In a tweet of 30th September, Greta Thunberg wrote this:
“Ending fossil capitalism doesn't mean we have to implement socialism. We're stuck in an unimaginative 20th century debate. Regardless of what we'll call the economic system, it is essential that it functions within the planetary boundaries."
Whenever people start to initiate this ‘debate’ between capitalism and socialism (which is what Greta’s tweet is about), they are met with assertions that ‘us and them thinking’ concerning class is ‘outdated’ and ‘anachronistic.’ (I know I have been). How very clever – and convenient – this ‘classless’ ‘beyond politics’ ‘neither left nor right’ appeal of Thunberg et al is – in that it avoids having to confront the asymmetrical power relations, the material roots, the class dynamics, and the socio-economic drivers arising from prevailing social forms and relations; and avoids having to confront relations of class power and how these are entrenched and embedded in the social and institutional fabric. These, I would suggest, have something to do with the crises we are being urged in the most histrionic terms to address. If you don’t diagnosis a problem properly in the first place, you will not resolve it in the second. Far from being an ‘outdated’ and ‘unimaginative’ ‘debate,’ this is the class struggle that lies at the heart of converging social and ecological crises. But, of course, Thunberg et al are not interested in ‘debate’ (still less class struggle). There is no time. I would call their bluff here: if things really are that bad, then it really is too late, because the kinds of large-scale changes required require time. In which case, it is time to face the music and make our peace. Of course, it’s a very carefully contrived strategy. They are engaged in a monologue, not a dialogue; they want “us” to “panic,” (and stampede in a very particular direction, which is not made explicit, because Greta doesn’t prescribe, does she, but leaves it to us. Question: which forces and agencies have the capacity to push the new technologies to the desired scale?) In this tweet, she doesn’t prescribe, but does make a point of saying we don’t have to implement socialism; she then mentions that the economy needs to function within planetary boundaries, which is most helpful, seeing as “we” had never thought of that. But these “classless” people are not part of the vague “we” they refer to endlessly (to avoid using more sociologically and economically precise terms which have definite political implications). In fact, they see themselves as standing apart from and above the common people. Whenever I am challenged by these centrists now as being ‘outdated’ I take them on directly. One guy, prominent in eco-design and collaborative solutions, told me that Marx was outdated. I discovered him a year on presenting a rehash of eighteenth century ideas of enlightened self-interest as the way forward, no messy ethics and politics and awkward issues of power to address. It’s cowardice and I made sure to call him out. I have a long memory and bide my time. The issue, evidently, is not one of chronology at all – it is ideology. “Third way” “classless” thinking is as old as class itself, the well-worn pose of independence that appeals to those who are reluctant to address the material dynamics of the situation. Their relative autonomy from capital and labour gives them the appearance of independence but this is illusory; their incomes and jobs derive directly or indirectly from one or the other via the state and other governmental bodies and ngo’s. Marx’s critique of Hegel’s state bureaucracy as the ‘universal class’ is quite brilliant on this, exposing their ‘spiritualism’ and ‘idealism’ as the ‘crassest materialism.’ There is no mystery as to why, for all the talk of ‘system change,’ they go nowhere near socialism and eco-socialism; they have no roots whatsoever in the working class. This “non-political” politics defaults to the status quo and its iniquitous power relations every time. They speak the language of bureaucratisation, not democratisation, as a class which dare not identify itself as a class, lest its claim to embody the universal interest of all be exposed. There is a long history of a posh anti-capitalism that is quite distinct from socialism, that actually holds the working class in contempt. They see their job as being to tidy up the messy business of economics (and politics), order and regulate, overseeing the activities of economic agents, both capital and labour. Of course, the independence is more apparent than real. It is significant that socialism is denied. This thinking, being ‘non-political,’ defaults to the status quo every time.
I’ve been examining this class that dare not speak its name recently.
I have a lot more to say. It's long since been time to call time on this "classless" class advocating a "non-political" politics claiming independence of material interest and claiming to embody the universal interest of all. This is cynical and manipulative to the core.
