Producers and Parasites

What divides political elites

Musa al-Gharbi writes,

The occupations and employers with the highest concentrations of individual workers who donated to the Biden-Harris campaign included teachers, professors, and other educators; lawyers; medical and psychiatric professionals; people who work in advertising, communications, and entertainment; consultants; HR professionals and administrators; architects and designers; IT specialists; and engineers. Industries, professions, and fields that provided the highest total contributions to the Democrats included securities and investments, education, lawyers and law firms, health professionals, nonprofits, electronics companies, business services, entertainment, and civil servants.

…However, it should be noted that some symbolic professions do lean toward Republicans. For instance, geologists and many types of engineers (mining, petroleum, chemical, mechanical, civil) skew right. Although engineers on the whole favor Democrats, it makes sense that some subfields would defy the prevailing trend—particularly those tightly connected to (generally right-aligned) manufacturing and extractive industries… Most employees in banking or lending also skew right, as do most insurance agents.

This is from page 38 of his book We Have Never Been Woke, which I have only started reading. Many of his descriptions of “symbolic professionals” seem apt.

But al-Gharbi’s sociology strikes me as rigidly Marxist : the social structure consists of the exploiters and the exploited, and above that structure there is an ideological superstructure that helps to justify and preserve the class stratification. al-Gharbi’s twist is to place Woke beliefs within the ideological superstructure; he accuses social justice activists of enjoying membership in the exploiter class while posing as allies of the exploited.

What accounts for the different political orientations among people whose work involves manipulating symbols (words, numbers, bits), giving them what Al-Gharbi calls symbolic capital? He gestures at geographic differences (the Democrats live in deep blue cities, while the Republicans live elsewhere).

What I notice is that the elites on the Republican side tend to earn a living as producers. They make things that other people want or need.

In contrast, elites on the Democratic side include many people one may think of as parasites. They depend on producers for taxes or donations, but they do not produce what consumers want. They may even make a living by impeding production.

For example, land-use regulation serves to transfer resources away from the producers to various parasites. Taxes are collected to pay for government officials to implement the regulations. Developers hire staff whose task is to comply with regulations. They also devote resources to funding friendly politicians in order to speed the process of obtaining permits and exemptions.¹

The fuzzy distinction between producers and parasites

I do not wish to make a big deal of the producer/parasite distinction. It is very ill-defined. I hope it serves a useful purpose for this essay, but I do not expect to continue to harp on it.

Traditionally, parasites were criminals or predatory rulers. They stole from producers.

There is not a bright line between parasites and producers. I would classify many government employees sitting in an office (or working from home) in DC as parasites. But there are other government employees who are not—food safety inspectors, for example.

Lawyers tend to make work for one another. Some of this is parasitical, but not all of it.

Financial engineering can help make the economy more productive, but some of it is parasitical, finding creative ways to get around regulation or to fool unsophisticated consumers and investors.

Some medical research is productive. Some of it is parasitical. Government funding tends to attract parasites: consultants, grant-writers, lobbyists, and so forth.

Chances are you are a producer if you work with things or you work with people. The former includes agriculture, construction, transportation, or manufacturing. The latter includes restaurants, retail, business sales, child care, elder care, and health care.

The professions that work with symbols constitute new forms of both producers and parasites. As al-Gharbi points out, many of these professions emerged during the Progressive era. Professional associations in academia, civil service, and health care

defined the professions in question as fundamentally altruistic in nature—ostensibly dedicated not to profit or prestige but to the public good.

…although the symbolic professions and the credentialing system were ushered in under the auspices of transferring wealth and opportunity from those at the top to those who were needy and desperate, in fact the primary wealth transfer that actually occurred during this period was from the upper class to the upper-middle class. Symbolic capitalists took from the rich and gave . . . primarily to themselves (p. 62-63)

Me vs. al-Gharbi on the Woke

Both al-Gharbi and I have negative things to say about the Woke. But as I read him so far, we differ considerably.

My sense, based on only being a little way through the book, is that al-Gharbi maintains a distinction between exploiters and exploited, which I think has little value. I think there is more value in trying to distinguish producers from parasites, although that attempt has problems as well.

The exploiter-exploited framework allows al-Gharbi to treat all symbolic professionals as members of the exploiter class. He criticizes the Woke for being members of the exploiter class who make empty gestures toward being on the side of the exploited.

The producer/parasite perspective is much fuzzier. I think that many symbolic professionals would fall on the producer side of that distinction. As a loose generalization, I would claim that the Woke tend to fall more on the parasite side.

I applaud the freedom and prosperity in American society, and I praise the market for contributing to that. I get the sense that al-Gharbi opposes the extent of social stratification in American society, and he would blame the market for contributing to that. He would condemn the Woke for not trying hard enough to upend our social arrangements, while I would condemn them for trying too hard to do so. In terms of occupation, they tend to be parasites. Parasites who hate their host.

1. Economists call the favor-buying “rent-seeking.” The ordinary person calls it corruption.