(If you’re not on twitter, good for you, and you can ignore this). For everyone else: What’s the deal with this annoying turbo-lib, Will Stancil? I don’t know if this guy is getting DNC money or what. But he seems to be everywhere in “the discourse” now, quibbling about rent, inflation, wages, and line graphs. His message is that the left’s pessimism is not commensurate with the reality of Bidenomics, and that economic conditions are good, actually. His logic is to then support the Democrats, who are looking out for us.

I keep seeing responses to his posts that say he has read the graphs wrong, that they’re misused, and that he ignored other–more damning–graphs, etc. He then replies by saying it’s his critics, in fact, who’ve misread the graphs (which is happening in a current fight he’s in with Nate Silver lol). But my question is: a small uptick in wage here, a small drop in inflation there, maybe ketchup is cheaper… isn’t this all moot anyway? We know that capitalism and imperialism form labor aristocracies at one pole and slums at the other pole, and that sure, wages can go up, but as Marx says in Capital, “the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster.”

So something can be subjectively true and objectively false at the same time. Wages go up, but the whole system is rigged against us proles. If you miss the big picture as Stancil does, then you’re left ignoring the vast disparities in wealth that capitalism has wrought. I mean, fuckin’ a, even mainstream news reported that the ten richest people doubled their wealth during COVID. It’s been known that there’s something like $15 trillion stored in offshore bank accounts, untaxed. Meanwhile there is something like 1 billion people consigned to live in slums around the world. Anyway, I’m just irked by the dude and wondered why (a) he wasn’t getting ratio-ed on twitter, and (b) no one was making this bigger picture argument about wealth disparity–at least that I noticed. Most of the dunks were limited to his misinterpretation of data.