Marx and Walking-Around Money (3)

Here is third part of my contribution to the discussion of ‘Wages’ .

For a lecture to be a lecture, Goffman claimed that the lecturer must unite in his person the functions of author, animator and warrant for the text. In this last section of our interpretation, we will be asking just what it means to be the ‘author’ of the scripted portion of this discussion of wages with wage-earners. We also need to consider just what Marx stands as the warrant for, and how he does so. We have seen that Marx has shaped the discussion to persuade the workers taking part in it that they have the social possibility and the personal qualifications to transform their lives. To grasp the possibility he poses them in its specifics we must look at how it follows from Marx’ political activism at the time of the lecture and the ways it is directly expressed in the script for his talk. How does Marx connect the issues of consciousness, organizing and finances we have already explored to the notion of revolution and how does he include his listeners in this connection?

We have twice mentioned the point in the discussion of workers’ associations where Marx touts the pleasures of revolutionary activity. In the course of the talk, Marx connects workers and revolution in two distinct ways. In the lengthy critique of bourgeois economics, he talks about the objective process in which immersion in wage-relations revolutionizes workers social relations and life activities by removing them from the feudal, patriarchal relations of production.

In the discussion of the factors that cause wages to vary, Marx argues that the wage-labor relationship has two central implications. Because the capitalist commands the means of production, he commands the worker. This command entails for the workers a cycle of employment, rising wages, falling wages, and no wages in unemployment. In the discussion of bourgeois proposals to ameliorate the effects of this cycle, Marx argues that any amelioration that takes the cycle as given, only perpetuates the cycle and reinforces the power of the capitalists and of capital. Thus, from the perspective of the worker, amelioration of the symptoms of the system must lie outside the system.

Marx draws his conclusions about this self-perpetuating power of command in terms that imply a revolutionary response. In interpreting savings banks as a ‘machine of despotism,’ he concludes his first argument, “The workers themselves thus give into the hands of their enemies the weapons to preserve the existing organisation of society which subjugates them.” His first critical conclusion about the Malthusian supposition that capital must grow before wages uses the same language. If capital must first grow before conditions improve, then the worker must , “depress his position in relation to the bourgeois class more and more, to increase as much as possible the power of his opponent, capital. That is, he can only be in a passable position provided he creates and reinforces the power which is hostile to him, his own opposite.” This translation does not fully capture the violence of the relationship, since ‘hostile’ translates ‘feindselig,’ literally ‘enemy spirited,’and ‘opposite’ translates ‘Gegensatz’ which in context may be translated as ‘antagonism’ or ‘antithesis.’

Marx presents the factual shortcomings, logical contradictions and class perspectives of bourgeois economic as expressions of the real insufficiencies, injustices and oppressions of the bourgeois economy from the perspective of workers. These two perspectives are incommensurable in theory, and violently conflictual in practice. The wage-relationship is inherently antagonistic and combative. In the passage on workers’ associations in which Marx valorized the consciousness, activism and self-sacrifice of his collaborators in the lecture, he elevates this diction of conflict to the highest level.

The goal of worker’s associations is ultimately not the regulation of wages, “but the overthrow of the entire old society with its class contradictions,” where ‘contradiction’ translates the same ‘Gegensatz’ that referred to the enemy-class. The workers laugh at bourgeois economic authorities precisely because their language of monetary calculation is so utterly inappropriate to “this civil war” and its “fallen, injured, and financial sacrifices.” Marx underscores this analysis by repeating in a generalizing, sentential paraphrase, “He who wants to beat his adversary will not discuss with him the costs of the war.”

The passage closes with a dexterous rhetorical antithesis, or Gegensatz in German, in praise of the fearless autonomy of the workers who count their paltry wages, and “reckon in this minimum a little of the costs of war against the bourgeoisie,’ and who by judicious application of this minimal pittance to “their revolutionary activity … even make the maximum of their enjoyment of life.” When ‘revolution’ makes reappears, it refers to the subjective revolution made by the workers in themselves and by themselves in recognizing and avowing the necessity of social revolution.

We could, of course, conclude that promoting revolutionary consciousness and activity simply represents another perspective on the transformation of the lecture into an event embodying the worth of the democratic relations within the Workers’ Association and attesting to its qualities and the qualities of its members and friends. But if we include Marx' membership in the Brussels branch of the international League of Communists, we can hear the more specific and tangible organizational and programmatic messages he shares with his collaborators in the Association.

Marx and Engels has participated in founding the German Workers’ Association in August 1847, just four months before Marx delivered his talk on wages. Only two or three weeks before that, they had also participated in the founding of the local group and the regional organization of the League of Communists. The League had reconnected and reorganized the scattered, surviving circles of the League of the Just, a socialist organization of artisan-proletarians. This older League had views inspired by the French Revolution and correspondingly couched its aspirations in terms of universal reason and universal brotherhood.

When the League reconstituted itself as the League of Communists, it had gone thorough discussion of its political and organization principles and had opted for the new class-struggle perspective espoused by Marx and Engels. We can safely surmise that in accordance with those principles the League of Communists in Brussels took the initiative in establishing the Workers’ Association. The Association would appeal to workers who had already become active and conscious to a degree, without the requiring the level of theoretical sophistication, commitment or militancy expected from members of the League. The activities of the Association would promote the development of class-consciousness, socialist politics and revolutionary strategy through education and through worker activism around immediate goals.

In the protracted discussion of wages up to the section on workers’ associations, Marx explicates the socialist argument that the wage-relation must be abolished, not ameliorated. In the final two sections, he advances the communist conclusion that the abolition of wages will arrive through revolutionary struggle. When Marx, present as the guiding intellectual of the League, closes his talk with an invocation of the revolutionary strategy, he is, in the organizational context of the Association appealing to his listeners to support or even join the League.

As Marx describes the state of workers’ consciousness and organizations and as he reflexively describes the immediate small-scale realization of those aspirations in the lecture hall, he also appeals with urgency to the workers present: You have created the kind of organizations needed to bring down “the entire old society;” You have seen through the worthless arguments advanced against your cause; You understand that vehemence of the struggle; You have the means and the persuasion to fund this struggle; You can taste the satisfactions of revolutionary activity.” Marx is asking for money and recruits.

Since Marx begins the final discussion of the positive side of belonging to the wage-earners with the note, “Before we conclude … ,“ it would seem that this appeal for men and money sounded like the conclusion. So let’s put off the final reading of that section to consider two additional, specific and concrete messages Marx conveys in his appeal. The League of the Just had adopted revolutionary politics before Marx and Engels became involved in its development. The League made this move under the influence of Wilhelm Weitling, a self-educated worker militant, widely known among German working class activists. While Weitling advanced socialist and revolutionary views, he had two strategic differences with Marx and Engels.

