Gunter Grass, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, has recently admitted to serving in the Waffen-SS during the last days of World War Two.  This story is being dressed up as exposing Grass as a hypocrite.  I argue that the story is does nothing of the sort.  But it does contain the spectacle of another, similarly moustachioed Central European 20^th Century living ‘saint’ inadvertently flashing the gallery the some of the more vulgar parts of his character.  This post is not about the revelations volunteered by Grass, but the reaction of Lech Walesa to this stone being ploughed to the surface.

Lech Walesa has said that he feels uncomfortable sharing honorary citizenship of Gdansk with Gunter Grass.  He argues that Grass would never have been awarded honorary citizenship if his past had been known and that Grass ought to give up the title.  Grass, incidentally, was born in Gdansk.  Walesa was not.   

The name of Lech Walesa carries with it great moral authority.  His leadership of Solidarity against the oppression of Soviet-dominated Communist Poland resulted in the award of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize.  He is a saint in the popular historiography of the struggle against tyranny and for freedom. 

But that is not the full picture of Lech Walesa, not even of Walesa the politician.  His struggle against tyranny was also a struggle for something a little more specific that nebulous ideas of freedom.  He fought for a traditional, conservative and, above all, Catholic Poland.  This does not mean to say that as a result of this political alignment Walesa did not deserve the critical support of those with other visions of the good society as he lead Solidarity against an oppressive one-party, foreign-dominated state. 

But, in a Savonarolaesque narrative, if not in methods, Lech Walesa as political liberator now needs to be recast in an image he is seldom seen; Walesa the reactionary.  To do these we need only counterpose Walesa’s most recent intervention in public debate with that of sixteen months ago.  The reactionary Catholicism of Walesa runs him little risk of excommunication.

On the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI, Lech Walesa is quoted as saying; “This is a good choice. He will continue the mission of our dear Pope”.  Remember, Ratzinger is a man who publicly and consistently criticised the liberation theology of Latin America.  Remember, this is a man who, as head of the institution formerly known as the Inquisition, helped to purge from the Church those priests who argued that the Church had to play a role in fighting poverty and oppression.  Remember, this is a man who holds to hard-line conservative beliefs on contraception.  Remember, this is a man who has not held his tongue when expressing anti-Turkish views, arguing that it as a cultural threat to ‘Christian’ Europe.  Remember, this is a man who described homosexuality as an ‘intrinsic moral evil’.  Remember this is a man whose conservatism calcified as a reactionary response to the increased freedom of the 1960s.  He was one of the most reactionary and conservative candidates for Pope, but Lech Walesa hailed him as a ‘good choice’.  And, last of all, Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht.

Lech Walesa offers a generous response to a nasty reactionary bigot with a Nazi past being made the spiritual and political head of his faith.  Lech Walesa condemns a humane and tolerant writer, the author of an avowedly anti-Nazi book. 

This has nothing to do with whatever organisation Gunter Grass might have been coerced into becoming a member.  If it did, Lech Walesa would have condemned the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope and described the way in which he now felt uncomfortable as a member of the Catholic Church. 

But he did not, because Lech Walesa is a religious reactionary.  And this cannot be stated enough at a time when Walesa is using his moral weight to condemn another man in the eyes of the world.  To re-iterate; Walesa welcomed the election – to the position of leader of the faith Walesa holds – of a man with a Nazi past who currently holds bigoted, reactionary views.  And yet he has condemned a man with a Nazi past – with whom Walesa shares only tenuous, non-binding relationship – even though he now holds firm left-wing, progressive and tolerant views.

I am angled to incline towards [1] being the case.  And for me, under the conditions of [1], I still feel the need to remove the powerless Queen. 

For what she represents; her role as a social actant rather than as an empowered actor.

She, and the Monarchy that she embodies, represents a Britain of deference, of domination, of class, of imperialism.  And on, and on.  And these values are given a figurehead, a ‘God bless her’ organisational focus by the Queen’s presence as head of state.

But someone will become head of state.  Do we promote the Prime Minister?  If [1] is in fact the case then this would little alter our political system.  But it would give us another figurehead, and without a Queen to cleave to we would instead attach our loyalties to another living representation of Britain.  But this would be worse. 

Like the USA, we would find that our society would develop its very own case of Presidential Syndrome.  Couple the position of figurehead with the role of leader of the executive and the legislature and we would walk a dangerous path.  ‘I support our Prime Minister in whatever he does, because he is our Prime Minister and we must respect the office of Prime Minister’, to paraphrase Ms. Britney Spears. 

So do we elect an apolitical figurehead of the state?  The role of the figure as an actant even when the power as an actor is removed means that there can be no such thing.  If 51% of Britons, or, more accurately, 51% of whatever small percentage of the polity actually vote, or, even less if the race is more than a two-way… if the plurality of the voting population vote for, say, Richard Branson then his brand of self-aggrandising egotism becomes the representative character of Britain.  This would exclude those who feel differently, possibly a majority of the voting population, probably a majority of the polity.  And more, it would project this character outwards.   

