Resentment and Necrosis
How the Working Class Comes to View Itself as Lazy
Imagine, for the moment, that you and your friend are both members of the working class. You grew up together, your families come from the same socioeconomic background, and you both got hired as construction workers for the same company after you graduated high school. You’re on break at work, sitting in the shade and guzzling some water. About ten meters away, a group of what you assume to be university students are discussing a federal politician’s recent proposal to introduce Universal Basic Income (UBI) and to increase tax rates for the top 1%. You have heard about this proposal before, and fully support it. Curious, you ask your friend what they think about it. “UBI would just encourage people to be lazy,” they scoff, “and you shouldn’t tax people more just because they work harder.” You are taken back and confused. How has your friend arrived at these conclusions?
In an earlier article, I discussed what I denoted as the “UNO Reverse Card” fallacy. To summarize this fallacy briefly, it involves the use of a red herring — a diversion away from the real issue — in order to transform a tu quoque (“you as well”) argument into what I denoted as a non sum, vos sunt (“I am not, but you are”) argument. This form of rhetoric is much more successful than a normal tu quoque argument, insofar as one nonetheless has to affirm the claims of their opponent when making a tu quoque argument. The “UNO Reverse Card” fallacy, or a non sum, vos sunt argument therefore has two steps: burying, or the “I am not” process of using a red herring to divert away from the claim of one’s opponent, and inverting, or the “but you are” process of falsely assuming the original position of one’s opponent in order to redirect their own assertion against them. It is this same fallacy, I argue, which is used to turn the working class against itself, making their resentment and revolutionary impulses necrotic.
The internal contradiction of capitalism: the capitalist wants the working class to work as much as possible and to pay them as little as possible, whereas the working class wants to work as little as possible and be paid as much as possible. When the working class works more and are paid as little as possible, more surplus value — the new value created by workers in excess of their labor cost — is accumulated by the capitalist. In short, the capitalist is a leech, a parasite whose motivation it is to exploit the working class, for their own personal gain, as much as they can get away with. Of course, there are legal limitations on exploitation, but there are also natural ones; the more the working class is exploited, the greater their resentment for the capitalist, and the stronger their revolutionary impulse is. This resentment and revolutionary impulse, the capitalist knows, must be satiated or kept in check.
The opulence, the greed, the parasitic nature of the capitalist — these are buried, disguised, according to George Jackson, by the invention of a ‘consumer flea market’ and the establishment of wage laws by the ruling class:
The modern industrial fascist state has found it essential to disguise the nature of its ruling-class leisure existence by providing the lower classes with a mass consumer’s flea market of its own. To allow a sizable portion of the “new state” to participate in this flea market, the ruling class has established currency controls and minimum wage laws that mask the true nature of modern fascism.
It is necessary that the capitalist buries resentment and revolutionary impulse in this way. The capitalist needs to promote mass consumerism, petty greed, illusions of a bourgeois existence, among the lower classes, and to parade their own ‘charity’ through minimum wage laws which hardly effect their bottom line, in order to justify the reversal of a fundamental truth which lies dormant within the collective unconscious of the working class — the fundamental truth that they are being exploited by parasites.
Yet, this is not enough to bury the fundamental truth. The capitalist must necessarily disguise and defend its exploitative behavior by setting in stone the creeds of a justifying ideology. Meritocracy is the quintessential ideology for falsely justifying the existence of the ruling class; material conditions are set aside — the very material conditions which ensure both inter-generational poverty and wealth — and the working class is mislead into a state of bad faith, wherein their being-in-itself is subsumed into their being-for-itself. Not only, according to the creed of meritocracy, is the ruling class in its position of oppression, dominance, and exploitation solely because of their mythical, god-like work ethic, but the working class is in a position to be oppressed, dominated, and exploited because they lack this fictitious work ethic. To further proselytize the creed of meritocracy, the ruling class promotes certain members of the working class to petty positions of oppression, dominance, and exploitation of their own; in this regard, through meaningless corporate promotion and minuscule increases in wages compared to the decadence of the capitalist, the working class is given a religious icon and police force of its own. In exceptional cases, on the basis of pure luck and not principle, select members of the working class are able to become capitalists themselves — and the capitalists, who own and operate the dissemination of information to the masses, make saints out of these exceptional cases.
“You are being greedy!” they then proclaim, after they themselves are responsible for promoting greed within the working class, “We have given you minimum wages, and you demand living wages. We have given you a mass consumer’s flea market, and yet you demand the means of production.” On the basis of their carefully crafted meritocratic creed, they assert, “You are being lazy! You lack our mythic, god-like work ethic, and that is why you lack our decadence!” After the fundamental truth which lies within the collective unconscious of the working class is made dormant in these ways, the truth is inverted, re-directed towards the working class itself. Their resentment and revolutionary impulse is turned inward, becoming self-castration. The fundamental truth which is made dormant comes to play the same functional role as original sin; the illusion of meritocracy comes to be virtue and salvation.
The working class must emerge from this state of self-destructive, necrotic false consciousness. We must promote genuine class consciousness, or else the working class continues to suffer myopia, unable to see just how far their chains are stretched.
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