Class and the Culture War Part 1: The Labor Theory of Value And its Discontents

In part one of Mia's investigation into why Americans are so weird about class we go back to the ideology of the 19th and 20th century workers movement and how its weaknesses allowed capitalists to make a counter-attack

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming at you today, sweaty, smelly,
and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the desert
where I have been spending the weekend trying my best
to help, along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers,
to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian

(00:21):
crisis at the United States Southern border. People are being
held in the open desert in Hakomba, where it gets
hot in the day gets very cold at night, and
there are children, there are old people, there are young people.
All the support they're getting it's from mutual aid workers,
then maybe get some water from border patrol, from federal government,
and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast

(00:45):
to ask you if you can to help. We've all
spent all of our time and most of our money
the last few days week trying to help, and we're
all pretty broke, and we're all pretty tired. But I
could really do with your support, and I'm going they
give the venmos and cash apps and PayPal information for
two organizations who ideally love and whose work I have

(01:05):
seen is extremely effective and is the only thing keeping
this situation from being a lot worse. And please don't
think that if you don't have much money that you
shouldn't give. We can do a lot with a little.
So if you only have five bucks, that is great.
And five bucks is are top for someone to sleep
under or a few hot meals. And what we're going
to buy is food, blankets, tarps, water, the things that

(01:29):
stop people dying in the desert. Those two organizations, Border
Kindness and Free Shit Collective can be found online at
border Kindness and at free ship pb on Twitter. For
border Kindness, the venmo is at border hyphen Kindness. The
cash app is dollar sign border Kindness cash and the
xell and PayPal information is info at Borderkindness dot org.

(01:50):
Free Ship Collective are at free Ship Collective on cash
app and PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter. Thank
you very much, guys.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
Welcome Jack. It happened Here a podcast about things falling
apart and sometimes how to put them back together again.
I'm your host, Bio Wong. Now this is not one
of those times where it's about how to put things
back together again. This is one of those episodes about
why everything is absolutely awful, and one of the reasons
why everything is absolutely awful and something I've been driven

(02:23):
progressively more and more insane by in the past sort
of half a decade is the way people think and
talk about class in the United States. Why, for example,
do people think that Trump is working class? Why am
I watching people argue that being a barista isn't actually
being a worker. Why are all these millionaires driving forward
f one fifties while simultaneously claiming that they are also

(02:45):
somehow working class. Why are billionaires fleeing to Colorado and
Wyoming to cause play as workers about wearing jeans and
T shirts to bars. Why is every weight ring dipshit
posting the same video of a guy in an oil
rig committing approximately sixty thousand oh violations. Why is it
that the only part of the working class that anyone
ever seems to call the working class is the white

(03:07):
working class. Why is it that when people talk about
the white working class and then try to explain it
with data, and this is true across the entire ideological spectrum,
why do they start defining working class by things that
are objectively not class, like education levels. This reached a
breaking point with me a few weeks ago and has
finally caused me to snap and write this. Now, I've

(03:30):
given the game away a little by leading with the
white working class stuff, because a lot of the reason
that everything sounds so nuts is that when people talk
about class in the US, most of the time, what
they're actually talking about is race and gender. And this
pisses me off because I think more about class that
a lot of people with my ideology usually do, and

(03:51):
I think it can actually be a very useful way
to understand the world. However, COMMA thinking and talking about
class as I kind of floating signifier that you can
just jam conservative racial and gender politics into is a
really really bad way to talk about class. On top
of just the racism and the sexism, this way of

(04:12):
looking at class reduces class, which is a social relation,
into esthetics and grievances, and this leads to the question
how did this all happen?

Speaker 3 (04:21):
Now?

Speaker 2 (04:22):
You could take a really expansive look at this here
and go back to Aristotle or start later with Locke
or something, but I'm not going to do that because well, okay,
partially because this would be seventeen years long if I
tried to do this, and this episode is already now
three episodes. The other reason I'm not going to do
this is that the actual story of how everything got

(04:46):
like this is the story of how the right adapted
and distorted the incredibly successful leftist conception of labor that
built the identity of the working class in the eighteen
and nineteen hundreds. And in order to do that, we
need to talk about the labor theory value. Now, when
I talk about the labor theory of value, there are

(05:06):
two things going on here. You have, on the one hand,
Marx's law of value, and then you have the set
of slogans that are passed down the main line of
the workers movements. And these are not These are not
the same thing at all. Even though when someone just
says the labor theory of value, if that's a thing
that you've heard of, you probably immediately think Marx. So,

