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.
Jan
www.worldsocialism.org
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