Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich is an activist, jour­nal­ist and author of over 20 books, includ­ing her clas­sic 2001 title Nick­el and Dimed: On (Not) Get­ting by in Amer­i­ca. Ehren­re­ich is a con­tribut­ing edi­tor to In These Times where her work first appeared in 1977.

"We need to offer a vision of the joy of collective accomplishment, the joy of working together."

She, along with John Ehren­re­ich, coined the term ​“pro­fes­sion­al-man­age­r­i­al class” (PMC) in a famous 1977 essay to describe a class of ​“salaried men­tal work­ers” sep­a­rate from the work­ing class, whose main func­tion is to repro­duce cap­i­tal­ist cul­ture and class relations.

Ehren­re­ich recent­ly endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Demo­c­ra­t­ic race. She spoke with In These Times about the upcom­ing elec­tions, social­ism and the cli­mate crisis.

IO: You recent­ly endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 race. What made you decide to do so?

BE: The same rea­son I endorsed him the first time around. He’s the can­di­date that most rep­re­sents me.

IO: How so?

BE: Well, he’s a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist. There’s nobody clos­er to me that’s running.

IO: Do you think we’ll see a rise in union mem­ber­ship or union mil­i­tan­cy if Bernie Sanders wins the election?

BE: I think so. I don’t think that’ll be a com­plete­ly direct effect, but it will be an indi­rect effect where peo­ple begin to see that a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion is pos­si­ble, and begin to feel their own agency, their own power.

IO: What’s your response to Hillary Clinton’s recent com­ments that ​“nobody likes Bernie,” that he’s a ​“career politi­cian,” and open­ing the door to not back­ing him if he’s the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nominee?

BE: I wor­ry about Hillary. I can’t under­stand why she would be doing this. And I don’t want to spec­u­late. It’s just sheer meanness.

IO: Why do you think she lost in 2016?

BE: It’s attrib­ut­able to her. Spe­cif­ic things about her. A kind of vis­i­ble elit­ism best rep­re­sent­ed with that state­ment about ​“deplorables.” But the deep­er rea­son is that the Democ­rats have, in recent years, betrayed the work­ing class. They have not fought strong­ly for issues that are impor­tant to peo­ple who are not upper-mid­dle class or rich­er, and there’s a sense of betrayal.

IO: Pres­i­dent Trump, even if he didn’t win the pop­u­lar vote, still has some pret­ty com­mit­ted sup­port­ers. What do you think is ener­giz­ing his base?

BE: Well, what I just said. This sense that Democ­rats real­ly have noth­ing to offer. And lib­er­al­ism comes across to many peo­ple as a kind of elit­ist stance. It’s not ​“here are the peo­ple who are going to join with me in improv­ing con­di­tions,” but rather, ​“here are the peo­ple who are going to crit­i­cize us for being polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect.” And it’s just heartbreaking.

IO: What do you make of the recent New York Times endorse­ment of Eliz­a­beth War­ren and Amy Klobuchar, whom the edi­to­r­i­al board described as the ​“rad­i­cal” and ​“real­ist” models?

BE: You know, I don’t know. I have no idea what went on with that. What goes through their minds? Who knows. Klobuchar is kind of a mys­tery to me. I’m will­ing to learn a lot more. She’s cer­tain­ly been gal­va­niz­ing and she is def­i­nite­ly to the right of War­ren and Sanders.

IO: A lot of the rhetoric around the elec­tion has been framed as ​‘can a woman beat Trump’ and not ​‘what kind of woman can­di­date can beat Trump.’ What do you attribute that to?

BE: Sex­ism for one thing. I mean, you just put it very well, but main­ly we have to beat Trump, and I would love to see a woman do it and I don’t see a rea­son why a woman couldn’t do it. I real­ly think we have moved on quite a bit. I can remem­ber when Geral­dine Fer­raro was run­ning for vice pres­i­dent with Wal­ter Mon­dale and the crit­i­cism that was raised was that she was of a menopausal age and ​“could a menopausal per­son make deci­sions?” That was the lev­el of dis­course. I think we have moved on from there. Don’t you?

IO: I do. My con­cern is that, even on the Left, peo­ple want a woman to be pres­i­dent but some are more con­cerned about a can­di­date being a woman and less con­cerned about what kind of woman she is — like whether she’s a Hillary Clin­ton type, for exam­ple. They want to see a woman rep­re­sent­ed, and they care a lit­tle bit less about the plat­form she’s bring­ing because she’s a woman.

