The Problem with Class

[David Powers]

I’m just going to open with my most controversial current take. I think that class consciousness and class-based political projects in the Marxist sense won’t help us create the revolutionary community we need to overcome Capital. I will just briefly outline my thinking:
1. The bourgeois class no longer exists as a class in-itself, and society overall has undergone a high level of proletarianization and plebianization. It’s not an accident that the wealthiest people have job titles of CEO, and also, that rich people are now just as stupid as the rest of us. They really are that stupid because they too have been proletariazed, even if they might also be powerful and obscenely wealthy. (This line of argument comes from Bernard Stiegler)
2. From the individual point of view, class position is radically unstable, and class contradictions are experienced INTERNALLY by individuals as psychic contradictions: during different activities, I have to think like a (petit bourgeois) investor as I consider my financial future and invest in various strategies to get ahead, and as a web designer I’m technically a business owner. But I’m also malnourished and extremely lumpenized, and then sometimes I have jobs and I’m an employee, but these jobs don’t last. And simultaneously, to the extent that I can appreciate and enjoy classic bourgeois culture–Beethoven, Mozart, Moby Dick, etc–I have some cultural affinities with a bourgeois way of life that no longer exists.
3. I believe that the implications of the dominance of CAPITAL on a global scale, combined with the extreme division of labor, creates a situation where we are all essentially “atomized agents of capital” and that occasionally as agents, we might be part of a particular STRATA of workers, but these strata don’t really amount to classes in the traditional Marxist sense, they are neither in-themselves or for-themselves but merely distinct parts within the vast socio-economic machine.
4. I do not believe any kind of “class-first” politics can actually put these atomized workers and strata back together in order to form a political subject. Marx didn’t do that–he merely theorized the really existing movement of the working class, but I don’t think we see that kind of movement which could be a basis for overcoming Capital.
5. I propose that Climate Change imposes a new historical task on communists, that involves creating a new form of communism that includes other living beings, and the level of the biosphere itself–perhaps we could call it BioCommunism.
6. Therefore, I propose for now that an international communist movement MUST have strong roots in strata of working class and lumpenized workers, in order to have any chance, but that the goal is NOT class consciousness but instead consciousness of the possibility of creating a new community to overcome Capital and create a biosphere where humans and nonhumans can live together in a friendly way (especially, we absolutely cannot cater to tendencies of some working class people to oppose their interests to the interests of the biosphere).
7. Finally, I propose what matters is not your “Class Position” per se, but rather, to what extent you act as an “Agent of Capital,” and to what extent you are able to act as an “Agent of Communism”–there is always going to be contradiction here, and your position depends on division of labor, but we shouldn’t just mechanistically assume, “poor person GOOD, rich person BAD” in some stupid simplistic way, because right now almost all of us are acting in ways that will lead to nasty consequences for future human beings. And here I would emphasize, rather than class, the existential link formed by our current choices, which unites dead ancestors with the humans who are to come. Lewis Gordon’s great writing on the importance of Frederick Douglas’ mother is a big influence on me here.
Okay, SEND ME TO GULAG!

Discussion

[Matan Levin]

Rather than the previously “intelligent” leaders becoming stupid, isn’t it rather that knowledge itself has been drained of its import? If anything I am Kierkegaardian here in that intelligence is now widespread, and has even categorized itself as a symptom through wide forms of psychoanalytic discourse, as the Theory-Underground project can attest to. In that sense, proletarianization does not refer to the reduction of each individual person to a ‘lost’ de-socialized state, but rather to the ambiguous revelation that the field of identity itself has always been in a constitutive state of groundlessness.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 1 week ago by  Matan Levin.

[David Powers]

Also, as far as “theory underground” goes, I don’t think this space is representative of the ordinary population. I would guess that literally only 1 – 2% of the people I know “in real life” actually read books of ANY KIND, and none of them read theory or know the first thing about psychoanalysis.

[David Powers]

You claim that “the ambiguous revelation that the field of identity itself has always been in a constitutive state of groundlessness.” I believe the Hegelian position, which I follow, would be to claim that the socialization process is definitely NOT groundless, it is grounded in the Sittlichkeit of really existing communities, and the experience of “groundlessness” is itself a historical manifestation of a specific social configuration, which also includes the production processes which Marx first tried to analyze in a rigorous fashion.
I would also note that I am suspicious of your use of the term “field of identity,” this seems to me like it is pointing towards other discourses which I do not believe are helpful. Maybe I am paranoid here, but to me discussions of “identity” already concede too much to mainstream ideological discourses.

en.wikipedia.org

Sittlichkeit" - Wikipedia

Sittlichkeit" - Wikipedia

[David Powers]

