IT’S TIME ON THIS SHIT. We won’t survive if we continue to look to selfish individualism to solve all the problems it creates. We need to evolve ideas instead of acting out on them.We need to extend democracy to the workplace, where it ends under class hierarchy otherwise. We must recognise the slavishness of approval-seeking through upward class mobility, and the impossibility of upward class mobility on a dead planet anyway. We must recognise the sound entrepreneurial thinking of reducing capital costs in leasing slaves for the same reason as one leases the car pool, i.e. to save money on buying them outright. We must recognise that renting slaves, using them up and then throwing them out if they break or start complaining is what a class system does. It is not broken, it operates exactly as it was intended to by its anti-social architects to enable predation and exploitation as the system has always done.
Ditto requiring involuntary subsidies to dividends in the form of raising children to working age for free, and paying for one’s own housing via mortgages (in the original French: chained to death). We must recognise that the liberal middle classes offer us class compromise and upward class mobility as a bribe to abandon class solidarity and class struggle, and to remake ourselves in the image of our ruling class overlords. We must recognise that being granted token privileges within positively sacred social and class hierarchies, personal boundaries not so much, is a Devil’s Bargain that robs us of autonomy and agency at the same time as it grants us (in the affluent Global North, at least) disposable income and purchasing power as consumers in return for our freedom. A meme shows a sandwich board that reads: Don’t grow up, it’s a trap. And it is.
We must recognise that the Devil’s Bargain of the liberal class compromise is a sure route to debt slavery and, by extension, permanent submission to the dull drumbeat of work to service what we owe. We must recognise that debt constrains movement as much as do physical chains. What is the difference between being owned and rented if we do not control the conditions of our own and the product of our labour either way? We must recognise servitude for what it is: the denial of control over the means of subsistence by class-based monopolies. Ask yourself: if power over someone’s subsistence is power over their will, what difference does it make if monopoly power is public or private? Abolish the despotism of the dull work drums, of economic necessity and debt-servicing — a severely unnatural way to live. Jubilee forever; keep your home or roll it into a housing co-op.
We must recognise that the defense of the individual from political autocracy extents to defiance of the autocratic social and class hierarchies inherent to capitalist social relations of production. We must rise above the reasons for needing organised resistance to economic autocracy in the first place in how we respond. We must avoid becoming everything we claim to oppose. We must avoid reproducing authoritarian coercive control logic in the will to reconstruct harm as beneficial to the victim’s best interests in servicing a higher cause, up to and inclusive of the cause of the individual against coercive autocracy. We must recognise this logic in the violence of the mythology of altruistic outcomes from selfish means. We must recognise this mythology and its purposes in the civilising mission narratives of European Colonialism historically. We must reconcile with the impossibility of imposing consent and free contract on top of the fait accomplis of violent conquest.
Likewise, we must distinguish between criticism and attack, opposition and abuse. We really need to reflect on our own need to control everything in lieu of being halfway in touch with ourselves and our surroundings. If we cannot harmonize means and ends, and live values, we will fail. If we cannot model best-practise class solidarity, we will fail. We must refuse the Big Lie of the gold dragons in 3-piece suits of altrustic outcomes from self-interested means. Disobey its benevolently paternalistic third-party intermediaries who try to reconstruct the harms of social and class hierarchy as beneficial to the victims.
Act directly and collectively. Become the change we want to see by working together cooperatively. Find unity by rising above essentialisms. Transcend false binaries and find the Self in the Other. Grow compassion, empathy and understanding. Personal and collective growth, not economic growth. Make our class solidarity an irresistible force for the wellbeing of all, and our collective survival amidst encircling ecocide. We can and must do better than this, we owe it to ourselves, each other, the past and the future. It’s time to take a stand for class solidarity, we might need it for our collective survival.
Two cents.
Discover more from Class Autonomy
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
