Musings on socialism and lifestylism
How should socialists live their lives? There’s a good review of Tristram Hunt’s The Frock Coated Communist, about the life of Friedrich Engels, over at Resolute Reader, which highlights some things about Marx’s colleague that I didn’t know.
“[W]hat shines through for me is that Engels was a man who loved life. Fine wines and walks in the country, travel and the excitement of revolution.” As the inheritor of a share in the cotton industry, Engels rarely wanted for money.
Celebrated anti-communist Robert Service’s review in the Times also maintains that Engels enjoyed prostitutes, though Service’s assessment clearly sets out to be politically crude and personally spiteful so I take it with a pinch of salt.
Finally, Engels was also a shareholder and manager in a cotton factory. Like Robert Owen and the other idealist socialists, therefore, Engels was not one of the exploited but exploited the wage-labour of others.
So how are men like Engels, who espouse revolution and social change, to be taken? Engels’ own behaviour is divisible into two: his overtly political actions and his social life. These two seem contradictory – and Robert Service uses this seeming contradiction as a way to discredit the political views of the revolutionary pair.
Indeed this style of polemic is not limited to Service. Friends of this blog, and I myself, have been guilty of categorising certain soft Lefts by their social background (or social aspirations) and making snide remarks about Islington dinner sets.
The political Right often make similar remarks in the comments section of Liberal Conspiracy, often if Diane Abbott’s name is mentioned.
Recently both Private Eye and Jako said something similar about Austin Mitchell, regarding his recent appearance on TV, for talking about really elite dinner parties whilst they were meant to be living in supposedly working class accommodation.
I recently got into an argument at my local watering hole because I got rather irritated by a Buddhist, who kept insisting that if I was a communist, and “believed everyone to be equal”, and denounced wealth, that I should surrender my own.
My point is that this sort of prejudice seems widespread. I imagine few of us are completely immune.
Moralising like this truly has no place in politics. It certainly has no place for Marxists. If the point of Marxism is to overthrow the established economic and social order, and make available to all the benefits currently accruing only to the wealthy, then drinking fine wine or enjoying fine food should hardly be considered hypocrisy.
There was nothing fashionable, in Engels’ day, about posing as a socialist revolutionary whilst continuing to enjoy a wealth and comfort unaffordable by the average worker. Engels’ enjoyment of his comforts was unpretentious, therefore. And, according to Service, he was far from ostentatious about either side of his life.
This exempts Engels from charges of lifestylism, I think.
Secondly, more generally, whilst it is certainly the case that our political elite, including their client minions and the lesser parts, such as on the lower rungs of think-tanks, researchers in parliament etc, is rarely drawn from the poorest backgrounds (introducing racial and gender biases also) is this a problem with the individual or the system?
My argument would be that it is a problem with the system. If politics is to be accessible to everyone, then the inequalities which make it more accessible for some than for others need to be challenged.
There’s the argument that we can curb inequality at the top, and we should, but the restrictions are usually structural rather than directed against high value consumer goods: higher taxes for the purposes of redistribution for example. Getting too caught up in restricting what material goods people should enjoy, focused through the prism of their political views, re-introduces a Puritanism the Left should have escaped decades ago.*
Moreover, from a Left perspective, while it might be easy to amuse ourselves by poking fun at how insular the political class is – particularly those who aspire to represent the working class – better we have some effete soft Lefts in parliament than rabid Conservatives, who’ll still be privately educated Oxonian, Merc-driving multi-home owning gits but who’ll also vote through legislation that lumps the cost of millionaires getting richer on to workers.
Either that or we can simply employ Mil’s (and Walt Whitman’s) go-to phrase. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
[*] This is a view I would extend to sex work. In principle sex work is no more exploitative than building a private jet or preparing the vines at Chateau Lafite. If indeed Engels did employ prostitutes, though I myself have moral hang-ups about using such services, as I do with strip clubs, then I don’t think it constitutes hypocrisy on his part.
