Class Distinctions

Americans think that class distinctions are a European thing, they imagine the upper class to be some kind of nobility that rules over a certain province. Surely America, where a paperboy can become President, has overcome this? Ironically, class distinctions are now actually much harsher in America than in Europe.

So how does class work, how can we point to a group of people and say that they are the upper class? Biographies of the rich and successful love to tell the story of a humble beginning, lots of honest hard work, and then the fruits of labor. We can start to get a sense of what is missing here by reading books on how to become rich and successful.

Without fail they stress the importance of a good mentor. A mentor is someone who has already made it, and can help you get there by offering guidance and advice. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg advises women not to ask someone to be their mentor directly (“The question is a total mood-killer”) but instead let a professional relationship grow spontaneously over expensive wine at some fundraiser. The question is, if I am not already being invited to such fundraisers, how do I spontaneously meet someone like Sheryl Sandberg?

Even if you could sneek into the fundraiser, the other guests would catch on pretty quickly that you’re not “one of them”. Maybe you’re holding your chopsticks wrong, maybe your shoes are too old, maybe you’re drinking your wine too quickly… This is what class distinctions are made up of. It’s that feeling you get when you’re talking to someone who just can’t relate to your story about Balinese local culture, but is desperately trying to.

Class antagonism

The same split I was talking about in my last post becomes very important when thinking about Marx. There is an ambiguity in his work concerning class antagonism. Normally class antagonism is thought of as an antagonism between different groups in a capitalist society; rich versus poor, the exploiters versus the exploited.

 

But in Capital, Marx describes the logic of capitalism in much more abstract terms: in pre-capitalism we produce something, take it to the market to sell it, and with that money buy a product someone else has produced; but in capitalism we start with money, which is used to buy products in order to sell them at a greater price. The goal of the pre-capitalist process is to fulfill our needs; the goal of the capitalist process is to increase the amount of money, or capital, we started out with. This means that the production process, including the workers and the capitalist, are enslaved to the accumulation of capital, to the pressure of ever increasing profits.

 

If we look at it this way, the capitalists aren’t some evil exploiters, but are as much bound to the rules of capitalism as the rest of us are. If they don’t increase their profits, they lose their competitivity and go bankrupt. And yet, later in Capital, Marx starts to deride the capitalist, blaming him for the exploitation of workers and the evils that go along with it. He also starts talking about the bourgeoisie, a class of well-to-do collaborators with the capitalists, who profit from the system and strive to facilitate and protect it. The natural enemy of the bourgeoisie is then the proletariat, a class of workers who are exploited by the system and strive to break free from it.  Finally we have the rabble, the uneducated masses who are too busy toiling away to care about who is exploiting who.

 

I think that this splitting of society into different classes with different interests is, according to Marx’s own premises, totally illegitimate, and has led to disastrous political consequences. In his State and Revolution, Lenin describes the communist project as the annihilation of the bourgeoisie; if there are no more exploiters, the exploited will be free! Apart from the violence that such a strategy entails, it simply doesn’t work; it leaves intact the basic logic of capitalist accumulation. This is why Stalin, when the economy was failing despite the successful annihilation of the capitalist bourgeoisie, invented a new kind of bourgeoisie (called kulaks) that had to be eradicated before communism could work.

 

Does this mean that the concept of class antagonism, class struggle, has to be abandoned? Not really, because capitalism does create a certain split; but it is much more abstract than Marx and Lenin took it to be. Instead of splitting society into different parts, capitalism creates two different, mutually exclusive perspectives on society. On the one hand, we produce and consume what we want; on the other hand, we are slaves to the law of ever-increasing profits. On the one hand, we control the economy; on the other hand, the economy controls us.

 

So in conclusion, I think the reification of class antagonism into concrete groups of people goes a long way towards explaining the failure of communism in the 20th century. But the million dollar question remains: how do we escape? How do we fight an abstraction? Who do we put under the guillotine if bankers and capitalists are not to blame?

