David J. Blacker - What’s Left of the World: Education, Identity and the Post-Work Political Imagination

I am very grateful to the individuals and audiences who have supported this work. Notable among these are Kevin McDonough and the students and faculty at the Department of Integrated Studies at McGill University, and Chris Higgins and the students, faculty and audiences at the Department of Education, Organization and Leadership, the Center for Advanced Study, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This work was also supported indirectly through the research portion of my employment duties at the University of Delaware and I am grateful to my home institutions continuing commitment to such scholarshipsomething that is not to be taken for granted. I received tremendous help in the form of manuscript commentary from numerous friends and colleagues, including Aideen Murphy, Roxanne Desforges, Chris Phillips, Mike Watson, Quentin Wheeler-Bell, Terri Wilson, Carolyn Cohen, Dana Simone, Emile Bosjean, Matthew Charles, Marcia Blacker, Marion Monguillon, Marianna Papastefanou, and Alpesh Maisuria. Any remaining errors are of course mine alone despite these individuals valiant efforts to save me from them. At Zero Books I am very happy to thank John Hunt, Ashley Frawley, Nick Welch, Stuart Davies, Trevor Greenfield, Doug Lain and John Romans for their help at various stages. It was a pleasure to work with them.

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Chapter 1

Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain.

Eric Hobsbawm (1998)

Kants formula of humanity enjoins rational beings to treat one another never merely as means but always also as ends in themselves: Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in any other person, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means. Correlatively, human beings command dignity, respect and autonomy, aspects of a core Enlightenment moral attitude which, however much it falls short in practice, is associated with hallmark liberal political norms such as equal treatment under the law, civil liberties, religious tolerance, non-exploitation and personal autonomythe latter in areas as varied as limits on surveillance and reproductive rights. The old Marxist dialectical view is that these bourgeois freedoms, while welcome and necessary, were fated eventually to be superseded by allegedly superior post-capitalist forms of positive freedom arising from more evolved norms of production and distribution.

These successor norms were never quite specified, however. As per Marxist materialism, the implied idea is that the animating ideals of human interrelation would take care of themselves; phenomena such as alienation and wage exploitation would diminish to a vanishing point as a function of salutary alterations in real economic conditions, either by evolutionary or revolutionary means. Yet the normative underpinnings of the transition from exploitative wage relations were never really adequately theorized. In cruder circles it was even set aside as a depoliticizing and hence distracting bourgeois concern. Yet it is famously, even notoriously, true that, despite its pretenses to objective science and denunciations of moralism, Marxism (including Engels) was driven by an animus toward what it perceived as injustice and human suffering. And it does not seem hugely mysterious to find in their denunciations of the theft of workers surplus labor and the desiccating exploitation of the vampire Capital a tacit allegiance to the broad Kantian formula of humanity and its injunction against treating people as mere means. Why else would one be bothered by workers sorry fates?