Hypothesis: Obsession with class will always drag the left down.

[chilango]

Whilst the Marxish ideas of class remain true: that in a capitalist society those who produce (i.e. the working class) are also the only ones who have the power to end capitalism and create a different society; the left has over a 100 years or more developed this position into an untenable dogma.

Virtually all of us here are working class in the sense described above - yet the left and the right have both worked to convince us we`re not.

Unless we talk about class in that sense (and dump all the other definitions and all the moralistic baggage bandied about the "prolier than thou" left) than it is a bit pointless to place "class" at the center of our ideas. Its too arbitrary.

no?

 

[Idaho]

V. good Guardian comment peace here from a couple of months ago http://business.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1747155,00.html

Read it. Interesting enough - but a tad fanciful. I think there is movement for the Labour share of income to diminish in certain sectors. But I think the gain that capitalists achieve from this is largely short term.

E2A - Agree with you Chilango. A concise and more succinct version of what I was flailing around hopelessly at.

 

[Crispy]

A theory that I've posted before, I think, is the following:

Revolutions and other mass societal changes come about for two main reasons. 1. Physical/material stress, or 2. Belief Systems (mostly religion) - and usually a mix of the two. For example, the russian revolution wasn't just about a bunch of people reading marx and trying to put ideas into practice. It also wasn't just about centuries of crushing imperial rule on the population.

In the light of this, if you look at western capitalism, there is very little material stress. Despite localised areas of relative poverty, everybody lives a materially comfortable life, with good healthcare and plentiful food and energy. Compare a working class life in the UK with, say, India. Nobody wants to rock the boat - it's pretty comfy, relatively speaking. However, there are some strong belief systems floating about, some religious, some not, and I reckon that when material stress comes along, these buds will flower into mass movements and revolutions that will radically transform the shape of the world. Islam, Fundy Christianity, Deep Greens, Communism, Fascism etc. etc.

That material stress, I reckon, will be the coming energy crisis after peak oil. Western capitalism cannot function without cheap energy, and the powerful could become powerless in a short period of time. Then would be a good time to get involved in leftwing politics, because that would be when everybody in the country would be looking for answers to very pressing problems. That is when people are willing to get out of the boat and swim (oooh, nice analogy )

 

[118118]

Perhaps it is merely time for a new paradigm on the left. The old one is well over 100 years out of date.

If you take out the element of class and struggle, aren't you taking out the motor, or spark. Your left to rely on people's sense of fairness and morality, which, I would say, could manifest itself through democratic processes only. Without some kind of enemy, definetly, democracy is the only route, surely.

And, I don't know if our current democracy could achieve any kind of lasting equality, not that I know much about this, but there isn't much space for the free action and interaction needed.

So whats easier, relying on some kind of abandoned myth of/for revolution, or trying to change demoratic structures in a mire, of infininte regress iyswim

 

[118118]

It's definitely true that ressentiment infects left politics like a disease, and I think it was central to the collapse of that other political board.

Sorry, why is ressentiment, not a good thing. I think it describes quite abit of where I come from

 

[Idaho]

If you take out the element of class and struggle, aren't you taking out the motor, or spark. Your left to rely on people's sense of fairness and morality, which, I would say, could manifest itself through democratic processes only. Without some kind of enemy, definetly, democracy is the only route, surely.

And, I don't know if our current democracy could achieve any kind of lasting equality, not that I know much about this, but there isn't much space for the free action and interaction needed.

So whats easier, relying on some kind of abandoned myth of/for revolution, or trying to change demoratic structures in a mire, of infininte regress iyswim

Much as the revolutionaries will gnash their teeth at this, but the last 60 years *have* shown an increase of equality. If you took someone from the 30s to now, they would be more overwhelmed by the positive than by the negative.

However this is where the 'internationalised' argument comes in. Saying that the inequities in this society are not as important as the north-south inequities.

 

[Crispy]

It's exactly the attitude my mum has. She was born in a tiny 2 bed house with outdoor toilet and no heating, "pulled herself up by her bootstraps" and is now very comfortable. If you tried to have a conversation with her about poverty or inequality, she will counter with "You have no idea what it was like. It was hard. Even the poorest today have it better than when I was a child, so don't you harp on at me about the inequities of capitalism."