(05:28):
for example, let's get into a sense of sort of
what this kind of like sloganeering looks like. Here's the
beginning of the Gotha Program, which is the program of
the German Social Democratic Party in late eighteen hundreds. It begins, quote,
labor is the source of all wealth and all culture.
Now Marx hates this line. He writes a thing called

(05:49):
the Critique of the Gotha program where he goes on
a giant rant about how you know, nature also produces
use values and so on and so forth. But you know,
Marx just sort of bitterness at this aside labor is
the source of all wealth is a very very common sentiment.
It's the expression of the sort of common understanding of production, class,

(06:09):
and nature of value. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
As the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, Abraham Lincoln, a
man who is by no means a socialist and is
in fact the President of the United States, talks like this.
Here's Lincoln quote. Labor is prior to an independent of capital.
Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never

(06:31):
have existed if labor had not existed. First, labor is
superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration. Now,
this is obviously not something you'd ever hear from a
president of the United States today, and we'll come back
to Graver's argument about why that is later. But I
want to get a bit deeper into not just the

(06:53):
common conception of the labor theory of value, but what
the sort of capital w capital m workers movement believed
in and this, as it turns out, has a tenuous
relation to Marx, but is not the same thing, and
I think is different enough that I'm actually not going
to spend another like fifteen minutes trying to explain Marx's

(07:15):
version of the labor theory of value or Marx's law
value because it doesn't ultimately matter that much, which is
which is a very weird thing to say about the
actual sort of you know about about about sort of
Marx's role in labor movement, but it kind of doesn't.
So what I'm going to do instead is read, well,

(07:37):
I should, I should, Okay, I should also mention like
we are going to get a bit more into like
the things that Marx actually wrote and why they mattered
to the specific movement like next episode. But you know,
we'll do, we'll do. We'll deal with that tomorrow. And
in the meantime, I'm going to read a bit from
the journal end notes from a Unity and Separation supporting
workers claims to respectability was a vision of their destiny

(08:00):
with five tenants. One, workers were building a new world
with their own hands. Two. In this new world, workers
were the only social group that was expanding, whereas all
other groups were contracting, including the bourgeoisie. Three. Workers were
not only becoming the majority of the population, they were
also becoming a compact mass, the collective worker, who was

(08:24):
being drilled in the factory to act in concert with
the machines. Four. They were thus the only group capable
of managing the new world in accordance with its innermost logic,
neither a hierarchy of order givers and order takers, nor
the irrationality of market fluctuations, but rather in every more
finely grained division of labor. Five. Workers were proving this

(08:47):
vision to be true, since the class was realizing what
it was in a conquest of power, the achievement of
which would make it possible to abolish class society and
thus bring Man's prehistory to a close. This is the
basis of the formation of the identity of the working class.
It's how people understand themselves as workers, you know, and

(09:08):
so in Marxist terms, this is the class in itself
becoming the class for itself.

Speaker 3 (09:12):
You know.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
This is this is this is this is the identity
that produces the workers movement. It's the expression of what
what people believe about themselves. Now there are ingrained ideological
assumptions here that go sort of beyond peer arguments about class. Right,
this is an argument about a very specific kind of
factory worker. And in some sense, I think the focus

(09:35):
on the factory worker as like the sort of emblematic
like bearer of this. And this is true both of
the theorist of the time and from people like end
Notes who are looking back on it from like one
hundred years later. I think this is kind of a
distraction from what a lot of the actual base of
the workers movement is, which is to say, like coal
miners and workers involve energy logistics. You know, you could take,

(09:57):
for example, like the beating heart of the ANEC movement
in much of the twenties and thirties are these Andalusian
coal miners whose militancy and ability to sort of control
the supply of coal that you know, the capitalists class
relied on for production gave them enormous leverage. And as
the sort of as a historian Timothy Mitchell has argued

(10:18):
it was, it was this sort of capacity to you know,
break the economy through shutting off the coal supply, through
strikes and sabotage, which workers you know, were workers at
the time, Like think of like the strike as a
kind of sabotage. And it's it's this capability that informs
a lot of the sort of politics and sense of
possibility of the twentieth century workers movements. And you know,

(10:42):
given what, but you know, like given what what the
people who are like, you know, working in a coal mine,
or like you know, are are like a doc worker
or you know, it's like if you are working in
a factory, right, it makes sense that these people believe, right,
you know, in terms in terms of you know, if

