Remember the good, old Class Struggle? While there is somewhat of a second “red scare” occurring in American culture, a type of political hysteria which has been heightened by the digital realm of, to put it in Baudrillardian terms, “information at the meteorological stage” in which everyone seems under suspicion of secretly being a communist who embodies all the worst qualities of Stalinism; there remains nonetheless a steady undercurrent of legitimately Marxist ideas which retain a presence in the American political sphere, especially among young people in higher education. One of which is the basic delineation of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as a dichotomy (thesis and antithesis), “our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx).
Within the capitalist mode of production, this leads to Marx’s definition of exploitation. More than any other element, the longing for a class dichotomy which results in exploitation, is representative of the hauntological aspect of Marxism. There has arisen a unique nostalgia for a time when classes used to be more rigid— as it promised imaginings of a possible, better future.
A (Very) Brief History of Hauntology
Hauntology is a concept which is likely familiar to many of those living in the modern world, even though they may not know the word for it. Hauntology is a relatively recent concept in cultural theory, which was created incidentally by Marx through his famous phrase, “the spectre of communism”. The original meaning was not hauntological, but rather referred to communism as a possible future, which was invisibly taking hold of Europe. Derrida then picked up this term and reinvented it for a different purpose, in light of the political events which took place between the 1840s (publication of The Communist Manifesto) and the 1990s (collapse of USSR). Derrida lays out his definition of a spectre in Spectres of Marx: “the spectre is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back”. With the promise of a better future never having manifested itself, the possible future “haunts” us, after its death.
Mark Fisher expands on this, exposing its emotional core, in “What is Hauntology?”,
“The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production. What hauntological music mourns is less the failure of a future to transpire—the future as actuality—than the disappearance of this effective virtuality” (Fisher).
What hauntology morphs into after the promising force of rapid technological improvement proves to reinforce exploitation is a haunting of the very notion of being able to think of possible futures.
Mass Nostalgia
Mass nostalgia is the overgrowth of a culture which has reached the end of its history, a culture which has superseded its original intent, i.e. from capitalism to something beyond capitalism/techno-feudalism. Mass nostalgia cuts through individuality, and becomes a social obligation. This is why sexuality is no longer the major point of commerce, but reference. Major cultural production in America is concerned with nostalgia and reference because there is a longing to return to the feeling of cultural innovation. The political left falls into the same trap. Ideologies from the past are exhumed and seen as prophetic. This all contributes to a nostalgia for when class struggle was more easily defined. Marxism now today haunts the political sphere not so much as the “spectre of communism” but as the “spectre of class struggle”. The popular Marxism embraced today is one fundamentally fueled by nostalgia.
Orthodox Marxism does not address the contemporary social issues faced within globalized capitalism in all their particularities, after all, how could it? This does not mean Marx should not be taken seriously— just that the urge to return to a previous conceptualization of economics represents a nostalgic urge. The very terms which defined the world within a Marxist ideology are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the world becomes increasingly complex and as the processes of capitalism accelerate. Marxism as a worldview itself has become a type of spectre which we long for. There is a desire to return to a non-globalized version of capitalism, where exploitation is explicit, rather than implicit and virtual, and to eliminate the distinction of the middle class in order to have a more rigid understanding of a class dichotomy. The key to understanding this is the rise of technological utopianism, quite possibly the only true cultural force of utopianism in America left.
As the wealth gap only grows larger, tech entrepreneurs offer consumers very (hyper)real forms of economic empowerment (i.e. Robinhood lets consumers participate in the stock market, crypto offers a new way for consumers to engage with currency) which ends up enriching the few in power while simultaneously enriching enough of the consumers to retain a perception that everyone is actually becoming wealthier and more powerful. Zizek describes in The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto,
“bombarded by imposed ‘free choices’, forced to make decisions that we are, for the most part, not even properly qualified for, we increasingly experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change. Bourgeois society generally obliterates castes and other hierarchies, equalizing all individuals as market subject divided only by class difference; but today’s late capitalism, with its ‘spontaneous’ ideology, endeavours to obliterate the class division itself, by way of proclaiming us all ‘self-entrepreneurs’” (Zizek).
The system is rapidly changing, and consumers are being invited to participate in mass entrepreneurship. When you are within this faux-Bourgeois class, you have much of the power that the Bourgeoisie would have had in the past. The truly upper class, such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, lead lives of spectacle, transfiguring themselves into real-time entertainment. These hyperpublic figures allow consumers to vicariously experience the catharsis of absurd wealth, while retaining the ability to ridicule them. In the past the poor have most often been the butt of the joke, but now it is often the wealthiest people alive.
The system is now also globalized. Money has no physical standard. Virtual transactions of money are becoming normalized, even across borders. The wage labor of an individual is now infinitely entangled within a national economy and the international. This new system is perfectly expressed in Network (1976), written by Paddy Chayefsky, a film with subtly hauntological features. In the film, a television broadcaster attempts to make real political change in the world by protesting an unethical trade his own television network is making with a Middle Eastern country. The character does political action the traditionally “correct” way, through using his individual voice as an American citizen. He wants to go up against “the system”, but when he is lectured to by the president of his network, it is revealed to him that the world has become fundamentally post-ideological:
“You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! [...] What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do” (Chayefsky).
