Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

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Introduction

In Part 1 of this article, I argued that we need to value the work of the working class more appropriately because the contribution of their work to the communal structures (the human artifice) is inseparable from the consumptive enjoyment of the very goods those structures produce. In other words, one’s production constitutes the benefits of consumption. So, for example, enjoying a full meal at the end of a long day’s work is deserved and integrally connected to the hard day’s work – and the human artifice that facilitates this is essentially operating as it should – i.e., according to the human condition.

The problem is that our artifice has detached a worker’s productive labor from her consumptive enjoyment of the fruits of that labor. In Canada, for example, the unaffordability or inaccessibility of some of the most basic necessities of life for working-class citizens – food, housing, medical care, education – should be a signpost that the artifice we have constructed is detached from the most fundamental aspects of the human condition. More and more people need to work 3 jobs just to get by – and often well into a typical retirement. Two problematic aspects that exemplify this detachment are at crisis levels: 1) the unmet need for recognition at the level of human identity, and 2) for empowered individual lives in our social frameworks. We can easily identify the first crisis in rising suicide rates in the wealthy West, but also the widespread rise of depression and anxiety, and declining birthrates. The second crisis shows itself in corrupted deliberative democratic processes, the attack on the US Capitol Building, Brexit, and the increasing support for nationalist parties in Europe. These aspects had been unproblematic before the adoption of what has become known as neoliberalism, where the economic theories and practices of Ronald Raegan and Margaret Thatcher reached into areas not originally intended for economic values and frameworks.

Let me reiterate: the logic of economics has reached into parts of our lives that are not home to such logic. To illustrate, it seems natural to me that I treat my house instrumentally; my extra bedroom could be converted to a rental property or the renovations that I undertake are to boost the house’s resale value. But, before the 1980’s, we understood the house we lived in as our particular location in the world, i.e., as our home. Putting the instrumental logic of economics on the very house we live in corrupts and colonizes our sense of “home” – which certainly still connotes something towards our personal identity. Economic logic in private and personal spaces eventually corrupts those spaces. Yet, economic logic also corrupts our public spaces, where we act together with others who have no access to our private spaces. The most obvious current example is the role of the Israel Lobby in US public affairs.

According to our given system, the logic of the economics of work has been inappropriately extended to parts of our public and private lives in which such logic is destructive. 

Currently, our default position is to value work in terms of money or status. We easily slide into the assumption that the money people make is the measure of their contribution to the public world. But this is a mistake, as even,  I think, most ardent laisser-faire libertarian economists would recognize. If it were true, then the value, the true value, of the contribution of a hedge fund manager is 1.000 or 2.000 times greater than the value of the contribution of a teacher, or for that matter a physician. People would be hard-pressed to make a moral case about the proportion of the value of the contribution of these different roles. But what that means is if we can’t rely on the market to tell us the value of a contribution to the common good, what that means is, it falls to us, as democratic citizens, to deliberate about and to work it out in public life. But to do that requires that we engage in public discourse in messy, contested debates about competing notions of the value of a contribution. They’re messy and contested because to know what counts as a valuable contribution to the human artifice requires that we ask one another, and ourselves: What are our common purposes and ends as a political community? 

Now, going back to Aristotle, he thought this was the first question of politics: What is the end, i.e., what are the purposes of political community? There is a tendency, in liberal public discourse, to try to avoid questions about common meanings for the human community. Liberals often argue that we live in pluralist societies, and people have different and competing notions of meaning, of value, and of what is actually productive. So wouldn’t it be better, wouldn’t it make for a more tolerant society, if we could set aside contested notions of the good, life, in politics, and try to resolve our central political questions without reference to those contested ideas? But if we made a mistake, these past decades, in outsourcing our moral judgment about what’s valuable to markets, if that was a mistake, then it means we can’t avoid bringing into public debate contested notions of what’s a valuable contribution, and therefore contested notions of what really is valuable? Now, I am not suggesting that we have to come up with immediate, definite answers – even though that may seem to be the point. Instead, I am suggesting that Western societies have shirked the responsibility to have public deliberations. Some answers to such thorny questions, no doubt, will be a by-product of the deliberations, but the deliberation itself may be the actual point. And it seems that Aristotle may have been right about its importance all along.  

The general point is this: economic concerns are not only about the money someone makes,  they are also about one’s role in the economy and one’s standing in society, which are clearly bound up with recognition and moral identity. If the economies of the West were to order the communities we lived in, and by extension, our place within these communities – then excluding a large portion of the working class population would be an economic indictment of a moral failing – not merely growing pains in the path towards human flourishing.

