This age of thieves
Sep. 18th, 2004 06:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbAlthough its influence endures in the number of misguided intelligences that still use its basic assumptions, often without consciously knowing what it is that they are using, I think we can say without too much dispute that twentieth-century Communism is dead. The work of burial and dissection goes on; there still are waves of protest and controversy when some prominent person writes a book denouncing - decades after it last was a real political force - the crimes of Marxism, and, more importantly, the strange condition of two-faced blindness, of unselfconscious and, one might say, sincere hypocrisy, of its Western supporters. (The last such was KOBA THE DREAD by Martin Amis.) It is true that there has never been a Nuremberg for Communist crimes, and that plenty of people have made the transition without doing anything to pay for the crimes they committed or consented to; but whatever the opposite party may have been, certainly if victory is measured by an enemy's defeat, its victory is complete.
Much, perhaps too much, has been written about the success of Communism among Western intellectuals and elites; indeed, to follow the most recent historiography of the success of Communism outside Russia, one would think that it was all a matter of rich men hob-nobbing with celebrated critics after visits to succesful art exhibitions. But that was not what struck me - struck me painfully, with a clarity that resonated from my own life and experience - when I recently visited some old-fashioned red revolutionary websites. What struck me was what we have lost, how people could allow themselves to think and feel when, not just Communism, but the whole revolutionary left continuum - trades unionism, socialism of various colour, cooperativism, communism, anarchism - were a reality.
This is not mainly an issue of the intellectual classes at all. What made the revolutionary left powerful was that it actually belonged to the classes it championed. It awoke them to the unquestionable fact that it was their work that built and ran the society at whose bottom they lived; and the equally unquestionable fact that they were as human as the richest boss, and not one whit less valuable. It taught them to respect themselves; it taught them to educate themselves. It branded the owners of the factories in which they worked with one simple name that explained, perhaps too simply, but in an easily understood and not altogether undeserved way, the employer's role in the motion of work and money that shaped society: "thief". The old socialist, unionist, anarchist songs, did not speak in the refined language of "exploitation" and "added value": they simply declared that the person who has not made a contribution to the making of a thing, and who yet takes most of the money made out of it to himself, is a thief. And so he is.
The websites I visited were full of those old songs, songs written not by classically trained composers or clever chanteuses in the smoky clubs of Paris, but by the workers themselves; songs in English, in French, in Italian, some of which I had sung myself as a boy - for I grew up in an atmosphere of watered-down Marxism, and in a tradition of continuity with all the areas of social revolt from the co-operative movement to anarchism. That it was in fact a comfortable middle-class world says a lot about things that a lot of people have already said a lot; but I was not thinking of my own childhood. I was thinking of the values that those songs - which I had absorbed so unthinkingly thirty years ago - handed down; I thought of what the working class had been, and what it is now. And I could have wept.
What social revolution meant to the working class was self-respect. It meant that they were as good as the next man; and it implied that they were to live their lives accordingly. Unionized or socialist or anarchist workers set their faces against drunkenness, against disorder, against ignorance; educated themselves; indeed, they made as much of a fetish of respectability as any lower-middle-class household ever did. It was on these grounds - on the grounds of their personal and group honesty, self-respect, hard work - that they challenged the ruling class; that they challenged its right to skim off the profits of their hard work for its own pleasure.
That was then; perhaps it was never completely so; but it certainly was the trend across Europe from the 1880s to the 1940s, when co-operative societies, popular education colleges, and popular sports clubs, sprung from one end of Europe to the other. And this is now. And what a dreadful now it is. The self-respect that the working man had had, not handed down to him by some superior kindness, but claimed himself against all the powers of the world as a right, is not only dead but forgotten. The worker creeps apologetically into a place of work that it has never even occurred to him to regard as his; does his bidding without interest, ever under the threat of the sack; and goes away again. It does not even occur to him to think that work is something he does for his boss; no, to employ him is a favour that the boss does to him - a favour that may be rescinded at any time.
The atomization of the workers may have been the result of single political changes (certainly, anyone who cares for the working class ought to paint Arthur Scargill's face on a punching-bag and practice on it daily); but it could never have gone as far as it has, and gone unchallenged, without the catastrophic change in popular culture - without the fact that the working class adopted, unthinkingly, a kind of popular culture that was handed down to them by the very capitalist giants that were the designated enemy and the thief. And this happened long before 1989, long before the triumph of the enemies of socialism; it had been happening for decades. Think: the time was when, to a working man, "popular culture" meant to go to evening classes and attend public lectures; to read socialist, anarchist, or atheist literature; to educate himself. Now it means the tabloid press and television; objects that not only deny that self-improvement is in any way desirable or feasible, but that, at the same time, offer for admiration and emulation a world of "glamorous" celebs that is by definition outside, above, and against, the world of the working class. In other words, they encourage the worker, either to settle down in a world of poor expectations, poor education, poor ambitions, or else to turn one's ambitions to a world of shallow desires, of wealth and consumption, of "glamour". Bill Watterson was right: when Marx said that "religion is the opium of peoples", he hadn't seen anything yet.
