Content warning: hom*ophobia (especially) but also racism. Sexism too. All that ‘woke’ stuff.
I grew up in a small country town of around nine (sometimes ten) thousand people in inland northern New South Wales. There, the wellbeing of the local economy was largely determined by whether the abattoir was currently up and running. And that depended, on reflection, on currency prices. These determined, in the flexible ways that globalisation by then demanded, the relative competitiveness of the meat grown and processed in my little town. And whether the abattoir was employing anyone.
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Whole lives, families, businesses and community depended on factors over which no one (there) could control. Such fluctuating fortunes in working class income (and dignity) was, as the ‘crisis of masculinity’ Jeremiads put it at the time, emasculating. But it was a material consequence of changes to global capitalism.
Image: Luke Fildes The Doctor (1891). Oil on canvas, 166 × 242 cm (65 × 95 in). Tate Britain, London.
What it wasn’t, contrary to claims of conservative women (including, sometimes, my own mother), was the fault of feminism. Frankly, in my town feminism was visible mainly as a bogey (wo)man (friends, correct me if you remember it differently). Globalisation, though, was felt everywhere, from the co*ke machines that supplanted our local cordial factory, to the fluctuating fortunes of an abattoir-led economy.
I was only a kid. The global economy was barely on my radar. What endlessly invaded my radar, however, was hom*ophobia, which I encountered well before I understood anything about sex at all. The awful name calling, the relentless suspicion between boys surely also too young to understand what they meant by ‘poofter’. It was a deep gendering of stances towards the world, grounded in hegemonic heterosexuality, that taught me more than any Evangelical interpretations of Adam and Eve could, that patriarchal rule represented ‘natural’ order of things, which was unaccountably threatened. Harmful for us all, I am an unspeakably angry witness of the lifelong trauma this inflicted on my gay brother, among others.
I was pretty stunned, then, to see that when Australia held a postal survey on same sex marriage in 2017, my home town voted Yes to gay marriage. Let’s not overstate the sense of progress, it was barely a majority. Hardly an isolated incident though: that other country town I know pretty well, Broken Hill, now hosts an annual Broken Heel festival of Queer that my friend who grew up there says was similarly unthinkable in her youth.
This week, from three different angles, I was asked to consider such solidarity with queer to be ‘woke’ (a word now almost only ever used to belittle) in a way that undermines solidarity with the working class.
Questions of ‘woke’ are relevant to me as someone who writes about professional virtue.
Unbeknownst to my teenage self, a battle was already underway between cultural historians and their Marxists teachers and forebears. This made it seem that ‘identity’ and the ‘material’ were at odds. And there was a structure v agency debate that I continue to find pretty irresistible. The evident alignment between cultural history and neoliberal capitalism (observed by William Sewell, who in Logics of History acknowledged he was as guilty of it as anyone) didn’t (at least in my view) make it wholly wrong.
Still, like many who lean towards materialism, I felt that the cultural turn tended to turn a blind eye on matters of structure that were fundamental to historical capitalism. Certainly, nearly everyone stopped using economic and statistical data, though as time passed it was mainly because they didn’t know how, anymore.
So, I understand and kinda relate to the desire (see Nigel Bowen’s recent substack, also Christian Parenti’s Cargo Cult of Woke article, the latter gratefully received via Terry Irving this week) to reject so-called ‘identity’ politics as not materially (so to speak) about class. And maybe provoking of fascism, as Bowen fears - though I think it is at least as likely to be accurately described as provoking to fascists, an important distinction.
Also, Leftists Sometimes Do Silly Things is just not the Breaking News headline that some (like Parenti, but also the third anti-woker that came my way this week, Eric Kaufman in The Times) seem to think. A litany of stupid pedagogies (for instance) imposed by well-meaning educationalists hardly stand out from those turning reflexivity into painfully well-meaning but counterproductive activities for decades, arguably centuries. And is a pattern of behaviour hardly confined to the Left. Or the PMC.
Material Stuff
Any preoccupation with ‘identity’ that fails to see the ways that race, gender, sexuality and environment are also materially constituted is missing something important.
