The Revolution Will Not Be, Period

A Black Lives Matter flag (news photo)

“Hey, Justin! You have a job application in the trailer?” Our bubble-bellied HVAC installer, call him Brian, swaggered in from his long lunch, hitching his belt as high as his love handles would permit.

“They make you go through the office,” said Justin, our site supervisor, pointing vaguely toward our general contractor’s regional office. “Why? You looking for a job?”

“Naw, I just drove past Walgreens, and there was some Black guy waving a Black Lives Matter flag. I thought, maybe if he got a job, he’d be too busy working to fucking protest like a little bitch.”

I watched Justin turn stone-faced instantly. Like me, outright racism angers him, but like me, he’s learned saying anything is like shouting against the wind. Our workplace, and probably our entire industry, is so permeated with racism, that complaining about it is useless.

Recently I’ve seen increasing calls on social media for America’s workers to reject voting, abandon civil politics, and unify for a Marxist uprising. Choosing between elephants and jackasses is mental slavery, the call goes. Only revolution will change our condition! This implies multiple problems. First, Marx postulated a spontaneous revolution arising from working-class consciousness, not a planned rebellion; as the Soviets learned, a centralized uprising invites Stalinism.

Worse, though, as social scientists have observed, American workers lack class consciousness. Or so I’ve thought. They actively resist calls to organize, even the fairly mild organization of a registered labor union. American workers don’t think of themselves as workers, as socialist writer Barbara Garson discovered. They see working as incidental, something they’ll eventually surpass and abandon. Why have class consciousness when we consider economic class only temporary?

But this week’s exchange between Brian and Justin crystallized for me why Americans lack class solidarity: because we have racial solidarity. American workers see themselves as in the same boat as billionaires because we share what W.E.B. DuBois called “the wage of whiteness.” In a society which considers white skin a mark of character, we perceive strong kinship bonds with people who share our race, not our economics.

We enjoy the protection of believing billionaires share something important with us pedestrians. They don’t, of course, as anybody who’s ever worked in an Amazon warehouse already knows. But we persist in seeing ourselves as having more in common with Jeff Bezos than with someone like Jacob Blake. And anyone who protests therefore contravenes White Americans’ idea of who, exactly, we are.

Surrounded by a pervasive narrative of up-by-your-bootstraps industriousness, White Americans have internalized a message that financial success, and therefore transcendence of economic class, comes entirely from within. My co-workers believe they can work themselves out of penury, despite the lived evidence; many believe that only time and travail stand between themselves and dreams of unsurpassed wealth. And they remain undeterred by the fact that nobody they know has achieved this.

Why then—I wondered, in a flash of confused insight—do they consider billionaires like Goerge Soros and Bill Gates as untrustworthy enemies? This confused me for several minutes, until I concluded: these billionaires want to change a system that permanently disadvantages the poor. If White workers accept the Soros/Gates narrative, they must accept that their poverty isn’t a momentary hiccup, it’s a persistent state. This contradicts their deeply internalized narrative.

Both grassroots organizing, and top-level reforms, remind workers that their position in “the system” isn’t transitory. If they resisted the hierarchy, then whatever advantages they’ve attained would necessarily derive from the system, not themselves. Changing the damaged system will negate their minor achievements. As I’ve said before, changes which increase fairness for populations, are often deeply unfair to individuals, and vice versa.

Workers like Brian have worked hard and played by the rules, sometimes for decades. Many have dedicated their entire adult lives to making incremental gains in the system. Any change in the markedly unfair system will cost them everything they’ve achieved. They’ll embrace the continued unfair system, and demand others assimilate into that system, before admitting that they owe their gains to a rigged system. It’s difficult to blame them.

That’s why the Marxist revolution won’t happen in my lifetime. Because it’ll take longer than that for White Americans to see they have more in common with that protester waving the BLM flag, than with the management class. The tension between the mainstream American narrative, and the reality which protesters demonstrate, isn’t just difficult, it’s painful. Like anybody in pain, they’ll lash out petulantly at the doctor offering a cure.