Politics of skill, crisis of skill

I’ve built a whole adult-lifetime of politics on ‘skill’: 45 years and counting. There is something of a crisis at this time because it seems to me that both the notion of skill and the visibility of skill and the opportunity of skill - and so, the human *value* of skill - are at a watershed.

The ultra-emotional, charismatic, crowd-pulling, fundamentalist Right - in all forms, religious or secular - is succeeding terribly in substituting blood and guts and unreined fantasy for discretion and moderation, well-attuned and graceful action with material things, and well-founded insights into what may be done well, or at all. We depend on skill more than we know for the qualities of our lives, and more than we easily can sustain, generation-on-generation, in times that are at once extremely modern and extremely primitive.

I sense that what is available today to a young person in an ‘advanced’ society - in what can be seen around them in the work of older people, and what those people value, and what they themselves can mundanely experience at first hand - is very different from what was commonplace when I was a working-class kid in a declining industrial town, sixty years ago.

I took it for granted then that my father’s life-project of my childhood years - to show that he was ‘a skilled man’ and to have that recognised in his employment and by his co-workers - seemed utterly sensible and worthwhile: a giving to society of his very self. As I became an adult and ‘political’, in another, newly expanded and exciting sphere of work (the work of the page and the library, the editorial collective and the shop-stewards’ committee and the research-and-development community) it was plainly obvious that my own skills should be dedicated to defending and advancing the right of every wage-worker to skilled work and a skilled self, in the face of Capital’s ongoing mission to domesticate labour, sacrificing skill and discretion to commerce and enforceable extraction and appropriation of surplus-value.

Today the mission has ramped up several gears thanks to the digital capabilities of what once, in my own lifetime, was rather cutely called ‘the new technology’, and to the now-global spread of capital investment and accumulation as the dominant form of economic organisation: in my own younger years, ‘monopoly capital’ was an arguably novel phenomenon and ‘the military-industrial complex’ was a controversial thesis.

> In 2024 there is even more of an edge on this. The ‘advance’ of so-called (generative, LLM) artificial intelligence is an awful acceleration of the historic trajectory of deskilling under the imperatives of both capital and technocracy.

# The long revolution - under post-post Fordism? The ‘long revolution’ that was addressed by Raymond Williams when I was a schoolboy has a fifty-year longer past now, and an even more fraught, contradictory future. On the cusp of Fordism and post-Fordism, Raymond Williams addressed what he presented as ongoing revolutions in literacy, the technological forces of production and the governance of communities of living and working. Literacy - of which ‘skill’ is a part - is now (under post-post-Fordism) more universal, more complex in the context of a more complex ecology of media and more deeply compromised by the application of those same commercialised media.

The revolutionising (by capital) of the forces of economic production - the apparatuses of configured technological means, the cultures of mobilised labour-powers (‘skills’) - is today more radical and more fast than in Williams’ post-war, high-Fordist, ‘white-heat of technological revolution’ Britain. And the challenge of enabling the producers of complex intersecting societies - the people who mundanely do the work in which ‘society’ is constituted - to skilfully and wisely govern themselves is more urgent and is deepening, as the quotidian societies of working people (communities of life and work, families, occupations, subcultures of leisure or creativity) become more self-referential (inside bubbles of social media) and more deeply subject to calculated invasion and subversion by the schemes of consumerist Capitals, governments of economically competing states, power fantasies of oligarchs and a conceited, self-aggrandising, hanging-on-by-our-teeth professional-managerial estate. The skill - the discrimination, competence, sensibility, material insight, operational community - that we require in the face of such times is hard to define and achieve.