*Recherch*

The Philosophy of Laboring (Punks and Platonism)

Posted by jeffrubard on August 2, 2009

Six years ago, I wrote a “squib” called “The Philosopher of Labor: Or, Why We Can’t Quite Do Without Proudhon”. Though the title is a reference to a very sly joke by Marcuse about “dialectics”, a “private” joke of Marx’s, and the politics of capitalization in the United States the sentiment was genuine enough: Proudhon’s method and ideas are closer to the actual mindset of the socialist worker than Marx, and for good enough reason. However, since I’m not trying to make political points at the moment, let me generalize the observation slightly.

Although a rather sick but understandable joke dominated the left-wing understanding of Platonism in the late 20th century, the culture of a functional workplace is Platonistic: allow me to explain via a consideration of the punk “subculture”. Punks are dressed widely at variance with the “norms” of bourgeois society, although thirty years on there is a lot of conservative continuity in their style; however, the “message” is not quite what you might think it is. Punks can always work, that’s why they get to look that way; if they couldn’t, they wouldn’t.

An additional consideration derived from punk should help us understand better. Punk music is a Platonistic form of rock and roll, in that it is very, very good musically but out of step with the times and enunciates ideals that aren’t quite “practically effective”: although drugs are poison, probably every “straight-edger” eventually had a problem themselves, and even though Chuck Berry is an immortal I’m not sure people needed to hear him again in the musically diverse late-’70s.

However, this kind of inexactitude and correctness is just what makes actual workplaces performing essential services in a profitable but clean way work: you say the thing you really believe but can’t quite make true, and then labor under that “illusion”. This is one of the things that makes working life “seem” undesirable compared to a life of idleness, and there may be materialistic or “immoralistic” reasons for thinking productive activity a fool’s errand, but it’s just the way it has to be: if you’re “steady on your feet” and want to continue living, you have to find some ideal you can agree on with a class enemy (whatever side you’re on) and get going.