Part of the disaster arises from the sheer political success of the Socialist parties. When the Socialist parties started to populate local administrations, elected bodies, and eventually Parliaments, they moved their programs of social improvement from the sphere of co-operation and bottom-up action to that of State action and top-down provision. In the short run, results were usually excellent: from the mass building of public libraries to the erection of city milk companies to provide purified milk to children, the amount of good that state intervention did was enormous. But it bred into the (increasingly) former revolutionary movements a tendency to think in terms of state provision rather than self-reliance and co-operation. When it became clear that something had to be done, the movements no longer organized their members to do it for themselves; they went and lobbied the state administration. From this expectation of State support, this effective dependency on the State, it was only one step to taking the same subservient attitude to private enterprise. The line was crossed when supposedly left-wing politicians started bragging about "creating jobs", as though work were a favour that came down from above upon the undeserving head of the worker.
The final end of this degeneration is the rise of Thatcherism. Thatcherites are mostly disenchanted left-wingers. Then there is the further stage of abjection that leads the very socialist movement itself to accept Thatcherism. I used to think that was a peculiar feature of Italian intellectual corruption, but the same horror has been perpetrated in Britain's once Labour party, without quite the baroque elaboration of bullying robbery of Craxi and his accomplices, but certainly with as much commitment to the brutalities of the unregulated market and a far more intense love of privatization.
Let us be clear about one thing. I am absolutely not nostalgic for Communism; nor yet for intellectual horrors such as anarchism. The connection between these movements and the worst episodes of modern history is neither casual nor infrequent. And by that I do not only mean Russian Communism: as one Italian wag said long ago, when Italy had her first Socialist Prime Minister (Mussolini), it was a national catastrophe. Fascism was born out of a rib, not so much of Communism proper, as of the wider revolutionary movement; indeed, Mussolini was, both socially and culturally, an absolutely typical and rather successful product of working-class self-improvement. There seems to be some horrible destiny whereby this movement of self-respect ends up in tyranny and mass murder. And incidentally, it bears a constant and murderous hatred for religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, which I cannot accept either.
This is what I find so heartbreaking. The age I live in is an age of thieves; an age in which the triumph, not of freedom, but of "capitalism", is trumpeted from the rooftops; in which the principles of so-called free enteprise (actually an anti-competitive conspiracy of feudal big business powers) are bragged without doubt or shame, and as if they had anything to do with individual freedom - whereas what they really amount to is the disenfranchisement of the majority of the people and the effective neutering of democracy. Is it possible, is it necessary, that the only alternative to revolutionary tyranny and massacre should be the brutal, vulgar, self-satisfied rule of the swindler and the thief?
Much, perhaps too much, has been written about the success of Communism among Western intellectuals and elites; indeed, to follow the most recent historiography of the success of Communism outside Russia, one would think that it was all a matter of rich men hob-nobbing with celebrated critics after visits to succesful art exhibitions. But that was not what struck me - struck me painfully, with a clarity that resonated from my own life and experience - when I recently visited some old-fashioned red revolutionary websites. What struck me was what we have lost, how people could allow themselves to think and feel when, not just Communism, but the whole revolutionary left continuum - trades unionism, socialism of various colour, cooperativism, communism, anarchism - were a reality.
This is not mainly an issue of the intellectual classes at all. What made the revolutionary left powerful was that it actually belonged to the classes it championed. It awoke them to the unquestionable fact that it was their work that built and ran the society at whose bottom they lived; and the equally unquestionable fact that they were as human as the richest boss, and not one whit less valuable. It taught them to respect themselves; it taught them to educate themselves. It branded the owners of the factories in which they worked with one simple name that explained, perhaps too simply, but in an easily understood and not altogether undeserved way, the employer's role in the motion of work and money that shaped society: "thief". The old socialist, unionist, anarchist songs, did not speak in the refined language of "exploitation" and "added value": they simply declared that the person who has not made a contribution to the making of a thing, and who yet takes most of the money made out of it to himself, is a thief. And so he is.
The websites I visited were full of those old songs, songs written not by classically trained composers or clever chanteuses in the smoky clubs of Paris, but by the workers themselves; songs in English, in French, in Italian, some of which I had sung myself as a boy - for I grew up in an atmosphere of watered-down Marxism, and in a tradition of continuity with all the areas of social revolt from the co-operative movement to anarchism. That it was in fact a comfortable middle-class world says a lot about things that a lot of people have already said a lot; but I was not thinking of my own childhood. I was thinking of the values that those songs - which I had absorbed so unthinkingly thirty years ago - handed down; I thought of what the working class had been, and what it is now. And I could have wept.
