The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie – Slavoj Žižek

The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie – Slavoj Žižek, London Review of Books, 26 January 2012.

Interesting take on Marx’s notion of the ‘general  intellect’ – “by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical know-how”.

He claims there is a shift from the selling of commodities that derive  their exchange value from the human labour used in production to the renting of resources including knowledge – rent appropriated though the privatisation knowledge and resources.

Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply.

In a passage redolent of Bauman’s wasted lives as the collateral damage of global capitalism Žižek writes

In the ongoing process of capitalist globalisation, the category of the unemployed is no longer confined to Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’; it also includes, as Jameson notes, ‘those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernising projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases’..

The general thrust of the argument seems to be that a paid proletariat involved in production is much less central to capitalism than it used to be and increasingly surplus to requirements. Rents produce massive profits part of which are paid in salaries to a bourgeoisie that manages corporations but it is ‘surplus’ salary in the sense that its allocation is less to do with merit or competence and more to do with ideological and political objectives. In this sense they are being paid more than they are worth by any normal economic criteria. Most middle class and student protest is to do with maintaining their salaried position in the system rather than overthrowing it.

These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.

One thing that is not covered in the article is the role of those that rent and consume. There is still a great deal of production of material goods that require effective demand and a market. In addition many of the salaried bourgeoisie get their wages from administrating one way or another the poor and excluded and, in the process of which, legitimate the inequality and ideologically disguise the role of the poor in maintaining the system. Is this the commodification of the poor or their constitution as a resource for rentiers?

Socialisation as reflexive engagement

Thanks to Mark Carrigan for bringing this to my attention http://markcarrigan.net/2012/01/15/margaret-archer-socialization-as-reflexive-engagement/ As he notes, Margaret Archer’s presentation starts about 8 minutes into the video. Some quick initial notes:

Archer refers to the traditional theory of socialisation as the ‘blotting paper model’. She picks out Parsons for particular condemnation and Mead as the most sensitive to the problems with this model in that he at least recognises that the modern world of globalising capitalism has undercut some of the preconditions for the traditional model to be adequate. Her critique rests on the crucial question she claims realists ask as an opening gambit in all their enquiries – what are the necessary conditions for something to be the case – the transcendental argument. She adopts this approach in her critique of the traditional theory of socialisation. What are the necessary conditions for the theory to be correct? Having enumerated these and found them lacking, the theory can be exposed as inadequate.

Under current conditions of globalising capitalism the ‘reflexive imperative’ has intensified due to the increased pace of change, particularly since the 1980s. Due to changes in the family initially but the wider world which growing children and young people enter, the ‘communicative reflexive’ – the socialised individual assumed by the traditional theory – is now a minority. Two other types of ‘socialised’ individuals now predominate – the autonomous reflexive and the meta reflexive. The first of these is the entrepreneurial chancer on the lookout to exploit opportunities, individualistic, supporter of capitalism and by implication selfish and amoral.  The meta reflexive is critical of society and hopes for change and is constantly disappointed that it doesn’t happen.  Archer says that they tend to become volatile and wander from job to job.  These seem to me to be rather overdrawn, at least in the presentation.  There is a forthcoming book. Some characteristics of the meta reflexive can be seen, for instance, in radical academics and employees in the public sector. Perhaps it’s best to see Archers’ reflexive types as ideal types.  The fate of the old style communicative reflexive is uncertain as they are peculiarly unfit for this stage of modernity, their form of socialisation does not fit current conditions and therefore they potentially become ‘fractured reflexives’. This is a condition where they relinquish a large degree of autonomy. They become passive subjects at the mercy of circumstances that they do not actively engage with to achieve a degree, at least, of self determination.

I wonder how this maps onto Ulrich Beck’s classification of responses to risk society – active engagement, resigned acceptance and confused denial? Perhaps the different sorts of socialisation and forms of reflexive engagement Archer outlines may lead to differential propensities to fall into Beck’s categories later in life.