BE: I’m obvi­ous­ly not in that camp. In 2016, I vot­ed for Hillary in the end, but there were so many rea­sons to dis­trust her. For me, it all start­ed in the 1990s with wel­fare reform which Bill Clin­ton gets cred­it for — and Hillary enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly sup­port­ed. It plunged a lot of peo­ple liv­ing in pover­ty into extreme pover­ty. It was just very dis­taste­ful to me that she was, with her pol­i­tics, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic can­di­date. Also, her stance on bank­rupt­cy, which I guess she mod­i­fied over time. The Iraq war. On and on and on. So I did not see her as the right can­di­date of either sex, that I would be inter­est­ed in.

IO: Lib­er­al pun­dits, when they’re speak­ing about the can­di­dates, often lump War­ren and Sanders into the same camp. How would you describe their dif­fer­ences and the dif­fer­ences between their supporters?

BE: *laughs* I don’t know. I haven’t done a study of this. I under­stand that there has been some talk on the left that War­ren is the can­di­date of what John Ehren­re­ich and I describe as the PMC, where­as Sanders is poten­tial­ly more the can­di­date of the work­ing class. But, you know, I think that’s get­ting a lit­tle bit sil­ly. Peo­ple can come from dif­fer­ent class­es and change their class alle­giances. So I’m not inter­est­ed in that kind of essen­tial­ist think­ing. Somebody’s from a wealthy back­ground or white so that deter­mines every­thing about their pol­i­tics? I don’t think so.

IO: Would you note any dif­fer­ences between the PMC from when you wrote that essay in 1977 ver­sus today?

BE: Oh, for sure. And I’ve writ­ten about those dif­fer­ences and so has John Ehren­re­ich. We have seen vast swaths of the pro­fes­sion­al man­age­r­i­al class dumped down to the lev­el of the work­ing class. This is the big les­son of Occu­py. There were home­less blue col­lar work­ers with grad­u­ate stu­dents who knew they were going nowhere or who had PhDs even and were going nowhere. So there’s been a huge demo­tion for tra­di­tion­al PMC pro­fes­sions such as col­lege teach­ing, which is over 70% adjunct now. Oppor­tu­ni­ties have just shrunk in so many areas. I feel it par­tic­u­lar­ly as a jour­nal­ist and writer. You must feel it, too, I should think. At one point, a long time ago, when I was start­ing out and my kids were small, I could pret­ty much sup­port us — with child sup­port — but as a free­lance writer. Now, could you do that today?

IO: *laughs* No, I bartend.

BE: That’s one of the things I actu­al­ly thought of at times, but in those days, this would be in the ​’80s, I could still get jobs, not decent-pay­ing jobs, but I could get out­side jobs and I could patch those things togeth­er with the free­lance assign­ments and the free­lance assign­ments paid at least a dol­lar a word. And as my name became bet­ter known, it went up to like $3 a word.

You can’t get that now. This is why I insti­gat­ed the Eco­nom­ic Hard­ship Report­ing Project, which is a lit­tle group that encour­ages low-income peo­ple to write and we will work with them from the ini­tial idea and fram­ing it into a pitch and find­ing a place to get it pub­lished. And then we also raise mon­ey so that we can pay the writer and make sure the writer gets $1 a word.

IO: That’s incredible.

BE: You know, we’ve been doing things for In These Times, recent­ly. And we’re always look­ing for peo­ple who have a great sto­ry to tell and hope­ful­ly an orig­i­nal way of telling it and get­ting them into both main­stream media like the New York Times, for exam­ple, and in local news­pa­pers. The path that exist­ed for me — the upward path — is gone. The fact that I could make a thou­sand dol­lars for a thou­sand-word piece was deci­sive in allow­ing me to also be an activist and also write about things that I didn’t care if I got paid for.

IO: How would you explain this rise in pre­car­i­ty, not even just among peo­ple who for­mer­ly had union jobs or indus­tri­al jobs that were shipped over­seas, but in gen­er­al, for things like journalism?

BE: The big media out­lets are owned by bil­lion­aires who, in most cas­es, have no real inter­est in the con­tent of the jour­nal­ism or the qual­i­ty of the jour­nal­ism that they are help­ing man­age. If you elim­i­nate half the peo­ple in the news­room of a news­pa­per, they don’t care. To them, it’s just anoth­er prof­it source. That’s what hap­pened — cap­i­tal­ism ate it up.

IO: Even out­side of media, for exam­ple, teach­ers’ jobs are under attack. It feels like the econ­o­my keeps grow­ing but there is still less and less work for all of us.