Weitling proposed, in effect, an oppression-based theory of revolutionary agency. He believed that the poorest of the poor, the notorious raggedy-ass proletariat, were the core of the revolutionary forces. He also believed that they would revolt spontaneously, without prior preparation, in response to an insurgent action by a small, conspiratorial group of militants. Marx and Engels, by contrast advocated education and mass activism as the foundation for revolutionary uprising. During 1846-47 through their writings and their correspondence Marx and Engels argued against Weitling’s ideas and propagated their own principles of revolutionary socialist activism. In 1846 Weitling moved to Brussels, so these views confronted each other face to face. The confrontation climaxed in a blow out between Weitling and Marx. Weitling then emigrated to America, and the movement building strategy prevailed in the reorientation and reformation of the League of the Just.

The League of Communists solidified Marx influence on its strategies when it invited him to attend its Second Congress in London in late November and early December of 1847, after the League was established in Brussels, but before Marx composed and delivered the talk on wages. At this congress, the League revised and definitively adopted its ‘Statutes . Most of the statues deal define organizational structures and their relationships, but the first and the next to the last bear directly on the meaning of Marx’ lecture.

The initial section of the statutes states the revolutionary goal of the League and requires of its members, “A way of life and activity which corresponds to this aim‘ as well as “Revolutionary energy and zeal in propaganda. “ The last section of the statutes, “League Funds,”deals with finances. These statutes oblige national sections and individual members to pay dues to cover the costs of correspondence, administration, the printing and distribution of propaganda, and the dispatch of emissaries on League business. The section is, in fact, the longest one in the statutes. The League was very concerned with money.

Since the Congress ended on Dec. 9, Marx must have begun the draft for the lecture very shortly after his return to Brussels. In accord with the statutes Marx exerts energy and zeal by immediately preparing a sterling piece of propaganda. He urges a circle of class-conscious worker activists, a number of whom would have had the opportunity to meet and discuss with Weitling, to reject Weitling’s strategy and adhere to the newly adopted standards of the League.

In direct contrast to Weitling, Marx argues that the best-paid workers should allocate disposable income to the formation of political and industrial associations. Dues-paying members are the heart of the League's strategy. If for a moment, we skip to the conclusion, the claim “the worker can do what he likes with his money” not merely encapsulates the decision for self-organization, socialism and revolution, it advocates a specific, organizational strategy for pursuing those ends. The talk directly advocates this new strategy of the League and familiarizes the listeners with this position.

To return to the structural possibilities of the text again, despite formal division between the apparent conclusion after the discussion of workers’ associations and the putative coda on the positive side of wages, these two passages form a coherent topical unit. The theme is the overthrow of the old society. We will need to reflect a little on the character of the ‘old society.’ The statement that concludes the coda on the revolutionary overthrow of the old society through the workers use of their wages conjoins the subjective and objective sides of revolution in a singularly complex pun that the linked English translation fails to capture. The complex conjunction of these elements condenses the program that Marx and Engels will in a matter of months write for the members of the League returning to Germany to participate in the revolutionary movement of 1848.

The last paragraph on workers associations and the coda on the positive side of wages bound together in another chiasmus. What the translation calls “the overthrow of the entire old society” is in German the Sturz, the fall of that society, the fast, hard fall. The paragraph closes with the objective ‘revolutionary activity of the workers’ through their wages in their organization. We move through the steps of the process to the summary of the whole.

The first paragraph of the coda resumes the topic of the proletariat ‘revolutionizing’ “the old society” and “itself.” The revolutionary process is then specified in a series of indexically mediated subjective ‘falls.’ The first two falls are explicit, “everything patriarchal falls away” and “halo of sanctity is entirely fallen” (which the translation turns ‘fallen’into ‘gone.) In the next paragraph, the ‘higher forms of labor’ have ‘lost their old sanctity.’ Since ‘sanctity’ is effectively synonymous with ‘halo,’ ‘lost’ is chained with ‘fall.’ The final step reverses the perspective of ‘lost,’ the workers “first became free of their subjection to a given relationship.” Now we have proceeded from the whole to the steps. The apparent conclusion ended at the peak of the revolution. The coda returns to the details of the process. This return prepares the ground for the very specific, tightly constrained conclusion.

How does the 'old society' figure in this process? Exactly how have the workers ‘lost’ patriarchal relations and entered ‘freedom’? Marx defined patriarchal relations briefly in the last piece of complete text in his discussion on the lower limit of wages, “The peasant still has free time and can earn something on the side.” Because the peasant is bound to the ground he lives on, he can, outside the time required for his manual services, provide his own subsistence. He owns the means of production, aside from the soil, from which, however, he cannot be alienated. This self-subsistence furnished the material basis for the feudal class struggle over the time spent in services and the amount of payments in kind. The surplus that belongs to the peasant exists as particular use-values. He struggles to eat more and drink more of that which he has produced. The collective struggle of the peasants secures for each individual the right to consume the produce of his own labor.

The factory worker cannot provide for his own subsistence. He cannot consume the produce of his own labor because that particular commodity could not meet his subsistence needs, even if it were his own property and not that of the capitalist. But in contrast to the produce of the peasant, wages as money are the universal equivalent of all other values. Their equivalents extend beyond the narrow range of subsistence produce, and, just as factory workers labor collectively, their money can be pooled. When the workers pooled their money for collective struggle against “the entire old society” in Germany in 1847, their struggle included the struggle against the feudal relations of exploitation as well as against capitalist exploitation. This double struggle comprises the strategic point of the coda’s conclusion.

The translation of the decisive final sentence in the coda, unfortunately captures only half the meaning of a profoundly conceived, but awkwardly executed pun, and thus obscures its political sense. The sentence says in full, “The advantage both over payment in kind and over the way of life prescribed purely by the (feudal) estate is that the worker can do what he likes with his money.” First, let us note that the German text does not have a sentence. It simply begins, “Advantage, that … .” Like the shift from third person to second person that shortly precedes it, this stylistic shift in the script mimes more spontaneous speech, blunt and succinct. The shift in spoken style foregrounds the conclusion, differentiates and separates it from the entire preceding text.

The second problem with the translation is in the coordinated construction of the two prepositional phrases, "both over payment in kind and over the way of life prescribed purely by the (feudal) estate.” These phrases are grammatically ambiguous in the text. The preposition is ‘gegen,’ which can, as it is translated here, be used in construction with ‘advantage.’ In this first sense, the entire construction asserts the subjective superiority of wages to natural produce in the sense we just discussed.

But ‘gegen’ much more commonly means ‘against.’ In this sense, it modifies “do what he wants.” The lost half of the construction’s sense says, ‘he can do what he wants both against payment in kind and against the way of life prescribed purely by the (feudal) estate.’ In this second sense, the construction describes the political and social goals of a democratic revolution that throws down the oppression and exploitation of the peasants. In combination, these senses express both the subjective possibility of freedom inherent in wages and the most tangible objective possibility for their use.