If we have a problem with capitalism, it should be that this system of production – more than any other – creates more wealth than any period in human history. Yet a large proportion of the global population see little of it, continuing to survive by turning their own bodies into a commodity through their labour. Sex is just one more of these.
The Hunt biography also seems fairly confident that Engels ‘enjoyed prostitutes’.
Good points, mostly. Toynbee has her faults, but people always lay into her for being well off. Bearing in mind that she is someone who thinks the rich, herself included, should be taxed more, I see no problem with this. Is arguing for your own economic interests to take a hit to help others really hypocritical in the slightest? I would argue it’s sportsmanlike.
“This is a view I would extend to sex work. In principle sex work is no more exploitative than building a private jet or preparing the vines at Chateau Lafite.”
No, but the economics of immediade exploitation is not the only dimension worthy of consideration here. If ‘work’ is to be the only paradigm of the social good, we might as well compare sex work to being made to go for a strenuous run. The fact is that Sex is (hopefully) something that is deeply affecting. One might expend the same amount of energy charging through a booby trapped jungle and thousands of tracer bullets to that which would be expended crawling through a coal mine.
They may produce similar divisions of overall surplus value.
Once is certainly more trauma inducing than the other. Failing to accept the particularly degrading nature of sexual exploitation dehumanises left economics.
One, even. Inline spellchecking doesn’t seem to be working.
Disagree. This feels like an uncomfortable attempt to protect Engels and your own way of living.
Not that I necessarily object to the latter (and I’m guilty of it too); as you say the point is to promote systemic change that will raise standards of living for all, although some might suggest that wealth redistribution should be led by example from a grassroots level (whether it is fashionable is beside the point, which is surely that these things are an enjoyable privilege denied to others for want of wealth – an imbalance that, even to a tiny degree, could potentially be redressed. Plus the below).
For me it is always the degree of exploitation that is at issue, when we balance the merits of addressing personal hypocrisy against retaining systemic focus (there need not be a dichotomy but I recognise there can be). While all activities that exploit the low-cost labour of others are ultimately objectionable, I think you can hardly compare the conditions for workers in a cotton factory in Engels’ day, or the purchase of unfettered access to a woman’s body – the most invasive, degrading, objectifying and dehumanising form of exploitation of an individual that still exists today – to working in a French vinyard. In fact, I find it pretty insulting that you do so.
Well both of you can find it dehumanising / insulting, I was looking at the principle of the thing and didn’t have a survey of every prostitute in the country to call on.
Surely the real point is that asceticism is something we can leave to the monks et al.
Unfortunately we live in capitalistic and consumerist society so we have to make compromises therwise you end up as irrelevant hippies
[Sorry I make it a point not to comment on these parts of the blog: I feel I'm intruding, but rules are there to be broken, so...]
Doesn’t the fact that your principle equates the degredation of working in a nineteenth century factory with that of working in a french vineyard say something about your principle?
There are more and less privileged sections of the working class, true enough. But since I don’t know the specific conditions in Engels factory, nor for that matter the specific conditions of workers on a vineyard (which needn’t be easy, Barney – think of immigrant orange pickers in California, or mushroom pickers here in the UK – it’s a tough life), I’m working off generalities.
I know its tough: I’ve done similar jobs and they were hard work (even though they were summer jobs and therefore rather easier than if one were doing it one’s whole life).
My point wasn’t really that. I was more getting at the original phrase “in principle…” was it just a casual expression or does the principle actually equate these in the “class reality metaphysic” or however it is you guys see reality?
Well I don’t speak for “us guys”, I just speak for me. It was short-hand, mostly.
I’m not sure what you mean by suggesting I’m equating the two however; the two jobs are obviously different in a whole range of features. Yet they have similar characteristics. When I say “in principle” they are the same, the similar characteristics are what I’m flagging up. If I don’t flag up the differences, in this instance, it’s because I was throwing an idea out there to see if it got a response.
