DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT

Marx and the Death of the Author, Part V: Thinking above your station

As you may have gathered from a myriad of context clues and even out-right omissions in my previous posts, I'm British. Some of Britain's most notable cultural exports are based around the comedy or drama inherent in Britain's historically hyper-classist society. From the dramatic works of the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, or E.M. Forster*, to the comedies of Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse, or the crime dramas of Agatha Christie, or television dramas like Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs, and comedies like Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder, Only Fools and Horses, and Keeping Up Appearances, the role of class in British society and culture has been evident for as long as the English word has had a printed alphabet. I mean, a lot of class pops up in Shakespeare! Class dictates your schooling, your accent, and your societal expectations in Britain, and as we see repeatedly from Nigel Farage, when the British upper-classes pretend to be working class for American-style political clout, it ends in comedic tragedy. (I do not believe for a moment the git frequents pubs, I should know, historically I have frequented pubs).

As we've also established throughout this series, Marx was a German who spent most of his adult life in Britain. A British-German if you will, and resultantly much of Marx's interpretation of the world around him is through a British-German lens. Resultantly, when Marx discusses class, we must bear in mind the way that class formed in Britain. Also Germany, but for obvious reasons I'm more familiar with British class and therefore more comfortable talking about it. Also 'Germany' as a concept is historically nebulous with ever shifting parameters throughout history, whereas 'British', we have a distinct island and so this discrete variable is a little less negotiable than the land borders of central European states throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Also, thanks to Nelson, Napoleon never invaded, no Confederation of the Thames, just Britain as King James VI & I made it, for better and worse.

Right, enough dawdling. The British class system, of course, centres on the nobles of pre-modern Britain. I don't care too much for medieval history, so I am not going to go too deep into the formation of England, Wales, and Scotland, general gist in Romans leave, we have a period of several kingdoms fighting, Vikings invade, more kingdoms fighting, the south the Kingdom of Mercia gets a bit big for its britches, conquers neighbours, fancies itself England now, fights with the kingdom from my 'neck of the woods', Northumbria, more Vikings, now Normans, and before you know it, it's 1066, William the Conqueror wins at Hastings, and we have modern England. More stuff happens, England eats up Wales. Those Northumbrians I discussed still feel different enough from the southerners and centre themselves in York, so now we have the Duke of York and the Duke of Lancaster, and they fight, both have Roses as their Symbol, White rose for York, red for Lancaster, War of the Roses we call it, both York and Lancaster lose, some upstart from Wales comes, Tudor is his name, ends the war and adopts both the roses as his symbol. Eventually his family make this Henry VIII guy, and some say that's the end of the Medieval Period, others says it's with Henry VIII's daughter Elizabeth I, others say it's when a Puritan psycho cuts off the head of Charles I.

Regardless, during the Medieval period, the most effective way to govern Britain was through counties, often called 'shires', and these counties needed Dukes, Lords, Viscounts, Barons, etc. The biggest, and therefore most important shires, like Yorkshire or Lancashire got the specialist boys who were hire up in the hierarchy of 'most likely to become King after current King finds out what eternity is like'. After Wales gets conquered, England wants them to feel special, so the most special of the special boys, the one immediately next in line, gets to be the Prince of Wales. The person currently sitting on the special chair in London also gets to make his favourite nobles new titles and the like, and so begins the ever increasing list of titles and nobles that England and Wales are saddled with when the Tudors or the Stuarts, depending on who you ask, call time and 'modernity' begins.

These people, the ones who had owned the means of production during the middle ages, namely the land the agricultural labourers worked on, made up the class that Marx identified as the aristocracy. The holders of wealth from the pre-capital era, who the liberals of the 18th century had rebelled against, these liberals comprised primarily of the members of the next class, the bourgeois.

