Weekly Grounding #145
Democratic Party civil war; H-1B visas; Gates Foundation; proletarian minority; the new counterculture
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“The Democratic Civil War Is Over. The Progressives Won.”
At her eponymous Substack, Evan Barker argues that, “For years inside Democratic politics, progressive operatives have been underestimated, sometimes even looked down upon as ‘unserious’ and unable to build real electoral power. They’ve operated mainly on an island, building an entire ecosystem that functions outside of the main DNC apparatus.”
She continues: “But here’s what the establishment Democrats (and maybe even Republicans) do not realize—these progressives building power are not ‘crazy activists’ or Bluesky keyboard warriors; they are highly skilled and competent. They’ve now had a decade to get their shit together, learn from their mistakes, and build infrastructure—and that’s exactly what they’ve done. On top of all this, progressives are now backed by major Democratic donors, not just the grassroots, as they advertise.”
Barker observes that “Bernie and Mamdani-style candidates are actually a reflection of where most democratic voters ideologically are. Over the past decade, the establishment and the progressives have morphed into the same conglomerate, and with the loss of working-class voters, they’ve shifted further left on social issues to appease their mostly coastal, upper-middle-class, suburban, and college-educated base. The progressive insurgency is no longer an insurgency—it is increasingly becoming the Democratic Party itself. The establishment’s failures have created an opening, and progressives have spent years building the infrastructure to fill it.”
“The question is no longer whether progressives can take over the party,” she concludes. “It’s whether they can build a coalition broad enough to win back the voters Democrats have been losing for years—or whether they’ll inherit the same problems that weakened the establishment in the first place.”
For more on this topic, see my article, “The Populism-Industrial Complex,” published this week here on Handful of Earth.
“The Human Cost of H-1B Dream”
At The Hindu, Aditya Mani Jha reviews Tanul Thakur’s recent book, Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme. He writes that the book “balances the broader socio-political picture with the pleasures and urgencies of old-school narrative journalism” to mount a devastating critique of the H-1B system.
“As the subtitle indicates, the gaming of the H-1B system forms the crux of the book,” Jha writes. “But there is no one set of rogue players muddying the waters here. There are cynical American politicians lobbying to further deregulate the IT sector. There are desi consultancies which promise H-1B visas to poor Indian students—looting their money, making false job assurances, and breaking American law in six different ways on an average day. Sample this passage describing how the New Jersey-based IT firm 4M operated. It would immediately ‘bench’ newly arrived employees—IT industry jargon for having a job but no client work.”
Jha observes that the Wild Wild East “is exceptionally cautious and meticulous about its facts and figures—so much so that nearly a third of the pages are occupied by notes and the index. This is understandable, for this is a hot-button issue currently and one of the loudest talking points for Republicans and Democrats alike…Immigration-obsessed folks in both the U.S. and India would do well to read this book.”
For more on the H-1B visa system, see my essay, “I’m One of You Now.”
“The Rise and Fall of Financial Inclusion”
At The Dark Side of Development , David R. Whitehouse reports that “The Gates Foundation…plans to end support for financial inclusion in 2030. That’s much earlier than the public ‘sunset’ date of 2045 given by Bill Gates in May 2025 for winding down all foundation operations. Initiatives that will from 2030 be defunded include the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, an independent think-tank set up at the World Bank in Washington, and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), based in Malaysia.”
He notes that “the effects of financial services on economic poverty indicators, health and social outcomes were ‘small and inconsistent,’” according to the most rigorous meta-analysis of financial inclusion programs. “There was also no evidence for any positive changes in behaviour among people with new access to financial services…” '
So, “How did financial inclusion become so widely accepted as a policy aim despite the lack of a clear track record? The influence and spending power of the Gates Foundation were a major factor. Yet there seems no obvious reason to think that the lives of the very poor can be changed simply by making basic financial services available…The decision by the Gates Foundation to end financial inclusion support can be a positive moment if the policy debate now moves beyond the artificial parameters which the foundation set, and gives more space to other approaches. Locally developed alternatives to financial inclusion, some of which have histories longer than that of Western-style banking, need to get more attention.”
The idea that the free market can deliver better outcomes for the poor simply by providing basic financial products should now be laid to rest,” Whitehouse concludes. “The state must come back into the picture. Through their regulatory capacities, developing country states are the only actors with a realistic chance of limiting the harms of generalised micro-credit access. International organisations and donors can help by supporting the development of that regulatory capacity where it is insufficient.”
“Proletarian Minority”
In a brilliant piece of theory, Labour & Leisure takes stock of the British working class and the implications for working class organizing: “Today, services now account for around 85% of jobs and roughly 80% of output, with the two largest employing sectors being health and social work at about 13.5% of all jobs, and wholesale and retail at about 13%, with manufacturing down to roughly 9% of output and a similar share of employment, our domestic economy having shed the bulk of mid-century industrial labour that once stood at roughly a quarter of all labour performed. Health and social care is largely state-funded, drawing on redistributed pre-existing revenues rather than generating its own registrable surplus; in terms of retail, its share of value has already been realised elsewhere. Against all this stands the logistical-distributive section of the working-class which, per Logistics UK’s accounting, employs around 2.6 million people (roughly half that of health and social care), constituting 8% of the contemporary workforce.”