 

[kyser_soze]

Without some kind of enemy, definetly, democracy is the only route, surely.

And this is exactly what I mean when I say that capitalism has defined the terms of engagement - the whole notion of 'enemy', the violence that implies...if you use violence to achieve a 'better society' all that does is legitimise the use of violence in the future, which means that ultimately nothing will have changed.

It may sound cheesy/hippy, but in order to change society you need to change the way people view conflict - and to do that you need to change society for positive reasons rather than negative. Tbaldwins 'Nastyness' thread might be a piss take, but at the end of the day history shows that all violence does is beget violence - and continues to legitimise violence as a tool for change and achieving power, just the same as it is among the rest of the animal kingdom.

And surely the whole purpose of building a fairer, more equal society is that it's a rational, conscious move by humans away from simplistic survival psychologies (which is all cap is - it's driven by immediate, indvidualistic survival needs, not by thought out, collective, long term surivival needs) toward something that allows us to shrug off 6,000 years of violent, oppressive & hierarchical societies.

One theme that crops up a lot in religions is the idea that living a good life requires people to take a harder path - to forgive rather than condemn for example - and I don't think changing society will be any different. A violent revolution is easy if the situation is right, and forgive me if I'm wrong on this, but there hasn't been a violent revolution anywhere that has either survived or actually changed the basic oppressive nature of the society it's happened in - and indeed in many cases has made the lives of those it was supposed to help much worse (The French Terror, Stalin's purges, Nazism, Mao's Cultural Revolution). If history is supposed to be a teacher, surely one BIG lesson is that violence doesn't change anything in the long run, and that at some point it will be necessary to take a harder road if humanity, as a whole species, is going to reach a better place.

 

[Crispy]

Christ Ky, you really are turning into a hippy aren't you?

But I think you're right, and the worrying conclusion is that the sort of change neccesary will take a commitment of religous proportions. Be very careful who the priests are...

 

[Fruitloop]

It's interesting to look at it from the point of view of Jung's 'shadow self' as well - all the stuff that you have to put away in some dusty corner of your unconscious mind in order to live socially at all. It makes the undertaking seem less impossible when you think that it's essentially an extension of a process that everyone undergoes already. It's reminiscent for me of the injunction in the Dao De Jing to 'put away all dangerous things within yourself'.

Jeez, now I sounds like a hippy.

 

[Idaho]

It's exactly the attitude my mum has. She was born in a tiny 2 bed house with outdoor toilet and no heating, "pulled herself up by her bootstraps" and is now very comfortable. If you tried to have a conversation with her about poverty or inequality, she will counter with "You have no idea what it was like. It was hard. Even the poorest today have it better than when I was a child, so don't you harp on at me about the inequities of capitalism."

My grandfather, a lifelong communist and trade unionist, has worked throughout his life to fight for better pay and conditions, supporting rent strikes, campaigning for this that and the other. Even the most lazy leftist intellectual could tear him apart in debate - but none of them put together will ever have nearly as much impact as he has had on people's lives over the last 70 years.

I think you have to engage with society. All these intellectual groups of leftists fighting over nonsense points of theory that are utterly removed from reality will never get anywhere. The left as a whole will never get anywhere until it makes as it's goal, the improvement of people's lives.

 

[kyser_soze]

I must confess it's my re-readings of the Dune books, and then looking at real history, that has led my thinking in this direction. Harnessing the power of religion but doing it in a rational fashion...almost an impossible ask...

I really don't want to come over as a peace and love type, simply because that kind of simplistic thinking won't work either...

 

[Fruitloop]

Sorry, why is ressentiment, not a good thing. I think it describes quite abit of where I come from

Well, it's not morally bad, it's just unhelpful in a couple of ways. Firstly because it distracts attention from the causes of problems onto their observable effects - f'rinstance away from the collective participation in the culture of celebrity and its function as part of the spectacle, on to the loathing of individual celebrities, who may well be more at the mercy of the culture as a whole than we are ourselves; our attention is directed away from the roles and onto the personnel. This shift is very seductive because it's easier to affect the latter than the former - easier to shoot a celebrity that we hate than to abolish the spectacular culture that endlessly throws them up at us.