The last misleading feature of the translation is the transposition of the prepositional phrases. The less flexible word order of English and the choice to make the phrases depend on ‘advantage’ has moved them toward the front of the construction to immediately follow ‘advantage.’ But in the original they are the last constituent of the sentence. The actual word order is that in my second translation, “he can do what he wants both against payment in kind and against the way of life prescribed purely by the (feudal) estate.” The translation has chosen the less obvious, less intuitive reading, which is only an echo of the second, and an awkward injected one, and this choice has inadvertently concealed the more obvious and straightforward reading.

This choice has also obscured the single most complex rhetorical structure in the work, a second device constructed to make this conclusion as striking and as salient as possible. The coda rings out on a clear assertion that the immediate political goal of the revolutionary German workers’ movement is to prepare for and see through the democratic, anti-feudal revolution. After all the lengthy exposition of wages, wage labor and the internal logic of capitalism, the final words of the lecture put the workers at the service of another class and say nothing of socialism.

This conclusion comes as no surprise. If it should implausible, we need only look at two other documents drafted by Marx and Engels around this time. The two were working on the Manifesto of the Communist Party from the 9th of December 1847 to the end of the month at the same time Marx was preparing the script for his lecture.

Marx and Walking-Around Money (2)

A week ago, I posted the first part of a response to Roger’s comments on Marx’ lecture ‘Wages’ Here is the second part.

This step in the interpretation moves from the ‘lecture’ as a textual genre to the ‘lecture’ as a type of event. Before we proceed, I just want to apologize for the academic style of presentation here. Most discussants at this site share an interest in Marx and a training in the interpretation of texts. But my disciplinary background and theoretical commitments are farther afield than most. My interest was/is in talk rather than writing and my predilection is for theories based on observation that drawing limited generalizations and, as a matter of principle, articulate a minimal theoretical apparatus. So I don’t always feel like I can just name names, and I have to recapitulate some concepts.

The case in point, Erving Goffman, whose name does not come into the discussions here, typifies the take on language in social life I was schooled in. In Forms of Talk he discusses ‘lectures.’ He distinguishes a number of obvious and not so obvious features that make lectures what they are. Among the obvious are the requirement for a single speaker and listeners, for a text, as well as for a tenor of seriousness and an overt goal of imparting understanding of a topic, rather than making an emotional impact. These factors interact to create an event that engrosses the listeners in the subject matter. This engrossment comprises the special quality of the event. This quality depends heavily on the speaker. The need to achieve this quality makes the speaker responsible for producing a text, performing the text as a script and personally standing in for the text’s value by believing in it and holding its position. Success in this conjunction of functions likewise manifests the lecturer’s intellectual authority.

The participation of the listeners occurs most significantly in the qualitative outcome. The presence of listeners does first require an organized effort to recruit them. Their incentive to participate is access to information, but even more so to the presence of an authority. Their participation in authority and information generates the lecture’s particular emotional and social outcome. The skillfully crafted text and accomplished delivery that can engross them create a sense that the text exists ‘just for them. The intelligence and craft of the text and the performance establish that people like the listeners are the kind of people who have what it takes to appreciate a serious and authoritative lecture. Reflexively, the successful lecture demonstrates and validates the seriousness of lectures on the whole. It does the same for the possibility of perceiving, reporting and speaking to an audience about the structure of the world. It warrants too the motives and organizations that arranged the event.

While Goffman observed the contemporary American academic lecture, I think these properties hold good for the 19th-century too. But in Marx’ lecture these constitutive factors do not operate in the straightforward way Goffman describes. We could consider them to be the normative standards for the bourgeois lecture, just as the ideas of the economists were for the economy. Just as the lecture-text overturned those standards logically, the lecture-performance will overturn the bourgeois norms of informed authority. And just as the text displaced logic from its bourgeois grounds to proletarian grounds, the performance displaces the qualitative outcomes of engrossment, unique access and validation of the right of the event from the ground of bourgeois institutions and values to the work in progress of the workers.

The lecture on wages was presented under the auspices of the German Workers’ Association in Brussels. The Association was founded in August of 1847, with the participation of Marx and Engels, some four months before Marx delivered his lecture. The Association originated in workers’ aspiration to education and self-improvement. The lecture series that included ‘Wages’ shows that education promoting class-consciousness was one of the missions of the Association. In the audience for the lecture we would have found workers who were class-conscious and active in the workplace and in politics. Some would have been members of the Association and contributing to support its activities. Some would have come from the curious periphery of the Association seeking more information.

We can easily recognize how Marx and his text meet the audience’s criteria for a ‘lecture.’ In Marx we have a Ph.D., a philosopher and lawyer. He handily qualifies as a Respektsperson, as his German audience would say. We can imagine the Association, in recruiting the audience for the lecture, posting and distributing handbills advertising the speaker Dr. Karl Marx, a title more exceptional then than today. Three newspaper reports from Vienna, included in the supplementary materials in vol. 5 of the MEW, do refer to Marx with this title. At the very least, Marx was known to his brothers in the Association, who would have formed the core of the audience. in talking up the lecture among their co-workers, they could give first-hand praise of his erudition and eloquence. Marx himself attests the seriousness, the intellectual authority and the informational value of the event.

Once the delivery of the text had begun, it too would evince the seriousness, authority and informativeness of the event. The citations, the detail, the logic. As the delivery cumulates this volume and complexity of information, its sheer length signifies these qualities in an age that seems to have prized loquacity as an expression of a speaker’s invention and authority. By their attendance, workers aware of the demands the lecture would make on them demonstrated considerable confidence in their intellectual abilities. They could appreciate the effort Marx had made on their behalf. The careful listener would recognize that Marx had contributed to the analysis of capitalism substantial elements above and beyond the content of his bourgeois sources. In that sense, the text literally existed ‘just for them’ and provided access to information and authority even the bourgeois experts did not possess. In the new-found, confusing and upsetting world of dependence on wage-labor for their sustenance, the workers could indeed find assurance through the lecture-text and the lecture-event that their world had an order and could be understood and that the Association contributed vitally to attaining that sense of certainty, order and understanding.

These expectations and Marx’ ability to engross his audience, however, only serve Marx as a resource for transmuting the lecture. In parallel with the lecture-text’s overthrow of bourgeois economic logic, the lecture-performance overthrows the bourgeois lecture-event. Marx employs the means through which lecturers routinely establish their relationship to the text and to their audience to transform the presumptive relationship between him and his listeners. The transformed event allows the participants a foretaste of communist society. The relationship among them is overthrown in two steps, just as bourgeois economic logic was. First, Marx’ comments on the logic of bourgeois economists and their theories establish a counter-authority. Then Marx moves outside this logic altogether to posit a new mode of life-activity.