Addendum to: Why smoking is good for you

In my last post I brought up a certain opposition between Truth and the fantasies that serve to conceal this truth (in short, ideology). I conceived it in terms of workplace exploitation, but I think it has a much broader use. It’s a fundamental split that runs through each identity.

For example, Mad Men‘s Don Draper and Dick Whitman perfectly embody this split. Don Draper is a highly succesful creative director in advertising, while Dick Whitman, his past self, is a son of a whore raised in poverty. Although his boss doesn’t seem to care about his past identity, Don is haunted by it. The question is however, which one is real? Is Dick just a symptom of Don, a past life that has to be eradicated if Don is to fully become Don? Or is Dick real, and Don just a mask to cover up Dick’s shame?

A similar question arises when pondering the mysteries of David Lynch’s masterpiece Inland Empire. Is it a film about a whore who imagines herself an actress with an exciting affair to deal with the humiliation of being a whore? Or is it about an actress with an exciting affair who imagines herself a whore because of the way men treat her? The split is irreducible. It’s not a split between two halves of the same thing, but between two radically different perspectives on the same thing.

So when I said smoking is a better way to deal with the horrible Truth of our being than lying to ourselves, I preferred Dick to Don, the whore to the actress. I should also make the opposite case; lying to ourselves to escape the horrible Truth is the first step towards actually changing this horrible Truth. For example, democracy can be said, in a cynical mode, to be nothing but another way to manipulate the people into legitimizing the power that oppresses them. But this same idea of democracy inspired countless revolutions, most recently in the Arab world. Or take the story of the bored aristocrat son who pretended to be a communist in order to shock his rich family, but then started believing in his own talk of Marx and actually became a convinced communist.

Which is better then? A ritualistic identification with the Truth (like smoking), or a belief that a lie can become so powerful that it will change the Truth? I think that if we want to change something in our world, we’re going to need both.

Why smoking is good for you

In contrast to many of my peers, I didn’t get any present when I turned 18 and never smoked. Many of my friends secretly smoked since being 14 and took the present anyway. My parents had a wholly different strategy. My mother simply said she would break our legs if she caught us smoking. I didn’t take this threat too seriously but I never smoked anyway because I was too nerdy to pull it off. But lately I’ve been thinking, what if there’s more to smoking than looking cool?

What if smoking is a way of regaining control over your life? Let’s say you’ve just worked 8 hours in some lousy office or service job for a crappy salary, how do you deal with that? How can your ego deal with being screwed every workday from 9 to 5? One way is to construct some fantasies that restore some of your self-worth (see my other post); sure you’re getting screwed, but one day you’ll quit and the office will fall apart because you’re the only one that knows how things work, and they’ll be so sorry for treating you like shit! A different way is to screw yourself harder than they can by smoking a cigarette. The cigarette externalizes, makes tangible, the abstract violence that is done to you by workplace exploitation (among other things) into the little ‘cancer-stick’ that is the cigarette. In this way it could be similar to punching a wall when you’re angry, or even self-mutilation.

But which part of yourself are you punching when you smoke? In my view, each human is split into two parts. One part knows the painful Truth of its existence; the fact that you are basically an insignificant cog in the machine, lacking any meaning or dignity. The other part is precisely the fantasies and the lies we tell ourselves to deal with this horrible truth. Since a direct confrontation with this Truth is impossible, the only way to assert it is through a ritual like smoking. When we smoke we act out, we willingly stage the violence that the world inflicts on us, thereby creating a distance towards it.

Such an ‘acting out’ of our misery is the only way to really confront it, and to do something about it. Still, there is a big gap between confronting and changing, as evidenced by the people who are stuck smoking two packs a day.

Racism is a class issue

I’ve been thinking about racism after a long discussion on it. My ideas about racism mostly come from (surprise) Zizek. Particularly his analysis of the Yugoslav conflicts of the 90’s was an eye-opener for me. He argued that the Western perception of the conflict as an ethnic one hindered probing into deeper causes of the conflict and finding Western complicity in the suffering there. But cannot this logic of an ethnic division mystifying a political/economic division be applied to Western countries as well?

