middle class black woman and a poor black woman, they might have the blackness and being a woman in common but their experiences might be very different based on their class perspective.

Intersectionality is really an important theoretical lens in order to really understand people’s experiences, how our lived experiences matter and how they’re very different depending on these different identities.

SK: Tina, Karl Marx talked about conflict theory. He said that it’s never-ending and that the workers are always going to be revolting against that person in power. He also said that it would take really dramatic change to make an economy that works for everybody. What’s your response to that theory?

TW: I do think that there is something to this struggle that continues. There is always going to be the possibility that some will want to have more power and be greedier.

Marx also talked about the importance of class consciousness and understanding the system. The more conscious we are about it, the more empowered we become. I do feel like it can change. It has changed and will continue to change. It will evolve and continue to change, but to get to where we want to get to, it will have to be very transformational. The economic systems that we know today will not ever show us the type of equity that we want to see, so we need to move towards things like cooperatives.

SK: When you mention class consciousness, I think, I’m a skinny white woman. I can control where I go. I can go to the grocery store, the post office and hang out with other older, skinny white women. How is class consciousness going to keep changing and what can our listeners do to make a change?

TW: I use this example in class often. I talk about Walmart and the Waltons and how they take up a few spots on the list of top richest in the country. I give my students the understanding that without the workers that make the products, the workers who work at Walmart or people who shop there, there is no Walmart. That’s the consciousness I’m talking about; understanding that there really is just us. When we come more to that understanding and understand our power in the system, we will see a number of changes; people taking their own power and it having an effect. That’s the way we’ll get to where we want to be.

SK: Like protesting in the streets and making noise?

TW: I believe it’s all of the above. We have to do all of the above. When it’s necessary to protest, protest, but I think also the daily choices we make in terms of what we invest and divest in, where we put our energy, who we organize with, who we support in terms of organizations, all of that will create the change that we want to see.

Mass mobilization is definitely a big part of it and has brought us some of the changes that we’ve been able to experience.

SK: I’m loving this mass mobilization. Then I think about people in power who may have opposing views to people who are protesting. What’s it going to take for all of us to collaborate peacefully?

TW: I think one of the things it will take is really dealing with issues of white supremacy in our society. Basically, 95%+ of this country in particular are working class, living day to day and the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few, but we’re unable to organize because of issues across things like racism, sexism, homophobia, white supremacy. When we deal with those things and really root them out, we can start to build a class consciousness across those identities but until then, basically we’re going to be pitted against one another, there will be groups scapegoated. That’s what the elite use to keep power. If we want to get more power out of the hands of the elite and spread it more evenly across society, we’re going to have to organize, not only just our groups but all groups that have that in common.

SK: It’s important for groups to organize. Is there anything else that can help deconstruct white supremacy?

TW: I do believe that a lot of the work that needs to be done is in people that have benefitted from not just white supremacy but denial.

Most people have probably read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time where it talks about until we consciously understand and work together, we’re not going to be able to overcome this nightmare of our history. We have to first accept history, but then go from there to build a new society.

I believe that it’s not really up to the oppressed, whether it’s class oppression or what have you, but it’s for those who have benefitted from the system as is, the status quo. Are they ready to be more just, to be more equitable or are they going to hold onto power by any means necessary and possibly destroy the country?

Suzanne Kryder Interviews Nick Hanauer, Entrepreneur, host of the Pitchfork Economics podcast

SK: I’m going to call you a rich person. I don’t know how you feel about that, but do other rich people agree with you?

NH: Some, yeah, sure. A growing number of rich people agree with me.

When I first started talking about economic inequality more than ten years ago, it made almost everyone I knew angry because it felt like an attack that to them seemed unfair.

Today, most reasonable wealthy people recognize that growing economic inequality is a problem and we have to find ways to address it.

There are a bunch of other wealthy people who are working hard to try to change these dynamics. My friend Paul Tudor Jones spun up an organization called JUST Capital. Chris Hughes, one of the Facebook founders, is actively working to try to address these issues. There are a ton of very wealthy people who are working hard to try to change this, but it’s certainly not the majority.

