In response to this article in Unheard, I read this comment:
The social milieu susceptible to wokeness (what EP Thompson called the lumpen-bourgeoisie), are also the same exhibiting the highest fear of the pandemic, AND the highest level of social racism against the working class (the deplorables) and support cancel culture and deplatforming. The relation is only indirect, but it is important to point out that indirect relation, as it proceeds from a similar mental structure. In this particular conjuncture, it is the liberal class which has shifted to a culture of fear
The intellectuals and politicians of the Left made the horrific discovery that the working class were not their foot soldiers, and so turned on and against the working class. The discovery is not as recent as people now making an issue of this may think. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century it was apparent that the working class were not behaving as socialist revolutionaries - and even reformists - thought they ought to behave and thought they would behave. First Kautsky, the Pope of Marxism, then Lenin turned Marx on his head to argue that socialism is brought into the working class 'from the outside.' Left to their own devices, the working class would geneate only a 'trade union consciousness.' That thesis directly contradicted Marx. And maybe the truth is and remains that Marx was wrong about the working class, his assumption that the proletariat is the 'universal class' on account of its structural position leading him to presume actions and predispositions on the part of the working class that its actual members do not share. There were three ways to go here, the democratic way, which entails working with the grain of 'ordinary' folk and their concerns, create a vanguard to lead the working class in what is conceived to be the correct direction, or just abandon the working class as irredeemably selfish, stupid, and prejudiced in one form or another. The second route became the dominant one but has now morphed in its failure to the third. The obvious question to ask: when will the first option be tried? And the answer to that question is a) when the working class gain control of their own social organs, organs of self-administration and self-emancipation, and become politically autonomous in relation to their social power and b) when members of vanguards are prepared to respect democratic principles and social realities and abandon favoured political preferences and principles to the extent that they contradict them.
I quote from this article:
“this battle is really about working-class discontent.”
It beggars belief that when there is a real rebellion under way, social media activists are hooked on climate activism and Extinction Rebellion and such like, pushing governments into hugely expensive climate programmes without any supporting social and political transformation. One thing that never gets mentioned – except to dismiss ‘ordinary’ people as feckless, ignorant, greedy, stupid, or some description of ‘ist’ and ‘ic’ – is class. Working class people are not welcome, their views and culture scorned, their turning up for work and putting a shift in dismissed as complicity with capitalism.
This is about reviving working class politics from the base upwards, not about making appeals to leaders, vanguards, and activists who have entirely different interests and agendas of their own. The vanguards in politics have a very poor view of the working class:
“Without proper leadership, the workers would be too inert and stupid to do anything about their plight.’
And yet we have seen time and again, since the nineteenth century to the present day, that the working class are anything but 'inert and stupid.' The explosion of militancy on the part of ‘ordinary’ people ‘ought to have been greeted by enthusiasm by the Leftist activist and organiser set. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.’ What has been dismissed as ‘populism’ has ‘triggered a primordial sense of dread in the hearts of the urban classes.’
‘In one recent display of moon logic, the Canadian activist, writer and self-described socialist Nora Loreto complained that “labour” was invisible in the resistance to the “fascist” truckers that had occupied Ottawa. An exasperated comrade chimed in with a story of being a shop steward for a teamster (truck driver) union, and — horror of horrors — the painful truth was that many teamsters were more likely to be in the protest themselves than protesting against it.
The exchange is modern Western Leftism in a nutshell. Is there a single better illustration of the contradictions of the moment? An “activist” and organiser” recoiling in horror at a bunch of truckers — people who work in the real, material economy, ferrying the foodstuffs and goods we all depend on to survive — staging a political protest, only to then ask “but where is the organised working class in all of this?”. Isn’t it obvious to the point of parody that the workers are the people inside the trucks?
‘The divorce between “the Left” and “the workers” is now complete and irrevocable. I think this is a parting that ought to have come decades ago. The division has been apparent for a long time now. In 1989, Ralph Miliband drew attention to the crisis in the agencies of labour representation and socialisation, emphasising the disconnect between representatives and represented. I would describe this as a process of deradicalisation, except I would note that once we proceed from working class people themselves we can see that their legitimate concerns are not necessarily identical with those with a radical politics. But there has, at the same time, been a devaluation of the working class voice in politics and culture.
‘Now it seems that the trucker — and by extension, the pilot, the garbage collector, and the bus driver — does not need or want this caste of self-appointed leaders.
‘This divorce has happened all over the world in recent years. After the massive rejection by Red Wall voters of Jeremy Corbyn and his activist base in the smart, urban, and highly credentialed parts of Britain, one started to see a rhetoric of open loathing for the dumb, uneducated gammons and proles.
