"A Good Life"

Leftism once was small-c conservative and must be again.

Apparently I am living in the richest country in the world. According to one measure, anyway: GDP adjusted by Personal Purchasing Power.

Economic analysis tools are relentlessly obscured and manipulated, and though this essay isn’t about economic analysis, the next few paragraphs will discuss them. If you tend to fall asleep or shut down when such things are discussed, you can skip ahead to the section labeled Economics in Real Terms.

Perhaps you’re aware, for instance, that the Wikipedia entry for “recession” was temporarily locked from future edits recently because users fought over its definition. The problem was that according to the general definition (two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth), the US is in a recession. Biden and the National Bureau for Economic Research, a private group, have refused to name the current situation in the United States as recessionary. An editing war then occurred, with pro-Biden sorts insisting on edits suggesting there is no universal definition and others insisting there is.

Unemployment

There are other economic analytical tricks particularly evident in the United States. For instance, the official unemployment rate of the US is currently at 3.6% for June, which is extremely low. The problem with this rate is that it isn’t what most people think it is. Rather than describing the total percentage of working age people who are out of work, it is a “seasonally adjusted” number that counts only on a subset of those who are actively receiving unemployment benefits as “unemployed.”

Another measure, the “True Rate of Employment,” which is one a little closer to what European countries use (though every country finds a way to manipulate their own numbers), puts the US at 23% in April, the latest figure. That measure accounts for “people who are looking for work but don’t have a full-time job, working part-time but want full-time work, or who earn below the poverty line.”

Salaries and Minimum Wages

There’s a further complication to these economic measures when you compare them across countries. In Europe, for example, the minimum wage is set not at an hourly rate but a monthly salary rate. In the US, the federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour, which translates to $1,257/month for someone working a 40 hour work week. Here is a comparison between that rate and the monthly minimum salary for a full-time worker in several European countries.

• US: €1,162 euro/month¹

• France: €1,645.6

• Germany: €1,744

• Luxembourg: €2,313.4

There’s also another caveat here, as many countries also offer what’s called a “13th month” salary. This is an extra paycheck at the end of the year equal to one month’s pay. In some places it is enshrined in law, in other places it is merely customary, and in some countries the 13th can be distributed throughout the rest of the year to bring the monthly salary to the minimum. So in some countries the actual yearly wage is 13 times the monthly salary, but in the United States it’s just 12 times unless your corporate employer gives you a “Christmas bonus.”

A larger problem is that real wages mean different things in different places. In the US, a full-time worker on minimum wage is very unlikely to be able to afford a one bedroom apartment on his or her own. On the other hand, a French worker on the minimum wage, assuming he or she is living somewhere besides Paris, can absolutely afford to do so. That’s because the minimum wage in France is indexed to generalized cost-of-living figures, which include rent, food, transportation, clothing purchases, and even entertainment costs (an occasional dinner out, for example).

And of course, in many European countries, health care is nationalized, and paid time-off for sickness and vacation are guaranteed. What nationalized health care in France looked like when I lived there up until a few years ago was a 24 euro (about 27 US at the time) doctor visit, and antibiotics for about 8 US dollars. In the US, you’d be lucky to get away with an out-of-pocket $250 for both. In Luxembourg, the costs are about twice that, but they’re fully reimbursed. You pay up front and then the government sends you the money once you submit the documentation.

Because I work independently, I don’t have the extra benefit of the paid time off, but most European workers do—between four and six weeks, not including sick time. In the US, I only ever once had paid time off as a “benefit” from an employer, and fighting with them over whether or not I was allowed to actually take the time they promised often made doing so more difficult than not taking it. Very few hourly employees even get that option in the US.

Gross Domestic Product

Comparing all these differences across countries gets extremely complicated and always involves a subjective human element, something that economists aren’t capable of translating into mere numbers. The calculation I mentioned at the beginning, the one that puts Luxembourg as the richest in the world, is one of those few attempts to at least admit there is something else happening besides robotic exchange of money.