The transformation begins by realigning the participants’ relationship to the text. In Goffman’s model of lectures, the lecturer establishes his relationship with his audience through his signaling of his own alignment to the text. Marx expands this device to create an alignment he shares with his audience. Certain familiar physical and vocal means we can only conjecture about, the raised eyebrow, the imitation of a different style of speaking, even conviction and passion. Other standard devises for generating alignment-to-text are more legible. Most conspicuously, Marx uses the standard devices of sarcasm and irony. He also employs less common classical rhetorical techniques.

We can see on the surface when Marx shifts from the description and analysis of bourgeois economists to outright mockery of their moral posture, “This is the sense of the upright philanthropists who rail against the celebration of the Sabbath. “ He hammers on the misconception and moral charade of the theories, “To reveal the utter stupidity, baseness and hypocrisy of this doctrine ... .” He conflates the limited conceptual powers of the economists with the inconsistencies of their texts, “this trite contradiction.” But Marx is not simply maligning the bourgeois economists with his invective. The sarcasm and ironies target the economists’ near total ignorance of workers’ lives and the consequences of their economic logic for workers.
The discussion of the bourgeois proposal to improve wages through education, one of the more elaborate passages in its rhetorical shape, illustrates this logical, materialist basis for Marx’ derision:

***
Another suggestion, very popular with the bourgeoisie, is education, especially comprehensive industrial education.
[a] We shall not draw attention to the trite contradiction which lies in the fact that modern industry replaces compound labour more and more with simple labour which requires no education;
we shall not draw attention to the fact that it throws more and more children from the age of seven upwards behind the machine and turns them into a source of income not only for the bourgeois class but for their own proletarian parents; the factory system frustrates the school laws, example Prussia;
nor shall we draw attention to the fact that the education of the mind, if the worker had such an education, has no direct effect at all on his wages, that education is altogether dependent on the conditions of life, and that by moral education the bourgeois understands indoctrination with bourgeois principles, and that, finally, the bourgeois class neither has the means, nor if it had them would it use them, to offer the people a real education.
We confine ourselves to stressing a purely economic viewpoint.
***

Marx deploys the figure of the paralepsis, or ‘passing over.’ In this figure, by pretending not to mention a point, the speaker does introduce it. Marx’ first point is purely conceptual, on an inherent trait in the capitalist development of the forces of production. His second point moves into fact. Capitalism seeks child labor and in fact undermines existing public education. The third point, equally concrete, but more general, argues that workers do not have access to the education they would need, that the bourgeoisie provides an entirely different education, and that the bourgeoisie has an inherent incentive to provide no education at all.

Marx 'passes over' these concepts and facts, because they are too obvious to need mention. With regard to his sources, Marx ostensibly avoids the discussion of these facts, because it would obviously embarrass, even discredit, the authorities who inexplicably or duplicitously overlooked them. With regard to his audience, he declines to mention them out of respect for struggling workers to whom these issues are so familiar that it would insult their intelligence to mention them. That he does actually mention them works toward reconstituting the lecture in interconnected ways. Marx thoroughly disqualifies the conventional authorities. He manifests his own superior intellectual and moral authority. He demonstrates that he understands the experience and thoughts of his audience. Accordingly, the vector of access to information is reversed. Marx derives his authority from his access to the knowledge possessed by the workers. Marx does not provide the workers with to bourgeois science, he validates their own knowledge as an adequate basis for the criticism of that science.

The sentence that closes the ‘passing over’ returns us to the ground of bourgeois economics. It laconically summarizes the economists’ ignorance of human fact, “We confine ourselves to stressing a purely economic viewpoint.” Its irony underlines the wholesale inadequacy of bourgeois economic thought. This conclusion also suggests a more subtle, philosophical critique. In bourgeois economic thought, the worker figures only a category inferred solely from the already truncated, merely market-based categories of economics. For this thought, the worker is a speculative category in the strict Hegelian sense. The rhetorical inclusion of workers’ as foundational for the lecture implicitly endorses the materialist method over Hegelian speculation. The real rejection of that idealism, however, resides in the inclusion of the workers in the logic of the argument, and even more so in their inclusion in the order that constitutes the event. The fundamental flaw of bourgeois economics is the exclusion of workers in the concrete and of their needs.

Leaving behind the bourgeois proposal to ameliorate wages poverty, we find ourselves again at the passage to the proletarian viewpoint and the fulcrum on which the preceding logic is overthrown. On the level of the event, we can anticipate that Marx now intends to move beyond the overthrow of logic to the overthrow of the social order in the event. Just as Marx has noted the absence of workers from bourgeois economic logic and rewritten that logic through their inclusion, he now needs to incorporate workers into the fabric of the lecture-event and reorder that event.

As we listen to the remarks on workers’ associations, we can now hear that they do more than just describe the current methods and state of workers’ self-organization. What they describe on the large-scale, they also reflexively describe on the immediate small-scale. When Marx claims that worker’s associations are more than just organizations for the improvement of wages, that they are a means of unifying the class, he is describing the political topic and practical purpose, however modest, of this lecture-event. When he says, that “From this viewpoint, the workers laugh at the smart bourgeois schoolmasters ..,” he invokes the laughter that has accompanied his lecture and reiterates his audience’s superiority to the small-fry experts who would try to teach them social arithmetic. The workers’ project begins with the happy rejection of bourgeois theories.

He makes the point again yet more strongly, “that workers are so far from stingy is proven to even the economist … .” As a consequence of his emphatic, reiterated ridicule of the economists’ total ignorance of flesh-and-blood workers, he can now take for granted the complete contempt which his audience feels for the most dim-witted discussants of the question, the economists. Workers’ activity is a fact so obvious, even an economist can now understand it. And the workers can’t miss it, not just because they do it themselves, but because they are doing it at the very moment in which Marx speaks the words.

When he says, “the best-paid factory workers form the most coalitions” Marx cites the very artisan-proletarians who provided the core constituency of the politically flavored Association and of complementary industrial activity. When he invokes their willingness to scrimp up contributions to maintain their organizations, he points to the sacrifice that has made this evening possible, from printing the flyers to renting the hall. When he says the workers pay this price because of the extraordinary pleasure they draw from this activity, he pays tribute to the consciousness and motivation that have made activists and militants of the members of his audience.

The reflexive reference to the lecture-event itself now fully engages in the workers’ point of view. Marx still maintains the objectifying language of bourgeois economics, but the seemingly odd use of the third person in referring to the immediate context already generalizes the most important features of the event to bring out the seriousness their modest scale might otherwise disguise. Marx has made the workers hosting him and listening to him an explicit objective element of the event. Through the discussion of the self-organized workers’ activity he and his host/listeners are engaged in, he has brought us to the threshold of the conclusion and the remarkable breakthrough that the event makes here to workers’ essential, subjective contribution.

