Reflections on the working class

Deplorables, garbage…these are just some of the pejoratives that have been leveled at the working class by ruling elites in recent years. 

This is not a new trend either. In its long history the working class has always been the focal point of bourgeois contempt and disdain. 

Much of the upper class fears workers in the same way that American slave owners of southern plantations once feared their slaves. The capitalist master sees in the downtrodden worker the fact that his riches are bought at the worker’s expense. And he is made aware that his own existence is entirely predicated on the worker, while the doesn’t need the capitalist at all. This fear then, the fear that in reality their precarious situation and fundamental weakness will be revealed through a mass awakening of working class consciousness manifests itself as a fundamental disgust and condemnation. 

The rapidly disappearing middle class also fears the working class although not as palpably. Theirs is instead an internal fear that manifests itself as a pressure to work even harder lest they themselves lose their tenuous class position and slide backwards into the working class. This fundamental insecurity is the flame that the ruling class constantly holds to the feet of the embittered middle. It’s a carrot and stick game in which many get the stick and only a select few the carrot. The middle class ability to succeed is largely predicated moreover on their ability to ape upper class ideology and tastes. Or at least what they are told these things are supposed to be. Therefore they are encouraged to foster closer effectual ties with their superiors rather than their closer cousins, the workers. The replication of ruling class ideology and repudiation of working class consciousness therefore finds fertile ground among the middle. 

In this scenario the working class becomes the enemy within. Even though only the working class is the revolutionary class, or rather precisely because of this fact, capitalism works all the harder to deny them any agency or asendency. Instead bourgeois ideology portrays the workers as the obstacle to progress when in fact it is the capitalist class itself which is the true fetter. Another classic case of projection. 

“Science” in particular is the blunt tool with which working class consciousness is beat into submission. This class consciousness itself is portrayed as a backwards superstition, a myth or a fantasy. The idea that strong workers unions and organizing could produce real material gains is seen as something akin to a mythical unicorn while workers’ own beliefs, the true reflections of their material realities, are mocked by bourgeois “experts” as “misinformation.” Marx once said that capitalist social relations are mystified by the fetishistic object of desire, money, making even workers complicit in their own exploitation. The only way to break this veil was for workers themselves to become conscious of their own power as the agent of historical change. 

But that can never happen unless we begin to see the world, and to critically evaluate bourgeois ideology, through the lens of class. Much of what the media feeds us today is in fact nothing other than regurgitated propaganda designed to blind us to the true state of affairs. Only when we discern the class character of our information can we understand efforts to ban cow farts or gas stoves and engines for what they really are, attacks on the working class. 

E.P. Thompson’s classic 1963 The Making of the English Working Class is one such attempt to clarify the truth of history and consciousness by in the authors words rescuing the poor and downtrodden from the dustbin of history. As such it is not only a landmark in historical science but also an apt guide for interpreting the present. Two key points I will pick up on from Thompson’s work in the next essay are religion and nationalism in regard to working class movements. Modern day bourgeois scholars routinely condemn both of these phenomenon thereby precluding their use by modern workers’ movements in the West. But Thompson’s work suggests that both can in fact be potent tools for honing worker consciousness.