Conservatives want you to work until you die

Shutting down all the Ben Shapiros of the world

Yesterday a clip of Ben Shapiro talking about Medicare and Social Security went viral. In it he says, "No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem." Nearly every comment and response was telling him to shove it where the sun don’t shine, naturally. Here is a multi-millionaire who has built a destructive media empire by saying awful things into a podcast mic and publishing Facebook posts, and he’s telling everyone else retirement is stupid. It’s a disgusting farce; I just wish that’s all it was.

Unfortunately Ben’s commentary to us peasants is also something more. It’s a canary in the coal mine. In France, we saw how the government effectively raised the retirement age to 64, despite one of the most intense waves of protest the West has seen in recent years. In the U.S., politicians are floating the retirement age being raised as high as 70. Nikki Haley even said, “They should plan on their retirement age being increased.” In this case ‘they’ means us, of course, the masses. Not her wealthy donors, who can choose to retire whenever they want. Raising the retirement age isn’t for those who profit off the labor of everyone else, it’s for the working class, who are already being forced to work later and later into our lives by this economic system and the lack of retirement security in this country.

The vast gulf between people who say we should work for a greater and greater portion of our lives and the working class people who actually do the hard work is just the start. There’s an even more significant divide looming before us. On the one hand there’s the conservative and neoliberal belief that life is about economics, money, and work. On the other hand, standing in stark contrast, are the beliefs most of us hold dear: that life is about relationships, connection, joy, family, community, service, happiness, and overall well-being.

But conservative influencers have a different calculus. Their devotion to capitalism, combined with their enclosure in a strange little world of sycophants and hustle culture and finance bros, makes them unable to realize how radically unpopular these ideas are. It shouldn’t be hard to see that “work up until the moment of your death” is an idea that will always be hated by most people, but podcast guys whose job it is to make millions spewing the worst ideas known to humanity apparently can’t see that.

To be fair, their job isn’t just spitting out terrible ideas day after day. It’s also to shift the window towards the far-right in multiple ways. Economically, we see politicians proposing raising the retirement age and we also see a roll-back of child labor laws. These ideas are both immensely unpopular, so someone has to shift the window a bit. One way we see changes in what people deem acceptable here is the increased airing of extreme positions, which make bad but less severe proposals seem relatively better in comparison. We see this pattern from the far-right ecosystem again and again.

Shifting the Overton window to benefit hyper-exploitative capitalists isn’t the only explanation. There’s also the simple fact that all publicity often is good publicity, and the world of social media often rewards people for saying extreme and outrageous things. These comments drive clicks. But in this case, I think there might be such thing as bad publicity. I think the right is going too far. It’s difficult to think of a more universally hated idea that “you should never get to retire.” And in their search for clicks within the insulation of their strange little bubble it seems like these influencers are increasingly losing touch with any semi-normal people. At least I hope they are.

I hope they are because I want their influence to wane, rapidly, but also because I want more and more people to see how conservatives and neoliberals, whether in office or on YouTube or wherever they may be found, have a ton of disdain for the rest of us. We need to see that, and break from their ideologies. It’s not just Ben Shapiro who has an immense disdain for working people. The dominant capitalist ideology and its propaganda tell us that we’re failures if we’re not massively wealthy, and simultaneously that we should be content to work for $12 an hour until the day we die. Business podcast guys tell us that we’re complaining when we say life has gotten more and more expensive, then talk about the massive loans they’ve gotten from friends and or family to start their businesses.

We have to break away from the “financial expertise” of people who still believe billionaires are “self-made” and cover their ears and close their eyes when they encounter the reality of worker exploitation. They aren’t serious people, they exist to lie and distract and prop up an ideology that only really exists in Econ 101 textbooks, not out in the world. These are folks who want you to work until you die, and don’t care if you die on the job. They have announced, repeatedly, that they think kids being exploited by bosses at younger and younger ages is fine, and would happily drag us back to 1855 as long as they found themselves at the top of the heap when we pile out of the time machine.

The Ben Shaprios of the world deserve your anger, of course they do. But the system they represent deserves it infinitely more. These men speak for a system where your productivity has been captured by the rich, preventing you from enjoying the fruits of your labor. Technological innovation has allowed the amount, both in products and in value, that each of us produces to skyrocket. But capitalism, particularly in the neoliberal age, has taken the wealth we produce from us.

That chart is from the World Economic Forum. It’s not controversial data. The money we all produce, so much of which is already taken from us by bosses, has been decoupled even further from what we receive since the Reagan era. In other words, we could have the wealth we need to retire at a young age, if we simply got the fruits of our labor. But the capitalist class isn’t satisfied with taking a larger and larger chunk of what we make, they want more. Always more. So now, they want us to work until our dying breath.

It’s not a question of whether or not we should accept this madness, this limitless greed. Of course we shouldn’t. It’s a question of how we should resist, and how we best bring more and more people into the movement that rejects capitalist exploitation. I’m not saying work can never be rewarding here, of course it can be. When we get to do work we care about, on projects that are meaningful to us, and when we get to control our conditions work can be valuable and fulfilling. Yet that’s not what’s happening right now. At this juncture in history most people are simply working to survive, doing jobs they don’t like, all to make others richer. We’re already producing everything we could need and want. But the products of our labor are seized, taken from us, and we’re getting less and less of it back in our paychecks.

And that should make you angry. Being told you shouldn’t retire should make you angry, and I’m sure it does. Now it’s time to channel that anger. It’s time to take it and use it as fuel to build a world where we all have everything we need, and then some. It’s time to use it as fuel to build a world where what we make, what we produce, what we create is ours, not the boss’s. We can take a step towards this new society by uniformly rejecting the arguments of those who look down on us, who simply want to oppress and profit off us while they hoard more than they could ever need. Shutting down the arguments of these clowns is a first step out into the light, where we’re then a little freer to be constructive and build a better world. Every day more and more people are stepping out into this light. I hope you’ll join us on the path to a society where we have what we need, where you and your labor are respected, and where we’re all able to enjoy life, grow, and find real meaning. A better world is possible.