It Could Happen Here - Class and the Culture War Part 1: The Labor Theory of Value And its Discontents

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

In part one of Mia's investigation into why Americans are so weird about class we go back to the ideology of the 19th and 20th century workers movement and how its weaknesses allowed capitalists to make a counter-attackSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, everyone. It's me, James, and I'm coming at you today sweaty, smelly, and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the desert where I have been spending the weekend trying my best to help along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States southern border. People are being held in the open desert in Hukumba where it gets hot in the day, gets very cold at night. And there are children, there are old people, there are young people. All the support they're getting is from mutual aid workers that maybe get some water from Border Patrol, from federal government and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast to ask you if you can to help. We've all spent all of our time and most of our money the last few days, week trying to help. And we're all pretty broke and we're

all pretty tired but i could really do with your support and and i'm going to give the venmos and cash apps and paypal information for two organizations who i dearly love and whose work i have seen is extremely effective and is the only thing keeping this situation from being a lot worse and please don't think that if you don't have much money that you shouldn't give we can work do a lot with a little so if you only have five bucks that is great five bucks is a tarp for someone to sleep under or a few hot meals and what we're going to buy is food blankets tarps water the things that stop people dying in the desert those two organizations border kindness andness and Free Shit Collective, can be found online at Border Kindness

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and at Free Shit PB on cash app and PayPal and at free shit PB on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys. Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart, and sometimes how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Now, this is not one of those times where it's about how to put things back together again. This is one of those episodes about why everything is absolutely awful. And one of the reasons why everything is absolutely awful, and something I've been driven progressively more and more insane by in the past sort of half a decade,

is the way people think and talk about class in the United States. Why, for example, do people think that Trump is working class? Why am I watching people argue that being a barista isn't actually being a worker? Why are all these millionaires driving Ford F-150s while simultaneously claiming that they are also somehow working class? Why are billionaires fleeing to Colorado and Wyoming to cosplay as workers by wearing jeans and t-shirts to bars? Why is every white ring dipshit posting the same video of a guy in an oil rig committing approximately 60,000 OSHA violations? Why is it that the only part of the working class that anyone ever seems to call

the working class is the white working class? Why is it that when people talk about the white working class and then try to explain it with data, and this is true across the entire ideological spectrum, why do they start defining working class by things that are objectively not class, like education levels? And this reached a breaking point with me a few weeks ago and has finally caused me to snap and write this. Now, I've given the game away a little by leading with the white working class stuff, because a lot of the reason that everything sounds so nuts is that when people talk about class in the US, most of the time, what they're actually talking about is race and gender.

And this pisses me off because I think more about class than a lot of people with my ideology usually do. And I think it can actually be a very useful way to understand the world. However, comma, thinking and talking about class as a kind of floating signifier that you can just jam conservative racial and gender politics into is a really, really bad way to talk about class. On top of just the racism and the sexism, this way of looking at class reduces class, which is a social relation, into aesthetics and grievances. And this leads to the question, how did this all happen? Now, you could take a really expansive look at this here and go back to Aristotle or start later

with Locke or something, but I'm not going to do that because, well, okay, partially because this would be 17 years long if I tried to do this and this episode is already now three episodes the other reason I'm not going to do this is that the actual story of how everything got like this is the story of how the right adapted and distorted the incredibly successful leftist conception of labor that built the identity of the working class in the 18 and 1900 1900s. And in order to do that, we need to talk about the labor theory of value. Now, when I talk about the labor theory of value, there are two things going on here. You have, on the one hand, Marx's law of value, and then you have the set of slogans that are passed

down the main line of the workers' movement. And these are not the same thing at all, even though when someone just says the labor theory of value, if that's a thing that you've heard of, you probably immediately think Marx. So for example, let's get a sense of sort of what this kind of like sloganeering looks like here's the beginning of the gotha program which is the program of the german social democratic party in late 1800s it begins quote labor is the source of all wealth and all culture now marx hates this line of he writes a thing called the critique of the gotha program where he goes on a giant rant about how, you know, nature also produces use values and so on and so forth. But, you know, Marx's sort of bitterness at this aside, labor is the source of all wealth is a very, very common sentiment. It's the

expression of the sort of common understanding of production class and nature of value in the 19th and early 20th century. As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Abraham Lincoln, a man who is by no means a socialist and is in fact the president of the United States, talks like this. Here's Lincoln, quote, labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not existed first. Labor is superior of capital and could never have existed if labor had not existed first. Labor is superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Now, this is obviously not something you'd ever hear from a president of the United States today.