BE: Well, teach­ers are actu­al­ly a very hope­ful side. In the last cou­ple of years, the num­ber of teacher strikes, includ­ing with rad­i­cal demands like for afford­able hous­ing for the fam­i­lies of the stu­dents they teach — this is unprece­dent­ed. It’s amaz­ing. I feel very hope­ful about them. I think that they’re a great exam­ple of some sort of resis­tance. But you know, it’s been relentless.

And I don’t have to tell some­body at In These Times that huge vol­umes of mon­ey and man­age­r­i­al effort go into pre­vent­ing union­iza­tion or col­lec­tive action of any kind by work­ers. I don’t want to lim­it the forms that that action could take to offi­cial unions. There are oth­er ways peo­ple can resist, oth­er forms of orga­ni­za­tion peo­ple have been cre­at­ing, like the Nation­al Domes­tic Work­ers Alliance—there’s just a lot of things going on and exper­i­ment­ing, which is exciting.

IO: What do you think we need to stop this upsurge in right-wing pop­ulism? Is it a left-wing pop­ulism or is it some­thing else?

BE: Well, yes of course. The short answer is a left-wing pop­ulism. But some­thing I would want to add to that is, and this may sound a lit­tle weird to say in a straight­for­ward polit­i­cal inter­view, but we need to offer a vision of the joy of col­lec­tive accom­plish­ment, the joy of work­ing togeth­er. The joy of work­ing togeth­er across lines of race or oth­er things that sep­a­rate peo­ple. We have to be not just the side that’s about gloom, which is what I feel, but about pos­si­bil­i­ty and good feelings.

My favorite orga­niz­ing project in this coun­try is the Work­ers’ Project of Fort Wayne, Indi­ana. They orga­nize work­ers and com­mu­ni­ty, too. They do a lot of their orga­niz­ing through fun things: Pic­nics and par­ties that draw hun­dreds and thou­sands of peo­ple. Peo­ple love it because we don’t have that kind of thing in our lives.

IO: I think the best vision of a future with any kind of joy in it is being pro­vid­ed by the Green New Deal. Peo­ple are start­ing to talk about a short­er work­week, leisure time, a jobs guar­an­tee, pub­licly fund­ing the arts.

BE: There are just so many things that could be done. We could be increas­ing pub­lic spaces where peo­ple gath­er for fes­tiv­i­ties and enter­tain­ment. We’re instead lim­it­ing pub­lic spaces more and more and seg­re­gat­ing more and more by class and race. We could be hav­ing a good time togeth­er. And we need to radi­ate that a lit­tle bit.

Social­ism, to afflu­ent peo­ple, often sounds like pri­va­tion. Oh, they’re going to take stuff from me and give it to some­body else. Sup­pose what you got in exchange is just a more joy­ous and con­vivial world. Where you talk to peo­ple on the street, where maybe peo­ple start danc­ing in the street — whatever!

And I’m seri­ous about this. I wrote a book called Danc­ing in the Streets: A His­to­ry of Col­lec­tive Joy, about the inter­twin­ing of fes­tiv­i­ties, his­tor­i­cal­ly, with polit­i­cal move­ments. One of the great­est exam­ples would be the slave upris­ings in the Caribbean in the 19th cen­tu­ry. They would use the occa­sion of Car­ni­val for the upris­ing for some prac­ti­cal rea­sons: there’s a lot of noise going on and peo­ple can be masked. But also, what makes peo­ple want to do things? It’s not just all antag­o­nism and anger — there’s a lot of that. It’s also the joy of doing it.

IO: What do you think it will take to get to that joy­ous world?

BE: Prac­tice. I just want to see that become part of what the Left does. Every­thing we do should have some thought for the plea­sure of doing it.

IO. The Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ists of Amer­i­ca (DSA) went from around 6,000 mem­bers in 2015 to almost 60,000 today. What do you make of DSA’s recent growth?

BE: Oh! It’s won­der­ful. It was the most heart­en­ing thing that hap­pened after the elec­tion in 2016. I feel great about it.

IO: Could you speak a lit­tle bit about your time in DSA? What was it like when it was first found­ed? How has it changed?

BE: There was a lot of dis­cord from the begin­ning. And I am, I guess, a good exam­ple of it because I was part of the NAM con­tin­gent, New Amer­i­can Move­ment, that merged with DSOC, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Social­ist Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee. And I had not been enthu­si­as­tic about the merg­er. What hap­pened was they said, ​‘would you like to be the co-chair of this orga­ni­za­tion?’ I said okay not real­iz­ing how much I was putting myself in a very dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion polit­i­cal­ly because there were such big dif­fer­ences between me, for exam­ple, and Michael Har­ring­ton. And I came to feel some­thing like a token, which I was.

