Marx, Gogol: dead souls among the woodfall

 

Its very hard to find anything in Gogol, right up to the meaning; Gogol somehow shrinks from your touch, wriggles away. He hides, and when you finally find him it won’t be right, it won’t be him: it isn’t that you have found him, but that he thrust himself out where you didn’t expect him, where there was no place for your ideas of him, where he wasn’t yesterday. That Gogol is no longer where you remember him; this one is not where you expect him. – “Being Burried Alive, or Gogol in 1973 – Andrei Bitov

 On the one hand, it is a mere coincidence that, as Marx was writing about windfallen wood in 1842, in Russia, a novel named Dead Souls was passed by Nicholas I’s censors and published. On the other hand, no Gnostic historican can afford to turn up his nose at mere coincidence – for are we not the slaves of intersignes? And surely this must be an intersigne, an exchange happening in the basement below universal history, where all the dealers in codexes are busy cutting them up and mashing them back together.

 To look at windfallen wood from the aspect of whether it can be defined as private property, Marx claims, tells us a lot about what private property is defined as. The same can be said for buying dead souls – souls that exist on an equality with live ones on the tax rolls. What Chichikov has figured out (and was born to figure out – in Chapter XI, Gogol’s portrait of the birth and schooling of a rational choicer certainly shows us this much) – is what we now know in various other forms – the credit default swap, the leveraged buyout, etc. Which is that in capitalism, the nominal, given the right circumstances, easily triumphs over the substantial. One buys a company making real things – like mattresses – with debt itself. All of these brilliant financial innovations were not dreamt of in Nicholas I’s Russia; and yet, buying dead souls in order to take out a loan from the government to buy a substantial estate – Chichikov’s general plan – touched on the very essence of financialization. Touch on its intersection with the forces of life and death – which is why in the town of N. (a town Gogol describes in his notes as pure emptiness), a stout middle aged man, looking neither handsome nor ugly, having no real distinguishing trait about him, could, in the course of his business, eventually be mistaken by the townspeople for the Antichrist – that is, Napoleon – himself.

Meanwhile, in Köln, Marx is writing about dead wood and live ownership.

Marx, in the Holzdiebstahl articles, allows himself to speak of the “poorer” class - ärmere Klasse – which, for those of us who’ve done our time on the Marx job, followed the old man’s routines, read the letters, tapped the secondary literature, written our reports, know the drill – is an indication that we are in the early stages of the man’s career here, in this text. The Marx of 1860 knows that the class of the poor misconceives class – which describes levels within the system of production, not something as contingent as income. The class of workers may be poor, but their class status is defined by what they do. Meanwhile, as those covering the classical and neoclassical economists know, the poor remain fixed as a primary economic unit in their schemes and dreams, in crude opposition to the ‘rich’. For class has dissolved as an organizing property among the economists, and economic units are determined outside of their place in the system of production – outside of their productive function, which enters in terms of a labor market. The labor market is a marvelous thing, a beast as fabulous as any reported by Pliny. The labor market, of course, then gives us a throwback sociology, which gives us these things – the poor, the rich – as a sort of hybrid of magic and statistics. In the neo-classical world, the rich face the poor, in the first instance, without mediation, and then, in the second instance, in an interface mediated by the state, that ‘redistributes’ money from the rich to the poor. This is the fairy tale, this is the leitmotif, this is how it is told on all holiday occasions. And thus, so much is allowed to the second of Polanyi’s double movement – that is, the movement that pulls against and curbs the social excesses of the pure market system. The state, here, functions solely to take care of the welfare of the poor. On the other hand, the first movement is ignored – in which the state redistributes, indeed, makes possible, the welfare of the rich. The state is the dead machine that creates its live doctor Frankenstein – that is, private property itself. A process that accompanies capitalism down to the present day, where private property can now be had in the genes of a virus; we cut up the planet’s atmosphere and apportion it out. And so property emerges where no property was – and so accustomed are we to this phenomenon that we do not even think about or see it.

Thus, even at this point in his life, Marx – without his essential tools of class and the system of commodities – understood that this ‘side of the economy is, as it were, being twisted out of shape by the application of categories that do not reflect the dynamic axis of the economic system – in fact, seem as though they were designed to obscure it. The law is no longer written on stone tablets, but jimmied into place by those who control the legislative activity. All of which rather disturbs the high abstractions of the philosophy of law taught to Marx in Berlin. And – as the articles on wood theft show - the greatest of these misprisioning category-makers and voluntary blindspots turns out to be the divide between the private and the public spheres, which is ideally true, and practically a sham.

