poetry and the savage

Two days ago, I was having coffee with a friend. This particular friend is an expert on recent and avant garde American poetry. Unlike her, I know very little about American poetry after Berryman and Lowell. So she was patiently asking me why I was so sniffy about Jerome Rothenberg or Charles Bernstein, and other carriers of the torch passed down from Pound and Stein.

In response to which, I am trying to read more of these poets.

However, in the course of our discussion, I did say something that wasn’t absolutely ignorant.

I said this. There’s a story Yuri Lotman tells in Universe of the Mind about a Russian mathematician who advertised that he was going to give a talk on the geometry of dressmaking. Naturally, the audience for this talk filled up with dressmakers and tailors. Finally the great man arrived, ascended the podium, unfolded his manuscript and began: for the purposes of this talk, let us assume that the human body is perfectly spherical.

There was a great rush for the exits by the dressmakers and the tailors.

My loyalties are divided between the audience and that mathematician. Similarly, my loyalties are divided between one tradition in writing and the experimental writers and poets. On the one hand, I, like the tailors and dressmakers, find it a little absurd to mix together the highly theoretical and the pragmatic – and writing is, on one level, as pragmatic as spreading jam on toast. Thus, when an avant garde writer seems more interested in the theory of what he or she is writing than the product itself, it seems absurd.

On the other hand, it is just as absurd to think that the mathematician is wrong. Far from it! For unlike jam, which comes from fruit, water and sugar, and bread, which comes from wheat, writing comes from somewhere else. A nineteenth century positivist would say that it comes from the brain, and think that he has thereby said something scientific and true. But this is like saying it comes from space, or from time. It is not so much true as a truism that gets in the way of a problem - and thus is the enemy of the true.

The standard history of literary criticism tells us that Mallarme introduced ‘theory’ into poetry – as writing turned to its material and metaphysical circumstances in order to go on.

I don’t have a quarrel with the story that Mallarme and Rimbaud make an inflection in poetry. But lets not be provincial. It has not escaped the notice of any human who learns how to write and read that something – ungraspable – is going on here. In the seventeenth century, European explorers and settlers began to distinguish ‘civilization’ on the basis of writing, distinguishing themselves as possessors of the book from those who did not write. This division is hard to justify – the supplements and codicils added to this story have long ago been unlocked by Derrida. It is in the history of the downfall of that literate/uncivilized distinction that avant garde poets – cousins of my Russian mathematician – make the most sense to me.

I will not end this post by judging between the tailors and the mathematician. How could I?

Another blog for the Middlesex Philosophy Department

Following in Nicole's and Nina's footsteps, I want to align this blog with saving the Middlesex University Philosophy department. But that isn't really enough. Saving it and not purging the amazingly bad and ludicrous Middlesex University Administration would mean that the Philosophy department would be nibbled to death. The administration has demonstrated that it is incompetent to run a university. What John Garner once said about the vice presidency applies in spades to the administration: they ain't worth a bucket of warm spit.

In a better world - the world that New Labour failed to install - this decision would lead to an investigation of the invidious business takeover of the public university system in the U.K. That investigation won't happen, and the better world that New Labour utterly failed to create is going to bite that party on the ass. It is dying of trivial sensationalized news stories, and seems - as per this boneheaded act, which could easily have been prevented - to want to alienate not only the working class, but the clerical class that is its main constituency. Great work, fellas! The story of the decline of the left is the story of leftist parties that 'compromised' to gain power, and in so compromising created the tailspin we are all amply suffering from.

Slouching towards Maslow's pyramid

There has been, as far as I can tell, no canonical study of how and why certain ideas – psychoanalysis, Maslow’s theory of needs, gestalt therapy – infiltrated into the precincts of that most American of sciences, organization science, and all its business school progeny. The ultimate American utopia is the corporation – those of us on the reservation outside of it just think of ourselves as the dreamers of the better future. But inside those corporate walls, that future is manufactured wholesale.

In 20th century America, war, organization and information systems formed the sinister matrix to which our best guides are still the great dark codexes: J.R., Gravity’s Rainbow, Flow my tears the policeman said. Randall Jarrett’s tailgunner glosses not simply the belly of the state at war, but the great human product of the 20th century, organizational man.

Maslow’s career, to be read properly, must be read by the flickering light common to incendiary bombings and the vast, flawless labyrinth of neon lights that track the corridors of skyscrapers and of insane asylums.

Early in his career, Maslow’s major research concern was what he called dominance. In a paper from 1937, The Comparative Approach to Human Behavior, he wrote:

“The writer some years ago was confronted with the problem of the relationships between dominance behavior, sex behavior, and social behavior. The attempt to study this problem in humans directly turned out to be a failure. The multiplicity of theories, the variability of concepts and of terminology, the sheer complexity of the problem itself, the impossibility of separating the superficial from the fundamental, all combined to make the project a baffling and even possibly an insoluble one.”

This is a rather odd methodological statement. Why should we posit special relationships between the behaviors he lists – or even take those behaviors (such as dominance behaviors) as given? Especially as, on his own account, there is a ‘variability’ of terminology and theory.

Dominance, here, is certainly the dominant pre-occupation. The paper suggests that the problem is one that we all know from the sciences – the problem of being ‘objective’. Maslow’s suggestion that we can get there by an indirect route – namely, comparison with the less ‘baffling’ behavior of primates – and so disentangle the bloody bonds of human behavior was, of course, in the post-war period amply taken up. Yet the method seems to make headway sideways, for what could make the behavior of primates less baffling when the original baffle is in the cultural construction of the terms of the problem?

“It is just this situation, e.g. complex of similarities and differences, that makes it possible for the psychologist to set up experiments in which the main variable factor is the relative presence or absence of cultural influence. If these cultural influences can be controlled out by experimentation which involves groups of humans and infra-humans, there is then promised an improved possibility of achieving greater understanding of what our primate inheritance may be.”

What could ‘control out’ cultural influences mean, applied to the highly culturally specific notion of experimentation? Maslow here is participating in the social sciences paradigm that seeks the ultimate Other – the Other who functions, paradoxically, as the silent parameter, void of all ‘cultural’ properties – for instance, the property of having a first-person status – and at the same time as the template for the social sciences subject.

However, his animal studies were only one wing of his project. The other wing went in the contrary direction – seeking to bar entrance to cultural influences by welcoming them, aiming for the dead center of normality.

Maslow, as Dallas Cullen and Lisa Gotell have studied Maslow’s sexological research. This research was directed towards understand ‘normal’ female sexuality. To get behind this problem, Maslow, curiously, culled out Lesbians, Catholics, blacks and all women who came from families whose fortunes were not in the upper 5 percent of the American income percentile from his research set. He interviewed the resulting selection of women, all students at Columbia University, and concluded that the dead center for which he had embarked had finally been hit. And thus he was able to pursue a problem he articulated in a journal jotting from 1960:

“the 2-fold motivation of women (1) to dominate the man, but (20 then to have contempt for him, go frigid, manifpulative, castrating, and (3) secretly to keep on yearning for a man stronger than herself to compel her respect, & to be unhappy, & unfulfilled & to feel unfeminine so long as she doesn’t have such a man.”

From experimenting on animals to the ghastly postwar obsession with the frigid bitch – this is, of course, the dark side of what appeared, in the sixties, to be a humanizing program. The social structure should satisfy the needs of the people – isn’t that really what marketing is all about?

what are human needs? The cold war perspective

… something is considered to be a need if its deprivation produces disease. – Abraham H. Maslow. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 23

“Zum Leben aber gehört vor Allem Essen und Trinken, Wohnung, Kleidung und noch einiges Andere. Die erste geschichtliche Tat ist also die Erzeugung der Mittel zur Befriedigung dieser Bedürfnisse, die Produktion des materiellen Lebens selbst, und zwar ist dies eine geschichtliche Tat, eine Grundbedingung aller Geschichte, die noch heute, wie vor Jahrtausenden, täglich und stündlich erfüllt werden muß, um die Menschen nur am Leben zu erhalten.” – Marx, DI, 28

I’ve made this round of posts about productive and unproductive labor because I wanted to say something about the class structures that evolved out of the building of the artificial paradise. But the more I have been trying to grasp the relations, here – with the help of the story of the rise and fall of a perfumer, whose trade, from a certain moralizing point of view, has less ‘value’ than that of the peasant or the miner – the more I am muddying this small pond that I not only swim in, but have dug.

Marx grasped the fact that the capitalist epoch was one in which the fundamental class structure was reduced to a duality: the bourgeoisie, defined as the owners of capital, on the one side, and the proletariat on the other. The reduction of the three class structure of pre-modern traditional societies was not simply a matter of beheading the nobility – who, besides, as Arno Meyer pointed out (among others – Thomas Mann not least among them) survived the ancien regime and lasted well into the 20th century in Europe. Marx, however, noticed that they survived by a mixture of accommodation and force, as they had to not only adapt to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, but become, as it were, bourgeois. However, Marx is not and never was a rational choice thinker. He was thoroughly dialectical. The relationship between the two classes and their ‘interests’ is a dialectical one. The Great Transformation produced a long, long effect that primarily redefined all social functions with regard to both their relation to abstract labor time and the tendency to routinize all work functions. The latter is the stepchild of Marxist analysis – the ideal interchangeability into which the capitalist system forces all workers, whether as brain surgeons or as garbagemen, if often treated as though it were a secondary characteristic – or, when it is pointed out, is contrasted with the utopia of the dissolution of the division of labor in some gauzy way. This misses the firm grounding of alienation in the specific processes of capitalism. It misses the way that the worker’s “position” – Lage – is worsened, even if the worker’s wages go up. Marx began writing as the industrial revolution went into an accelerated phase, and the factory became the cutting edge work site. Unfortunately, in the twentieth century, the factory became fetishized by Marxists, to the extent that Eastern Europe became a sort of museum of anachronistic factories.

