Machiavelli argued that a prince must appear to be of the people, must seem to have the same values and morals that they do. For him, writing in the sixteenth century, the most important way to appear to be of the people was to be religious. Christianity as set of ideals is certain doom for any ruler, but a necessary appearance for every ruler. As Louis Althusser sums up this general demand. “The prince must take the reality of popular ideology into account, and inscribe therein his own representation, which is the public face of the state.”
Althusser's general formulation makes it possible to ask the question what is the popular ideology that a contemporary ruler must take into account. Of course religion has not totally disappeared, at least in the USA, there has been a president who did not attend church or, at the very least, sell overpriced vanity bibles. I would argue that the centrality of religion has fade in the face of capitalism, our new religion of daily life. More specifically I would argue that every would be prince need to situate themselves in relation to the primary activities of capitalist society, selling labor power, or working, and purchasing commodities, or shopping.
This is why every presidential election season must entail its spectacle of candidates donning hard hats and jeans and visiting various worksites a long with state fairs and dinners. They must show their familiarity with both the world of commodities, and that particular commodity called labour power that people sell in order to live. There are famous stories, most apocryphal, of candidates failing to put on a convincing performance in front of the machines and customs of working life, such as George H.W. Bush's supposed surprise at a supermarket scanner and Hilary Clinton's shock at seeking an apartment in Harlem. As Machiavelli would remind us, when it comes to politics appearance is reality. If one looks out of touch with working or shopping one is out of touch with the economic concerns of most Americans. Photo-ops around work and consumption must be cultivated with the cunning of a fox. The risk of failure is greater than the potential of success.
Last week Donald Trump staged an odd variation on this ritual of American politics. Trump spent a few hours cosplaying working at a McDonalds that was only open to donors and supporters. All of this has to do in part with trolling Kamala Harris for saying that she once worked at McDonalds, a claim that Trump has repeatedly called into question. I have not followed the whole story, but it appears that Harris mentions the job even though she did not list it on her resume. If I am right about this, then it seems like this in an instance of the meme "tell me you never had a minimum wage job without telling me that you never had a minimum wage job." Taking old jobs crappy jobs off of your resume as one, hopefully, gets better and better jobs is almost a right of passage in the modern labor process. Almost everyone has a job that they would like to forget, and skills they would never want to use again. I worked as a bus boy and barista for years in high school and college and I am not sure if it makes any sense to tell a university that I can load a dishwasher quickly or make a passable cappuccino.
I still have the apron from my first job.
Trump's particular ploy has multiple levels. In part it is an attempt to continue to use fast food as an an image of Trump's own particular status of a man of the people. It is the corollary of his famous image in front of the stacks and stacks of Big-Macs. Trump has shown himself to be quite at home in the world of fast food. It is the catholic church for this modern Prince. It is what makes him a "blue collar billionaire," to use a line I recently read but couldn't believe. That such a line is even utterable as anything more than an oxymoron shows to what extent class is increasingly defined as primarily as an aesthetic rather than an economic position. The most valuable symbolic capital is to be worker, to have the tastes, culture, and appearance of an imagined idea of the worker, which is to say male, white, and blue collar. Which brings us to the second aspect. By this rationale Harris, as a black woman, could never have worked a real job. To the extent that she has held jobs at all must be due to DEI or, more crudely, some kind of exchange of sexual favors for work. These points that Trump returns to again and again in his rallies are not just him being cruel, they are fundamental to his worldview in which white men work, black and brown people take their jobs through DEI or by evading ICE, and women...women exist for sex (reproductive or otherwise).
I have written before on this blog about the idea that racial capitalism must in part be understood as the intersection of the hierarchies of racism and the hierarchies of work. This can be seen in the exclusion of Harris from real work, real work is white and male, but it can also be seen in another aspect of Trump's campaign, his warning that immigrants are coming for "black jobs." Two things can be said about this: first, such claims are an attempt for Trump to expand his base, to expand beyond white men, and he can only do this by expanding the logic of his appeal, by expanding negative solidarity. Or, more to the point, to expand the kind of affective composition of anger and ressentiment that negative solidarity depends on, the sense that one has been wronged and the people who have wronged them are to be found, at least in part, among those who are beneath them in a social hierarchy. Trump is inviting everyone, black people and even hispanics, to hate immigrants, to feel that immigrants are eroding whatever small gains they have made in society. Such claims about "black jobs" cut both ways, as much as they include, or attempt to include black people in hatred and fear of immigration, they do so in a way which racializes and naturalizes existing hierarchies of labor. The image it invokes, but never directly names, is that jobs in things like fast food, as well as service jobs in general, are in some sense "black." They are the jobs that we see black people doing, and because of that, they are the jobs that we think black people should do. As much as Trump is trying to expand his base he is also appealing to his true base, racists, by invoking an ideal of a hierarchy of jobs from manual labor to mental labor, from fry cook to CEO, that matches with, and overlaps with a racial and gendered hierarchy of white and black men and women.
Can you get a gold medal in trolling?
As I have written about briefly here, and at length in my book The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work, the dual nature of the labor process that Marx described, as both abstract and concrete labor can be understood to correspond to two different images of humanity and society. The first, abstract labor gives us an image of humanity in the abstract, of human beings as all bearers of labor power, equal and interchangeable. The second, concrete labor, gives us an image of humanity divided into specific jobs, different tasks, each situated hierarchically. While the first is modern, coming into existence with capitalism which produced the worker as an abstract subjectivity, the second is ancient, and has been around since Plato dreamed of a society with a place for everyone and everyone in their place. Both coexist in the contemporary labor process, in contemporary society, but in such a way that the hierarchy of different jobs is no longer found in different natures, with their corresponding metals, but in the racial and gender division of society. There are supposedly "black jobs" and "white jobs" just as there is women's work and men's work. Capitalism continues and deepens the existing hierarchies of society.
One of the things that has drawn my interest in work, and the politics of work, is, to paraphrase Hegel, because the worker is the antechamber of the citizen. It is in work that we get our images and ideas of humanity, of how it is possible for us to cooperate and act. It is also in work that we get our frustrations and fears. Trump's vision of politics is one in which the frustrations and fears work to reinforce the divisions and hierarchies of the existing labor process. The opposite of this would be a politics of positive solidarity, one that takes as its starting point that we are all, white, black, immigrant, men, and women, waged and unwaged, workers. All exploited. Unfortunately, that position is not on the ballot, and will never fit into any ballot box. It is a revolutionary politics.
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