Saturday, June 6, 2009

23

future, nor as an inherently preferable, that is, more morally
pure, existence in the present, as compared with middle class life.
We say this because these are the pretended presumptions of
many inverted snobs in the 'class struggle' movement, they tick off
proletarian characteristics like naturalists identifying a separate
species. We do not pointedly prefer football to opera, we do not
think it is better, more pure, more human to be poor than to be rich.
We do not think it is inevitable that human kindness is more likely
to be encountered in working class individuals than in middle class
individuals. We do not think working class people are better than
anybody else because they have been defined as belonging to one
or other social category. We are not interested in working class
culture. We don not accept that you can be working class if you are
not employed as a worker no matter what your family history (this
is not intended as an insult or slight on people's sense of
themselves and where they come from, but we are bored with
university lectures who use 'life was hard back then' as a means
of asserting their authority). Quite simply, we see the working
class as being an economic function organized as part of
capitalism and not an ethnic identity, if you are no longer employed
as an industrial worker then you are not and industrial worker. The
same goes for industrial workers when they are on holiday, off
sick, in the pub, or indeed anytime when they are not present on
the actual production line, that is, anytime they are not working or
having an effect on their work (in official or unofficial industrial
action, when they are preventing production).

We are not interested in theoretical expanding the working class
to include all militant formation from blacks, gays, women,
disabled peasants; we are not interested in the working class
becoming more human (that is, more political) by means of a
raising up through consciousness. We do not celebrate the
working class: working class life is rubbish, it is not a condition to
be aspired to, and the past thirty years of pro-revolutionary
fetishization of the proletariat as a thing in itself (the legend has it
that the leftists group Militant, used to force its activists to war flat
caps and donkey jackets on their paper sells so as to 'fit in') has
mistaken and confused the actually power of the working class and
reduced the proletariat to the status of just another oppressed
minority. Finally we do not endorse the delinquency of the
underclass or interpret it as rebelliousness, we see permanent
delinquency as the psychological absorption of dehumanization, no

No comments:

Post a Comment