And we'll come back to Graybridge's argument about why that is later. But I want to get a bit deeper into not just the common conception of the labor theory of value, but what the sort of capital W capital M workers movement believed in. And this, as it turns out, has a tenuous relation to Marx, but is not the same thing. And I think it's different enough that I'm actually not going to spend another like 15 minutes trying to explain Marx's version of the labor theory of value or Marx's law of value because it doesn't ultimately matter that much, which is a very weird thing to say about the actual sort of – about sort of Marx's role in the labor movement, but it kind of doesn't. So what I'm going to do instead is read, well, I should, okay, I should also mention, like we are going to get a bit more into like the things that Marx actually wrote and why they mattered to the specific movements

like next episode, but you know, we'll deal with that tomorrow. And in the meantime, I'm going to read a bit from the journal Endnotes from Unity and Separation. Supporting workers' claims to respectability was a vision of their destiny with five tenets. One, workers were building a new world with their own hands. Two, in this new world, workers were the only social group that was expanding, whereas all other groups were contracting, including the bourgeoisie. 3. Workers were not only becoming the majority of the population,

they were also becoming a compact mass, the collective worker, who was being drilled in the factory to act in concert with the machines. 4. They were thus the only group capable of managing the new world in accordance with its innermost logic, neither a hierarchy of order-givers and order-takers, nor the irrationality of market fluctuations, but rather an ever more finely grained division of labor. 5. Workers were proving this vision to be true. Since the class was realizing what it was in a conquest of power, the achievement of which would make it possible to abolish class society and thus bring man's prehistory to a close.

This is the basis of the formation of the identity of the working class. It's how people understand themselves as workers. In Marxist terms, this is the class in itself becoming the class for itself. This is the identity that produces the workers' movement. It's the expression of what people believe about themselves. Now, there are ingrained ideological assumptions here that go sort of beyond peer arguments about class, right? This is an argument about a very specific kind of factory worker. right this is an argument about a very specific kind of factory worker and in some sense i think the focus on the factory worker as like the sort of emblematic like bearer of this and this is true

both of the theorists of the time and for people like end notes who are looking back on it from like a hundred years later i think this is kind of a distraction from what a lot of the actual base of the workers movement is which is to say like coal miners and workers involved in energy logistics. You know, you could take, for example, like the beating heart of the anarchist movement in much of the 20s and 30s are these Andalusian coal miners

whose militancy and ability to sort of control the supply of coal that the capitalist class relied on for production gave them enormous leverage. And as the historian Timothy Mitchell has argued, it was this sort of capacity to break the economy through shutting off the coal supply through strikes and sabotage, which workers at the time think of the strike as a kind of sabotage. like think of like the strike as a kind of sabotage and it's but it's this capability that informs a lot of the sort of politics and sense of possibility of the 20th century workers movement and you know given what but you know like given what what the people who are like

you know working in a coal mine or like you know are are like a dock worker or, you know, like if you are working in a factory, right? It makes sense that these people believe this, right? You know, in terms of, you know, if you're looking at something like, you know, workers are building the new world with their hands, right? Or like, you know, we are the only social group that's expanding. We're the only people who are like capable of like managing the new world with their hands, right? Or like, you know, we are the only social group that's expanding. We're the only people who are like capable of like managing the new world according to its own logic.

This makes a lot of sense if you are one of the people who live in a world that has effectively disappeared now. You know, and that is a world where you literally are watching cities be constructed out of like, you know, the tiny shells of villages, right? The only way you can sort of experience that now is if you were one of the people in sort of the late, the 90s and the 2000s in China, you know, like watch Shenzhen turn from a fishing village into one of the largest cities in the world. But that's not really a thing anymore. But on the other hand, like this is what these people are experiencing. And this is a group of people who can literally feel in their hands the sort of the power and the value of the labor in what they're producing. They can, you know, they can see commodities appear in the world and they can know that it was, you know, by their hands that the world was built.

And this is not, you know, this is not purely a metaphor, right? These are people who are literally creating the world was built. And this is not, you know, this is not purely a metaphor, right? These are, these are people who are literally creating the world around them. To quote one of the verses of Solidarity Forever that modern trade unions, uh, hilariously notably do not include in the version of, uh, in the version of the song that they tend to sing at things, the, the, the trade union version drops a bunch of verses. And one of those verses is, in our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies multiplied a thousand folds. We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old for the union makes us strong. And this is both the positive vision of the workers' movement and its own sort of theoretical

self-conception wrapped into one. It is the sort of rosy romantic picture of what the workers' movement is. However, comma, this is the incredibly romantic version of this. And before we sort of leave the world of pure romance and go into the sort of dirty and grimy worlds of reality where everything kind of sucks and things are not what they normally seem we are going to take an ad break welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows

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nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean.