Bourgeois is, as you may guess by the sheer number of gratuitous silent vowels, a French loan word. The French had similarly borrowed it themselves, from the Dutch. My blog focuses on Britain because I am British, and that is the easiest history for me to grapple with because I have spent a life time of going to British historical sites, first with my Dad, and now with my wife. I've never set foot in the Netherlands, but when discussing the history of capitalism, we must recall the Dutch, as capitalism in the modern sense of the term owes much to the formation of the Dutch Republic. Much of the political and economic life of the Dutch Republic was driven by the Berger class, the same people who we can also blame for the Dutch East India Company's genocide of the Bandas people in Indonesia in order to create scarcity of nutmeg, thus driving up the price, which the Dutch East India Company held a monopoly over, and for the Boers of South Africa who would eventually create apartheid. You see, capitalism has always required violence to secure its interests, right from the beginning. Said violence is not unique to the British Empire, the American, French, German, Belgian, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese empires also indulged in it. But again, I'm British, and an expert in Commonwealth economics and history, so I'm sticking primarily with what I know.

Berger -> Bourgeois. The bourgeois, both in the history of capitalism as told by neo-classicalists and neo-liberals as well as by Marxists play a vital role in the advancement of history. In Britain, in France, in Germany, in the Netherlands, the emergence of a wealthy class above the poor but below the aristocracy was critical to the unravelling of the medieval economies. Rapidly centralising states also contributed to the decline of the medieval mode of both production and governance. In response, Charles I of Britain tried to do this 'absolute monarchy' thing, but that resulted in a rather heated pub fight across all of Britain and Ireland from the 1640s to the 1660s, and Parliament succeeding in establishing something akin to democracy on British shores, giving the emergent British bourgeois more room to grow their capital than their French counterparts who would follow the British example in the 1780s, but pretend that they were the first to do it.

It should be noted here that aristos of the early modern era held a very different kind of capital to their bourgeois counterparts. Aristocrats were not always rich in capital, whilst the bourgeois were. Some aristos were flush in capital, but not all. Aristocratic power was more political than in capital, whilst the bourgeois, who held 'only' capital were attempting to use their capital to attain the political power that the aristocracy had. This led to considerable social and political tension in the countries where this was occurring, Britain and her empire were no exception. In some places, it would lead to an outright rejection of traditional aristocracy (France after the 1780s, the Dutch Republic) in others it would see uncomfortable compromises (Britain, Germany, the US, especially in the south). In the British case, the bourgeois got the House of Commons, the Aristos got the House of Lords, and as the 18th and 19th centuries progressed, more and more of the bourgeois would set their eyes on gaining additional legitimacy by climbing into the aristocratic class and/or the House of Lords, beginning the tradition of British monarchs elevating particularly politically adept members of the bourgeois to aristocratic footing (looking at you, Baroness Thatcher) to prevent an outright bourgeois revolution like the French or the Dutch had done.

The more power the bourgeois gained, the more power capital gained. The more power capital gained, the more entrenched the capitalist mode of production became, replacing the feudal one.

One of the ways in the modern world that capitalism attempts to gain legitimacy is to pretend that this was the way it always was. That there is no alternative. As such, it pretends that England was always capitalistic, or that ancient Rome practised an archaic form of capitalism. This is untrue, the precise binding of capital to power, and the capacity for capital to reproduce capital without wider societal gain is a phenomenon that dates back only to the 1500s at the earliest, and is the result of a series of political decisions made, largely during the 17th and 18th centuries in Britain and the Netherlands. Capitalism in its present form is a unique consequence of European politics and foreign policy from the 17th century onwards. The way we conceptualise money today is not ancient in the slightest, and we see that in the formation and decline of the British aristocratic class from the middle ages into the capitalist era. Capitalism is indeed a break from medieval history in Europe. A violent one, at that.

This isn't a call to return to feudalism, mind you, that also sucked. But it is a reminder that if capitalism had to come, it can go, and we can and should try something better, more democratic even.

Through the course of this series, I've frequently referred to the bourgeois class as the 'capital class', that is the class that holds the majority of capital, and the power derived from it in the current system. I'm going to return to that, since bourgeois is a French loan word, and we won the Napoleonic War, so I feel no need to use French words. Statistically speaking, if you're reading this, you're neither aristocrat or bourgeois. I have had a member of the aristocracy as a boss in the past, and Michael if you're reading this, well I'm surprised and touched you're still following my work after all these years, and yes I have gone quite Marxist since we last spoke, nonetheless don't be a stranger.

