The Veneer of Social Movement
Should we focus less on the underlying, unmasked parts of Capital? Probably not, but the mask can sometimes be more than just a mask.
Marx is usually, and I would say generally pretty accurately, accredited with discovering not just the overlaying movement of capital, but moreover, he helped uncover the mask that Capital applied to itself. He did so in response to many socialists at the time who typically didn’t, and he did so to find the true reasons behind capital’s productive and reproductive process. Sometimes, we, as Marxists, might tend to focus a little too much now on that underlying, core aspect, and forget to realize that people just don’t often think that way, even while implicitly understanding it.
As a pretty obsessive Marxist myself who tends more often to hang on his every word, I take what he said very seriously, and try to take that theory of social movement as an abstraction that can breathe and shape when applied to new conditions. So it’s not that Marx is wrong (could you imagine the wild statement that would be?) moreso I think we should think about, sometimes, how the veneer of that movement can affect the actual, social emancipation at the core, the material driver of social change.
Consider Marx’s referenced statements on the Irish question in The Monthly Review:
In his 1870 letter, Marx described what he then considered the overriding priority for labor organizing in England: “to make the English workers realize that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.” His closing words of advice to Meyer and Vogt were similar: “You have wide field in America for work along the same lines. A coalition of the German workers with the Irish workers (and of course also with the English and American workers who are prepared to accede to it) is the greatest achievement you could bring about now.” This internationalist and class-based perspective has lost none of its good sense in the century and a half since it was written.1
Marx, while not being wrong here(and especially as he wrote a lot on the Irish question), can come across scientific or crass in this passage in describing something that affects the minds and feelings of the participants of society. I’m sure you can imagine the xenophobia, marginalization, or even racism2 that the Irish proletariat felt towards them. I’m sure to Marx, and to us, that is very important, but here, his core message is a scientific one; your social movement is reliant upon an independent Ireland. The actual treatment of these people is imperative to look at, because actually seeing the social and physical violence enacted upon them by their fellow proletariat, their contemporary English proletariat, local and state governments will undoubtedly affect the way we see and react emotionally and organizationally.
So the question I’m asking today then, is how does the “veneer”, or perhaps sometimes, the cultural, or identity based reflection of material interests affect our own labor movement, past and present? In the first article I linked, it’s obviously about the relationship of American proletarians to their Mexican contemporaries, but I would rather take a more worldly look, especially at global imperialistic attitudes, rather than just one within our own continent, and apply it to the cultures that surround the union movement.
As a preliminary, I would ask you to take a look at this video and think about how it relates to the union and labor movement at large:
Immediately after the ad starts, a few statements made my eyes widen a bit.
This is no import
International Ladies’ Garments Union
None of those statements necessarily contradict each other, but it is funny to point out how it’s not an import, yet they are also connected internationally! What a great set of statements. “It’s not an import, no, we could never undermine American workers by having those “foreign” workers lower our wages! Also, look how cool we are standing in solidarity, organizing in an international union with those same foreign workers!”
Taking a look at this video, a few things stuck out to me like a sore thumb. It shows that a union is more than just the vehicle for immediate and scientific social change and a part of the whole in the broader question of the social movement, but it’s clearly an identity; something part of our cultural lives, just as being a proletarian is. This commercial is obviously appealing to the general American consumer populace who may or may not support unions, with the latter being a group the union would like to appeal to in order to establish legitimacy, but also to xenophobic workers, who demand that domestic goods are somehow better, and that our goods should be touched by American hands only. On the flip-side, this also might appeal to anti-imperialist and communist workers, who I would tend to describe as the polar opposite of xenophobic, who demand domestically productive American industries, so that imperialist profits can not be clawed from developing nations or the global south at large.
What does a commercial like this mean for us? It’s clearly a commercial that is beneficial to these workers in some way, but it’s also obviously not just a statement, saying abrubtly and scientifically, “Our immediate aim as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union is to establish consistent domestic production so that Indonesian textile workers may develop their own social movement without the American State reaching it’s imperial claws into it” as that, I’m sure, would not be a very well received statement-regardless of how true it is. As it may develop over time, rather than creating antagonistic relations with Indonesian workers, it will foster a sense of true internationalism, to see our common enemy, capital, rather than seeing each other asa means of lowering our working conditions. It, to me, clearly means that this “veneer” that reflects our social change, the commercials, the music, the movies-by in large, the “superstructure” is ever so important to analyze as that reflection of social change, something we can use to catalyze that movement, rather than something to ignore as something that is just a simple “mask” that removes us from scientific analysis of social change.
Wilson, D. L. (2017, February 13). Marx on immigration. Monthly Review. Retrieved July 4, 2022, from https://monthlyreview.org/2017/02/01/marx-on-immigration/
Ignatiev, N. (2009). How the Irish became white. Routledge.