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Unity Without Uniformity:
Class, Heterogeneity,
and Culture
Kathryn Russell
State University of New York College at Cortland
At
the beginning of the Twenty-first Century, an exciting movement for global justice
ties activists together in many ways, forming a diverse and decentralized unity.
People engage with each other in local, regional and world social forums, across
the internet, during encuentros, and in networks of mutual support and communication
like People’s Global Action. PGA initiated the global days of action which
included “the battle for Seattle” and other confrontations with global
capital. A Peoples' Global Action Asian and Gender conference will be held in
Dhaka, Bangladesh in April, 2004. “The Krishok Federation of farmers, women,
indigenous and landless are convening this week-long conference of which two days
will be devoted to gender and the struggle against patriarchy.”
PGA unites Bolivians who successfully prevented the Bechtel corporation from privatizing
their water and forced a change in the central leadership of the country, farmers
in India struggling against Monsanto, women in Colombia fighting Plan Colombia,
Mexicans opposing Plan Puebla Panama, Canadian postal workers, and thousands if
not indirectly millions of others. The PGA is “a grassroots movement of
all continents” which is a “coordination network of resistance to
the global market, a new alliance of struggle and solidarity . . . for all those
who fight the destruction of humanity and the planet by capitalism and [seek to]
build local alternatives to globalisation.” It is not only anti-corporate,
but also explicitly anti-capitalist.
The variety of activist forces fighting the neoliberal model of global capitalism
dominated by Washington does not represent a communist movement, of course, but
socialists the world over participate and many are in leadership positions. Objectively,
the movement can be said to represent a historical force through which the working
class is constructing itself internationally. To participate effectively in such
struggles Marxists need to be able to demonstrate a serious commitment to diversity
and democracy.
Thus, there are strategic reasons for Marxists to be concerned with diversity.
But there are theoretical reasons too, ones not foreign to classical Marxism but
ones that can be seen as grounded within its core. I will argue, contrary to some
Marxist theoreticians, that capital is not a material force that homogenizes everything
in its greedy path. An attention to cultural heterogeneity is a necessary correction
and further elaboration of a Marxist philosophy of human development. Taking Marx’s
thought as a paradigm rather than a dogma, we see that it has core assumptions,
but that there is also room for disagreement, growth and change. I will argue
that articulating an appreciation of diversity is necessary in the following four
areas:
A. A theory of class formation consistent with Marx’s own
emphasis on class as a social relation that is historically constituted;
B. A recognition that the direct producer is a collective laborer
distributed throughout the productive process;
C. A
methodology that blends abstract and concrete modes of analysis; focusing on capitalism
as it “actually exists.”
D. An appreciation
of the power of culturally based resistance
Marxists have too often seen class as a monolithic entity. I will claim that class
relations are not homogenous but are a complex and multifaceted unity of many
concrete determinations. Also, we need to appreciate the complexity and attention
to empirical detail that Marx brings to his own analysis of actually existing
capitalism. Capitalism and socialism do not exist as abstractions: they exist
within local, concrete forms of life that are profoundly diverse, containing many
variations. For example, in Capital, Volume 3, after discussing how the
“direct relationship” between “the owners of the conditions
of production to the immediate producers. . . [reveals] the innermost secret,
the hidden basis of the entire social edifice,” Marx cautions his readers
to remember:
This does not prevent the same economic basis – the
same in its major conditions – from displaying endless variations and gradations
in its appearance, as the result of innumerable different empirical circumstances,
natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from outside,
etc., and these can only be understood by analysing these empirically given conditions
” (927-28).
I will argue that the dynamic of capital accumulation
itself creates heterogeneity. Capital cannot effectively spread itself without
capturing real economic and political forces that make possible the extraction
of value. Following Marx, we see that attention to local conditions and cultural
forms make it necessary for our theory to have an appreciation of diversity.
A. As a culturally and historically constructed relation, class is
heterogeneous.
In his important article “Experiences
and Perspectives of the Socialism in Cuba,” Miguel Limia, points out:
Concrete people make [history] by carrying out their personal projects and
connecting their vital activity in a form sui generis. The subjective talents,
the spiritual culture, of the makers of history are essential for the unfolding
of the social reality, including its regularities" (7).
Limia’s attention to how spirituality and culture form important components
of individuals’ lives is a crucial step forward. He feels that Marxist philosophy
has too often portrayed class as static and undifferentiated, a view that impedes
the full development of popular participation in revolutionary change. He stresses
that Cubans form a diverse, multiracial ethnos (9, 13-4). In order to move the
revolution forward and stabilize it, social scientists must investigate how the
multiple aspects of people’s actual material lives interact. Their political
participation stems not only from their national and class identity (which is
stratified or heterogeneous too), but also from their ethnicity, race, gender,
age, and spiritual identity.