Gross Domestic Product, which is the figure usually used, is a measure of the total monetary value of all goods and services produced within a country. It’s not actually calculated on those numbers, though, but through a complicated formula of adjustments between production output, income (individual and business), and investment (or “expenditure”).

GDP is a meaningful number on a national level, but an utterly meaningless one on an individual level. To see how this is the case, consider the most recent figure for the United States, the “richest” country in the world. The US GDP is $20.89 trillion, which works out per capita to be $63,413 per person (58,602 euros).

Averages versus medians

That last number isn’t the average income, however, but rather than average “wealth” produced. Actual average incomes are also calculated through different metrics across countries. The US publishes “household incomes,” rather than individual incomes, which tends to skew the number much higher. A single individual is considered a household, but also so is a married couple where both are wage earners. Back when there was typically only one wage earner in a family, this kind of calculation made sense, but it no longer does.

That number, the median family income in the US, was $79,900/year in 2021. But also keep in mind that this is a “median,” not an average. An average is the sum total of all incomes divided by the amount of people, while a median is the mid-point at which half of all incomes are higher and the other half is lower.

To see the difference, if you have 100 people making ten dollars a year, 1 person making $100 a year, and 100 people making 1 million a year, the median income is $100/year. In that situation, the average would be $497,512/year.

We’d get the same median if there were 1 person making 1 dollar a year, one person was making a million, and 199 people were making $100. However, the average of that arrangement would be $5,074/ a year, closer to the median while also tipping you off that there are hyper wealthy people skewing the average.

What a median shows you is what is considered the middle range, but it doesn’t give you any hints about wealth disparity. It tells you nothing about the people making only a dollar and nothing about the people making 1 million. The average at least hints at wealth disparity: in the first case, the people making 1 dollar and the people making 100 dollars have a very good indicator of how much richer certain people are than they are.

Of course, no country actually has an hourglass situation like that first one. Instead they all look like pyramids with distended pinnacles: the vast majority earns very little, a smaller group is somewhere in the middle, and at the top there’s a needle point extending ever upward of incomprehensibly rich people.

Economics in Real Terms

The figure that puts Luxembourg now as the richest country in the world, GDP per capita adjusted by Personal Purchasing Power, does get a little closer than all those previous calculations. That rate is $140,694, almost double the US rate of $76,027.

Again though, these are just numbers, but you can get a sense of what it signifies by comparing mean salaries between the US and Luxembourg. The US rate GDP/PPP rate is very close to the mean salary household income of the US, while the Luxembourg rate is more than twice its average salary (usually cited at just below the US median family income).²

Numbers are too abstract and esoteric to really describe what it feels like to live in Luxembourg after having lived most of my life in the United States and part of my life in France, and of course that figure for Luxembourg says nothing about my actual situation here.

First of all, I don’t make anywhere close to the average salary for Luxembourg. In fact, my monthly income is closer to the French minimum than it is to the Luxembourg minimum, and when I lived in France my income was under the US minimum.

That’s a good place to start, though, because my experience of living in France below the minimum income was the first time I began to understand something crucial about the way American poverty works. When I lived in the US, I never went to the doctor, nor to the dentist, always bought used clothing, and did everything I possibly could to keep my food budget as low as possible. Also, I had to live in a house with five other people in order to afford rent, and this all when I was working full time. My monthly expenses were about $1,800/month, and I never had anything saved up afterwards.

In France, my total monthly budget for rent, food, utilities (including cell phone service), occasional entertainment, clothing, and rare medical expenses per month was about 850 euro (roughly 900 dollars at the time). In other words, it cost less than half as much to have a much better life in France than it did in the US.

It took me quite some time to get used to this. The first time in a decade that I bought a new—not used—article of clothing at a store, I felt both a sense of relief but also of deep fear and guilt. Shouldn’t I have just tried to again mend the threadbare trousers I’d bought second-hand several years before, trousers that were already falling apart when I paid for them? Would I soon look back in despair at the purchase, finding myself homeless because I paid 30 euro for something that actually fit well?

