The cost of living stuff is a different issue. If you’re operating a factory, you want housing, healthcare, etc to be cheap, so that you don’t have to pay your

The cost of living stuff is a different issue. If you’re operating a factory, you want housing, healthcare, etc to be cheap, so that you don’t have to pay your workers as much. If you’re a tiny group of people coming up with new ways to financialize housing, healthcare, etc. you want exactly the opposite. I think of this division as something like “Industrial” vs “Financial” capital. Part of the reason the old labor movement isn’t relevant any more is that we don’t actually make stuff any more. “Industrial” capital is not at the seat of power any more. The real problem with today’s unions is that the counterparty has changed. The people who are making houses expensive aren’t at the table negotiating with the unions; they have no employees! Unions are fighting the shrinking ghost of “Industrial” capital. The reason for this shift is geographic. The stuff that actually gets made is made (under a yoke of hellish cruelty) at the periphery. There, housing is cheap! But the profits flow back here unevenly, to a tiny group of holders. And hence we are dominated by financial capital. This is also the origin of the red/blue divide, roughly speaking: One is the local “Industrial” concentration and one is global “Financial” concentration. The third bloc, labor, were only really relevant when labor actually had a relationship (with the leverage inherent to that) with the dominant form capital. Now the two groups have predictably been crushed: the local concentration of capital and the union. They’re both sitting at the wrong table.