Is there a trade-off between class consciousness and identity politics? Revolutionary subjectivity is not easily dichotomized, and historically, it is imbricated with class consciousness, even as class formation and identity remain problematic under capitalist domination. Identity politics, when reified becomes middle-class commodity merchandising as the red-hat Trumpists have shown.
A revolutionary state of class-conscious proletariat seems distant depending on the stage of late capitalist development and any global North/South schism. Can we see that a mass melancholia about this state of affairs is also a “mechanism of governmentality”?
The climate crisis has made us conscious of how a prefigurative imaginary remains, much as it did with various utopian socialist cultures under early capitalism. Like the student movements of the last Century, are today’s activists ready to challenge a status quo even in US red states.
Despite the call for “a ‘state science’, a science of governmentality, that works to constrict political agency” the conflict remains. Attention to settler colonialism reaches back centuries but remains to inform a current ecological crises dependent on superstructural actions.
Our commitments must proceed beyond the pluralistic and embrace the multi-disciplinary analysis beyond labor-power and the value-form no differently than how the later Marx embraced natural science and the metabolic. Ecosocialism has enabled a greater cross-sectional class analysis that reveals the constraints on political agency, direct and indirect.
Foucault's concept of governmentality goes beyond the narrow limits of state power to look at how these societies employ more subtle methods of power exercised through a network of institutions, practices, procedures and techniques which act to regulate social conduct.
journals.sagepub.com/…
Or as Milchman and Rosenberg claim, the governmentalization of the state ‘represents an expansion of the state beyond the traditional sphere of sovereign power’ (2002: 137)
There are no obvious answers beyond the need to engage in a prolonged process of mass movement organizing and struggle on the conjoined terrains of political-economy, culture, and public discourse.
The first task is to build a more powerful and coherent red-green coalition that can win climate objectives that improve peoples’ lives (Bond Citation2012; Aronoff et al. Citation2019), while the second is to shift the GND narrative beyond the view that it “must deliver more growth” towards a different understanding of prosperity and well-being (Soper Citation2020). As Jason Hickel writes: “if the GND ends up for whatever reason working against growth, then by our own criteria it will have failed and will be vulnerable to attack on these grounds” (Hickel Citation2020). Thus while the argument made by degrowth critics like Matt Huber and Robert Pollin—that we must promise more to win the working class—is understandable, it not only chooses to ignore politically inconvenient ecological limits but is itself a strategically risky proposition, given the likely (but not inevitable) failure of growth in an era of converging climate, political-economic, energy, and food crises.
We can therefore see that a path to ecosocialist degrowth via a GND transition-followed-by-crisis is possible, but by no means the only possible path. However, we should then consider possible dangers and trade-offs that ecosocialisms-in-transition would likely encounter and possible strategies to confront them. In short, rather than focusing on the idealized utopian end-point, we need to ask difficult questions about the transition period.
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In sum, we can speculate that there at least two different ecosocialist “equilibria” in the future possibility space: first would be the ecosocialist degrowth trajectory that emerges from a relatively near-term GND crisis (e.g. between 2030 and 2050), and second would be a more long-term ecosocialist transition (e.g. between 2050 and 2080) that forces a rapid scale-up of NETs, collectively managed solar geoengineering, and an intensification of extractivist conflicts.
www.tandfonline.com/...
Can we break with predictable melancholy and enact this in the Global North.
...while leftist politics in America remains centered on personal identity, class consciousness is unlikely to develop.
A better way to frame the issue is to focus on an enemy common to all of those groups – employers, which have overly broad discretion to set their employees’ salaries – and the common problem that results, namely, that workers as a whole are paid too little and unfairly.
We do need to “scrutinise the ways in which prefiguration is a politically precarious concept in educative settings and whether (as well as how) resistant practices can develop lasting effects and be institutionally anchored.” It is more than contesting wages and benefits but reconfiguring work and more completely redefining trade unionism.
One of the greatest (prefigurative politics) examples during the 20th century in this regard is the comunismo libertario (libertarian communism) society organized by anarcho-syndicalists such as the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), or in English the National Confederation of Labour, for a few months during the Spanish Civil War. Workers took collective control of the means of production on a decentralized level and used mass-self communication as a counter-power in order to give useful information on a wide range of options going from vegetarian cooking to the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases.