Marx, I believe, was not so much a great predictor as a great diagnoser of dialectical forces – he could feel the heartbeat in the social moment. One of his diagnoses was about imagining a time when the productive laboring force ‘supported’ a vastly greater number of unproductive workers and rentiers.

In thinking through the story of the Human Limit, I have, so far, ignored the story of human need – and the notion that a social and political arrangement doesn’t just exist to make humans happy – but to satisfy their ‘needs’. The high moment for ‘humanistic’ Marxism, in the fifties and sixties, was premised upon the idea that the fair society is one in which economic and social arrangements were aligned to maximally satisfy human needs – which, of course, entailed a lot of discussion of human needs. Abraham Maslow enters into this discussion from the side of animal ethology – which became a very popular reference points for some of the sixties theorists, like Bateson or Deleuze and Guattari. And certainly Derrida, who was more finicky about such things, takes the notion of the double bind from Bateson.

So I’m thinking that I am going to shift from Marx-Balzac here to doing a little archaelogy work on needs in Maslow and the culture of the fifties and sixties. A jump forward to make a jump backwards. A knight’s move.

the manufacture of smell, judged from Maslow's ladder

So where does smell rank in the order of things?

Cesar Birotteau is fascinating not only because the characters often seem to be mere vehicles for monetary transactions, but also because Balzac has a fine sense for the infra-class differences that pit supplier against manufacturer, the building owner against the tenant, the proprietor of the shop against the landlord, the financier against the client – all differences that are at once matters of money and matters of stations in the circulation of capital.

Over this whole construct, this speculative web, sits the changes in a perfumery. One which, as Balzac saw, was on the verge of shedding its old form as a mere outgrowth of the revenue of the great bourgeois and the nobility, and donning a new form as a mass luxury provider. Now this thing requires marketing and chemistry, the annexation of the third life and the use of science – embodied, in Balzac’s novel, by a natural philosopher in the old mold, Vauquelin. The old natural philosopher was not part of a team, and did not have at his disposal the statistical tools that restructured the whole of experimental science. Rather, the heroic myth of the experimentum cruces is metonymic with the individual genius, the artisan-manufacturer of discoveries. Balzac, in one way, was just such an individual genius – Baudelaire was astonished by the absolute nullity of Balzac’s juvenilia, and all the more appreciative of the effort, the act of the will, that seemed to make Balzac a genius. And, of course, metonymic with the genius and his discovery was the financier and his coup.

Confusing notes on a topic I must get back to this weekend. But time is waiting in the wings...

Reality and speculation in restoration Paris

Imagine a dinner. Much wine. An old Parisian ‘notaire’ – who combines the various offices of lender, soliciter, and financial counseler – confides his problems to a plausible young man he has met at various dinners given by one of his clients, a successful, though not very educated, perfumer. His problem, it turns out, is a passion – as one should have guessed from the beginning – as one did guess from the beginning, given the state of his nose, ‘ignoblement retroussé’. Having become, from the very wedding night, an object of the unsurmountable physical disgust of his charmingly rich wife, the notaire has found other outlets for the passion announced by his nose – one of which is the very expensive “belle Hollandaise”, whose lifestyle the notaire has supported by defrauding his client. The plausible young man is sympathetic – of course he would be! When the notaire reveals that his plan is to blow out his brains, the young man dissuades him – he even has the notaire empty his pistols by shooting them into the air.

This is the dinner which is at the heart of the intrigue in César Birotteau. The notaire is named Roguin, the plausible young man du Tillet, and the perfumer is César. We have already seen that du Tillet is dangerous. His start in life as César’s first apprentice was certainly not enough to satisfy his ambitions. Finding that he could not seduce his boss’s wife, he satisfied his sense of Birotteau’s inferiority by stealing three thousand francs from him. When Birotteau goes through the books and discovers the theft, du Tillet – in a wonderfully savage little scene – stares the perfumer down. But – as Balzac says – du Tillet was the type of man who could never forgive a victim. Thus, freed from his duties with Birotteau, he begins his rise among the speculators of Paris. Each rung on the ladder is, figuratively, someone’s skull.

There is a whole critical tradition that finds César Birotteau – or to give this novel its entire and real name, “HISTOIRE DE LA GRANDEUR ET DE LA DECADENCE DE CESAR BIROTTEAU, marchand parfumeur, adjoint au maire du deuxième arrondissement de Paris chevalier de la légion d'honneur, etc.” – as insurmountably tedious as a perverted husband on one’s wedding night. As the book is rife with money making schemes, and as each scheme demands a backstory, the criticism takes major offense at this evident dangling of the monetary in front of our eyes, when we readers live by our passions. Myself, however, as a long time reader of Gaddis’s J.R., find the rat’s nest of financial speculations in this book – the trail of the incorrigible du Tillet - to be as fascinating as anything Balzac ever wrote. Here, the realism that created Balzac’s peach shows itself to be, literally, speculation. Against which Balzac balances the elements contained in the title of the novel. On the one hand, of course, the title is mock heroic in Balzac’s best style. On the other hand, it encodes the ideology of the limited good – about which readers of LI have perhaps read all too much – in the form given it by its greatest theorist, perhaps, Montesquieu. I’ve already done a few posts on Montesquieu’s meeting with John Law, and his entire inability to understand Law’s “system”. This is, in a sense, a very pregnant symbolic moment – the moment in which the ideologist of the limited good meets the inventor of modern speculation – and its echo is all over Balzac’s novel, which includes a very glorious passage on grandeur and decadence – which, in English, is invariably translated as rise and fall.

I’ll quote from a translation not my own:

“Every existence has its apogee, a period during which the causes act and are in direct relation with the results. This prime of life, where the lively forces reach equilibrium and are present in all their glory, is not only common to organic beings, but also to cities, nations, ideas, institutions, businesses, enterprises, which, like the noble breeds and dynasties, are born, rise, and fall. Whence comes the rigor with which this theme of growth and decline is applied to everything here on earth? For death itself has, in times of plague, its progress, its slowing down, its renewed outbreak, and its sleep. Our itself globe is perhaps a rocket a little longer lasting than others. History, by retelling the causes of the grandeur and the decadence of everything that has existed here on earth, could warn man of the moment when he should bring an end to the action of all his faculties; but neither conquerors, nor actors, nor women, nor authors listen to its salutary voice.

César Birotteau, who should have considered himself at the apogee of his fortune, took this pause as a new point of departure. He did not know, and moreover neither nations nor kings have attempted to write in indelible characters the cause of these reversals of which History is full, of which so many sovereign or commercial families offer such great examples. Why shouldn’t new pyramids ceaselessly recall this principle that must dominate the politics of nations as well as of individuals: When the produced effect is no longer in direct relation or equal proportion to the cause, disorganization begins? But these monuments exist everywhere, they are the traditions and the stones that speak to us about the past, that sanctify the whims of indomitable Destiny, whose hands erase our dreams and prove to us that the greatest events are summed up in one idea. Troy and Napoleon are but poems. May this story be the poem of the bourgeois vicissitudes which no voice has dreamed of, since they seem to be so devoid of grandeur, while they are by the same claim immense: this is not about a single man, but about an entire populace of suffering.”
In this post, I haven’t mention Marx and the productive/unproductive category I have been trying to unravel – but I want to use the three formulations of that category to speak of what is going on, here. In another post.

Reply to critics - three formulations of productive labor

I have been following what I take to be an inconsistency in Marx’s application of the notion of productive and unproductive labor – for which I’ve received rather puzzling feedback by two commentors, Duncan and Chuckie K., in my next to last post. I find it puzzling because the response doesn’t address the argument at all – that is, doesn’t deny the inconsistency – but simply insists, in spite of numerous textual instances in Marx that I’ve included (from Capital 2 and from the Theories of Surplus Value) that Marx only and always identifies productive labor as follows:

(A) “Where all labor is partially recompensed by itself as is the agricultural labor of sharecroppers [Fronbauern] for example, and is partly exchanged against revenue as the manufacturing work of cities in Asia, no Capital exists and no wage labor in the sense of the bourgeois economy. These determinations, thus, do not derive from the material routine [Leistung] of work nor from the nature of their products nor the routines of work as concrete work, but instead from the particular social forms of the social relations of production in which they are realized [sich verwirklichen]

An actor for example, or even a clown, is according to this a productive laborer when he works in the service of a capitalist, of an entrepreneur, to whom he returns more labor than he takes in the form of his working wage; while a freelance tailor who comes to the capitalists home and makes him a pair of pants and creates for him sheer use-value is an unproductive worker. The labor of the first is exchanged against capital, and the second out of revenue. The first creates a surplus value, when in the second, revenue is consumed.” [259]

But of course Marx does, as I’ve shown, define productive and unproductive labor from the material routine of work. Here he derives it from a material routine, even granting that the laborer is not simply exchanging labor powr for ‘revenue’:

