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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
7, 2006
Going to Class War with the Proletariat
We Got ...
The
Immateriality of the Working Class
By DICK J. REAVIS
Anyone who today attends the showing
of an anti-war or anti-corporate movie like those produced by
Michael Moore will---if he or she is brave enough to notice-find
that its audience is composed mainly of college-educated people,
many of whom have master's degrees.
It was not so 70 or even 50
years ago. In those days, the scruffy classes were the chief
consumers of anti-establishment cultural fare.
The same thing can be said
of today's anti-imperialist actions. Working stiffs may have
volunteered to defend Republican Spain, but today's human shields
in places like Colombia and Palestine come mainly from the ranks
of college grads. Demonstrations against the war in Iraq mostly
draw college students and middle-agers from the MA crowd.
This has been the case at least
since anti-apartheid, anti-sweatshop and anti-globalization demonstrations
swept Ivy League campuses in the 80's and 90's. Even pre-1970
protest against the Vietnam war-in the era of conscription and
student deferments-was a largely collegiate affair.
Republicans, for the usual
demagogic reasons, openly assail the demographics of the Left.
They allege that activism is an affair of the "elite."
The Left has responded by saying
as little as possible about its class derivation. Shame keeps
it silent.
What activists have generally
said, during campaigns to organize campus workers, or to divest
from apartheid, or to boycott Wal-Mart, is that they are acting
for reasons of conscience. It's as if they felt that it were
a religious duty to ally themselves with the less fortunate--as
if Dickens, not Marx, provided the text for their movements.
American Leftists do not see
their lobbying, their demonstrations or cultural productions
as acts of class solidarity. They do not see themselves, nor
does hardly anyone see them, as members of the working class.
Instead, they regard themselves and are regarded as sons and
daughters of a fortunate "middle class."
Marxists, or at least the members
of the nation's dozen Leninist sects-whose intellectual preparation,
enthusiasm and persistence make them an important force on the
Left even now--have generally agreed. They view college-educated
folk as petty-bourgeoisie, as members of a fickle and frivolous
class which, because it is destined to divide its allegiance
between Right and Left, is an unreliable ally.
Yet most college graduates,
and even most people with graduate degrees, do not take their
livings from dividends, nor from what were classically called
"the rents," nor do they buy franchises from Starbucks
or McDonald's. They work for corporations and bureaucracies that
serve the bourgeoisie, they pawn their liberty for consumer debt,
and they face, more so every day, the specters of outsourcing,
layoffs and pension-funding collapse. They say that they "own"
their homes, but banks and mortgage lenders hold the notes; most
people in the "middle class" are indentured to their
houses. They are working folks, however literate or momentarily
comfortable they may be.
The sects, heaving romanticized
an archaic image of the working class, have encouraged highly-educated
Leftists, who might have continued to organize their collegiate
classmates, to cast their lots and spend their lives among the
poorly-educated; the Greensboro textile union martyrs, two of
whom were physicians, were shining examples of that.
The tactic of "industrial
concentration," as the transplant scheme is called, has
over the course of 40 years neither slowed the decline of union
membership, nor revived its once-militant spirit. Either the
number of colonists-perhaps as many as 500 a year--has been insufficient,
or the traditional working class has turned a deaf ear.
Most Leninist missionaries
stay in their manual-work settings for less than five years.
Disillusioned or exhausted, they then enter the college-educated
workforce or enroll in graduate school, taking with them a good
deal of class insight. But nobody calls upon them to spread class
doctrines inside suburbia or in gentrified inner cities, where
most of them ultimately settle.
These relatively seasoned agitators
become, in one sense, tragic figures-but because of a hypocrisy
of sorts. When intellectuals organize the folk, they inevitably
encourage it to stay in its place, the better to make the Revolution.
Instead of doing that, the fabled industrial proletariat, whatever
its parent generation does to preserve, build or defend its union
and community organizations, also does whatever it can to send
its offspring to college. The effort succeeds often enough that
the descendants of shop stewards don't often preserve family
traditions like packing lunch pails and punching time clocks.
Almost everyone-Leninists excepted-tries his or her best to rise
from the circumstances of manual to those of mental labor. The
sons of daughters of the salts of the earth wind up living across
the street from the collegians who, in the certainty of youth,
tried to discredit the appeal of class mobility.
The Left's doctrine of downward
mobility has been assailed-if only in the politest way--by a
handful of scholars, notable among them somewhat utopian Michael
Hart of Duke and his co-thinker, Italian anarchist Anotnio Negri.
Their 2004 "Multitude," in a single chapter, 2.1,
lays out the theory that highly-educated people in the overdeveloped
world-advertising copywriters, journalists, teachers, chefs,
programmers and IT operatives-are sensibly classified as "immaterial
workers," people who don't produce tangible products, but
are workers nonetheless. Hardt and Negri even argue that immaterials
have the vaunted power to halt production, because in contemporary
economies, factories don't start their motors until marketing
studies are done.
Until ten years ago, the attitude
of the labor movement, seconded by most Marxists, was that Hardt
and Negri's favorites, as service workers, were mere auxiliaries
of the industrial proletariat, and were probably unorganizable,
besides. Such skepticism has wanted lately, largely because in
order to survive, American unions have had to organize government,
retail, janitorial and hospital employees. Greensboro's textile
mills, after all, have gone to China. The nation's industrial
working class has been so thoroughly decimated by automation
and globalization that it today makes more sense to say that
American industrial workers are immaterial, than to say that
immaterials aren't workers.
While it may be true, in the
Marxist paradigm, that only industrial workers can bring about
the Revolution, what is undeniable is that, in the United States,
it is the immaterials who have distinguished themselves as the
organizers of class solidarity actions, as opponents of empire,
and as defenders of the rights of the people.
Hardt's and Negri's immaterials,
even if they haven't learned to speak in the name of their own
economic self-interest-and even if they haven't discerned their
interests--are blindly leading the contemporary class struggle
in the United States.
Their consciousness would be
more advanced if American Leninists quit looking for signs of
the Second Coming of the Great Flint Strike--and paid them mind.
As Donald Rumsfeld might say, "We have to make the Revolution
not with the proletariat we want, but with the proletariat we've
got."
Dick J. Reavis is an assistant professor of English
at North Carolina State University. He can be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com
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