(11:03):
if if you're looking at something like you know, workers
are building the new world with their hands, right, or
like we're you know, we're the only social group that's expanding.
We're the only people who are like capable of like
managing the new world according to its own logic. This
makes a lot of sense if you are one of

(11:23):
the people who live in a world that has effectively disappeared,
now you know, and that and that is a world
where you literally are watching cities be constructed out of
like you know, the tiny shells of villages, right. The
only way you can sort of experience that now is
if you were one of the people in sort of
the late the nineties and the two thousands in China

(11:43):
who you know, like watch shen z En turn from
a fishing village into one of the largest cities in
the world. But that's not really a thing anymore. But
on the other hand, like, this is what these people
are experiencing. And this is a group of people who
can literally feel in their hands the sort of the
power or in the value of the labor in what
they're producing. They can, you know, they can see commodities

(12:05):
appear in the world, and they can know that it was,
you know, by their hands that the world was built.
And this is not you know, this is not purely
a metaphor, right, These are people who are literally creating
the world around them. To quote one of the verses
of Solidarity Forever that modern trade unions hilariously notably do
not include in the version of In the version of

(12:29):
the song that they tend to sing at things, the
trade union version drops a bunch of verses, and one
of those verses is in our hands is placed to
power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might
of armies multiplied a thousandfold. We can bring to birth
a new world from the ashes of the old. For
the union makes us strong. And this is both the

(12:50):
positive vision of the workers movement and its own sort
of theoretical self conception wrapped into one. It is the
sort of rosy romantic picture of what the Worker's movement is. However, Comma,
this is the incredibly romantic version of this. And before
we sort of leave the world of pure romance and

(13:11):
go into these sort of dirty and grimy worlds of
reality where everything kind of sucks and things are not
what they normally seem, we are going to take an
ad break and we're back now. There are a lot

(13:38):
of things about this workers movement that if you just
sort of look at it theoretically, or if you know
you're looking at these one of the sort of like
incredibly sort of rosy self caricatures. I guess if you're
purely looking at the kind of propaganda that the movement
produces in order to create itself, you were going to

(14:01):
get a very distorted picture of sort of what was
actually going on on the ground. And this also makes
it very very difficult to understand what happened, because you know,
if you want to understand how this movement was defeated
and how the like all of the sort of branches
of the worker's movements, like all of his different ideologies,

(14:24):
all of those different manifestations, are essentially destroyed. You have
to get to the point where you are you start
to realize that the ideological conception of productivity, right of
of the producer, of you know, like of of what
the worker is, was never as sort of dry and
objective as theorists wanted us. And you know, you got

(14:44):
the sense that they wanted like themselves to believe. Case
in point is the nature of what Marx calls the
lump and proletariat. So here's from endnotes again, who were
these lump and proletarians preaching anarchy? Attempts to spell that
out usually took the form not of structural analysis, but

(15:04):
rather of long lists of shady characters, lists which collapsed
in on themselves in a frenzied incoherence. Here is Marx's
paradigmatic discussion of the lump and proletariat from the eighteenth
through mayor of Louis Bonaparte, on the pretext of founding
a benevolent society, The lump and proletariat of Paris had
been organized into secret sections, each section led by bonapartist agents.

(15:31):
These lumpins supposedly consisted of quote, vagabonds, discharged soldiers and jailbirds,
escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mounton bunks, lazaraini, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps,
brothel keepers, porters, litter roddy, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.

(15:53):
In short, the whole indefinite, disintegrating mass thrown hither and
thither from which the front call Labohm. Is there any
truth in this paranoid fantasy? Do escaped convicts and organ
grinders share a common counter revolutionary interest with beggars, which
distinguishes them from the common mass worker, who are apparently

(16:15):
revolutionary by nature. To think so is insane. The lumpen
proletariat was a specter haunting the worker's movements. If that
movement constituted itself for the dignity of workers, then the
lumpen was the figure of the undignified worker, or miraculoately,
the lumpen was one of its figurations. All of the
movement's efforts to give dignity of the class were supposedly

(16:38):
undermined by these dissolute figures drunk singing in the streets,
petty criminals, and prostitutes. References to a lumpen proletariat registered
what was a simple truth. It was difficult to convince
workers to organize as workers, since mostly they didn't care
about socialism. A great many of the poor, especially the
very poor, did not think or behave themselves as proletarians,

(16:59):
or find the organizations and modes of actions of the
movement as applicable or relevant to them. In their fear
of time, they'd rather go to the pub than sing workers' songs.
In the figure of the lumpin we discover the dark
underside of the affirmation of the working class. It was
a biting class hatred. Workers saw themselves as originating out
of a stinking morass from Kotsky's The Class Struggle quote.