In those days it was total­ly dif­fer­ent. You could not bring up the ques­tion of Pales­tine. You’d be quick­ly silenced. Cer­tain things were just off lim­its. You could not crit­i­cize union lead­er­ship. We were sup­posed to always iden­ti­fy with union lead­er­ship which was, at the time, often quite pro­gres­sive, like Bill Win­pisinger of the Machin­ists’ Union, but we were very lim­it­ed in what we could talk about. DSOC came from a tra­di­tion in the Amer­i­can left where pol­i­tics was all about class and class was rep­re­sent­ed by the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty and the unions. And so, things like women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, were just seen as dis­trac­tions. You must run into that some­times, still.

IO: Def­i­nite­ly. With­in the Left there are peo­ple who view class too nar­row­ly, in the way you were just describ­ing, and are crit­i­cized heav­i­ly for it and go back and forth with oth­ers between ​‘your under­stand­ing of the world isn’t inter­sec­tion­al’ and ​‘you’re focus­ing on iden­ti­ty politics.’

BE: It’s kind of crazy. So-called iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics, like the fem­i­nist move­ment, grew out of larg­er move­ments — how much larg­er can you get than women? We came into fem­i­nism with anger about racism, about the war in Viet­nam, about all these oth­er things. It was nev­er, ​‘Hey, look at us. We’re women.’ I mean, yeah there was some of that. That was impor­tant, but to nar­row it down is to mis­un­der­stand. We had a much more inclu­sive notion of what we were going about. It’s always been true.

IO: I think a lot of the lib­er­al left miss­es that when they say I want a woman pres­i­dent and don’t fac­tor in what mate­r­i­al inter­ests that can­di­date has in mind. Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez was recent­ly dis­par­aged for point­ing out that in any oth­er coun­try she and Joe Biden would not be in the same par­ty. She lat­er added that the Unit­ed States does not have a left par­ty and, at best, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty is a cen­ter or cen­ter-con­ser­v­a­tive par­ty. What do you make of this cleav­age between estab­lish­ment Democ­rats on the one hand and the pro­gres­sive wave push­ing the par­ty towards the left on the oth­er? Do you think the left will be able to cap­ture the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Party?

BE: Oh, god. We used to debate this so much in the old DSA! I nev­er had a strong feel­ing. I’m sort of an oppor­tunis­tic per­son when it comes to this kind of thing. If you have a local Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty that is very pro­gres­sive, then go with that. I don’t know, I’m not a strate­gic per­son in that sense.

IO. Could you imag­ine a future where cap­i­tal­ism can some­how adapt to the cli­mate cri­sis, but we still all survive?

BE: There’s no time to wait and see. There isn’t enough time. I would have to say social­ism takes a lot of defin­ing. And I think peo­ple will be going about it all kinds of dif­fer­ent ways. So it’s not like Oh, here’s what you do. Here’s the starter kit for soci­ety.

IO: How would you define socialism?

BE: Well, it has to start with the knowl­edge and the faith that we can solve prob­lems when we work togeth­er. Which means it has to start with some sort of work as well as an under­stand­ing of how total­ly mutu­al­ly depen­dent we are. The issue is no longer the Left ver­sus the Right. It’s those who want as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble to sur­vive this cri­sis and those who will be sat­is­fied to get a few bil­lion­aires safe­ly tucked away in their mis­sile silos turned into mansions.

That’s one out­come, is that you do have some sur­vivors but the great major­i­ty of peo­ple die off. That’s the right wing. And the out­look, judg­ing from the Trumps and Bol­sonaros of the world, seems to be grab what you can while the grab­bing is good. Let’s burn the Ama­zon. Let’s get every­thing we can out of this sit­u­a­tion and those of us that are very, very super rich will sur­vive, per­haps, in lunar colonies or in old mis­sile silos.

IO: What do you think it will take to avert the cli­mate cri­sis? To a place where we live in an inhab­it­able society?

BE: Well, we have to have less reliance on things, objects, fos­sil fuels and more reliance on each oth­er. For exam­ple, in grow­ing food, in enter­tain­ing our­selves, all sorts of things. We have to see our­selves as each other’s resources. In the frame of mind I’m in today, what­ev­er I think about polit­i­cal­ly, whether it’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry can­di­dates or any­thing, has to be in the con­text of the com­ing apoc­a­lypse — no, real­ly. This is no time to fool around. I will keep try­ing. That’s all. Until the last gasp.