Thug life

Even where professionalization filters some anti-social tendencies out, it's only doing so for the purpose of capital accumulation. There is a utility in having people behave decently toward one another, at least while they are at work, because it minimizes disruption. Maybe your job is not all about profit in a direct way, but our overall economy is, and that impacts everything -- including how you get your funding, no matter what you do.

The other point we have made is that we as individuals may endorse professional norms for our own reasons, if only because we believe people should behave decently toward one another in any context. Within the social life of the United States, that doesn't happen with as much organized consistency anywhere as it does within professional structures, where there is a cost associated with non-compliance. The problem in most confrontations outside of work is that people don't perceive any comparable cost -- for example, to the social whole -- and so look to maximize personal advantage in every encounter: we race other drivers, ignore the homeless, harass service-sector workers, anonymously bully others online, and so on. Even as a boss, our capacity to act any way we like is restricted at work; whatever abuse we dole out must be codified in a way that puts our employer's interests first.

When we talk about poor and working class cultures, on one hand we observe relative independence from what is coercive about professional culture. If we begin from the anarchist idea that "all authority is wrong unless it can prove that it isn't wrong" -- i.e. that it isn't, in fact, authority but one or another mode of responsibility -- this is something we should support. We should want to support people who reject capitalist professionalism for the specific reason that it tries to tell people what to do, or how to think about themselves, for a purpose that excludes their own welfare.

At the same time, autonomous social culture must be constituted to transcend what is decent about capitalist professionalism; which is to say, it will include some of the same elements: specifically, those which people regard as worthwhile irrespective of whether these also prove useful to power at a given moment. Every social instinct inherited from our more communal past has atrophied under the assault of contemporary industrial culture, conditioned as we have become to a war of each against all. But we find in working class non-compliance an autonomy without the organized consistency which could sustain the kind of values that go well beyond the forced decency of indecent relations.