Marxist Speculations on the Vibecession

🎶 Marat we’re poor, and the poor stay poor / Marat don’t make us wait any more / We want our rights, and we don’t care how! / We want a revolution…now!—Marat/Sade

There is a long-standing discussion of why it was that the 2024 US public believed that the economy was poor when in fact it was the envy of the world, people at the lowest income levels were making gains, and the labor market was the best in a generation.

I’ve been watching the discussion of this, now, for two years, and I have noticed how certain the people who hold that view are, in the face of all evidence, even the evidence of their own lives. This suggested to me the sort of strongly-held belief that is part of identity rather than reason. Perhaps two things are at work:

1. Class consciousness. Most of us have real class enemies in Bezos, Musk, and Thiel. Faced with this, it was easy to minimize the incremental improvements that the Biden administration made, especially for people who are not aware of how political change works in the USA.

2. False consciousness; this group identified as working class and felt their identity challenged by being lifted up. Ironically, the people most strongly identified in this way are not working class, not proletarians, not the people “living in holes, dying in holes,” but the lower ranks of the petite bourgeoisie.

Was the vibecession perhaps an intersection between true and false class consciousness?