‘During the pandemic lockdowns, the email jobs caste loved to talk about essential workers, and luxuriated in public displays of gratitude for them. But this caste of genteel urbanites never realised that this choice of nomenclature was in fact much more meaningful — and ominous – than they understood. Some people, it seems, simply are critical to the functioning of the economy, pandemic or no pandemic. Once those people — and truck drivers are perhaps the most critical of them all — start to demand to be listened to, they have ways to make those demands felt.’
And the vanguards? They set about cultural engineering to enforce behavioural change.
I quote:
The police calls it an ‘Occupation’ and they are right, Truckoccupy is the Occupy of the working class, the inclusive movement taking place in Canada, with a healthy immune system against division. The way they have been reacting to racism and allied with indigenous people is exemplary, as well as how they have maintained their cool against multiple provocations and misrepresentations by the media. Fighting for the right to work, to take care of their families and communities without excessive interference of an authoritarian and woke state with misguided and oppressive public health mandates. Let’s hope the Canadian officials listen to the medical expertise of the Scandinavian and dozen other countries:
The demands against mandates and lockdowns is sensible, especially since the jury is out more and more that they were not effective. See the review of recent meta-studies by Dr. Campbell, shared in the Research forum. The truckers are not just on the side of civil rights and a open society, but also have the science on their side. It's a self-organized movement that deserves our support.
Russell Brand is getting interesting. He has noticed the radical disconnect and has had the nerve to point it out.
I’m not remotely surprised by any of this. I studied High Politics in my first degree. I studied the passing of the Reform acts, extending the franchise to working people. The Conservatives were in high panic, thinking they were about to be expropriated at the ballot box. Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston Churchill, told them to calm down – the Liberals only pretend to be friends of the people, in truth they despise them; and the people dislike the liberals in turn. What we see as the Left in politics still expresses this divide. In fact, the fracture has now become an open split. And I think it’s irrevocable. ‘Ordinary’ people are not the political pets of vanguards. I affirm to creative citizen agency of so-called ‘ordinary’ people. I’ve been saying it for so long now – my first book ‘The Proletarian Public’ – revalued the work and example of industrial unionists in the UK, the French Revolutionary syndicalists, the council communists, all those whose politics proceeded from the human roots, not abstracted ideology based on a priori principles.
The most striking thing of all about this for me has been the haste and the taste on the part of the dominant activist voice to denounce working class people for not going through them. I can only bring to mind Max Weber’s prediction that Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat would be realised as a ‘dictatorship of the officials’ over the still, and more efficiently exploited, proletariat. These vanguards are heads without bodies, full of orders, edicts, and instructions but utterly bereft of the social force and structural capacity to carry them out – hence the taste for authoritarian imposition. I argued for a process of self-emancipation as a self-socialisation from below a quarter of a century ago and that remains my view.
The truth is very simple: those who tend to be most active and interested in politics tend to be more concerned with their own ideas and interests and quite naturally conflate them with the good of all; they speak the language of ‘we’ ‘the people,’ ‘humanity’ and ‘the workers’ fluently but tend to lack real organic and continuous connection with the actual flesh and blood members of any of these categories. They spent decades championing the cause of ‘the workers,’ and now having seen that the working class is not Marx’s revolutionary class at all, and maybe a class with as many conservative as socialist values, they have moved on to champion what they consider more likely agents of emancipation. It is delusion and illusion, a plain piece of idealism and utopianism in politics, advancing ends without the means of its realisation. That way always defaults to authoritarian imposition in one way or another. As for those who consider themselves Left, it was always noticeable to me that the only working class people the activists in the vanguards actually had time for were the ones who fitted their socialist preferences – the rest were dismissed for their ‘false consciousness.’ That form of leftist politics was crude in the first instance and now utterly bankrupt in the last. When the working class return, let’s hope they do so on their own times and resist the interference and deviation from extraneous elements, the bane of socialism in the twentieth century. But instead of admonishing vanguards and activists with the statement that the Left has abandoned the working, I shall end on a hopeful note: the working class has abandoned its erstwhile leaders and representatives on account of being utterly useless and are now reclaiming their political independence, to develop in accordance with their own concerns. Whatever the politicians and intellectuals of the Left have to introduce 'from the outside,' the working class should tell them to keep it there - on the outside.
Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, who identify themselves as Leftists in politics, have asked: “Why has the mainstream Left ended up supporting practically all Covid measures?” It’s a pertinent question, not least given the devastating impact that Covid policies have had on the working class and global south. How did the Left end up ridiculing the very notion that there might be motivations other than “the public good” at play? And a further question arises – to what extent is the ‘mainstream Left’ actually ‘Left’ in any sense of the term? The use of public force to ensure certain ends? Is that all the mainstream Left is now?
