George Hoare: Dividing society, obscuring class
Thoughts on Social Division II. A Guest Essay by one of the Bungacast hosts
When approaching any social phenomenon, the quickest path to grasping it is usually a vulgar Marxist one – and almost always, the more vulgar, the better. We might suggest that social division is a process rather than a fixed reality of contemporary society. While the same could arguably be said about class from our vulgar Marxist perspective – the irreducible reality of contemporary capitalist societies is that they are defined by their class divisions, which have continually to be reproduced – saying that a society is socially divided is different to saying that it is defined by class struggle. In the case of class struggle in a capitalist society, the agents are clear: the working class versus the capitalist class, with some intermediary classes in between. With social division, the agents of division are left unstated. It’s also not clear from the outset why social division might be beneficial to some and harmful to others. In this sense, then, it is useful for us to think about who the social dividers are and what it is that they might get out of social division.
To be crude, it is likely that those who gain most from social division are not those who would be able to realise those gains by drawing strict class divisions within society; in other words, it is the ruling and intermediary classes who (in theory at least) have the most to gain from attempting to construct society as socially rather than class divided, because any construction of society as class divided would reveal the difference between their interests and those of the majority of society. This is particularly useful for the professional-managerial classes of contemporary capitalism who find their ideological expression in today’s Left, since they are not able to articulate their class interests directly as this would reveal those interests not just to be different to those of the working classes of their countries, but in fact directly opposed to the workers’ interests. To the extent that social division replaces a more “reductive” model of society on a class basis, it is useful politically for the professional-managerial class in redreawing lines of conflict in ways that hide their class position. For a vulgar Marxist, then, social division is a political tactic.
But we can also ask what social division actually looks like in contemporary capitalist societies. At least in the UK case, it is increasingly clear, as the political crises of Brexit and Covid have demonstrated, that social division is made up of two main processes: establishing and maintaining strict social barriers with clear mechanisms of exclusion, and the demonisation and social delegitimation of those not enclosed within the preferred part of the divide.
Combining these two theses – that there are social dividers who gain from social division, and that social division consists of social closure and delegitimation of those outside – gives us a rough vulgar Marxist starting point for analysing social division: social division is a political tactic utilised by the contemporary professional-managerial class, which specifically allows it to divide the working class and delegitimise any dissent that comes from the working class on the key issues around which social division is created.
The social division tactic is also explained in part by its fit to the wider cultural context. We live in an extremely pessimistic age, pervaded by a general feeling of apocalypse – the sense of a historical, metaphysical, and human ending. Nowhere is this clearer than in contemporary approaches to the environment and the climate. As Thomas Fazi analyses, we are seeing the increasing mainstreaming of “degrowth communism”, a purportedly radical and anti-capitalist position that articulates the necessity of humans finding a “new way to live” and decreasing economic and human activity that impacts on the environment in order to save the species. In one sense, “degrowth communists” are no more than the intellectual heirs of Malthusianism, spreading a generalised fear about overpopulation and seeking sooner or later to manage population growth among the least desirable parts of society. What is new, however, is the way in which degrowth communists find themselves on the same page as Davos types; as Joel Kotkin frames it in his The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, we have a clerisy (the PMC) allying with the oligarchs and using environmentalism as the new religious ideology to control the serfs and yeomanry (the contemporary middle and working classes). For both the degrowth communists and the concerned elites, man truly is the most dangerous animal. Social division becomes a necessary tactic, then, given the stakes at play: if the planet and the continued existence of the species as a whole is at stake, then any demonisation of enemies or invoking of clear friend/enemy distinctions is justified by the desperate need for victory on behalf of the whole species.
In this situation, we can be relatively sure that the process of dividing society around any politicized issue – Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, climate change, inflation – will continue and deepen. In other words, our societies are only likely to feel more and more divided and in more and more intractable ways. Are there any ways to avoid this movement towards division, that might only end in total atomization? One approach is to emphasise the deeper historical narratives that might tie us together and argue for a politics of the common good, which is the path taken by Blue Labour’s Maurice Glasman. However, this is unlikely to be appealing to the PMC who benefit from dividing society, nor plausible to the rest of society as energy crises deepen. More promising, perhaps, is to recognise that we are not supposed to be a united society in terms of what we think or in our class interests. The opposite of social division in the short term is not social unity but the return of a new version of an old idea: that different parts of society have different interests. In the longer term, we might find a higher social unity of sorts through a much more democratic society – one that is structured around a unity recognising our shared humanity and the universal human achievements in science, art, and culture. But putting aside this utopian dreaming and focusing on articulating an idea of class interests that structure society as a number of opposed parts seems a much better response to the trend towards total division we see today. It is likely that the first steps in doing this will seem very modest by historical comparison, but to vulgarise how one of the original ‘Marxists’ might have put it, you have to try to jump where you’re at, not where you might like to be.
Cover photo: The Specials - Ghost Town video still (1981).
"...focusing on articulating an idea of class interests that structure society as a number of opposed parts seems a much better response to the trend towards total division we see today"
Thanks for the article George (and Elena). I think people like yourselves, Thomas Fazi, Simon Elmer, Leila, Alex and others have been doing a great job of applying the focus George describes in the quote above. Since the 'flash point' of 2016 and (to my mind at least) accelerated and concentrated during the Covid years. Although the last three years have caused huge division, I also feel this period could be the catalyst for a firmer coalition forming among those members of the working and middle classes that have been demonised by the PMC and Davos Set over that last decade or so. Let's hope so.
From the article - "...concerned elites..." - concerned, not for the well-being of others, but that they should maintain (or rather, increase) their control of the masses?
Thanks for the cover photo Elena. RIP Terry Hall.
10/10 interesting, well written and compelling