Ultimately, the desire to “revert” to orthodox Marxism is a desire to return to ideology. The conservative desire to revert to an orthodox understanding of capitalism and the free market, too, is disconnected from the state of things today. The hope is that if we can return to strict, rigid moral or economic categories, that we can reduce the system to something understandable. The problem is that the post-capitalist force of the world market is able to subsume this desire, even profit off it, in the form of what Mark Fisher dubs “capitalist realism”.
Class Confusion
Nowhere else is this spectre of Marxist Nostalgia more obviously represented than in the popular slogan, “eat the rich”. The phrasing itself has a tinge of capitalist realism— because there is a lack of clear solutions offered for fixing the increasing wealth gap, solace is found in a completely implausible action. None who proclaim “eat the rich” are advocating for cannibalism, and this indicates the phrase’s nostalgic tinge. There is a very real urge in our culture to adopt simple understandings of complex problems in order to liberate ourselves from interconnectedness and subsume ourselves into virtuality. “Eat the rich” imposes on the speaker a virtual future, where one would be willing to advocate for economic equality, yet deliberately obscures such a future through its virtuality. The phrase itself harkens back to the French revolution, and to a time where the rich could be easily identified and to a culture rich with theorized futures. This is a crude Marxism, which features an unwillingness to engage with Marx’s thought— a philosophy which begs its reader to develop it and to adapt it to the circumstances to come.
Bong Joon Ho’s morally complex film Parasite addresses the increasingly confused relationship between the rich and the poor. The poor family who lives in a half-basement desperately attempt to fake their way into the world of the wealthy family, which lives in a house which clearly indicates their extreme wealth. The film contains a vital insight: the way to make it up the new hierarchy is through simulation, and utilizing psychological manipulation, this is how you become faux-bourgeois. What the lower class wants, the film seems to suggest, is not equality, but to engage in the spectacle of wealth. Of course, this dynamic is doubled down upon in the film’s second half, where it is revealed that the wealthy family’s maid has a husband who literally lives in the basement, the upper and lower class are made physically manifest.
This morally confuses the plot: who in this situation is truly poor, and is the parasitism of the rich on the poor to be countered with a parasitism of the poor on the rich? Ultimately, the rich know who’s poor, as demonstrated by the recurring motif of the “smell” of poor people being repulsive, but the poor do not really know who their enemy is: is it the rich family who make minimal attempts to be generous with their wealth, or is it those who worship the rich through benefitting from them and becoming parasites, or has the entire system corrupted them with greed as well? All of these ambiguities are left to the interpretation of the viewer. But a review by a Marxist-Leninist online sees no such ambiguity.
In Sally Jane Black’s review (a reviewer I have deep respect for but also happen to disagree with sharply), she claims Bong Joon-Ho fails to become class conscious. And articulates this in a way which longs for a simplistic model of class struggle:
“This film captures conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie, but the essence of the relationship between the two is never made explicit, never truly captured. Instead of focusing on the basic economic exploitation that is universally true in every capitalist society, the film focuses on the treatment and perception of workers by the rich. There are moments that come so close to getting it right, but they fail to go the next step and make it clear [...] the key missing piece is understanding surplus value. Without understanding that the core exploitation to capitalism, to the relationship between worker and boss, is that the worker produces the wealth (directly or indirectly) and the boss takes it while doing nothing (or in the case of the petty bourgeois, not enough to justify this theft). Because of this act of cruel exploitation, we workers are left with breadcrumbs (see the family in the basement) and the bosses live in luxury. Were we workers able to control the company and the money created by our labor, that money could and would be used for the betterment of our lives through public services (healthcare, education, etc.) and communal property” (Black).
Black hopes for Joon-Ho to reach a realization of orthodox Marxism in a film which is addressing the issues of a fundamentally different system from what Marx was critiquing. Surplus value, of course, still exists, but reducing class structure to these terms ignores the new virtuality of money, and the ways in which wealth is acquired in a global system. The family is absurdly wealthy, to the point where exploitation is implied, yet such exploitation, if articulated, would interweave and connect between so many different countries, corporations, and groups of people, that it is not clear who is entitled to such surplus wealth. The new class consciousness of popular Marxism is to reduce the Bourgeoisie into a type of identity, rather than an economically demonstrable reality.
This nostalgic urge is also demonstrated in an (already outdated) “eat the rich” Tik Tok trend (see image below). The videos comically demonstrate something fundamentally true about the state of politics in America: that there is a confusion about who is actually rich. The examples range from things which actually are a demonstration of middle-class wealth (studying abroad in Europe) to things which are not a demonstration of economic standing whatsoever (a $10/month music subscription). This is the result of Marxism being reduced to a type of identity politics, in which identifying yourself as rich, or simply acting rich supplements actual economic distinction.