Jacob Siegel presents his answer in The Covid regime has fooled us all:
‘The answer, it seems, is fairly clear: the Left did this because the Public Good has become, along with The Science, largely a costume worn by the professional classes who, quite rightly, suspect that they have more in common with a Moderna executive than an anti-vaccine mandate truck driver.’
Siegel proceeds to argue that the collective hysteria gripping many in the Covid pandemic is an example of mass formation psychosis: ‘it posits that the response to Covid in countries with strict policies illustrates how people can be brought into a collective trance that makes them easy to manipulate and prone to acting in ways that are contrary to reason and evidence.’
‘Such mass formation can only occur when four conditions are met: the society has to be atomised and lacking in social bonds; most people living in it must feel a pervasive sense of meaninglessness about their own lives; they must also feel a free-floating anxiety that is not attached to any particular cause; finally, there must also be high levels of free-floating frustration and aggression that, again, have no specific source.’
Society has been atomized and what social bonds existed have been withered away under the imposed social isolation: sites of social connection and joy have been systematically shut down, leaving people feeling lonely, frightened, powerless; modern society is gripped by a pervasive sense of meaningless, grace of a disenchanting science which says that we live in an objectively valueless world; this atomism and meaninglessness, I would argue, leads to a willingness to embrace surrogates, ersatz communities and causes – here I am interested in the connections between the ‘mainstream Left,’ climate activism, and Covid authoritarianism – it’s the same people, with the same social roots and the same mentalities. They demonstrate a clear predisposition to an austerian, authoritarian politics, divorced from ‘ordinary’ people and living in a social comfort zone. This is where the claims to neutrality behind the humanitarian ‘we’ start to unravel. In a recent work I identified the existence of a techno-bureaucratic class of mangerialists who claim not to be a class at all, but a neutral and independent body of people concerned with the universal good. They are the class that dare not identify themselves as a class, and yet who are highly class consciousness, recognize each other and associate with each other instinctively and who express their disdain, horror, and opposition to all other classes – particularly the working class. Their relation to the capitalist class is more ambiguous. This would-be ‘universal class’ bears all the hallmarks of the posh anti-capitalism that defined a reformist bourgeois politics at the turn of the nineteenth century. Whilst they can express certain anti-capitalist sentiments, look closely and it becomes apparent that they are bourgeois to the core, identifying capital as a thing that can be taken over – by them, by experts, technocrats, and managerialists – and made to work rationally for the good of the whole. That rational and holistic good is now conceived in ecological terms. Such people loathe the working class, whom they see as complicit in ‘bad’ carboniferous capitalism. But look closely and they have connections with, and are often deeply rooted in, new technology.
Siegel comments:
‘While the tech companies have few actual employees compared to older productive industries, their largesse now directly subsidises whole sectors of the professional class economy, including journalism. Individual professionals may not have become richer during the pandemic but, unlike hundreds of thousands of American workers who lost their jobs — many of whom worked in the small businesses that were shuttered over the past two years — their employment was mostly secure.’
This was a point I was concerned to establish in Affirming Democracy and Politics against Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism – those claiming neutral and independent expertise are not socially and economically innocent at all, whatever their claims, but possess roots in and connections to specific social forces within the corporate form. These are the people who now constitute ‘the mainstream Left.’
‘Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that those professionals would instinctively internalise Covid policies that enriched their tech oligarch patrons as a personal victory and defence of their own status. Few would put it that way, of course. Instead, they accuse protesting truck drivers of being fascists and call for them to be arrested because they recognise that medical mandates provide a ruthlessly efficient — yet morally sanctioned — means for sorting the populations between rulers, who deserve to monopolise power, and subjects, who can follow the rules or be crushed.’
I have seen precisely this attitude all over social media among those most vocal and active in environmental politics – particularly the sheer utter contempt of working class people, who are ridiculed openly as stupid, greedy, and worse. Those who do not agree with us are to be abused, condemned, mocked, bullied, dismissed, denied. You can call the people who do this what you like – one thing they are not is Left.
That seems to be the underlying logic animating Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland security official under Obama who spoke for many in her circles when she recommended the best way to deal with the protests: “Slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers, and move the trucks.”
Democrats, bourgeois, liberals, progressives - why are people be surprised? As soon as socialism appeared as a real rival to liberalism and capitalism, the professional, educated middle class took it over in a clear act of political and cultural expropriation, relocating it from the social to the abstracted political sphere, putting themselves in the place of the working class. For a century or more there has been a systematic and concerted attempt to exclude the working class from politics and culture. Every time the working class raises its head or makes its voice heard, it is subject to the abuse and ridicule of those who claim to know better – and who seek to maintain their dominant position.
They are all over the Covid regime, giving some indication of how they envisage the Climate regime of the future – austerian, authoritarian, and with them and their ilk giving the orders. I'm here to tell them that they are not as clever as they think they are, and the working class is nowhere near as stupid.
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