Work Rhythms.

Work rhythms forma focal point organizing the lived world of people living in capitalism. This is obvious when we think about our own lives, yet somehow we rebel from the idea. We rebel from that idea in part because our ideas in general are rebellion from a certain type of toil we experience regularly.

Part of the difficulty of building a radical ideology that confronts capitalism as a whole lies in the very experience of it by the people most embedded within it. There are rough levels of participation- if you are truly desperate, as are several billion people in the world today, you desperately desire escape from a system whose material conditions you experience with brutality every day. Or, of course, you get used to it, and develop a stoic resolve oriented around survival, supporting children, etc.

If you are in the relative heights of power, you're quite conscious of the way your work dictates your life. You are conscious of it because it gives you power in the form of wealth and a certain prestige. These aren't illusory per se, but they are secondary signs of the basic fact that you form a cog in the bureaucracy of society, that your actions carry over to larger numbers of people. You have authority over others, you have a host of underlings, "ghost slaves" perhaps.

But in America, we need be concerned with the lower classes to middle classes. We have a swollen lower-middle class, and the lower middle class lives and breather by trying to forget what its true identity. This large brunt of America corresponds to the plebeians of Rome, underlings too beholden to society to oppose it significantly, yet dependent upon the dictates of higher level officials in the Roman bureaucracy and armies. It is this middle position between total desperation and total incorporation into the Machine that has long been the preferred class of liberals.

This is a crucial class to understand in America, because it's so fucking big, and in theory has tremendous resources upon which to draw. It potentially has the power to become both laborer and capitalist, by pooling resources en masse.
[for example, this was an interesting feature of the Howard Dean presidential campaign and the much heralded rise of small donors in the political process; a large horde of middling liberal Americans pooled enough resources to actually challenge elite-supported candidates- note the absolute horror expressed by established liberals and media, and the ferocity with which they smashed his campaign on the most trivial of pretexts, a known and hidden microphone error]
In real terms, in simple brute terms, this class COULD challenge capitalism, effectively, without resorting to the age-old dialectics of power that characterize revolutions born of desperation and coups from vying pools of elites.

So the question becomes, why the fuck don't they?

We need to stop talking in terms of ideals and corruption and being bought off in the system. We can't just say that they're comfortable enough to do nothing. This analysis isn't rooted in materiality, really, neither the materiality of the economy nor the materiality of the working body in capitalism.

The work rhythms of capitalism, as they relate to most people in America, very simply make you want to escape work. Work is toil- not so wretched as to demand a change in quality, yet offering no real power or dignity (which is just knowledge of an egalitarian power) in life.

So we escape it. We work and then try and forget that we're working. We try and forget it before, during, and after work. So we think of ourselves as workers only secondarily. Indeed, this could be a good psychological indicator of class in America, at what level you identify with your work, and how consciously.

This makes perfect sense given the logic of work, especially in late capitalism*, but it also makes it fucking impossible to mobilize such people around a class identity primarily.

We see signs of this in certain seismic political shifts in America, for instance the collapse of working class based political organizing. The unions that prosper currently are those that focus more on issues of social justice and utilize and ethos of social work over those that focus on class identity.

How the hell do we deal with this? One method is to attack the chief avenues of escape from working identity.
*television
*alcohol and bar culture, as it currently functions
*drug culture
*popular music
*popular film
*a large portion of current "higher" arts
*organized religion

This has been the preferred method of Marxists. It has not fared well.

I think we need to make other methods primary.

*Focus on building a positive working class identity based on identity forming experience, skill development, and autonomous systems of learning and knowledge transmission and application.
*Rebuild an idea of "yeomanry." After all, the yeoman farmer of independent businessperson is the double, the affirmative twin, of the nihilistic late capitalist plebeian. Give a plebeian positive experience of productive, creative work, give her some genuine power over capital, and she'll turn into a yeoman ideologically. Give people genuine access to productive capital and systems to train them in its deployment and skilled operation in the economy.
*Encourage collective yeomanry, i.e. cooperatives. This is crucial, foundational. Only with roughly egalitarian cooperatives may we insure that people involved in a work place leave at 5 oclock feeling relatively "unalienated." Only with cooperatives can we guarantee that the chief requirement of unalienated labor, continuous participation in the construction of a shared narrative, is met.

These methods are incremental yet directed, they embody large clusters of steps with clear directions. Because of this, by the argument above, they are very difficult to deploy rhetorically. They don't have an aura of escape to them, they aren't cloaked in fantasy. But they must be developed.

*late capitalism for me refers simply to the condition of a large proletarian workforce that does not conceive itself as such, i.e. is detached enough from meaningful processes of production that it has no positive working class identity. for me the term only has meaning as a conjunction of economic identity and existential experience, based ultimately rhythms of the body. and their denial or affirmation. "late capitalism" is misleading as I would say that empires such as Rome developed the same condition with its plebeians.
so for instance, a white collar worker can easily forget their place in production, moreso than a stonemason, because of alienation from the final product.