A close friend who moved to France from the US with me had many of the same reactions. She cried in a French grocery store just I had, seeing that it cost the same amount to buy a week’s worth of food as it did to buy two day’s worth in an American grocery store. Shockingly, we could suddenly afford to buy lots of fresh vegetables and fruit as a basic part of our diet, rather than as a special luxury.

Class and The Good Life

That’s what a higher “personal purchasing power” looks like in real terms, rather than economic abstraction. Specifically, the threshold for a decent life is lower when personal purchasing power is higher. Sure, you could also have an even more decent—or even extravagant—life at higher income levels, but the disparity between what is available to everyone and what is available only to high-salaried people is less significant. A high-wage earner in France might go to the Alps or to Gran Canaria for their vacation, while a low-wage earner might stay home or go visit their parents in the countryside for their vacation, but both of them get vacation. The prices on the menus at the restaurants each person might visit with their friends may differ vastly, but going to a restaurant with friends is something people in either group can do.

It’s not just something they can do, but something that’s included in social conceptions of a good life. Individuals may choose to go to restaurants or not, but the option to do so is seen as something everyone ought to have. Class divisions here (in Luxembourg, but also in France and Germany) determine which restaurants you go to, not whether or not you are able to go to them at all.

Class in the United States is deeply obscured through education, the media, and now especially through identity discourse. Despite this, class in the US actually plays even more of a determinant role on what is available to you and whether or not you have access to things. I thought I understood this when I lived in the United States, but I don’t think it’s fully possible to see it until you’ve lived somewhere else.

The biggest revelation for me was a kind of code I’d unconsciously developed in the US to determine how much money someone else made or what kind of wealth they were born into. That code was their evident health, their posture, and especially their teeth.

If you have good teeth in the US, that means you had the ability to go to a dentist. To go to the dentist, you need to either have insurance or a couple of thousand dollars a year extra that you can pay a dentist with. Someone with all their teeth, teeth generally straight and not yellowed or evidently rotting, had parents who could afford to take them to a dentist, and then got a job as adults where they could afford to continue to go to dentists.

(You’ve maybe noticed: I don’t have good teeth.)

When I moved to France, these signifiers no longer had meaning. Everyone around me had great teeth, including homeless people. Crazier still, everyone seemed to be in generally good health, without untreated limps or skin conditions, and with good posture. I couldn’t ‘read’ class from their bodies like I could in the United States, and instead had to learn new signifiers (speech and accents, particularly).

Luxembourg and Small-c conservatism

This experience continued even more so when I moved to Luxembourg, which has an even better national health system than France, higher salaries, lower unemployment, and higher personal purchasing power. Luxembourg of course is a very rare sort of country. It’s very small and very conservative in the lower ‘c’ version of the term. Its economy is based much more on finance than industrial production, though it was once a significant producer of steel. It cannot support itself agriculturally, nor with raw resources, or manufacturing, or energy, or anything else except maybe dairy products. It cannot even support itself through internal labor: the country’s population triples during weekdays with cross-border workers coming in from France, Germany, and Belgium.

So it might seem then there’s not much to learn from it about how to create a more economically egalitarian society. If it can only support itself through moving around other people’s money and buying other nations’ resources and labor, then its ‘good life’ is really quite fragile.

On the other hand, it’s actually because of its small-c conservative values that Luxembourg never went the way of Singapore or the United Arab Emirates, two other small nations with higher GDP/PPP than the US (Singapore is second after Luxembourg). Both those nations are known for lavish and conspicuous opulence at the top with a large and mostly imported underclass kept in line through draconian laws and policing, much like the United States.

By small-c conservative, I mean that Luxembourg has not tried to initiate massive technological or societal changes in order to accommodate new industry or development. Capital is always a disruptive influence in a society, and allowing it to direct the course of a society will always result in social unrest. Nations which allow Capital to disrupt society then must deal with its consequences, usually by building lots of prisons and filling them with those who don’t adapt to these changes, as in the United States.

