On the new class fundamentalism

These are my comments from a roundtable organized by Igor Shoikhedbrod at APSA 2022. They are a first, rough attempt to think through issues of class in social theory and in socialist politics. They are both rather tentative and rather basic, but I hope they are also somewhat helpful.

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I’m trying to figure out the new “class is fundamental” discourse. In some of its aspects, it is not so new. Adolph Reed has been pushing the same line for 35 years. Aging Trotskyists are not saying anything they haven’t been saying forever. But older tendencies have gained a new inflection by interaction with elements that are much more genuinely recent. The post-Bernie anti-liberalism of certain parts of DSA, the anti-PMC line being pushed by the romantic workerists who publish in Compact, etc., seem very conjunctural.

Within this context, what does it mean to insist that class is fundamental? 

I find this a hard question to answer, in part because it is hard to isolate the theoretical account offered by these authors from the critical attacks on others that carry the message. The critical attacks often seem to boil down to an imperative to say the word “class” more, and the words “race” and “gender” less. Nonetheless, the critique seems to be motivated by the sense that “class” cuts the social world at its joints. There is a conviction that organizing around racial, gendered, or other identities, and around injustices of status and standing, are distractions from (a) what is *really* going on, and (b) what might actually *work* politically.

"What is really going on": The fundamental social processes that drive, undergird, and explain the conflicts about status and standing and identity are the class processes of capitalism in its current neoliberal form.

"What might work politically": Naming and appealing to people’s material interests – which are their class interests – is both more motivating and more inclusive than naming and appealing to people’s status, standing, and identity, which are particularistic and divisive, rather than universalistic and unifying.

I understand the appeal of this, I think. The individual claims out of which these intuitions are constructed are themselves compelling. The class processes of capitalism are fundamental for understanding the world. Appealing to common and material interests, and building universalistic policy programs, are the best shot we have of moving things in a better direction. And yet, the class fundamentalist position as whole doesn’t seem to me to make much sense. When I think about how and in what sense each of the elements is true, then it seems impossible to combine them in the way that the new class fundamentalism does, and the whole things seems to fall apart. 

I want to look at the two aspects of the position in turn, and to point out where I keep getting tripped up.

In what sense, first, are class processes and conflicts the fundamental social processes that drive or explain other conflicts? 

Class is fundamental, in this sense, because production is fundamental. Class relations organize production, and so, since production is fundamental to the existence of human society, solving the class relation problem is a constraint on everything else that goes on in society. 

Now, you could say the same thing about reproduction. Since reproduction is also fundamental to the existence of human society, it might seem that relations of reproduction – sex and gender – are equally primodial and equally basic to everything else going on in society. But here there is an illuminating contrast. It turns out that human beings can reproduce the species in in a wildly divergent set of social relations. Reproduction does not require any particular social relations to be successful. That is, in the case of reproduction, stable functionality radically underdetermines social form. As long as there is enough food, humans find ways of reproducing the species, and the ways they find to do so are flexible and varied to an incredible degree. 

Not so for production. Production at a certain level – for a given population, at a given level of social wealth – binds us socially to a much greater extent. Hence, production relations are much stickier. We cannot produce food and technology for a world of 8 billion people, who are used to and reliant upon modern life, in just any old way. We are, in this sense, locked in – for now – to certain relations of production, and this means to certain class relations. 

Class, in this sense, names the relations of domination and exploitation that are productively necessary for a given society. 

The point of base-superstructure materialism is to underscore this fact, that class relations are themselves a “social technology” of production, and that more productive class relations are more powerful class relations, which tend to win out in competition with other, less productive class relations. (The mechanism of this winning out can vary. It might be that more productive class relations outspread less productive, or that they developmentally outstrip them, or that they lead to military overmatching, or…)

However, there are a couple wrinkles. First, a tendency is just a tendency, and will be more notable and stable at a large scale and over a long time than it is locally and at any given point. Historical materialism is not a species of determinism. Second, the more productive the economy, the greater the surplus, and the greater the inequality in how this surplus is spread around, the greater the “slippage” between socially necessary class relations at the level of the whole and the relations of production that obtain locally in any given workplace or jurisdiction or line of production. That is, the more productively developed an economy, the less likely its “competitive edge” is to be critically present in some one site or line of production.

In this situation – and it is, I think, our situation, to a greater extent than it has ever been any other society’s situation – class relations remain fundamental, but they are progressively distinct (without being independent) from work relations. Work relations – relations of domination and exploitation at the site of production – are labor-management relations, not proletarian-capital relations. Proletarian-capital relations obtain in an abstract but determining way at the level of society, which is mediated in its essential productive processes by the labor market. Work relations obtain in an empirically perceptible but overdetermined way at the level of everyday life, which is mediated in its contingent productive processes by all sorts of things.

