Against the Common Good

Blue Labour & Communism

“They have already told us that there is
nothing universally human in all that we
propose. And they are right. Indeed, here
there is nothing of the bourgeoisie's
particular interest. Have you ever seen
a working class struggle with a platform
of generically human demands?
There is nothing more limited and partial,
nothing less universal in the bourgeois
sense, than the struggle which workers
wage on the factory floor against
their direct boss.” "
Mario Tronti

Essential to Blue Labour is a conceptual refoundation of socialism in Catholic Social Thought. This theoretical break is motivated by a suspicion that classical social democracy and Communism follow a machinic outlook commensurate to pro-capitalist liberalism, denying the humanity of workers, transforming them into mere factors of production. Maurice Glasman in his Economics of the Common Good quotes Pope Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, the premises of what would become Catholic Social Thought, stating that capitalism “violates right order whenever capital so employs the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice and the common good.” Glasman speaks of labour formally unencumbered by the singular ends of capitalist profit or production-as-such as a (moral) good, advocating an economic order which elevates the practice of work “not exclusively as the immediate fulfilment of a task but as something that is received from the past and oriented towards the future”. Labour then is something which ought to be conditioned in such a manner as to “constrain capital and promote virtue”; Labour is a tradition, an inheritance, the workplace a site of meaning and value transcendent of capitalist value markers: interconnecting systems of fealty, obligation, and mutual patronage are what makes the class. This is also Glasman’s conception of the Labour Party/movement, a locus of tradition commensurate with that of a Church. What does this mean in real terms, in the real conditions of our present economic arrangement?

(Side note: Definitions and conceptual prescriptions are inevitably contentious, and before the formation of a Party or some kind of organisation with sufficient social legitimacy to force a concept into popular use it's not necessary to lay out an exact name for a mode of production. Having said that, I find EdBerg’s Metacartel thesis very useful, having infinitely more explanatory power as a determinate element within the contemporary social-economic order than overly prescriptive terms like ‘technofeudalism’ and the like, so as ever this post owes a significant debt to Ed’s ideas and work.)

I've written on a number of occasions that I don't buy into the ‘essential reality’ of capitalism, in the applicability of that word to describe our present mode of production, that it's more correct to say we live in a protracted interregnum (made all the more sinister and parodical by the existence of the Chinese socialist system). Our economic arrangement is the product of a self-dissolving transitional period which seems to constantly reproduce economic justifications for its perpetuation. The capitalist class, through the pursuit of its general interest, inadvertently socialises production, dismantles the system’s competitive foundations and reproduces circuits of accumulation in a malformed associative mode characterised by the determinacy of cartels, the transformation of the capitalist from an owner driven by profit accumulation into a function of asset management, the objective expropriation of private property through bureaucratic-managerial capture; a revolution in the forces and relations of production locked in perpetuity by the incapacity of a political form to take the reins and direct it to completion, to a self-conscious and sufficiently associative economic arrangement.

In this order both labour and capital appear terminally estranged from their material groundings, as if the dynamics of exploitation have gained a transcendental status. The contradiction between the relations and the forces of production at once appear more obvious than they ever have, yet their overcoming appears permanently deferred. Thinking on these lines, that the relations of production are a transcendental cage, reinforces the present state of affairs and spurs on the now hegemonic intellectual tendency whereby socialists constrain their approach according to certain fundamental ‘laws’ of political economy. Blue Labour don't align with the broad left in their particular critique, but their approach still takes prima facie the permanence of capitalist relations of production. Their solution is to invert the standard Fabian approach and focus rather on the perceived value of labour as a site of certain emergent non-capitalist social behaviours, inheritances, and activities, the ‘remainder’ of capitalist exploitation which might be cultivated to eschew the sense of meaninglessness and psychological fatigue endemic to labouring in the present arrangement. The group advocates “a theory of Labour value in which work constitutes value, in both the subject, the person who works, and in the object, the commodity produced”, that “Labour has value in itself and is constitutive of the person and of the species.” This posits the ‘sociality’ of social labour in what Marxists would perhaps call the non-essential, residual features of social labour. The struggle therefore is not to end labour but to end the impersonalisation of labour, to reacquaint the worker with a prior form of economic activity, in definite ‘places’ as the grounds of a fruitful comradeship and solidarity. It's easy enough to admit that when a Marxist reads 19th and 20th Century canonical texts, wherein struggle is confined to the factory or the workshop, that a certain sentimentality can arise, a longing for the simpler dynamics of outright and naked exploitation. For one, the roadmap to revolution is more straightforward (all the good writing was done in and for this period), but further and more fundamental is that there’s an aesthetic which is naturally conjured by contemplating the old form of capitalist-era social labour, the Ken Loach vision of a proletarian commonplace, a ‘jumpers for goalposts’ socialism. Intensified automation, deskilling, offshoring, the disintegration of any determinate ‘meaning’ in labour, to any tangible essential grounds for the reproduction of the working class as a class; Blue Labour seek a regime to reimpose meaning at once politically and romantically, in the quiet life of the worker. This is an appealing prospect for the Communist inculcated in the image of proletarian power and the revolutionary drama of factory and workshop militancy handed to them by the socialist tradition.