He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. Now, there are a lot of things about this workers' movement that if you just sort of look at it theoretically, or if you're looking at one of the sort of incredibly sort of rosy self-caricatures, I guess, if you're purely looking at the kind of propaganda that the movement produces in order to create itself you are going to get a very distorted picture of sort of what was actually going on on the ground and this also makes it very, very difficult to understand what happens. Because if you want to understand how this movement was defeated start to realize that the ideological conception of productivity right of of the producer of you know like of of what the worker is was never as sort of dry and objective as theorists wanted us and you know you get the sense that they wanted like themselves to believe case in point is the nature of what marx the lumpenproletariat. So here's some end notes again. Who were these lumpenproletarians preaching anarchy?

Attempts to spell that out usually took the form not of structural analysis, but rather of long lists of shady characters, lists which collapsed in on themselves in a frenzied incoherence. Here is Marx's paradigmatic discussion of the lumpenproletariat from the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte. On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpenproletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents. These lumpens supposedly consisted of, quote, vagabonds, discharged

soldiers and jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, motten bunks, lazarani, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, litterati, organ grinders, rag pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggers beggars in short the whole indefinite disintegrating mass thrown hither and thither from which the french call la boheme is there any truth in this paranoid fantasy do escaped convicts and organ grinders share a common counter-revolutionary interest with beggars which distinguishes them from the common mass worker who are apparently revolutionary by nature? To think so is insane. The lumpen proletariat was a specter haunting the workers' movement. If that movement constituted itself for the dignity of

workers, then the lumpen was the figure of the undignified worker, or miraculously, the lumpen was one of its figurations. All of the movement's efforts to give dignity to the class were supposedly undermined by these dissolute figures, drunk singing in the streets, petty criminals, and prostitutes. References to the Lumpin proletariat registered what was a simple truth. It was difficult to convince workers to organize as workers, since mostly they didn't care about socialism. A great many of the poor, especially the very poor, did not think or behave themselves as proletarians or find the organizations and modes of actions of the movement as applicable or relevant to them. In their fear time, they'd rather go to the pub than sing workers' songs.

In the figure of the lumpen, we discover the dark underside of the affirmation of the working class. In the figure of the lumpen, we discover the dark underside of the affirmation of the working class. It was abiding class hatred. Workers saw themselves as originating out of a stinking morass. From Kotsky's The Class Struggle, quote, At the time of the beginning of modern industry, the term proletariat implied absolute degeneracy, and there are persons who believe this is still the case. Moreover, capitalism was trying to push them back into the muck.

Thus, the crisis tendencies of capitalism could only be resolved in one of two ways, the victory of the working class or in its becoming lumpen. Now, you can see a couple of things very clearly here. One is there's been a lot of attempts to like resuscitate the lumpenproletariat as like a functional class especially since especially the 70s and i i i really i really would recommend those people go back and read what marx actually wrote about lumpenproletariat because it makes no sense it is just like absolute sort of blithering nonsense and the reason it's this kind of like incredibly bizarre, like paranoid, you know, list of fantasies is that beneath the sort of like faux scientific objectiveness like of the workers movement is this incredibly petty moralism and a set of sort of Victorian social values with all of the sort of cruelty of the aristocratic masters. of their aristocratic masters.

And I want to sort of point out here, like this, this kind of thinking, you know, this kind of like, we are the movement that is a liberation of the class. But in order to do that, we need to prove that like, we are like actually sort of like real dignified human beings.

And that there's another group of people who are just us, but we hate them because they don't behave the way that we think they're supposed to. This is a very, very common thing that you see in basically all social movements, especially in their earliest and shittiest iterations. You see this in the early feminist movement. I mean, you see this still in the feminist movement, but there are sections of it that do this too. There's a really good piece called Some Like It Hot by Sophie Lewis about the sort of feminist reaction to Marilyn Monroe. And I'm going to read a little bit from it. One of the things that you get the sense of is that people like Gloria Steinem just absolutely hate Marilyn

Monroe. And the stuff they write about her is stuff that like you just would be like almost incomprehensible to imagine any of these people or even just sort of like you know not even like a like a modern sort of like conservative like writing on purpose about a woman and being allowed to sort of get away with it i mean they write just horrible things about her um i'm gonna read a little bit from the piece perhaps it was Monroe's dumping of three husbands. Two of them were famous and powerful that posed, quote, no adult challenge to Steinem's mind. Or perhaps Steinem's comments closed nothing so much as her own inability to see high femme people as subjects. Here, in case it might pierce the veil is monroe apogim written on waldorf astoria a letter paper in 1955

