Marxism, Post-Marxists, and a slow realization that after everything you've just ended up back at the starting point . . .

Quite a while ago, most of us at The Daily Wenzel would have considered ourselves non-Marxists. While we sympathized with the plight of working classes and riled against the rich and the status quo, our Maxists friends seemed altogether too stuffy and intent on bringing about a paradigm that was outdated and historically flawed. If you keep insisting on asking the same questions, we thought, you were always going to arrive at the same answers. How do you come up with new answers? we wondered. Obviously, asking new questions was they key, but how do we know if the questions are really new and not just different by degree instead of kind? A change in context, we argued, would yield a new perspective with new questions, but what could create a new context we then asked?

Well, we paused and thought. Quite a few mid-morning cappucinnos were consumed, and eventually we felt that a real change in context could only come about by a change in the daily living conditions of people. People constructed context based on how they lived their lives, and so if they somehow changed the way they lived, they could change the questions they thought to ask. What enabled people to change their daily lives, mainly technology, but what fuelled technological change? The economy.

In that moment the image of our laughing Marxist friends loomed large overhead.

That was a few years ago and the technological development of society has continued to increase rapidily. People now commonly speak of living in an Information Age and we find ourselves coming back to our thought on what causes a change in daily life. Our original answer of the economy does not seem so powerful now, as we are coming to the realization that context is dependent on meaning, and the question we should have been asking is what gives daily life meaning? The answer to that varies by time and place. In the feudal age that Marx describes, it was religion. The industrial revolution enabled the economy to envelop all of society. In this so-called Information Age, it is not so much the information that is important, but the manipulation of it. What gives our lives meaning is the lives and meaning we see reflected back to us in the media.

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle seems more relevant now than ever before.

We ain't got no class

Our Marxist friends may shrug and play coy, sheepishly refusing to let go of their cherished notion of class altogether, we at thet Daily Wenzel, are under no such compulsions. We do not believe in class. Or at least, we do not believe that economics plays as great a role in group identity formation as our Red friends would have us believe. While much has been written about the formation of group identities and the shifting and ovelapping nature these identities may have with one person feeling they belong to several different social groups at once, the primary basis for social cohesion has always been common experience. The explosion in multiple social identities in recent years has been in large part because of the continued fragmentation of daily life.

In feudal societies, social groups were divided in large part due to status; rights and privelleges gained or purchased from the state and recorded in law. While most of us are familiar with the three basic divisions (first, second, and third estate to borrow from the French usuage). These were not monolithic blocks however, as each one was intensely sub-divided and at various times, the boundaries were somewhat porous. It was only after the French Revolution wiped away many feudal distinctions, that class began to develop as a social construct. In many ways, this was due to the decline of the journeyman craftsmen under the emerging industrial system. Rather than functioning in part as independent owner/operators, journeymen who could not afford to open their own shop, or eventually convert their shop into a factory, found themselves working in factories with other labourers.

When we recall that throughout much of the nineteenth century factory workers tended to spend anywhere from ten to sixteen hours at work, would often eat meals together, and spend a few hours at a pub together, the idea of a shared experience forming group identity becomes apparent, with work becoming the single biggest element. Add to this the fact that until late in the nineteenth century, many workers in the same occupation or trade lived in the same basic neighbourhoods. This was especially true in the emerging factory and company towns common in North America. However, the explosion of the suburbs following the Second World War dramatically reduced the amount of common experiences that particular workers would have.

Rather than place emphasis on class then, we would suggest that experience forms a particular outlook or mentalite (to borrow a term from Francois Furet). Classes exists where workers have enough commonalities, be it experiences, greivances, or future goals, to bring them together. Experience can include the same past-times or shopping patterns. Witness the Canadian coffee divide by comparing location and clientele of Tim Horton's and Starbucks. Aspirations and self-image play as large a role as basic economic background.

We are quite intrigued with this notion, so look for more updates in the future.