The Labour Metaphysic and the Redemptive Myth of Wealth
Resolidifying 2
When I first started to write on socialism and class, I was made aware of the existence of a 'labour metaphysic' in politics. Not everyone, I learned, shared the view that there was something special about the working class and that people like me, who predicated socialism on working class agency, were guilty of 'privileging the proletariat' over all other voices. Whilst I certainly reject any view that values working class people only to the extent that they fulfil their 'destiny' and embrace a certain political position, I will still argue that labour, and nature, are the only two sources of wealth and that this gives the working class a structural capacity and social significance that needs to be revalued, valued, and made the basis of a healthy, stable, and functioning society. If the workers of the world downed tools overnight, the lights of the world would go out. Whatever else that is, it isn't metaphysics.
In recent decades the belief in the redemptive destiny of the workers of the world to realize socialism has crumbled, abandoned even and maybe especially by the agencies of labour themselves. Progressives have never cared for it. Liberal voices drawn from outside of the working class resented the privileging of another voice over theirs. To them, class designation was a fetish that raised some – the working class – over others – them. They missed entirely that any privileging of the working class here arises from the structural capacity to act in a capitalist economy which expands values through the exploitation of labour and nature. No labour and no nature and there is no capital. These are basic social facts. However politically important other social groups such as the intelligentsia may sometimes be, these 'cannot provide the major troops for the fight against capitalism' 'since they are not socially located within the process of production in such a way as to be feasibly capable of taking it over.' (Eagleton 1991: 218). The working class possess precisely that social location and hence the structural capacity to act. The belief that the working class would indeed come to act is the redemptive myth that many see marxism to have projected upon labour, hence the claims of a labour metaphysic. I'm not so sure about this. The working class and, in particular, its organs of self-administration and political representation have been subject to a concerted and systematic assault since the anti-combination acts of the early nineteenth century. No ruling class concerned first and foremost with the possession and retention of power in the here and now ever gets so excited about metaphysics. Suffice to say that the relation between social locations in the production process and political forms is not arbitrary but 'necessary,' which is not to say that it is inevitable. The people who value the working class because they are socialist in potential are the same ones who despise those working class men and women who fail to conform to the ideal type projected upon them. The relation between class, politics, and culture has never been simple and direct in this sense. It is the redemptive myth of a certain politics, a politics 'from the outside,' that has died a death, not least in light of the discovery that working class people possess concerns with respect to community, stability, security, traditional values, law and order, local and national identity and patriotism, immigration, multiculturalism and other 'hot' topics that do not necessarily coincide with the liberal voice that dominates progressive politics. We should have known this from the well-known existence of that most vilified of beasts, 'the working class Tory.' If the connection between working class social position and socialism is a 'necessary' one, but not an inevitable one, there is no connection with liberalism. To the extent that liberalism takes over the radical or progressive platform in politics, whether in the form of the economic libertarianism of the right or the cultural libertarianism of the right, the working class will feel abandoned and politically homeless, lost in a sea of socially arbitrary pluralism, unable and unwilling to pick and choose in the political marketplace. So I make no apologies for 'privileging' the working class on account of the centrality of its labour to the production and reproduction of society and of its structural capacity in the construction of an alternative social order, no more than I apologize for the 'privileging' of nature as the universal metabolism which is the condition of all human activity on Earth. Without either, there is only arbitrariness, a world of endless plasticity and self-creation, a world of pure capital. Without the capacity to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the artificial, the good from the bad, then the idea of a moral and political marketplace itself cannot work, since there is no criteria enabling those choosing their values and their goods to decide between all available options. To quote those apostles of the free market, Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as society, only individuals who are free to choose the good as they see fit. Those who reject a 'labour metaphysics' and a privileging of the working class on account of its social position are really advancing a liberal position that dissolves all social significance. Society and public life become merely the aggregate of single, discrete subjective choices. But without a common standard of evaluation, the notion of a marketplace of ideas and values cannot work, in that there can be no truth or falsehood, right or wrong, good or bad in such conditions. And if that is the case, then democracy itself cannot work. All choices are arbitrary. We thus enter an epistemological, moral, and social crisis.
