Rich socialists as champions of the working class
But the working class in the US doesn’t seem to think so; they don’t vote for the DSA candidates, for the most part. The DSA gets its support from the dissatisfied and yet well-educated scions of the comfortable and wealthy.
Gustavo Gordillo, the 38-year-old co-chair of the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, is peddling his anti-capitalist lefty agenda while enjoying the life in the two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home on a gentrifying tree-lined block in Bed-Stuy. …
The Ivy League [Yale] radical’s converted single-family home was bought in 2019 by his mommy and daddy through a dummy corporation, Chucuito LLC, for just under $1 million, property records show.
Since then, it has undergone a major facelift, with renovations done to its entire front facade, the planting of lush landscaping, the revamping of the interior and the addition a pair of decks on the roof as well as near the front door, according to plans filed with the borough in 2023. …
“My son and my other son both live there,” Gordillo’s father said …
Here are some of Gordillo’s plans for landlords. Somehow I think that he might give his own parents a pass on this, considering that he’s the beneficiary of their property-holding. Then again, he’s probably not paying them anything to live in the building, and perhaps his goal is to confiscate the property from his selfish (Boomer?) parents and take it for himself:
Gordillo and his DSA comrades have meanwhile railed against property ownership, calling for a redistribution of land “from landowners to the landless.” …
“We don’t think that anybody should have the constitutional right to double-digit returns on their investment,” he said.
For years he claimed to be an electrician, but his history in that arena was unclear until the NY Post uncovered the following:
Former Yale University liberal arts student Gustavo Gordillo, 38, was fired from his apprenticeship program in March after ghosting his employer for months, meaning he never made it as a fully-credentialed electrician, the IBEW Local 3 union confirmed Wednesday.
“After learning of Mr. Gordillo’s prolonged absence from and failure to participate in required work and classes, the trustees of the Joint Apprentice Training Committee terminated Mr. Gordillo from the program,” the IBEW said in a statement.
A source close to the union said “he didn’t have a strong work record to begin with” and took the job “just for show,” while hogging “a slot from someone who probably really needed the opportunity.”
Absolutely perfect.
And to top it all off, the DSA now pays him $95K a year with benefits.
Has he ever paid his own rent? Plus, it turns out he didn’t graduate from Yale after all, although he “attended”:
The Yale registrars’ office confirmed to The Post on Wednesday that he studied literature there between 2006-10, but did not earn a degree. He also studied sculpture at Yale’s graduate School of Art a couple of years later, records show.
Gordillo’s dad admitted Tuesday that he paid his son’s $2,600 a month rent on the Lower East Side, through a dummy corporation, Chucuito LLC, until 2019.
I think there’s a certain logic to someone from this sort of background becoming a socialist. For them, the connection between earning money and buying things isn’t necessarily part of their “lived experience.” That does not mean that all or most people from such backgrounds become socialists; plenty do not. But a significant number of socialists do seem to have that sort of background. Perhaps becoming socialists is the only way they can feel virtuous without actually refusing their parents’ money.
NOTE: It’s not a new phenomenon, either; one can see this sort of thing among some prominent socialists and Communists of the past. Take Che Guevara, for example. He was raised by very financially comfortable leftist parents, and he earned a medical degree before becoming a revolutionary. He had Mangione’s stylish looks and a similar willingness to kill, and like Mangione he attracted quite a following among US leftists (in Guevara’s case, mostly after his death).
The actual working class people of the US have been a bitter disappointment to their never did an hour of honest labor rich socialist saviors for over 100 years.
I’ve never seen any evidence that wage-earners in the United States are, for the most part, motivated by abstractions. Things palpable to them in their daily lives are important, but the connection between those things and public discourse can be fuzzy and obscure.
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Abstract from their daily lives, people from all walks of life can be motivated by antagonisms (just and unjust). The Democratic Party seems to have a lock on blacks, Puerto Ricans, California Chicanos, and single mothers.
