Universalisms: European, Middle-Class and Working Class

Cover: via https://libcom.org/article/class-introduction

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Ben Debney || World-Systems researcher Immanuel Wallerstein was notable amongst other things for his exploration of European Universalism–the mentality amongst European Colonisers in the early modern era after 1492, essentially, that what was good for Europe was good for everyone.

As a mentality identifiable to intellectual history, to the historian of ideologies and belief systems, European Universalism is arguably of interest as system of meaning whose framework is visible in the attitudes and mentalities of the Western middle class: what is good for the middle class is good for everyone. Against the cultishness of selfish individualists, we might posit a working class universalism.

For its part, European Universalism has become a little bit of a problemo for international law, or at least for the countries of the global South who have to suffer the laws of the conquerer. Koskenniemi argues convincingly that European Law tries to dodge this core contradiction by vacillating between state sovereignty or universal principles when the other makes no sense in explaining why it does anything, thereby ensuring neither is really very credible.

While natural law alleges itself to be rooted in the same forces driving photosynthesis, from a historical standpoint, it is actually rooted in predatory conquest and ideologically-driven gaslighting (not least in the form of the witchhunts that smoothed the transition to colonial control particularly in South America, where the Spanish exported them along with the Inquisition against heathenism, pagan idolatry and sensual permissiveness).

This fact is the great elephant in the room of the self-talk of European Universalists: that the law is the gift of free consent and the rule of impartial principles beyond individual ego and self-interest. As we know in fact, thanks not least to Stannard and his work on the American Holocaust, the hegemony of European law as the legal framework for the world-system is based on large-scale crimes against humanity in the Americas.

This presents something of a dilemma for liberalism insofar as the former was laid down by the Conquest, the exact opposite of free consent. Thus the respectable community of law-abiding nations includes individual countries of the global South only insofar as they allow themselves to become resource tributaries–as long as they pay tribute to the imperial core in the form of their resources, in other words.

Historian Charles Tilly argues that, in this respect, empires tend to resemble standover rackets, abusing and trauma-bonding with their victim peoples in turn with a view to maintaining supply of resources–if not the narcissistic supply of the conqueror lording his power over his vassals for good measure. Post-genocides, attempts at trauma-bonding with those left built on the historical claim that colonialism was a favour to its victims in teaching them European forms of authoritarian codependence, predation on one’s fellow human beings, and cultish rationality bounded by collective narcissism and collective paranoia.

The obvious core lie of the European Civilising Mission narrative, with the unspoken assumptions of European Universalism behind them, was that the harms of conquest were a benefit to their victims–in the case of the American Holocaust, the estimated 10% of the population of both halves of the Americas who survived the Conquest. The foundation of liberal international law then is the psychology of coercive control.

As with any cult, under the norms of European Universalism, non-payers of imperial tribute are excommunicated from the community of respectable nations. Nonconformists disturb the collective paranoia on which the bounded rationality of European Univeralism depends, threatening by example. Any number of postwar examples abound; Arbenz in Guatamala, Mossadegh in Iran, Allende in Chile.

From a historical standpoint, then, imperial coercion gaslighting its targets with the forms of its own other, then, is the true face of world order. This is hardly surprising in light of the morally disengaged, coercive-control narratives that characterise the European Civilising Mission, underwriting its paternalism, moralistic hypocrisy and punitive cruelty on a good day. The arrogance and conceit of the Civilising Mission was borne out by the Lockean mentality that the world untouched was ‘wasteland’ insofar as it had not been conquered, enclosed, commodifed and tapped for exploitable natural resources.

Apparently, the purpose of the Civilising Mission was to improve a world that had sustained modern humans for at least 200,000 years by rendering it an infinite source of plunder and an infinite garbage dump. By trying to force a fit between a finite planet and an endless growth economy, not least as expansionist extractivist colonalism progressively exhausted ‘commodity frontiers,’ plundering and despoiling any given resource for maximum immediate gain, like locusts.

As far as European Universalism is concerned, then, we might conclude that the world is working exactly as intended for the only people world capitalism was ever designed for: propertied European white cishet males–maybe even only the current generation of them for that. This is the ideal to which the middle class tries to aspire, to approximate the apex of global imperial class hierarchies.

For this reason, we all seem to compare ourselves to the norm and try to modify ourselves to more closely conform to the ideal of power; black people straighten their hair, same-sex attracted try to pass as straight, women and nonwhites adopt the macho traits of toxic masculity to pass in corporatised patriarchal hierarchies.

For our part, anglo cishet males at the top of the shitheap fight amongst ourselves and backstab one another when we’re not ganging up on those we exclude. In our competition for supremacy, we count on all our diverse enablers who aspire to be like us, who are as happy as we are to roll corporate hierarchies in egalitarianism glitter in the name of opportunities to advance within a rat race of rats from all backgrounds taking bribes from the man to participate in our own subjection and exploitation in return for tokens from the table of ruling class privilege.

In this, a middle-class universalism, generally comparable from a psychological perspective to European Universalism, says that taking rat race bribes from the man is as much a part of the natural order of things as natural law. This is maybe predictable to the extent that the propertied big knobs ruling the global class order have always cultivated the myth of the middle class, and upward social mobility, as a bribe to the working class not to resist perennial ruling class warfare. Certainly not to keep up the good fight over the long term for the classless society, and the extension of the democratic revolution to the economy.

Thus the working class in the global North especially is generally conditioned to see ourselves as a temporarily embarrassed ruling class, per Steinbeck, not as exploited slaves leased like the car pool, for not dissimilar reasons. Owning a house, the ruling class tells us through its corporatised media, corporate-captured governments and intellectually sanitised schools, puts us in the same class as Jeff Bezos, and is definitely not a debt trap that ensures our docility.

(We very definitely need not make warnings about wage-slavery, debt slavery or trying to make an endless-growth economy work on a finite planet features of our system of indoctrination to servitude. We should conform to the desire to dominate all life underwriting European Universalism and mimick our ruling class overlords, faking it until we make it, or forget the difference, or both.)

European and middle-class universalisms are both essentially weak insofar as they need to deny the dependency both of European colonists on the vassals they exploit, and of the propertied ruling classes on the productive working classes they relentlessly exploit. This inadmissible state of dependence tells of the value of the working class. This tells us why we need not measure our value by the particular and discrete value systems of the ruling class, and of those amongst our class who take their bribes, forsaking class struggle for selfish individualism at the same moment they trade freedom for consumerism.

It is a no-brainer really that a world born of coercive control logic generates endless social pressure to conform, to join the rat race and not embarrass selfish individualists by retaining individuality and an ethical core. The deeply-ingrained born-to-rule elitism of European Universalism, and so also arguably the patent universalism of the liberal middle classes, asks only servile conformity with the unspoken but deeply ingrained norms of world capitalism, born of the coercive control logic of the European Civilising Mission and the intellectual prejudices of European Universalism.

We can surely do better. Articulating values associated with a producers’ universalism means developing consciousness as a class, and so the basis for fighting for political autonomy as a class–indeed, for abolishing classes entirely. European Universalism says the world and its freedoms belong to Europe’s; middle class universalism says the world and its freedoms belongs to the middle classes. A workers universalism not only rejects the cultish bounded rationality of the class order, but the condition of dependency on which it depends.

If the difference between the universalisms of our class oppressors and our own is the difference between valuing ourselves as political actors and believing we need the ruling class enough to accepts its bribes to conform, or its empires, its value is clear, and we owe it to ourselves to recognise that.