The economic policies that have produced these outcomes are deeply entrenched and it will take a lot of time and a new political consensus to change them.

SK: Our program is about peace, Peace Talks Radio, so I want to ask you about peaceful solutions. You mentioned starting an organization with your friends. What else are some possible peaceful solutions?

NH: Democracy is a peaceful solution to society’s problems. Democracy is the best way that human societies have yet found to adjudicate their differences.

The American people need to come together and elect representatives that will truly represent their economic interests.
The truth is that over the last 40 years, for some bad and some, I wouldn’t call them good reasons, but at least not nefarious reasons, both political parties in our country were hijacked by neoclassical economic thinking and neoliberalism. It was not just Republicans and conservatives, but Democrats also who enacted economic policies that enriched the few and impoverished the many.

President Obama had strong majorities at the beginning of his first term. He could have doubled the minimum wage, but he chose not to. He could have raised the overtime threshold but chose not to. He could have given unions more power by helping to reform our labor laws but chose not to. I could list 100 things.

I am a Democrat, but our party was captured by these neoliberal ideas too. As a consequence, we enacted as a democracy, policies that made rich people richer and everyone else poorer while being told by academic economists that it was all going to work out and everybody would be better off. That turned out to be either just wrong or a lie.

We have now dug ourselves a deep hole and we’re going to have to dig out way out. That will require a new kind of economic and political thinking. There is no reason that that transition from a neoliberal world to a better world be violent. We can very easily simply elect sensible people who will raise labor standards and tax rich people appropriately and reform our healthcare system so that it’s not just one giant price fixing scheme. These transitions do not have to be violent. They are common sense and broadly popular. We just have to get it done.

SK: When you say, “elect sensible people,” I’ve heard that politics is run by wealthy people, even the Democrats. Is that true?

NH: I’m of two minds about that. I am a very large political giver, but these guys will never do what I want them to do.

SK: People are like that.

NH: It is undeniable that money has a huge influence on politics, but at the end of the day, we still have a functioning democracy and if ordinary people make their voices heard, they will get the democracy that they want.

I often am challenged in the way that you just have. Having worked on the frontlines of this fight for a decade, what I think is really important for folks to understand is that even the people they thought were on their side got confused about economics and economic policy. Even Democrats who theoretically should have been on the side of workers, really did believe because they took economics courses in college which taught them this, that if you raise wages, it will kill jobs. Therefore, to raise the minimum wage threatens the health the economy. That turns out to be a straight up lie. That’s just objectively false, but it is what people were taught in school for a really long time.

To a certain extent, I have seen the enemy and it is us. We all collectively deserve blame for that. You may or may not know that I was part of the gang of people who did the $15 minimum wage. When we first started talking about that in 2012, even the people on our side thought we had lost our minds.

There is a lot more that can be done if people think about the problems in the right way.

SK: The $15 minimum wage you’re talking about was in Seattle, correct?

NH: The $15 minimum wage started in Seattle, but now affects about 30 to 40 million workers. It’s the law of the land in California and New York State, Washington State and a whole bunch of other places. We have taken that policy idea and propagated it across the country.

My point being all of the academic economists, whether they were right-leaning or left-leaning thought that if you imposed a $15 minimum wage that Seattle among other things would fall into the Pacific Ocean! It’s just not true!

SK: You have a podcast called Pitchfork Economics.

NH: I do.

SK: What is pitchfork economics? Explain how wealthy people do not run the economy.

NH: Pitchfork Economics is our teams podcast devoted to explaining to folks how economics really works. The point is that if you don’t get economics right, the pitchforks come out.

We have laid out all of the economic principles and ideas that frame up our understanding of how our capitalist economy does or should work. We’re trying to explain to people where we went wrong and how we can set it right and build a market economy that benefits everybody, where everybody wins when the economy wins.

SK: Explain how wealthy people don’t keep things running. Many people believe the wealthy people will keep everything going.