Hi Matan,
First of all, fascinating response. I have to first admit that I am not sure I comprehend the precise meaning of your final claim, that “proletarianization does not refer to the reduction of each individual person to a ‘lost’ de-socialized state, but rather to the ambiguous revelation that the field of identity itself has always been in a constitutive state of groundlessness.”
However, I think I understand enough to categorically say NO, and I think I can get to the heart of the matter fairly succinctly:
From my point of view, proletarianization is a direct result of automation in the production process, including automation of the “capitalist functions” and management of capital, and the struggle between living labor and dead labor. Theoretically, this interpretation of our current situation aligns with Bernard Stiegler and has theoretical roots in the following passage by Karl Marx, found in the Grundrisse:

[Once] adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages…. [The machine’s] distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material – supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.

• This reply was modified 8 months, 1 week ago by  David Powers.

[Matan Levin]

Greetings Dave, sorry for the weeklong pause before responding

The passage you quote from Grundrisse describes a situation in which the alienated subject’s passive capacity to be a laborer is determinative of their identity within society. The machine itself is what possesses the formerly human dimension of intensive technique. Where does this leave the subject? Marx’s response here, which is where he is in total lockstep with thinkers like Nietzsche, is that this new subjectivity with no formal attributes besides its passive ability to generate value is also in fact the universalization of the intimate site of a traumatic truth found implicitly in all historical subjectivities, which create themselves as coherent classes by confronting and questioning given definitions of intensive labor, uselessness, and standards by which their class position is esteemed socially.

-ML

[Matan Levin]

Also, if there was any skepticism of my intentions in using identity, rest assured it was done in service to Marx’s emphasis on class precisely insofar as class represents an unspoken compromise which is a foundational necessity for, but also an impediment to, the self-determined liberal subject which is expressed through “mainstream discourse”.

[David Powers]

You said, “The machine itself is what possesses the formerly human dimension of intensive technique. Where does this leave the subject? Marx’s response… is that this new subjectivity with no formal attributes… is the universalization of the intimate site of a traumatic truth….”
I think your comments help me to understand where I have a fundamental disagreement. I claim that you are referring only to “linguistic subjects,” that is, the subject that can be inferred on the basis of language. But the “linguistic subject” only emerges from the “biological subject.” To put it simply, I believe you are obscuring the fundamental importance of the human body, and especially the possibility that working with machines introduces pathological situations into human life that cannot be overcome by merely taking a subjective position about the universality of being subjected to machines. Of course, this universality does represent a foundation for collective political action, but since it is mediated by the pathological physical conditions, such universality is not sufficient, and I would argue, doesn’t necessarily lead to any project to overcome Capital, and the proof is that no serious project to overcome Capital exists at the moment. Marx could point to the nascent worker’s movement–we can’t point to anything like that.
Here we should look to Catharine Malabou’s work on brains and destructive plasticity; the question raised is this: at what point do human brains and bodies get so damaged by the system of machines, that subjectivization as such is simply off the table? And here I would also (following Byung-Chul han) claim that self-exploitation is the primary power relation, and that what we are dealing with is addicts caught up in short-circuits of drive, addicts who are unable to sublimate or desire properly.
And this is all political, because then following Hegel, we would need to ask what kind of really existing collective projects can and do create some kind of alternative possibilities for subjectivation — in other words, what are the contemporary manifestations of Hegel’s “Ethical Life”? Because people first have to experience what it feels like to be free, and to be free in a community, and to work for something together as a part of a community; if they have never had any of those experiences in real life, then they may not be ready to participate in any kind of political project. And I would argue that along with lived experiences of collective solidarity, we need spaces where bodies and brains can heal, because today’s burned out brains and worn out bodies are not capable of revolutionary activity, solidarity, or the pre-revolutionary forms of libidinal investment that would be necessary preconditions for any larger movement to overcome Capital.

Of course, here I would also claim that coming together to discourse on Theory Underground is an example of the kinds of experiences that might be part of the necessary pre-revolutionary conditions.

[David Powers]

Replying to my own post here — it seems like my thinking is actually quite similar to what Zizek is saying starting around 29:00 in the recent Theory Underground video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB2pJt3wZl0
Possibly I picked some of this up unconsciously from Zizek videos I watched in the past, but I have not actually read many of his books and don’t follow him super closely–I was really thinking more in terms of a response to people like Cutrone or Tutt who are dealing with class in a way that seems a bit too clear cut for me, so I was quite fascinated to hear Zizek bringing up points that had crossed my mind as well (including the idea of the “Lumpen-Bourgeoisie”).

• This reply was modified 8 months ago by  David Powers.

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