Another Cuban theoretician, Maura Salubarria
Roig adopts a similar approach in her paper “Political Culture as an Instrument
of Social Change.” She points to a crisis of politics – a disconnect
between changes in Cuban social structures and the diversity of meanings, reactions,
and perceptions of everyday people, who have varying concepts of time or place
and disparate interpretations of symbolic political codes. They have diverse priorities
and exercise distinctive forms of political participation. She argues for a nuanced
understanding of the relationship between class and culture, where class is a
junctural phenomenon, not a monolithic abstraction. In addition, she calls for
a new cultural form of politics that appreciates multiple subjectivities and strategizes
alternative forms of resistance.
Limia’s and Salubarria’s
approaches exemplify the sort of theory needed for building a truly democratic
society. They recognize unity without uniformity as an approach to solidarity,
and they put forward a compelling politics that opens many possibilities for concrete
alliances across different social strata. Their embrace of diversity is reminiscent
of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he argues that
treating everyone the same sees individuals “from one definite side only”
ignoring their concrete material differences (615). Liberal notions of equality
that dictate treating everyone the same are inherently undemocratic. They promote
privileges for some over others because people have different abilities and concrete
circumstances. This writing is the piece where Marx stresses that a genuinely
democratic principle of distribution is “from each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs” (615). In a document on the Internet called
“The Politics of Karl Marx,” Terry Eagleton comments on this passage
as follows:
Socialism, then, is not about some dead-levelling (sic) of
individuals, but involves a respect for their specific differences, and allows
those differences for the first time to come into their own. It is in this way
that Marx resolves the paradox of the individual and the universal: for him, the
latter term means not some supra-individual state of being, but simply the imperative
that everyone should be in on the process of freely evolving their personal identities.
According
to Limia and Salubarria, successfully developing the Cuban Revolution’s
values of social emancipation, national independence, and human dignity
requires careful attention to the heterogeneous identities through which individuals
in different classes, levels or social groups subjectively feel and express their
own needs.
These considerations make it possible to have a theory of
class that accommodates an appreciation of diversity. Class is presented as a
material and relational process. Marx’s own texts exhibit a dialectical
methodology through which universals are taken to be concrete unities of many
contradictory determinations constantly and continuously intertwining. Understanding
class dialectically requires attention to the way that general processes manifest
themselves in particular ways and the ways that concrete processes construct the
general.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood insists in “Class as Process and
Relationship,” working classes are made up of real individuals who are “active
and conscious historical beings” not “blank and passive raw
material” (80). She points out that a primary goal of both her work and
E.P. Thompson’s (The Making of the English Working Class) is “to
render class visible in history and make its objective determinations manifest
as historical forces, as real effects in the world and not just as theoretical
constructs that refer to no actual social force or process” (93). Quoting
Thompson, she argues that:
Class formations emerge and develop as men
and women live their productive relations and experience
their determinate situations, within “the ensemble of the
social relations,” with their inherited culture and expectations, and as
they handle their experiences in cultural ways” (80).
Noting the way class operates in history, we see then that it brings into play
the various encultured motivations, insights, commitments, and concrete experiences
of actual people. Thus, an appreciation of cultural diversity should be seen as
already present in Marxism. Indeed, as John Saul argues, we can still “emphasize
the production process as our chosen entry-point into social analysis and political
practice while also taking seriously the concerns of those who wish to highlight,
alternatively or simultaneously, the claims to our attention of other nodes of
oppression and resistance” (354). Being sensitive to the dialectical play
of identity, differentiation, and unity, we realize that culture constructs class
and vice versa.
B. The direct producer is a collective laborer
with a heterogeneous identity.
Therefore, class is not static,
but a heterogeneous nexus of social forces. This viewpoint underscores a need
to see “the direct producer” as a collective laborer. The working
class is a collectivity with a distributed identity that combines within itself
variations of generalized local culture as well as individual reactions. In a
chapter called “The Working Day” in Capital, Volume One,
Marx says, “Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment
of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of
that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists,
and collective labour, i.e., the working class” (344). Marx argues that
the working class forms itself historically in and through struggle. As such,
it manifests itself by pulling together an array of local peculiarities and diverse
cultural forms.
