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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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