Being ‘Prolier than thou’ and the wisdom of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Having been denounced online for the umpteenth time as a “liberal” (sic), “middle class” “student-type” (etc) as a result of my daring to support the postal strike, I wanted to write a quick article before I head off for a couple of days without the internet.
During the US elections, I remember reading in the Guardian about Mrs Obama’s appearance on one of those awful women’s shows. This was brought to my mind today because I remember wondering where the hell this notion of needing humble roots springs from. The press and various Republicans attacked Mrs Obama for being one of the elite, with her $275,000 per year salary and Princeton education.
Leave aside for a moment the outright hypocrisy of these Republicans – who often claim ‘Christian’ values while diddling their assistants or rent-boys or any number of other things. Politicians evidently feel they can get a gig for beating up on people who appear ‘middle class’, or who speak out on things like poverty without being poor or homeless themselves.
Some of the attacks on Michelle Obama bordered on outright racism during the election, slurring her for fist-jab gesture of the sort which rappers and any hip-hoppish sorts under 25 generally make. It was denounced as a ‘terrorist’s fist-jab’ by (hold your breath) a FOX news presenter, who has since been taken off air apparently. Much in the same way, I suppose, that Obama’s entirely capitalist measures for the banks and healthcare have been denounced as socialistic.
A lot of what Obama has done, beginning with his comment during the primaries that bigotry and violence stemmed from poverty, has been spun as patronizing the poor. The means to combat it, for almost every prominent politicians has been to create a “man-of-the-people” circus from Bill Clinton’s jazz movement right on down.
Obama, Mrs Obama, McCain and the rest have all attempted to portray themselves at one time or another as being like the average American. Mrs Obama, with her recitation of life in south Chicago is just one more in the long line of politicians to reap the benefits of a working-class upbringing. Why is that so special, so valued?
One might almost think that it is considered so important because it acts as a talisman to ward off those who might otherwise suspect all the candidates of being yet more self-serving pawns for big business. How can that be the case, campaign hacks say, when my candidate is working class, who worked him/herself up from the gutter? Is it not the case that, if someone has the genuine interests of workers at heart, it’ll be plainly evident and it won’t matter which class they come from?
The Right loves to make the point, in debate, that all the most famous socialists came from well-to-do households, whereas the best capitalist ideologues pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. This ignores the fact that there is an immense amount of wealth to be tapped by capitalist ideologues, whereas the life of the average ‘professional’ revolutionary involves gutwrenching poverty and borderline alcoholism (from what I’ve seen anyway).
Individual backgrounds do not mean so much as present conditions; someone can have been brought up by middling parents but yet be working class. Someone can have had a great education and attempt to use it for other people’s benefit. We don’t seem to have a problem with doctors or other highly-qualified workers doing this – where’s the difference with politics?
Of course the difference is not principled, it is not an objection to ‘help’ per se, from someone of a wealthier background, it is simply that the snide attacks are indicative of political disagreement – and couching it behind the snide attack is simply dishonest. Ironically it’s not the less well off who object the loudest. As with Obama’s comment during the primaries, it was the other millionaire politicians who screamed foul the loudest.
More revolting still, in the American case, is the next step on that ladder of platitudes; “this [America] is the only country in the world where that is possible.” That’s precisely what Mrs Obama said a few days ago. With comments like that, the media don’t have to spin the news in order to create the narrative they want; the incipient nationalism is there, lock stock and sound bite. The American Dream, rolled into one person.
No doubt Britain has something similar; at its root, this type of triumphalism is summed up “If you like X so much, why don’t you go live there?“
All I can say is bring back Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Our electorates, American and British are forcibly cast and chained to the role of Gatsby, believing ‘in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.’ Someone should read to them the final passage of the Great Gatsby as it has a haunting relevance.
“It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
That is the trajectory of all such snobbery, inverted or actual.
It seems obligatory for them to say “wow, this country is great because I’ve made it” – Michelle Obama is having to make up for having said that her husbands election campaign was the first time she felt proud of her country.
What is forgotten is that okay, you made it – but what about all the people you grew up with? Where are they now? Still working long hours for low pay?
As George Carlin says:
“You know why they call it the American Dream? Because you have to be asleep to believe in it!”
Ah I never read those final lines like that!
Stop ruining my literary memories!
Dave,
Kautsky set out this relationship clearly, and Lenin borrowed from it, though not accurately. As Marx and then Kautsky state scientific socialism is the product not of the working class, but of a section of the bourgeois intelligentsia. It is brought into the workers movement by them. It is not surprising that these ideas are more easily picked up by others from that social strata, possibly more easily than they are by workers for the very reasons that theey arise first amongst the bourgeois intelligentsia.
But, Marx was absolutely clear and resolutely fought against his former associates who beleived that Socialism was possible on the basis of a determined struggle by this elite. Draper covers the ground on that ddebate by Marx well. Engels always makes clear that precisely because he and Marx saw the working class as the historical force that creates socialism, his role was to act as a supporter and educator of that class. He was in its service not vice versa. And the problem is that Marx’s own theory tells us that the petit-bourgeois – and again its necessary to read Engels version of what they meant by class in his letter to Bloch – by its nature wavers. Both Lenin and Trotsky relate how in Russia there were many “Marxist” students who suddenly found themselves on the other side of the barricades when the chips were down.
That was one reason that Trotsky argue in discussions with the US Trotskyists where the role of intellectuals and petit-bouregois elements became crucial, that non-workers had to only be given a candidate membership until they had proved themselves capable of supporting worker members in their activities, of relating to workers, and recruiting workers. We seek to build a Workers Party, and the conclusions from that are obvious.