In a compelling article published in New Left Review
called “Beyond the Boundary Question,” Peter Meiksins discusses this
collective laborer. Stressing the complexity of Marx’s approach to class,
he argues that to grasp the revolutionary potential of working class unity, it
is not enough to point out that workers have the same relationship to the means
of production, because workers respond to their exploitation from an individual
point of view.
Furthermore, there are always a number of factors such
as gender, race, locality and occupation that can complicate the workers’
reaction to exploitation. Unlike the relations of production, these factors do
not automatically generate conflict; they do so only when they are culturally
defined as conflictual (110, emphasis mine).
Workers react in various ways to the following sorts of experiences: “low
wages, close supervision, the threat of unemployment [ . . .] being treated as
a cost, being exposed to de-skilling tendencies,” etc. (110-11). Developing
a sense of class unity, Meiksins argues, requires that they recognize a pattern
among the diversity of experiences they share. This pattern is what I am calling
a unity without uniformity.
Two features of Marx’s theory make
it possible to accommodate both the disunity and the unity of the working class
“without resort to non-Marxist concepts” (111), according to Meiksins.
These are the necessary complexity of Marx’s account of why, in a society
built upon an apparently equal exchange between two commodity owners – capital
and labor, the real relations of the capitalist mode of production promote class
inequality. The second is the collective nature of socialized labor.
A
single product or service depends upon a wide range of employees, from specialized
production workers, through clerical workers who keep track of the paper work
involved in ordering materials, coordinating production, marketing goods, etc.,
to technical specialists who design products and the production process, and even
managers who coordinate the work. This is true not simply of material production
but of virtually all sectors of the economy (111).
The direct producer
is a collective laborer because effective valorization requires the heterogeneous
distribution of productive capital. Seeing the direct producer as a collective
reality also captures the socialized nature of labor under capitalism. Today this
distributed collectivity is even more globalized than it was when Marx remarked
on capital’s tendency to reach worldwide in The Communist Manifesto.
Emphasizing the heterogeneity of working classes does not have to lead us, however,
to liberal forms of multiculturalism that ignore the proletariat’s emancipatory
historical role. Meiksins concludes by saying: “From a political point of
view, it can be argued that only an approach that bases itself on the essential
unity of the working class is able to take seriously its real segmentation and
heterogeneity” (119).
C. A focus on capitalism as it “actually
exists.”
Marx’s theory is paradigmatic of efforts
to weave together the theoretical and empirical, because actually existing capitalism
gathers up a multiplicity of factors that present themselves in a complex array
of local determinations and particularities. If we look at how capitalism works
“on the ground” so to speak, we can notice local variations in the
extraction of value.
Let us consider an example of the way that Marx
combines abstract and concrete analysis by looking again at “The Working
Day.” His theoretical point in this chapter is that the defining characteristic
of capital is its need to constantly increase the rate of surplus value. “Capital
is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives
the more, the more labour it sucks” (342).Marx hypothesizes abstractly that
perhaps, due to physical and moral constraints, “the interest of capital
itself points in the direction of a normal working day” (377). However,
a study of actually existing conditions reveals that the ready availability of
surplus populations makes such restraint unnecessary.
As an example
of his reasoning, he points out that plantation owners in Georgia or Mississippi
who “are drawn into a world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production”
do not limit the working day to preserve the physical existence of living labor
because a fresh supply can be imported from Kentucky, Virginia, or Africa. In
actuality, a slave owner “takes out of the human chattel” over a span
of just a few years “the utmost amount of exertion it is capable of putting
forth” (376). He draws an analogy then to England where workers can also
be easily replaced and thus worked to an early death. “For slave trade,
read labour-market, for Kentucky and Virginia, Ireland and the agricultural districts
of England, Scotland and Wales, for Africa, Germany” (378). Thus, Marx claims,”
experience shows” (380) that real concrete factors are appraised to allow
the greatest degree of exploitation possible. Marx links an abstract mode of reasoning
with empirical data, and in doing so, he corrects his initial abstraction and
asserts that the opposite is true: capital does not need to calculate the heath
or morbidity of the worker unless it is forced to (381).
Furthermore,
the extent to which restrictions on capital’s wanton greed exist
or not will depend on local culture, for instance, the level of working class
resistance, the rigor of collective bargaining agreements, and the enforcement
of labor laws or environmental regulations. Many sources of heterogeneous variability
interact with capital’s constant, general need to reproduce suitable conditions
for increasing valorization: “Under free competition, the immanent laws
of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force
external to him” (381).
