Comrade Motopu finds class fetishism over class analysis in Amber Frost’s 2024 book Dirtbag.
This is a book about a millennial socialist’s ridiculous adventures in left politics, and what happened when I threw all my weight behind an unlikely insurgent left-wing presidential campaign. Sounds good to a publisher, but it’s hardly reinventing the wheel. Hunter S. Thompson’s 1973 book Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 obviously beat me to that one. —Amber Frost, Dirtbag
Amber A’Lee Frost’s Dirtbag could be described as a Gonzo memoir. She herself calls it an “ADHD gonzo bricolage.” What that means as far as street cred is negligible these days. I’m looking at my copy of Fear And Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 and remembering the forward was written by Matt Taibbi. Since then, he became an employee of Elon Musk, a twitter files curator, and boilerplate ex-Left anti-woke contrarian. He’s a good representative for the crowd that seems to see themselves as the heirs to Thompson’s legacy. Gonzo is a devalued social currency.
Beneath the coopting of Gonzo style there’s Amber Frost’s actual politics. Basically she wants to bring back the New Deal era labor/capital compact that saw higher wages, job security, and benefits like healthcare and pensions. To do this, the focus has to be organizing the industrial labor force to engage in point of production challenges and using industrial choke points to shut down production and distribution to attack capitalists. But that necessitates creating millions of new manufacturing jobs.
Frost has become known as the mean class-reductionist lady and I might agree if I thought she was serious about class analysis. Dirtbag is about class fetishism, specifically her fantasies about the industrial working class, part happy worker smurf, part “Yes Chad.”
Frost has such a romanticized ideal of industrial workers that any suggestion to prioritize organizing other sectors sends her into attack mode. It’s not just that she believes that blue collar workers confronting capitalists at the point of production is a vital part of organizing. Plenty of trade unionists and labor activists think that. It’s that she is not even willing to admit there has been a decline in industrial jobs and manufacturing in the U.S.
She insists manufacturing doesn’t need to “come back” because it never really left. She throws up a FRED chart showing “All Employees, Manufacturing” noting the number of manufacturing jobs was fluctuating but that it didn’t necessarily signify steady decline:
In 2019, it was at a dismal 12.817 million, but it’s important to note that the decline itself hasn’t been a steady descent. There was minor growth in 1984, and again from 1988 to 1989, and a relatively steady increase from 1993 to 1998 to levels commensurate with the low dips of the 1970s, and often with levels above—sometimes considerably above—that supposedly golden era of manufacturing from the 1950s to the mid-1960s.
Here’s her chart:
But here’s a couple of other charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that jobs in manufacturing, mining and logging, construction, trade-transport and utilities all declined steadily from 1950 to 2020 as a percentage of total US jobs. So it’s not just the number of jobs, but the percent of total US jobs that tells us about the decline.
And another represenation:
To examine her class fetishizing, I’ll focus on her tirades against historian Gabriel Winant and trade union reformer Eddy Sadlowski below and briefly explain how her industrial dream points to the productivist ideology of the influencer and scholar crew she rolls with.
First, a bit of background about Frost from section one of her book.
Introducing Herself
Frost sets up her backstory in the first section of Dirtbag, “Indiana.” It starts with her as the child of a single mom struggling with poverty, constant moves to new towns, early jobs, high school, punk rock, confronting a bully, and then her entrance into labor organizing and defending women’s reproductive rights. We see the formation of her class centered politics, and her tenacious personality from an early age.
Part II covers her move to New York City, organizing with the Working Families Party and DSA, encountering Occupy Wall Street and eventually hooking up with Chapo Trap House and becoming a Left fringe celebrity and political influencer. It’s implied that Chapo Trap House became her main and steady source of income though I don’t know what her net worth is at this point.
The third section focuses on her dedication to the second Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, which most of her other work ended up being channelled into in 2019.
We get it, you’re working class
To me, her class war routine comes off as a bit forced at times. I’m for the class struggle and abolishing class. It’s just that Frost lays it on so thick and so constantly, turn to any page, that she ends up sounding like a spy for the Campus Republicans going undercover for reconnaissance on the Left. I know she’s not, but there’s so much stuff like this:
“Liberals want to like the workers, but they fundamentally perceive them as wild animals; thus, they can only find them sympathetic when they are domesticated, endangered, or—even better—extinct.”
And
“I realized that not only are so many middle-class liberal professionals, particularly those who make up the liberal media, absolutely fucking insane, but their politics operate according to a delusional fear of working-class people that rises to the level of psychosis.
And
“It’s important here to note that these politically unambitious cynics, usually smack-dab in the center of the media/activist/academic Venn diagram, are not merely faddists scrambling for a fresh, new, and perhaps more “woke” substitute for the blue-collar workers whose putative, anti-elitist resentments make them so nervous (though many most certainly are).”
If you read her book you will be faced with this non-stop signalling about her authentic working class status and how she really gets the workers, hell she WAS one, and how she’s not like those liberals “who look down on you, fear you, want to replace you, and want you DEAD, man!” [this last fake quote is mine].
Then there’s her favorite story, which she tells often, about how she drove a forklift at a couple of her jobs and thinks young people would find it fun, so give ‘em that kind of job,…but I’ll stop.
The Occupy Wall Street Debacle: A Confederacy of Dirtbags
In her introduction Frost quotes Vampire Castle era Mark Fisher to provide a basic expectation of solidarity politics: “We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree—on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication.”
That describes a solidarity where we can communicate, listen and learn from each other, debate, and still have each other’s backs.
Frost loves solidarity, but not with anarchists. During her participation in the Occupy Wall Street movement she “read and reread Jo Freeman’s essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ to understand and parse out the fatal defects of anarchist horizontalism we were witnessing but weren’t allowed to admit. ‘This apparent lack of structure too often disguised an informal, unacknowledged and unaccountable leadership that was all the more pernicious because its very existence was denied.’”
Freeman’s essay is worth reading and anyone who participated in an Occupy (or de-Occupy) encampment can relate to the critique after engaging with General Assemblies and seeing ways in which any form of democracy can be subverted by smaller influential groups within a group. I saw similar problems when I worked along side (not in) the International Socialist Organization against the 2003 Iraq invasion. They manipulated and essentially controlled the entire agenda of their own cadre and their front group “Students Against War” all with the use of Robert’s Rules of Order and a predetermined set of goals decided outside their local membership through the organization’s practice of “Democratic Centralism.” The tyranny of structure.
At any rate, given that Frost came into the Occupy Movement armed with foreknowledge of the problem of unaccountable power, the reader is waiting to see how she implemented this into her own participation with OWS.
Smash cut to Frost and her husband spontaneously and unaccountably mobilizing and leading a march of OWS participants to march in circles with no designated destination until they headed for Wall Street and got attacked by a phalanx of billy club wielding cops who beat and arrested many of them.
