“Capital therefore takes no account of the health and the
length of life of the worker…” Karl Marx, Capital Volume I

“Joe,” I interrupted, pettishly, “how can you call me Sir?” Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

I came home to Montana for one reason only: to care for my bedridden mother, who is recovering from a rather serious medical procedure. Differently from past trips home, I came bearing contraband in my suitcase. Namely, a copy of Marx’s Capital Volume 1. I say contraband because, while my mostly apolitical and disinterested mother simply turns a blind eye, my reading Marx is actually a source of tension between myself and my increasingly conservative father. Or, if not a source of outright tension—we learned long ago to forego heated political arguments—indicative of a certain kind of distance that has grown between my bourgeois life and the relatively parochial working-class one my parents lead here in Montana. The tension over our divergent politics, represented by Capital, is fetishized: merely an appearance that hides a deeper, more concrete relation tied to changing class relations and the difficulty in reconciling them.

Reading Marx here has (unanticipatedly) produced a groundswell of emotion inside of me, related starkly to the permanence of class and the collision of my newly bourgeois life and my proletarian roots—anchored here in Montana, the place that even after years away my imagination still conjures when I say the word “home.” Reading Capital here has shone a light on the way in which class can be “transcended” and yet persist, the ways in which working-class people rationalize and cope with class society, and the ways in which these rationalizations and coping mechanisms produce tensions among us. Finally, it has shone a light on how shallow a victory it is to move out of the working class, when you have to leave others behind.

Origins

I was not raised with many bourgeois values, securities, or pleasures. I never learned to read music or play instruments, to “appreciate” film or art. Attempts at learning a second language had to wait until college, my going to which made me the first in my family to do so. I was not raised visiting museums or galleries. I was not endowed with that familiar object of sentimentality, the “childhood home,” that single structure in which childhoods are spent, memories stored, and heights marked on door frames. Rather, I moved once or twice a year for the entirety of my youth, into relatively more or less comfortable spaces, always with the understanding that the latest place would not be permanent, that there was the potential for improvement in the next move but also that things could get more difficult. Nor was I raised with familial or communal networks that could be relied on. So-called social capital was low. I always recognized that many had it worse. The specter of my mother’s own childhood loomed large in my own—the destitution and violence of her’s were at once uncommon to me and yet common through transference. Long before I had ever read her, I resonated with Gillian Rose’s admission that “in my mother’s family I find only devastation, made doubly demonical and destructive by the diversion of vast amounts of psychic energy devoted to its denial.” To that end, reminders were sometimes given, explicitly and implicitly, that in many ways we were lucky.

Far from having a terrible childhood—so many in this country have it markedly worse than I did—I had one that is instantly recognizable to millions of Americans. In other words, I had a normal working-class childhood. There is nothing inherently honorablein the struggles of my childhood. Just as we should not speak of noble savages, we should not speak of a somehow pure and honorable proletariat. If Marxism stands for anything at all, it is the self-abolishment of this class, not the idolization of it. The one bourgeois value that was instilled in me by my objectively un-bourgeois family was the value of education, the American dream: going to college and finding a different life than my family had known for generations before me. This is exactly what I did. It was this process of becoming more bourgeois and professional that created dizzying tensions in my relations with my parents.  This process is a testament to the fact that the individualized improvement of one’s lot is a shallow stand-in for collective emancipation, for more thoroughgoing transformation.

My mother had a great many jobs in my childhood: as a nurse’s assistant at an old folks home, caring for the elderly, moving them, feeding them, bathing them; as maid in a hotel, stripping beds, washing laundry, rapidly tightening sheets and fluffing pillows; as a secretary, taking calls, filing, struggling through Microsoft Office; as a caterer, cooking, prepping and delivering food for large events (often for the very wealthy); briefly a barista; and then finally some years of better financial fortune as what Marx would call a “small master” of a daycare, which began with a few small children in our living room and expanded until she willingly shuttered it last year. All of this work—much of it caregiving—was backbreaking and took its toll on my mother. The necessity of her recent surgery, and her crippling inability to move in the months leading up to it, can (I have no doubt) be traced back to these years of proletarian labor.