(B) In order to simplify the matter (since we shall not discuss the merchant as a capitalist and merchant’s capital until later) we shall assume that this buying and selling agent is a man who sells his labour. He expends his labour-power and labour-time in the operations C — M and M — C. And he makes his living that way, just as another does by spinning or making pills. He performs a necessary function, because the process of reproduction itself include unproductive functions. He works as well as the next man, but intrinsically his labour creates neither value nor product. He belongs himself to the faux frais of production. His usefulness does not consist in transforming an unproductive function into a productive one, nor unproductive into productive labour. It would be a miracle if such transformation could be accomplished by the mere transfer of a function. His usefulness consists rather in the fact that a smaller part of society’s labour-power and labour-time is tied up in this unproductive function. More. We shall assume that he is a mere wage-labourer, even one of the better paid, for all the difference it makes. Whatever his pay, as a wage-labourer he works part of his time for nothing. He may receive daily the value of the product of eight working-hours, yet functions ten. But the two hours of surplus-labour he performs do not produce value anymore than his eight hours of necessary labour, although by means of the latter a part of the social product is transferred to him. In the first place, looking at it from the standpoint of society, labour-power is used up now as before for ten hours in a mere function of circulation. It cannot be used for anything else, not for productive labour. In the second place however society does not pay for those two hours of surplus-labour, although they are spent by the individual who performs this labour. Society does not appropriate any extra product or value thereby. But the costs of circulation, which he represents, are reduced by one-fifth, from ten hours to eight. Society does not pay any equivalent for one-fifth of this active time of circulation, of which he is the agent. But if this man is employed by a capitalist, then the non-payment of these two hours reduces the cost of circulation of his capital, which constitute a deduction from his income. For the capitalist this is a positive gain, because the negative limit for the self-expansion of his capital-value is thereby reduced. So long as small independent producers of commodities spend a part of their own time in buying and selling, this represents nothing but time spent during the intervals between their productive function or diminution of their time of production. [Capital, Book 2, chapter 6 - http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch06.htm]

And here productive labor is defined not by its capitalization, but by its supplying a necessary product:

[C] “… what he [the laborer] pays for education is damned little; when he does it, it has a productive effect, because it produces labor power.”

C creates no surplus value – or, if we stretch the idea of creating surplus value that far, anybody could be said to – the tailor making pants in Marx’s A example could be producing necessary “labor equipment”, i.e. pants, for the laborer, and so on. [B] I have already discussed. In sum, there is no way to reconcile this category under one heading. To try to do requires either torturing the meaning out of these texts, or requires pretending that they don’t exist, because we know what Marx really wants, even though, babbling fool, he left these unsightly and fragmentary quotations.

This is foolish. Marx did not retain Smith’s idea of the productive and unproductive labor simply to define it in terms of A – that would make the distinction not only trivial, but would mire Capital in the bourgeois point of view which, as Marx says, gives the distinction its sense.

What is interesting here is not the coherence of the distinction, but the incongruities between A, B, and C. It was out of the wobble between definitions that Marx built up a picture of what today’s servant economy looks like. Marx could actually imagine tailors or maids being employees of services in which they would be paid by the service – in which case they would be productive workers, according to A:

“On the other side, assume that capital has taken over production completely – that thus commodities (in distinction from simple use value) is no longer produced by some worker who possesses himself the means of production to the production of this commodity – that thus only the capitalist remains as the producer of commodities ( only the single commodity of labor power excepted), so must revenue be exchanged either against commodities, that capital alone produces and sells, or against labor, that is bought just like these commodities, in order to be consumed, thus simply according to the material determination [stoffliche Bestimmtheit], for the sake of their use value, for the sake of the service, that they produce in their material determination for their buyer and consumer. They have a determinate use value (imaginary or real) and a determinate exchange value. But for the buyer these services are mere use values, objects, with which he consumes his revenue. It is not for nothing that these unproductive workers [my italics] keep their share of the revenue (of wages and profits), their share of the commodities produced by productive labor; they must buy it, but they have nothing to do with its production.” [my translation, compare here, page 304] http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm#s1

We will keep going with this. I’ve been sort of anxious to find an entry for talking more about the determinants of class. I’ve wanted to bring up Balzac. I can blindly feel there is some connection, here, but I can’t say it yet.

On the other hand, I am confident that Marx, here, does perhaps what we don’t “want” him to do, and preserves a distinction between productive and unproductive workers that is clearly in defiance of A. Although Nicole will perhaps disagree with me, here we are surely faced with the way in which Marx plays with distinctions so that they are posited historically – with A being posited as being from the capitalist perspective. There are other perspectives – on the ground, grass roots perspectives – that Marx did not disdain.

equality

It strikes me as an odd thing that our econometricmaniacs have never considered whether there is an average point spread at the heart of republican government – that is, a spread between the richest and the poorest.

I was struck by this thought reading a passage in Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn where Orwell presents a six point program for Labour. Here is the second point:
“Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.”
Has any well known public intellectual in the West said anything remotely as radical in the last twenty years? And yet, it isn’t really radical at all. Orwell is simply putting a figure on one of the oldest strains in democratic culture, going back far before, say, Babeuf in the French Revolution.

It would do infinite good to the disparate, small and more radically inclined grouposcules to settle on a figure and try to impress this into the public mind.

What is the current figure? At the moment, according to David Leonardt – taking the figure from the government – there is, on the one hand, this: “0.01 percent of earners — that is, the top 1/10,000th of earners, a group that began at $8.6 million in annual income…” And then there are the bottom earners. The press likes to bundle the top earners into larger packages – say the top 10 or 20 percent – which is highly misleading. In fact, even if one uses the median income stat as a marker – with 47 percent of households reporting 50,000 per year or less – we get a spread of around 100-1.

How is that disparity paid for? Every day, the newspapers, those pipelines of conventional wisdom, announce we can’t afford this or that: social security, medicare, etc. In fact, those stories are right. Except that they don’t include an invisible codicil: we can’t afford our entitlements AND our income inequality. The system that was set up after WWII assumed that we would do our best to tax the uber-wealthy. Of course, we haven’t done that for over thirty years now. This Reagonomics space has produced an amazing difference in amount of wealth accumulated by the top and the bottom. Using Saenz’s studies, G. William Domhoff puts it like this:

“As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).”

This, of course, is utterly disguised by the system. The world of YouTube is so different from the world of, say, movies and television because it is a world that reflects that disparity – whereas the mediasphere has long cut off the bottom 80 percent. Hollywood weeps over its own virtue when it deigns to show any figure making less than 200 thou per. One of the amazing things about the Wire was not the plot, the cops, etc. – it was simply the acknowledgment that people actually live in the urban housing that suburbanites carefully scoot around, traveling through highways that ring cities. Imagine that! Myself, as my income is in the bottom 15 percent, I was rather thrilled to see people wearing the type of clothes I wear – cast offs from Goodwill – living in the type of rented space I live in.

The art of this era is so dominated by depictions of the wealthiest that it makes the era of Louis XIV look democratic. At least the peasants of Perrault were not trotted out and exhibited as freaks on reality game shows.

A serious radical plan for change would attack the invisible codicil. Equality may be an impossible goal, but inequality is a cancer.

if the service worker is a servant, the service economy is the servant economy

In the Library of Babel, no doubt, one can find all the books that drifted through the projects of the great writers – Nietzsche’s book on the Eternal Return of the Same, for instance. Among these books, the one I’d love to read is Marx’s book on Balzac – which, Engels told some correspondent after the Old Moor’s death, was among the projects that were to come after the works on the political economy. How well we know the utopia of "after", the project that is coming up next!

I think the so called “fourth” book of Capital, which Kautsky edited from the notebooks – otherwise known as Theories of Surplus Value – may be Marx at his most Balzacian. For instance, in considering unproductive labor, the example that comes to mind is the mistress – a most Balzacian figure. Whose labor is classically unproductive, in Adam Smith’s sense – it is labor paid entirely out of revenue, or the excess [Ueberschuss] deriving from productive labor.

I’ve been building a case – as my readers may have noticed – that the category of productive/unproductive labor operates inconsistently in Marx – but that once one frees that category from its uniform determination by value, we can see how useful it is in mapping class positions. Although my commentors think I am screwing the pooch, here, and that value theory is aligned with the p/u distinction, I can’t see how this can accommodate the entirety of what Marx says about productive labor. For instance, I can’t see how the policeman – and indeed, all state employees – engage in unproductive labor – that is, their work does not enter into the valorization process of capitalism – while teachers do engage in productive labor. Let me quote a little bit here from a section about the class origins of the revenue upon which unproductive labor lives:

“If according to A. Smith, labor is productive that is directly exchanged against capital, so there comes into question, apart from the form, the material elements of capital which is exchanged against labor. These are dissolved in the necessary means of life; thus mostly in commodities, material things. Whatever the laborer has to pay from his wages to the state and church forms a deduction for services that are forced upon him; what he pays for education is damned little; when he does it, it has a productive effect, because it produces labor power; whatever he spends for doctors, lawyers, priests is paid to misfortune; there remains very few unproductive labors or services wherein the wage of the laborer is dissolved, since he of course cares himself for his own consumption costs (cooking, cleaning the house, and most of the time, even repairs).”