Above all what has always distinguished Communism from social democracy is that Communism is the theory and practice of class suicide. This is the case in actuality, in the active political pursuit of the new mode of production, as well as in theory, in the making of the Communist agent and their approach to economic history. Marx writes to a mutual striving of both reality to theory and theory to reality, a possibility pried open by the convulsive arrival of the proletariat to the scene of world history. The secret of proletarian existence is the dissolution of the social order which brought it about and therefore the death of the class by its own hands. Social democracy is, from the Communist point of view, a recoiling from the proletariat's world-historic mission. The social reality of the working class, its congealed traditions and obligations, have come into irreconcilable contradiction with the responsibility history bestowed upon it – a crystallisation of the proletariat into something other than its material ‘classness’, rather a set of definite sentiments, cosmetic characteristics, behaviours, and so forth. A retreat into sentiment has caused history to vomit up new force to complete the mission, something born from the consequences of the proletariat’s recoiling, its refusal of refusal. Modern bureaucracy was birthed in class struggle, on the basic level by the compounding social-organisational complexities incurred by the intensification and expansion of capitalist markets as well as from the movement of capital in the concessions it has granted to the working class as means of ensuring profitability and political hegemony. The working class is the motor of capitalist development, every concession made by the capitalist to the worker is a means of evading a final confrontation, the working class’ confrontation with itself. The political history of capital is “a succession of attempts by capital to free itself from the class relation ... successive attempts to emancipate itself from the working class” (Tronti). Each successive attempt has brought about fresh concessions, each layer in the compounding sediment of capitalist concession incubated a strata to facilitate and meditate class struggle, an element intimately bound with the procedure and the reality of the conflict itself. The figure of the trade union bureaucrat folds in with the vestigial dispossessed petit-bourgeoisie and the asset-enriched workers of the Thatcher generation, along with all the other disparate social forces untethered from essential economic determination to form a new social element, and therefore a new social interest. The economic conditions which gave rise to the ‘PMC’ and engendered the emergence of Blue Labour within intellectual British socialism are the same which eschewed the Communist movement, that a social force came into being with no precedence and no coherence to the index of historical memory which we seem to inevitably fall back on to decode the present.

Marxists denying outright the ‘classness’ of the ‘PMC’, typically in defence of orthodoxy against revisionism or intellectual trendiness, end up smothering the orthodoxy of method in an affirmation of eternal laws of economic history, privileging the one prescribed exit in a ‘classical’ conception of proletarian revolution. Whether the ‘classness’ of the ‘PMC’ is valid or not, it stands to reason that economic determination in our period doesn't lie in the hands of the ‘classical’ bourgeoisie. Every Marxist truistically understands that empiricism and classical economics amounts to the fetishisation of ‘established facts’ of a given period confirmed as iron-clad laws stretching across time to conjure an impenetrable, transhistorical condition of economic and social ‘reality’. Marxists have made their own equivalent to this, a fetishistic submission to the “laws” of another period’s class relations (at least to their understanding of it), a superimposition of different antagonistic complexes conditioned in different forces and relations of production, mistaking an instance in the disclosure of the real movement for its revealed totality (this is something Haz points out which is worth paying attention to, why Marx subtitles Capital as a ‘critique’: the text isn't intended to be an addition to the corpus of classical political economy as such, rather to unravel classical political economy through pushing its axioms and presuppositions to their terminus, revealing their internal contradictions. Taking “laws” from Capital, or any of Marx’s texts, is obviously antithetical to the method, amounting rather to a repudiation of Marx and an unwitting subjugation to the object of his critique).