My father for his part had fewer jobs, mostly in the field he was trained in for a year back in the late 80s: HVAC—monitoring and installing heating and cooling systems. If one is not familiar with this line of work, suffice it to say that it is almost unimaginable the weight of these systems, of boilers, rooftop cooling units, and the like, and the difficulty and strain of lifting and installing them. On top of this my father had his fair share of second jobs at night, including multiple stints as a pizza delivery man. While I am here for my mother’s surgery today, I have no doubt that in the future I may be back for his own. He walks with an uneven gait now and sometimes cannot feel one of his feet. Not to mention the quite serious heart condition he has developed as a result of years of strain, paired with the food and alcohol choices he made to deal with these years. In other words, as Didier Eribon says, “a workers body, as it ages, reveals to anyone who looks at it the truth about the existence of classes.”

Coping and Reproduction

How could I read chapter ten of Capital—the Working Day—about the perils of overwork and not think of my mother and father? As I sit with my mostly bedridden mother, chatting, playing games, sometimes just ruminating in silence, I am reminded all too viscerally that the “hidden injuries of class” are not so hidden. Not for her, and not for my father. They are felt every day: in the hands, the feet, the hips, and the heart. Of course, when Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb wrote The Hidden Injuries of Class in 1972, it was psychological ailments that they sought to bring to the surface, and not physical ones. Hidden Injuries is an extraordinary glimpse into the modern interdependencies of dignity and freedom, with the former being difficult to feel when the latter is restricted by the class divisions that characterize capitalist modernity. To cope with these tensions, working-class people rely on so-called badges of ability to feel a sense of worth. These include the pursuit of education and self-sacrifice. Both are more than merely a means of achieving better material conditions: they are ways of asserting control over one’s life, exercising freedom, and demonstrating the virtues that we presume are valued in society. They are, in other words, a pursuit of both better living conditions and of dignity. When one becomes educated, job opportunities present themselves that are based more squarely on creativity, autonomy, and rationality, and less on following orders. Barring this, those workers stuck at the bottom of hierarchical work structures can at least assert their autonomy through sacrifice. They can deny themselves in various ways to make a better life for others. Namely, their children. In so doing, they assert control over their life in a way that is denied to them by the workplace and the class structure. Sacrifice, then, is “the final demonstration of virtue when all else fails.” All of this means that, in Sennett and Cobb’s words, “the psychological motivation instilled by a class society is to heal a doubt about the self,” not to motivate one to acquire more material goods for their own sake.

With regard to this so-called self, badges of ability separate the individual from the mass and give one “the right” to transcend one’s social origins. In other words, the possibility of feeling dignity is tied to the internalization and naturalization of inequality and the assertion that the worker is a unique individual alone. Striving for these badges allows workers to cope with life under capitalism, to imagine that a different future is possible for themselves and their loved ones. However, when these attempts are thwarted, workers feel as if they have no one to blame but themselves. More perniciously still, even when these pursuits succeed, they can cause damage.

My parents’ sacrifice allowed me to get an education and move into the professional classes, but in doing so opened gulfs between us. The very act of my becoming what they wanted me to be can only but highlight their class position and “inadequacies.” It is not uncommon for acts of sacrifice to be precursors to feelings of betrayal. My parents sacrificed so that I could become more educated, successful, and refined. But when these desires came to fruition in my academic accolades, my interests, choice of career, and adoption of radical politics, they appeared as me turning my back on my origins, looking down on it, and thus on my parents too. They appear as both a success and an act of betrayal. Our societies suggest to us that these developments, these divergences, can only be resolved with one motto: never the twain shall meet. One actualizes and legitimizes their new class position through the rejection of what they left behind. The left behind, consciously and unconsciously, and assuming they desired your success, help actualize your new class position too, but they do it in an antipodal manner: they burrow into their class identity and the idiosyncrasies that are allegedly natural to it. By owning their “backwardness,” they allow their children to fully differentiate themselves from their own pasts, but making differences in taste, politics, and manner particularly stark. This is endemic to capitalism, whether in its early or its late epoch. Think of Great Expectations and its humble blacksmith Joe, who begins calling his young brother-in-law Pip—increasingly acculturated into the gentlemanly classes— “Sir” while unconvincingly wearing his nicest clothes in Pip’s presence. This, ultimately, is a shallow gesture: Pip remains ashamed of Joe, and Joe remains a blacksmith, though one with a polite tongue and a relatively clean suit. And so, Joe concludes that he and Pip “is not two figures to be together in London; nor yet anywhere else.” By the novel’s end, Pip has seen the error in his ways, but only after a series of tragedies and shocks.