Now, Marx's goal, here, I think, is to show that revenue can be traced to money spent by the laborer and money spent by the capitalist - both have 'extra' money. But the money spent by the capitalist far outweighs that spent by the laborer - the servant occupations will naturally cluster around those at the top of the capitalist food chain. These useful remarks, however, contain an internal echo, a sort of muddying of the categories. For it seems that cooking or cleaning or the work of lawyers and doctors is considered unproductive not simply due to their location in terms of simple circulation, but rather, in contrast to a hierarchy that exists in the ‘necessary means of life’. Hence, education suddenly surges out as an exception to the rule defining the unproductive by the form of the exchange value it lives on. Instead, we find the category wobbling between systematic determinations, responding to the two semantic pulls I mentioned above – one pull being the definition of productive labor in terms of its valorization within capitalism, the other pull being the definition of productive labor in terms of the production of a value for social reproduction. Of course one must remember that Marx’s purpose hangs over this entire discussion, which is to destroy the system that produces value from the bourgeois point of view in the first place.

Yet CK and Nicole’s objections to my interpretation of the productive/unproductive category have made me delve more deeply into what Marx has to say in the TSV, especially with regards to social reproduction – that descendent of what Herder called Bildung. Marx has some surprisingly astute things to say about the origin of the service economy – or, as Marx might call it with more truth, the servant economy. It is, after all, the servant who is disguised in the modern service worker. And his consideration of a society which consists of a plurality of unproductive workers is strikingly prescient of the direction in which capitalism has gone. Here, I think, we might do well to think about Marx in terms of his relation to Balzac – which is very unexplored, especially in comparison to his relation to Hegel. Balzac’s sense of the very grain of servant class’s life – as in Cesar Birotteau – is, I think, a very big influence on Marx’s observations here.

on an essay by Louis Dumont

In the fifties and sixties, there was a certain amount of interest in Jasper’s “axial age” – the period in which, supposedly, the Greek, the Indian and the Chinese civilizations all established a founding distinction between the transcendent and the temporal. Left out of the axial age are the Africans and the Mesopotamians – Egypt and Sumer.

Daedelus held a symposium on this idea in 1975 to which they invited an article by Louis Dumont. This post is going to be about his essay, “On the Comparative Understanding of Non-Modern Civilizations”. Alan McFarlane’s essay on Dumont is helpful – it is here.

Dumont is doubtful about the suggestion that there was either a hidden connection between the axial civilizations, or that we should us the term from a perspective in which we have chosen “our” civilization – the Greek. His essay is, in part, a standard plea for the primacy of the emic understanding of culture in any comparison of cultures.

“Professor Momigliano has set the basic, indeed, the liminal question, with great clarity. Conscious of being heir to the classical trinity of Greco-Roman-Judeo Christian civilization, we can choose one of two strategies. Either we can remain purely and simply within this established configuration and go on looking at all other civilizations as strange entities, which can nevertheless be approxi mately described by reference to our configurational coordinates, or we can try and transcend this limitation in order to gain a more catholic perspective, con sidering each of the civilizations in question in its own right. The latter alternative, the catholic approach, is not commonly practiced today, though some may naively imagine that it is. Nor is that approach impossible, as others may maintain.”

This plea runs through modernity in correlation with a set of other heuristics – all of which arise in some kind of opposition to the happiness culture. The plea for the imagination, the critique mounted from the notion of alienation, and the anthropological principle of relativism are all, I think, linked. In fact, in a post last year, I made a plea, myself, for seeing the rupture that Foucault takes to be the moment in which Man emerges as the subject of the social sciences as, really, the rupture that defines the Other as the primary source for the social scientific image of Man. The displacement of the human limit within the definition of Man is, I think, symptomatic of the various discourses of the subject.

So much, then, for placing Dumont’s notion in an intellectual geneology. Dumont is best known for his book, Homo Hierarchicus, which is anthropology on the grand scale. Since the symposium was working on the grand scale, Dumont, here, tries to define hierarchy – his great theme – against what he takes to be characteristic of modernity. In Dumont’s schema, Marx is the grand master of modernity – and here excuse me if I quote a long bit. Hey, I know from my own experience that quoting long bits of text make me skip over the quote and get to the meat – but this long bit is essential to Dumont’s point:

“We must go still further and guard against the unwary or generalized use in our field of any and all of our current conceptions. Conflict - I might even say, contradiction - looms large in our ideology. We believe in regulated -and even to a degree, unregulated - conflict, and certainly this is functional or "rational" in our world. To take immediately apparent and widespread representations, we have not only the "class struggle" and "the struggle of all against all" but also the "race struggle" of the Nazis, the perhaps abortive "generation struggle" of some student movements, the altogether more promising "sex struggle" of the "Liberation" movements. When I say that this is an important ideological phenomenon, I do not mean that it exists only in the imagination, and not "out there," but surely a foreigner who might hear of our social life only in such terms would conceive of it in a very unilateral or biased way. Such representations, incidentally, are not eternal, and the "struggle against nature" has perhaps now entered its old age.”

Dumont, in this essay, wants us to see the varieties of this archetype of struggle as a social thematic unique not just to the “West”, but also to modernity. But first, a word about the "West". One of the myths we take for granted is that the West – that we – come from the Greeks, although of course we - those of us who descend from European settlers in America, and those of us who live Europeanly in Europe, come from a whole different group of people who came from Central Asia. But when we say ‘West”, we pretend this isn’t so – except for a few like Rimbaud, perhaps: “J'ai de mes ancêtres gaulois l'oeil bleu blanc, la cervelle étroite, et la maladresse dans la lutte. Je trouve mon habillement aussi barbare que le leur. Mais je ne beurre pas ma chevelure.”

In any case - against this conflict model, Dumont, famously, posed a hierarchical model – a model in which parts could be absorbed by, rather than polemicized by, the whole.

Dumont summarily lists three elements that he believes make up the fundamental modern ideology: individuals as the bearers of ultimate value (whether moral or conceptual, as the final level to which all things social can be reduced); the relation of people to objects (which is the great definer of the individual); and thirdly, wealth – about which I should quote Dumont:

“3. Wealth constitutes an autonomous category centered on movable wealth but in cluding, secondarily, immovable wealth. (Marx noted that this had been the case only in small, exceptional, merchant societies). This point is a corollary of the preceding one. In the traditional, as against the modern, case, immovable wealth is attached to power over men, while movable wealth is disparaged and/or subordinated.”

Dumont summarizes his anthropology of classical Indian society in this way: he believed that he could obtain a “unified view of the religions of India, based on the recognition of the fundamental role of the renouncer, and a revision of the place of kingship in Indian society from an early date.” It is the renouncer – especially put in juxtaposition with the three elements of the traditional ideology – that fascinates me in this essay.

“At the end of our period we find, correlatively with the beginnings of caste, a full-fledged and peculiar social role outside society proper: the renouncer, as an individual-outside-the-world, inventor or adept of a "discipline of salvation" and of its social concomitant, best called the Indian sect. These sects were religio-philosophic movements transcending the Hinduism of the man-in-the-world. They also were to be perennial in India and acted powerfully on this Hinduism, witness the two most prominent of them in retrospect, which appeared near the end of our period, Buddhism and Jainism.”

What is renunciation about? Dumont thinks it is, firstly, about rejecting the sacrificial economy in which the priestly caste plays the primary role; and secondly it is about internalizing sacrifice. But ‘rejection’ already sets this up in the conflict terms we turn to, as of second nature. For Dumont, within the hierarchical society, the fundamental gesture is “relativising”. Dumont works with a fundamental binary between the Brahmin and the renouncer – and it is in this relation that the differentiation between the priest and king – between sacred rule and rule that is sacralized – takes place, with the king, then, in a sense gaining his sovereignty by establishing a latent relationship with the renouncer.

Here, Dumont makes a very interesting observation:

“The main comparative interest of the Indian outworldly individual is perhaps that we clearly understand his origin. It begins when persons of noble birth, questioning priestly rituals and values, go into the wilderness in quest of ultimate truth. Then, while the society, under the preeminence of the priests, hardens into a ritualistic social order, an institution appears by which a man (in principle, a man of superior birth only) may leave the social world and his duties in it, ceremonially die to it, and care only for himself and his liberation from the fetters of the human condition. From a traditional point of view, it is much more difficult to understand the emergence of the modern value, i.e., how the individual can be come, as against the society as a whole, the bearer and embodiment of ultimate values, and how correlatively the society can come to be thought of as merely a collection, a juxtaposition, of such individuals.”

My ears perk up when I reach the word fetters – and when I think of the major textual role that fetters play in Marx. From the viewpoint of a renouncer, what could be more obvious than the statement - you have nothing to lose but your chains – leveled against the supreme product of the division of labor?

This post is a detour - but then, it is part of the genius of the blog form to build a system out of detours, and by so doing, point to the poetic fact that all of the connections between the central points in a system are detours.

class and the economy

I’ve been pondering, evidently, productive and unproductive labor, which I have come to think do not function as economic explanations so much as explanations of the intersection between capitalism and the production of new class categories. Or perhaps I should say this: that Marx’s remark, in The Communist Manifesto, that the tendency in bourgeois society to shrink the fundamental class structure to just two – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – does not express itself, in the social world of the nineteenth century, as a simplification, but rather as a complication. Dumezil’s notion of the trois functions – priests, warriors and producters – or clerks, nobles, serfs – defining traditional societies is prefigured in the proto-sociologists of the 18th century. In the three estates system, the estates are easily recognized and identified with. Under that system, class analysis is easier because it is written on the very face of any representation that emerges in that sphere. The destruction of the old order is heralded in the Sacre of Hegel’s Phenonenology, which is as a sort of grand Manifesto of the clerks. However the transition to a dominantly bourgeois society, which emerges as a result of radically overthrowing the long tripartite structure, makes class identity more difficult, rather than less.

