The most radical statute enacted in the United States in the last century was H.R. 7260, passed by the 74th Congress and signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on August 14, 1935. The Social Security Act was far from perfect when first passed – among other deficiencies, it excluded professions in which workers were majority black in order to gain the votes of Jim Crow Democrats, and benefits were not indexed to inflation – and even today it remains imperfect. But Social Security and Medicare, the latter birthed in 1965 out of amendments to H.R. 7260, remain our most radical programs. Government-provided cash and health benefits to nearly every American of retirement age or unable to work due to disability are something we take nearly for granted. Yet just to pass a flaccid version of such a program in the past decade, such as Part D or the Affordable Care Act, required concessions to insurers and manufacturers that allowed them to make off like bandits.
Despite being beneficiaries of our most radical, progressive programs, though, the aging are seen as conservative, even reactionary – the Fox News demographic, a bunch of crotchety old geezers ranting about kids on their lawn (do people still say geezers?). Maybe there is something inherently reactionary about aging, but to admit that without exploring it seems defeatist at best.
I don’t need to trot out the statistics on how the population of the industrialized world is aging (though thanks to immigration, the United States is aging much slower than many others). We all know that. What I want to do is – somehow – make sense of what aging means to the left. Especially today’s young left, a collection mainly of people in their twenties or early-thirties.
Because if a new state of affairs – radical democracy and a rejection of neoliberalism – are ever to take hold, it will require the left to engage, really engage, with older people. To that end, we need to challenge aging as reactionary. This is just one small step and a tiny piece of the conversation, as our understanding both of the demographics of today’s world and its implications shift by the day.
•
I doubt Marx or any of his contemporaries ever foresaw the present “crisis” of aging. While he lived at the beginning of what became known as the population revolution in the west, it’s difficult to imagine he would foresee today’s industrialized world that will soon contain more people over 65 than people under it. Marx himself died just short of his 65th birthday, exceptionally long-lived when average life expectancy at birth for his generation in Western Europe was around 40 years. In his day, retirement was a luxury reserved only for a very, very select few. Even a half a century later, when Franklin D. Roosevelt (who himself died at 63) signed the Social Security Act into law, the number of people who stood to benefit was fairly small.
The retiree’s place in the system is not that clear. At face, they appear to be entirely a consumer, especially with the guarantee of at least a modest income. In this sense, they help perpetuate the system by absorbing some of the surplus value created by increasing automation – for neoliberal capitalism, aging appears to be one way (along with reorganization of labor) to stave off the crisis presented by mechanization of many jobs, at least for a while. Perhaps aging is late capitalism’s kinder, gentler form of primitive accumulation.
Yet to consider seniors as just consumers of goods and services ignores the work that many older people do, almost all of it uncompensated (their retirement income at least in theory represents delayed compensation for previous labor). Caregiving is one of the most productive forms of uncompensated labor in the United States, and many caregivers are quite old – the average age of someone caring for a person over age 65 is 63. And, notably, some two-thirds of caregivers are women. Melissa Gira Grant has provided us with an excellent framework for understanding sex work as work; perhaps we should start to understand caregiving as work as well. Because the number of hours spent caregiving increases as the age of the caregiver increases, retirement seems to represent not the end of a person’s working life, but the transfer from structured, compensated work to an uncompensated, informal work, albeit one with far less alienation from the fruits of labor.
As tempting as it is, we cannot think of aging as a bad thing. Rather, it reflects a tremendous progression of medical research and living standards. Some may argue that it represents one of the great successes of capitalism, but that’s a falsehood. Russia’s shocking entrance into the global capitalist system has correlated with a net decrease in average life expectancy, for instance, as medicine became privatized and much more difficult to access. And many of the technological and social advances that have improved mortality – even early ones like penicillin, prophylaxis against malaria, workplace safety regulations, and hygienic guidelines for physicians – have been the result of research outside of the private sector and grassroots social movements.
It’s only when profitability and production entered the equation that the private sector became involved; the pharmaceutical industry’s dedication to penicillin production after World War II became a market driver for antibiotics is one such example. In fact, the overlap between profit and research in the private sector threatens to reverse many of these gains by promoting research into, for example, highly profitable new forms of male enhancement drugs at the expense of research into much less profitable but much more important antibiotics in the face of resistant bacteria.