I have, therefore, in my work launched a vigorous defence of class analysis and class politics and have argued for the centrality of the working class on account of its material futurity and society making capacity. This has a clear political significance: ‘Class struggle is the nucleus of Marxism. This is so in two inseparable senses: it is class struggle that for Marxism explains the dynamic of history, and it is the abolition of classes, the obverse or end product of class struggle, that is the ultimate objective of the revolutionary process’ (Wood 1986: 12). Without that class agency, what material force and futurity does any progressive politics possess?
At the same time, as a member of the working class, I see working class men and women, not unnaturally, as real flesh and blood individuals with a culture and a life of their own, outside of objective sociological definitions and political projections. Of course, working class people don't always behave politically as bourgeois politicos radicalised by ideology would have them behave. The collapse of the redemptive myth of the proletariat, and with it the collapse of radical politics, was not the collapse of political mythology. The myth wasn't extirpated, it was inverted and perverted. Throughout history, the ruling class have been seen as the parasitic class dominating through the exploitation of the labour of the wealth creators. The triumph of the capital metaphysic inverted that mythology, with the rich and powerful now presented as the wealth-creators and the working class traduced as feckless, workshy, and parasitic. In an age in which material riches and the endless expansion of material quantities is paramount, when virtues have been rendered sins against the GNP, it was inevitable that we would be presented with a redemptive myth of the rich. And why should we be surprised, since expropriation and annexation of the commons has been the name of their game since their rise? It is their very birthmark, which they take as their birthright. And so tore down the hallowed shrines of socialism, plundered its goods, and took upon themselves the role of humanity's saviour through the endless expansion of material wealth. Greed is good. The thing that trickled down the most in 'trickle down' economics was selfishness, immorality, and greed to render Margaret Thatcher's declaration 'there is no such thing as society' a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is an inversion of the true relation between wealth-creation and parasitism here that is nothing less than diabolic. There has been a social fall from the early promise and expectation that the meek were to inherit the Earth. The association between social and spiritual redemption in Christ's message made riches far more sinful – and dangerous – than poverty, and the sin of usury – the use of money to make money – continued well into the Middle Ages. The relation became somewhat awkward for the Church as a dominant institution in the middle of an expanding commercial society. The rich needed reassuring that their immortal souls were not imperilled by their worldly success. A Church which ‘clothed its walls in gold and left its sons naked,' as St Bernard lamented in the twelfth century, discovered that compromise brought certain worldly benefits. As spiritual power yielded to the overweening power of its temporal rival, the long and painful and highly political process of stripping the poor of their redemptive qualities began.
Marx, the greatest Judaeo-Christian heretic in history, did his level best to restore that myth and put it on a solid materialist basis. Marx was present as industrial capitalist society inverted the true relation between creators and appropriators through its alienative and exploitative relations, rationalising and naturalising the social production of wealth and its private appropriation. Marx saw the proletariat, upon whose social labour capital was accumulated and values expanded, as the class in 'radical chains,' the 'universal class' whose self-emancipation would emancipate the whole of society. If that was a redemptive political myth, it was one that those grown wealthy and powerful on the back of labour were inclined to believe, and act to check. 'What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,' wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, 'are its own gravediggers.' If that was a socialist prophecy, it was one that both socialists and the bourgeoisie took to heart, the one to fulfil, the other to deny. And the working class themselves? History was to prove no more reliable a God than God Himself. The recovery of agency in the historical process comes with the corollary that real flesh and blood individuals do not necessarily stick to the script, and in large part write that script as they act or otherwise.
The promise of Earthly redemption was, inevitably, let down by its practice, and proved incapable of supplanting its other-worldly counterpart. Such is the fate of the Mythos when translated into the language of the Logos. Marx's 'scientific socialism' ought always to have been read in terms of an expanded and integral notion of science, one in which labour and production came with an aesthetic dimension, the realms of fact and value were joined, and creative agency in the making of history was restored to the world.