Small-c conservatism is not the opposite of liberalism but rather the opposite of neo-liberalism: it prioritizes the stability of the society over the potential growth Capital promises at the expense of continuity.

One way this is evident in Luxembourg is directly next to my house in this village. Yeas ago, the government designated huge swathes of land as green zones, meaning that they could not be developed at any time without a change in parliamentary law. So, the open field next to our house with a spring and an ancient oak can never be developed, nor can the rolling hills behind us or across the street. In fact, we cannot even add a shed in our backyard because of the law.

The purpose of the law of course was conservation, another aspect of small-c conservatism, but describing it that way leaves out the political logic that drives such decisions. These green zones were a big ‘fuck you’ to Capital, making it harder for developers to turn a quick profit off land and construction, favoring the stability of society and the character of a “good life” over the potential increase in tax revenue. Of course, it was also a ‘fuck you’ to large landholding farmers, some of whom were becoming exceedingly rich by selling off parcels of their land to developers and becoming capitalists themselves.

It’s really useful to compare this situation to the kinds of arguments we see in the United States coming from the shallow husk of a left. Restrictions on land development are narrated as harmful to the poor, who supposedly would have more access to housing if only developers got their way. This is of course a false framing because the United States lacks something that both France and Luxembourg have: national rent control. Rent increases in both countries are tied to inflation indexes, and though this regardless means that Luxembourg rents are astronomically high, they’re still affordable for the average salary earner (houses, I must be clear, absolutely are not).

Capital Versus The Good Life

Rent control is small-c conservatism because it is based off of older European ideas of “charitable” prices and Catholic prohibitions against usury. So is the restricting of land sales and development: remember, it was precisely the Protestant change in England and its commodification of land that started Capitalism itself.

Also, though, both these principles became the roots of an older kind of leftist politics we never see in the United States anymore. Both Marxists and Catholics alike prefer to forget that the League of the Just, the communist party group which merged with the Communist Correspondence Society, was an explicitly Catholic communist group and it was they who asked Marx and Engels to write the Manifesto.

The idea that a person who decides to live in a place should be able (if they choose) to always live in that place until he or she dies is part of an old order of thinking that was equally European, Catholic, and Communist. That same order of thinking also believed that a person should be able to find a good job and keep working it—if they choose—until they retire.

Both of these ideas are inimical to neo-liberalism and also to a certain urban cultural outlook shaped by Capital. In that view, living in one place and having one job your entire life sounds like an awful, boring, and vapid existence, despite the fact that in much of the rest of the world it’s viewed as core prerequisites of a good life. The American “dream” was once having a good paying job and owning a house that you could live in the rest of your life and pass on to your children. Now, it’s owning nothing and living as a “digital nomad” where community means whichever tiny subset of the internet follows your social media profile.

Of course, that’s not true for everyone. The “deplorable” class that Clinton and the Democrats hated so much and who returned that hate with a vote for Trump still hold onto that earlier dream, and they rage at how impossible it’s become. They’re likewise hated by the online set with their ‘OK boomer’ retorts and their baseless certainty such people are all fascists.

The most brilliant and most disgusting success Capital has ever affected in the modern world is precisely this false dichotomy manifesting through a cultural stance of enlightened urban versus reactionary rural. Cut away at such pretensions and you’ll doubtless find that most oppressed identity groups would actually like the same thing as their supposed enemies. What single black mother in a city would really not like a stable home of her own with a yard or a safe nearby green space for her kids to play in? What trans or queer sex worker wouldn’t trade that life for a living wage at a job and a reliable apartment they didn’t have to worry would disappear at their employer’s or landlord’s whim?

I’m hardly the first and most definitely will not be the last to note the connection between identity discourse and the goals of neo-liberalism, but what’s much more important is what is lost to us when we take Capital’s societal disruption as an inevitable and unavoidable fact of existence and a necessary engine of social equality.