As Marx embarks on the positive side of the wage-relationship, he takes the second, more consequential step in transforming the event from a conventional lecture into a distinctly proletarian talk. With a simple shift in pronouns he removes the last of the barrier of bourgeois authority between him and his audience as well as the barrier between the normative lecture-event and the workers full subjective participation.

Decisively, Marx replaces the asymmetric roles of bourgeois authority with a collectivity, “I do not need to explain to you in detail how without these production relations neither the means of production — the material means for the emancipation of the proletariat and the foundation of a new society — would have been created... .” With ‘I’ and ‘you’ Marx moves from talking to his audience to talking with them. Once again, the figure of ‘passing over’ indicates their reciprocal access to the indispensible knowledge and experience held by the others. ‘You’ addresses the audience members with respect, and, through its’ grammatical ambiguity between singular and plural ‘you,’ Marx addresses these men as a group and as individuals. More than ever, the value of wages as a means to self-organization is self-evident to these men whose effort and donations have made the lecture possible.

The shift to inclusive membership in the group intensifies in the second point of the section when Marx concedes the negative effects of the wage, “that I become for sale through and through.” This time ‘I’ goes a step further. Beyond simply including Marx as an equal participant in the group, it merges Marx, the individual audience members and the group in their collective experience as labor-machines in the labor-market. With this ‘I’ Marx speaks for himself and for the workers in the audience. He shows how well he knows their minds, so well that he can speak for them, but with their voice and not in their place. He acknowledges how important his access to their experience is for what he has to say. They all share this “I”. This viewpoint of simultaneously individual and collective subjective self-perception and self-awareness of wages frames the three points that follow.

The first statement of the positive consequences of wages, “everything patriarchal falls away,” depicts the process metaphorically. Where does the ‘fall’ occur really? In the consciousness of the worker, as a result of his self-awareness of wages. What falls away? The worker’s experience and understanding of his former relationships in the process of production as he has moved from old-style apprenticeship and journeyman training to the new relations of factory work. What makes the ‘fall’ possible? The transparency and simplicity of the wage relationship that makes its nature unmistakable as well as its odious materialism, in the moral sense, that makes it easy to envision dumping it. Marx calls on the workers to sort through their old ideas in light of their new situation.

In the second point, the ‘fall’ continues. In counterpoint, “halo" narrows the focus to specifically religious conceptions, while the scope is generalized beyond the process of production and circulation to "all" relations, which are now equally transparent and odious. Marx specifies this generalization with reference to other occupations not formerly considered ‘work.’ Within this transformation of the ideological professions, Marx' own experience renders the workers’ experience intelligible for him, as the reduction of the law to an effectively waged-relationship has subjected him to wages as a lawyer. This experience of the labor-market in law also qualifies Marx objectively for membership in the Association.

The following metaphor of the ‘regiment’ turns these callings of ideological authority into mercenaries on the other side of the class war. As enemies they deserve no credence. As wage-workers in the ideological factory they have no more claim to intellectual authority than any other workers. As Marx has demonstrated many times throughout his talk, a factory worker has more to say about wage-labor and better reason to say it than does any bourgeois buffoon. Marx calls the workers to intellectual self-reliance and creativity.

I assume that brackets around the first point 3) strike it from the text. The second point 3) that replaced it deduces from the featurelessness of the wage-relationship the freedom of the worker to shape his future. If workers can see through wage and can see more clearly than bought-and-paid for intellectual authorities then they have the potential for ideological and material freedom to shape the future.
In these points Marx validates in sum the choice made by everyone present, him and his audience as one effective collective, to put their hearts, minds and money into the organization of the Association and into the organizations they have yet even to imagine. What they have experienced in the course of the evening, the transformation of a mere lecture into a moment of equality and self-determination, of democracy and freedom delivers just a faint harbinger of the future they can create for themselves through the proceeds of their labor.

More than in the literal meaning of any of its parts, the meaning of‘Wages’ is located in Marx’ work as an orator. In the most fundamental difference from the kind of lecturing Goffman discussed, Marx aims to move emotionally more than to persuade rationally. In this mode, he adheres to the practice of classical rhetoric, rather than to the Enlightenment premises of rational public discussion or to its diluted contemporary academic versions.

He disavows fundamentally the standing of intellectual authority and divests himself of it. He does not treat information as property of an authority, who can regulate access to it and distribute it in the measure he sees fit. In this talk, information emerges as a collectively created insight arising from reciprocal contributions. Information-talk does not confer a distinctive subjective status on an audience that enjoys access to authority and information. It endows what once appeared to be an ‘audience’ with the status of authority, working class authority.

The outcome of the lecture-event does not ratify or validate the tradition of events of that type. Nor does it confirm the orderliness and reportability of the world. Instead, this talk articulates a world of disorder and a world of disorderly accounts. At the same time, it reveals a world that has never been reported, a world that holds possibilities aborning that cannot yet be reported. This talk overturns the social foundations of the ‘lecture.’

Marx’ talk on wages does still straightforwardly share a few of the features of the lecture suggested by Goffman. It does engross its listeners, whom we can no longer call an audience, with its theme. It does makes them feel that the text and the event exist just for them. But their participation is not aural and informational. They are that theme and what they are doing right then and there is that event. They are not engrossed in listening to artfully delivered information.

As they listen, these worker militants are engrossed in creating an event and a world of a new kind. And, to put that same conclusion more concretely, the talk validates the motives and the standing of the group that organized the event, the Deutscher Arbeiterverein. ‘Wages’ and what the group does through their chosen speaker is the Verein. The Verein is the work of creating a new world and reporting that world to those for whom it holds promise. The collaboration of this group of men embodies, as the very words are spoken, the possibility in the claim that “The worker can do whatever he likes with his money.”

Now that we have looked at the lecture-text and the lecture-event, one question remains to be answered. That question sounds quintessentially post-modern. “What do we mean by ‘Marx’ in this interpretation? Analytically, we will begin with the unity of author, animator and warrant of the text supposed by Goffman. Historically, we will begin with Marx’ political activism at time he wrote ‘Wages.’ We will see how his role as speaker meshes with that activism to create a role distinct from that of the ‘lecturer and how this mesh gives his talk and its conclusion a very specific and practical sense.

Masculism and Consumerism...

desiring machines yadda yadda

In part 3 of her lecture here, Silvia Federici talks about - among other things - the mechanisation of the body in mechanical philosophers and the development of anatomy in the 17th-18th century as a feature of the counter-revolution that was the establishment of capitalism.





These PUAs seem to be an expression of a contemporary mechanisation of the "personality" and the mechnical approach evo-psych takes to the mind which accompanies this stage of capitalism emphasising the discretionary consumption of the majority in the core, fuelling the development of practises of advertising and marketing, and the speculative activity of rentiers and owners of capital, fuelling the development of practises of market manipulation.

Signage

Bill Ayers speaks two blocks from my cubicle and you get this .



