Nouriel Roubini: The Main Street Manifesto

Nouriel Roubini publishes The Main Street Manifesto.

The precariat is the contemporary version of Karl Marx’s proletariat: a new class of alienated, insecure workers who are ripe for radicalization and mobilization against the plutocracy (or what Marx called the bourgeoisie). This class is growing once again, now that highly leveraged corporations are responding to the COVID-19 crisis as they did after 2008: taking bailouts and hitting their earnings targets by slashing labor costs.

One segment of the precariat comprises younger, less-educated white religious conservatives in small towns and semi-rural areas who voted for Trump in 2016. They hoped that he would actually do something about the economic “carnage” that he described in his inaugural address. But while Trump ran as a populist, he has governed like a plutocrat, cutting taxes for the rich, bashing workers and unions, undermining the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and otherwise favoring policies that hurt many of the people who voted for him.

Emphasis Mine

Roubini accepts Marx's class analysis, and that Trump is a right-wing populist who has betrayed his base. Indeed, he echoes the famous lines in his conclusion:

The new proletariat – the precariat – is now revolting. To paraphrase Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto: “Let the Plutocrat classes tremble at a Precariat revolution. The Precarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Precarious workers of all countries, unite!”

Roubini forgets that the proletariat in Marx's day had a precarious existence. It was only through the struggle of unions against brutal oppression by the bosses, that a measure of certainity in the lives of workers was achieved. The neo-liberal assault of the past 40 years has eroded most of those gains.