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I’m recalling some observational research James Q. Wilson and a colleague did in Boston in 1966. In interviews with ordinary residents, ‘poverty’ was a topic hardly mentioned. The number one concern was street crime. Interviewing city hall officialdom, ‘poverty’ was what concerned them. Per Dr. WIlson, there was a complete disconnect between city hall and the street. It wasn’t bridged by electoral politics.
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I suspect if you spoke to a probability sample of wage earners, you’d discover that the vocational development of the young and how modes of sorting the labor market have extended dependency are a concern, that street crime and general public disorder is a concern, that the surprises and confusions which attend visits to doctors and hospitals are a concern, that elements of schooling are a concern (disciplinary issues and crap peddled by wokerati teachers), that the condition of public works is a concern, that the terms of mortgage lending are a concern, that property taxes are a concern.
There’s nothing new under the sun.
I was at Columbia in 1968, and noticed the same phenomenon among the most radical lefties. They also had no appreciation of the labor involved in everyday civilization, street lights, cars, windows, that sort of thing. Marx used the labor theory of value, but few of his followers labored.
What really catches my attention is the guy’s age. He’s almost 40 and has not accomplished a single productive thing in his life.
@ Neo > “I think there’s a certain logic to someone from this sort of background becoming a socialist. For them, the connection between earning money and buying things isn’t necessarily part of their “lived experience.” That does not mean that all or most people from such backgrounds become socialists; plenty do not. But a significant number of socialists do seem to have that sort of background. Perhaps becoming socialists is the only way they can feel virtuous without actually refusing their parents’ money.”
Never having to pay your own bills or earn your own way certainly leads to the “money just exists” outlook of most socialists, especially those who believe they can exact infinite levels of taxes from the wealthy because they “just happened” to get rich.
Somehow.
Had to be oppression and theft.
Because how else do you get money?
It’s the only thing they ever learned to do, in the form of whining and mooching.
(As always, Eric Blair aka George Orwell is a notable exception; there were more working socialists in the old days, it seems to me.)
Your speculation about internal motivation is possible, but I suspect that there are multiple layers of “reasoning” that create socialists out of social parasites.
I note that Gustavo Gordillo’s “career” is a pale precedent for Jason Arday, but definitely of the same ilk: lie about anything and everything.
Similarly, it appears that the first job that Bernie Sanders stuck at was a government job. Bernie was kicked out his commune for not contributing to the common pot. A mooch, in other words. He preferred to engage in political argument instead of working.
The “working class” can sniff out the work-shy DSA types, as they have given them little electoral support.
These socialists remind me of my daughter, age about seven. Daughter: “Let’s go to McDonald’s!” Me: “I don’t have enough money.” Daughter: “Let’s go to the bank and buy some money!”
Kate ,,,,And the famous “ I can’t be broke ,I’ve still got checks “
Re: Rich socialists as champions of the working class
If one goes back to the Weather Underground, it was much the same. The 10-12 members of the Weather leadership were mostly upper-class, upper-middle-class, or middle-class. Only one working-class guy:
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[Jim] Mellen was born in Inglewood, California, in 1935, to Helen and Dennis Mellen. His parents divorced when he was young, and he later explained that growing up in poverty fueled his leftist politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Mellen
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After the Revolution failed, quite a few of its survivors rather smoothly became professors, lawyers, writers, consultants and nonprofit professionals. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who hosted in their home Obama’s first appearance as a political candidate, are particularly vivid examples.
They weren’t working-class kids who somehow wandered into Columbia and the University of Chicago. They were largely children of the American professional class rebelling against their own class.
Let’s not omit Obama’s socialist mother, wealthy grandmother.
The right way to help a poor person is to offer them a job, better than what they are now doing.
Help many folks by starting a business, or a franchise, and hiring many poor people.
Among the upcoming crop of DSA candidates, they seem to be in the same mold of Gordillo or are the second generation children of hostile unassimilated immigrant parents, or both.
Marx, also, never labored. His own father berated him for being ungrateful for all that he had received and being embittered by the first thing to go against him.
AesopFan: Never having to pay your own bills or earn your own way certainly leads to the “money just exists” outlook of most socialists…
One thing that really pissed me off about Obama as an oppressed minority leftist leader was that I knew he had never had to dirty his hands with the usual entry jobs of the young.
