This is Richard Wolff responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question from our Patreon community.
This question comes from Norma Vega, it's a question about tribalism
and by that I understand (and I hope this is what is in Norma Vega's mind) as the tendency
for people who share many things with others to not see much of that sharing, to imagine
themselves a special part of a special group (a tribe) that is unique, that is special, and that
pretty quickly becomes, in this mentality, superior, threatened, and therefore entitled
to defend itself at the expense of other groups similarly viewed as tribal alternatives or others.
It's an old problem in human history but it has taken on a remarkable urgency in the period of
capitalism for reasons I'd like to talk about, and in particular right now here in the United States.
A great many of the criticisms of Donald Trump, the right wing white supremacy,
the people who assaulted the capital on January 6th of this year, and so on,
is to refer to them as being caught up in some tribalism. Some gathering together
as if they were a special group—those who see clearly, those aware of Q Anon, those who are
white, those who understand that the election was rigged—things like that.
And I think Norma Vega is quite right in how she phrased her question to us, that this tribalism
goes much deeper than anything having simply to do with what the right wing under Donald Trump
is attempting to do in the United States today. So let me talk briefly about the relationship
(if you like) between capitalism on the one hand, and tendencies to tribalism on the other.
I think those have been established in a very large literature that some of
you might be interested in pursuing. The literature which in the Marxian tradition
is called The Theory of Alienation. It's about psychology, basically,
about what happens to human beings caught up in a capitalist system, and it asks the basic question:
how do the specific qualities of capitalism on the one hand influence and shape
our psychological predilections, our feelings, our attitudes towards one another?
There’s no reductionism here; it's not an argument that whatever your psychological issues are,
they are all caused by or reduced to your economic situation in capitalism.
It's rather the insistence that the capitalism we all live under and within has something to do
with our psychologies and that it's important for us to understand what that is.
By the way some of you have asked me to sometimes mention authors or books or articles that are
particularly good on the subject. If you're interested in the marxist theory of alienation
I cannot do better than recommend to you a book written many years ago (half a century ago) here
in the United States by an immigrant from Germany. His name was Fritz Pappenhein and the title of the
book is The Alienation of Modern Man. Super book, very well written (in english of course) published
in New York by the Monthly Review Press. I cannot more strongly recommend that work.
Here's the basic idea: in capitalism something happens
in a very particular way in the economy that influences our psychology.
It's the system of production, the organization of production, and by that I mean
the way we organize the human interactions that go on in the production of a software, or a hot dog,
or a shirt, or a chair, or anything else that is produced in a modern capitalist system.
In that system there is a tiny group of people at the top: the owner, the partners who run and
control the business, the board of directors (if it's a corporation). They make all the decisions,
they decide what the enterprise (the workplace) will produce, what technology it’ll use,
where the production will occur, and what is done with the output that everybody helps to produce—a
tiny group of people make that decision. The vast majority of people in every workplace are those
who are the employees, who are very different from those I just finished describing,
the employers. The employers: a small minority; the employees: the vast majority.
The employees are cut off from participating in the decisions that shape their life at the
workplace. They are excluded from deciding what is to be produced, they are excluded
from deciding what technology will be used even if that technology is hurtful to them,
pollutes the air or the water, makes too much noise, crowds them together, makes them vulnerable
to a pandemic, etc. They have to live with the technology chosen by others, they have to produce
objects, goods, and services chosen by others, they have to do that where the others decide it's
to be done. And then the big one that Marx himself was so interested in: at the end of the work day,
after each employee has poured his or her brains and muscle into producing something they are told
“go home”. You have nothing to do with what happens to your creation, to what you have
helped to produce. You are cut off from (you are alienated from) your own product. Other people,
who often had absolutely nothing to do with the production that you just finished performing,
they decide, exclusively, what is to be done with you—you're in those products because your
brains and muscles help to produce them, you are alienated from them. Well, this is a fundamentally
unequal and unjust arrangement. It's the opposite of democracy because the mass
majority who have to live with the results of this workplace organization have no control
over it. A tiny group controls it for everybody, and therein lies the first instinct to tribalism.
The people at the top know, whether they admit it to themselves, whether they're conscious of
it or not, they know they're a tiny minority. They know their power is anti-democratic.
The more they insist this is a democracy, the more you should understand this is trying to
make up in words and verbiage for something that is very lacking in the real world they live in.
They are terrified above all of one thing: the recognition by the mass of the employees
that that's what they are, a mass of employees. The majority in whose interest democracy is
supposed to prevail, and sooner or later one after another they're going to figure out that
they’re being ripped off in this arrangement. If they understand that they have the numbers,
they have the majority, and they have the right to prevail, then capitalism itself is going to
dissolve—the great fear of the capitalist. Therefore, they encourage (consciously or not,
intentionally or not, it really doesn’t much matter) tribalism.
They want some workers to think of themselves above all not as employees but as white people,
to be distinguished from black people. A tribalism that very quickly leads to the white people
projecting that the black people want to take from them, and being able to say, therefore, I’m
justified in having police shoot those people on a scale that they don’t shoot white people etc. That
the men are different from the women, that the skilled are a different tribe from the unskilled,
that those who went to the fancy universities deserve to be sitting up there at the top whereas
everybody else who didn’t doesn’t, and so on. The horrible breaking up around issues that really
matter less and less in modern capitalism as more and more of us become employees of somebody.
This tribalism persists because it's functional, too. It helps capitalism reproduce itself
by blocking the awareness that all those little tribes don’t matter as much.
They're important, they have their role to play, but they don't matter
as much as the big tribes: the employer and the employee. If we could overcome dividing society
that way, which means overcoming capitalism, we would have gone a very long way, not all the way,
but a very long way to redefining all those little identifications, all those little
tribalisms that haunt us and that we need to get beyond.
This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.