Sorry about “you guys” – it was shorthand.
What I was trying to get at was that one must analyse the world by a model constructed of certain principles. From what I have seen of Marxist analysis (and to be honest I haven’t got the time to read Zizek etc) it is quite mono-principled; everything is seen through quite a limited prism of relation to means of production, and the resultant exploitation and alienation themes. I realise I am simplifying, but I see it as an accurate model of what I have seen of your model. I’m uncomfortable with a theory that reduces everything down to such a narrow base.
I don’t think it does reduce everything down to a narrow base. Quite the opposite; whilst in my writings you may pick up the constant stress upon the equality of workers, and perhaps in this case the moral equivalence of different exploitative practices, this is because of the context in which I’m writing. It’s not an academic excursus, it’s polemical, in the context of a Left influenced by postmodern ideas that are a recipe for bad tactics and inaction where it counts.
Fair enough. I’ve just not seen any evidence of any breadth. Where is it? Where else does the analysis start from?
The analysis starts the only place any analysis can start: the material building blocks of our social, economic and political existence. This is not the extent of the analysis though.
By material building blocks I presume you mean capital and land, and the control thereof.
Yes, property, production, capital and the social relations which different methods of organizing these imply.
That looks quite narrow. Your model seems to imply that satisfaction at work is purely a function of how the agent stands in relation to capital. I don’t think that is very plausible.
I wouldn’t say it is very plausible either; I imagine something so seemingly simple is a very complex. But Marx was not one to suggest that theory should take the place of empirical examination of any subject.
That’s not what we were talking about, however. I was talking about analysis of the social totality; you’re talking about one aspect of it.
Okay that slightly loses me. What exactly is social totality?
The material realities which underpin social relations evident in society, those social relations themselves and how they shape our cognition. Of that, job satisfaction concerns only the cognitive.
Okay. That makes a bit of sense. Sounds suitably post-Kantian-with-a-bit-of-empiricism-thrown-in as well. Presuming that job-satisfaction is an important driver of happiness (pretty plausible) and admitting that your model offers no discernible analysis of job satisfaction, doesn’t this leave your model rather limited in its scope? (Presuming of course that people’s happiness is a legitimate political goal – which I think kind of underwrites most political thought – but that is another debate).
The problem is not that my model offers no discernible analysis of job satisfaction, it does. Marx was never one to advocate approaching things armed only with theory; empirical research was a key part of his method. To find out what causes job satisfaction, ask workers. Pretty straightforward.
The problem is that this one aspect cannot be reduced first to social relations and then the underpinning material realities. This is what you seem to think Marxism (or my brand of it) aims at: the idea that you can read off everything about a society from the current organisation of production and other such matters.
Achieving the happiness of all is a perfectly legitimate goal – and I have more to say on the relevance of job satisfaction (and other happiness barometers) and their use in any systematic world-view, but it shall have to wait til tomorrow as I’m frazzled and it’s bed time.
Apologies for taking a while to get to this Barney. I haven’t forgotten. I’m trying to work out a good phrasing of what it is I want to say.
Basically my point will be along the lines that the very concept of job satisfaction is created by capitalism – it presumes the current relations of property and production. You can ask a shopfloor worker what makes them happy, and try and maximize these factors – but they’ll still be a shopfloor worker and will still be constrained by the logic underpinning their employment.
I’m not saying that maximizing such factors isn’t a worthwhile endeavour of course.
Interesting. I’d put it the other way: a guy who serves at tills and stock shelves still serves at tills and stocks shelves even if they have a 1/10,000 vote in the direction of the firm.
I take one of the implicit points you were making to be that ownership (though you would put that word differently) is empowering and positive; no doubt it is. But I think it is not predicitively helpful to see it as underpinning the situation – rather what underpins the situation is the actual day-to-day of doing the job. The relation to capital is more accurately captured as a small constituent, the effect of which fluctuates with factors such as the nature of the job and company etc