The concept of prefiguration later came to be used more widely,[9] especially in relation to movements for participatory democracy.[10][11][12] It has especially been applied to Italian Autonomism in the 1960s,[13] the US antinuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s and the anti-globalization movement at the turn of the 21st century.[14]
The continuing central question from the 20th Century is the lack of global revolution and the rise of fascism under capitalism. Has pessimism and melancholy blunted the force of prefigurative politics, and will an expected class stratification improve revolutionary potential.
WHY DIDN’T THE REVOLUTION HAPPEN?: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF MARX AND CLASS STRUGGLE
In the mid-twentieth century, thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School – most notably Herbert Marcuse – tried to explain the absence of revolution while maintaining a broadly Marxist framework.
Marcuse argued that mass media and consumerism had eliminated the proletariat’s political imagination, thereby sapping the West of its revolutionary potential; in lieu of positive revolutionary activity, he urged a purely negative “great refusal” to participate in consumerism.[2]
Most contemporary Marxist thought tacitly adopts Marcuse’s pessimism about an imminent revolution. When Marxist literature mentions revolution at all – a rarity – it discusses revolution as a pipe dream, or a hazy and contingent possibility, or sometimes even a strategically unsound goal. In a rather frank article from 2019, apropos of the 100th anniversary of the First Communist International, Jacobin editor Loren Balhorn wrote that “[a]t least for the time being, it would appear unwise to emulate the Comintern’s strategic perspectives” – that is, the pursuit of an international proletarian revolution – “for working class power.”[3]
For a Marxist, these answers are both unsatisfying and strategically unhelpful. It is time to return to the very basic question that the events of the twentieth century raise: why didn’t the revolution happen? The question is of vital strategic importance to contemporary socialism, but there are few attempts to formulate a square answer.
This essay focuses on one aspect of that question – the failure of class consciousness to take hold in western industrialized countries.
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None of this undermines Marx’s basic point that labor and capital have antagonistic interests. But the existence of the middle class, coupled with the transition of advanced economies from manufacturing-based to information-based industries, has made it more difficult to figure out who’s the capitalist and who’s the laborer. That necessarily inhibits the development of class consciousness.
For that reason, proponents of identity politics often accuse socialists of “class-reductionism.”[18] But while this is sometimes fair criticism, more often than not, the exact opposite is true – movements centered around one type of personal identity conceptualize every political struggle in terms of that identity, replacing “class-reductionism” with race- or gender- or sexuality- reductionism. That tendency both inhibits class consciousness and causes a fundamental misunderstanding of key political issues, to the strategic detriment of the left.
CONCLUSION
This analysis of class consciousness in modern America gives rise to several strategic observations. First and foremost, the delicate balance of factors that has allowed the middle class to remain viable for almost a century may be deteriorating. Although factors of convergence have supported the existence of the middle class for the past century or so, those trends seem to be reversing.
Near the end of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty suggests that population and economic growth are slowing, inflation is slowly declining, and economic inequality is on the rise in the western world. If the forces of convergence turn into forces of divergence, the classes will slowly stratify, and a degree of class consciousness will probably develop on its own. Socialists should exploit this reality by advancing a class-centric analysis directed at members of the middle class suddenly cast into poverty by these economic trends.
By the same token, leftist generally should recognize that, given the competing substrata of the economy and the multifarious forms of oppression, neither class nor personal identity furnishes a comprehensive answer to all social ills. As discussed, class alone doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of police violence, and race alone doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline. Instead, we should take an empirical approach to confronting specific problems.
Relatedly, leftists should spot wedge issues – which thrive in the areas where two oppressed groups believe their interests are in tension – and avoid schismatic arguments. Instead, leftist analysis should begin with the tangible interests that most oppressed people share.
By framing issues in terms that take into account both identity and class, socialists can take advantage of rising economic inequality to promote class consciousness. And then, perhaps, we can prove that the revolution was merely deferred – not denied.
www.hamptonthink.org/...
A Politics of Melancholia by George Edmondson & Klaus Mladek, returns us to the cultural framing of our present century of spectral reemergence, especially hauntology.