...
I’ve been trying to return to the themes of the human limit, using the various things I have come to the surface with from my recent immersion in Marx’s ocean. Marx’s awareness of the human limit itself has a sort of obvious gravitational force that I have to defy, at some point, lest I be swept into the great orbit of perpetual commentary.

So, herewith a few more jumbled notes.

In Enracinement, Simone Weil notes that collectives through which we can remember (and through remembering, remain in continuity with) the past have dwindled, under the spell of modernity, to the state. The family has been hollowed out, so that there is no question, within it, of honoring or even showing any interest in the ancestors. Economic forms, the union, the firm, exist as instruments to destroy that continuity – or so she claims. Thus, the state is the only entity left standing.

While organized labor does have a stronger collective memory than she gives it credit for, I think this is generally sociologically true. This deracination, as she calls it, is a dimension of what I call the artificial paradise, which seals itself against the past as against a thing that the human cannot control. But I would give more credit than does Weil, ever the bearer of the absolute, to the clerks. The third life is where continuity with the past has come to rest.

what is the sound of one hand clapping - more on productive labor

“Due to the claque, a play is made now like they used to make a commercial operation: and soon one will set oneself up as an author as one sets oneself up as a banker, a bookstore owner or a cloth merchant.” My translation. Quoted from an anonymous pamphlet in Theater in Balzac’s La Comedie Humaine, by Linzy Erika Dickinson 98.]

The “science of reception” was, of course, studied by the “generals” among the claqueur. There’s something fascinating in this branch of emotional labor – that is, the production of emotions in others for the purpose of sale. It did not, of course, escape the eyes of the literati – after all, they were rubbing shoulders with the claqueur. They were, so to speak, simply on different ends of the industry. There were authors who did not like this. Hugo, for instance – who, as Amie has reminded me, I need to work on! – was supposed to have refused to allow the claques to attend Hernani – although alas, as Graham Robb shows in his biography, this legend isn’t true. What Hugo did was pay for downmarket claqueurs – from the popular quarters.

I’ve been trying relate this thread to what Marx has to tell us about productive and unproductive labor. In the Grundrisse, he relates this directly to the notion of class.

“It does not yet belong here, but it can be remembered here, how the creation of surplus labor on the one side corresponds on the other side to the creation of minus-labor, relative idleness (or in the best case, non-productive labor) on the other. This is understood firstly by capital itself; than even the classes, with which it shares it. Thus from paupers, flunkies, Jenkins, etc. living from surplus produce – in brief, the whole train of retainers; to the part of the serving class who do not live from capital, but from revenue. An essential difference of this servant and the laboring class. In relation to the whole society the creation of disposible time then even as the creation of time for the production of science, art, etc. It is in no way the course of development of society, that, because and individual has his needs satisfied, it now creates his superfluity; instead, because an individual or class of individuals are forced to work more than is necessary to satisfy his need – because surplus labor on the one side becomes non-labor and surplus wealth posited on the other. The reality is that the development of wealth exists only in these antitheses: while the possibility is that just in this development lies the possibility of its abolition.”

What I called a “stage” in my last post – to Nicole’s objection – is coordinate with the notion that revenue – the revenue from the great land owners, the aristocrats – flows into the parfumers shops (like Balzac’s Cesar Birotteau), and supports the ‘non-labor”ing laboring classes.

In the Theories over Surplus Value, Marx considers the half and half economies, non-labor, and productive labor:

“Where all labor is partially recompensed by itself as is the agricultural labor of sharecroppers [Fronbauern] for example, and is partly exchanged against revenue as the manufacturing work of cities in Aisa, no Capital exists and no wage labor in the sense of the bourgeois economy. These determinations, thus, do not derive from the material routine [Leistung] of work nor from the nature of their products nor the routines of work as concrete work, but instead from the particular social forms of the social relations of production in which they are realized [sich verwirklichen]

An actor for example, or even a clown, is according to this a productive laborer when he works in the service of a capitalist, of an entrepreneur, to whom he returns more labor than he takes in the form of his working wage; while a freelance tailor who comes to the capitalists home and makes him a pair of pants and creates for him sheer use-value is an unproductive worker. The labor of the first is exchanged against capital, and the second out of revenue. The first creates a surplus value, when in the second, revenue is consumed.” [259]

metaphysical subtleties

I’m most dissatisfied with the fact that, in the interesting comments in my post on circulation work, I squirted a darkness as of squid ink over the issue at hand.

Since the point is important – the place (or not) of productive and unproductive labor in Marx – I’m going to make a brief post that will only make sense to those who’ve read the comments thread.

I think the question is mired, a bit, in another issue. Undoubtedly, capitalism contains a heterogenous mix of incompletely capitalist economic forms. A woman who works as a maid, or a groom in the stable on a rich man’s estate, are not much different than a craftsman who runs his own shop. What Marx calls simple circulation locates a stage in the development of capitalism, in which the valorization process is, as it were, immature. The maid’s service in the house is paid for immediately. If she is exploited, it is not because the people who pay her are using her to create capital – at least directly. As a self employed person, she may use some of her earnings to buy some of her own supplies. Or she may buy a lottery ticket. The thing is, from the point of view of the bourgeois economy, she does not produce value in the full sense of the term.

But what if this maid finds the backing to hire other maids, and starts a maid service?

Here I think is where the controversy starts.

The maids are performing the same service –cleaning. The maid company contracts with customers and pays the maids. At this point, I think, we have three points of view.

1. The maid’s service itself, cleaning, produces no value, because cleaning itself is not a productive activity. It is a non-productive service. Although the maids have commodified their time, this has no bearing on the question at hand. The maid service – that is, the company – produces no value. This seems, at least, to be hinted at in the Grundrisse.
2. The maid service, cleaning, does produce value, and thus we have capitalism with all the trimmings. Productive and unproductive labor refers, then, to stages in the development of capitalist enterprise, not to the output of any particular enterprise. The maid’s service company produces value. In the full sense of the word.
3. The maid service does produce value for the cleaning service, but – this is my position – Marx sometimes uses the category of productive and unproductive value in such a way that he artificially separates the maid’s cleaning service from, say, the toy manufacturer. But, I contend, he is inconsistent about this. In the end, he doesn’t come down with a clear distinction between a maid service company and a toy manufacturer.

My view, of course, is 3. Unproductive versus productive labor – which, as Marx says in the Grundrisse, is, from the bourgeois point of view, correctly separated by Adam Smith – seems to me to unhelpfully intrude on the story of the genesis of the commodity. In the back of my mind, I am thinking of the fetish for industrialism of the communist economies – my suspicion being that they picked up on this distinction, and it became one of the drivers in the process of trying to produce a certain kind of proletariat, one concentrated in heavy industry.

But for all that, there is still something at the bottom of the productive/non-productive distinction which has some hold not only in the economy, but in our social practices. Take Maricopa, Arizona. I’ve mentioned Maricopa before – this NYT article about the place was burned into my brain cells. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/realestate/keymagazine/406ariz-t.html?pagewanted=all Most of the economic activity in Maricopa was building houses for other people to buy – from outside Maricopa. In a sense, the only reason to live in Maricopa was to sell other people on living in Maricopa. This reflexivity, and the lack of endogenous “industry”, seems to cry out for the word, unproductive. Just as circulation work seems to valorize valorization, so, too, certain forms of labor seem ‘parasitic’ on other forms of labor, so that one wants to organize one’s analysis around a hierarchy, going from the productive to the unproductive.

Yet I think, ultimately, this is a reversion to superstition. One must resolutely remember that one’s point of view about the usefulness of a product or service has no bearing on its use-value, which is an objective matter. Thus, one only wants to find mature valorization – not just the exchange of money, but the full circuit that entails surplus value and the reproduction of capital – and say, this is productive labor in a fully developed capitalist system.

Commodities and Reality, or Balzac and a peach

I found a reference to a conversation recorded by Leon Gozlan between Vidocq and Balzac in Robb’s biography of the latter. I went to Gozlan (o, the things you can do on the Internet!) to read it myself. I am not sure what to make of Gozlan, who may well have been heavily fictionalizing himself. In any case, he sets this story about the time that Balzac was trying to cut Les Paysans for its serialization. Readers of LI will remember that Marx chose to illustrate the force of the capitalist system, as it borders older, archaic modes of production, with the story of Les Paysans.

According to Gozlan, the process left Balzac tired and discouraged. Vidocq, who was among the company who had gathered at Balzac’s place one night, saw this, and said:

“I say that you give yourself a lot of pain, Monsieur de Balzac, to create stories of the other world when reality is before your eyes, near your ear, under your hand.”

“Ah, how charming, you believe in reality! I would never have supposed that you were so naïve. Reality! Tell me about it: you have returned from that beautiful land. But go on – it is we who create reality.”

“No, monsieur de Balzac.”