•
In today’s America, the benefits of aging, like seemingly everything else, accrue almost exclusively to the wealthiest in the system. And the inequalities of advantage and disadvantage experienced throughout life in a highly unequal system become cumulative and more pronounced, reaching towards a zenith in a person’s twilight years. In gerontology this is referred to as, appropriately, cumulative advantage/disadvantage theory – but the principles behind it should be familiar to everyone on the left, as it reflects a fundamental fact about the way capital accumulation works. When removed from production and wage-earning by retirement, the worker lives off only the wages of his previous labor, with perhaps some small increase thanks to investment in securities or bonds provided by today’s retirement system, something unknown and unimaginable in Marx’s time. The rents provided by ownership of physical capital, meanwhile, continue to accumulate. As such, the longer a person lives, the more their wealth grows. Aging only increases the gulf between the classes.
The discontents of cumulative advantage and disadvantage can clearly be seen across the aging United States. Even afforded some semblance of a living standard by Social Security and Medicare, the poor live fewer years and in worse health. They are unable to access many of the expensive tools for successful aging that are not covered by Medicare – drugs, therapy, and so on – that enable the upper class to get a leg up in their old age. Many seniors – in the United States, especially people of color – are forced to live in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, where their aging is inhibited by a lack of green space, high crime rates, poor housing stock, and environmental hazards, among others. Poor old people and rich old people (and black old people and white old people, for that matter) are experiencing aging in completely different ways.
We can imagine a future, perhaps even a near-future, in which the class divide in human lifespan becomes even more pronounced, going from the gap of today to a gulf to an ocean. Scientists remain divided on whether there is truly an endpoint to human longevity, and some – maybe madmen, maybe prophets – believe that aging could be ‘switched off’ altogether. While the latter sounds like something out of science fiction, it may be only decades from now that cures for chronic diseases and cancers mean that the top one percent are living half again as long as everyone else.
Where is the red line in years that can be stolen from us? What happens when, in addition to being exploited in the labor force, the potential for decades upon decades of our existence on earth are being stolen from us by a tiny cabal of the ultra-rich?
That may sound bleak, but it is seems to be the natural progression of what is happening today, when capital would deny the poor and old what security they have. Those like the Koch brothers and Pete Peterson shamelessly attack Social Security and Medicare, those radical programs, with the élan of a lion savaging a wildebeest. The United States already prioritizes subsidies for financiers and capital over subsidies for the most vulnerable Americans, but privatizing Social Security would take this to an entirely different level. At best, it would provide no benefit over the current system, but would still likely result in nominal fees going to financiers out of the taxes paid by American workers, a small but real redistribution upwards that already occurs elsewhere in the tax system. At worst, it would represent widespread theft of the earned financial resources of the American worker by capital – theft aggressively promoted by the United States government – while providing no security to the worker in retirement.
•
Seniors are probably the most important electorate in the (horribly broken) United States political system. They are also one of the most belligerent. Few issues get people pouring into the streets like threats to Social Security and Medicare. In that we have the paradox of aging. Seniors will fight to protect these programs but will turn around and vote for candidates that want to strip them away. They’ll complain about socialism while benefiting from socialism.
Why are seniors so active in politics? Because, even with the uncompensated labor they perform, they have lots of time. While the rest of us are slogging through increasingly long workdays for lower and lower pay, in turn producing lots of surplus value, and while most outside the Beltway have no time to think critically or care about issues beyond the surface level, seniors are watching television and grumbling. And occasionally getting real mad.
When talking about engaging seniors, it’s important to note that, at least according to the continuity theory of aging, “old” is not an identity, at least not in the context of traditional identity politics. Continuity theory postulates that individuals try to maintain a state of equilibrium with who they have been across their entire lives, and that in aging they adapt strategies to maintain consistency of personality, relationships, values, and beliefs – in a word, their identity. A black, female, gay, or transgender senior is black, female, gay, or transgender (or all of the above); I don’t know if they think about themselves as a “senior” as well, except in the case of policies of clear and present value like Social Security and Medicare.
Of course, we need to be honest: the young and the old are never going to see completely eye to eye on every issue. But there is a ton of overlap between the young left and many older people on a plethora of issues. Protecting and enhancing those radical programs, Social Security and Medicare, are something we can all get behind, especially if we want universal basic incomes, which are effectively just Social Security for All. Issues of race, housing, healthcare, transportation, and many others are intergenerational as well. Preferring to age in place, a conversation about sustainability and climate change can begin at home and in the community where older people live. And we should recognize the intense primacy of women in the senior population due to gender differentials in mortality; the result is that feminist activism can unite old and young.
•
Aging is far from “sexy” and in some immutable ways it is almost certainly inherently reactionary. But if old age should burn and rage at the close of day, it’s up to us to harness that. The left needs to begin engaging with the process of aging and older people if it is to succeed in replacing the current system. After all, even in a utopia, aging is here to stay.
For the foreseeable future, at least.
The post Rage against the dying of the light appeared first on Conor F. McGovern.