The fate of socialism as a state-centred industrial expansionism in which the working class remained the exploited value-creating class delivers lessons of its own. The working class, like Jesus' poor, are still with us and, their favoured parties having been subject to continuous political defeat, seem here to stay. But the myth and the socialist dream it sustains has not entirely faded, only the temporal forms of its expression. Properly understood, Jesus did not argue that 'the poor are always with us,' in the sense of claiming that the division of riches and poverty is the natural and right order of things and is with us to stay. Quite the contrary. Jesus is telling the disciples that 'you always have the poor with you.' This is a different point with a very different meaning. He is telling the disciples that they will attract the poor most of all because his ministry was aimed particularly to the poor.And it is indeed the case that Jesus and the disciples were followed around by crowds of mainly poor people. There was nothing here of the poor coming to know and accept their place and reconcile themselves to an eternal and natural condition of poverty.
But the poor are indeed still with us, in search of new messiahs and saviours. One of the most important aspects of Marx's 'redemptive myth' is that he affirmed the principle of working class self-emancipation. The working class, as the value creating class, are their own saviours. In fact, Marx insisted on this principle against all well-meaning bourgeois who thought the working class in need of being educated and emancipated 'from the outside' (to use the phrase of Kautsky and Lenin). In the Circular Letter to Bebel, Liebknecht, Bracke, et al. Marx wrote:
When the International was formed, we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself. We cannot ally ourselves, therefore, with people who openly declare that the workers are too uneducated to free themselves and must first be liberated from above by philanthropic big bourgeois and petty bourgeois. If the new party organ assumes a position which corresponds to the opinions of those gentlemen, which is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains, much though we should regret it, but to declare publicly our opposition to it and to abandon the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad. We hope, however, that it will not come to this.
Marx CL The First International and After 1974
Unfortunately, social democratic politics in its dominant forms came precisely to this. We are now living through a crisis in the agencies of working class socialisation and representation, agencies which seem to have grown remote from and even turned against the actual working class themselves. The disconnection and remoteness is tangible. The dissatisfaction that has accompanied this process is an indication that the old dream is still alive yet and that we are far away from resignation. There is a revanchism in the air, which could go left or right or anywhere between and beyond. The working class are in a fragmented and politically homeless condition at present, losing not only its political identity but also the stabilizing supports of familiar community, social ties, mores, norms, and networks. 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned,' wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. The task of resolidification remains before us, and is more urgent than ever as the capital system proceeds to unravel social and ecological boundaries.
But if the connection with socialism is more uncertain than ever, then tendencies towards working class Toryism are mutating new forms. It may gain initial expression as a revenge against a globalising, atomising, identitarian liberalism and its elites, the people who have presided over the economic and cultural aggrandisement of capitalism this past half-century. That revenge is a cul-de-sac, a dead-end. But it does express, in however inchoate a form, the need for social and moral resolidification.
The working class remain with us, along with its antithesis capital, as twin poles of wealth-creation and appropriation. Marx was not wrong about community and alienation, wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community, but his mistake was to have rested the case for connection and unity upon the most ephemeral and transitory of ties, socio-economic interests. A society needs something more solid and enduring in order to resolidify. But the production of life's daily necessities remains an imperative within all societies, as a condition of their social and economic coherence, and the working class are indispensable to that process. A strong labour movement is crucial to the conservation of coherence but such conservation is an alien concept to capital, the nature of which is mobile, transitory, and opportunistic. Marx and Engels themselves establish the contrast between conservation and capital's constant revolutionising of the basis of society:
'The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
Marx and Engels continue with words aimed against conservative reactionaries which now apply to socialist labour and its attachments to a national division of labour:
'The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.'