 Yet, as I’ve pointed out, at this point in his career Marx is still working with these categories, still looking at socialism with the eyes of a lawyer – or rather, a philosopher of law. There is an old and oft told tale about how all of that works out, which skips over the Rheinisher Landtag and puts Marx in a capsule with Hegel, where they struggle for dominance. And who am I to object? The tale is all well and good and philosophisch like a hardon – but we should remember that Marx isn’t, actually, in a capsule, nor is he simple a figure in the history of philosophy, with its Mount Rushmore like heads. Neither the law nor justice jumped out of Hegel’s encyclopedia. The law was something any peasant, any Josef K., could bump into in the midst of life, in a wood. The legal approach to property, Marx will find out, is one-sided – insufficient. It is only when this insufficience gets too big for its britches and goes around presenting itself as the totality that we fall into mystification.

 Marx already touches on parts of that mystification in these articles – but I feel irresistibly impelled, by every imp in my bloodstream, to sample some Gogol here, who had a knack, a supernatural knack, for dramatizing muddle. In the 9th chapter of Dead Souls, as we watch two women devise, between them, a story about Chichikov’s plan to elope with the governor’s daughter for which they haven’t a shred of evidence or even a thought that proceeded their confab – as this beautiful error is hatched in their gossip, and the two women become more and more descriptions of themselves – the agreeable lady and the lady who is agreeable in all aspects – Gogol pops his head out to make a rather astonishing case that this is the equivalent of what happens when the historian – shall we even say, the universal historian? – conjectures a story into the world:

 

That both ladies finally believed beyond any doubt something which had originally been pure conjecture is not in the least unusual. We, intelligent people though we call ourselves, behave in an almost identical fashion, as witness our scholarly deliberations. At first the scholar proceeds in the most furtive manner, beginning cautiously, with the most diffident of questions: ‘Is it not perhaps from there? Could not such-and-such a country perhaps derive its name from that remote spot?” Or: Does this document perhaps not belong to another, later period?” Or: “When we say this nation, do we not perhaps mean that nation there?” He promptly cites various writers of antiquity and the moment he detects any hint of something – or imagines such a hint – he breaks into a trot and, growing bolder by the minute, now discouses as an equal with the writers of antiquity, asking them questions, and even answering on their behalf, entirely forgetting that he began with a timid hypothesis; it already seems to him that he can see it, the truth, that it is perfectly clear--- and his deliberation is concluded with the words: “So that’s how it was, that is how such-and-such a nation should be understood, that’s the angle from which this should be viewed!

 

To so radically equate gossip with historical philosophy leads us, surely, to Marx – if only because Gogol, too, is responding to the ‘historical school’ that derives from Herder, Schiller and Schelling; and because Marx, like Gogol, has an eye for the principle of the ludicrous. There are two ludicrous themes in the wood theft articles. One consists in how, exactly, law is re-creating the status of the private property holder in the face of his history – “for no legislation abrogates the legal privileges of property, but it only strips it of its adventurous character and imparts to it a bourgeois character”. There is certainly an undertone in this description, which makes the normalization of feudal law into a cynical play, a game of dress down and dress up, of stripping the adventurer and imparting to him the burger’s placid certainties, that reminds us of Gogol’s Insprector General – and may have been meant by Marx to refer to Beaumarchais. No undertone of comedy is ever insignificant in Marx. Our second ludicrous theme consists in the parallel Marx draws between the modal status of the windfallen wood and of the poor. The wood that by custom is gathered in the forest – wood that is scattered, strewn - is cut off from the organic tree, and thus becomes philosophically unnecessary and organically dead. Meanwhile the gleaners, the poor are also cut off, in as much as their customary rights are contingent [zufaellige] concessions, and thus their very existence, insofar as it is based on these customs, is outside of justice [Recht] – which puts it in Robin Hood’s realm, apart, accidental. In fact, in a beautiful phrase, Marx claims that the custom [Gewohnheit] or usages of the poor are the “anticipation of a legal right.” The spirit of Benjamin, the angel of history Benjamin so fiercely invoked, floats over this idea that the little tradition, the shared usages of the peasants, anticipates the moment of their legal recognition in the future. That anticipation is, of course, the revolution.

Chichikov and Charlie Javice

 