I’m calling it a techno-bureaucratic managerial class (thinking back to the old ‘managerial revolution’ thesis of the likes of James Burnham back in the 1940s, but with a new twist). (I don’t have a title for them, although I do have some colourful names. I have heard them described as an ‘overclass.’ The important point to make clear is that this putative independence is utterly bogus, part of their claim to embody and articulate the universal interest of all. The truth is that they are not independent of capitalist relations at all, and any anti-capitalist rhetoric, (as in the disdain of commerce, anarchy, the business cycle, class and class struggle, consumption etc), is not aimed at uprooting the capital form at all, only making it more rational and orderly. (You can see why I make a big issue of identifying ‘capital’ as a process and a relation entailing a certain logic and systemic imperatives. You will find this managerial class identifying capital as a ‘thing,’ laying claim to being able to take it over and direct it to the common social and ecological good. A fine ideal, people will say in support. But it is utterly utopian. Capital, as an alienated system of production, is not for appropriation and redirection in this way. It will absorb such high-minded idealism quite easily (as happened to the first wave of techno-bureaucratic control, Fabian state socialism in Britain and elsewhere). The tendency to institutional and technological solutions as the default option, and the systematic aversion to class analysis, tells us that we are in the presence of a very definite and cohesive and self-aware group of people. A class, in fact, however much they deny it. They are a very cohesive class, in fact, recruiting the same kind of people with a shared outlook and value system.
It is, of course, much easier to deploy the institutional and technological toolkit within prevailing power relations and structures in order to address crises than it is to ask difficult political questions about the root causes and socio-economic drivers of these crises. It’s one for people: are people really interested in ‘system transformation’? If they are, then awkward questions are the order of the day, and involve something much more than the ‘debate’ so casually dismissed here.
As for this ‘classless’ ‘beyond politics’ ‘neither left nor right’ appeal, how utterly outdated and unimaginative. I take is these people would like the Blue Regime of Napoleon III, which proclaimed itself to be neither white reaction nor red revolution. How did that go, remind me? It’s a dangerous subject history, one can get the feeling seeing people claiming to offer something shiny and new that one has seen it come and go its predictable way many times before.
There’s a serious issue of language and terminology here. The evasions of progressives and radicals on this issue of class is leaving the door wide open for those from other political traditions – and with other commitments – to help themselves. I've just been listening to conservative thinkers who are re-appropriating class and applying class analysis most perceptively to the rise of the techno-bureaucratic managerial class. (I’ll make it clear that here I don’t mean those wild libertarians who are screaming ‘global technocratic elite’ and equating it with ‘socialism.’ If they put their prejudices to one side and analysed, they would see that whatever this ‘new class’ is about, most of all it is an attempt to outflank socialism, check democratisation and a genuine socialisation, and extend a bureaucratisation on the basis of untransformed capitalist relations. It might be a regulative agenda, but that doesn’t make it socialist, and the idea that it does stems from the false dualism of state vs market, plan vs anarchy, which is indeed unimaginative. I’ll be generous and say that that is what the tweet is driving at).
This whole area is wide open to class analysis. These conservatives I’m reading (Michael Lind, ‘The New Class War’ for one), point out that Marx himself didn't claim to invent the concept of class. Which is true, with Marx pointing to liberal political economists and thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith and many others. You can go back further to Plato and Aristotle. How very disappointing to see this tradition of critical analysis consistently being thrown away, and people allowing it to be thrown away by those hell-bent on ideological evasion of critical confrontation subjecting power to public (democratic) controversy, challenge, and change. How ironic to see people thinking they are being rebellious lining up behind appeals cast in the most vague and vapid of terms – “we,” “all humankind,” “collaboration,” “classlessness.” It’s baloney.
The absence of class is leading to a vapid centrism on the part of 'progressive' liberal leftists and leaving the door open to more perceptive analyses on some parts of the right (not the libertarian head-bangers who shout ‘globalism’ and ‘socialism’ at each, every, and any collective purpose. Such people explain nothing, only expose their own ideological prejudices). (I loathe a lot of these terms, too, because people, in short order, will go to the labels instead of the analysis of the relations behind them).
But I am most interested in the existence of the universal (techno-bureaucratic) centrist class that dare not speak its name – that dare not identify itself as a class lest it expose its universal claims to represent the good of all to be utterly bogus.
I am preparing a new piece on this, which at the moment is very angry in tone. That anger is in reaction to the abuse and scorn that has been heaped upon ‘ordinary’ working class men and women in recent decades. I don’t make the mistake of arguing that the voice of the working class is always right, and I don’t make the mistake of ‘otherising’ the liberal bourgeois as lefties, luvvies, and loons (the ‘woke,’ people concerned with rights and identity politics, climate rebels and activists, the celebrities who are in on it all, ‘social justice warriors’ etc). There is a need to overcome the division here and spring the trap that turns progressive and potentially progressive against one another. But it takes two, and as a fully paid up member of the working class, I shall be speaking up a lot more from this side of the divide, in the hope of overcoming that divide.
