Dogs, specifically the domesticated kind , are nature's sycophants. They
beg. They perform tricks upon command. Their tails wag upon the merest pat
from their masters. They are ever loyal. They know their place.
Dogs do not reject their masters. As a canine Lenin might have observed,
the dog is incapable of reaching an independent consciousness. Urging dogs
to stand up for their dignity is as pointless as distributing cleanliness
manuals to rats.
Cats, on the other hand, are remarkably sensitive to their own needs.
These are nature's materialists, ever heading to where food and shelter is
available and there settling for as long as their needs are satisfied and
their human providers leave them alone. Try as they might, humans will
fail to train cats to beg or jump through hoops or pretend to sing the
national anthem. Cats purr when they get what they want and they depart
when they don't. You will rarely see a cat on a lead.
Now, with all due excuses in advance for the implied anthropomorphism of
all this, there is a conclusion which merits a few moments of the reader's
political contemplation. Capitalist culture is based upon the expectation
that the working class can be turned into dogs. The good wage slave is
essentially a well-trained pup whose loyalty to the master who holds the
lead is undying and whose bark is reserved for anyone threatening to
invade the masters' property. Workers are educated as pups are trained,
with a few bones on offer to the graduates best able to jump to the
appropriate orders of their future bosses.
BBC's “One Man And His Dog” could well be a documentary about job
training, except for the obvious fact that most "job-seekers" (as the
unemployed have now been reclassified) are denied such splendid rural
scenery as the back-drop for their exploitation-seeking. In capitalist
culture the tail-wagging wage slave, content in a squalid kennel, running
to fetch the sticks which the master throws and fearful of the stick which
the master wields, is the most ideal of dehumanised creatures of the
profit system.
Of course, some capitalists tend to become strangely sentimental when it
comes to pet dogs in ways that rarely extend to their employees. The
billionaire inhabitant of Buckingham Palace, for example, is reputed to
have quite a soft spot for a corgi with a belly-ache after eating too much
lunch (which is perhaps why she reserves the British beef for visiting
heads of state), but is not known for her concerns about workers dying as
they wait in queues for hospital appointments.
Other capitalists patronise charities concerned with animal welfare
(usually excluding the welfare of the defenceless suckers whom they chase
and shoot for sport) while resenting every penny they are forced to pay
towards the welfare of their wage slaves. Cruelty to domestic pets is a
crime. If the dogs of the rich and famous were transported in conditions
which have become customary for rush-hour users of the buses and
underground trains there would soon be a campaign formed to put an end to
it.
Now, the great unconscious fear of the bosses is that workers become
rather more like cats. At the very least, cats are like high-class
prostitutes, sitting on their owners' laps and purring, with one eye on
the smoked salmon and the other on their claws should the would-be owner
make a single false move. At their best, cats are animals who know their
place in a way that dogs never will: in the sun, near the food and drink,
never far from the open air and long leisure hours of idle roaming,
peaceful napping and hot sex. What characteristics do capitalists less
admire in their workers than those?
Dogs are pack animals. Humans (with the exception of FC Millwall
supporters and marching Orangemen religious fanatics in the Nothern
Ireland) are social, but not pack animals. In short, we are socially
interdependent, but we have sufficient consciousness to survive and
prosper alone as well as in groups. Dogs survive either by total
dependence upon the pack or by domesticated submission to an owner. Cats
are not pack animals and are never quite owned by those who imagine
themselves to be cat-owners.
The socialist is the lion of the capitalist jungle. Not content to hunt
the pack or be trained into the domesticity of wage slavery, the socialist
looks at the world from a position of strength. There are more workers
than there are capitalists. We are stronger than them. We are the ones
they depend on to protect them as a class—from one another and, above all,
from us. We are intelligent enough to know our way round the jungle and
find our way out to the other end. And our capacity to rise up scares the
hell out of those who would like the working class to be forever weak and
bowed.
Freedom does not depend upon humans becoming more like cats—just less like
dogs. Like cats, we might learn that there is more dignity in walking away
from tyranny into the unknown than putting up with lousy treatment
forever. But the message of this rather strange piece is not that
SOCIALISTS SAY WORKERS SHOULD BECOME MORE LIKE CATS.
Rather, SOCIALISTS SAY WORKERS SHOULD BECOME MORE LIKE HUMANS. This means
refusing to adopt the political posture of the dependent canine and
resting satisfied with the reformers' offers of bigger bones. Instead, let
those who think they can own us learn soon that our bite is as bad as our
bark — and our bark can become a roar.
Jt
www.worldsocialism.org
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