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.

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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.

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ABC News: Getting people to follow coronavirus restrictions is harder the second time around

Getting people to follow coronavirus restrictions is harder the second time around.

The research also examined factors that predicted who was most likely to comply with restrictions.

The two primary predictors were feelings of "duty to obey the government" and "personal morality".

Simply, people were most compliant if they felt a stronger duty to obey government instructions, and if they thought it was morally wrong to flout the rules. These findings suggest social norms, rather than fear of COVID-19, motivated compliance the most.

The findings also revealed age and gender both had a bearing, with older participants and women being more likely to comply.

Those who perceived a greater health risk from COVID-19 were also more willing to follow the rules, as well as those who felt there was a higher risk of being caught and fined for breaking them. However, these factors were nowhere near as important as feelings of duty to obey or personal morality.

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The survey referred to is described in "Morals, duty or risk?: Examining predictors of compliance with COVID-19 social distancing restrictions". The implication for policy is:

Authorities often rely on sanctions such as fines and arrests to enforce laws (this has also occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic to enforce social distancing restrictions). However, our findings suggest that while sanction risk predicts compliance, authorities cannot rely solely on legal sanctions to force compliance. Authorities need to continue to persuade citizens that it is both morally right to abide by the restrictions and that we all have a duty to protect those most vulnerable to the disease. In other words, people should be asked to obey the COVID-19 social distancing restrictions because they have a moral responsibility to act to protect others.

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This is a searing indictment of Capitalism. That moral responsibility has to be urged upon people implicates Capitalaism as being an amoral system. A personal morality is not expected of people in a Capitalist system.

We need to envision and create a political and economic system that encourages and rewards personal morality and responsibility.

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