The concept of a revolutionary proletariat was first put forward by the French revolutionary socialist and radical Auguste Blanqui.[4] The Paris Commune, contemporary to Blanqui and Karl Marx, being viewed by some as the first attempt at a proletarian revolution.[5]
Marx wrote of the class conscious proletariat being the active agent of revolution, which distinguished him from Blanqui who viewed a selective revolutionary conspiracy among all the lower classes as being the driving force of a proletarian revolution.[6] This was also in contrast to the views of the communist William Weitling and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin who viewed the lumpenproletariat as the driver of the proletarian revolution.[6][7] Through Marx and Friedrich Engels' work they write that if the proletariat does not make up a majority, it must at least occupy an important position among the popular mass to achieve a proletarian revolution.[8] Some later Marxists, such as Georgi Plekhanov, emphasized the need for a majority of the population to be proletarianized for a proletarian revolution to occur.[9]
Other Marxists, such as Luxemburgists[22][23] and left communists,[24][25][26] disagree with the Leninist idea of a vanguard and insist that the entire working class—or at least a large part of it—must be deeply involved and equally committed to the socialist or communist cause for a proletarian revolution to be successful. To this end, they seek to build mass working class movements with a very large membership. The Situationists' view is that as well as the standard proletariat being a driving force for revolution, other oppressed classes would also act as drivers.[27]
(A) revolution that aims to abolish the entire system of wage slavery must also do away with the power of one class to oppress another. That is, it is not any more a mere change of rulers, of government, not a political revolution, but one that seeks to alter the whole character of society. That would be a social revolution."[28]
What is ecosocialism?
Ecosocialism brings together two complementary ways of thinking about humans and the environment they live in. The “eco-” in ecosocialism comes from the science of ecology and its emphasis on the complex and dynamic interactions among the living and non-living components within an ecosystem. In particular ecologists understand how the life-supporting functions within an ecosystem can be disrupted by the behavior of one organism, for example, humans.
But ecology lacks a social analysis; it has no way of understanding how economic and political forces drive human behavior and social change can take place. Ecosocialism combines the insights of ecology with the rich tradition of socialist thought and action, especially that associated with Marxism. Marxism shows that the ecological crisis is rooted in a destructive economic and political system, capitalism, and it provides ways of understanding how capitalism works and of envisioning a system beyond capitalism, in which production is driven by human need. At the same time, environmental disasters like Chernobyl and the Aral Sea remind us that challenging or even eliminating capitalism is not enough. Whatever else we may think of the “really existing socialisms” of the 20th century, we can agree that with few exceptions, they failed miserably in ecological terms. Thus ecosocialists are fighting for a new sort of socialism, one that takes into account the place of human beings in the planet-wide biosphere.
systemchangenotclimatechange.org/...
Q: Was there a similar phrase in vogue before chewing gum became popular?
The phrase can't walk and chew gum at the same time is often used to describe someone who's clumsy, uncoordinated or stupid, and there are many idioms for this: can't tell one's arse from his elbow, all thumbs, butter fingers, ham fisted, klutz.
There are also other phrases that mean it's impossible to do multiple things at the same time, but these are usually "defensive" rather than "insulting", such as having your cake and eat it too (recorded in 1546 as wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?) and the Yiddish can't dance at two weddings [with one behind/pair of feet].
Another multitasking phrase with yet another meaning is to have one's finger in too many pies, for a person who is able to multitask, but is overdoing it.
Q: when did walk and chew gum enter the lexicon?
It can be found in a May 1966 snippet of the US Marines' The Leatherneck, quoting Sgt Jerry Necaise:
"In fact, I had a man in my squad who was so uncoordinated, he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. But, after two weeks in Canada, he was skiing like a pro!"
According to The Big Apple it can be earlier found in a Texas newspaper:
24 December 1956, Denton (TX) Record- Chronicle, sec. 2, pg. 2, col. 4:
A classic comment by a local basketball player referring to a teammate’s co- ordination: “He can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”
The same site believes the phrase comes an earlier "talk and chew gum".
english.stackexchange.com/…
How will this Century’s student-worker alliance organize its role negotiating governmentality, can it see a connection between melancholia and a lumpenproletariat.