‘Yes, monsieur Vidocq; you see the true reality, it is this beautiful Montreuil peach. The one which you call real, it grows naturally in the forest wild. Very well! That one is worth nothing. It is little, sharp, bitter, impossible to eat. But this one here that I am holding has been cultivated over one hundred year, obtained by trimming it to the left or the right, by transplantation to drier or looser soil, by certain grafts – this one at last, which one eats and which perfumes the mouth and the heart. This exquisite peach, it is we who have made it the only real one. The same procedure occurs with me. I obtain reality in my novels the way Montreuil obtains reality in its peaches. I am a gardener in the realm of books.”

Reality and value – such will be our text, following up my post concerning circulation work. LI’s occasional critic and reader, Mr. Chuckie K., advanced the thesis that I misunderstood Marx, here. Let me recommend the comments thread. And let me advance to an example – a piece of reality that was incorporated in 1820, in Paris, under the title, l'assurance des succès dramatiques. This agency, run by a former wigmaker named Porchon and his partner, a M. Sauton, would hire people to make a play or an opera a success. These claqueurs would be sure to applaud, laugh loudly at the jokes, cry copiously at the sad parts, and in other ways make sure that a playwright’s opening night went well. Porchon would even loan money out to the writer – Alexander Dumas was one of his grateful clients.

We possess a ‘Memoir of a Claqueur” (1828) by one Louis Castel Robert. Robert’s story was of a reality that, like Balzac’s peach, required the intense cultivation of history – the history of France in the 1820s. Having inherited some money, and being of a tender, philosophical disposition, Robert, a young man in Paris, naturally pissed his funds away on drink, women, books and idleness. At the end of this process he confronted an unpleasantness that many of his type encountered, viz, debtors prison. In Sainte Pelagie, he had the good fortune to fall in with a man named Mouchival. Mouchival was a common looking fellow – yet Robert soon learned he was not so common after all. He was only in Sainte Pelagie due to a misunderstanding, practically - having co-signed on a loan for a friend – for Moucival, like Porchon, was always a friend in deed – he found himself being charged with it. The man, however, was quite equal to the situation. As an entrepreneur in the claqueur field, he had simply written to a rich client who fancied himself a dramatist and expressed the need for some cash, for which he would, in the future, supply such services as may be required, yours truly. Thus, he was utterly confident of rescue. Rescue, in the form of francs, eventually did appear, but sent by an actress – through which he, in turn, rescued his promising young acquaintance, Robert. Which is how Robert found a place to fill in the world as a claqueur.

The claqueur was a character type in Paris. The yellow gloves of the claqueur were particularly distinctive, and became a nickname for the claque crowd. – les gants jaunes. Robert writes that Mouchival gave him ‘elementary instructions in the science of cabales, and treated, as an experienced master, all the articles of the tactics proper to making plays succeed or fail.” Robert learned the “circumstances in which it was necessary to applaud or whistle, cry or laugh, be silent or scream, yawn or blow your nose.”

The romantics, particularly Schiller, had invested a utopian hope in the division between work and play; but for the capitalist, for whom every boundary is a living thing, that division promises not the sweetness of life, but an unexploited margin of profit.

As Mouchival soon teaches the young man he has inexplicably taken under his wing, the surface work of the claqueur is just one link in the chain of profit. A more noticeable link is in the work of selling tickets. A certain number of tickets are allotted, free, to the claqueur. He can sell the superfluity himself. But the claqueur is not the only one to scalp tickets. Indeed, a good part of the theater world, from the actor to the usher to the critic, supplements their income on such sales.

Well, more on this subject in the next post.

Haunted by the circulation worker

I was talking to a friend the other day about Marx… do I talk about anything else, lately… and I explained that Marx just can’t be right when he writes that that “circulation” work does not produce value. In fact, as I have discovered, the secondary sources, those offshore oracles, are generally silent about circulation work. David Laibman has a good run down on the topic, concluding: “Of the three significant definitions of unproductive labor – socioeconomic, evaluative and analytic – the first is operational but uninteresting; the second operational but unanchored in value-theoretic categories; the third ambition in the value-theoretic sense, but unoperational, and therefore invalid.” In other words, let’s smack our hands together and say, enough of this nonsense!

Unfortunately, mine is a life of few experiences, and simple pleasures. Wordsworth, a man of independent means who wanted a life of few experiences and simple pleasures, had the rentier income that allowed him to go tromping through hill and dale until he came upon a waterfall in the wild, and later to make a poem about how the sound of it haunted him. Myself, I bike through gas fume haunted streets to libraries, grocery stores and coffee shops, listening to mp3 music that blots out the aural chaos around me, and so I am haunted by more inward tending concerns – for instance, circulation work. Like Laibman, I find Marx’s notion that it creates no value to be puzzlingly wrong; and because Marx starts his analysis this way, the category has been rather thrown away. But if one considers that the entire solution to the problem posed by the reserve army of the unemployed since the Great Depression has been to absorb it either into work for the state or circulation work, surely there are characteristics proper to it that have impressed themselves mightily on the wax tablets of our collective unconsciousness (along with archetypes of caves and the fear of hot hairy mouth of some predator eating your ass).

For, although Marx makes a distinction here that is overridden by the general bias of labor theory of value – that makes a surprisingly regressive turn back to the material object, as though we had never escaped the artisan’s artifice, and the tailors of the Federation of the Just had finally gotten the better of him – at the same time, Marx’s conclusion fits with a certain social emotion that ‘things are better.’ A large subsection of modern literature is devoted, in one way or another, to the melancholy of circulation work, the perception that, day after day, what one does is “shuffle paper around”. In Studs Terkel’s Working, he sets his interview with a stone mason in the very preface of the work – which makes a lot of aesthetic sense. “Stone’s my life. I daydream all the time, most of the time it’s on stone. Oh, I’m gonna build me a stone cabin down on Green River. I’m gonna build stone cabinets in the kitchen. That stone door’s gonna be awful heavy and I don’t know how to attach the hinges.” This is the pure poetry of life. So that one feels a distinct comedown when the man says: “One of my sons is an accountant and the other two are bankers.”

All of these things, in a manner of speaking, passed before my eyes when my friend said that she was teaching Bartleby the Scrivener to her class next week. For Bartleby’s archetypal power has only increased as the circulation worker has become the dominant prole in the Western world.

Hmm, I want to add more to this, but I will have to do that later.

Mythology and revolution

There is a beautiful sister and an ugly sister. We know such tales from childhood.

There is the allure of the beautiful female face that seems to summon us. And there are the hissing snakes for hair and the gorgon features of the face that repulses us.

In his 1848 article for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung about the June revolution of 1848, Marx gives us a story of the beautiful sister and the ugly sister in terms of revolutions. The part played by the beautiful sister is the universal revolution that overthrows the signs of the old order. This revolution is conducted under the sign of the universal family – except it is no longer a family with a father at the head of it. No, this is the family of brothers, of fraternity. But this revolution conceals within it an undermining fact. Just as Cinderella does all the chores that allow her sisters to appear beautiful, so, too, does the proletariat do all the chores that allow for the beautiful overflow of fraternal feelings. When the proletariat gets tired of playing this role, it rises up. This is the revolution of the ugly – the ugly sister of the beautiful revolution. The story shifts, at this point. Cinderella’s godmother does not turn her into the beautiful woman she secretly is. Rather, the godmother – a chthonic which – takes Cinderella’s place.

“The February revolution was the beautiful [schöne] revolution, the revolution of universal sympathies, because the contradictions which erupted in it against the monarchy were still undeveloped and harmoniously slept next to one another, because the social struggle which formed their background had only achieved an airy existence, an existence in phrases, in words. The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive [abstoßende] revolution, because the phrases have given place to the real thing, because the republic itself has bared the head of the monster by knocking off the crown which shielded and concealed it.”

The repulsive face of the monster - who does it belong to? The phrase about the repulsive revolution suggests that the monster is the working class – a monster concealed by the old order. But it is more than the working class. The proletariat is the product of the bourgeois system. Thus, in the house of the father, the monster is concealed – and when the brothers rise up to destroy the father – a story of Freud’s, remember – what do they find? Father was a bluebeard. But they, the brothers, far from being innocent, have merely used the crown to conceal their own work.

The monster’s head comes back in the preface to the first, German edition of Capital. Here, the same unveiling takes place. Again, what the monster is, and who is responsible for it, becomes cloudy – is the monster the system or the product of the system?

Where capitalist production has been completely assimilated by us, for example, in the actual factories, the conditions are much worse than in England, as the counterweight of factory regulations is missing. In all other spheres as, besides, in the whole of continental Europe, not only the development of capitalist production hurts us, but the lack of its development as well. Next to modern distresses, a whole series of inherited distresses also oppress us, springing from the vegetative continuation of archaic, obsolete modes of production, with their train of obsolte social and political relations. We not only suffer from the living, but the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!

In comparison to England, social statistics in Germany and elsewhere on the continent are in a miserable state. Yet they lift the veil just enough in order to allow us to see the Medusa head behind them.”

Who would want to see the Medusa head? Here, there is – or there is supposed to be - a crack between the mythological and the revolutionary. To lift the veil and gaze upon the repulsive medusa is the first step, for the revolutionary, in the long process of sezing control of the social conditions that produced the Medusa.
And yet, is the mythological so easily tossed aside? Reading the history of the socialist movement, it is impressive, to me, that the greatest actors in that movement seem to come up with the worst readings of Marx. Instead of emancipating themselves by way of the ugly sister’s strategy, they stand, rooted to the spot, by the sheer power of the system, and find ways to deal with it.