I may have to temper the anger of the first draft in order to clarify the points at issue in more cool language. It’s rarely wise to inflame a situation. People respond to the provocation in kind, and all sides take to the trenches. From personal experience, though, I have to record that my exchanges with people in commons and design on this issue have not been rewarding. When I have been reasonable I have been simply dismissed. I have been told that 'class' and 'us and them thinking' are 'outdated' and 'anachronistic.' Such people make their appeal in terms of a classless humanitarianism. And yet it is evident that these people really do constitute a class, but, at the same time, cannot admit to it, lest it expose as ideological their claims to act in the universal interest. They rest their claim to power and control on the possession of a disinterested knowledge and neutral expertise. This is hogwash. The members of this class stand at a distance of relative autonomy from capital and labour and therefore can imagine themselves independent and 'beyond politics' and 'neither left nor right.' That is the image that they present to the world. I can only think of Marx's critique of Hegel's state bureaucracy as the 'universal class' here, with Marx describing its spiritualism and idealism as the 'crassest materialism.'
Of course, seeing the collectivism and the bureaucratic managerialism of this claim to order, organize, and regulate society and ‘the economy,’ the libertarians of the right are quick to sound the alarm and condemn it all as 'socialism.' It is anything but. It stands in the line of a posh anti-capitalism, one which expresses open contempt for the working class and which seeks to render working class self-organisation and self-administration subordinate to a rational plan formulated by others.
The claim of independence is bogus, too. The power and resources of this 'classless' class derive directly or indirectly from capital and labour (via the state and various governmental or non-governmental organisations). They have material interests of their own, which they seek to expand under the cover of the general interest). I have much more to say on this (having already written 40,000 words in five days). In the article Chaos is Being Normalised, Paul Mason writes of the "incomprehension of the technocratic elites" as they stand paralysed before a crisis they neither know the origins of nor have the critical and conceptual tools which would enable them to find out. "The liberal establishment does not know what to do." "Few are prepared to address the material roots and class dynamics of this crisis, because nobody taught them to do so. But they are clear."
We are living within a long crisis with transformative potential. That is, this crisis is not accidental, the result of errors and bad policies to be corrected by incremental reforms and new policies. This is why I bristle when I see so many of this ‘new class’ repeating the argument that neoliberalism is the ideology which is the source of all our ills (check George Monbiot’s article on this). This is precisely the kind of deluded thinking of bourgeois intellectuals that Marx and Engels criticized in “The German Ideology,” making ideas and theories responsible for deep seated socio-economic contradictions. Ideology, in this sense, is right about the wrong system – the inversion lies in the social relations, not in the thought about them. The point is important to establish since to argue that neoliberalism is the problem, and nothing more, we simply need new thinking and a new theory, without any fundamental transformation in social forms and institutions. How convenient. Which theory? The Keynesian theory whose failure in the past opened the door to the neoliberal reaction? Are we just going to keep re-heating old theories or coming up with new ones that end up working within the same constraints? Or actually get down to addressing those nasty ‘c’ words – capital, class, contradiction?
Dear Greta's slogans are vague enough to attract broad support in the first instance, but then what? That approach is subject to the law of diminishing returns. But if there is a radicalisation and a mobilisation, sooner or later there is the question of where this social and political energy is to go. Given that we are told from the same sources there is no time for politics, no time for debate, I wonder why there is such a big play on not being prescriptive … Given that these same sources tell us that pretty much everyone has failed and that no one has solutions, I am left wondering if that wiping of the slate clean is merely an attempt to end politics, end disagreement, end contention and (class) struggle to enforce ‘agreement’ on whatever may be the only game in town, the only rescue squad available. Gee, I wonder what that could be, in a world in which the corporations have all the financial, technological, and institutional resources …
This has all the hallmarks of a calculated vagueness with very definite political ends in view. A lack of clarity on politics, policies, forces and agency leaves people entering the field out of wishful thinking (after years of desperation) wide open to distortion, deviation, and defeat when it comes to treading the hard boards of politics. Vague hopes for something better – which is what a broad ‘classless’ appeal attempts to incite – tend not to last long in face of a harsh reality. Obfuscation is a dangerous game (when it is not merely plain ideological cover for plans and programmes that are a little way down the pipeline, to be unveiled once the demand has been created – basic marketing). Bad process and bad argument always but always come back to bite you on the backside for the way they set a precedent. My fear is that the radical moment is being thrown away. By people who talk big on ‘system change’ but lack the means, the motives, the intent, and the commitment to transcend asymmetrical relations and restructure power and resources in a more egalitarian fashion. That’s not what they mean by system change. We are in the presence of an openly manipulative and cynical (non-)politics that takes our values and principles and changes, takes our commitments and diverts them, takes our causes and exploits them; with an engineered mobilisation and radicalisation, we are confronted with something that seems to be our own creation, but whose construction was initiated long before our action and which, one day, threatens to confront us as the incontrovertible agent of the imperatives of money and bureaucratic power.