quote everyone has violence in themselves i am violent here is another spoken to photographer bruno bernard in 1956 both the anti-communists on the house committee on un-american activities and the movie censors on the production board should be buried alive. Perhaps Steinem, who proudly worked for the CIA in the 50s and 60s, would not appreciate this kind of courage. The courage of one Norma who, when notified by the police at a Los Angeles roadblock in 1949 that a nearby house was being monitored for ties to communists, shouted the officer's ear off and went straight to tip off blacklisted screenwriters norma and ben bowersman and so you know you you can sort of see what's happening here right it's it's a very similar thing where there are these sort of like you know you have these very sort of like like

respectable mainstream feminists who look at someone like maryland monroe who you know and they just fucking hate her they absolutely despise her because she is sort of, she is the image of what they sort of think that they're fighting against, right? Like, what liberation looks like for them is to, like, not be this kind of woman. And that's, you know, and this is, that's the sort of unspoken, or sometimes just overly spoken core of what a lot of this stuff is. And this is how these people can justify working for the fucking CIA and somehow claiming themselves to be superior feminist to Marilyn Monroe who at great personal cost and at great danger like you know fought huac and shit so you know this kind of like we are the group who is going to free our own group we're also not like because we're not like

those other people who are literally the same as us but we don't like them because they we don't think they're respectable enough this is a very very old sort of trend but it has real social consequences and it's you know it's a really disastrous strategy because it means that all of these movements have these sort of flanks from which they can be attacked. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building

things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. one of these flanks for the for the workers movement and one that's become increasingly important now is the kind of producerist conception of what a worker is you know this is the man sort of creating the new world with his bare hands the problem is that you know this

is never what most labor actually was um here's davideber again. In fact, there was never a time when most workers worked in a factory. Even in the days of Karl Marx or Charles Dickens, working class neighborhoods housed far more maids, boot blacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies, school teachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees in coal mines, textile mills, or iron foundries? Are these former jobs productive? In what sense and for whom? Who produces the souffle? It is because of these ambiguities that such issues are typically brushed aside when people are arguing about value. But doing so blinds us to the reality that most working class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually resembles what we

archetypically think of as women's work. Looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention caring for, monitoring, and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects. Then it involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things. And you can see in this sort of issue, right? You can see the axis upon which the workers' movement is going to be split in the 80s and 90s. If you can convince a set of workers that what they're doing is masculine, productive labor, right?

And that what those other people are doing is this like feminine care labor that doesn't produce anything. You can turn the entire ideology of the workers movement on its head and transform it from a liberatory ideology about the end of the class system to a patriarchal ideology about the necessity of labor to sort of manhood and masculinity. And once that ideological shift is made, you can start writing off entire fields of labor as being insufficiently quote-unquote productive, or as the right-wing shift renders it, you can say productive and mean insufficiently masculine

to count as part of the working class TM. This problem, as Graeber argues, is a consequence of the sort of maniacal focus on production that defined the workers' movement because it obscures the fact that, again, most of actual labor is care labor. And this is something we've discussed at length on this show in sort of ethnographic, if not theoretical terms, while talking to Starbucks workers. And in these conversations, it becomes almost immediately clear that a huge part of the job has very little to do with making coffee or even sort of classical customer management and like the interpretive and emotional labor of doing service work.

What these workers are actually doing is acting as a replacement for the collapsing American social safety net, right? They are taking care of and literally saving the lives of people who capitalism has spat out and left to die and this is by by any like any actual you know i'm not gonna say objective standard because i don't think there is an objective standard for what work like what how much work something is but you know in terms of the amount of labor in terms of the difficulty of labor in terms of like what is being expected of these workers, this is incredibly intense, difficult labor. But because of the sort of patriarchal idea and conception that has sort of consumed what our sort of collective conception of what a quote unquote real job is the enormous amount of care labor that baristas do every day and you know there's there's a good argument

graber makes a very similar argument to this that you can look at the entire job you can look at like most economic production as care labor right because you're producing this coffee in order to care for someone you make a bridge in order to like like in order so that people can use it right but you know there's a good argument that like all everything a barista does is care labor but because you know it's not like making cars or being one of the last 50,000 coal miners left in the u.s it's not considered real labor. And all of this is just a bomb that is left sitting under the ideological core of the workers' movements. And that bomb probably would have just gone off on its own. Well, I say on its own. That bomb probably would have been set off

by something we're going to talk about more tomorrow, which is the shift in the labor force in a lot of countries that sort of deindustrialized towards this kind of labor being the sort of standard, like, you know, being just even more obviously the standard form of labor. But the ruling class figured out a way to sort of set this bomb off and ensure that, you know and and ensure that it would you know like just detonate the workers movement immediately and the thing that they figured out to set this bomb off is racism and that is what i'm going to talk about tomorrow the story of how the fusion of racism and sexism that i may well be remembered by historians is the force that

burned the entire world, consumed what was left of the workers' movement, and turned this country into neoliberal Reagan hell. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast,

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