Racial capitalism, historically constituted by colonialism, underpins contemporary racism. Patriarchal power structures and capitalism are similarly co-constituted. The feminisation of work, making it more precarious and less well paid, has not-coincidentally also tended to offer LGBTQI+ folk a precarious place in the labour market. The fact that the post-industrial economies of the global moment also experienced a simultaneous crisis of masculinity must further remind us that gender and economic structures are always entangled.
Environmental degradation and the looming climate catastrophe is likewise caused by almost-identical patterns of ‘primitive accumulation’, surges of profit based on cheap humans combined with cheap nature, (cheapened by racism, sexism, hom*ophobia, transphobia, beliefs in the superiority of ‘man’ over ‘nature etc)
When it is performed as work, Virtue is material too, brought into being as material stuff. Imagining virtue to inhere in white, middle class bosoms, this ‘capital’ was invested to seek financial and virtuous profit for their PMC selves and (they hoped, usually genuinely) for society.
Its alignment to colonial capitalism, combined with the hierarchical (and similarly material) system of ‘merit’, made the consequences pretty awful. Not only were there stupid things, like an association between feminine sexual purity and hospital hygiene, but hierarchies built on ideas about class, race and gender superiority turned merit into a technique of exploitation.
Video: This week, New Books Network was about Virtue Capitalists.
In the 1960s and 1970s, when anti-colonial activism showed that anti-capitalist liberation must go beyond the domestic, industrial working class, each profession had a moral crisis. This is good - it shows that the virtue that is embedded in all professional work could be turned against capitalist structures. This is important in the present moment when we evidently need professional expertise to tackle social, economic and environmental disaster.
The moral crisis did split the liberal technocratic goals of the professional class from a radical version. These two sides have sat in an uneasy alliance ever since.
(The understatement here, of both ‘uneasy’ and ‘alliance’ is extraordinary…more another day, maybe).
There was also a subsequent split between professional virtue and managerial authority, a split of the P from the M in the PMC. The divisions we see now between professionals and managers was combined with a process of moral deskilling that diminishes professional authority both at work and in politics. This is gendered: as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, it is no coincidence that the ‘feminisation’ of professional virtue is linked to the rise of women in professions becoming proletarianised under the rule of a masculinising managerial class.
Sneering at ‘woke’ (and there is no more toxically sneery a place than our present public sphere) is one of the expressions of the class conflict that the split in the PMC has produced.*
It is tempting for professionals to turn virtue – virtue that is still needed to teach well, care for the sick, build stable structures, tackle climate catastrophe, build a new politics and so on – into a battle for technocratic control. This is, I think, what we would call in Australia a ‘teal’ position, which is pro-capitalist and pro-climate, often supporting other ‘progressive’ (anti-sexist, pro-LGBTQI+) values too.
*This produces an ‘intra bourgeois’ conflict between a feminised professional elite (for the process of proletarianisation is far from complete) and a masculinised managerial one (whose ascendance is also not absolute). Though the most extreme of hyper-masculine ‘managerial’ politics really must be opposed, teal v blue** is not, I suggest, productive of change. It is instead rather destructive in the changes the conflict inhibits.
**For those not local to me, blue in Australia refers to the conservative LNP, the opposite of the way it is used in the US. Teal makes sense in this context because it is blue + green.
Which is to say, under the conditions that are proletarianising and feminising professional work, the conditions for solidarity with the working class are there and should be embraced as the path to real change.
But. Creating the intellectual conditions that facilitate a racist sexist transphobic society is hardly a revolution worthy of the name.
F*cking capitalism means seeking climate justice, being anti-racist, anti-sexist, and inclusive of gender and sexuality diversity. Firstly because it is right – we hardly need to quote the rates of black incarceration, Aboriginal deaths is custody, the emergency-level crisis in domestic violence, the rates of self harm among LGBTQI+ people, the millions of floating dead fish in rivers essential to survival, we know this. But also because their sources of oppression and exploitation are the same.
F*cking capitalism.
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