This analysis – which is based on Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor – highlights a constitutive obscurity in the new class fundamentalism's political project.

The injunction to focus on class in political practice is itself interestingly out of step with the injunction to trace things back to the political economy of capitalism. After all, “class” does not name a reality proper to capitalism, but a constitutive element of almost all human societies to date. The corollary of tracing the fundamental dynamics of capitalism would be an emphasis not on class but on the proletariat. But naming the proletariat would emphasize what so much of the new class discourse obscures, that the working class as the producers of things is not equivalent to the working class as the class of wage-workers, and neither is equivalent to the proletariat, the class of people dependent upon wages for life, whether they are working or not. 

I think this conflation of capitalist class relations with work relations is an understandable but regrettable feature of the new fundamentalism. 

Understandable, because it’s not as if capitalist class relations are independent of capitalist work relations, and work relations are much more empirically tractable and politically salient in an obvious way. 

Regrettable, though, because it leads this current emphasis on class to fall into a false opposition between “class-based” politics and other forms of political organizing. This is because, by shifting between features of the structural class relation basic to capitalism (between capitalist and proletarian) and features of one or another work relation, the new class fundamentalism makes its political task too easy. Class politics has the immediacy of work relations, but the universality of class relations. Class politics – like workplace organizing – appeals to material interests, but it also – unlike workplace organizing – has a national and even international constituency. 

There’s the old saying in labor circles that “the boss is the best organizer.” I think the new class fundamentalism wants this to be true, not only at the level of the shop floor, but at the level of society at large. And there are points in time when that actually seems plausible. In the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, in Europe and North America especially, it was reasonable to think that capital organized labor at scale. The emptying out of the countryside, the massive amalgamation of the industrial working class in factory, mine, city, and district – all of this encouraged Marxists and other socialists to think that capital was itself forging the proletariat into a political subject with common experiences, common spaces, common mores and traditions. 

That belief is not reasonable anymore, about Europe and North America at least – and it was never as correct as it was reasonable. 

Cedric Johnson said the other day, at a panel honoring Adolph Reed’s work, that what victims of police harassment and violence have in common is not race but class. That is true – but it is also abstract. Around here, it may be that everything I see and know tells me that police harassment and violence are about race. And local truths about racial harassment and violence are no less true than local truths about workplace harassment and precarity and overwork.

It seems to me that the real challenge of a class-based politics in our world is that it is an inherently abstract, theoretical politics. Building a global alternative to the capital-proletarian class relation is necessarily the most challenging and difficult political struggle imaginable. It is tempting to think that there is some local crystallization of this abstract, global struggle, some everyday struggle that doesn’t have to be translated into this global struggle because it just is this global struggle in a bite-sized form. But I don’t think that’s true. 

I could support this platform...

1. Universal, equal, and direct suffrage with secret ballot in all elections, for all citizens of the Reich over the age of twenty, without distinction of sex. Proportional representation, and, until this is introduced, legal redistribution of electoral districts after every census. Two-year legislative periods. Holding of elections on a legal holiday. Compensation for elected representatives. Suspension of every restriction on political rights, except in the case of legal incapacity.
2. Direct legislation by the people through the rights of proposal and rejection. Self-determination and self-government of the people in Reich, state, province, and municipality. Election by the people of magistrates, who are answerable and liable to them. Annual voting of taxes.
3. Education of all to bear arms. Militia in the place of the standing army. Determination by the popular assembly on questions of war and peace. Settlement of all international disputes by arbitration.
4. Abolition of all laws that place women at a disadvantage compared with men in matters of public or private law.
5. Abolition of all laws that limit or suppress the free expression of opinion and restrict or suppress the right of association and assembly. Declaration that religion is a private matter. Abolition of all expenditures from public funds for ecclesiastical and religious purposes. Ecclesiastical and religious communities are to be regarded as private associations that regulate their affairs entirely autonomously.
6. Secularization of schools. Compulsory attendance at the public Volksschule [extended elementary school]. Free education, free educational materials, and free meals in the public Volksschulen, as well as at higher educational institutions for those boys and girls considered qualified for further education by virtue of their abilities.
7. Free administration of justice and free legal assistance. Administration of the law by judges elected by the people. Appeal in criminal cases. Compensation for individuals unjustly accused, imprisoned, or sentenced. Abolition of capital punishment.
8. Free medical care, including midwifery and medicines. Free burial.
9. Graduated income and property tax for defraying all public expenditures, to the extent that they are to be paid for by taxation. Inheritance tax, graduated according to the size of the inheritance and the degree of kinship. Abolition of all indirect taxes, customs, and other economic measures that sacrifice the interests of the community to those of a privileged few.