The globalisation of capitalist relations has also removed the national ground upon which the traditional agencies of labour socialisation and representation stood. But, of course, as Marx and Engels argued from the first, socialism is international or not at all. It is not socialism that has withered and died, but the nationalisation of the socialist challenge to capital. For now, the working class has been fragmented and absorbed into a global market, its redemptive qualities, already compromised within the constraints social democracy's socialism as nationalisation, stripped away. The national shrines of socialism have been stormed and stripped by the marauders of mammon, the apocalyptic warlords of wealth, emptying out the places where mine, mill, and manufacture once were to leave industrial wastelands. The working class of these areas were abandoned not only by capital, but by their erstwhile political representatives, people they appointed to do their bidding but who, when it mattered, did the opposite. The rich did more than assert-strip the old industrial heartlands. Most of all, the plutocrats stole the proletariat's mythic mantle as saviours of humankind. They were no long idle parasites and possessors free-riding on the labour of the workers, but heroic entrepreneurs and wealth-creators, to whom all owed thanks for the material largesse they enjoyed, upon whom all depended. The hypermobility of the golden hordes reduced time and space to endless flux, pushing bodies and nervous systems to the brink and beyond. Their fevered pursuit of new markets to open up and commons to colonize and commodify identified them as new frontiersmen who pushed so far out that frontiers existed no more. The transgression of social and national boundaries could not but result in the transgression of planetary boundaries. In light of this conquest and capture of the Earth, there is bitter irony in reading the stirring words with which Marx and Engels close The Communist Manifesto:
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
The capitalist golden hordes were open and explicit in their aims and ambitions, expropriating the global commons, overthrowing all social relations that stood in their way, and then soliciting thanks for the largesse they made available on the market at a price. It has been the workers of the world who have been left trembling as a result, their organs of social control and political representation rendered feeble. The proletarians may well still be in chains, but whether there is a world still to win after capitalist capture and colonisation remains to be seen. After a capitalist hyperreality and hypermobility putting an end of history and end of geography, future work seems to be one of reconnection and restoration rather than further revolution. Having enclosed the human and the natural commons and turned them inside it, it is difficult to see where it is possible to go next. In terms of material largesse, the possessors and plutocrats have lived up to their calling. People are wealthier and healthier than at any time in history, and in greater numbers. We are invited to express our admiration for the wonders they continue to perform, and give thanks for their entrepreneurial skill and wealth-creating genius in enclosing the human and natural commons and making bits of it available on the market for a price. We are expected to marvel at the mysterious alchemy that enables the few to make money out of the wealth of the world. Under their auspices, the market has been expanded to become the entire cosmos, a forever expanding universe which pushes everything and everyone beyond their boundaries to reach into infinity. It is indeed alchemy, pure magic, a defiance of reality, in which the infinite is brought down to earth and pursued by finite means. The vertical has been horizontalised, the eternity once projected into the heavens has been located in the temporal sphere. All boundaries have been transgressed. In appropriating the myth of salvation to present themselves as wealth-creators, the parasite possessors have spun a tale that has bent reality out of shape. Society has been seduced into believing that the rich and the rich alone possess the magic powers of wealth-creation. That the exploitation of labour and nature is the true sources of this wealth has been mystified. The truth is that there is no occult process at work, the myth of salvation by way of the rich is a political lie. It is a political lie that is produced and reproduced daily through various media, but also by the willingness of many to think it possible for them to ascend the golden ladders the rich throw down for those prepared to be aggressive enough to make the climb in the cut-throat competition. The working class are nowhere to be seen, except as targets for scorn and ridicule. There is no sorrier a sight than a fallen idol. The working class are routinely exhibited as feckless, stupid, and greedy, tasteless, crude, and moronic, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic to boot. The ideals, values, and demands once advanced by the working class movement are still affirmed, but only when presented through the mouths of stars and celebrities drawn from the fields of film and TV, music, entertainment, and sport. This is a natural consequence of the shift from a producer ethic to a consumer ethic. The world of work is treated with an aristocratic disdain, involving the performance of tasks considered beneath the dignity of a truly human being. Where once socialism exalted the citizen-producer, the contemporary world hails the icons of a consumer society, all of whom have a special cause to advance or a political opinion to offer, as