Industrial workers’ jouissance in grinding hardship was essential, not just their suffering

Evidence

If you describe the workers’ fate exclusively in terms of alienation, exploitation and poverty, you present them as victims who only suffered passively the whole process and who only acquired claims for later reparations (socialism). You miss the essential, which isn’t the growth of the forces of production at any price, nor even the death of many workers, as Marx often says with a cynicism adorned with Darwinism. You miss the energy that later spread through the arts and sciences, the jubilation and the pain of discovering that you can hold out (live, work, think, be affected) in a place where it had been judged senseless to do so. Indifferent to sense, hardness.’ — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 72

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Lyotard’s aesthetic of the sublime-as-privation versus the beautiful, and to the standing interest in sacrifice — the workers’ ‘hold out’ in senseless conditions echoes sacrificial endurance. — connects to: Workers derive status from their power to disrupt and survive the economy; Industrial capitalism defined workers by the very labor it extracted; Exploitation requires subordinates capable of suffering, not just of laboring. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1706
• QUESTION: How does this defense of jouissance in hardship sit against the ADDENDUM article on sacrifice as stabilizing stratification? Lyotard romanticizes necessity as hardness.

Broader Connections

• Workers derive status from their power to disrupt and survive the economy #expands (0.85)
• Industrial capitalism defined workers by the very labor it extracted #expands (0.78)