Is some reactionary millionaire training them to make these signs? Is this a strategy, or what?

Marx and Walking-Around Money

When I read Roger’s remarks of Feb. 25 on the piece ‘Wages’ by Marx, I wanted to comment immediately. But by the time I had outlined my response, it far exceeded any reasonable length for a comment box. I have reservations about the approach Roger has taken. His interpretation selects a single sentence from the text and draws from it implications that presume it conveys a scientific claim of universal scope. I read this sentence very differently. I believe we will find it has a very different force and scope if we consider in some detail the generic texture of ‘Wages.’

Four aspects of this texture indicate that the force of the text and of that one sentence follow from an immediate practical goal and that the scope of any claim it establishes are correspondingly limited. We need first to consider what kind of text ‘Wages’ is and how that status determines the logic that governs its argumentative construction. To specify the force of the sentence itself within this argument, we need to trace the topic of wages and their allocation fully. To understand the formulation of this topic in the crucial sentence, we need to consider how the text engaged its auditors. To grasp this engagement as concretely as we can, we need to connect the topic of wages and their use by the wage-earner to the political project Marx was embarked on.

The editors of the Marx-Engels Werke propose that Marx drafted ‘Wages’ in preparation for a talk he presented to the Deutscher Arbeiterverein (German Workers’ Club) in Brussels. This talk was the next to last or last talk in a series. I believe this ascription to be correct and that we must accordingly look at the constitution of this text as a ‘lecture’ if we are going to appreciate what Marx was saying and why he said it the way he did.

The lecture notes opens with a summary of the conclusions drawn in passages of the draft which have not survived. These conclusions establishes a ‘logic arc’ within which the statement functions. Now just as it is erroneous to retrospectively project the Marx of the future into his earlier works, it is equally erroneous to ignore the Marx of the past in reading the present Marx. At the time of ‘Wages,’ Marx’ work still retained much of the form and substance of Hegel. In keeping with Hegel’s style of dialectical argument, Marx has initially defined a fundamental relationship, then proceeds to elaborate the contradictions that unfold within this relationship. The first point of the summary establishes that capitalism treats human activity as a commodity and for workers this relationship reduces their life activities to a mere means.

The following points elaborate the processes implicit within this relationship which determine the rate of wages, such as supply and demand or the profit motive. Marx abstracts the logical properties capitalism, a logic in which life activities have already been completely permeated and transformed. After this abstraction what remains to discuss are the internal dynamics of that transformed instrumental life. When Marx concludes the lecture with a statement of the positive aspect of wages, he introduces a twinkle of starlight in this vast darkness. In Hegelian terms, after treating at length ‘necessity,’ that which capital must do in and of itself, he finds in it ‘possibility,’ that aspect of the relationship which can in its turn generate an new system of relationships out of the old.

The draft continues with notes on eight bourgeois economists pertinent to the second point of the summary. After these notes, the draft has three fully written sections in which Marx discusses his own insights into the system-internal determination of the level of wages. These sections correspond to points three through seven of the summary.

In the last two sections before the conclusion, Marx discusses measures which ameliorate the dismal rigors of wages. To appreciate the significance of these sections to the lecture’s conclusion, we now have to pay closer attention to the formulation of the test. We will see that the logic of the argument transforms dramatically and prepares the force of the conclusion.

In the first, lengthy section titled “Suggestions for Relief,” Marx mentions and criticizes three popular bourgeois proposals to insulate wage earners against fluctuating income or to generate higher wages. He then criticizes these measures because they cannot counteract the entire range of systemic pressures to reduce wages. In the second, much briefer section ‘Workers’ Associations’ Marx addresses the organizing undertaken by the workers themselves to obtain and maintain better wages. First he points out two objections to workers’ association advanced by bourgeois economists. Then he defends the formation of such associations.

To recognize how Marx transforms the logic of his presentation at this point, we must consider ‘Suggestions for Relief’ and ‘Workers’ Associations’ as a single rhetorical unit, despite their formal separation. Marx was widely read in the Greek and Latin classics in the original languages. Just as he had absorbed the principles and materials of Hegel’s philosophy, he had mastered the devices of Classical rhetoric. Marx has ordered the presentation of the topics in these two sections to form a single rhetorical unit through the mirror-symmetrical figure of chiasmus. Chiasmus consists of two parallel constructions in which the order of the constituents is reversed in the second construction. We could schematize this construction, A:B::B:A.

If we consider that dialectics assumes a dynamic relationship between at least two elements and that the dynamism induces a new relationship between those elements, then we can recognize in the chiasmus a rudimentary, prototypical schema of the dialectic. We can specify the schema that binds the two sections of the lecture. First there are two points of view, bourgeois and proletarian. There are two types of content, model and criticism. The chiastic structure of the two sections of the argument is bourgeois model:proletarian criticism::bourgeois criticism:proletarian model. The process begins in bourgeoisie’s conceptualization of their own practical activity and ends in the practical activity of the working class. The texture embodies rather than explicitly describing this historical and social development.

In the schema ‘::” stands in the place of the fulcrum on which the order is overturned. Let us consider the dramatic assertion which occupies this position in the argument. Marx prefaced his reprise of the bourgeois criticisms of association with the assessment, “What the economists remark about associations is correct …,” a characterization perhaps all the more surprising once we have heard that the economists claim association cannot maintain or raise wages. After completing his reprise of the objections, Marx repeats his assessment, but adds a crucial explanation, “ All these objections of the bourgeois economists are, as I said, correct, but correct only from their point of view.”

In moving through the rhetorical reversal of order, we have moved into a new logical grounds for understanding. We began with bourgeois models which characterize the reciprocal relations of the factors that determine wages in terms of mathematical ratios and which seek the optimal equilibrium within this constrained range of necessities misconceived as possibilities. At the same time, we have moved from the conceptual proletarian critique of the bourgeois model’s categorical insufficiencies to the workers' practical critique via organizing associations. Returning to the level of the lecture’s logic, as we pivot on this fulcrum, we also pass from the formal dialectic of ideas to the material dialectic of activity. Marx has refuted the bourgeois ideas not by an immanent critique, but by demonstrating that they advance the interests of capital in and within wage relationships and that they are irrelevant to solving the problems wages pose for workers.

After this assertion of the distinct and irreconcilable bourgeois and working class viewpoints, Marx completes this section with a discussion of associations. He does not analyze the inherent logic of associations in the way he analyzed capital. Marx approaches the organizing of associations as a practical activity and focuses on a single, salient aspect of that activity. In fact, the meaning and the force of the claim that workers can do whatever they want with their money follows from this topical focus. The reiterated perspectives on the topic delineate a textually specific sense for workers using their money, and the truncated paraphrase in the concluding section of the lecture must be read as a summarization of this more elaborate presentation of the topic.