(17:22):
At the time of the beginning of modern industry, the
term proletariat implied absolute degeneracy, and there are persons who
believe this is still the case. Moreover, capitalism was trying
to push them back into the muck. Thus, the crisis
tendencies of capitalism could only be resolved in one of
two ways, the victory of the working class or in
its becoming lumpen. Now you can see a couple of

(17:44):
things very clearly here. One is there's been a lot
of attempts to resuscitate the lump and proletariat as like
a functional class, especially see this especially in the seventies.
And I really, I really would recommend those people go
back and read what Marks actually wrote about the love
and proletariat, because it makes no sense. It is just

(18:05):
like absolute sort of blithering nonsense. And the reason it's
this kind of like incredibly bizarre, like paranoid, you know,
list of fantasies is that beneath the sort of like
foe of scientific objectiveness of the workers' movement is this
incredibly petty moralism and a set of sort of Victorian

(18:25):
social values with all of the sort of cruelty of
their aristocratic masters. And I want to sort of point
out here like this this kind of thinking, you know,
this kind of like we are the movement that is
a liberation of the class. But in order to do that,
we need to prove that like we are like actually
sort of like real dignified human beings, and that there's

(18:47):
another group of people who are just us, but we
hate them because they don't behave the way that we
think they're supposed to. This is a very very common
thing that you see in basically all social movements, especially
in their earliest and like shittiest iterations. You see this
in the early feminist movement. I mean, you see this
still in the feminist movement, but there are sections of

(19:08):
it that do this too. There's a really good piece
called some Like It Hot by Sophie Lewis about the
sort of feminist reaction to Marilyn Monroe, and I'm gonna
read a little bit from it. One of the things
that you get this sense of is that people like
Gloria Steinem just absolutely hate Marilyn Monroe, and you know,
the stuff they write about her is stuff that, like

(19:31):
you just will be like almost incomprehensible to imagine any
of these people or even just sort of like you know,
not even like like a modern sort of like conservative
like writing on purpose about a woman and being allowed
to sort of get away with it. I mean, they're right,
just horrible things about her. I'm gonna read a little

(19:51):
bit from the piece. Perhaps it was Monroe's dumping of
three husbands. Two of them were famous and powerful. That
posed quote no adult challenge to Steinem's mind. Or perhaps
Steinem's comments closed nothing so much as her own inability
to see high fem people as subjects. Here, in case
it might pierce the vail is Monroe Apagem written on

(20:14):
walderf a story a letter paper in nineteen fifty five,
quote everyone has violence in themselves. I am violent. Here
is another spoken to photographer Bruno Bernard in nineteen fifty six.
Both the anti communists on the House Committee on Un
American Activities and the movie censors on the production board
should be buried alive. Perhaps Steinem, who proudly worked for

(20:35):
the CIA in the fifties and sixties, would not appreciate
this kind of courage, the courage of one Norma, who,
when notified by the police at Los Angeles roadblock in
nineteen forty nine that a nearby house was being monitored
for ties to communists, shouted the officer's ear off and
went straight to tip off blacklisted screenwriters Norma and Ben Bauersman.

(20:55):
And so you can sort of see what's happening here, right.
It's a very similar thing where there are these sort
of like, you know, you have these very sort of
like like respectable mainstream feminists who look at someone like
Marilyn Monroe, who you know, and they just fucking hate her.
They absolutely despise her because she is sort of she

(21:16):
she is the image of what they sort of think
that they're fighting against, right, Like they're they're, they're, they're,
they're what liberation looks like for them is to like
not be this kind of woman. And that's, you know,
and this is that's the sort of unspoken or so
sometimes just overtly spoken core of what a lot of
this stuff is. And you know, and this is how

(21:37):
these people like can justify like working for the fucking CIA,
right and you know, somehow claiming to themselves to be
like superior feminists feminists to Marilyn Monroe, who you know,
at like great personal costs and at great danger, like
you know, fought Hugh wac and shit. So you know,
this kind of like we are the group who is
going to free our own group. We're also not like

(21:59):
because we're not like those other people who are literally
the same as us, but we don't like them because
we don't think they're respectable enough. This is a very
very old sort of trend, but it has real social consequences,
and it's you know, it's it's a really disastrous strategy
because it means that all of these movements have these
sort of flanks from which they can be attacked. One

