The Bourgeois Blues

What great tragedy is the life of the petty-bourgeois intellectual! What a profound struggle he faces in descent from the ivory tower! To be the tallest among the small, a Man with Ideas among just-plain-men, is to be plagued with the contradictory consciousness that's driven so many to isolation & crisis. O desperate confusion! O woe! Pity the great & privileged thinking man!

In his Between Existentialism and Marxism Jean-Paul Sartre makes the astute observation that class consciousness may only be attained through direct experience of class conflict. That's to say, one cannot identify with the class struggle without first participating therein. This is a clear application of the dialectical method of analysis. Theory & practice are dialectically linked, so that one may not exist without the other. One cannot understand the proletarian circumstance until one experiences it, wholly & directly.

So where, in the equation of class struggle & consciousness, does that place the Thinking Man of Privilege?

Let's consider a hypothetical situation. A young, petty-bourgeois intellectual is exposed, on paper, to the central tenets of Marxist philosophy. He reads excerpts from Capital, he analyses State & Revolution for a week or two. He has some conversations with other, more well-read students of Marxism-Leninism. He has a degree from a prestigious institution of higher education. There is money in his bank account & he has few material responsibilities. Most importantly, he does not have to work for a living. But, in search of experience & adventure, he decides to take a job as an unskilled laborer, a worker in an assembly line. There, he works among the People, whose lives depend upon the meager wages earned with their daily toil. These People among whom he exists are uneducated by comparison, but they are far more practically skilled than the intellectual. He earns, like his comrades, less than a living wage in this position, and he quickly grows frustrated with his circumstance. He believes that the practical skills he is learning are less valuable than the metaphysical lessons of experience learned by his cosmopolitan intellectual predecessors. Materiality, in other words, is subordinated to the pleasures of thought. "My time is worth more than this," he says, "because I have read thick books! I have written long analyses of the meaning of sexual penetration in the Modern bildungsroman! I will no longer exploit my body & waste my valuable time for an industry in which I do not believe!"

He quits his job. His fellow workers, however, cannot quit their own. They have bills to pay, and no other marketable skills. Principles are of secondary concern, because of the material urgency of survival. In short, they are locked into their situation. He is not. He is free, because of his padded bank account & bourgeois mindset, to walk away from the assembly line & devote his time to thought & introspection. He is a lucky man, he thinks, because he has learned the Truth of Class Consciousness, and he goes to sleep with a smile on his face & hope for the future, now armed with an understanding of the Plight of the Worker. He may think of the men who once worked alongside him, but only in passing, & in the context of their proletarian charm, the wisdom they've acquired in their noble savagery. They are footnotes in the novel of his life, anecdotal characters used to add color to the philosophical musings of his autobiographical narrative.

But he has worked, he tells himself, worked hard, for a week or a month, perhaps even a year, and has therefore paid his dues. He believes that he has earned the right to speak of class, when in fact, he knows little of the struggle to which he refers. Someday, when a revolutionary movement develops around him, he will sit at his desk & write long essays on the value of the worker in society. He will sign petitions & organize sit-ins. He will raise his fist at rallies & shout slogans with his fellow intellectuals, but he will not set foot in the trenches of the true struggle. He will not give up his privilege, because he believes he has already given up enough, by working for a moment among those he supports from afar, whose fingers are bleeding from overwork. And he will never sacrifice his luxury, because he cannot let go of his bourgeois intellectualism. His degree is always in the back of his mind, always a reminder of his arbitrary superiority, no matter how sure he is of its meaninglessness. He will never have to strike for shorter work-days or better health benefits. He will never have to look his children in the eye and tell them there will be no food on the table tonight, or any night this week. And because of this, he will never fully understand the struggle, and can never claim a knowledge of that struggle. He has no right to it. It is not his to claim.

And yet we petty-bourgeois intellectuals claim the struggle daily. We understand the ideas, the philosophies, the grand, sweeping generalizations of our thoughtful predecessors who classified & identified the masses to whom they had never spoken. And because of this understanding, we are somehow imbued with a right to speak of the Revolution, though the fight will never be our own. Our sympathy is not empathy. Our interest is not in shared experience, but in analysis & observation. At best, we are anthropologists in the field, taking notes. We live among the natives, always looking through the lenses we've learned to value as tools of comprehension, never stopping to think that dirty hands & callused fingers may actually be the key to understanding.

Those who have the choice to live without are different from those who live without choice itself. No matter how many pages of Marxist-Leninist theory I read, no matter how much research I perform on the experience of the CCP during the Long March, I will never know the truth of struggle until I am forced, without choice, to be exploited. To choose exploitation as a means of enriching one's experience of The World & its processes is to negate the struggle of those who are & will continue to be exploited ad infinitum. It is not noble to sacrifice one's privilege unless it is sacrificed completely, unless luxury and caution are thrown to the wind & the mind is wiped clean of its philosophical clutter.

I do not pretend to be strong enough to throw away the books & surrender completely to the circumstance with which I am chiefly concerned. And because of this fact, I have no right to speak of the essence of class consciousness, of great & explosive revelations of Truth. Because of this, I am not dangerous, because I am aware of my inexperience, & embrace it as a challenge that must be faced, a step in the process that leads toward the acquisition of Revolutionary Consciousness. The dangerous ones are those who claim consciousness that is not their own, who assert correctness without first having sought the validation of experience.

In closing, the wise words of two philosophers of experience, one a Chinese revolutionary, the other a doctor-poet from New Jersey.

No ideas but in things / There is no knowledge without practice