Statistically speaking, if you're reading this, you belong to the third and final class that Marx wrote about, the proletariat. The proletariat owns the labour necessary to create value, the surplus of value is what is converted to capital. Capital gives the proletariat wages, yes, but only so as to enable the extraction of said capital from the proletariat. The capital class would be happiest if you owned nothing, but still paid for it, through rent, licencing, or subscription, so as to generate additional surplus capital.

Marx writes of history as a series of class struggles. The most powerful class has always exploited the most numerous, the proletariat, through any matter of means, namely through creating a series of fictitious 'in groups' and 'out groups' for the masses to rally around, and against, or by promoting hierarchies as scientific, god-given, or otherwise necessary. Compared to previous versions of racism and sexism, the capitalist mode of production commodifies it ('sex sells', Edward Said and his work on using exoticism to sell, and hence British and American military recruitment heavily implying that foreign women will fawn over their white liberators, encouraging horny young men to enlist and do war crimes, or the illustrated Kama Sutra gaining best seller status in otherwise racist and 'modest' Victorian Britain). This is why right-wingers and capitalists always make such meal off of religious and racial differences, and use them to inhibit class consciousness. The British and American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, had more in common with the insurgents they were fighting than the media and capitalist classes back home telling them to fight to 'preserve our way of life'. In a sick way, the modern victim of Christo-fascism in the US has far more in common with the victims of Islamo-fascism in Iran than they do with the leaders pushing for this remarkably unpopular, and wholly unnecessary war. (In a war of fascist versus fascist, no one wins, least of all the Iranians who have already suffered immensely).

The liberal/capitalist revolution was a class struggle against the aristocratic class, and the capitalist class succeeded because, then and now, they have better class consciousness than the other two classes, certainly better than the proletariat, since the capitalist class is uniquely capable of tricking the proletariat into thinking they are a member of the capitalist class (the capitalist class spent a considerable amount of time and energy doing this during the Cold War). The reason it feels like there is no difference between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party today is because of the remarkable class consciousness within the capitalist class, and their remarkable capacity to accuse the rest of us of waging 'class war' whenever we try to mimic their strategies (projecting like an IMAX) of engaging in Cartel pricing (unionising), pressing economic sanctions on them (boycotting), or forming legitimate political opposition (creating a party that isn't beholden to corporate donors, which will get you labelled all sorts of nasty things in the British press, that said Your Party is a rubbish dumpster fire and we need to stop centring everything on 70+ year old people, love you Corbyn, but it's time to retire).

Standing, for better or worse, tried to create a new class, a class he calls the Precariat, which he argues is the proletariat with less stability. As a researcher on the gig economy and informalisation, I think the Precariat class is just the proletariat, but with extra disillusionment because of the harsh realities of Thatcherite Britain, yes, we are still living in Thatcherite Britain, that's why everything has gone to shit. As mentioned in a previous entry, Dumenil mentioned a psuedo-class, the managerial class, who are proletariat, but because they have been elevated within the proletariat class they side with the interests of capital against labour, assuming they can join the capitalist class. Much like Second World War era collaborators, you should not negotiate with a group infamous for bad-faith negotiating. To give standing the benefit of the doubt, I frequently use the idea of the precariat to describe a similarly 'pseudo-class', or class within a class of the increasingly vulnerable proletariat as predatory capitalism continues to figure out how to efficiently extract surplus value whilst minimising actual services rendered, whilst also insisting on selling the last vestiges of the 'welfare state' to the capitalist class, so they can extract the last remaining bits of blood from the stones that are the poor. A phenomenon that has unsurprisingly led to the stagnation and even decline in life expectancy in the West, as well as record numbers of mental health crises, public health crises, and homelessness ('rough sleeping' as the BBC calls it, to make sure you don't notice that we have a surplus of houses we could indeed home people in, but the landlords insist we keep building and selling to them).

Nationalism is stupid, racism is stupid, transphobia is stupid, homophobia is stupid, religious bigotry is stupid. They're using all these to distract you from class solidarity.

Stop voting for right-wing parties. They'll never love you back.

Well, I'm depressed. Next week primitive accumulation.