It might be interesting to revisit Dennis Wrong’s 1961 article ‘The Over-socialised Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’  http://www.jstor.org/pss/2089854

Also worth a look may be the chapter of Sennett’s new book ‘Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation’ which appears to be about early years socialisation http://politics.salon.com/writer/richard_sennett/

There is a set of notes on another Margaret Archer video I posted earlier Margaret Archer on Reflexivity

Mark has also posted some reflections provoked by the ‘Socialisation as reflexive engagement’ video at http://markcarrigan.net/2012/01/16/some-thoughts-on-socialization-and-personhood/

Institutionalised racism

Yesterday 2 men where found guilty of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence 18 years ago, April 1993, in Eltham, south east London. Although several people were arrested the evidence was found to be inconclusive and the cases dropped. For a variety of reasons including an inquest that returned a verdict of unlawful killing “in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five youths” and the evidence that the police had not investigated the murder properly, the MacPherson Report was commissioned. The report, published in 1999, identified ‘institutionalised racism’ in the Metropolitan Police as a fundamental factor in the bodged investigation. For a full time line of the story see the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16283806.

On the radio this morning, BBC 4 Today, the concept of institutional racism was explained by asking the question; did the police give the murder the time, resources and serious consideration it warranted? The answer was no. Was this because the victim was black? The answer was yes. The police always have to make decisions and judgements about how to allocate scarce resources and if they routinely take the colour of victims into account when making these decisions, this is institutionalised racism. It is a matter of a pervasive culture that provides the background to individual choices on procedural matters. If we take this as the meaning of institutionalised racism, then it still boils down to racist attitudes and decisions by policemen, police staff and police managers and leaders. The institutional culture provides the recipes for thinking and acting, and also for relatively unthinking routine engrained behaviour, language, attitudes and so on.  The thinking and unthinking acting reproduces and reinforces the culture. It is institutional racism as it permeates the whole institution and provides it with its taken-for-granted common-sense view of the world. In an interesting piece today in the Independent  (The killing of Stephen Lawrence ended Britain’s denial about racism), particularly on the initial coverage of the murder of Stephen Lawrence by the media, Brian Cathcart defines institutional racism using a quote from Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, on the day the Macpherson report was published:

“The very process of the inquiry has opened all our eyes to what it is to be black or Asian in Britain today… and the inquiry process has revealed some fundamental truths about the nature of our society, about our relationships, one with the other. Some truths are uncomfortable, but we have to confront them.”  Chief among these truths was the existence of institutional racism, and Straw was clear that it went beyond the police: “Any long-established, white-dominated organisation is liable to have procedures, practices and a culture which disadvantage non-white people.”

However, there are other aspects of institutionalised racism that the discussion on the radio did not bring out. An example of another dimension to institutionalised racism is the 1981 British Nationality act. This act created a number of different bands of citizenship and importantly removed the ‘right of abode’ in the UK  from many commonwealth citizens who previously had it. The new Act defined a category of full UK citizenship with the right of abode that systematically excluded the majority of ‘new’ commonwealth citizens – predominately black –  but retained it for the majority of individuals in the ‘old’ commonwealth countries, for instance Australia and Canada. To have full British citizenship with the right of abode it was now necessary to have had a UK domiciled relative who was a British citizen prior to 1949.  The Act therefore had a disproportionate effect on black and Asian commonwealth citizens – not by accident including, for instance, Hong Kong. Once this law is in operation and applied by border controls, it matters not whether the individual immigration officers are personally racist of not. They may not have a racist fibre in their bodies. The application of the racist law produces racist effects independently of the individuals applying the law equally to all who present themselves at the border control, or issue passports at the passport offices in commonwealth countries.

In the case of the institutionalised racism of the Metropolitan Police we have an example of  colour-blind criminal law being distorted by the discretionary decisions and practices of racist personnel. In the case of the British Nationality Act we have the example of institutionalised racism of a different sort where racism is embedded in the structure of the law and is equally consequential whether its operatives and officers are personally racist or not. This latter type of institutionalised racism does not depend on personal racism. One implication of this is that institutionalised racism cannot be solved simply(!) by race awareness training and tackling the cultural issues. Colour-blindness must be built into the process of making laws, rules and regulations as well as in there subsequent application and enforcement.

This was cross-posted to the Leeds University Public Sociology blog http://www.sociology.leeds.ac.uk/public/2012/01/04/institutional-racism-job-done/