The story of Charlie Javice, one of Forbes 30 under 30 – along with Sam Bankman-Fried – was unrolled at length in the NYT's Sunday section. How she was a poor girl, the daughter of Didier Javice, who has worked on Wall Street for more than 35 years, with 11 years at Goldman Sachs and three at Merrill Lynch, and a mother who the NYT could not contact or find on Linked in. You know the type – her Mercedes was a hand me down from Dad, the private school she attended did not vote her prom queen, etc. She had a revelation – from God above, the ultimate billionaire – before she was out of that school, however:
"Ms. Javice’s career helping others began, in her telling, on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. She spent time volunteering there one summer, between terms at her private high school in Westchester County, N.Y.”
God, perhaps, directed her to Wharton.
It is the Wharton that throws me off. It is a top business school, like Harvard School of Business, and it discourages its students from ever reading literature by throwing business inspiration books and CEO biographies at the students. Once suitably dimmed, they are made to squander the gift of reading on, for instance, studying case studies from the Harvard Business Journal and making them their own. How to clean out the deadwood, how to leverage borrowing to purchase a small publicly traded company and, after emptying it of any valuable properties, rolling it back into the market as a hollowed out brand. Top notch stuff, to make America's CEO class top notchiest! Things which make America, or that part of it found on business tv cable channels, sit up and take notice!
What I think it is when she was volunteering. Some volunteer left behind, in her hut, Gogol’s Dead Souls. And it gets boring in the jungle night...
Dead Souls chronicles an entrepreneur named Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. Because he lived in the benighted 19th century, before Forbes magazine even existed, he never managed to be one of the 30 under 30 – but nonetheless, he saw the sweet fortune to be made by getting in the middle of the trade between the serfowner and his tax liabilities, the dead serfs who are still exist on the property lists. Like Michael Milikan of blessed memory with his junk bonds, Chichikov realizes that the dead souls can be borrowed against – you can leverage that dead weight up – and they can, of course, be purchased for a song. Except that the owners out there in the sticks are all suspicious and shit.
I am thinking that this book hit Charlie Javice like the best case study ever made – like that Harvard Business article about how Hedge Funder Eddie Lampert was going to squeeze value out of Sears Roebuck by screwing its pensioneers – really, old trash when you think about it – thinning the work force to a muscular few and spinning off those urban properties like crazy! But Ms. Javice had a true appreciation of business as art, conceptual art. Lampert was good, but his scam, perfectly legal of course and shipshape, was so, well, grossly material. Properties for god’s sake! Javice saw that the Chichikov path was so conceptually superior! So she, according to the NYT, started a company, Frank,  that was almost perfectly useless. The company was to step in  to “help” students get funding – student loans and shit – by “simplifying the process.” Like Bankman-Fried, her activity was noticed by the beneficent country-clubbers in our fine, fine media:
“All along, Ms. Javice was making frequent media appearances. In December 2017, she wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times with the headline “The 8 Most Confusing Things About FAFSA.” The piece contained so many errors that it required an eight-sentence correction.”
The problem with her company, Frank, was, frankly, the cash flow. The cash was supposed to come from students availing themselves of a service that cost way more than doing it yourself. What is an entrepreneur to do? Or, to put it in bumper sticker form: “what would Chichikov do?”
He’d instruct his underlings to just find names of students and put them down on a long computer list and pretend that they were clients of Frank, that is what he would do!
Of course, in Imperial Russia and in the U.S. of the 21st century, the great way to wealth is dishonesty on a massive scale. So, her company of the equivalent of dead souls – fictitious students engulfed in debt, how great is that! – Javice made her bold move. Although as a creative it was hard to let go, when J.P. Morgan threw 150 million dollars her way, she, well, decided to take the money. No doubt animated by the thought that this pile of money, used properly, could really effectively altruize those poor people on the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Or something like that. But first the penthouse!
Unlike Chichikov, however, Javice did make one teensy weensy error. For along with the company, Javice had turned over her email account. Perhaps she forgot it as she was signing the 20 million dollar retention contract with J.P. Morgan, the euphoria of the moment and all that.
The email account turned out to be a  fascinating snapshot of how today’s 30 under 30 take lemons and turn them into lemonade!
Problem: Company’s useless services were not attracting gullible rube parents and their throw away kids.
Solution: “The messages, according to the bank, included copious evidence that she had hired a data science professor to create fake information to prove to the bank that the millions of customers Frank claimed to have were real.”
Chichikov, alas, did not have a date science professor that he could buy for 15 thousand rubles to do the hard lifting. We can laugh now at that earlier age, but remember: they came up with the dead souls idea first! Hat tip where hat tip is due!
One person does come out of the Javice story badly:
“Highlights from the emails also included a Frank engineer’s questioning of Ms. Javice’s data manipulation request. She responded that she didn’t think anyone would end up in an “orange jumpsuit” over it, according to JPMorgan’s complaint against Ms. Javice and Mr. Amar.”
News does get around in the industry. An engineer that won’t get on board when a higher up demands action to create a massive fraud – why, this is not a guy you want in the ranks of your middle managers! Not a can-do guy, but a nattering negativo. I hope he or she  is suitably ashamed, whereever he or she is.
At the end of the day, though, what is 150 million between friends?
“For there’s no good in them now whatsoever – they’re all dead folk. All a dead body is good for is to prop up a fence with, as the proverb says.
“Why of course they’re dead,” said Sobakevich, as though he had come to his senses and remembered they were dead in reality, but then added: However, it may also be said, what good are the people who are now numbered among the living? What sort of people are they? They are so many flies, and not people.”
This is where the landowner Sobakevich is wrong, as Javice has decisively proved – for even flies, if they have, somehow, a social security number, can borrow money to go to school in order to find a lowlevel job paying off the loan that put them through the school! It is as plain as the nose on your face – living souls are now as good as dead ones!