I would like to think that I never felt this way about my upbringing or my parents, and therefore never needed an about-face à la Pip. But neither the truth of that claim nor the stories we tell ourselves matter much; our society is structured in a way that pushes us toward certain conclusions. Because our capitalist society draws inferences about a person’s value from the social (perhaps more precisely financial) value of their output, and because that social value is arbitrarily inflected with notions of control, autonomy, flexibility, etc. the juxtaposition of a job like mine at a university and most of my parents’ jobs has the effect of accentuating feelings of indignity, because capitalist society places more value on one of these things than the other. Simply put, even at the familial level, capitalism has a way of mucking up feelings of love and pride by mixing them with feelings of bitterness, betrayal, shame, and resignation.

When my parents did not resign themselves to “backwardness,” they—lacking higher education, access to networks of connected individuals, and more—strove to acquire badges of ability in the only ways they could: through frugality and entrepreneurship. Sometimes, this meant attempts at starting a small business, or at a minimum getting wrapped up in various multi-level-marketing schemes. Through these, one can attempt to exercise a little control over their own life. For the working-class person, these come with difficulties. This is not only because the deck is stacked against you and not only because, despite your demonstration of control and autonomy, dignity will be rare and fleeting. It is also because these acts require the emboldening and reification of the very class system that has oppressed you.

This is to say that we are talking about something more than mere psychology: we are talking about something integral to the reproduction of capitalism itself. Marx saw this clearly even 170 years ago. As the Grundrisse shows, the laborer may become tired of simply exchanging his use-value for mere subsistence, and so instead withdraw part of their wages from circulation and treat them as a means of building wealth, as opposed to a “vanishing medium of exchange” for subsistence products. This of course requires of the worker, in Marx’s words, “self-denial, saving, cutting corners in his consumption.” This can be done on behalf of himself, or those reliant on him and is, in other words, what Sennett and Cobb call sacrifice. Marx takes this notion of self-denial one step further, noting that it can mean denying oneself not just in the consumptive sphere, but the denial of rest, the denying of “any existence other than his as a worker.” Plainly, working more and spending less time with loved ones, leisuring, or simply resting and recovering. From both cases, Marx draws the critical insight that such denials can only occur at the individual-level. This is not because the capacity or desire to make such sacrifices is somehow rare among workers. And it is not even because dignity is equated with self-assertion, as Sennett and Cobb have it.

Rather, it is because a collective expression of such denial is fundamentally impossible under capitalism. The closer the mass of workers moves towards this expression, the clearer it becomes to capitalists that wages are in general too high, that workers are receiving more in wages than is a fair exchange for their “necessary labor-time,” i.e., the amount required to reproduce themselves, to subsist. Thus, “an individual worker can be industrious above average…only because another lies below the average.” In other words, the capitalist mode of production relies on the desires of individual workers to make a better life for themselves, as a way of regulating and reproducing itself. To the extent that capitalism pushes us towards sacrifice, it is a sacrifice with a double nature. It means on the one hand self-sacrifice, and on the other the ritualistic sacrifice of our fellow workers, even our families. For Marx, the best workers can hope for from their acts of self-denial is the creation of what we would today call a rainy-day fund: the capacity to store a little and weather the routine fluctuations, from dips to collapses, of our capitalist economies. Today, even this is unattainable for many working-class families, who would be plunged into destitution at the onset of a serious medical event or car trouble, let alone a recession.

