Who owns the working classes?
The question would not seem to be a complicated one. Starting from a philosophical position, the working classes are comprised of individuals who own themselves; they must achieve their liberation through collective action, and only then can they truly become themselves and realize the potential they waste through toiling for others. A material analysis yields an equally simple response: the working classes, by dint of having to sell the only thing they own — their labor — are owned by the bosses, and they must forever struggle to regain control of the products of that labor to own themselves. It is only when the question becomes cultural — that is, when we begin to characterize the working class through an arbitrary system of shared likes and dislikes, tendencies and temperaments, and reflections of the society in which they live — that we muddy the waters beyond clarity.
Unfortunately, it is this analysis, the cultural one, that has held sway in our country at least since the postwar era. Normally, it is an approach peddled by the ownership classes and their toadies: reactionaries, conservatives, certain strains of libertarians, and others who perceive that the capitalist system is either working on their behalf or can be gamed to do so. (See this for a recent and particularly hilarious example.) These people’s interest in the cultural framing has everything to do with division: it has always been used as a tool to sow discord amongst the various groups that comprise the working classes in order to prevent them from coming together and making demands of the owners. It doesn’t really matter what form this division takes — black vs. white, male vs. female, immigrant vs. native, gay vs. straight, rural vs. urban, educated vs. uneducated, service vs. trade, latte sipper vs. coffee drinker, craft beer swiller vs. macro-brew guzzler — as long as it serves as a distraction and keeps everyone’s eyes off the prize.
Recently, however, a strain of this culture-war battle for the imagined soul of the working class has come from the left. I use the identification with much more generosity than it probably deserves, because among these self-proclaimed leftists, there are few people you will meet who are politically active outside of social media. You will generally not find them in activist spaces; they seem to do no organizing; they are not joiners or builders, and they neither lead nor follow. Leftist politics seems to be more or less a hobby to them, or an object of critique alone: they wait for someone else to do something, and then tell them why they’re doing it wrong. They enjoy speculating about whether or not someone actually has any working-class bona fides, an activity I find generally counterproductive, but it can’t be missed that…well, let’s just say they spend a lot more time on the internet than someone who has to work full time is normally able.
They insist that the work of most people who do actual organizing is actually harmful or counter-productive, especially if it ever evinces a shade of social justice; any discussion of racism, sexism, or homophobia, or any attempt to introduce elements of decency towards the disabled, the neuro-atypical, or the traumatized, they say, is nothing more than rank liberalism, and will doom the socialist project by alienating the true working class, who they seem to perceive as a monolithic unit made up of rough beasts who will retreat angrily into their caves if they are ever asked to behave as if they live in a society. Given that their entire critique is based on this extremely inaccurate conception of the working class, it is remarkable how out of touch it really is: sometimes, reading their attacks and listening to their arguments, they seem to have attained their knowledge of the proletariat the same way I attained mine of the Sea Peoples — something out of history books that has a contextual importance, but that is so distant from everyday lived experience that it can never be truly known.
According to this vision of the toiling millions, we cannot discuss racial justice, for they are a mass of unrepentant racists who bristle at the very notion of equality and diversity — as if the working classes in America are not largely nonwhite now, and have not been for decades. We cannot speak of women’s issues or sexual harassment, because the working class consists mainly of grunting Neanderthal males whose relationships with the opposite sex are expressed through clubbings and draggings — as if women have not been a primary component of the low-wage workforce since after the Second World War, and don’t have as much stake in its improvement as men. We cannot ask them to observe social norms that request respect or demand sensitivity, because they are rank morons who can no more be taught to observe social decency than a wasp can be taught not to sting — as if working-class people have not learned to moderate their behavior to the situation their entire lives, in both situations they are forced into (work, school) and ones they choose voluntarily (churches, unions, social clubs). We cannot ask them to understand intersectionality, because they are uniform racially, sexually, and ethnically and their binary brains shut down entirely when asked to process new information — as if working-class people have not been on the front lines of diversity throughout American history and have seen and been forced to deal with social and cultural changes long before they reach upward to the bourgeoisie. We cannot ask them to be flexible or to understand different approaches to workplace organizing, because they are all hard-hat-wearing outer-borough lunkheads — as if working-class people have not been at the vanguard of the shifting economy, and have not seen the trades abandon them and the service industry subsume them for this entire century.
Of course, none of this is to say that the correct Marxist approach to these matters is settled, or that we may not overcorrect or undercorrect, or that this is not a matter of some dispute. But it is a curious vision indeed of the working class for people who profess to be class-forward: veterans aplenty, but with no tolerance or familiarity with post-traumatic stress disorder or other neurological sensitivities depressingly common to those who have served; family men everywhere, but with no experience of autism, gender dysphoria, severe allergies, or learning disorders that are so common that federal laws mandate public institutions have the tools to deal with them; masculinist behavior of the old school, but unable to understand discipline, self-control, or self-sacrifice; rough and tumble lifestyles of debauchery and hedonism, but with nary a soul lost to recovery; unions without racial diversity, families of only the traditional configuration, no one interested in education or elevation, and so committed to individualist indulgence that they’d rather see the whole socialist project fail than give up clapping during meetings or drinking on the job. I’m not sure where they’re finding these proles; I find them in situation comedies and newspaper cartoons of the 1970s, but I certainly do not find them in my organizing among working people. Indeed, one wonders why these revolutionary leftists care to fight for the working class at all, since they seem to perceive it as irredeemably racist, unchangeably sexist, stupid, vulgar, unteachable, violent, and incapable of development. The working class I grew up in, and the working class I know, is accepting, understanding, flexible, kind, bright, resourceful, and with infinite untapped potential; the working class they claim to represent is nothing but a reactionary cartoon.
People of this sort are fond of simplifying their arguments by pointing out that the movement’s foundational document explains in its very first sentence that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, and that an deviation from their provincial understanding of the cultural character of working people — from which position they give away their game, for it forever takes the place of a material or theoretical understanding of them — are betraying the class struggle that belongs at the forefront of the left. They forget that the second sentence describes the many permutations of that very class struggle and how they have changed over time, and that it goes on, on the first page, to describe the “manifold gradiation of social rank” and the “new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle” that have altered, but not eliminated, prior class antagonisms. We must remember always that, yes, our struggle is a class struggle and always will be. But we must beware always those who misunderstand or misrepresent the nature of class struggle, and who insist on an understanding of class character that is not only dated and incorrect, but which draws its very nature from the imagination of our enemies.