:sicko-laser:

He was stuck in California traffic on his way home and stressing over his taxes, which he still hasn’t paid and which are kind of complicated. He’s an international person who has a good job at [very rich and powerful tech company], they pay him partly in extremely valuable stock, and he is also becoming a landlord. (Yes, I know—he revealed this to me a couple of months ago and I told him it was a bad idea, but alas, nevertheless.)

All this being said, my man, who sits almost at the very top of the American pile—of the world pile—was asking me good-faith questions about communism. He asked if people would pay taxes under communism. I did my best to explain that under communism, there is no private property, and therefore nothing to tax, that communism is about the elimination of social constructs like race, class, gender, nationality, etc. (For some reason he’s even having trouble finding a professional to do his taxes for him.) We only talked for about thirty minutes, and my kids managed to interrupt me TWICE during our discussion, but my friend also lamented the loss of community and friendship he’s experienced since graduating college, and also how covid has devastated his relationships with his remaining friends. I didn’t have time to talk about alienation, but I did discuss dialectical materialism. In the past, my friend has also complained about his company’s return-to-work policies. I’ve mentioned unionization to him, but I have to say, as a fellow labor aristocrat, that fear (of losing the little we have) is certainly one of the prime characteristics of the labor aristocracy. Unionizing never even occurred to me back when I was a lib and had a swank job. No one mentioned it to us, not once, even when our employer’s arbitrary behavior frustrated us. The best we could think of doing involved just getting another job.

I also made sure to mention that he was stuck in traffic because the California government is seemingly incapable of building fucking trains, that he has to do his taxes because the American government works for no one but billionaires (who have no trouble paying accountants to do their taxes for them). We aren’t allowed to have good things in America because if you give poor people universal health care, for instance, that’s not only going to bankrupt the poor health insurance companies, but what are people going to ask for next? Universal housing? Universal labor unions? What then?

My friend’s class position as a labor aristocrat even among labor aristocrats means that it is unlikely that he will become a communist. And yet it’s a sign of the times, isn’t it, when someone whom the vast majority of people would consider successful, is nonetheless asking deep and serious questions about American society. There’s a group of four of us who became friends in college, and my friend has remarked that it’s funny how we have turned out:

• My friend achieved his dream of working for [bazinga tech company];
• I became a communist;
• Our mutual friend, with whom I haven’t spoken in years, became an NFT bro (his parents are hedge fund managers). Back in college he was alternately obsessed with Buddhism and business. Now he’s just as passionate about capitalism as I am about communism, even though he’s started several startups and none of them have come close to the success he dreamed of;
• Another mutual friend is now trans and studying to become a therapist. This friend is sadly still a lib, however—a Berner who nonetheless believes that communism = concentration camps for all. This friend (who evidently uses she/her pronouns around others but has not asked me to do the same) comes from an “old family” with seemingly limitless wealth. I hung out at their house all the time in high school, and there was a framed portrait of Robert E. Lee on one of their walls.