Guy Rundle on the knowledge class, part three

The knowledge class's ideology of radical universal equality can often bump up against the moral beliefs and choices of different classes.

Welcome to Guy Rundle’s mid-winter short course on the knowledge class. Click the following for parts one and two.

Why does the knowledge class have such power and cultural unity, even across the capital/labour divide? The answer is that the power of people belonging to the knowledge class comes from their growing control of cultural and moral life, and an implicit sense that the work they and people like them do is part of the next system — one in which production is coordinated by networked systems faster, more fluid and more responsive than capitalist markets, while also being steered by purpose rather than profit. This system is forming within capitalism, as capitalism did within feudalism. The merchants became the bourgeoisie; the knowledge class will become the managers.

When this group was smaller, a subclass or less, it attached itself to the working class as they shared aims. Many intellectuals who became organisers and activists in this great movement knew that, for days, years or decades at a time, they had to suppress their own opinions of and predispositions towards equality — of the sexes, of strangers, of the “different” — to speak to social groups whose life was still more traditional.

It’s a myth that socialism, or labourism, was uniformly radical; it was equally a conservative movement, fighting the dissolution of communal ways of life by the annihilating effect of capitalism. But now that such a group forms its own class, its attitude changes collectively. Its class imperatives come to the fore. It becomes utterly undesirable, morally impossible for many — even those who are wage-earners on low incomes — to de-prioritise the radical demands of identity rights that emerge from its class.

This can be seen in the contradictory politics of the Greens. Their core is shared by a number of “old new” leftists, centrist political-economic types deriving from the environmentalist wing, and a third group of newer recruits whose focus on cultural politics and rights is overwhelming.

The first two groups are the ageing representatives of past political formations; when they are gone, the Greens will be an organic party of the post-industrial knowledge class, its new prince. In that, the “third group” now organically represents a wider membership than the first two groups. So a conflict such as the election of convenor Linda Gale — who advocated a pluralist debate on sex and gender definitions within the party, which her opponents argued would allow what they described as transphobic hate speech — connects to the political beating heart of thousands of members and to the movement’s collective beating heart.

No matter how much the leadership from old formations might curse the way in which such a stoush completely interrupted a debate about our planet-killing resources sector, they feel they cannot say so. The new Greens groupings treat the trans issue as concrete and absolute as the fact that the catastrophic Scarborough gas project has been greenlit by Labor.

That is a pure expression of where the beliefs of a core of the knowledge class now sit. Not everyone, because no one is simply determined by one class frame. But the implicit idea of many — conservatives, media liberals and Marxists alike — that people will find a sort of pivot point of “common sense” is to misunderstand how social change shifts what “common sense” is. The modes of life of the knowledge class and other groups are diverging more greatly than any two classes in history, and “common sense” is now wholly class-bound.

One objection to this might be that we have seen something like this process before, in the social movements — race, women, sexuality — from the 1960s. A traditional social value system of huge power was overturned, in a way that would have seemed impossible 20 years earlier. Is this not happening now? The same-sex marriage plebiscite delivered, with 65% of the vote, a legal change that most people could not have imagined a decade earlier. The answer would be that, to a degree, the knowledge class is the incipient ruling class of a new world that is transformed for everyone by new communications and media forms, mass immigration and global consumption over several generations. So everyone is lifted out of the more parochial ways of life they once occupied.

The mistake would be to believe that those social revolutions occurred equally and totally in every social aspect. That’s particularly so of juridical moments. The 1967 referendum didn’t end racism despite a 90% yes vote, and it wasn’t the civil rights triumph it has been retrospectively constructed as; many racist people voted for it, simply to shift the “race problem” from state to federal responsibility.

The yes vote on same-sex marriage can be seen as a vote to not be responsible for enforcing an absurdity. But the idea that everyone now agrees with the idea that same-sex relationships are equal to heterosexual ones, that the latter is not to be preferred in one’s children, its centrality taught in schools, is a mistake. The same would go for racial differences. There may now be many Australians who are now not particularly racist but remain “racialist” — that is, they believe there are biological differences between the races that create different social and cultural forms. And so on, all the way through the culture.

Pretty much no one now believes that women should not have the vote, but the idea of sex/gender equality has different meanings and ideas in different social groups of how far it extends from public life into private. The knowledge class believes, fervently, in the near-total social construction of human beings, the absence of any biological hard-wiring. That firm belief is simply a part of their ideology of radical universal equality and of total transformability. When your only tool is the hammer of language and maths, everything looks like a problem to be solved.

The ensemble of “equality beliefs” that the knowledge class sees as a set does not present as such to different classes, who frame the world of moral choices with a mix of parochial and communal imperatives that many knowledge class people now simply do not recognise as being moral at all — deliberate harshness towards undocumented refugees, done in the name of protecting the national community, being one manifestation of such.

Furthermore, because this is the major operant class division of our time, the knowledge class and its “other” — everyone else — define themselves against each other. There’s no question that this is driving culture-class differentiation. Since the knowledge class is now dominant but believes itself to be insurgent, and the “others” were once dominant but now see their beliefs undermined in terms of legitimacy and meaning, both sides define themselves against the other — so the process is one of mutual resentment. With that in place, the culture-class war will remain dominant in current political life.

Why the desire among so many left political activists to not consider this class framework as determining social life? Mainly because many would hope for a renewed worker-progressive alliance that would restore a more material politics to the centre. That just ain’t going to happen anytime soon. The task for leftists within the knowledge class is… well, first it’s to understand this new class system. Intellectuals have a tendency to identify every class’s ideological mystification but their own. Marxism is not merely a barrier to understanding the differences between the knowledge class and workers; it’s the means by which this difference is actively obscured. The romance of the great cause dies hard.

Beyond that, people have to talk back to the Pollyanna-ish idea that you don’t have to make choices and prioritise issues. Then it is to try and get fellow class activists to accept the plurality of social truths and social moralities, which vary by social class. Quite aside from that being the true state of things, it will make it less surprising when the opposition eventually emerges from people many might have thought were allies, and whose lives are lived under very different terms with different hopes, fears and imaginings. Those interested in a more extended treatment of this topic should see my “Necessity Has No Law” essay in a recent issue of Meanjin. Yes, more extended. No, you shut up. Now, where’s that drink?