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By Root 230 0

could never afford to own one of the cars he makes, but he participates in the greatness of Rolls-Royce, and feels himself enlarged by it. The company has a national character: Britain’s best. Likewise consider the Mercedes worker, who feels the pride of “German engineering” as his own. The product is still “torn away” by a different class, as Marx says, yet there is a political community, distinct from the market, where we locate a common good. Ideas of national greatness, often tied to material culture, once sustained common identities that mitigated class antagonism to some degree—being an Englishman. The Marxist would fully agree, but put a negative cast on such identity as an obstacle to revolution. For him nationalism is an ideology that keeps the working classes down by preventing the development of class consciousness. But the pride of the Rolls-Royce panel beater gives his work human dignity, and the Marxist is presumptuous to call it “false consciousness.”

Ironically, it is now the managerial elite of international capital that is likely to complain of the false consciousness of those workers on whom the idea of the nation retains some grip (for example, those who oppose easy immigration). It is now the capitalist who says, “Workers of the world, unite!,” the better to dissolve those “inefficiencies” in the labor market (that is, high wages) that arise from political boundaries. The slogan once expressed a hope to organize a body of workers who were dispersed and hence exploitable, whereas now it captures the desire for a mass of “human resources,” exploitable because undifferentiated. This latter intention is accompanied by all the easy moral prestige of multiculturalism, so it finds its champions on the erstwhile Left. Those at the top of the food chain get a new identity in which to take pride, that of the sushi-eating, Brazilian-girlfriend having cosmopolitan. But what does the autoworker get as industries lose their national character? It is harder to take pride in one’s work as “a Rolls-Royce man,” for example, if the car is assembled from parts made who knows where.

One remedy is to find work in the cracks; work the market rationale of which is fully contained within a human scale of face-to-face interactions. This is what the speed shop offers; it is a community of making and fixing that is embedded within a community of use. Such enterprises are not “scalable” in the way that whets the appetite of remote investors, much as they might like to explode the happy scene and “take it global.”

These reflections on the role of community in meaningful work needn’t be confined to the manual trades. Consider once again our hypothetical Everest-climbing mortgage broker. First, imagine an older version of the banker. In the nineteenth century, there was a prohibition in the United States on banks opening branches in communities other than the ones in which they originally operated. People had to trust the bank if they were to deposit their money in it, and bankers had to assess the character of borrowers before writing loans; it was generally believed that “the bankers’ interests and the interests of the larger community are one and the same,” as a historical sociologist of banking writes.3 We might imagine a banker sits down with a young couple and begins to form a judgment of their creditworthiness, that is, their character. This character is knowable because there is a community. Maybe the banker asks around at the grocery and the hardware store, and notes subtle cues in the tone of voice or body language of their proprietors as he mentions the names of the applicants, and inquires after their record of credit. Satisfied, he vouchsafes their creditworthiness to his colleague bankers, who live in the same community, and a mortgage is secured. A thirty-year relationship is established between the bank and the couple. The banker feels he has done a good turn, helping virtue to its reward by the diligent application of his own powers of discerning observation, and his knowledge of the ways of men. He exercises