A Manifesto for the Working Class

It was March when I sat down to talk to Cruz — a month which saw the fortieth anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike’s beginning. Northern California is a long way from Britain, but growing up in the 1980s in a working-class, mixed heritage household, Cruz made connection between her experiences and those of workers across the Atlantic. Recounting her experiences as an adolescent, Cruz examines the ideology of the ‘American dream’ with the actually available prospects open to working-class Americans. ‘I grew up believing that if I just worked hard enough,’ she says, ‘there was no way I would not be a success.’

But what this belief in manifest destiny leaves unspoken is that it isn’t enough to work hard — it requires a person to ascribe to different cultural conventions. This is because culture is hegemonically bourgeois, influenced and modelled on capitalist ideals (if not necessarily controlled by those within its ranks — as the connections between the Israeli state, the arms trade and major cultural and educational institutions reveal). In adolescence, Cruz discovered that despite her best endeavours in academia, she was required to become something other than who she says. ‘In order to survive,’ she tells Tribune, ‘I had to kill myself off.’

For Cruz, an early counterbalance to the cultural dynamics of an oppressive reality was her discovery of British post-punk bands like The Jam, Joy Division, and The Fall. The Jam and their angular, sharply dressed frontman Paul Weller made a particular impact on Cruz:

‘Rather than an abstract ‘Fuck You’ at ‘the System’, Weller sang about the working class, articulating how it felt to work a shitty, meaningless job for low pay. He sang about his rage at capitalism, at Tory politicians. He sang about the middle class and how the working class were exploited. And he sang about the resulting depression. His songs were addressed to us, the working class.’

Weller’s lyrics are acerbic in their analysis of Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Immaculately turned out in the mod fashion of recent decades, he moved in a twitching way that mirrored the staccato delivery of his lyrics. The Jam were fashionable, political, and popular — in Britain, at least. Mark Fisher, whose writing bears an indelible mark on Cruz’s, identifies the left-populism of The Jam in ‘Going Underground’ — ‘it mattered that they were popular; the records gained in intensity when you knew that they were number one, when you saw them on Top of the Pops — because it wasn’t only you and fellow initiates who heard the music; the (big) Other heard it too.’

Yet the idea that a band like The Jam could exist today seems almost implausible, not least because the Left has ceded so much ground since then. For this reason, Cruz looks to the political unconscious of cultural production. This question of political possibility, Cruz says, can be traced to subtle exercises of agency, such as Weller’s jerking motions in his live performances — and how on an unconscious level, working-class artists find means of expressing themselves through the body itself. Like the sharp suits worn by The Jam, Weller’s physical movements and lyrical delivery presented a confrontation — something that was not of the ‘big Other’ which, as much as The Jam’s socially incisive lyrics, was an effective means of divergence from the dominant culture.

Both culturally and politically, the late 1970s and early 1980s marked the beginning of a comedown. The speed-inflicted energy of punk rock burnt out just as the bastions of the European Left gasped their last tactical manoeuvres. The murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro on the eve of brokering a power-sharing deal with Italy’s formidable communist party (PCI) occurred ten months before Sid Vicious’ fatal overdose in a Manhattan apartment; Francois Mitterrand’s successful 1981 presidential bid was, as Fabien Escalano describes, a victory for socialism at the expense of its soul.

But for Cruz, this period of what is decreed in the official history as an inevitable economic reconfiguration is the point where the working-class avant-garde developed new forms of cultural representation, ones which contained the potential to imagine realities beyond the oppressive conditions of an emergent neoliberal order.

For understanding Cruz’s approach, the manifesto is key; not the obvious connotations, such as the Communist Manifesto, but rather the influence of Marx and Engels on twentieth-century art. From dadaism and surrealism to Dziga Vertov’s ‘art of fact’ constructivism and Bertolt Brecht’s attempts to ‘break the fourth wall’ between cultural producer and audience, radical art sought to confront the ways that everyday life is manipulated and distorted through institutions and capitalist cultural production.

These cultural legacies trickled into the avant-garde imaginary of late 1970s and early 1980s Britain; contrasting with the ‘freedom’ and ‘fluidity’ of postmodern neoliberal culture, the manifesto form is a wholly different discipline. The implications of a manifesto are exciting and paradoxical. Manifestos invoke sculpting by secrecy and exclusivity, yet their function is to engage and include a mass audience through expressing commitment to change. In the Surrealist Manifesto, Andre Breton writes in recognisably Marxist language that ‘man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work.’

For the Surrealists, the material world could only be confronted through its diametrical opposite: the ‘unconscious’. The artistic products of this unexplored topography was revolutionary in intent, not least because, despite the emphasis on immaterial space, the Surrealists sought to establish new relations between ourselves and the material world by reconfiguring hegemonic systems of imagination.

A striking example can be seen in the Jeu de Marseille, a reinvention of the standard 52-card deck of playing cards conjured up by Breton and fellow surrealists awaiting their escape to America following the Nazi invasion of France. The deck reconstitutes the deck’s court hierarchy, replacing King, Queen, and Knave with Magus, Siren, Genius, and transforming the standard suits — Diamonds, Spades, Hearts, and Clubs — into Locks (for knowledge), Wheels (for revolution), Stars (for dreams), and Flames (for desire). Each picture card depicts a figure of importance to the surrealist movement: Freud is the Magus of Stars, the psychic Hélène Smith is the Siren of Locks, the Marquis de Sade is the Genius of Wheels, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi is the Joker.