Meanwhile, those, like Lenin, who did understand that the system was ineradicably rotten, end up instituting capitalism by way of the state. Lenin’s NEP is the only live fact in communism – its heir is the policy of the Chinese communist party.

“Perseus needed a cap of invisibility to pursue the monster. We pull the cap of invisibility deep over our eyes and ears, in oder to be able to deny the existence of the monster.”

Every day, the newspaper bring us evidence of the existence of the monster, and every day, we pull our cap more deeply over our eyes and ears. Today, in the business section of the NYT, there is a story marveling over the docility with which the people of Lithuania have allowed the government, on purpose, to slash spending and sink the Gross Domestic Product by 15 percent. Why did the government do this?

“But Mr. Kubilius and his team [the president of Lithuania]say that with a budget deficit of 9 percent of G.D.P., a currency fixed to the euro and international bond markets unwilling to lend to Lithuania, the government had no choice but to show the world it could impose its own internal devaluation by cutting public spending, restoring competitiveness and reclaiming the good will of the bond markets.”

Restoring competitiveness, as one finds later in the article, has a correlation with the booming business of suicide:

“The psychological toll has been immense. Suicides have increased in a country where the suicide rate of 35 per 100,000 is already one of the world’s highest, local experts say.

According to figures collected by the Youth Psychological Aid Center, telephone calls to its hot line from people who said they were on the verge of committing suicide nearly doubled last year to 1,400, from 750.”

Meanwhile, the electorate awaits… for something.

In the reception area of the bank’s headquarters, bankers laughed and drank beer from a well-stocked bar as rock music played in the background.
It is a far remove from the soup kitchen at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church in Vilnius, where 500 people a day line up for a free meal of soup and Lithuanian pancakes.

Mecislovas Zukauskas, 88, a retired electrician, has lived through the devastations of World War II, the Soviet occupation and, most recently, the death of his wife. He is taking his pension cut in stride.
“The government does what it wants to do,” he said. “We can do nothing.”

Can we really do nothing? And if we agree to that, what was the beautiful revolution for, anyway? Questions that no NYT reporter asks. A former New York Herald reporter, however, would remember that the point of revolution is not, finally, to end up in the good graces of the bond market.

Dixi et salvavi animam meam.

But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.
9Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?
10And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”

Marx’s God was entirely higher order of divine beast, who had in his hand a bill of indictment linking the thread counts of every yard of sack cloth to the bloody fingers of its blind seamstress.

As I have indicated, Marx’s well known doctrine according to which the contradictions of capitalism vow it to a perpectual cycle of crisis became a polemical weapon to move socialism to an accomodationist position, one in which the governing class, periodically repenting its evils and reforming its regulations, would thus turn away the evil that otherwise would be done to them by the proletariat.

It was over this issue that the lion roared his last great roar – which, as is well known, discomforted the lion’s supposed heirs. One of the costs of inheriting holy writ from a man who is still alive is that the author can unexpectedly round on the adorers. When Marx received the Gotha program, around which the Socialist Democratic Worker’s Party was to be organized, he recognized the imprint of his old antagonist, Lassalle. Old antagonist, and yet co-worker –for it was through Lassalle that Marx’s name became known in Germany. After Marx’s death, Engels, who was, now, the revered elder, found that nevertheless, times had moved on, and Marx’s intemperate remarks (had the prophet gone senile?) were not the kind of things to be published for everybody to read. Marx’s glosses are scathing - about the rhetoric of the program, about the nationalism, about the idolatry of the state, about the peace and democracy platitudes that disguised the police state, about the sentimentalizing of work, about the desire to chase women – witches once again! - out of the public sphere, and seemingly willing to pick nits concerning labor and labor power.

But Marx never made a mountain out of a molehill that did not, to his eye, contain a Himalayan potential. Lassalle’s men, Marx saw, had moved communism backwards: back to a theory about distribution. Back to the pre-scientific socialists.

Marx never wrote a book entitled “Distribution”. The point of Capital was not that the system of distribution was unjust – rather the point of Capital was that the system of production was inhuman, a contradiction at every point of what the definition of the human that had emerged in the great revolutions that had founded our modernity.

Lassalle, of course, won. At least he has up until now. Marx’s demand is so total – involving as it does the dissolution of classes as the result of the overthrow of capitalism – that the reader, even today, instinctively flinches. Leon Bloy, Marx’s Catholic antithesis, has the same fierce sense of demand, which, for him, is the essence of divinity. God demands that you eat his flesh and drink his blood. And all of civilized Christianity, and every truism about family, and every attempt to make that demand the equivalent of being good, is an absolute falling away from the divine. The absolute, in the fallen world, always takes on the mask of the banal.

… In the Grundrisse, Marx clearly sets out the contradictions inherent in capitalism, the sum total of which expresses itself in crisis.

"First of all, there is a limit, not inherent to production generally, but to production founded on capital. This limit is double, or rather the same regarded from two directions. It is enough here to demonstrate that capital contains a particular restriction of production -- which contradicts its general tendency to drive beyond every barrier to production -- in order to have uncovered the foundation of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital; in order to have uncovered, more generally, the fact that capital is not, as the economists believe, the absolute form for the development of the forces of production -- not the absolute form for that, nor the form of wealth which absolutely coincides with the development of the forces of production. The stages of production which precede capital appear, regarded from its standpoint, as so many fetters upon the productive forces. It itself, however, correctly understood, appears as the condition of the development of the forces of production as long as they require an external spur, which appears at the same time as their bridle. … These immanent limits have to coincide with the nature of capital, with the essential character of its very concept. These necessary limits are:

(1)Necessary labor as the limit of the exchange value of the potential of living labor, or of the wage of the industrial population;
2) Surplus value as limit on surplus labour time; and, in regard to relative surplus labour time, as barrier to the development of the forces of production;
(3) What is the same, the transformation into money, exchange value as such, as limit of production; or exchange founded on value, or value founded on exchange, as limit of production. This is:
(4) again the same as restriction of the production of use values by exchange value; or that real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, a form not absolutely identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all.
However, these limits come up against the general tendency of capital (which showed itself in simple circulation, where money as medium of circulation appeared as merely an evanescent thing, without independent necessity, and hence not as limit and barrier) to forget and abstract from:
(1) necessary labour as limit of the exchange value of living labour capacity; (2) surplus value as the limit of surplus labour and development of the forces of production; (3) money as the limit of production; (4) the restriction of the production of use values by exchange value."

These internal limits of capitalism are the key to the surface problem of distribution. Because production is tied indirectly to use value – on the one hand, the use value, to the capitalist, of the working time he buys, and on the other hand, the use value to the potential consumer of the commodity – there is no direct connection between the use value of the product and the quantity in which it is manufactured. It is, as it were, manufactured blindly. But in as much as the more the capitalist can exploit the laborer, the more surplus value he gains, the tendency is weighted towards overproduction. This is rooted not directly in the conditions of the marketplace, but more fundamentally to the conditions of production under capitalism. In as much as circulation work is subject to the same logic, it, too, will be overproduced. Every time we pick out a region of commodification in capitalist society, we will find the tendency to overproduction. Thus, to use Arlie Hochschild’s example of the emotional labor of the airline hostess – it, too, will be subject to overproduction. If the smile is your asset, you will find – as Hochschild’s interviewees affirm – that you never stop smiling. Emotional labor consists in producing, after all, the signs of emotion. Whether these signs are ‘real’ or not is as immaterial to the enterprise as the advertising slogans on the juice can are immaterial to the grocery store that sells it.
Thus, production is both limited by the incentive system that draws it forth to continually misalign itself with total use value – giving us, for instance, more pills for male pattern baldness, and less research into malaria – and is compelled to offer ever more commodities and ‘choices’, ultimately driving down the level of the realization of the value of these things for the capitalist.
…
At the end of the Gotha program, Marx signs off with the latin sentence we are quoting as the title of this post. It means, I have spoken and saved my soul. This must be the last sentence in my little book on Marx. As the critique of the Gotha Program might be Marx’s last roar, it is important to note that he was a lion to the very end.
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crisis two

According to Marx, capitalism as a subordinate economic system already appears in feudal Europe by the sixteenth century. Braudel and Polanyi would agree with that assessment – others would look at proto-capitalist enterprises in Northern Italy in the 14th century. Still, the full development of capitalism – wage labor as the predominant form of labor, the circulation of the commodity to money to commodity circle, the development of a world market and a credit market, an industrial technostructure, all really come together in the ‘advanced’ nations of Western Europe in the 19th century, and in North America, in the U.S. and Canada.

One could add that, since Marx, we have evidence for a demographic shift in households in the sixteenth century, as the paterfamilias household, in which sons and their wifes lived in the household complex with their parents, becomes much rarer, compared to the nuclear family type, in which the sons and their wives start new households – at a cost that forces up the age of marriage for both sexes. In a study of the Shipibo, an Indian group in Peru, Clifford Behrens discovered that the advent of a market economy in the sixties and seventies was marked by a similar shift to nuclear households, where before a matrilinear household pattern – husbands and wives living with the wife’s mother, which Behrens calls “uxorilocal’ – had held before, and in fact been the prevailing ethos in economic activity (a man had to provide for his wife’s mother). [Human Ecology 1992, 20: 4]

Since Marx’s death, we’ve seen two world wars and one cold war; we have seen the rise and fall of a communism that, at least, operated in Marx’s name, even if not in Marx’s spirit.

