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?

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.

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?

My problem with vegetarianism

Something bothers me about vegetarianism. It seems so sympathetic, the vegetarian who refuses to eat meat out of concern for the way animals are treated on our modern farms. And they are usually so modest about it too; they don’t want you to feel guilty about eating meat and hate to inconvenience you at dinner parties. But isn’t it strange? Usually when somebody boycotts something they want as much people to participate as possible, and tell everybody why they are boycotting. Isn’t there something totally passive-aggressive in the vegetarian’s attitude, telling you that he won’t eat the chicken because of how it was tortured, but you should go ahead and finish it?

So why does the chicken get tortured anyway? Marx already knew that the capitalist does not make money by selling a good product at a reasonable price, but by producing as much as he can as cheaply as he can. Finding the people who will buy the product is the secondary problem. That is because the producer who wins the market share is the producer with the cheapest production process, and the cheaper the production process, the more products he has to sell to make enough profits to retain his hold on the market share. If a country makes laws against torturing chickens, or polluting the river, the capitalist has to calculate whether it is cheaper to conform to the law, break the law and pay the fines, or (more probably) move his production to a country without such a law. This makes the treatment of animals in agricultural industry a systemic problem inherent to capitalism.

So does that make us consumers guilty for enabling the mistreatment of animals? Yes, insofar as we do nothing to solve the problem. But vegetarianism is not the solution, it’s just creating a different market niche for people who want to buy (and have enough money to buy) tofu and other meat-replacing products. But I suspect most vegetarians know that the agricultural industry is not going to change because they won’t eat meat. I suspect they are just trying to wash their hands clean of it, so that they don’t have to ask themselves the hard question of how to change the system, and pretend they are not guilty.

So when the vegetarian dies and meets Saint Peter at the pearly gates, and Peter asks “What the hell happened on Earth?”, the vegetarian can shrug and answer: “It wasn’t me.”