8. Masters, slaves and US

In my last piece on Workers’ Co-ops, equality and survival, I oversimplified for lack of time and space.

I noted how Class and Capital emerged as a dominant few creamed off surplus from the rest of us. While the many were bound to labour for subsistence, a few were able to take off, look around and see new possibilities. Out of this social and economic division – of labour and/or leisure – came a separation between practical and purposive aspects of working life. A minority had the time and resources to conceive and plan alternatives, impose new orders, while the majority were stuck with daily toil on the ground. The expression ‘idle rich’ misses an important point, insofar as it was this same ruling class that conceived and directed what was done. But in the separation of direction from practice, both classes and functions were impoverished: direction overlooked essential practice, while labour lacked the overview it needed to inform itself.

In stating the social and functional division between ruling few and labouring majority I did NOT explore the cross-overs and commonality between them. No ruling class was entirely removed from physical labour – if only because all sorts of women have babies. And no working class could live without some ‘higher’ aspiration. We do not live by bread alone, or fine words: our heads and bodies remain attached to each other and to mother earth.

But our divisions result in some curious cross purposes, as when lords and ladies make primitive hunting and gathering their own preserve, forests and gardens walled and fenced against the modernism of field and factory. Serfs and labourers cling to folk-custom while adopting and rejigging the fashions of their masters. Cultures mingle in church, sport and comedy. Across the mutual – though unequal – exploitation of opposing interests, an undertow of sympathy persists.

Sex jumps the firebreaks of apartheid, or our species would have subdivided long ago. Classes and peoples – like prisoners and guards - grow into each other and the structures that keep them together and apart. And just as prisons cant work without collaboration, agricultural and industrial revolutions arose from subversive exchange combinations and exchange.

Radicals ignore this mutual assimilation at their peril, until kings and maypoles are restored and rebel heads displayed to cheering crowds.* By contrast, liberals underestimate the destructive force of the structures that set us at odds. To be radical means recognising both the conflict and the commonality, making enemies as well as friends in the quest for common humanity. Without this dialectic, reform is a papering-over of cracks and revolution a vicious circle.



*After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, Oliver Cromwell's body was disinterred and his head stuck on a spike over Westminster