The piece argues that “logistics workers are, despite only making up 8% of the workforce in Britain, the inheritors of economic determination through the effects wrought by the withdrawal of their labour; no other element can claim the same level of fundamental economic determinacy, therefore positioning logistical workers as the legitimate inheritors of the category which Marx establishes as the working-class. Here we arrive at perhaps the fundamental scandal for contemporary Marxism: the productive proletariat, the revolutionary subject, has transitioned from the category of the mass, from the absolute majority of the population of the developed world, to a miniscule social minority who, in Britain, constitute a mere 8% of the workforce taken as a whole.”
“If we follow this assertion further we can see that what Marxists continue to call the ‘working-class’ doesn’t necessarily refer to a ‘class’ in any determinate sense; what is called ‘the class’ more so refers to a kind of politically-constituted coalition of various different ‘labour-power sellers’ cohered by a formal relation to the wage rather than by a common relationship to production. The docker, the carer, the warehouse picker, and the call-centre worker are united at the level of juridical category, but where they relate in terms of the production and realisation of value, each diverges immeasurably…I would wager Communism is still the politics of the working-class, but that it can’t any longer call itself the politics of the masses, and that our movement ought to proceed from this understanding, however difficult it might be to cast off the inheritances of the prior period.”
I wrote on a similar issue over a decade ago in an essay published at Idées Nouvelles Idées Prolétariennes and Counterpunch, entitled “Students, Workers, and the Specter of Surplus Value.”
“Writing All Night Long”
In a deeply insightful essay at The Republic of Letters, Patrick Jordan Anderson writes: “At the end of March, after months of searching for a suitable venue, I started a quiet overnight job at a transitional housing facility which allows me to commit more of my time to writing. My official duties are minimal, requiring mainly that I be awake in case one of our residents needs me, or in the less likely event that something more urgent should unfold. The arrangement frees me to put several hours each night into writing while still fulfilling my professional obligations.
“It was a bold maneuver, I’ll admit, to restructure the rhythm of my days around such an ostensibly useless endeavor,” he elaborates. “For one thing, a simple dentist appointment, oil change, or any of the usual errands which you’d normally run during standard business hours now require a degree of logistical foresight never previously necessary. But the back portion of the daily cycle, when the demands and distractions of the daylight hours recede and are replaced by a quiet stillness, opens possibilities for pursuits which have themselves come to occupy a peripheral status within the larger society which does not easily recognize their value.”
Anderson continues: “Often what it means to make a living doing intellectual work today is to subsist on the margins, either wholly outside the institutions that once sustained it, or by maintaining contact of the most tenuous sort: teaching part time on a contract basis, or picking up sporadic commissions wherever you can. More precisely, it often means not making a living doing intellectual work at all, but supporting it with income from other sources altogether. (I said earlier that I’m being paid as I write this, but they’re not paying me to write this.) It has become precarious, peripheral, and largely independent of the cultural edifices which formerly underwrote it and held it to rigorous standards. This is all to say that the intellectual life looks increasingly similar to the creative life, as it borrows strategies that have belonged to artists working outside of the official channels to create work intended to be something more than a mere consumer product.”
“The so-called ‘creator economy’ has existed for years,” he notes. “But as institutional decline approaches what feels like a point of final crisis, it’s now being required to take on new burdens and responsibilities which it can’t reasonably be expected to bear: in a word, to provide a stable home for the arts and for intellectual pursuits which uplifts and insulates them from the raw market forces that are inimical to the slow, unquantifiable, and often unpopular output of a culture’s best artists and thinkers.”
If in isolation my case amounts to little more than a singular curiosity, many such cases signify a cultural development of the first order. My colleagues in this eccentric endeavor don’t work in offices down the hall as they once might have, but in front of screens all over the world, in home offices, spare bedrooms, and coffeeshops, in pilfered moments smuggled furtively from their day jobs; they’re the writers, the former academics, the Substack moonlighters, and the side-hustling video essayists and podcasters who are finding ways to produce, in many cases, work of real intellectual merit outside of the established cultural infrastructure. Whether they come to it eagerly or reluctantly, these apostates of formal respectability are finding alternatives to the thinker-as-professionalized-knowledge-worker which has been the standard for centuries, and acquiring in the process the more familiar precarity of the modern artist. At issue now, though, is whether this arrangement really can support the life of the mind in the highest reaches of its potential.”
Anderson concludes: “It wasn’t really true, as the tech companies once breathlessly promised, that there’s never been a better time to be an artist. Despite its pretense of serving the interests of culture, the assurance was always self-regarding, existing in the starkest contrast with most artists’ actual experience. But I am convinced that there’s never been a better time, in my lifetime or just about anyone else’s, for a new campaign of counter-cultural audacity, working imaginatively around the older cultural infrastructure to find ways of doing worthwhile intellectual work in spite of the existing institutions’ increasing inability to sustain it with the same principled vision that they once did, incorrigibly optimistic, and undertaken by those who don’t mind looking foolish in more conventional eyes.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.