21
votes
The United States needs a third Reconstruction; whatever its shape, the era ahead must rekindle the aspiration of a nation molded in the ideal of perfect equality that we have always seeked
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- Title
- The United States Needs a Third Reconstruction
- Authors
- Wilfred Codrington III
- Published
- Jul 20 2020
- Word count
- 2298 words
I well and truly believe in color-blindness of the law. The law should treat everyone as equals, but the issue is that the vast majority of our laws are not (at least functionally speaking), especially since they rest on a foundation of policy that was explicitly racist.
So, in order to rectify these problems, we must look through the lense of the oppressed, and bring them to equality by eliminating their problems. Many of which can be colorblind.
Colorblind solutions to systemic racism:
Yes, I do realize the last three of these are going to be virtually impossible to implement shy of a full revolution. But they're also some of the most critical, as the greatest disparity is the collective economic repression and wealth built up over generations of racist policy.
This smells a lot like actual, real communism. And not the kind where American right-wingers scream communism because someone doesn't want to go into crippling medical debt, but actual communism. No I mean the kind of communism half of Europe got to know quite intimately as satellite states of the USSR.
How do you guarantee a job? What if there just isn't enough work? How do you build a framework to take that wealth away? Who redistributes it? Who controls the people redistributing it? And what if the people in control don't care about doing the right thing, or their idea differs from yours? We've done this not so long ago, and it lead to massive failures.
I don't think the jobs guarantee belongs squarely within the category of communism. There are plenty of state capitalist nations that implement a jobs guarantee or monetary policy that seeks full employment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee
Leveling off wages is what my highschool econ professor taught that socialists believed. Everyone is familiar with the objections to this, I've never encountered anyone (socialist or otherwise) who actually endorses it. Surprised to see it on this list.
But your cited job guarantee isn't even one, as it only guarantees a job per family, not for everyone. I don't know which form OP meant but judging by his other points, I'd guess he meant it for everyone. That being said, the problems remain: Do you force business to employ more people that they need? Do you just found state-owned business and employ people there?
Hence my referring this to actual communist policies, because a median wage is communist, not socialist and together with the fact that everyone had work it was one of the central pillars of the communist era on the other side of the iron curtain, and it usually ended with five people making you a coffee in a state-owned chain, because everything was owned by the state.
Because it was a time when one job per family was the norm and possible to sustain the family. Full employment is a job for everyone that wants one.
And frankly, we should return to the days where only one full-time is needed to sustain a family.
The benefits of having a parent at home are tremendous. We should be encouraging this, not punishing it.
91 hours?? Is that thirteen hours a day?? What field are you in?? Obviously a great big reset button is a hard sell but I can't imagine what you're doing that that schedule would be necessary. Is the idea just that you work more than any of your peers, so you're more valuable? That seems like a terrible race to run..
Really though, what field are you in? I'm genuinely curious how you came into that particular self-sacrifice:get-ahead ratio. Did you design this schedule yourself or were you hired into it?
Oil. More specifically (if I've read the text correctly), checking the drills' apparel so that when they send them drilling for said petroleum, they can get all the data back.
I have so many questions about this deal. Why are those processes organized into thirteen hour shifts? Are there only two capable people available? Is it especially grueling work? This sounds like an extremely exotic strategy for accruing wealth..
Thanks for the thorough response. I thought you were claiming to have worked 91 hours every week, but alternated on/off weeks sounds vastly more endurable. This still seems exotic to me, given the rarefied technical education you describe having had to absorb to be eligible for such a post. I don't really recognize the "bootstraps" or "getting ahead" language, but obviously you're in for all you're worth so who am I to contradict the point that of course you wouldn't like to lose out on the wealth you would need to have been guaranteed to bother.
Essentially...yes. We are living in a nation that was built on the back of genocide, imperialism, and slavery (still practicing in many ways). The systemic economic inequality plays a major role in that because white people have been disproportionately been given better opportunities to succeed and build wealth for themselves and their heirs.
70% of the workforce make less than annual median wage. Let that sink in for a moment.
I'm proposing that 30% of workers sacrifice so that 70% can be brought up to median. A full 25% of workers are making less than $25k annually, which is abhorrently low.
Nobody's work is more or less valuable than anybody else's. Time is our most precious resource, and we should be striving as a society to do as little work as possible, and instead focus on enjoying life.
Obviously the author refers to the civil rights movement as a reconstruction too, since most, if not practically all of the progress done by Lincoln and his lot was undone after the 1876 elections when Jim Crow and literacy tests were reinstated as a form of slavery. This is talked about in the article.