Despite being a highly Catholic society, Luxembourg has a gay prime minister, implemented same-sex partnerships in 2004 and same-sex marriage the year before the United States did. More important than all that was its decriminalization of homosexual relations at the end of the 1700’s when it was temporarily part of France. In fact, homosexuality has been legal in Luxembourg almost as long as the United States of America has existed (just 18 years short).³

This fact puts to lie a really obnoxious tendency of American leftists to tie social “progress” to capitalism. Though the title of an interview at Jacobin from 2020 is probably sufficient to show this problem— “Capitalism Made Gay Identity Possible. Now We Must Destroy Capitalism”—a quote from the interviewed author reveals even more:

“even independently of feminism, capitalism was drawing women into the workforce, giving more women the choice as to whether they want to get married or stay married. Second-wave feminism arose out of this, not the other way around. For better or worse, capitalism is disrupting this old order in which heterosexual nuclear families are everything in terms of the structure of life. And then when people fear that change, they point their finger not at capitalist society or the capitalist system of production, but instead at gay activists and feminists.”

In other words, this kind of left believes the societal disruption caused by capitalism is a force for good and accelerates progressive social change through eroding older social arrangements, including the heterosexual nuclear family. Because capitalism destabilized the nuclear family and marriage, their argument goes, suddenly people like me were free to love other men.

Of course, lost in such an analysis is what predated the familial form, the heterosexual extended family in which generations lived together in the same home or on the same land. I say “lost” but what I really mean is “willfully ignored,” since this newer form of leftism sees older forms of familial relationships as even more oppressive or regressive than what replaced them. The situation of Luxembourg—a very conservative catholic society where inter-generational family relations are still very much important and Capital’s disruptive influence is severely limited—undermines this belief that capitalism and social progress are intertwined at all.

Again though, Luxembourg is a very, very tiny nation that was mostly made up of farmers, lumberjacks, artisans, and priests for all but perhaps the last 120 years of its existence. It never had overseas colonies (or any colonies, for that matter, though Luxembourgian bankers certainly invested in the ventures of others), nor has it ever started any wars for conquest, for slavery, or for any other reason. Also until quite recently, it had a very religiously and ethnically homogeneous population and benefited from the stability such a situation causes.

As such, it might seem that nothing useful could be derived from its experience for other places, but this is wrong. More than anything, its small-c conservative cultural, political, and economic frameworks points to a potential route of resistance to Capital, a route closed off by the American left with its cultish devotion to the myth of Capital-as-progress.

That myth is the doctrine of neo-liberalism itself, a religion which seeks to destroy everything in its way for the sake of profit. Capital sits upon its shrine, demanding not just full obedience but a complete re-writing of human desire and what comprises a good life. Not family, not home, not stable and reliable work and intact communities, but rather atomized individuals with virtual time-shares of digital goods and memberships in ever-shifting identity categories.

Such is not a good life, or even any kind of life at all.

1. I’m using the average Euro to Dollar exchange rate for 2022 though it’s been close to parity several times this year.

2. This is super complicated because the average salary in Luxembourg is an actual average, not a mean, and it is not calculated by family but by individual salary earner. The mean for Luxembourg is usually cited around 10 to 20 thousand less per year than the US, but that’s also because Luxembourg has a smaller proportion of uber-rich than the US.

3. For those curious as to how Luxembourg decriminalized homosexuality so early, the answer is actually “empire,” or specifically the French empire. Many moral laws were abolished after the French revolution, and then later set out more formally with the Napoleonic Code. Belgium and the Netherlands also decriminalized homosexuality after being temporarily annexed by France, and even afterwards they never got around to making it illegal again, though all countries later passed short-lived age of consent laws that were lower for heterosexuals and higher for homosexuals. Only during Nazi occupation was homosexuality criminalized again, but in all cases the laws were repealed after liberation.