(22:31):
of these flanks for the workers movements, and one that's
become increasingly important now, is the kind of producer's conception
of what a worker is. You know, this is the
man sort of creating the new world with his bare hands.
The problem is that, you know, this is never what
most labor actually was. Here's David Graeber again. In fact,

(22:53):
there was never a time when most workers worked in
a factory, Even in the days of Karl Marx or
Charles Dickens. Working class neighborhoods housed far more maids, boot blacks, dustmen, cooks, nurses, cabbies,
school teachers, prostitutes, caretakers, and costermongers than employees and coal mines,
textile mills or iron foundries. Are these former jobs productive

(23:15):
in what sense? And for whom? Who produces? Us who flay?
Is because of these ambiguities that such issues are typically
brushed aside when people are arguing about value but doing
so blinds us to the reality that most working class labor,
whether you're carried out by men or women, actually resembles
what we are typically think of as women's work. Looking

(23:36):
after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring,
anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking, not to mention,
caring for, monitoring and maintaining plants, animals, machines, and other objects.
Then it involves hammering, carving, hoisting, or harvesting things. And
you know, you can see in this sort of issue, right,

(23:58):
you can see the axis upon which the workers movement
is going to be split in the eighties and nineties.
If you can convince a set of workers that what
they're doing is you know, masculine productive labor, right, and
that you know what those other people are doing, is
this like feminine care labor that doesn't produce anything. You
can turn the entire ideology of the workers movement on

(24:19):
its head and transform it from a liberatory ideology about
the end of the class system to a patriarchal ideology
about the necessity of labor to sort of manhood and masculinity.
And once that ideological shift is made, you can start
writing off entire fields of laborers as being insufficiently quote
unquote productive or you know, as the right wing shift

(24:40):
renders it, you can say productive and mean insufficiently masculine
account as part of like the working class TM. This problem,
Graver argues, is the consequence of the sort of maniacal
focus on production that defined the workers movement, because it
obscures the fact that, again, most of actual labor is labor.

(25:01):
And this is something we've discussed at length on this
show in sort of ethnic graphic, if not theoretical terms.
While talking to Starbucks workers and in these conversations, it
becomes almost immediately clear that a huge part of the
job has you know, very little to do with making
coffee or even sort of classical customer management, and like
the interpretive and emotional labor of doing service work, what

(25:23):
these workers are actually doing is acting as a replacement
for the collapsing American social safety net.

Speaker 1 (25:28):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
They are taking care of and literally saving the lives
of people who capitalism has spat out and left to die.
And this is by by any like any actual you know,
I'm not gonna say objective standard, because I don't like
there is an objective standard for what we're like how
much work something is. But you know, in terms of
the amount of labor, in terms of the difficulty of labor,

(25:50):
in terms of like what he is being expected of
expected of these workers, this is incredibly intense difficult labor.
But you know, because of the sort of patriarchal like
idea and conception that has sort of consumed what our
sort of collective conception of what a quote unquote real

(26:12):
job is, the enormous amount of care labor that bariss
do every day. And you know, there's there's a good
argument Graber makes a very similar argument to this, that
you can look at the entire job, and you can
look at like most economic production as care labor, right,
because you're producing this coffee in order to care for someone.
You make a bridge in order to like, like in
order so that people can use it.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
Right.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
But you know, there's a good argument that like all
everything in Barista does is care labor. But because you know,
it's not like making cars or being one of the
last fifty thousand coal miners left in the US, it's
not considered real labor. And this, all of this is
just a bomb that is left sitting under the ideological

(26:58):
core of the workers' movements, and that bomb probably would
have just gone off on its own, you know what
I say, on its own, that bomb probably would have
been set off by something we're going to talk about
or tomorrow, which is the shift in the labor's force
in a lot of countries that sort of de industrialized
towards this kind of labor being the sort of standard like,

(27:20):
you know, being just even more obviously the standard form
of labor. But the ruling class figured out a way
to sort of set this bomb off and ensure that,
you know, and ensure that it would like just detonate
the workers movement immediately. And the thing that they figured
out to set this bomb off is racism. And that

(27:42):
is what I'm going to talk about tomorrow, the story
of how the fusion of racism and sexism that may
well be remembered by historians is the force that burned
the entire world, consumed what was left of the workers movement,
and turned this country into neoliberal Reagan hell.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
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