(Yes, its the demands put forward by the German Social Democrats in their 1891 Erfurt Program. Ah, smell the progress!)

The Workers' Paradise To Come

Of course we all know by now that the US is posed to elect its first Marxist president one week from today. Admittedly, the evidence for Obama's Marxism is, uh, peculiar. For example, he buys large slots of prime-time TV. You know, just like Stalin used to. Also, he and his running mate both "shrug off accusations of liberalism." Honest.

(Actually, my favorite bit of this "essay" is the inset photo of Marx, the caption of which informs us that:

German philosopher Karl Marx, author of "The Communist Manifesto," advocated redistributing wealth in order to achieve a classless society. (AP Photo)

I think it's actually the "(AP Photo)" that gets me. Like there's some AP stringer somewhere who caught Marx on camera.)

Nonetheless, there are slightly less fantastical grounds for thinking that an Obama administration would be better for workers than a McCain administration. One of which is Obama's support of card-check legislation.

Right now, if workers want to organize a union at their workplace, they have to go through two steps: 1) a card campaign, in which they get at least a majority of their fellow workers to sign cards indicating that they want a vote on whether to have a union; and 2) a secret-ballot vote, ordered by the labor relations board, which is an up-or-down vote on whether to accept union organization. Card-check legislation would do away with the second step.

Today the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of pro-worker sentiment, farmed out its editorial page to a scribe from the National Right to Work (for Peanuts) Committee, who decries the more-likely-than-ever card-check era by claiming that unions prolonged the last depression, and if we get card-check, by gum, they'll prolong this next one, too! The argument is that the Wagner Act (that great bugbear of all who want the right--the RIGHT, I say!--to work for peanuts) caused the recession of 1937. Whatever. My favorite paragraph:

Given the reality of unions in the workplace, the law meant that efficiency and profitability were compromised, by forcing employers to equally reward their most productive and least productive employees. Therefore subsequent wage increases for some workers led to widespread job losses.

Yeah, and Mussolini made the trains run on time. I like the notion that in modern large-scale industries, the employers know who their most and least productive workers are, and that weeding out the lazy ones is teh key to profitability and efficiency. The boss, he just like Santa Claus! As Edmond Burke observed a long, long time ago ("Thoughts and Details on Scarcity"):

Unquestionably, there is a good deal of difference between the value of one man’s labour and that of another from strength, dexterity, and honest application. But I am quite sure, from my best observation, that any given five men will, in their total, afford a proportion of labour equal to any other five within the periods of life I have stated; that is, that among such five men there will be one possessing all the qualifications of a good workman, one bad, and the other three middling, and approximating to the first, and the last. So that in so small a platoon as that of even five, you will find the full complement of all that five men can earn.

Anyway, it's unsurprising to find that NRO is riding the same hobby-horse today. They do it with a thought experiment: imagine that Joe the plumber is a hard-working, ill-informed, anti-union, friendless schlub; as such, he might get press-ganged into a union without even knowing it! Why, it's fasco-communist! My favorite bit:

The Union leaders are pretty sophisticated at organizing. After all, it's what they do. Pretty quickly they identify both the employees most receptive to unionization as well as those most opposed. Joe falls into the latter group so the Union never even attempts to get him to sign a card. In fact, since most of the pro-union employees work a different shift, Joe's not even aware a union drive is going on. The Union gets 51 employees to sign cards and gets certified by the NLRB as the collective bargaining representative for all employees — including Joe, who had absolutely no say in whether he wanted a union.

Obviously Peter Kirsanow (one of the B-listers, apparently) has never been in a union, or he never would have written those first two sentences. My question for Peter: Did Joe have a say in whether or not he was such an unbelievable ass?

I have no doubt that card-check will change the terrain quite a bit for unions. These changes will not all be in the direction of making unionization easier, either. Tactics on the other side will change to reflect the new regime, and I would guess there will be an increase in militancy on both sides. I for one, will welcome our new soviet overlords!

More on Locke, that sneaky SOB

Ah, Locke on property!

