A vacancy has occurred

With the vacancy created by the political demise of the working class, the role assigned to them as the liberators of humankind has now been taken over by the rich, says  Jeremy Seabrook.

---

WHEN the myth of the liberating destiny of the workers of the world finally crumbled, it was only a question of time before a new myth would arise. And what could that be, in an age when wealth is paramount, if not a fable about the rich? And indeed, they have plundered the trampled shrines of socialism and seized the role of the saviours of humanity.

The blending of social and spiritual redemption is not a new phenomenon. In some versions of scripture, the meek were to have inherited the earth. The association of Christ with the poor continued to make wealth more dangerous than poverty well into the Middle Ages, for love of riches imperilled the immortal soul. If the majority were fated to toil for their subsistence, wealth offered temptations from which the poor were exempt. This did not, of course, inhibit a church which 'clothed its walls in gold and left its sons naked', as St Bernard lamented in the 12th century; spiritual power readily yielded to its overbearing temporal rival. But evicting the poor from their closeness to God proved a long and painful process.

The fall of the poor finally occurred only with the establishment of industrial society. When people were coerced into squalid urban settlements to service the needs of manufacturing, a new form of humanity took shape, the industrial worker; a being whose temper was as alien to the old country psyche as it was to both the landed elite and to the factory-owners. The wild, unknown character of these people struck fear into the heart of privilege. The working class was the offspring of dogmas of wealth-creationism; impoverished and oppressed, it would later be called upon to fulfil the prophecies of Marx; by which time, history, it seemed, was once more on the side of the downtrodden.

Myths, by their nature, should remain in the realm of poetry, or at least, of theory. The practice of earthly redemption proved as destructive as its other-worldly counterpart; and the fate of the great experiment that was the Soviet Union is known. But for a long time, the democratic Left took a borrowed lustre from this tale; it seemed the working class was here to stay, and upon its willingness to cooperate with (if not fulfil) the mission entrusted to it, the social democratic dream was constructed, and is far from having completely faded.

The working class in Britain proved as transient as any other social formation. It rose, reached its zenith and then dissolved. As long as the making of daily necessities remained within a national division of labour, social and economic coherence persisted: the workers were indispensable to its maintenance. A strong labour movement depended upon conserving this situation; but conservation is alien to capital, the nature of which is mobile and opportunistic. The proletariat perished in its birthplace, the derelict workshop of the world.   

As soon as the working class was absorbed into a global market, its redemptive power, already tarnished, wasted away. It was overrun and vanquished by the golden hordes of the rich who, apocalyptic warriors of wealth, invaded the spaces where mill, mine and manufactory had been. No time was lost as they assumed the heroic mantle of those they had displaced.

The rich, no longer idle, plutocrats or possessors of lucre described as filthy, set about demonstrating their power. Their hyperactive movements across continents, their hectic schedules, by which they immolated themselves with ruined digestive tracts, heart attacks and high blood pressure, the urgency of promoting this or that must-have product, their dedication to the opening up of markets made of them new frontiersmen, worthy descendants of the buccaneers and adventurers who had won an empire. Breakfast in London, lunch in Dubai and dinner in Delhi - they rush by private jet from boardroom to marketing strategy meeting, from acquisition talks to the deployment of fortunes in esoteric financial instruments; workaholics, in whose capable, unsoiled hands the fate of nations rests.

They have proved their high calling, and by their fruits we know them, the marvels they perform, the mysterious alchemy that has enclosed the human commons, as it once enclosed its material counterpart, pastures, forests and heathland. Under their tutelage, the market has become cosmos, an ever-expanding universe which pushes everything beyond its reach into invisibility.

The wealth-creators have spun their own myth of salvation. All we want and desire, as individuals and as society, can be realised only through them, for they alone possess the occult powers required for the generation of wealth. And to augment their strength, they throw down golden ladders for the talented and the sharp-elbowed, the ingenious and ambitious, to join them. These now include icons of heroic consumption, stars and celebrities of sport, music, entertainment and television; and together they have taken up the relay of redemption from a faltering proletariat. Despite cutthroat competition for the position of saviours - indigenous peoples, the wretched of the earth, slum-dwellers, women, gays, anti-globalisers and students - the vacancy has been filled. 

Even the banking crisis did not affect the status of those set apart by their wealth. However distrusted, the magicians of money are still revered; the myth of their redemptive capacity is now a far more plausible narrative than the discredited epic of labour. The rich are the true agents of deliverance, and a fallen working class is only a memory, a faint grimace on the face of History.

The hostile takeover bid by the wealthy for the role formerly attributed to the oppressed has been a great success. Theirs is a spiritual as well as material supremacy, although they have no need of theory or textual prophecy. They inhabit a supraterrestrial topography which hovers above national, regional, religious, linguistic entities; cultural wars rage, leaving them scatheless. If, as Arundhati Roy has suggested, the rich have seceded from society, this is only in order to govern it more effectively from the empyrean they occupy above the clouds.

It may be, however, that the rich have also assumed - unwittingly this time - another function assigned by Marx to the now-fallen workers. In the debauch of wealth of the contemporary world, as the treasures of the earth are gouged and the planet simmers in the choking fog of universal industrialism, it may be that the rich, in the frenzy to use up resources that were to have sustained posterity, will turn out to be also the gravediggers of capitalism.                                   

Jeremy Seabrook's book Pauperland: Poverty and the Poor in Britain is published by Hurst (October 2013).

*Third World Resurgence No. 276/277, August/September 2013, pp 60-61