This would be terribly inaccurate.  G.W. Bush may be a moron, but it is not true to say that American’s are morons, or that America is a moron nation.  However entertaining it may be to say so.  But, that said, G.W. Bush, as the head of state of the United States, has done one thing tremendously well; project the image of America as a moron nation to the rest of the world.  That is now a patently clear-cut case, carved by diamond drills onto Mount Rushmore.  The figurehead of the nation, shapes that image of the nation as an exaggerated copy of he, she or it 

It.  It is the word, as it is my answer to the problem of head of state.  If the head of state needs no real political power, as in scenario [1], then the head of state need not be human.  Or even alive.  A statue would suffice.  But not of a once-living person, an object that would carry its own set of exclusionary, unwanted and debilitating images.  Rather, what I propose is that we erect a stature, representative of a human being but not recognisably of any gender, of any race, of any period in time.  We could all own a functionally identical copy of our head of state, to sit on the mantlepeice, hold a door open or to serve as a patriotic magazine rack.  The Queen cannot do that, can she? 

The statue would be an empty space, a cipher for whatever values and characteristics we choose to ascribe to it.  Even if the we in question is a minority of one.  After all, if instead of telling people what it means to be British we allowed people to develop their own definitions of what it means to be British, would not that be, well, very British indeed?

Regardless, we do tend to regard efficiency as an objective, unarguable good.  Who can argue against an increase in efficiency?  This is the rhetorical question that is asked whenever workers oppose measures to increase their productivity.  But the efficiency being considered here is organisational efficiency, investor efficiency or proprietor efficiency.  These are not, necessarily the same as worker efficiency.  Superficially, it does appear that we are discussing worker efficiency in these disputes.  But that demands that we understand workers as being mere tools, machines without subjective position, and such would be a totalitarian understanding.   

But as efficiency is a relative measure, what does it mean to be an efficient worker.  In the age of Homo economicus, of atomised economic units standing in the stead of thinking, civilised men and women, to be an efficient worker from the position and interests of the worker means to maximise the wages received while minimising the amount of labour input.  As, in most employing organisations, wages are fixed according to rank, and as promotion hierarchies narrow as one rises through the ranks, the surest way that the majority of workers can maximise individual efficiency is to contribute as little labour as possible while remaining in employment.  In other words, to skive and to slack.

Is it ethical to encourage such behaviour?  It has always been acceptable for employers to encourage an increase organisational efficiency, in other words a decrease in the individual efficiency of the worker.  It has always been acceptable for this to be achieved by encouraging increased contribution of labour by means other than a parallel increase in material reward.  This is overt; the business press regularly carries advice to increase productivity by holding events such as Christmas parties, justified by the rationale that for a small material outlay a much larger contribution of labour will be returned.  This, of course, has a mirror.  And the reflection it shows is this; a newspaper encouraging and advising, in all seriousness, workers in mechanisms of reducing their labour contribution while maintaining the material return.  So is it ethical?  Well, such a newspaper article would be damned as irresponsible.  But it is entirely comparable, morally, to the behaviour and attitude of the employers.   

Homo economicus, the stripping away of the weight of all in human relations except the exchange of material goods and services, therefore does, as Marx and Engels suggest in The Communist Manifesto, lead to increased and overt conflict between employers and employees.  The antagonistic interests of these two groups is laid bare when it cannot be hidden, and even soothed, by aspects of human experience such as community.  This heightening of class awareness is not, one might suspect, the intention of the majority of the advocates of remaking men as Homo economicus.

But class interests have not been heightened, you say.  Yes, perhaps ‘class’ is the wrong word.  ‘Class position’ is perhaps far more appropriate, as there is a lack of the solidarity that is implicit when the word ‘class’ is used alone.  Homo economicus is, after all, an individual, with no ties but those of overt materiality.  And more, there is mitigating propaganda two fronts; the traditionalists and the employers.  The traditionalists tell us that it is virtuous to play the role of efficient robot, rather than efficient man or woman.  A good ‘work ethic’ they say, when they justify acceptance of exploitation, rather than, if we are to be Homo economicus, a determination to exploit others, including our employers, in our material relationships, the category of relationships that are the totality of that which ought be important.  And the employers?  They tell us that we are part of a family, or some such narrative, to encourage sacrifice on the part of the workers that they would not make.       

But what is wrong with this?  Both democracy and the market.  If you are a believer in either of these you must be an opponent of lies.  For the market to work as both a moral system and as a superior distributor of resources it must be a market in which rational, informed actors operate.  Democracy demands that each citizen operates from a position of educated awareness of the state of the world and of their positions in the world.  If the workers believe, say, that they are part of a family represented by the company for which they work, then they are not informed, and their rational action is misplaced by this misapprehension.  Families do not discard members who become sick or otherwise unproductive, and indeed, in the typical company a belief in the company as family with mutual obligations based on more than mere material exchange forms no part of executive decision-making, being purely an attitude to be enculturated in those to be exploited.

So, there are two options.  The first is to embrace the market and Homo economicus and encourage the workers to maximise their own efficiency, to engage as rational economic atoms.  The second is to embrace democracy and build socialism, to make our economic system, and therefore our society, one that genuinely encourages behaviour that is based on more than the nexus of cash exchange; not the attractive illusion peddled by employers and traditionalists, but a system of genuine mutuality.