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Tony Blackshaw
© Tony Blackshaw 2008
There is a sentence, a paraphrasing of Nietzsche, which hangs over the Left:
‘I fear that we are not getting rid of class because we still believe
in the grammar’. So deeply embedded is class in the doxa of the Left
(the knowledge it thinks with but not about) – together with its associated
metaphors i.e. ‘base and superstructure’, ‘struggle’,
‘capitalism’ etc. – that it seems the natural place to
look for anyone concerned with complexity and defeat of inequality, injustice
and the humiliation of poverty. The trouble with this cultural practice
is that it does not work as well as it once did. The main reason for this,
and the one that is most often overlooked, is the fact that the everyday
world of men and women – their inner and exterior lives and how these
are individually experienced and shared with others – is one thing.
Political discourse is quite another. There is always a slippage between
the two and nowhere is this slippage today more conspicuous than with regard
to the issue of class.
What I want to argue within the confines of this short contribution is that
in the last thirty or forty years we have witnessed two revolutions: an
economic revolution and what Agnes Heller calls the revolution of everyday
life. So all-consuming have these two upheavals been that they have changed
monumentally the ways in which most men and women see their places in world.
Moreover, with these changes the efficacy of class as a political mobilizing
tool and a force of liberation has deteriorated, to the extent that it has
by now been exhausted of its former alchemical power: class might still
be the key metaphor in the grammar of the Left, but in the lives of ordinary
men and women it is by now a rather faded one.
Let us look at these two revolutions in more detail. It is impossible to
be precise about the why, the when, the where and the how of the revolution
of everyday life, but most commentators locate its genesis in the changing
social and cultural conditions of the 1960s. We are all familiar with the
processes and events associated with this revolution but few scholars have
remarked on what it has meant for human consciousness. Heller’s work
suggests that the revolution of everyday life must be understood as a fundamental
change in consciousness that emancipated ordinary men and women from the
social structure of class which had been established with the substitution
of modernity for feudalism.
Everyone knows that with the advent of modernity the swinging pendulum of
human destiny shifted decisively in favour of freedom over constraint; moreover,
that at the same time a new form of social stratification based on industrial
production and the essential prohibitions of class replaced feudalism and
its closed system of stratification. Everyone also knows that this class-bound
social order initially maintained extant patriarchal social relations, until
the emergence of feminism that is, which challenged traditional conceptions
of femininity and gender in the 1960s and 1970s. However, what is hardly
ever acknowledged or commented upon is that at some point during the same
period the hitherto pervasive power of class was itself finally broken by
the self-emancipation of all men and women.
What had seemed to be human destiny appeared overnight to turn itself into
a gleeful dismantling of an orderly life to one of perpetual disembedding
and reembedding, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, drawing on the words of Tony
Giddens. If modernity in its formative industrial production stage posed
men and women dilemmas such as ‘who I am?’ and ‘what am
I to be?’ these were now increasingly becoming a matter of self-awareness,
self-definition and self-assertion, as opposed to being guided by unawareness,
obligation and commitment to a particular way of living that by now had
become an object of irritation and a subject of caricature.
As Bauman points out, human identity was in the process transformed from
a ‘given’ into a ‘task’, and for the first time
in history it seemed that everybody was in a position to think of themselves
in ways that had until now only been the prerogative of the most affluent
and the ‘deviant’: as individuals de facto, which meant exceeding
the possibilities of the limits of their class, culture or family situation.
With this great transcendence of consciousness Mark Two, modernity had transformed
itself into a world where people, no matter what their status at birth,
were increasingly refusing to accept the way they were supposed to live,
recognizing as they did that their lives were now about choice. With this
revolution what the world seemed to be saying to men and women, who now
imagined themselves as individuals first and foremost, was this: ‘forget
who you are and if you cannot be what you want to be, imagine that you can’.
To be a modern man or woman today is to be an individual de facto, which
also means to be free with all of individuality's loneliness, responsibility,
existential angst, unavoidable desires etc and in particular the readiness
to take chances. In the words of Alexander Nehmas this means that you are
almost compelled to do something with your life ‘that is both significant
and very different from whatever has been done before’. It also means
that you are charged with the task of ensuring that your own individual
existence does not remain without a purpose – is not inauthentic.
A life lived as an individual de facto is also what Heller describes as
a contingency life, which is the opposite of the kind of life lived in the
totality of a class system; men and women who inhabit a contingent world
- one in which they are individuals who are wholly contingent, yet make
out of that very circumstance their own identities, which they may or may
not choose to share with others - become contingent beings by having been
stripped of that kind of innocence. As Richard Rorty suggests, men and women
who think of themselves as contingent know that who they are is merely a
matter of contingency i.e. due to the kind family they are born into, the
city in which they are born etc. Importantly, they are also consciously
aware that things could always be different. It is this awareness more than
anything else that today gives modern life its weight.
The world of cosmic contingency, of contingency-awareness, of chance and
accident, and the willingness to take risks, is the terrain of contemporary
modern human existence. As Heller points out, to have this kind of consciousness
is not only to have grasped the point that your life doesn’t serve
any purpose higher than being lived, it is also to have historical contingency-awareness,
or to be aware that not so long ago, each and every person was believed
to serve a special purpose in the world. Most men and women who inhabited
modernity in its formative stage saw no need to recognize any of this. Today
that world is more or less extinct and contingency consciousness is more
or less a ubiquitous phenomenon.
