O klasičnim zanimanjima radničke klase i političkoj rekompoziciji odnosa na njihovom lešu:
VANISHING CONSTITUENCIES
Surveying the social landscape of the advanced capitalist societies from which we hail and which we know best, many of us have sympathy with and still feel somehow indebted to the old working class, the generation of trade union and left party members under postwar democratic, state-administered capitalism. Many of them are now retired, or about to retire. Their industries, the factories where they have toiled, have shrunk or disappeared , leaving them behind in their now depressed and decaying local communities. They are, their labour is no longer die Quelle allen Reichtums; they now depend for their livelihood on a society more-or-less willing to pay for their pensions and healthcare. In a neoliberal, turbo-capitalist society, such dependence is a stigma. Even where governments and the public treat them respectfully, the legitimacy of the social entitlements their generation has instituted is fragile, as indicated by recurring discussions on pension reform and healthcare costs. “Grandfather clauses” freezing benefits for current recipients that the next generation will not receive further de-legitimate the welfare state in its present form. They also reinforce perceptions of the old working class as an unproductive surplus population that, fortunately, will wither away with time.
When we were young, we sometimes found solace in the belief that “the revolution advances on the mortality tables”. Something like this, I am sure, is today felt by the new generation of human capital owners, the new middle class recruited in large part from among the children of the old working class, who have moved to the cities where they live very different lives from their parents. The social marginalization their parents feel, their sense of being seen by society as an economic and social burden, is bound to breed deep resentment. The new politics of neoliberalism no longer has a place for their industrial-proletarian collectivism, not least because it required the shared experience of factory work to become politically productive. Alienated from the self-declared “knowledge society” of today and removed from their means of political production, many of them are now turning to the New Right, which has learned to cultivate their sense of undeserved inferiority. An important contributing factor seems to be that some of the new nationalist parties and movements defend the national welfare state in which the old working class has invested its political and economic capital and on which their livelihood depends. Their turn to the Right widens the gap between them and what has become the mainstream of “modern society”. While “the Left” may pity them for their disappointment, winning them back seems difficult at best, and so would be convincing the rest of society that they are more than a demographic rustbelt from which nothing can be learned for the future.
Who remains for the Left to give support to and draw support from? To answer this strategically all-important question we may look at extant ways of life under “advanced capitalism”, their different relationship to market and economy, and the kinds of solidarity associated with them. One group that comes to mind has already been mentioned: the children of the old working class who have made it under post-industrial capitalism, at least so far – certified owners of expensive human capital, confident self-promoters and self-commodifiers, highly adept at marketing and networking, with a deeply engrained view of the world as a meritocratic tournament designed to detect and reward the best, according to inherited talent, acquired skills, and relentless effort. They are the born, or trained, individualists par excellence, and therefore liberals at heart and to the bone. Nothing is left in them of the collectivism of the industrial workers of yesteryear. Individualism reigns supreme, and politics is there to establish the freedom of the individual from the collectivity, whatever that collectivity may be. Democracy, then, is rights without duties, or more precisely: without authoritatively imposed and enforced duties. Rights, the model being human rights, come for free, from a right to have rights – and democratic progress consists in the removal of whatever obligations may in the past have been foisted on individuals as a condition of membership, detracting from the essential liberty of everyone to live the lives they deem best suited for their “self-realization”.
Not that there was no place in this for compassion and indeed solidarity. Where individual rights are at stake – in particular rights to be different and not to be discriminated against in the market-place – they are almost religiously upheld. Equality comes from and is identical to the absence of discrimination on the basis of whatever ascriptive characteristic may distinguish an individual from others. Democracy means above all equal access to markets and institutions. It also has a place for material solidarity and egalitarian redistribution, but ideally these should be voluntary, private not public, springing from an informally benevolent “civil society” rather than being formally obligatory. Rights of citizenship come for free, unlike in the past when they were linked, legally or morally, to military or other public service. Freedom and democracy mean the right to choose one’s obligations freely. Since the draft was abolished in most Western countries, no comparable civic duty has emerged anywhere to take its place. Parties or trade unions, with packages of programmatic commitments one has to buy wholesale as a matter of organizational discipline once they have been formally adopted after “democratic” deliberation, are perceived as archaic, and so are the bureaucratic formalisms of traditional political organization. Projects, not parties, are the organizational form of choice: one can join and leave any time, as one sees fit, hang on as long as nothing more attractive appears, and not longer. Democratic centralism, as it used to be called, and party discipline of whatever kind are out.
Political parties or movements pursuing an alternative society, instead of specific, individual, and programmatically unrelated single purposes, do not thrive on this kind of motivational base. Any attempt to organize the new middle class must accommodate high fluidity of commitments, “nonideological”, fleeting enthusiasm, and a continuous building and rebuilding of individual and collective identities, as in “patchwork families”, in “flexible” labor markets, and in project-group work organization. This very much corresponds to the possibilities offered by the new “social media” for individually-centered social networking, as a substitute for or, depending on one’s perspective, a technological improvement over older, more stable social structures. Political engagement is voluntary in this world, funded by donations rather than dues or subscriptions, often taking the form of mass petitions on the internet in support of specific causes. Basically, such engagement is a charitable activity. Compared to the new politics of disjointed spontaneity, the social-democratic welfare state appears like a rigid bureaucratic monster, and the charitable giving of multi-billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg is apt to elicit more admiration, in spite or even because of its capriciousness, than the tax-financed, routinized programmes of public social policy.
As to the political economy of the new middle class and its liberal libertarianism, we find here a strong belief in merit as the principal source of socio-economic status and in the basic fairness of educational institutions and labor markets, if properly arranged so as to offer equal opportunities to everyone. This combines with a general mood of optimism, perhaps linked to the need in the new service sector jobs to display a friendly face to everybody, customers and colleagues alike. Quasi-obligatory optimism and socially expected cheerful confidence in one’s own market chances suppress concerns over social security, including in old age, which deepens the cultural gap between the generations. That the world is a competitive meritocracy, an open-ended rat-race is considered normal and nothing to complain about, not least since complaining may be read by others as a sign of weakness or of a disposition to underperform. With hard work in precarious employment under competitive pressure comes a demand for advanced consumption as a reward for and demonstration of personal success. Conspicuous consumption often includes conspicuous attention to environmental sustainability, signaling social responsibility. Markets, for labour no less than for goods and services, are experienced as empires of freedom – whereas public provision tends to be found lacking in quality and attention to individual needs and tastes, making privatization appear desirable even among progressives. As women in the new middle class are fully integrated in competitive career and consumption efforts in the money economy, families, where they still exist, have little to no time to contribute to the production and maintenance of public goods, in particular where building their human capital had required them to take up credit which they now have to service.
https://wolfgangstreeck.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/streeck2017_whose-side-are-we-on.pdf
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by bemty Wed Dec 04, 2019 4:01 pm
