Notes in the Margins: Not Yet Proletarians, or Thoughts on Labor Day
R.C. Roberts writes about the state of the American worker on today, Labor Day, and what he sees as their future; to be divided by the rise of a proletariat identity.
In June 1945, the now famous Jean Paul Sartre was sent to America by the magazine Combat to report back on the condition of the United States, a land both marvelled at and held in suspicion by the French. In the course of his time there, Sartre would write seven articles about the conditions within the United States, touching on everything from the American worker to race relations.
He titled one of his articles, interestingly, American Workers Are Not Yet Proletariats. Sartre begins it with a punchy observation of a liberal journalist discussing the 'working class' of the United States. Irritated by what Sartre characterized as the "obviously puzzled" nature of the journalist, Sartre pressed him on why he was so befuddled. The response of the journalist was interesting:
"It's because you Frenchmen talk about the American working class as if it really existed…"
This is followed, in the relatively short article, by Sartre noting how the use of the term 'worker' was used by Americans instead of a term like proletariat. The difference? For Sartre, it is not entirely clear, but he hints that it has something to do with how conscious the worker is of being someone who rents out his time while owning neither instruments or product of their labor. But it seems that an interview he has with a worker in Detroit explains his title:
"I let my opinion be known to a worker in Detroit who replied, 'I know, but what can we do? At international meetings, workers delegates from Europe often criticize American workers for not expressing solidarity with the international proletarians but that's because you are not aware of our situation; we are not yet proletarians.'"
***
It has to be said, on Labor Day, that the American worker is still not yet a proletariat. We are workers, atomized, serialized. Many of our crusading 'socialists' talk about the 'corporate space', with its well lit offices and clerical drudgery. But their lips never taste the greased restaurant floors or the effluvium of backed up toilets the janitors deal with. Here, where the work is done as service, where every act belongs to someone else, not only are you exploited for your work; you are pumped for your time. There is no Office style camaraderie. It is actively discouraged. People are judged by their productivity in personal ways. To be called lazy is to be seen as worthless. You are demanded to give up weekends, days off, and even sleep in the name of your job; you are told, continuously, that your job is your number one priority.
If a proletariat arises from the American workers, as we have long awaited for, I do not think it will take all the workers with it. It will cut a space for itself out of the existing serialized group, and it will be born of the indignant. This indignation will find itself in the professional worker, one who accepted their exploitation relative to the wage it gave them. You are already seeing it with teachers and nurses, and we will see it spread as the economy shifts. As the economy changes and technology changes the modes of production, the 'professional' worker's wages will fall. The fall of wages are always a cause of a renewed need to reflect; and then one sees their alienation, awaiting them. And this breeds indignation; and that is the fuel that feeds any movement. With the time to theorize, the time to read this and that book about Marx, the professional worker will make demands because they have always been in the position to do so. They have indignation to fuel their demands, as they are on the losing side of technological revolution. Other workers, however, have it differently; they already lost before technology was revolutionized. They have known nothing else. With memories that are fresh, memories of drudgery rewarded with high wages, the professional worker will fight.
I think--perhaps because of my love of cruel irony--that the PMC will birth the American proletariat; if it is ever born. And you can wave your theories at me, demand that I just don't understand Marx, or Adorno, or any number of your secular bien-pensants. But the problem with the theorists, and most on the Left now, is that they have a sense of perfectionism that tastes of a universalism that, when walking those greasy floors or cleaning toilets, makes no sense. Capitalism, if it is both cultural and economic, has more than one form. Capitalism is not a monolith, you can't make a God out of it. If capitalism is not monolith, in form or type, then neither is the proletariat that it will inspire. The ideal of the proletariat, as some unity of the industrial workers and their slightly upper-scaled compatriots, is a nice one, but one which will be made jagged by reality. The universal, when it comes down from the clouds, will be cut and stabbed by the particular thorns on the ground.
This notion of universalism comes up against a sense of perfectionism; the proletariat is many things to a Leftist, but never imperfect. It includes all workers, always. It is the janitor and the office worker, the Uber driver and receptionists. Even the recent discussion of 'crunch' in the videogame industry has brought forth the eye of the 'proletariat theory', discussing the need to give those workers the right not to be forced into that sort of situation. And the end game of the proletariat, the sort of worker who will support it and the shape the American proletariat will take, is seen as unfailingly good, perfect, or Marxist. I tend to disagree; as Sartre noted in one of his articles, titled Open Societies, that in America national characteristics interfere with class characteristics, as well as outlive them. As he writes:
"...in 1920, a worker no longer knows whether he is a proletarian because he belongs by birth to the proletariat or because he is an Irishman who just got off the boat. On the other hand, national and religious solidarities persist for a long time among immigrants and explain the existence of those innumerable Irish, Jewish, Mexican, and Chinese neighborhoods which function as barriers and blind them to class solidarity."
This, in and of itself, reminds me of another Sartre-ism; that there are two types of poor. The poor who are poor together, and those who are poor alone. The first, he says, is the true poor, and the second is just rich people out of luck. They see themselves as the ‘Irishman just off the boat’, not an American worker. And I think the American worker will make up the true poor, while the American proletariat will be those who see themselves as ‘out of luck’. The historical and national characteristics will form the future American proletariat, including class but twisting it horribly. It will unite some workers, while leaving out others.
Born of the Left's death, the failure of secularization, and the way cyberspace allows for us to be out of touch with reality, the American proletariat will be composed of people who love labor but hate work. Labor will become the idea of the exploited worker, who works for themselves or their family, and who keeps a certain sort of faith, be it humanistic or religious. They will be those becoming disenfranchised. Labor, seen as productive but exploited, will be seen as deserving. Work, on the other hand, will be the dirty secret; following in the footsteps of all American history, those who work will be people who provide services because they were born into the class.
They will be the people who are seen as always 'confused', misdirected, deplorable, a historical phenomenon of class rarely discussed, like it is extensively in Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. They will be the ‘waste people’ we have, for all our history, kept out of consideration of the economy.
The proletariat will be a universal ideal, jaded by the impossibility of its perfection. We will have one, but we will not recognize it until it is too late. The proletariat won't be Marxist, it will be American.
***
So as I watch various talking heads, professional or self-proclaimed, talk on Labor Day about labor, I cannot help but grouse. Often, these sorts of people bring forth the violent past of the American worker. They state, with comical aggression, that they would be violent with the exploiters of the country. They quote everyone from Karl Marx to Dorothy Day to Eugene Debs, and are vocal for an entire day about their solidarity with 'the working class', the proletariat! Maoists speak gleefully of violence against landlords, bravely hiding behind their computer screens.
Every 'Marxist' thinker or writer will write something powerful and blithe in the name of this, America's Labor Day. They fight for the proletariat, they cry! Workers of the world, unite! America was made by labor, not by capital! They tell you, over and over, that they believe in the American proletariat.
But they don't understand, Leftists of a dead Left, our situation. The working Americans are workers, and not proletarians.
Not yet.