Marxism is good for you, eat your vegetables
Hello good people! And the rest of you!
I hope you’re all maintaining. I’m feeling careworn myself. (I relate to some of the title track to the newest Propagandhi record, “At Peace,” the singer saying he’s “not quite thriving but I’m buoyant” with some other lines about being at peace “give or take a fit of blinding rage” and being “presently convulsed with grief.”) I started to write about some of that carewornness but it bored me because here’s nothing interesting in my complaints about pay and whatnot at my job. That complaining is valid is a hill I would die on (as is any hill whatsoever, frankly) but the point of this lil blog of mine is to think new thoughts and ‘argh shit at my job omg, ugh fuck’ and so on is about as far from a new thought for me as possible, being more like a constant static hum that’s been here so long I can’t remember when it arrived or what life was like before it. And while perhaps the distress of being an empathetic person relatively untouched within the larger bloodsoaked hellscape of the world these days is a topic worth exploration and in which one might find new thoughts, I think that’s above my paygrade as writer - leave the brain surgery to the brain surgeons, best I can do is replace a plywood panel, so to speak.
ANYway what I actually wanted to jot down here is that I think a Marxist analysis offsets some of the grinding that leaves us careworn. Brief bit of background. I graduated college in 2000 with a philosophy degree and some illusions and naivete: I had a degree, a degree was supposed to provide a good job, so I just sort of assumed there’d be a good job. There wasn’t. I’m sure this was partly on me (it was a situation which was a mix of design flaws and operator error, so to speak), but especially after the downturn following 9/11 the job market just sucked, even for my friends from middle class families who had connections that help one find a good job. Like a lot of people, I limped along, continuing to not really make a living. (Having typed that out it occurs to me that my naive belief in good jobs was a factor in the operator error side of things as it meant I had what I thought were reasonable higher standards in an ‘ideas above my station’ sort of way - I kept noticing the shitness of the shit jobs I had because I assumed, at least kinda wrongly, that there were non-shit jobs to be had.) That was a big factor in my decision to go to grad school. When I was accepted, one of the first things my wife said to me, excitedly with a big smile, was ‘you’re not going to have to job hunt for like FIVE YEARS!’ I remember the relief and excitement of that. I was in grad school when the 2008 financial crisis happened, which simultaneously made visible how not actually that good the academic job market had in fact been for a long time and also made the market far worse. I found the job hunt at the end of grad school really awful and I landed a decent-ish job (the one I’m still in) just as we were literally at zero money and beginning to talk about which relative we would ask (and how we’d couch the ask) if our family of four could move in while I looked for temp jobs. (I’ll add, the academic job market in general has only gotten worse since, massively so, so younger scholars have it even worse.)
I mention this because at one point shortly before or after I landed the decentish-but-slowly-declining job I was venting about having been through the meat grinder and my wife said something like ‘as awful as all of this is, imagine if you weren’t a Marxist? There are people who think hiring is meritocratic and markets reflect actual social value, what if you were one of them?!’ I’m biased of course because I think my wife’s cool and smart and all, but I think it’s a good point. The less one understands the design flaws and the more emphasizes operator error, the more one will understood life lower on the food chain as being the result of the decisions we make down here. As bad as it sucks to feel hard done by, to feel like it’s all your own fault is far, far worse. (And in this case, just false! Operator errors occur in the context of, ie, happen downstream from, design flaws. There’s a good Marx quote to that effect - there’s always one...!)
Of course Marxism’s not generally a full spectrum unbreachable shield that prevents the world’s bullshit from getting pushed in and becoming a source of distress, would that it were. Nor is Marxism’s benefit to our, I dunno, quality of life/mental health/psychic survival/whatever a primary good that the tradition provides, but it is on such good. It can help us to be a little bit more free in the short term immediate sense by making the world and its effects comprehensible and held at arm’s length a little - it lets us step back from the distressing things that capitalism necessarily generates, so that stuff is a little less directly up in our face, which lets us breathe a little more and make decisions. That’s a pretty attenuated sense of ‘more free’ so maybe I should qualify it as something more like ‘provides some precondition for freedom’ or something. I dunno. You get the gist, I think.
Having typed that out, it occurs to me there’s a relationship to an idea I continue to find compelling in Werner Bonefeld’s last book (I cowrote a review of it last year [?!? where does time go and how does it move so fast when it obviously moves so agonizingly slow?] with my friend the inimitable Rob Hunter.) The concept is ‘social coldness’ which refers to the kinds of indifferent or impersonal orientation people take to each other in this society. It manifests as exceedingly ugly. Walter Benjamin writes that the successful in general - those who are “victorious” - always march “in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot.” That capacity to step across and often upon the bodies, living and dead, of other people and to do so without either heated, active malice or grief, that’s social coldness - the ability to roll up the window and fail to make eye contact while driving by the person on the corner with the sign saying “please help.” This coldness is cultivated in a great many ways that evolve over time through various techniques and ideologies. It’s also a necessity for living in this society.
To look the full scope of human suffering fully in the face would trip the breaker in the brain, so to speak. My point is that social coldness has a significant relationship with critical thought - the ability to step back and take a breath as I said, that involves a degree of coldness despite being necessary and even beneficial, which is to say that the proliferation of social coldness is awful but not every instance of its lived practice is entirely bad. Rob and I mention this in our review, Bonefeld stresses that our response to social coldness can’t be just uncritically embracing its opposite. Rather - and this is me, not Bonefeld, I assume he’d agree but don’t want to misattribute or ventriloquize - the thing to do is open up some space, hit pause in a sense - a simulated pause, to be clear, because individual thought alone can’t stop the world - to be able to consider, critically analyze, decide, act.
Alright gang, time’s up, onto other stuff. Keep on trucking!
cheers,
Nate
ps- I can’t recall if I’ve mentioned this. I’m very excited about this noise rock band Kowloon Walled City right now, especially their most recent record, “Piecework.” The cover art on the last four records is apt: empty spaces with a sense of ache or being made too small by circumstances. Parts of it are sparse - silence, or minimal sound - and parts of it are huge - loud guitar and bass, hammering drums, bellowing vocals. All of it’s bleak but not just bleak, in that ‘life despite emptiness’ kind of way. If that’s of any interest you can check it out on Bandcamp and might consider chucking the band a few bucks since they’re all people with jobs. https://kowloonwalledcity.bandcamp.com/