What social revolution meant to the working class was self-respect. It meant that they were as good as the next man; and it implied that they were to live their lives accordingly. Unionized or socialist or anarchist workers set their faces against drunkenness, against disorder, against ignorance; educated themselves; indeed, they made as much of a fetish of respectability as any lower-middle-class household ever did. It was on these grounds - on the grounds of their personal and group honesty, self-respect, hard work - that they challenged the ruling class; that they challenged its right to skim off the profits of their hard work for its own pleasure.
That was then; perhaps it was never completely so; but it certainly was the trend across Europe from the 1880s to the 1940s, when co-operative societies, popular education colleges, and popular sports clubs, sprung from one end of Europe to the other. And this is now. And what a dreadful now it is. The self-respect that the working man had had, not handed down to him by some superior kindness, but claimed himself against all the powers of the world as a right, is not only dead but forgotten. The worker creeps apologetically into a place of work that it has never even occurred to him to regard as his; does his bidding without interest, ever under the threat of the sack; and goes away again. It does not even occur to him to think that work is something he does for his boss; no, to employ him is a favour that the boss does to him - a favour that may be rescinded at any time.
The atomization of the workers may have been the result of single political changes (certainly, anyone who cares for the working class ought to paint Arthur Scargill's face on a punching-bag and practice on it daily); but it could never have gone as far as it has, and gone unchallenged, without the catastrophic change in popular culture - without the fact that the working class adopted, unthinkingly, a kind of popular culture that was handed down to them by the very capitalist giants that were the designated enemy and the thief. And this happened long before 1989, long before the triumph of the enemies of socialism; it had been happening for decades. Think: the time was when, to a working man, "popular culture" meant to go to evening classes and attend public lectures; to read socialist, anarchist, or atheist literature; to educate himself. Now it means the tabloid press and television; objects that not only deny that self-improvement is in any way desirable or feasible, but that, at the same time, offer for admiration and emulation a world of "glamorous" celebs that is by definition outside, above, and against, the world of the working class. In other words, they encourage the worker, either to settle down in a world of poor expectations, poor education, poor ambitions, or else to turn one's ambitions to a world of shallow desires, of wealth and consumption, of "glamour". Bill Watterson was right: when Marx said that "religion is the opium of peoples", he hadn't seen anything yet.
Part of the disaster arises from the sheer political success of the Socialist parties. When the Socialist parties started to populate local administrations, elected bodies, and eventually Parliaments, they moved their programs of social improvement from the sphere of co-operation and bottom-up action to that of State action and top-down provision. In the short run, results were usually excellent: from the mass building of public libraries to the erection of city milk companies to provide purified milk to children, the amount of good that state intervention did was enormous. But it bred into the (increasingly) former revolutionary movements a tendency to think in terms of state provision rather than self-reliance and co-operation. When it became clear that something had to be done, the movements no longer organized their members to do it for themselves; they went and lobbied the state administration. From this expectation of State support, this effective dependency on the State, it was only one step to taking the same subservient attitude to private enterprise. The line was crossed when supposedly left-wing politicians started bragging about "creating jobs", as though work were a favour that came down from above upon the undeserving head of the worker.
The final end of this degeneration is the rise of Thatcherism. Thatcherites are mostly disenchanted left-wingers. Then there is the further stage of abjection that leads the very socialist movement itself to accept Thatcherism. I used to think that was a peculiar feature of Italian intellectual corruption, but the same horror has been perpetrated in Britain's once Labour party, without quite the baroque elaboration of bullying robbery of Craxi and his accomplices, but certainly with as much commitment to the brutalities of the unregulated market and a far more intense love of privatization.
Let us be clear about one thing. I am absolutely not nostalgic for Communism; nor yet for intellectual horrors such as anarchism. The connection between these movements and the worst episodes of modern history is neither casual nor infrequent. And by that I do not only mean Russian Communism: as one Italian wag said long ago, when Italy had her first Socialist Prime Minister (Mussolini), it was a national catastrophe. Fascism was born out of a rib, not so much of Communism proper, as of the wider revolutionary movement; indeed, Mussolini was, both socially and culturally, an absolutely typical and rather successful product of working-class self-improvement. There seems to be some horrible destiny whereby this movement of self-respect ends up in tyranny and mass murder. And incidentally, it bears a constant and murderous hatred for religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, which I cannot accept either.
This is what I find so heartbreaking. The age I live in is an age of thieves; an age in which the triumph, not of freedom, but of "capitalism", is trumpeted from the rooftops; in which the principles of so-called free enteprise (actually an anti-competitive conspiracy of feudal big business powers) are bragged without doubt or shame, and as if they had anything to do with individual freedom - whereas what they really amount to is the disenfranchisement of the majority of the people and the effective neutering of democracy. Is it possible, is it necessary, that the only alternative to revolutionary tyranny and massacre should be the brutal, vulgar, self-satisfied rule of the swindler and the thief?
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no subject
Date: 2004-09-18 01:19 pm (UTC)I hate it when stuff like this happens.
Sorry, for the problems.