McGill was once the home of James Tully, eminent scholar of Locke. As much as I hate to criticize one with whom, but for the arrow of time, I would have been a colleague, I have profound reservations about his A Discourse on Property. Some of these stem from my general apathy towards Skinner-esque historical work. And some stem from my partisan desire to defend C. B. Macpherson (Another Canadian! Canada rules!!!), who comes in for some rough treatment, some of which is probably fair enough, but some of which is certainly way off base (I'm happy to share, if anyone's curious).

Setting aside these two issues, however, I am mostly annpoyed by the lengths and depths of Tully's credulousness. He gets so caught up in Locke's "obvious" distaste for money, for instance, that he actually seems to be convinced that Locke was some sort of Rousseauian romantic, longing for the good old days before money corrupted us all.

But the case I really want to talk about is this: Tully denies that Locke is a defender of private property, arguing that, in fact, Locke is arguing for a system of private use rights within common claim rights (mumbo jumbo for: Locke is SO NOT a tool of incipient capitailism, man!).

Why is this a sign of credulousness, you ask?

Because in order to make this argument, Tully has to take at face value all that stuff Locke says about 1) the earth being given to us by God for our common ejoyment, and 2) this end of enjoyment also limiting our natural right to property--we can't let anything spoil, and we have to leave as much and as good for others.

Not to get all Straussian, but Locke obviously thinks this is a bunch of bunkum, deployed only to sucker the rubes into thinking he's way more conservative than he is. Well, I'm not suckered.

First of all, the claim that the earth is meant for our use means only that nothing non-human has any rights. There is no teleology immanent in nature such that it is fitted for our use. That is why labor makes property; it distinguishes the thing upon which it expended from the commons by giving it a purpose it did not have by nature. Locke says this pretty explicitly (Sec.28).

Second, the natural limits of property are no limits at all, on Locke's own terms. Since nature is of no use to us withou labor, there is no objective grouds for determining spoilage: one man's spoilage is another man's scienc project, or art project, or whatever. Moreover, for the same reason, the person who apprpriates nature always necessarily leaves as much and as good for others. Without being apprpriated, nature is no good whatsoever. Therefore, Locke says that "he that incloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniencies of life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to nature, may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind," averring only that he has here drastically underestimated the productivity of labor (Sec. 37).

It's merely the icing on the cake that money comes along and, by our tacit consent, overthows all barriers to prperty accumulation and inequality. They were barriers with no real existence to begin with.

Therefore, I say unto James Tully, "You've been had, sir; taken in and swindled."

The Latest in Popular Justice

The Times of London reports:

Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi.

Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, the head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian-headquartered manufacturer of car parts, died of severe head wounds on Monday afternoon after being attacked by scores of laid-off employees, police said.

The incident, in Greater Noida, just outside the Indian capital, followed a long-running dispute between the factory's management and workers who had demanded better pay and permanent contracts.

No idea if the report is accurate or fair. Think it will start happening on Wall Street anytime soon?

Exclusive Responsibility vs. Exclusive Work

It seems that the big hang-up in the current negotiations between AGSEM (the TA union at McGill) and the McGill administration is the question of whether or not the work assigned to the TAs on their workload forms is exclusively theirs or not. If it is exclusively theirs, then no one else can do that work should they go on strike. If it is not, then the course instructor can step in and do whatever needs to be done during a work stoppage.

That this would be a deal-breaker for the union makes perfect sense to me. If the union were to agree that TAs had no exclusive function, then striking seems to go out the window. Or, rather, striking would cease to be a confrontation between the TAs and the administration and would become instead a confrontation between TAs and their supervising faculty. If my TA goes on strike that means I have to do a bunch of extra work. No union wants to to get its members into that sort of bind. The line of confrontation must be between workers and management, not between two groups of workers.

Why the University should be equally adamant about this issue is a bit harder for me to see (unless one wants to attribute purely cynical motives to the administration, and that is never very satisfying). Here is the rationale the Provost has put up on the website:

Since the start of this unfortunate strike, professors have sent me a consistent message on this matter: do not compromise on this principle. Let me quote you one such particularly eloquent message:

The idea of exclusivity is absolutely unacceptable, and the university's proposed revisions to the workload form are clearly needed. The more AGSEM insists that it does not view the exclusivity question as closed, the more important it is that it be settled somehow, and the workload form is a good way to do it. Exclusivity is not simply a matter of TAs' working conditions; it is a matter of faculty working conditions, too. Exclusivity would mean a serious impairment of professors' pedagogical autonomy, and a serious infringement of our ability to meet our responsibilities as educators.