Secondly it can lead to an inversion of values that we should instead be maintaining, because they are associated with the despised rulers. For example, because the r/c have monopolised and appropriated high culture, sophisticated language etc with a reasonable degree of success, it doesn't follow that revolutionaries should therefore be grunting, uncultured apes. Instead we should accept that some of the things that they have appropriated do have real value, and the answer is to get control of these things back and exorcise their influence over them, not just give them up as a bad job in some fit of revolutionary sour grapes.

 

[Dubversion]

I must confess it's my re-readings of the Dune books, and then looking at real history, that has led my thinking in this direction. ...

oh dear, kyser, oh dear

<shakes head, walks away/>

 

[Idaho]

I see the truth in it

I think you are right in that. Herbert thought that humanity needed domesticating, but it would take a 10,000 year reign of tyranny to do it.

Herbert was the don

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
----------------------------
Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.
----------------------------
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
----------------------------
These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness . . .
----------------------------------
And my personal favourites:

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class--whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

and

Oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.

 

[kyser_soze]

oh dear, kyser, oh dear

<shakes head, walks away/>

Why oh dear oh dear? I used it as a starting point, not a reference text, and I do think that his thoughts on religion, the affect of physical environment on human societies (something that Banks also talks about in 'A few notes on the Culture') and the repetitious nature of human social change (i.e. that in the long term NOTHING changes in terms of resource reliance and the controllers of that resource)

It's not original, but melange as an allegory for Oil, the monopoly of the guild (and lets face it - does anyone really believe that the oil industry is little more than a cartel) and the complete reliance of ALL trade and commerce on it...

Anyway, berfore this turns into a geekfest and we return to class...I have another hypothesis...

Marx was incorrect in thinking that Capitalism represented a radically different model of society to agricultural feudalism; that 'capitalism' is industrial feudalism where the social relationships have simply become more complex and sophisticated, an old r/c has been replaced with a new one, new belief systems are used to obfuscate/justify the existing social order (religion replaced with celebrity and sport), but that the fundamental way that society is governed - a powerful minority with the monopoly of force ruling over a largely powerless majority who have to work to survive - hasn't altered and instead of Kings and Princes, the workers are now beholden to CEOs and Entrepreneurs.

It could also explain why the societies/revo who have followed have ultimately failed - if you view Marxism as the 'diagnosis' for what is wrong with society, if it got the diagnosis wrong, would it not be possible that the 'cures' would also be wrong?

 

[Idaho]

Why oh dear oh dear? I used it as a starting point, not a reference text, and I do think that his thoughts on religion, the affect of physical environment on human societies (something that Banks also talks about in 'A few notes on the Culture') and the repetitious nature of human social change (i.e. that in the long term NOTHING changes in terms of resource reliance and the controllers of that resource)

I think if your sources are not achingly cool hedonists or stylish misfits then he's not interested

 

[sleaterkinney]

I think you have to engage with society. All these intellectual groups of leftists fighting over nonsense points of theory that are utterly removed from reality will never get anywhere. The left as a whole will never get anywhere until it makes as it's goal, the improvement of people's lives.

tbh, and this isn't a troll even though it sounds like one, I think a lot of the leftists like that because it means they don't have to compromise their principles, getting involved with lots of different people means compromise.

 

[treelover]

Bit late, but like others I’m a bit surprised at the original post coming from sucha politically aware poster as Blue , isn’t this just an more intellectual version of the liberal plea: ‘can’t we all just get along together'.

I have a older friend, a lovely person who really believes in social justice, has fought for and won gains for some of the most deprived kids in my area. However, she also believes making money from property is ok, as long as as you can do good things with it. She doesn’t recognize though that the inflated property market is creating major new divisions in our society, a new ‘rentier class’ which is causing much insecurity for those at the bottom. I’m no class warrior, and I can’t stand the 19th C left approach, I accept class is more fluid and that there are many things wrongs with class politics but surely what it does do, is allow us to see more clearly who benefits, who controls what, and who is losing out. During the 80’s (unbelievably), the Job Creation Programmes allowed progressive historians, etc, to to get funding to probe class structures and identify who owned what, where etc, a brilliant one was done of the North East, and how old money, mining etc, had gone into new ventures: such as the the Gateshead Metro Shopping Mall, it became a popular pamphlet and gave insights into that part of the country. Just as salient, what happens when the 'long boom' is over as it must and the inequalities sharpen, become more focused and attitudes hardened, then class once again may become an issue, (although not as dominant as in the past) though I fear the question of migration, etc, will be a key problematic and just as dominant in the era.