Many Marxists have argued that the dynamics
of surplus value extraction make capitalism a uniquely homogenizing force. Supposedly,
technological development and a desperate drive to promote consumption will ultimately
destroy all local cultures. It is certainly true that capitalism has such tendencies
as we can see today by noting the tragic destruction of the environment and indigenous
culture the world over. In my opinion, however, these tendencies cannot be viewed
one-sidedly because an inclination to differentiate always accompanies capital’s
propensity for uniformity. In a very important study called Persistent Inequalities:
Wage Disparity under Capitalist Competition, Howard Botwinick argues
this point as follows:
. . . Marx’s analysis of the general law
of capitalist accumulation is also far more complex than is often assumed. In
fact, out of the very same processes of accumulation and mechanization that will
tend to deskill workers in the long run, there comes a profound process of continual
redifferentiation within these narrowing limits. What results is an increasingly
deskilled work force and a constantly redifferentiated working class (100-101).
Botwinick explains that Marx’s dynamic analysis of the conditions of capitalist
competition demonstrates that capital consistently creates ever more inequality
and heterogeneity. Such segmentation under competition is due to changes in the
organic composition of capital, growth or contraction in various sectors of the
reserve army of labor, and fluctuations in the success of workers’ efforts
to organize (9).
To understand how and why Marx sharpens his abstractions
with careful attention to rich empirical detail, we can point to the need to differentiate
between real control of the capitalist labor process and formal control. The latter
entails the availability of labor power as a commodity and the separation of labor
from the means of production, but the former brings into play much more. Local
variations may impede, enable, or even exacerbate capital’s ability to profit
off the labor available. In my hometown of Ithaca, New York, for example, a progressive
counterculture that values ecological sustainability and small business prevented
Wal Mart from locating here for many years. Capital must be sensitive to the actually
existing conditions it finds in a particular locale for the labor power it has
purchased to produce surplus value at increasing rates. Notice the difference
between extracting value by drawing peasants off the land to work in urban centers
and outsourcing white collar technology jobs from North America to Asia: different
technical and ideological strategies are entailed in each case.
Furthermore,
capitalism meets a diversity of conditions because of its necessity to globalize.
Unable to satiate itself with labor from which it has already fed and exhausted,
capital chases itself around the world looking for favorable conditions to satisfy
its voracious appetite for ever more wealth. It must work with empirically given
legal institutions, trade restrictions, and investment rules. Wherever it goes,
capital must obtain strategic, political control of global resources and culturally
situated human beings.
An example of how the capital accumulation process
adjusts itself to local conditions can be found in Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s
recent book Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity.
She contrasts the local culture of women lace makers in Narsapur, India with that
of female electronic workers in the Silicon Valley of California. She shows how
“class and gender proletarianization through the development of capitalist
relations of production, and the integration of women into the world market, is
possible because of the history and transformation of indigenous caste and sexual
ideologies” (150). These contrasting cultures contain ideological differences
that allow for the extraction of surplus value, though they are specific to each
locale. While
in Narsapur, it is purduh and caste/class mobility that provides the necessary
self-definition required to anchor women’s work in the home as leisure activity
[concealing its nature as wage labor], in the Silicon Valley, it is a specifically
North American notion of individual ambition and entrepreneurship that provides
the necessary ideological anchor for Third World women (155).
These cases demonstrate that exerting sufficient real, not simply formal, control
over the labor process brings different factors into play depending on the local
culture regarding gender.
Furthermore, it is important to notice the
specific way workers are incorporated into the capitalist mode of production to
appreciate differences in the manner of exploitation due to gender, race, national
culture, age, sexuality, etc. Analyzing the specificities of the lace makers’
point of entry into capitalist collective labor makes visible differences between
women and men of various ethnic groups and reveals how capital is able to utilize
existing culture to extract a surplus. Mohanty argues that “work, in this
context, was grounded in sexual identity, in concrete definitions of femininity,
masculinity, and heterosexuality” (149). Attending to local culture allows
us to analyze the sexual division of labor where men become merchants living off
the commodities produced by women. Practices of secluding women in the home and
seeing them as in need of protection cause women to experience relative disadvantages
compared to men since the domesticated nature of their labor renders it invisible.
Consider another entry point that illuminates heterogeneity in forms of exploitation.