A colleague I respect said something very similar to me just yesterday. Frankly, I just don't get it. I don't see how my autonomy or responsibility as an educator is affected one iota by me being unable to take over my TAs conferences or grading in the case of a strike. I would still make the syllabus and delegate tasks to the TA. I would still bear final responsibility for checking and rectifying grades, for determining the form and content of the course, for setting the standards by which student work is to be evaluated. In short, I would still have ultimate responsibility for the course. But that doesn't mean I should be able (or required) to step in and do everything in the case of a strike. The Provost's position just seems like a non-sequitur to me.

There are other employment situations in which a similar distinction must be drawn between work and responsibility. Nurses, for example, have work that is their own, even though doctors have ultimate responsibility for patient care. And, in fact, the University seemed to recognize such a distinction early on during this strike: no one asked professors to run conferences the last week of classes.

Can any one explain the University's position to me in small words that I might understand?

Can You Spot the Differences?

Frequently Asked Questions (distributed by the administration of McGill University, 4 April, 2008):

1. My TA says that if they go on strike I cannot grade exams and assignments.
That is incorrect. Grading is part of your function. It is not exclusive to the function of TAs.

Frequently Asked Questions (as posted on the McGill University website sometime in the last week--I first noticed it on Thursday, 17 April):

1. My TA says that if they go on strike I cannot grade exams and assignments. Is this true?

That is incorrect, unless you have fully delegated that task to a TA. Grading is part of your function. It is not exclusive to the function of TAs. If you have fully delegated that function to a TA, please bring the matter to the attention of your Chair.

I sense trouble for the University's legal argument...

Bio-Politics: An Object Lesson

A commenter over at Megan McArdle's (don't ask...):

"a certain floor of compensation for work"

That sentence summarize the problem with how work is conceived of in neo-classical and, for that matter, marxian economics.

Work is something that is not a good in and of itself, it is a negative that someone has to be "compensated" to do. Presumably because the person who is not working for wages have something better to do.

My fundamental objection to this view of work is that work is by no means a negative for an individual, but an intrinsic part of our "social being" in a society where most of us do not have activities like subsistence farming, etc. to keep us alive.

If you take the position that it is an intrinsic good to have people at work for a certain wage rather than to sit home and collect the identical sum doing nothing, then having as many as possible of the population at work is in fact, a collective good.

My argument is that to pay for idleness (Welfare, Unemployment "compensation", charitable handouts, etc.) fundamentally undermine the importance of work as a socializer, an activity that keeps people from doing things that are potentially harmful, deviant, or otherwise undesirable should they be not employed.

Look at most of continental Europe, where tight controls on hiring and firing, unionization, etc. have created an underclass of permanently unemployed, much like the underclass of mostly black ghetto dwellers in the US that is nearly permanently unemployable for different reasons.

To me, the danger of this underclass goes far beyond undermining the work ethic, incentives to work, etc. It goes to the heart of social stability in that persons who are idle at the margins of society and kept alive by handouts with no obligations are at high risk of doing things that upsets social order even more, like drug dealing, petty crimes, etc. because they are not occupied most of the time at a job.

So having said that, I am for a minimum wage, and at the same time, for the elimination of handouts without a reciprocal obligation to be at "work".

Count me in for eliminating programs like Social Security, disability payments, etc.

I lost track in there: We shouldn't compensate people for work because we shouldn't compensate people for idleness? If people would rather be idle than work, then doesn't compensation make perfect sense as a term? If people would rather work than be idle, then unemployment compensation makes perfect sense as a term and as a policy. Whatever.

Anyway: I just gave two closing lectures with the same punch-line. I said of both of my classes that my fondest wish is that they made my students a bit more useless. This wacko's idea of social engineering only makes my wish more fervent.

Strike On

AGSEM strikes! Refuse work!

Here's AGSEM's announcement--PDF!

TA Strike at McGill?

AGSEM, the TA union here at McGill voted overwhelmingly (79% in favor) to authorize strike action in their ongoing contract negotiations with the University. Obviously, with only a week and a half to go in the semester, this is a point where a strike might be highly effective. Still, since the union has to give 7 days notice (I believe), the window for a strike is fairly narrow. If we get through the next week or so without hearing that a strike is happening, then I would guess there won't be one--a strike that doesn't start until the middle of finals period has only marginal leverage. Therefore, I presume (hope) AGSEM is right on the verge of a breakthrough with the administration. Strike authorization should be enough to tip the scale by itself, and if it doesn't, then the union leadership has to be willing to move very quickly and decisively.

UPDATE: Never mind on the 7 day notice. I have just heard that this is not required. That makes the situation much more flexible. The union could declare a strike anytime before the first couple days of the finals period and have a pretty big stick. We've got up to two weeks of pins-and-needles.