Take America for example. Its ideology boasts that everyone has equal chances of making it there; with some cunning and a lot of honest, hard work anything is possible. This is belied by the fact that most black Americans are still stuck in poverty, despite the abolition of segregation. Of course there are also poor white people, but their social mobility problems are much less visible since there are rich white people and poor white people, but black people are mostly poor. So if anybody can become rich but blacks stay poor, what does that mean? Put like this, it can only mean that black people must be stupid and lazy, preferring to sustain themselves through crime instead of honest work. Obviously, the leftist strategy should be to contest the assumption that everybody has equal opportunities, and rehabilitate the notion of class struggle, showing how the ruling class benefits from keeping the lower class poor, and revealing how this economic oppression functions.

But unfortunately, American leftists have a knee-jerk reaction: black people are not stupid, lazy, and criminal! The problem with this reaction is not only that it fails to shift the issue onto class struggle where it belongs, but also that it is untenable; it is a statistical fact that black people on average perform worse in school and are more likely to commit a crime. This fact becomes a kind of repressed truth; everybody knows it, but is forbidden to assert it because it’s racist. Some leftists concede this and call it the racist subconscious of white America; they even humbly admit to also being a victim themselves of this subconscious racism. This is why they were worried at the time of Obama’s election that despite the polls saying Obama would easily win, the voter’s racist subconscious would in the last minute convince him to vote for the white guy.

In Europe we have a very similar problem, but the black guy is substituted for the poor immigrant, mostly from north-Africa or Turkey. The immigrants are lower class, and they bring with them the problems of the lower class: stealing, drinking, vandalizing, etc. When their white, slightly richer neighbours complain about these problems, the leftist accuses them of racism. After all, the leftist, living in his suburban apartment, has never encountered any problem with such immigrants. The result is that three groups who should be allies in the fight against inequality – the leftists, the white lower class, and the immigrant lower class – are all fighting amongst eachother. Again, the only thing that will bring them together is the rehabilitation of the notion of class struggle, not in the naive sense of poor people fighting against rich people, but as something that splits each member of society from within.

The Humiliation of Work

Imagine a farm with ten workers on it. To sustain themselves, each worker has to work 5 days per week. Now let’s say that through mechanical inventions, the efficiency of the farm has so increased that only two workers have to work on the farm to produce the same amount of sustenance. What would the workers do? Would they divide the amount of work amongst themselves, so that each would have to work only one day per week? Or would two workers do all the work and keep all of the food, while the other eight have to beg for scraps?

Although the former would make more sense to me, the latter is what’s being practiced all over the world today. Each worker’s effort should be appreciated, but instead he is considered to be lucky when he succeeds in finding work in the first place. Why? Are we in some sort of permanent crisis of production, such that everyone who doesn’t work deserves to starve? Or if this is not the case, why can’t we support the people whose work has been made superfluous by the very success of our production methods?

The answer is of course, because the wealth that our production creates flows not back into society, but into the accumulation of capital. This capital is then used to improve even more upon the production process, making it a vicious cycle. Workers are held hostage; if you refuse any command the bosses make, there are hundreds more workers outside waiting to take your place. This is where the true humiliation begins.

Not only do you have to work making money for someone else, you have to be thankful for the chance to do so. Not only do you have to be thankful to do so, you have to pretend to enjoy it, to convince your superiors that you are the right person for the job. Not only do you have to pretend to enjoy it, but you have to make sacrifices for it; working unpaid overtime to prove how dedicated you are to the success of your employer.

To protect themselves from this humiliation, some workers convince themselves that they really are dedicated, and that their sacrifices are appreciated, and that without them, the workplace would fall apart. This bubble is burst when they are replaced with a worker, maybe an intern, maybe an Indian, who will do their jobs for 2 cents less.