Those left behind by four decades of globalization and rising inequality were suffering from more than stagnant wages. They were experiencing what they feared. What they fear is a growing obsolescence, an obsolescence that could be slowed by fairer distribution, but whose eventuality was unavoidable. The society in which they live no longer seems to need the skills or contributions or, for that matter, the voice that they have to offer. This leads me to suggest that progressive parties need to move beyond concerns only with how to distribute access to the good things in life, important though that is. But progressive parties need also to have something to say about contributive justice:  What are the conditions under which everyone can feel, and rightly feel, that they have the opportunity to contribute to the human community and to be recognized and honored for doing so? Policy proposals that simply offer to compensate for inequality by increasing the purchasing power of working in middle-class families, or by shoring up the safety net, will not be enough. They won’t be enough to address the anger and resentment that now runs deep. And this is because the anger is about the loss of recognition and esteem. Diminished purchasing power matters. But the injury that most animates the resentment of working people is to their status as producers, not only to their ability as consumers to afford the goods they need. Only a political agenda that acknowledges this injury and seeks to reclaim the honor of labor can speak effectively to the discontent that roils our politics. 

Shortly before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to speak to a group of striking sanitation workers, and garbage collectors.  And this is what he said to them, he said: “One day our society will come to respect sanitation workers if it is to survive. Because the person who picks up our garbage is, in the final analysis, as significant as the physician. Because if  he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant.” And then he added: “All labor has dignity.” A political economy concerned only with the size and the distribution of GDP misses something.  It misses the importance of the work, and it makes for an impoverished civic life. Robert F Kennedy, running for president in 1968, shortly before he was assassinated, put it this way, he said: “Fellowship, community, shared patriotism: These essential values of our civilization do not come from just buying and consuming goods together. They come, instead, from dignified employment at decent pay, the kind of employment that lets a person say to his community, to his family, to his country, and, most importantly, to himself: ‘I help to build this country. I am a participant in its great public ventures’.” Few politicians speak that way today. In the years since Robert Kennedy, progressives largely abandoned the politics of community and patriotism and the recognition of the value of work. Instead, they offered the rhetoric of social mobility.

“Social mobility” is not language that comes from the human condition; it is language that is embedded in a kind of technocratic perversion of the human condition. The Industrial Revolution has pushed the limits of a sustainably livable planet; the technocratic logic of social mobility grafted onto the very structures of the human condition has distorted our very human condition. This religious-like faith in the language of social mobility and rising above the given social conditions of our birth emerged neither from our existence as citizens nor out of biological necessity, but instead, from mass social and technocratic pressures that are detached from any authentic needs we have as humans.

But perhaps we need to rethink what the human condition even is, and I intend to do that in part 3. Let me sum up what we have learned in part 1 and what you are currently reading.  

Bringing back public debate 

The rhetoric of social mobility was an idealism suited to a global market-driven age. It flattered the winners and insulted those left behind. By 2016, its time was up. The arrival of Brexit and Trump, and the rise of hyper-nationalist anti-immigrant parties in Europe announced the failure of the project. The question now is what an alternative political project should look like. What set the market faith fundamentally at odds with the ideal of self-government was its evasion of politics, its evasion of the political, and by this, I mean the persistent attempt by proponents of neoliberal globalization to depict the economic arrangements they brought into being as facts of nature beyond human control. According to their logic, free trade agreements, the free flow of capital across national borders, the financialization of economic life, the offshoring of jobs,  deregulation, recurring financial crises,  the declining labor share of GDP, and the advent of technologies favoring highly skilled workers: All of these were necessary features of a global economy, not contestable developments open to political argument. This way of thinking about the economy left little room for politics, little room for public debate about how to distribute goods, how to allocate investment, or how to determine the social value of this or that job. This way of thinking hollowed out public discourse and fueled a growing sense of disempowerment. Why disempowerment? Because if the basic terms of economic life are unalterable facts of nature, then there’s very little left for self-government or citizens. Politics is reduced to the task of bowing to necessity – to the necessity of a morally indefensible Wall Street bailout, to take us back to 2008, for example. If politics is mainly about adapting to the fixed imperatives of economic life, it is an activity better suited to experts and technocrats than to democratic citizens. This shrunken conception of politics has defined the age of globalization. It coincided with an inflated role for doctrinaire economists who claimed to offer a science of this necessity. But it was a spurious science, and the policymakers who imbibed it mismanaged the economy, exacerbated inequality, and created the conditions for the angry backlash that we now face.