"selling" your politics (Class war article on here)

iirc, the author is a poster on the forums here, so hopefully he'll see this. i think the argument is that their tabloid form is inherently linked to their populist, beano class analysis content:

well i have no first-hand experience of the original class war and little experience (beyond some online spats and reading their website/media) with the current incarnation, but i'd tend to agree with the thrust of the article.

i think the article is claiming that the specific caricature of what it is to be 'working class' (i.e. a set of cultural signifiers rather than a relation to capital) pushed by class war is patronising, and that the tabloid form adopted to convey this is not class-neutral as it's based on suspension of critical thought and the reduction of reality to simple binaries. i don't think you can extrapolate and say all media is. for example i don't think the most recent thing i've been involved in, Tea Break, is patronising or reductive.*

* Unless you follow Sean68's 'argument' that it reduces workers to mechanical drones only capable of desiring more crumbs from the masters table, but this is nonsense as it performs no such reduction: it's simply a dispute bulletin so it focusses on the dispute.

i think this is important, and is reflected in the 'class unity! class pride!' stickers i've seen round brighton. it's trying to ape the nationalist populism of their tabloid rivals, but substituting class for nation. However, what on earth is there to be proud about about being working class?

then or now? today (i.e. using 70 year-old images), it would certainly come in for similar criticisms as class war, although perhaps it's a better image to fetishise if there is such a thing, what with it being one of the high points of working class struggle in world history. then, sure it portrays a certain image to the exclusion of other elements, this is what propaganda and all media, even all communication does. however the criticism of class war is more the patronising, reductive sterotype of the working class that they fetishise, rather than them trying to popularise rebellion per se.

they're often unneccessarily difficult to read, but the key works aren't that long and have some useful stuff in once you get past the hegalian language. the main misreading people make is simply treating spectacle as a theory of media and consumption, rather than social relations, a higher stage of capitalist alienation and class rule. i think waslax is referring to their 'critique of the militant', i remember reading it but can't remember who it's by. iirc it criticises 'professional militancy' as a kind of representative function, a separation from the class as a whole, which i guess relates to Class War insofar as they charicature what it is to be working class, separating the subject (actual working class people) and its representation (as portrayed by CW).

I don't think they actually had much in the way of politics as an organisation. Class War members held all sorts of contradictory ideas. What they were promoting was not their politics, but their organisation.

Devrim

What's wrong with being a worker then? Surely socialism is just about everyone becoming a member of the working class? That's what it means to me anyway.

And I think Class War was a bit of good fun, a laugh, and inspired some good stuff. It was a new, fresh wake-up call that politics didn't have to be boring, cliched bollox as found on the Left. It went nowhere as a political organisation of course, but fair play to 'em! I'd rather read an issue of Class War any day than Aufheban (did I spell that right?), truth be told. Ultimately I think the way forward is a middle road between the dry as bones, boring, intellectualist pointy-head stuff and "laddish", unthinking, tabloid-style demagoguery-by-any-other-name.

you're on a communist board and need to ask?

it's about the abolition of the working class, and class itself. this isn't semantics. the working class is the dispossessed class, this couldn't be further from the means of production held in common by humanity and self-managed through councils etc. of course we'd get rid of the parasitical class(es), and everyone works 'according to their ability', but this is a long way from praising the class as it is now.

from what i've read and been told, CW were indeed an improvement on much of the anarchist movement at the time, but i think that says more about many of their contemporaries than anything else.

there's a difference between saying

1) 'we' are united in our experience of exploitation, and should be confident in the fact that 'we' are able to run this world without the parasites that exploit 'us', and work together to achieve it

and

2) 'we' are culturally superior to the class that exploits, so let's praise that cultural superiority.

personally, I think the second one risks getting stuck in a dead-end of conserving caricatures of working class identity.

very much agree, we do in deed need more of the positive, imagination and vision. people have enough shit in their lives to cope without some sections of the left promoting doom and gloom. boring as fuck!

I agree. I suppose the slogan 'class pride' depends very much on how you interpret it, as such I wouldn't use it devoid of 'class unity' which is aspirational to a large extent though when it does occur, albeit in limited form, this is actually something to be proud of. How about pride in the fact that, unlike the parasitic classes we actually produce the wealth of the world? Of course this does not mean we should be or are proud of the fact that this wealth is expropriated from us.

Yes, "the boss needs you, you don't need the boss" is better. Look, I agree that it is our discontent with our position in society that gives us the impetus to change it. In saying this I do not feel the proletariat has a historic mission to change society, it is simply in our best interests to do so.

then i doth protest too much

as a class we do, but although it has it's rhetorical uses, i'm still not that keen on it as so many of us (the unemployed, finance/accounts/admin workers etc) don't really produce anything of value, even in capitalist terms, and adopting such a 'positive' understanding often leads to productivist workerism (who are really productive workers...) or negri-esque 'everything is productive' nonsense.

i mean i take your point that we shouldn't take the 'class pride' bit of the slogan in isolation to the 'class unity' bit, and perhaps i did to an extent. but if we're talking context we also can't ignore CW's almost identity-politics take on class struggle, which is afterall what i raised the sticker as a symptom of. in that context it seems to be pride in being "young, white, living on an estate and swearing a lot" as the 'Death of a Paper Tiger' article puts it.

Well I know what's wrong with being a wage worker.

Well that's not what I'd define the working class as. That's what I'd define the "proletariat" as. The proletariat are enslaved workers, as opposed to free workers.

Yes, quite.

they can certainly contribute, in the same kinda way overhead costs make the bottom line possible within a single firm. you can even argue the unemployed keep wages down and discipline those in work, thus contributing to profitability/exploitation. which is why i agree as a class we do produce all of society's wealth. i wouldn't conflate all this into 'production' though, at least in marxian categories, although this is a whole other debate which has been had before. in finance in particular though, so much of what is 'accumulated' is speculative paper titles to future wealth it does really constitute ficticious capital, so even contributing to the production of such is nothing to be proud of. likewise i'd argue firefighters/nurses etc produce no value for capital (only necessary use values, but not exchange value which is necessary for value, and surplus value), but from a 'producing something useful' point of view as opposed to 'producing value for capital' are perhaps amongst the most 'productive.' wealth and value are not the same thing, and 'productive' has different meanings from different perspectives. but i digress.

this is in danger of getting semantic, but how do you have one class without another, in what way is a post-revolutionary humanity a class? but for what it's worth i'm using 'working class' and proletariat interchangeably here although strictly the former is narrower than the latter. as to being proud of creating society's wealth, i've addressed this is my responses to boul.

I agree with Camatte when he said that the tendency of Capital is to turn all of humanity into proletarians, and the project of the proletariat is to liberate all of humanity. (paraphrasing of course).

I havent read enough of him either, but i think its a correctly described tendency, even if its one that could probably never be wholly completed (as there would probably either be a revolution or extinction beforehand).

For example if Singularity is possible then that would be one example of real autonomous capital.

Also one big thing in camatte is the tendency for capital to colonize human beings and turn them into agents of itself.