The Eternal Triumph of the Working Class

We have lost an idea of what it means to be members of the working class. Liberals paint it as a structural weakness to be lifted out of with education and charity, conservatives paint it as a sign of failure and weakness of character. Radicals see it as a mark of oppression. And so all of them detach themselves from the reality of the working class.

Our writers and thinkers and leaders don't use that term because it scares them. They are repulsed by it and think everyone should be. And so we are brought p in this world and these lives, now at the cusp of the 21st century, in confusion about our values, fearful of yet resigned to our detachment and alienation in this world. We fall upon the world without a history. And the chief torment of living without a history is that we erupt into the world without a method of connecting to it, understanding and revering it.

We live in this state of distraction because we have had a simple truth hidden from us since birth by the subtle logics of a damnable system: we are members of the working class.

The working class has always lived and will always live, so long as civilization of any sort exists.

Intellectuals confuse the matter too much. Being a member of the working class means, very simply, that you live and breathe through the labor you bring to bear in the world. It means also that this labor leads and allows you to respect and revere the world rather than destroy and conquer it.

It has nothing to do with poverty or wealth or strength or weakness or good or evil. The working class is simply that way of orienting collectively in the world that allows us to build and rebuild it.

During the Spanish Civil War, Durutti (sp?), an anarchist military "leader" was asked about the destruction of the war. The battles leveled buildings and destroyed fields and factories, turned cities into craters. Wasn't this too high a cost?

Durutti responded, essentially, what of it? We built the cities, we built the factories and we tilled the fields. And when the bombings stop and the last fascist is banished from the Republic, when we have peace again, we will crawl out of our craters just as we have always done, and we will take the refuse and debris of war and build new life from it. We build as an act of living and so we will build again with joy and ease.

This is why Marx said the working class was the first real revolutionary class (though I don't agree with his historical bias per se). The working class builds and rebuilds society, and so embraces the whole in its actions. It is the font of creation for the whole human world. It can do whatever it godamn well pleases, as soon as it becomes conscious of this fact and organizes accordingly.

The dread and fear we feel as we encounter the world naked and unassociated vanishes the second we learn to build with it, realize that humans have this marvelous gift of understanding via labor, understanding through action and motion and experimentation. And this dread is banished into oblivion when we can associate together, such that we know our labor is joined with that of millions, and we build the world as brothers and sisters and not as alien things vying for power and property.

We are not taught to build and err and rebuild and err again and build anew. The second we perceive the reality of this, the second we live (and not just think it) the limits of the world are shown to be illusory. Nothing is automatic, nothing is given and set in stone, and so we are free to create anything in dialog with our neighbors and our world. This is the only true freedom, and this is exactly it is hidden from us.

The working class exists, it has always existed and always will, and it exists in each of us whenever we experience a signle instant of free, authentic, unalienated labor, every instant we learn and create in the world, and every instant we cast our empathy outside ourselves.

So it has not vanished, and it has not been destroyed or crushed. It always lies ready to leap to the surface of individual lives and society as a whole and the institutions therein. We need only awaken, and cast away the veils of alienation, greed, corporate property, bureaucracy, and fear that keep us apart from one another and drive wedges between our spirits and the spirit of the world. The power is there and will always be there, waiting to be called.

Happy May Day.