On Utopia

The word utopia is usually associated with an unrealistic fantasy about the world, something which will never really happen but is nice to think about as an escape from misery. Marx definitely saw the concept of utopia in this way, and emphasized how communism is not a utopian project, but the inevitable result of capitalism, the resolution of its inner contradictions.

The trust in the “objective historical necessity” of communism lead to disaster in the Soviet Union. When things went wrong, when for example the collectivization of agriculture led to the production of less food instead of more, Stalin didn’t reconsider the political decisions, since they were grounded in infallible marxist theory. Instead, he blamed the failures of communist policy on saboteurs, counter-revolutionary infiltrators. For Stalin, the most ruthless of purges were acceptable, because he was just an instrument of historical necessity. Even the accused, before being executed, were ready to admit their betrayal of communism before a show-trial, so that their last act would strengthen the people’s belief in the rightness of the party’s decisions.

Why this reliance on some pseudo-scientific objective truth to justify communism? Was it because it’s leaders were simply evil and power-hungry? This is what I hear from a lot of communists I have met; Stalin hijacked the revolution, if only Trotsky would have won the power struggle things would have gone much better, etc. This is too simple for me, and it doesn’t explain why all of the communist countries turned into more or less totalitarian dictatorships.

I think the real answer lies in the so-called abyss of freedom. Communism is such a radically different way of organizing a society that it was very difficult to foresee all its consequences. The imposition of such a system on millions of people was, even when they had the people’s best interest at heart, a huge responsibility for the leaders of communism. After all, there were no guarantees they were actually doing the right thing. This is what I mean by the abyss of freedom: it’s the anxiety you feel when you have to make an important decision, and there is no-one to blame if you make the wrong choice.

The “objective historical necessity” of communism was nothing but an invented guarantee to escape this abyss of freedom. I think what 20th century communism lacked was the courage to confront the abyss, armed with nothing but the idea of a utopia. This courage is then what we desperately need today.

The Communist Horizon

One day I asked my father to describe the future in one word. Without thinking long, he said bleak. I was a little bit shocked, not because I didn’t agree with him, but because until then I thought that the future looked bleak to me because of my personal situation. I was in my early twenties, had no idea what I wanted to do with my life (I still have only a vague idea), had no stable income, home or relationship, so I had every reason to worry about the future. But my father, a respected academic, had a good income, a successful marriage, four healthy children who moved out but visited often, what did he have to worry about? I realized that it wasn’t just me; the future actually is bleak.

Today, what does the future look like? I have only a vague and unsettling feeling about it. The most obvious reason is the ecological problem. How can we solve such a global problem? Obviously democracy is out of its league here, and a climate summit is already considered a success when the participants decide to talk again in a few years. The ongoing economic crises and austerity measures also do not bode well. We don’t understand why the economy is bad and we have no choice but to leave it to some experts and let our public services be bled to death.

In the cultural domain, thinking about the future takes the form of different dystopias. Maybe robots decide to take over, a meteorite wipes away the human race, zombies attack (usually because of failed genetic experiments), society is organized by rivaling criminal gangs, politics is reduced to a ridiculous puppet show, the nazis return to finish the job, etc. etc. Usually in such narratives, after the horrible catastrophe comes a redeeming moment; in the near-hopeless fight against evil, some humanity, some true compassion returns that was somehow not possible before. Only after the zombie apocalypse are mommy and daddy reunited.

So why can we imagine such a “return to humanity” only after a catastrophe that destroys our society as we know it? Because we don’t know how to simply change it. There is not even a dream, a hope, of an alternative society. Economic realism has destroyed the 1968 dream of a world where people live together in peace and harmony. Having come to the conclusion that our problems are of an economic nature, what would be the alternative? Let’s be honest, the only real alternative to capitalism is communism. Despite it’s repeated failure in the 20th century, it remains the only alternative. This is why we should assert the communist horizon (the title of Jodi Dean’s recent book); although it needs to be thoroughly rethought, reinvented, communism should be the horizon of our political activity, meaning that communism should be the ultimate goal.