In the last 20 years we have also witnessed a Mark Two economic revolution,
which has seen neo-liberalism and its ideology of market fundamentalism
become so pervasive that it seems that there is nothing left in the world
that is not commodifiable. With this trend we have also seen the substitution
of consumerism for production as the main (de)regulator our lives. By now
consumerism bombards us, every day, with images of things that we can and
can’t afford to pay for, and encourages us to want all of them. Rational
men and women know that their economic survival depends on buying only what
they can afford, but the availability of seemingly unlimited credit encourages
them to live above their means. The contemporary world is in effect a sociality
in which such class-bound virtues have been subsumed by credit; as Peter
Conrad recently argued in The Observer, that credit is - ‘so long
as you pay your bills’ – ‘proof of moral standing, and
the merchants who extend it express their own faith in your probity.’
As Bauman has consistently argued, consumerism has by now replaced work
as the backbone of the reward system in a sociality which is underpatterned
rather than patterned, disorganised rather than ordered. Life resembles
the board game Snakes and Ladders, where a shake of the dice can lead to
either a rapid ascent or a quick downward slide. It is only the losers in
this game of chance who are still controlled through the work ethic. To
put it simply, the market has redrawn the boundaries between social class
divisions as a relationship between those who happily consume and those
who cannot, despite their want of trying. Social control is barely noticeable,
except for ‘terror suspects’ and the ‘flawed consumers’,
incapable of fulfilling their designated social positions as ‘consumers
first, and all the rest after’, and whose subordinate position prevents
them from participating freely in what has become for the masses a dream
world of consumerism.
So why was it that when the world was saying to the men and women, ‘forget
your location in the class system and if even you can’t be what you
want to be, imagine that you can’, they were by and large only capable
of re-thinking themselves as individualized consumers? Or, to put the question
in a more metaphysical form, why did they move, as Eric Fromm used to say,
from a state of ‘being’ to a state of ‘having’,
or, we might say, from self-emancipation to self-marketing? The straightforward
answer is that ubiquitous contingency consciousness emerged at the same
time when the majority of people – for the first time – could
afford to consume items that were not necessary for survival. And given
the fact that from the very beginning, consumerism has always been about
transport, taking the consumer out of the penumbra of the present and into
another world, its success in engaging men and women as consumers should
come as no surprise.
What are the implications of these two Mark Two revolutions for the Left?
First and foremost, I’d say trying to persuade people who choose to
live their lives as contingency conscious consumers that they constitute
a class with its own consciousness, share a collective identity, have similar
interests and should develop the kinds of formal organization that would
allow it to advance the conditions of its way of life, is a fairy tale.
This is not to say that collective organization is unimportant. Neither
is it to say that inequality, injustice and poverty (of the imagination,
of culture, of morals as well as social and economic poverty) are not still
real problems. But it is to recognize that, just like the production-based
society of Ernest Gellner’s ‘industrial man’, the consumer-based
sociality that men and women today inhabit has its own ways of stratifying,
which includes its own inbuilt drive to maintain social hierarchies (including
those paddings of privilege leftover from feudalism and the social class
society) and that these are made to the measure of consumerism, which means
that they are largely about judgements of taste and the juxtaposing of different
lifestyles. All men and women living today know this; they also know that
they are compelled individually to respond to the situation in which they
find themselves in this consumer stratocracy.
Heller argues that there are three types of revolution: everyday life, economic,
and political. As we have seen, the revolution of everyday life has resulted
in self-emancipation, and economic revolution has resulted in market fundamentalism.
In simple terms, you could say that the one plus the other equals a new
world that still awaits liberation through political revolution. As I see
it, the major challenge facing the Left is how to link the revolution of
everyday life to a Mark Two programme of political revolution in order to
liberate men and women from market fundamentalism and consumerism.
In politics the ability to tell convincing stories is the difference between
success and failure. Metaphors are important to telling stories not only
because they use language in magical and enlivening ways, but also because
they are edifying and enlightening. But when metaphors fail to cast a spell,
people do not listen to them. Class is a metaphor whose magic still burns
brightly for the Left but it is by now too faded to resonate with the lives
of the majority of people today, who do not experience the world in the
way that people of a class society did. As Heller points out, the upshot
of this is that class no longer has any emancipatory force, which means
that Marx’s distinction between the idea of a ‘class in itself’
and a ‘class for itself’ does not carry any great weight –
if it ever did. It is simply the case that the grammar of class does not
have within its grasp an overarching narrative of sufficient power, simplicity
and wide appeal to compete with individualization. As Rorty would have said,
the Left needs to overcome the habit of imagining that it does, and help
class become a dead metaphor as quickly as possible, to reduce it to its
rightful role as status tool of social progress.
More importantly, though, the Left must overcome its estrangement from the
everyday worlds of men and women and recognize that individualization is
today the shaping force in the narrative of human existence and that all
men and women are contingent people living contingent lives, and that from
now on it will always be like this. The major task facing the Left is how
to re-acquaint itself with the habit of acquiring new metaphors made to
the measure of lives that are DIY, decentred, episodic, fragmented, consumerist,
sometimes magical, but always subject to uncertainty, anxiety, indecision
and change. In other words, what the Left needs are new ways of conveying
the world that men and women today can follow, and which will lead them
to realizations which are very much a part of their everyday existences.
What this also means is that the Left needs to start paying proper respect
to thinkers like Bauman and Heller, both of whom know that metaphor is becoming
of increasing importance in politics in a world in which life’s central
challenge has been turned from a given into a task, or, as Bauman puts it,
into a work of art, which entails that men and women are confronted daily
with task of setting themselves challenges, targets and standards of excellence
that are all too often well beyond the wherewithal of individuals alone.
Engaging with these thinkers might make the Left uncomfortable, but hopefully
it might also provoke it – and jog its memory about how to make some
of its own art with words that might just trip a switch and connect with
the lives of ordinary men and women, too.
Tony Blackshaw works at Sheffield Hallam University and
is amongst other things currently working on an oral and life history of
working-class culture in South Leeds circa 1940-2000.
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