proof of their care, compassion, and genius. When working class men and women offered the same views and backed them with social and organisational force, they were treated as pariahs and described as 'the enemy within.' They were a threat to the commercial order in a way in which the icons of heroic consumption are not. But the faltering and fragmenting working class have had their redemptive role as well as their labour appropriated. The wealth-creators currently occupy pole position and will retain that position until the occult alchemy covering their tracks is seen for what it is – a bare-faced expropriation of the global commons. Who, I would ask, has the epistemological and structural capacity to see through and break through that mystical alchemy if not the working class? Radicals, greens, and progressives have been offering many candidates for the job: students (again); intellectuals (again); the wretched of the Earth (again); indigenous people (how does that work? The problem is structural, not chronological, there is no going back, only forwards); women, LGBT. If some of this savours of Marcuse's 'Great Refusal,' and will go the same way, some of it is also quite consistent with liberalism, an attempt to render individual rights universal. Many, even all, of these causes are worthy, but few, if any, are of universal significance. Many of the claims can be realized within the liberal capitalist order and do not require substantive transformation leading to a qualitatively different order. There is nothing here that can replace the proletariat as Marx's universal class. Women? Gays? People of colour? Does anyone seriously think that the problems of capitalist aggrandisement transgressing social and ecological boundaries is caused by identity – white western men - and can be resolved by a change of identity at the helm? This is reactionary drivel that sends politics up a creek without a paddle. People are peddling all the harder these days, increasingly worried by the fact they are getting nowhere. They will get nowhere, no matter how hard they peddle:
A poem by Christopher Logue called Know Thy Enemy expresses well the point I am trying to make here:
Know thy enemy:
he does not care what colour you are
provided you work for him
and yet you do!
he does not care how much you earn
provided you earn more for him
and yet you do!
he does not care who lives in the room at the top
provided he owns the building
and yet you strive!
he will let you write against him
provided you do not act against him
and yet you write!
He sings the praises of humanity
but knows machines cost more than men.
Bargain with him, he laughs, and beats you at it;
challenge him, and he kills.
Sooner than lose the things he owns
he will destroy the world.
SMASH CAPITAL NOW!
But as you hasten to be free
And build your commonwealth
Do not forget the enemy
Who lies within yourself.
As for candidates for the redemptive role – the wealth-creators usurped the position of the working class as they appropriated their labour, and no-one can wrestle that role back but the working class. The magicians of money will continue to cast their spell until people are prepared to trace wealth-creation to its source in labour and nature, and nowhere else. Who is able to do this? The icons of consumer society with their pet cause? The professional middle class and the intelligentsia who have made their money and have secured a position within the prevailing order they turn and criticize? This is a licensed radicalism that is parasitic on the very society it purports to criticize. The spell of the rich and their mythical redemptive role can only be broken by the class whose exploited labour is the origin of their power. Until then, the rich will remain in pole position as the agents of deliverance from the very social and ecological crises they have unleashed upon the world, and the fallen working class an ever distant and increasingly disdained memory.
I write these words to reclaim that memory for the struggles that are sure to come.
Affirming that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle, Marx and Engels point to no inevitable happy resolution:
'Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
That common ruin is entirely possible should the false mythology of the rich not be checked and subverted by the recover of the redemptive myth of the working class. To repeat the key question: which other agency possesses the epistemological and structural capacity to see through and break through the mystical alchemy of the rich?
As society continues to avoid dealing with that question, the rich, in their frenzy of usurpation and appropriation, have taken on another of the roles formerly assigned to the proletariat, this time unwittingly. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argued that 'above all,' the bourgeoisie produces 'its own gravediggers.' The bourgeoisie are now going direct, cutting the outclassed proletariat out of their own revolution. Of course, the result will not be revolution but common ruination, as the Earth's commons are plundered and planetary boundaries are transgressed in the global heat machine of an all-encompassing industrialism, gobbling up the resources that could have sustained a decent life for all.
How odd to consider that Marx himself, also unwittingly, had part of the answer, not the constant revolutionising of the instruments of production and relations of society but in 'conservation' as 'the first condition of existence' not only for 'all earlier industrial classes' but for all societies. Conservation as against constant revolutionising is the watchword if we are to resolidify around the realities of labour, production, and nature.