However, I also think power is just as pertinent now, this allows us to examine why say unemployed graduates (and there are many) are in much worse situations than say a plumber who is earning vast amounts. Plans are also afoot to create ‘power maps’ to identify the unelectable quangos who now run the big cities. Power is also an useful tool to observe domestic hierarchies: eg the family home and domestic violence.

 

[treelover]

i think you are spot on there

tbh, and this isn't a troll even though it sounds like one, I think a lot of the leftists like that because it means they don't have to compromise their principles, getting involved with lots of different people means compromise.
Reply With Quote

 

[sleaterkinney]

Marx was incorrect in thinking that Capitalism represented a radically different model of society to agricultural feudalism; that 'capitalism' is industrial feudalism where the social relationships have simply become more complex and sophisticated, an old r/c has been replaced with a new one, new belief systems are used to obfuscate/justify the existing social order (religion replaced with celebrity and sport), but that the fundamental way that society is governed - a powerful minority with the monopoly of force ruling over a largely powerless majority who have to work to survive - hasn't altered and instead of Kings and Princes, the workers are now beholden to CEOs and Entrepreneurs.

<DA> Or could it be that society needs big chiefs and little indians?</DA>

 

[kyser_soze]

TL - you've missed the point a bit. Blue wasn't saying abandon class analysis, but stop making it some kind of pre-condition for 'acceptance' into lefty groups, and that it's this that's stopping many people who otherwise would engage with progressive politics because they can't be bothered with the kind of bullshit seen on *that other website* and the Workers Power thread.

I mean seriously - does it really take arcance knowledge of the history of Trots, Leninists and all the various factions around the world to see that society is fucked and needs changing?

 

[kyser_soze]

Sleater - wass <da> when it's at home...or indeed anywhere else...

 

[Crispy]

Thought I'd take some quotes from 'Notes on the Culture' That might be interesting:

The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane. That surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.

our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.

if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero

the mutuality of dependence involved in an environment which is inherently hostile would necessitate an internal social coherence which would contrast with the external casualness typifying the relations between such ships/habitats. Succinctly; socialism within, anarchy without.

That's enough scifi though Can we make Judean People's Front jokes now?

 

[Belushi]

That's enough scifi though Can we make Judean People's Front jokes now?

SPLITTERS

 

[treelover]

er, I think made my views about the declining 19th C left and trots in general, i do think we need a new paradigm, but class (and power) should be part of it.

btw, excellent thread, i though theory/phil, etc, board had been closed
down!

I mean seriously - does it really take arcance knowledge of the history of Trots, Leninists and all the various factions around the world to see that society is fucked and needs changing?
Reply With Quote

 

[Belushi]

i do think we need a new paradigm, but class (and power) should be part of it.

My position exactly.

It is refreshing to have a thread on this subject that hasnt declined into arguements about arcane left theology!

 

[Crispy]

Isn't it

 

[kyser_soze]

OK, so now what? We're not ditching class/power but approaching it from a different direction...maybe a more user friendly way of explaining it would be a start? Bringing the nature of the ruler/ruled relationship into individuals lives?

I've always thought that the best way to sell someone something it to make them think they're the ones who came up with the idea to buy the thing. Same applies here - ask a few pertinent questions, partially define the parameters of answers (in this case you have to avoid people going down the 'but that's just how it is' road) and let them think about it and come to their own conclusions. Then you talk to them again, talk through their thinking, give them new ideas to ponder, start introducing complexity...and keep the process going.

If that sounds like a religious indoctrination it's pretty close to it - the difference being that you never, ever tell them that every other way is wrong, or imply that their thinking is 'deficient'. You won't land everyone - but those you do land will have moved their thinking on...

 

[Crispy]

OK, so now what?

Hire Derren Brown, I think...