Capitalism is, of course, still here.

It has survived crisis after crisis. The capitalist class has managed to either physically exterminate revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow them or coopt the working class into arrangements that continued the process of valorization by which the capitalist accumulates surplus value from surplus labor.

At some point after Marx’s death, the inevitability of the collapse of capitalism due to its inherent crises became, as Karl Korsch pointed out in 1933, a point of entrance for reformist socialists into the system. If both crises and revolution pointed to the end of the capitalist system, then perhaps, from the point of view of crises, one could bargain with the system and fix it – in return for the worker’s receiving a higher share of the product.

Korsch was certainly not the only one to question the viability of this strategy.

Undoubtedly, we could look at the developed countries and say, Marx was wrong. The position of the working class was on the upswing, and as less variable capital was needed, the reserve industrial army was comfortably shoved into circulation work.

However, if we broaden our view, we might notice that the productive process, relocating in ever cheaper locales, is still actually mired in 19th century conditions. Meanwhile, the social cost of development has become global. While the U.S.S.R. might be remembered best, in the end, for having created the greatest human caused environmental disasters in history – this is surely true of the assassination of the Aral Sea – the acidification of the ocean and the unstoppable increase in CO2 in the atomosphere, which is leading to a global disaster such as homo sapiens have never faced, is surely equally condemnatory of the system we now live under.

It is in this broad overview that I want to locate crisis in Marx. Historically, I’d contend that the crisis doctrine has allured Western intellectuals into Marx’s teaching more than revolution. It has given Marxism the cast of a doctrine that preaches the historical inevitability of the collapse of capitalism due to contradictions in its immanent laws.

My presentation of Marx, on the contrary, is based on revolution – which hypothesizes that history is not, like nature, ruled by inevitable laws. However, a system may be constituted by relationships that derive, inevitably, from its fundamental structures. It can and does generate a second level of necessity, that is coordinate with its predominate mode of production. Revolution, which is itself dependent on a level of un-endurability, or alienation, does not emerge as some similar inevitability in the system. A system can collapse without causing a revolution, or without its collapse being caused by a revolution.

Such, at least, is the way I take Marx’s idea of revolution, which distinguishes it from the crisis of capitalism.

The questions is, then: what causes the crisis? And how does capitalism recuperate, or reproduce itself, given crises?

Let’s start with the contradiction between the classes. If the worker is dependent on the capitalist to the extent that he needs to sell his labor in order to survive, the capitalist is dependent on the workers to the extent that the purpose of his enterprise is to make a profit. The capitalist could care less about the efficient allocation of capital – the latter has never bought a yacht or merged two corporations in a deal paying off handsomely for the management. The capitalist only cares about profit. “The contradiction between production and valorization [Verwertung – realization in the standard translation] – the unity of which is capital, according to its concept – must be grasped still more immanently than simply as the indifferent, seemingly independent appearance of the individual moments of the process, or that the totality of the processes against each other.”

Marx projected an interesting scenario to explain crises as something that originates not in the circulation of money, but in the sphere of production. The scenario begins by distinguishing between two types of capitals – constant, which is all the dead labor in durables, instruments, machines, etc. – and variable – which is live, human labor. It is from that live human labor that the capitalist derives his profit – that is, the surplus labor objectified in the commodity. However, there is a tendency that the capitalist can’t avoid – the increase in constant capital in relation to variable capital. Competition, working on the surface, More dynamite, more meat, more Barbie dolls. More kinds of Barbie, more flavors and cuts of meat, more sophisticated explosives.

Marx makes a controversial move here – he claims that this general tendency – more constant capital, less variable – expresses itself in the fall of the rate of profit. Or at least that is one interpretation of the fall of the rate of profit.

There is, of course, another Marxian interpretation which claims that the working class makes the rate of profit fall when they become strong enough to bargain for higher wages, or another words, they cut into the surplus value of the capitalist.

Gunpowder and Money

George Bernard Shaw’s play, Major Barbara, came out in the year 1905. In that year, the industries of Europe and the United States were humming, and none more so than the Nobel Dynamite trust. Alfred Nobel not only invented safe explosives, but – in his search for strategic partners – he helped invent a new, multi-national corporate form. Munitions industries were peculiar things in the Europe of the time. Many of them were state run, on the premise that the state alone should be trusted with management of weapons manufacture and the secrets of weapon improvement.

Nobel, of course, was not manufacturing for the state. His dynamite built the railroads – or at least blasted out the tunnels through which track was laid – and opened up new passages in mines. Through complicated contracts with Dupont and various German chemical companies, Nobel and associates pretty much dominated the world explosives market. And given the need for ever new markets, the cartel also developed explosives for military use. Thus it came about that in the years before WWI, there was a lively interchange of chemical formulas for blowing things up in ever new and creative ways between Imperial Britain and Imperial Germany.

Shaw’s play is a paen to money, from the point of view of a man who called himself a socialist. The millionaire Undershaft confesses his deepest belief in a conversation with his potential son in law, the Greek scholar Cusins:

“CUSINS. You know, I do not admit that I am imposing on Barbara. I am quite genuinely interested in the views of the Salvation Army. The fact is, I am a sort of collector of religions; and the curious thing is that I find I can believe them all. By the way, have you any religion?
UNDERSHAFT. Yes.
CUSINS. Anything out of the common?
UNDERSHAFT. Only that there are two things necessary to Salvation.
CUSINS [disappointed, but polite] Ah, the Church Catechism. …
UNDERSHAFT. The two things are--
CUSINS. Baptism and--
UNDERSHAFT. No. Money and gunpowder.”

Shaw’s relish of paradoxes has not always worn so well. For instance, the ‘paradox’ that a courted woman also does the courting is not exactly a shocking state of affairs for anybody outside the narrow circle of the Irish Protestant society in which Shaw grew up. Henry James is infinitely more subtle about such things. But in announcing the gospel of money and gunpowder, Shaw found an enduring paradox, one that still digs into us if only because it is a paradox that has unfolded at the cost of tens of millions of lives in the 20th century. The wealthiest nations have also all been the most savage nations. Their wealth stinks of gunpowder. And even those countries that have not, themselves, been great aggressors, as for instance Nobel’s Sweden, have accumulated great wealth by selling weapons to those who want to, and will, use them. In the U.S., the military has long been an economic mainstay, the sector from which all good things flow – such as computers and the internet.

While I have been working out the pattern of Marx’s central thoughts, I have been interested in projecting them against our current circumstances, and the historical circumstances that lie between us and Marx. In the developed world, those circumstances have led to a post-industrial political economy – that is, a shift of the great mass of workers from manufacturing work to circulation work. Just as the agricultural sector was ruthlessly shrunk in the developed economies and is being ruthlessly shrunk in the second wave of development in China and India, so, too, was manufacturing.

These developments came about, partly, as a result of the 20th centuries numerous crises and wars, which seem to cycle between money and gunpowder. Yet, the record of crisis seems to offer us another paradox on the Shavian scale: the crises have strengthened, rather than weakened, the hold of capitalism in general upon us. If we define capitalism solely as ‘free enterprise’, of the ‘private sector’, this may not seem to be the case. Every economy of any size has adopted the mixed economy model, with a considerable part allotted to the state.

But if we define capitalism according to Marx’s standards, viz, a system of production dependent on wage labor, in which value is determined by the abstract labor time embodied in goods and services, then certainly we are still in the belly of the beast.

Looking at the crisis of 2008-2009, we see that it, too, falls into the pattern of crises that strengthen, rather than weaken, the hold of the capitalist oligarchs. There is, however, a difference between this crisis and those of the first half of the twentieth century. In the latter, the working class as a whole came out better than it went in. This time – or perhaps I should say, in the crises that have erupted over the last thirty years – the working class will be considerably weaker than when they came into it. Among the developed economies, the conviction in the oligarchic circles is that competition will demand the takedown of working class perks, and the reversal of working class salaries. The position of the working class had already deteriorated during the boom years, and it is evident that, given one of the unquestioned structures of our society – the increasing appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist oligarchs – capitalism can no longer afford a huge ‘middle class.’ Or I should say, it can’t afford it unless growth is of such a size that the bigger bite taken out by the investor class still allows the fortunes of the middle class to grow. In the Anglosphere, where the concentration of wealth at the top is the greatest, the mix of policies aimed at squeezing middle class salaries while pumping up middle class consumption has bumped up against the limit formed by that proportionality. In other words, the limit is the class composition of the ‘national’ wealth itself. The symptoms of this underlying malaise are everywhere: in the vacant house with the foreclosed sign, in the development of housing in the flood plains around Sacremento and the hurricane vulnerable Florida coast, in the two worker family that lives on income coming in and is in no position to buffer any sudden shocks with savings, and in the curious death of military Keynesianism as a tool that would give a big bang to an otherwise slow business cycle. In the 00s, the government threw trillions into the military, with no appreciable effect on employment numbers. Although the crisis struck, we are told, in 2008, that really means simply that the richest fortunes were imperiled in 2008. The median income household has been going through a crisis since 2000. The machine in the bowels of our noosphere has stopped.

So, let’s look at what the Grundrisse has to say.