Marx comments take as their point of departure the first of the two bourgeois criticisms of association, namely that the cost of creating and maintaining an association will exceed any increase in wages obtained through the association. He rejects the very pertinence of this utilitarian logic. Against it he poses claims about how workers’ consciousness of their struggle and its depth lead them beyond a utilitarian view of wages. If the apparent struggle for wages entails an ultimate struggle against wages, then the workers “rightfully laugh” at the kind of pedants who would even try to calculate “the cost in dead, wounded and money.” In fact, “Anyone who wants to beat the enemy, will not discuss with him the costs of the war.” The mere fact that workers really are forming associations refutes the economists' claim that workers are selfish self-calculators. When we look at the organizing underway, we see wages play an obvious role in the process, “the best paid factory workers form the most associations.”

Workers assume the expense of self-organization even though it requires sacrifice, “the workers use everything they can scrimp together from their pay to form political and industrial associations and to cover the costs of this movement.” Accordingly, the employers and economists, who award minimal wage increases thinking they will be absorbed in modest luxuries like tea, rum, sugar and meat, are outraged when the workers “include in their calculation of these raises a little of the costs of the war against the bourgeoisie.” The section climaxes with the pithy contrast between the bourgeois view of wages as a means to participate in markets and the workers view of money as a means to meaningful life activity, “they even make out of their revolutionary activity the maximum of their pleasure in life.” In four, sometimes lengthy sentences, Marx crams in seven instances of the use of the meager disposable income provided by wages for the purposes of self-organized political and industrial organizing and motivated by class-consciousness.

The entire brunt of the argument is that any wage that allows more than the bare necessities can also provide a resource for the struggle to end the wage relationship altogether. When Marx concludes his lecture with the claim that wages have the “Advantage: that the worker can do whatever he wants with his money,” he summarizes the more extensive argument of the preceding section with a brevity comparable to the condensed conclusions with which the draft for the lecture began. The brevity should not mislead us. Marx does not argue that workers can spend whatever money they have on whatever commodities they want. He never once says “spend” or “buy.” He says, “use” and “do.” Within money he sees possibilities outside capitalist production and circulation. He advocates uses of money as an instrument of non-instrumentalized life activity.

So much for today and so much for the conventional, internal verbal factors in the analysis and understanding of genre. Structure and diction contribute essential components in the constitution of genres, but we still have to consider the articulated text as an active element in the dynamic relationship between Marx the lecturer and the workers in his audience. Those elements will allow us to reflect not just on what Marx said, but on the force of his talk, why he said what he said and to what end. What is the situated, pragmatic sense of “the worker can do whatever he wants with his money”? I’ll be back in a day or two with more of the story.

Commodity Fanaticism - I

Anodyne Lite comments on an evident trend of excessively passionate fanaticism for entertainment commodities and the way many young leftists seem to mistake their personal, capricious tastes in music and videos for political commitments and moral virtues.



I would offer as especially vivid specimens of this infirmity Dominic Fox (a gifted writer) and Owen Hatherley (a knowledgeable commentator on architecture). They exhibit the extreme of the principal element - the certainty that their personal preferences in art and entertainment are political and moral virtues, giving rise to an almost tearfully disgruntled pedantry, based in the most superficial kind of erudition, about the objects of their obsessions - but also display an additional symptom of the syndrome, which is that they have convinced themselves that they discover everything they like, and hasten to plant their flags in canons and bestseller lists like Colombus discovering the New World. It brings to mind a comedian whose routine involved the line, delivered in a Bimshire lilt, "Ay, get your flag out me roses man." They assert - ludicrously, because they prefer only the most popular mass culture and the best known high culture works - that everything they like was underrated and unknown before they resurrected it with their admiration and uniquely intelligent and sympathetic understanding. This then acts as a kind of explanation for the absence of any commentary on the reception history and scholarship of their favourite stuff (they are unfamiliar with this and can provide no account of it), but also permits them to become midwives to their idol's divine creativity in fantasy, almost like auxiliary authors of their favourite artworks and culture commodities. Both Fox and Hatherley seem to believe they have, for example, rescued Samuel Beckett - canonical nobelist, more frequently analysed by US academics and students than Shakespeare, and almost uninterruptedly performed - from obscurity.

From Hatherley's Militant Modernism:

Beckett’s Late Review devotees seem to have an idea of him as some sort of amalgam of Zeno the Stoic and Father Ted, yet one can’t imagine Tom Paulin or Bonnie Greer relishing being assaulted by the panic attack of Not I or wading through the thick, impenetrable tangle of repetition and horror of How it Is.

I know for a fact that Bonnie Greer has a far deeper and broader knowledge of Samuel Beckett's oeuvre than Hatherley, and also is capable, which he is not, of engaging in interpretation of the work, informed by knowledge of history, genre, medium, institution, and existing scholarship, which Hatherley could not even begin to produce, having simply no acquaintance with Beckett scholarship or with any method of literary criticism or performance theory whatever. He produces a kind of commentary on art and literature (always stressfully sincere but often insightful and despite common diction errors - he doesn't know what "replete" means but uses it often, and other awkward tics of this type - engagingly written) relying solely, as in his popular remarks on architecture, on the elaborately displayed intensity of his opinion and the forcefulness and insistence of the mock aristocratic rhetoric with which he expresses his personal tastes and prejudices. And in the passage above, he does not quite assert, but clearly implies, that the heroic, self-sacrificing acts of recognition and appreciation required for the true Beckett devotee's progress to enlightenment (which nonetheless produce from Hatherley only vague, bland, obvious description without even a hint of interpretation - horror, tangle, repetition, panic) can be accomplished only by his little clique of narrowminded, chauvinist, parochial mutual admirers. Dominic Fox similarly suggests that only these possessors of a "British" national character are capable of giving Samuel Beckett the "approval" - that white ball of clubbability that is evidently the only reaction Fox is capable of having, apart from the black ball of ostracism, to anything - that Fox, perhaps psychotically and certainly wrongly, perceives Beckett to be suing him personally for with his novels. Without their courageous unsentimentality and hyper refined aesthetic organs, these two suggest, Samuel Beckett’s genius would have gone forever unrecognised. They barely stop short of congratulating themselves for making the works of Samuel Beckett what they are today.




Anodyne Lite asks if I have anything to recommend to read on this topic - because these two are just examples of a widespread phenomenon - and I don't. It's something I wish the EC would fund me to study. I would ask Jonathan Beller's advice, as I feel sure his already published observations imply something yet to be said explicitly about why this kind of irrational attachment, this commodity fanaticism (sedulously ignored by the legions of pundits advertising a new age of fanaticisms) has become so widespread and yet remains imperceptible to its victims even when someone takes the pains to point it out with meticulous specificity.

Anyway.