Bonapartism and Emancipation

Any political differences I have with my father grow out of these phenomena. My father’s increasingly right-wing politics are, to my eye, the product of decades of disappointment, of effort and pain that has gone unrewarded or even been punished, grown out of the dichotomy of how hard he works and how little he has to show for it, financially and in terms of dignity. In a society that privileges badges of ability, these feel like personal failures and not the result of systemic forces. In light of this, he has for many years internalized the fact that one can only get ahead at the expense of others. His political anger seems to stem from his so often being at the receiving end of this formula, rather than its beneficiary. This has inspired a turn inwards, away from society, away from democratic participation—itself the kernel of right-wing politics. Fifty years after Sennett and Cobb, my father is emblematic of one of the tendencies they exhume in their work: if you don’t belong to society, society can’t hurt you. In the absence of self-representation, we can settle for a little self-improvement, which I myself have been the beneficiary of, the beneficiary of my parents’ hard work, of their pains, their injuries. Politically, this manifests as a kind of “plague on both their houses” approach to politics, though it is in fact a faux neutrality that has been accompanied by an increasingly libidinal attraction to right-wing Bonapartism. The attraction to a Bonapartist figure is ultimately tied to the supremacy of badges of ability in American life, and the failure to acquire and benefit from them. In the helplessness of this feeling, it becomes easy to embrace the idea that you’ll never have what it takes to succeed and so should defer to another—preferably someone who claims to use their badges on your behalf.

Feelings of shame and inadequacy related to lacking badges of ability are, in today’s populist era, mixed with a kind of misplaced pride. Rather than feeling bitter about being looked down upon and striving to elevate yourself into the class that does the condescending looking, there is a sense of leaning into being “deplorable.” Differently from the tendency I illustrated earlier with reference to Great Expectations, this is now a political strategy and not an interpersonal affair. Of course, the working class has always had a sense of pride, but today’s pride is of a static nature: it is a pride built upon supposedly unchanging symbols, cultural characteristics and various other motifs. This differs from previous kinds of working-class pride that were rooted in imaginaries of transformation, either individual or collective. Psychologically, working-class pride would seem on the surface to be an improvement on working-class shame. Indeed, then as now there is much to feel proud of for working-class people who manage to improve their lot or give their children a markedly better life. Given the hand they were dealt, they chose the better virtues, strove for the badges of ability, and bore the injuries. To be quite personal, my parents feel immense pride in the fact that they made a better life for me and my siblings. I, tensions and all, reciprocate emotions to them that are colored with pride, gratitude, respect and responsibility. But we have to be clear that these feelings can be incredibly deep at the personal level and incredibly shallow beyond that: they are a sign of defeat, more than anything to be uncritically celebrated. Uncritically leaning into these feelings requires that we accept the capitalist mode of production as natural, perennial and even virtuous. Worse still, it requires that we turn a blind eye to those we have to sacrifice to feel a bit of pride, a bit of joy, a bit of love. These are tradeoffs we must refuse.  

I am proud of where I came from, and proud of where I made it to as well. But one must be careful in shedding off shame in favor of pride; we must not swing too far the other way and embrace a fetishization of the downtrodden, the forgotten or the left behind. As Adorno once put it, the proletariat has “no advantage over the bourgeois except their interest in the revolution,” and today they have not even that. Thus, while an idealization of the working class was never justified, it is even less so today. We must be comfortable living inside the following contradiction—of being proud of who we are, while at the same time rejecting the conditions that produce us, as we move towards what ought to be. That is what it means to be on the Left. As Leszek Kolakowski reminds us “the Left…is a movement of negation towards the existing world. For this very reason it is…a constructive force. It is, simply, a quest for change.” Thus, our project cannot only entail bringing our hidden injuries into the light, wearing them on our sleeve as the populists would have us do—it must strive to abolish these injuries altogether, for ourselves and for future generations.