Like the Jeu de Marseille, Cruz’s manifesto is cartographical, linking between the political unconscious and social reality. For many, as Cruz reflects, politics is ‘something someone else does,’ while for most normal people, ‘what we do instead is create our identities and commodify ourselves.’ Melancholia is an attempt to return something which has disappeared, but like the image of Hamlet’s ghost invoked by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, it cannot return ‘as it was’; there is something spectral about Cruz’s book, which invokes death as a reconnection with something that could once again come into being — not as it was, but as a new assemblage.

Which Way to Class Consciousness?

If class consciousness is, for Cruz, something in need of a refoundation, then certain forms of nascent political agency must be excavated and harnessed. In Melancholia, this agency is depicted strikingly in the conflict between what Cruz refers to as ‘neoliberal slickness’ and the libidinal energy manifested in the working-class body. Cruz establishes the concept of slickness through a quotation from the working-class American filmmaker Barbara Loden: ‘I really hate slick pictures, they’re too perfect to be believable — the slicker the technique, the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns to Formica, including the people.’ Loden, who emerged from a self-described ‘hillbilly’ background, is best known for her 1970 film Wanda, which documents a young working-class woman’s social alienation and slide into criminality. Shot on a miniscule budget with a skeleton crew, with Loden starring and directing. Compared to a glossy Hollywood vehicle like Bonny and Clyde or the products of her one-time husband Elia Kazan, Wanda is aesthetically and emotionally raw, more akin to what Cruz calls the ‘awkwardness’ of Andy Warhol’s films.

For Cruz, the essential strength of Loden’s film (and of working-class art in general) is the lack of sheen. She recalls the poems of Frank Stanford — whose poetry mythologises the Deep South — in which ‘sometimes there’s a line or two where the line just feels really strange.’ This ability to shock the reader by imposing glitching qualities on the writing can’t be smoothed over or contained by ‘refined’ technique but breaks through as a disruption of the form itself.

Similarly, the performances of Ian Curtis as Joy Division’s frontman are, Cruz argues, startling for their ‘extreme compression’. Moving robotically and twitching spasmodically to the rhythms produced by his bandmates, Curtis forces his ‘body into postures and movements that appear at once to be both violent and unnatural.’ Thus, Cruz continues, ‘To watch Curtis’ live performances is to watch a man overcome by an internal energy force.’ On the other hand, a slick corporate performer like Madonna ‘cobbles together cultural references of what sex looks like’ in the same way that a ChatGPT prompt reproduces simulacra by sifting ‘relevant’ data. Working-class art eschews gloss; it is anti-slick.

In one of Mark E. Smith’s final interviews, the frontman of The Fall derided Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk stalwart Blade Runner as ‘obscene’ — it bore no comparison to the science fictional worlds of Philip K. Dick, the author on whose work Scott’s film is loosely based. Similarly, Charles Baudelaire once revelled in the painted backdrops of the theatre because their ‘crude magic subjects me to the spell of a useful illusion,’ while decrying the realism of contemporary landscape painters who ‘are liars, precisely because they fail to lie.’

The sham of neoliberal slickness is that it is generated from cultural forces which don’t perceive its sheen for what it is, but as the truest form of representation. To this extent, it is parasitical of itself — unable to conceive its own cultural parameters, dominant forms of bourgeois culture can’t perceive itself as anything but a metaphysical entity that exists unquestioningly. The perennial Hollywood tagline ‘based on true events’ is testament to this: history, it concedes, exists, but the presentation of its existence to the public is subject to its rendering as an acceptable consumer product.

The most striking contrast Cruz draws between neoliberalism’s slick, sexless products and the libidinal working-class body is in her discussion of anorexia and bulimia, in relation to both Amy Winehouse’s and her own. What is insightful (and, perhaps for some, shocking) about her discussion of eating disorders and depression is that she perceives them as forms of agency. They are negative agencies in the sense that they are self-destructive, but they are demonstrable means of exerting control over one’s life.

In Amy Winehouse, Cruz observes, her pop mythology was curated through her appearance as a working-class, Jewish-British Jazz singer — ‘her cultivated persona was not cultivated,’ Cruz says, ‘it was herself.’ By the end of her life, as she recovered from substance addiction and struggled with a chronic eating disorder, Winehouse’s beehive hair and winged eyeliner became exaggerated, the chosen signifiers of her roots growing as her body diminished. Contrary to the line spun in the tabloid press — of a spiralling popstar — Cruz perceives Winehouse’s trajectory in terms of control: the working-class body as a site of dark, libidinally-charged activity in the face of a hegemonic neoliberal culture.

Here, in a severe compression, working-class agency is relocated from the body of mass movements to the body of the individual. What is established in an anorexic or bulimic body is a ‘space between’, which refuses to relinquish control to the received principles of consumer culture and clashes with the constraints of neoliberal society. For Cruz, this libidinal excess ‘becomes the space holder’ from which political, class-based thought can proceed: ‘it’s like this space that hasn’t been named yet or this world that has not yet arrived.’

The unavoidable paradox is that many of Cruz’s admired working-class artists either self-destructed or sold out. Cruz is not advocating for the ‘benefits’ of eating disorders but acknowledges them as a condition contingent on the stresses imposed by neoliberalism (Fisher’s much-circulated essay on depression, ‘Good for Nothing’, takes a similar approach to depression). In this respect, what we are presented with in the anorexic and bulimic is an instance of what Cruz calls ‘negative freedom’ — the subject of her next book.

These spaces between are not coherent forms of political resistance; however, as Cruz sees in Winehouse, they are political sites in which working-class people and their sense of self clashes with the accepted parameters of bourgeois culture. But the question that remains, for now as ever, is how we can transpose and upgrade this antagonism from the site of the individual body to the popular body of millions of working-class people.