To justify the controversial proposal that the professional element constitutes a class we have to wade further into its genealogy and determine what qualitative distinction lies between the proletarian class and the ‘professional-managerial’ class. We have to outline what makes the developed form of the proletariat as a politicised, mobilised class a determinate social force in the relations of production, above merely their being exploited (the genesis of a class is their entering into organised conflict with another class; otherwise they remain, in the case of the proletariat, a group of exploited individuals). The proletariat asserts itself traditionally through the trade union and the independent working class political party. What belongs to the ‘classical’ proletariat is their capacity to sell labour power and therefore their capacity to refuse to work, to stop the motor of profitability. According to the classical formula at a higher level this knowledge of refusal lays the ground for more abstract political demands pursued by the working-class party; all of the above can be called the ‘power’ of the proletariat, at its essential level their self-recognition as a class in the knowledge of their capacity to refuse work, channeled into political organisation, the demands and horizons then expressed in a more or less coherent program of action, tactics, strategy, and finally an ideology and culture centred on this political activity, unifying the abstract and concrete aspects of the class into a proletarian aesthetic distinct from and opposed to those of the other classes. The power of the proletariat is always dependent on their capacity to refuse work – we can say that each member of the class carries some ‘parcel’ of determinacy which is more sufficiently realised through the labour movement, in collective struggle. Individual capacity is granted by the social organisation of the capitalist workplace, by the level of technical development, everything which emanates from the labouring, even at the abstract or aesthetic level, is routed to this originary point, the workplace being the concrete site of exploitation and struggle. The typical markers of ‘PMC culture’, HR and complaints departments, litigious behaviour amongst employees regarding contractual benefits and so forth, are consequences of class struggle, bearing the mark of their prior form as weapons of the labour movement from the factory floor and the subsequent concessions granted from the capitalist in response. The outgrowths of formal social democracy developing according to a demand for institutional protection; striking as a professional lacks the immediate material consequences of the refusal to work in the classical industrial strike, inflicting consequences within a legal framework, bureaucratic or managerial misconduct according to employment law, etc.; the enculturation of the worker by a highly developed outgrowth of class struggle itself, not an imposition from outside but a direct consequence of qualities inherent to the working class, specifically the working class in its most developed form as a militant class engaged in political struggle. The ‘PMC’ can be read as the overcoming of the proletariat without the overcoming of capital, a suppression of the proletariat’s capacity for refusal by an ever-deminishing, thinning parcelisation of political determinacy as a direct consequence of the political activities of the proletariat itself. The professional element pursues the interests of the class in order to reinstate its originary moment, forcing a closed repetition of the dynamic of class struggle; in an extreme example, the Soviet Union was abolished by its own Supreme Soviet, by the professional element of the Soviet proletariat. The Communist Party as custodians of class suicide, terrified of the consequences of proletarian responsibility, opted to commence again the struggle of the working class and re-set the field of play. The professional element is a social Katechon, born of class struggle and crisis, reinstantiating its conditions long after it had already proved bereft of historical necessity. Blue Labour is a product of this same social element, angling to replace the moribund late-Fabian style with a sentimental conservative cosmetic. Despite protestations against the ‘lanyard class’, the intellectual bases and horizons of Blue Labour remain essentially within a professional consciousness; nothing might exist besides that which arises from precedent – the traditions of dead generations remain the hallowed index of historical experience from which all potential projects and endeavours must seek reference in, be legitimated by. As with every Fabian derivation, a fetishistic privileging of perceived necessity takes precedence over and above contingency.

The determinant distinction between Communism and social democracy is that Communism is not a universalism, nor is it a moralism: Communism is the partial interest of the working class to obliterate the conditions which brought it about, to obliterate its own interest. It is also the demand for the emancipation of the individual from all social & material complexes of fealty, obligation, and patronage. This has always been difficult to sell, so in prior periods Communists can be excused for hiding behind the veneer of social democracy and simple class-interest politics, but today this isn't necessary or desirable. Communism is more imminent than ever before, so the traditional guises worn by Communists are unneeded at best, at worst actively dangerous to the cause. The struggles to which they refer have either already been won, or are no longer advantageous. This doesn't mean Communists shouldn't express their ideas in terms more commensurate to people's present self-conception, but it does mean that we shouldn't be afraid of expressing our ideas, of announcing the historical responsibility of the class in terms and concepts which thus far we've been unable to, either by material necessity or by lack of imagination. If Communism is the real movement then it can be expressed in any way whatsoever, so long as it is true to form and strategically coherent.

Within the realm of social democratic politics Blue Labour is the most novel, the most adept at articulating a kind of strategic renegotiation with rhetoric, however the horizons of that renegotiation are essentially limited by virtue of not being grounded in the pursuit of Communism. What is admirable in Blue Labour is their melancholia, against the projected euphoria of the vast majority of groups and individuals in the socialist movement. Most strains of contemporary socialism in Europe and the West set about repressing their mournful defeatism in order to proceed. The recent Corbyn-Sultana feud serves to reveal this covert pathology of certain defeat quite plainly, the kernel of intellectual pessimism in contradistinction to the pretense of wilful optimism. One thing Blue Labour unfortunately fails on is an unwillingness to admit its own complicity in bringing about the present state of affairs, either on the granular level as adjutants to the rise of Keir Starmer, or the broader complicity of their tradition, in the forging of Britain's paralysing post-Fabian interregnum. Blue Labour is of the same substance as the left wing, the hatred engendered by it disclosing this identity, bringing to light the endemic repressive logic which lies at the centre of British socialism – the irony being that Blue Labour is (within its own terms) on a marginal ascendency. Twenty-odd MPs have fallen in with their cause, and their thought leaders enjoy something of an exalted position in the fringe-establishment of the UnHerd-Spiked-New Statesman set. Appeals to ‘community’ and ‘common good’ are ubiquitous, terms which aren't exclusive to Blue Labour but certainly began to take precedence in our political vocabulary concurrent to the group's ascent. Blue Labour is one aspect of the disparate and compartmentalised unconsciousness of world Communism, admittedly rather small in the broader scheme but significant in regards to our local left-wing and to the rise of intellectual post-liberalism in Europe and the West more broadly. If Communists maintain their conviction that Communism is the real movement then everything around us is an aspect of Communism, the assorted set of political objectives and preoccupations referred to openly and avowedly as Communism is little more than its broadest and deepest disclosure – or it ought to be. Sometimes things decidedly other than avowed Communism are more Communist, or at the very least assist in the disclosure of Communism in some way, in which case our work is to assess and to clarify.

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