Dean writes that “the absence of a common goal is the absence of a future”. I couldn’t agree more with this. In the absence of a common goal, our plans for the future amount to “how can I survive in this world with some level of dignity and happiness”. This battle I have been losing since I started it. Let’s do something else. Let’s change the future.

The meaninglessness of life in capitalism

I’ve talked a few times about the ‘meaninglessness of life’, but what do I mean by that? Though I definitely don’t think that there is some given (by Nature? God? Destiny?) meaning we have to discover in order to live a full and happy life, I don’t think life has to be meaningless either. We have to give life a meaning by choosing, deciding, what our lives should mean and by letting our activity reflect this decision. So what’s the problem, why do I think people suffer from a lack of meaning?

Perhaps not surprisingly, the answer is capitalism. Capitalist production is inherently meaningless, because its only aim is to reproduce itself. In a pre-capitalist production process, you start with producing something other people have a demand for, so you can sell it on the market, and with the money buy a product you have a demand for. In capitalist production the relationship is inverted; the capitalist starts with money (capital), buys a product with it (investment), in order to sell it at a profit. Where the goal of a pre-capitalist production process is to fill a demand, in capitalism, the goal is to make profit. In fact, when a company fails to make bigger and bigger profits, it stagnates and goes bankrupt. This is why our world is flooded by advertisement; we have to constantly be stimulated, seduced, into buying products we don’t really need, otherwise profits cannot not grow further.

So how does this vicious cycle of ever-increasing profits which holds the world hostage, so to say, affect us in our everyday lives? The problem is that we have to participate in it if we want someplace to live and something to eat. Even if you are lucky enough to earn money doing something meaningful, you are constantly fighting a losing battle against your boss, because he doesn’t care about that meaningful thing you are doing, he only cares about if it is profitable or not. Every employee will find himself hindered in his work by the demand for profits (or by cutbacks if you work in the public sector). The result is frustration and cynical withdrawal.

In order to cope with it, we have to invent narratives that make our frustrating activity meaningful; maybe you sacrifice yourself for your children, that they may have it better than you (which puts a terrible burden on your children), or maybe you imagine your work to be so crucial that you should do it no matter the personal cost (which makes you a kind of tragic hero). Another way to deal with it would be the cynical way: life has no meaning anyway, so you use what you earn to indulge in stupid pleasures. The alternative to these coping mechanisms is depression.

The only way out would be of course to change the system, to free ourselves from this pressure to always make more profits, and decide what is really important in life, and let the production process support this decision, instead of being slaves to it. Easier said than done though. But wouldn’t any activity directed at this goal of finding a viable alternative to capitalism be more meaningful than the participation in it?

More on hip-hop: the difference between ‘nigger’ and ‘nigga’

Unlike some supposedly radical leftists, I don’t think censorship is necessarily a bad thing. I think there should be less violence and sex on tv, and I think young people shouldn’t be exposed to content with a homophobic message or that is objectifying women. That said, I do think it’s strange when the word ‘nigga’ is censored from a rap song. Why? How can a black person be racist against another black person? So if it’s not meant as an insult, what then? Could it be a constant reminder to white America of the history of slavery? To me it seems that rappers are generally far too proud to emphasize their victim-hood like that.

I think that if you would look at the context in which the word nigga is used, you would find it often used as a wake-up call, telling someone to be honest with himself. Urban dictionary uses this example:

Guy 1: I got laid last night!

Guy 2: Nigga please.

So why use an old racist slur to do it? My guess is that the addressee is not reminded of his slavery past, but of the fact that, in the eyes of society, he is worthless. A poor black man officially has the same rights and legal status as any other man, but in truth he has no real part in society, he is not represented in politics, and the media do not care if he gets shot in the street. This realization also generates a certain solidarity; this is why ‘nigga’ can also be used as a term of endearment.

Maybe that’s also the reason why it gets censored; to deny that there exists something like this secondary status of blacks in America, to deny exploitation. Maybe nigga is just another word for ‘proletarian’.