During the first half of the 20th Century, African American agricultural workers
were drawn into Northern urban centers due to the Great Depression and the mechanization
of agriculture. The timing of their entry point and its particular geographical
nature influenced the manner of their inclusion into urban working classes in
terms of where they settled, how they were treated by “native” workers,
and how they felt about the changing nature of their exploitation. African American
women workers were mostly slotted into domestic service where they had to endure
long working hours, insensitive employers, and sexual harassment. Of course these
conditions were not unfamiliar to them, and they drew from their history of gender,
race and class oppression to react to them. Understanding their response and analyzing
the nature of their entry, however, allows us to appreciate the way their exploitation
differs objectively and subjectively from black male workers and from white workers
of either gender.
Capitalists certainly take advantage of sexism per
se, for example, but they do so in ways that vary according to local conditions.
At a general level, the importance of working class women’s sexuality under
patriarchy, their role in the biological reproduction of labor power, and the
sexual division of labor make the terms of their exploitation different from those
of male labor. In maquiladoras, for example, women are subjected to inhumane forms
of domination, which include being forced to participate in beauty pageants and
take birth control pills. In Manhattan, beauty pageants may not be staged, but
a parade of the latest fashions takes place in offices where a culture encourages
conspicuous consumption enabled by the purchasing of inexpensive clothes, clothes
made, interesting enough, by their sisters in the sweatshops. Also, women from
different cultures experience their exploitation differently from a subjective
viewpoint. Their feelings about birth control, for example, will differ according
to their religious practices. While each of these examples focuses on birth control
and beauty pageants, the differences among them illustrate that understanding
the complex mechanisms at work in the process of capital accumulation requires
attention to both abstract regularities and concrete, local particularities.
D. The power of heterogeneous cultures of resistance.
As I have argued, variations in local cultures serve as resources for accumulation
but also as sources of resistance. As Ellen Meiksins Wood suggests, we must attend
to “authentic expressions of class in popular consciousness and culture”
that represent an effort ‘to live the contradictions and options under pressure”
(106). Workers develop struggles that express their subjective orientation to
what is important or unimportant in life. Consider the determination of farmers
in India, who burn fields of crops instead of succumbing to Monsanto’s attempt
to coerce them into using agricultural methods that are inconsistent with their
identity and history. 
The 1990's brought fourth a qualitatively new form of global activism. After
many years of preparation, in January of 1994, the Zapatistas emerged on the world
stage in opposition to NAFTA. They occupied five towns in the Mexican state of
Chiapas, representing over a thousand indigenous groups and demanding education,
health care, electricity, water, recognition, and the right to live with dignity.
Their movement brought new life to protests the world over and inspired a new
generation of activists.
Part of the reason many activists are attracted
to Zapatismo is its emphasis on
democracy and diversity. The Zapatistas are
not a hierarchical organization, and they do not propose a single alternative.
Their “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle” announced “The
world we want is one where many worlds fit.” They are led by a council of
at least two dozen commanders chosen by their communities. The mysterious Marcos
insists that he is not the head of the movement – he is a subcommandante.
Who is he? Here is the sort of response he is famous for:
Marcos is gay
in San Francisco, black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San
Ysidro, an anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the
streets of San Cristobal, a Jew in Germany, a Gypsy in Poland, a Mohawk in Quebec,
a pacifist in Bosnia, a single woman on the Metro at 10 p.m., a peasant without
land, a gang member in the slums, an unemployed worker, an unhappy student, and,
of course, a Zapatista in the mountains.
This sort of presentation
of “self” captures the spirit of our time. Marcos is at once here,
there, and everywhere. He is a woman and a man. His identity is distributed
across the world. It symbolizes the solidarity of people whose lives are damaged
by capital’s violent and greedy reach for domination of nature and human
society. It represents the heterogeneity of sites of capitalist penetration and
the multiplicity of cultural forms gathered up in resistance to it. It represents
the collective laborer.
Finally, if we attend to actual historical struggles
through which workers oppose capital, we see that cultures of resistance are not
uniform either. As Miguel Limia argues, we need to account for “the differentiation
among the members of society in their daily constructive lives, conducive to common
emancipatory purposes” (14). In my view, those who stress the virtually
complete hegemony of capitalist development – the McDonaldization of the
world – risk ignoring everyday life activities of workers who may have to
adapt themselves to capitalist relations of production, but who also use their
culture to resist this incursion: popular traditions don’t simply disappear.
They mediate the possibility of the reproduction of capitalist relations and continue
to develop in conjunction with and in contradiction to new ways of life. Seeing
class as culturally constructed and heterogeneous puts forward the necessity of
unity. My approach recognizes unity without uniformity not only as a necessary
moment of international solidarity, but also as a way to analyze concrete material
conditions that make this solidarity necessary.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
for
footnotes and Works Cited go to: http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/taller/russell_100304.pdf
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