NH: Well, that’s not true. An economy is like an ecology and you could analogize to lions. Lions are the king of the jungle and it’s convenient and easy to believe that they are the most important thing in that ecology because they sit at the top.
This would be very sad, but if all the lions in the world went extinct, the world’s ecosystems would continue to survive. The thing that is at the bottom of that food chain are plankton and if all the plankton die, then we’re all dead.

A human economy is much like that. Yes, there are rich people who play an important role perhaps in running a company or whatever it is, but it’s the middle class that makes the economy go because if people don’t buy stuff then no one makes stuff and if no one makes stuff then there are no jobs. The true job creators in a market economy are middle class consumers and when they thrive, that’s the thing that drives business.

The most pro-business thing you can do as a matter of policy in a market economy is ensure that middle class families are doing well.

SK: Nick, I know you’ve worked on the frontline for over a decade. I’m curious how you did that. When I told people that I was going to interview a wealthy person for this program on Class Conflict, I got eye-rolling, face crunching and worse. There are a lot of 99%ers who hate wealthy people, which is confusing. Our culture says you should be rich. Tell me a few things you did to collaborate with people who had different values and different incomes. What did you do?

NH: Well, I stopped running companies and started devoting all of my time, energy and resources to civic, political and philanthropic things. I don’t run companies anymore. I run a civic enterprise called Civic Ventures. All I do is work on these things like the $15 minimum wage. The overtime threshold is another key part of our activities right now. My team runs all the gun violence politics in the State of Washington. We work on homelessness and housing affordability and all sorts of other things like that. That’s just what I do now. It’s my job.

SK: So you don’t get angry at these people who are saying, “No, we shouldn’t do that.”

NH: Angry at who?

SK: Other wealthy people.

NH: I get super angry, yes. I get very angry at them a lot.

SK: What do you do when you get angry?

NH: I beat them.

SK: Oh, you beat them. Not physically.

NH: I run campaigns and beat them. Yes, I’m really good at that.

SK: You’re the winner.

NH: A lot of my friends got really mad at us when we passed the $15 minimum wage.

SK: What would you tell our listeners? Our listeners are saying, “What can I do?” What would you tell our listeners they should be doing?

NH: Be involved. There are ten thousand things to be involved in. Every single one of your listeners should be involved in a local political project, whether it’s raising the minimum wage or raising the overtime threshold or reducing gun violence or paid family leave or reforming our healthcare system. There are ten thousand things that need doing. Every single one of those projects needs help and volunteers. Be involved! Put your shoulder to the wheel. That’s what democracy requires.

SK: What if they get bummed out and feel like it’s not working and want to give up?

NH: Don’t be a whiner! I have no sympathy! Of course, it’s hard and frustrating! That’s life! Keep going! I have no sympathy for whiners, I’m sorry. Just do it.

SK: I saw you on YouTube on BBC Hard Talk. You said, “Aspiration without legitimate opportunity creates anger, resentment and violence.”

NH: That’s right.

SK: Okay, but don’t people in the U.S. have legitimate opportunities to work hard and make lots of money?

NH: Not really. Of course, on a relative basis, we have more opportunity here in the United States than the folks do in the Congo or Haiti, but the truth is that our individual opportunities are framed by the structures of society.

The farther apart you stretch the rungs of opportunity, the harder it is for folks to move up that ladder. When CEO pay was 30 times the median worker’s salary, it was materially easier to move from working class to middle class to wealthy than it is when CEO is 500 times the median worker’s pay. Obviously, you have to move much farther.

One of the most insidious parts of neoliberalism as an ideology has been the way in which it has persuaded people that if you are poor, it is 100% your fault. If you are struggling, it’s only because you’re not working hard enough. It has nothing to do with the fact that your employer has power and has set your salary at a low level and you have no power and no ability to negotiate a different arrangement. That is the problem in the United States of America; folks aren’t paid enough, and they’re not paid enough because they’re not worth more. They’re not paid enough because they don’t have the power to negotiate more. That is the nut that we need to crack.

SK: And how do we do that?

NH: Politics, being involved, organization, building power.