Clarity is the order of the day, a clarity which exposes 'classless' appeals that scotomize material relations and class contradictions for the plain ideology it is (ideology in Marx’s critical sense of a set of ideas which conceals, rationalizes, and preserves existing power relations – do you think Marx’s self-emancipation of the proletariat leading to human emancipation in general is in the pipe line? Me neither).
It is galling seeing conservative critics like Michael Lind in 'The New Class War' making fertile use of the concept of class, whilst people who style themselves 'rebels,' in making big bold claims on ‘system change, not climate change,’ eschew class and class analysis for vapid 'classless' appeals to all nice people who believe in all good things (and who, incredibly, at the same time think themselves telling hard truths to power! The delusion is incredible, and a certain recipe for continued defeat).
I've been racking my brains wondering what to call this 'class that is not a class,' the class that makes classless appeals. 'New class' didn't quite say anything and 'techno-bureaucratic managerial class' - seeing itself as apart from and above capital and labour - is a bit of a mouthful. Then I heard Michael Lind refer to an 'overclass,' a class that seeks to order, regulate, and oversee society (for the common good, of course, not to advance any material interest of its own). Of course, we had James Burnham back in the forties writing of ‘The Managerial Revolution.’ I don't think it's a 'new' class or formation, for the reason these people are not, as they present themselves, autonomous of social relations, just at a remove from the economy, occupying a lofty position in governmental bodies or educational establishments from which they look down upon a messy and vulgar world that stands in need of being tidied up by way of their neutral expertise. And since, as they insist, truth is non-negotiable, how can anyone argue back and disobey? But the claim to be a universal (non-)class is ideological. Ultimately, they derive their power and resources from the state, which in turn derives its power and resources from capital, which derives its power and resources from labour. And it all of it, the working class remain the class of exploited labour. (And right wing libertarians persist in calling it socialism!)
As for the Thunberg quotes, they are beyond satire. There is no statement issued by way of Thunberg Inc. that isn’t carefully crafted and crafted. Anyone who takes the non-political stance at face value is a fool.
The statement that we need an economy that functions within planetary boundaries was helpful. Like we haven’t been wrestling with the theoretical problem of identifying the precise social forms and relations and systems of economic provision which mediate the interchange between the social and natural metabolism in harmonious fashion and the practical political and economic question of struggling to achieve some such thing in face of entrenched power. I have bad news: there are a variety of agents in the field, and they don't all agree and don't all have the same interests. Which, of course, is all quite well known by those offering a 'classless' 'non-political' stance. The forces of global capital are at bay, so let's call the struggle off, call it all a draw, and start again from scratch. Gee, I wonder where that leads.
I'll say it straight, a 'classless' politics that sees itself as ‘neither left nor right,’ indeed as 'beyond politics,' is the soft non-confrontational option of the privileged and the entitled who are so comfortable within asymmetrical class relations as to not even notice the existence of class and how it bears down with such weight on so many. And they don’t care, either.
It's long since been time to call time on this "classless" class advocating a "non-political" politics claiming independence of material interest and claiming to embody the universal interest of all. Cynical and manipulative to the core. Think you can come up with a 'new politics'? Try it. So many attempts to evade the issues of power, control, authority, and resources end up repeating some very old politics. Which ones will they be? Don't have them? Only 'the science' wielded as authoritative command? Then you have squat. Never ever ever let anyone bully a politics and a consent, least of all by claims of 'necessity' under time constraints.
(It’s too daft to laugh at, as they say in northern England. It reminds me of when we used to play-box with my dad when we were little. Whenever we got beyond his reach and got close to him on the inside and started to batter him with some pretty vicious low blows, he'd cling hold and shout "break." Just when we were about to flatten him. And then we'd start again).