The great irony of such a trend is that participation in it requires wealth enough to purchase a cell phone capable of capturing video and participating in social media. The trend overtly demonstrates that class today is infinitely redefinable, and that what many desire is a “virtual” liberation, to participate in digital trends which cathartically demonstrate social issues, without any real clear solutions offered besides hyperbolic ones. Figures such as Hasan Piker emulate political analysis, by streaming his thoughts on current events and offering crude Marxist critiques, while purchasing a $2.7 million mansion in Hollywood (Isidro). When he was rebuked for such a purchase, class confusion once again bubbled to the surface, as people made a distinction between wealth earned through exploitation in labor and wealth made virtually by way of online viewers donating, ad revenue, and brand deals. Piker is a post-fordist millionaire who can retain his identity as lower-class by acting as such.
class extremities
A truly hauntological film, Satantango, depicts the ways that various lower class lives intersect and fall apart in the Hungarian countryside following the collapse of the USSR. The film’s centerpiece is a proposed commune which is actually a front for a form of government surveillance. Irimiás is a cult leader like-figure who is able to convince the cynical villagers to turn their money over to him. Wary of his promises, the villagers become convinced that Irimiás has tricked them and they squabble over who should get the collective wealth. Irimiás splits the villagers off and sends them to different cities to become employed in different areas. Ultimately, Irimiás files a report about the villagers’ untrustworthy behavior.
The film captures the haunting of a Marxist nostalgia. All the characters live in a world where class is completely unclear, and there is no longer the Soviet government to see as the antagonistic power. The nostalgia for imagining possible futures drives them to participate in something which is ultimately an emulation of a solution. There really was no possible future to begin with. While the real forces of power are hidden behind multiple layers of ambiguity.
In all these recent trends, there is the spectre of class struggle, a desire to return to clear-cut class distinctions. Marxist nostalgia is what vindicates the actions of the Kim family in the first half of Parasite, and the prophetic ramblings of Mr. Beale in Network. There is a widespread urge to see the rich as exploitative, but there is little clarity on who is truly rich. This is especially prevalent in American culture (and South Korean), where the entire country is apparently becoming increasingly wealthy, yet the real-life distinction between rich and poor is becoming increasingly confused. I propose the solution is reconfiguring the concepts of class. There is no longer a dichotomy between the working class and the ruling class in Post-Fordism. Yet I retain that, for instance, someone who works at a Subway for a living is indeed unjustly underpaid, while billionaires unjustly horde wealth. Most people live in something like the middle or working class, while there is an extreme underclass and an extreme upper class. While there is a massive difference between the two families in Parasite, such interpersonal class struggle (as well as identity politics) is really a distraction from the extreme points of poverty and wealth. It allows for indulging in Marxist nostalgia.
Until the homeless who live on the street in every city of America are sheltered, and until the ultra-wealthy cash inflow are forced to de-accelerate, the warfare between the lower middle-class and upper middle-class will only serve as reconfigurations of the type of hierarchy. We must first accept that our system now is post-scarcity, and become disillusioned with the infinitudes of technological progress and the ever-more-convenient; the inverse effect is that egoism will increasingly become a political force. The only way to combat egoism (in the full Stirner-sense of the word) is through charity. In order to stop the incoming tide of global techno-feudalism, we all must give up our life of speed and luxury, and slowly revolutionize everything, from our seemingly benign media consumption to our economic structure. There is no equality without economic equality.
special thanks to Dr. Camelia Raghinaru for overseeing the writing of this essay.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean, and Chris Turner. Screened Out. London ; New York, Verso, 2014.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Communist Manifesto. 1848. 1848.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York, Routledge, 1994.
Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, Sept. 2012, pp. 16–24, 10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.
Slavoj Žižek. The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto. Cambridge Polity, 2019.
Network. Directed by Sidney Lumet, United Artists, 1976.
Parasite. Directed by Bong Joon-Ho, Neon, 2019.
Black, Sally Jane. “Parasite Review.” Letterboxd, 25 Nov. 2019, letterboxd.com/fuchsiadyke/film/parasite-2019/. Accessed 2 Dec. 2021.
Isidro, Charissa. “Socialist Twitch Streamer Endures Wrath of Twitter for Buying $3M Home.” The Daily Beast, 20 Aug. 2021, www.thedailybeast.com/socialist-twitch-streamer-hasan-piker-get-grief-from-twitter-for-buying-dollar3-million-los-angeles-home. Accessed 2 Dec. 2021.
Satantango. Directed by Bela Tarr, Arbelos Films, 1994.
The best philosophers and mathematicians question the definitions at hand to see whether they apply or even accurately describe what they claim to. I greatly appreciate the call to redefine the class paradigm from a dichotomy to a continuity. I find it interesting that in modern times, much of our society has begun to think of discrete structures as a spectrum (gender, sexuality) and continuous structures as a dichotomy (class, political party). Often times in mathematics, the dichotomy between discrete and continuous breaks down the higher the mathematics goes and they end up operating on the same level from an extremely technical understanding. I can't help but imagine society operates on a similar manner—the system which creates the class dichotomy also creates the class spectrum, but only on the most technical and fundamental level.