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.