This past Monday, @AdamMSays (who has a blog, Poetic Intellect) and I did a Twitter themed day – #MarxistMonday. While I’m not so sure it wasn’t just he and I doing Marxist Monday, I enjoyed getting to throw out some themes of Marxism, Critical Theory, and related themes, as well as engage a few of my peers about these things, we both said we’d do a Marxist Monday themed post on our respective blogs. Well, Adam’s much more timely than I and he got his up HERE Monday night. Me, on the other hand, waited until Wednesday to start and the next Monday to finish. Well, I didn’t quite have a topic smack me until I revisited an issue I’ve run across before that can be attributed to capitalism and its resulting social fallout – The Happy Slave complex.
The Happy Slave complex is, simply put, a person in a position of submission who, while understanding their powerlessness, finds happiness in it. The happy slave convinces himself that his work means something, ensures himself that he’s made strides for himself, and ultimately is fine with being powerless – at least he’s not dead, right? The happy slave can be equated to a Sambo or a Mammy, for those of us who know some African-American history. In fact, the Sambo especially highlights what it is to be a happy slave – putting on that Cheshire Cat smile, being overly deferential to the folks in power, and doing whatever you can to be the best slave you can be. That, folks, is a happy ass slave.
I’m sure my line of reasoning won’t be hard to follow here – capitalism, particularly the capitalism in place now, makes slaves out of us all. I won’t continue to just recite Marx over and over, but I’ll step towards Marcuse, who highlights a social problem with capitalism – the identification of self with job. That I am my job – it defines my existence. Why bring this point up? Two reasons – A) I just love it because it’s so true, and B) because if we do identify ourselves with our jobs (and let’s face it people, that’s what’s going on in many respects – our occupation is central to our self-identification), but my assertion that capitalism turns us into slaves for those in power and fundamentally creates and manifests the ideology that “you too can become one of those powerful people,” then we identify ourselves as slaves…and we do so with no problem.
This is, to me, a problem. Marcuse’s problem of identification combined with my slave theory of capitalism leads us to become happy slaves. We would like to believe that we’re doing something good with our lives. That, well though we might be slaves, it’s OK. The system doesn’t get changed, and there’s nothing we can do. So we just do what we can, saying that the system will win anyway. We grow accustomed to the system. We find ourselves indebted to the system. For many of us, the system is our proverbial lifeblood – it gives us meaning. And so we’re back at Marcuse’s identification problem and the sickness it creates in the capitalist society.
Slaves ought not be happy. Slaves ought to be pissed off because their only a commodity – they are no longer a person, but a thing. They are but means to various ends, and in the system that produced and enforced the slavery, there’s no reason to free them. The lack of freedom should push someone to wonder about the constraints placed on him/herself. But, the Happy Slave does have a restricted worldview – every good system that institutionalizes slavery knows that the slave mustn’t become aware that there is a thing called freedom. Then the slave will identify with the slaves’ job, and try to do the best job possible, only continuing to line the master’s pockets and maintain the status quo.
I’ve been speaking with analogy, but look at what happens in the world. “You are the job.” And with that identification, the game ends and the master has a replenishment of slaves. It’s nearly like American chattel slavery – the system enforced the setup such that the slave cannot break out of his containment without serious assistance. You can analogize it to The Matrix if you’d like, but many of us are walking around here as happy slaves. Possibly fine with their position as slaves, but are happy to at least be a house nigger than a field nigger.
Bold language? Perhaps, but slaves like to one-up each other. It’s tied to the happiness factor, so to speak. Since (I’ve tried to analogously show, at least) we’ve got slaves who are either unaware of their condition as slaves due to the pervasive depths of the system, or who are aware (and in my estimation, this is the truly happy slave) and choose to ignore their own enslavement, hoping one day that those who own you (remember, you’re the job and the job pays for your work, which is very close to ownership) will allow you to join that club of owners rather than property. So they toil, happily ignorant of the truth, and willfully remaining ignorant of the truth. That is what the happy slave does to maintain the happiness – one-up the other slaves due to their knowledge that they’re enslaved while simultaneously remaining ignorant of their slavery. If ever there was a conundrum, it was this.
Clearly, I’m blaming the capitalist system (more for its social outcomes, like this one) but I don’t like letting happy slaves off the hook. I recognize the difficulty in not wanting to play the game but having one’s hands tied, but those who try to use the master’s tools to break down the master’s house end up (generally) being co-opted by the power of those tools and sucked back into the system they initially wanted to break. So no, I’m not a general advocate of that methodology but I can see the usefulness of a few folks on the inside, so to speak. But capitalism dissatisfies me. It has done horrible things to the social stratum of many countries, with the economic and social power also wrapped up into racial power. There was a symposium in the early 20th Century called, The Meaning of Marx. Many famous philosophers, including John Dewey, came and spoke on the impact Marx had. At the end of the symposium, one of these philosophers remarked that basically, Marxism is the best social manner of operation. This is a paraphrasing because I don’t have the text in front of me, but I maintain that recognizing the many problems this current system has…well it’s almost not enough now. I have friends who are in the business sector of the world, some of whom are auditors – the good guys, making sure the big companies are doing what they say they’re doing. I applaud what they’re after, but it’s like a band-aid on a broken leg. Intentions are noble but will real impact be felt?
I’m not sure how to resolve the Happy Slave complex. There are a lot of happy ass slaves – and ignorance is quite blissful. But I’m not so sure how much of this I can take.
Mr. Philosopher: The Ignant Intellectual 
Happy Ass slave’s with freewill to chose his master! thanks had to share this-along with the herbert spencer doctrine-hope you do another version of this
Wow. I think I finally understand what Marx meant. When I first had a lecture on the manifesto I thought it was ridiculous to think that if the proletariat rose up they could eliminate the ruling classes, without just becoming them, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm. (Then you realize that Orwell was one of them). When you realize that these ruling classes have been the same families of people for centuries, it becomes clear. The trick is to do it so adeptly and so secretly and so quickly whilst simultaneously de-brainwashing 6 billion people, reinstating religion as a centre of community, bringing in Sharia law economics, so that you can then safely disband all government and go back to tribalism. hmmmm. At the moment I’m thinking – God created everything, slaves, masters and free men. It’s how it’s been for centuries and how it will always be. We cannot wake everyone up, but I’m looking forward to the time when no one can afford TV anymore. For now, I’ll just keep speaking the truth, however insane that makes me sound, and keep as much of my personal wealth to myself as I can.
I fail to see how Marxism is more freedom than capitalism. In a communist state you are owned by the state, told what you will own by the state. Your freedoms are much more limited under the scope of a Marxist style government. At least in free markets a person can choose what path they wish to take. Government interventions only seem to hinder the choices and paths a person can take.
If you are contrasting slavery to personal debt, the debt can only be an attribute to the persons free will decisions.
Note the difference in terms that you’ve used – first Marxism, then a communist state. I appreciate that these states have had communist revolutions of sorts, but I don’t agree with many of their positions on restrictions of freedoms. Marxism, however, is the ultimate in democracy – everybody is equal and has the exact same importance to the country.
Let’s be honest, however – in a free market your choices are very limited because of the creation of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The haves endeavor to continue to have and the have-nots are perpetually placed in a lower class/tier to the haves. There are still limited options in this scheme – there’s only so much that can be accomplished. For every person who “pulled himself up from his bootstraps,” there are hundreds who were in the same situation, putting in as much effort, and didn’t get the lucky break they also deserved (if we’re measuring by hard work). And we do measure what one deserves by their hard work – but in capitalism, someone else capitalizes on one’s hard work.