I did all those — busboy, dishwasher, short-order cook, construction, lifeguard, chicken farm, stoop labor. For me it was a big step up when I got my IBEW union card as a tech installing sound systems and language labs in schools.
I didn’t feel such jobs were beneath me. I needed the money and I was glad to work.
But to have Obama from his cushy prep-school/Ivy League background playing the black card for all he was worth, while lecturing the rest of us about the struggles of the poor and working-class, just galled me.
Che attended medical school, but did not earn a medical degree and was never an M.D.
Kate,
When my little angel was 7, we were passing by a gift shop in a hotel lobby when she stopped and asked me to buy her a stuffed toy on display. I told her to buy it with her allowance money, and she immediately wailed; ‘But I don’t want to waste MY money on it!’.
Paul J Bahan:
It is disputed and unclear. See this.
This is an old story. Read about Karl Marx and his career, largely funded by family and friends.
Does someone who went to a prestige school and didn’t learn anything about the real world count as well-educated? Perhaps they should be classified as ignorant but credentialed, or perhaps credentialed but ignorant.
The DSA gets its support from the dissatisfied and yet “well-educated” scions of the comfortable and wealthy.
There, fixed it for ya.
“Perhaps becoming socialists is the only way they can feel virtuous”
Well no. They can help the oppressed and support blatant frauds like Jason Arday.
@ Molly Brown > “I told her to buy it with her allowance money, and she immediately wailed; ‘But I don’t want to waste MY money on it!’.”
My go-to example comes from the period just after Obamacare finally got implemented (for certain values of “implementation”). A video showed up on the ‘net of a guy brandishing his own new insurance premium, which had obviously gone up. Someone asked him a question, which I don’t remember, but his reply is seared in my organic data storage: “Well, yeah, I wanted more people to have insurance, but I didn’t think I would have to pay for it!”
Our problem is two-fold: people voting to give themselves someone else’s money (because there is no other source for government funds); and people voting to give other people someone else’s money.
Make that three-fold: people voting to implement systems where they can siphon off the money that is supposed to go to the first two groups.
Marx has entered the conversation. Is there a corollary to Godwin’s Law?
@ Mary Catelli > “Marx, also, never labored. His own father berated him for being ungrateful for all that he had received and being embittered by the first thing to go against him.”
The bolded phrase suggested to me a connection with Jason Arday, although I have not looked up anything to test my hypothesis. Was the pushback that finally came after the publication of definitive proof of his plagiarism, and then the critical revelation of his serial fabulism, perhaps the first time he had ever encountered anyone saying something against him?
@Amadeus48: “Perhaps they should be classified as ignorant but credentialed, or perhaps credentialed but ignorant.”
Really, they should be classified as ignorant, ignorant, ignorant, and , oh, falsely credentialed.
@AesopFan: “Marx has entered the conversation. Is there a corollary to Godwin’s Law?”
If there isn’t, there probably should be. Then again, the less said about Marx, or Hitler, the better.
I have never actually read any of Marx’s works*, only just read about him. Certainly enough to pick up the correct perjorative attitude that a conservative would / should have towards him.
But it would seem that if anyone seriously thinks about the labor theory of value for about 20 seconds, they would realize just how flawed that idea is and have to wonder how any rationale and intelligent person could propose such a concept (without further qualifications, anyway).
*Somewhere I do have a book sale copy of Das Kapital.
@ R2L
https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-a-socialist-is-someone-who-has-read-lenin-and-marx-an-anti-socialist-is-someone-who-ronald-reagan-87-72-91.jpg
The end of the quote is “..someone who understands Lenin and Marx.”
@R2L:But it would seem that if anyone seriously thinks about the labor theory of value for about 20 seconds, they would realize just how flawed that idea is and have to wonder how any rationale and intelligent person could propose such a concept (without further qualifications, anyway).
Now is that any way to talk about Adam Smith or Benjamin Franklin? It’s like Columbus and the egg. We have the benefit of hundreds of years of people examining these ideas, and they didn’t.