When The Wire, sold as something like "to blaxploitation what the Sopranos is to gangster films", failed to attract an audience, HBO and the producers/creators devised a thoughtful promotional campaign that showed an acute sensitivity to fashions in the trendsetting sectors of the culture consuming public, lifting the terms and themes of its branding effort not from Esquire but from The Nation. It measured some distance travelled between the age of a substantial oppositional dissident critical intellectual culture and that of a dominantly delightedly and gratefully complicit one.

Twenty five years before The Wire's inauspicious first broadcasts, it was still unusual for people to admit liking, much less admiring, the television programmes they watched. Fifty seven channels and nothing on. But the mainstreaming of pomo irony launched a reversal of this attitude by at first introducing the (consoling, reassuring) idea that mindless shit could be watched with an attitude that transformed the activity of watching it into politically subversive cultural sabotage.

Audience fragmentation had to advance considerably before this pomo posture could really be widely exploited, since it belonged to an elite not the majority. ABC, under the guidance of an inexperienced hip former development executive Jamie Tarses, foolishly and without the confirmation of scientific study launched a re-branding campaign expressing this Nick at Nite, Harvard Lampoon irony at an extreme (TV is Good. and Watch TV. You have plenty of brancells to spare. or It's a beautiful day. What are you doing outside? Watch TV) which was a disastrous failure. For HBO's then tiny subscription base, upscale and confident that its consumption expressed its entitled and free "choice", this campaign might have worked, but for a major network still in the days of national airwaves broadcasters' dominance, aiming at a broad general audience, the tone was severely ill-judged.

Year after year, however, the posture steadily conquered television, in typically softened and veiled versions. From there, it was an obvious and easy step to the creation of programmes which absorbed this suggested audience irony and could be themselves perceived as critical or subversive, "quality" television vended as a traditional rich dramatic experience, but not spoilt by any pose of sincerity which would imply an insulting assumption of audience gullibility, and liberated from some difficult traditional requirements for dramatic writing by post-modern gimmickry, updated with irony and reflexivity. With these new programmes which collapse the relation pomosity established between the viewer and re-runs of Donna Reed, the audience participates in the programme's own sensibility with a newly justified reversion to passivity and endorsement. Mad Men is the most complete case, and unsurprisingly is set in the period which was the contemporary setting for many of the programmes on Nick at Night for which the suggestion of subversive, ironic consumption was originated by Harvard Lampoon veterans.



Those tasked with puffing the ailing cop-soap-blaxpolitation series The Wire decided - how very cannily would become evident after a couple of seasons - to claim for their show qualities which specifically academic, intellectual fans of The Sopranos (that programme it was trying in a sense to supply the "black" version of) - qualities defining serious dramatic art with lofty aims, socially responsible and intellectually nutritious rather than violent sensational junk - had attributed to HBO's first series to get a network sized audience. The influential culture critic and celebrated 2nd wave radfem Ellen Willis was the one to provide inspiration for the elements of The Wire's future branding for the newly active niche of culture industry and academic viewers who considered themselves critically sophisticated connoisseurs of an underappreciated art form they would rescue from its status as unjustly despised:

The richest and most compelling piece of television--no, of popular culture--that I've encountered in the past twenty years is a meditation on the nature of morality, the possibility of redemption and the legacy of Freud.

To be sure, The Sopranos is much else as well. For two years (the third season began March 4) David Chase's HBO series has served up a hybrid genre of post-Godfather decline-of-the-mob movie and soap opera, with plenty of sex, violence, domestic melodrama and comic irony; a portrait of a suburban landscape that does for northern New Jersey what film noir did for Los Angeles, with soundtrack to match; a deft depiction of class and cultural relations among various subgroups and generations of Italian-Americans; a gloss on the manners and mores of the fin-de-siècle American middle-class family; and perfect-pitch acting, especially by James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano; Edie Falco as his complicated wife, Carmela; Lorraine Bracco as Dr. Melfi; and the late Nancy Marchand as the Sopranos' terrifying matriarch, Livia.

Cumulatively, these episodes have the feel of an as yet unfinished nineteenth-century novel. While the sheer entertainment and suspense of the plot twists are reminiscent of Dickens and his early serials, the underlying themes evoke George Eliot: The world of Tony Soprano is a kind of postmodern Middlemarch, whose inhabitants' moral and spiritual development (or devolution) unfolds within and against the norms of a parochial social milieu.This era being what it is, however, the Sopranos' milieu has porous boundaries, and the norms that govern it are a moving target. In one scene, the family is in mid-breakfast when Tony and Carmela's teenage daughter, Meadow, apropos a recent scandal brought on by a high school classmate's affair with her soccer coach, declaims about the importance of talking openly about sex. Yes, Tony agrees, but not during breakfast. "Dad, this is the 1990s," Meadow protests. "Outside it may be the 1990s," Tony retorts, "but in this house it's 1954." It's wishful thinking, and Tony knows it.

Ellen Willis, Our Mobsters, Ourselves, The Nation, 2001

The first thing one notices is that Ellen Willis has lost her mind. At least, she has lost the critical capacities which once operated in, or were operated by, her mind alongside the functioning of sensual and aesthetic responsiveness. Here we see an unmistakable case of rationalisation, but one so frantic and excessive it's laughable. Or ought to be. A once sharp and curious culture critic devotes herself now to concocting a truly risibly exaggerated encomium to her favourite show, probably to alleviate some anxiety about the intensity of her own attachment to it. In the period known as the post-modern, consensus became difficult and even suspect with regard to the evaluation of aesthetic and entertainment products. But it is worth asserting the continued obviousness and intelligibility of aspects of discourse and symbolic artifacts. And it is obvious, not contestable, that The Sopranos is not particularly like Middlemarch, and that it is rather very much like other, earlier television, all the television Willis once pretended not to be watching and therefore must not now seem to recall. Tony Soprano declaring it 1954 at his table is a strikingly exact echo of Archie Bunker at his. The patriarch champion of Tradition, disconcerted by modernity and its disruption of hierarchies and order, is a beloved topos of popular culture - before Archie Bunker and George Jefferson's celebrated comic versions there were dozens upon dozens, in varying styles and temperaments, notably Yul Brenner's Siamese King, Topol's Shtetl milkman, and yes, of course, most relevant here, Don Corleone who resists 'the future' and its messenger the narcotics trafficking Virgil Solozzo - but it is not found in Middlemarch.



Where the culture critic who remained critical and serious should sense the obligation to interpret the representations and symbolic material, as for example the change from All in the Family to The Sopranos involving the erasure of any unpleasant acknowledgements of the discomfort of real class stresses (working for a living), Willis abdicates or evades, shields her eyes from signification which might distress a fanatic devotee of the programme invested in its virtue as a confirmation of the innate instinctive virtue of her tastes. Instead of interpreting the programme's content, in context of history, genre, tradition, medium, instituion, etc, Willis, spaniel-like, sniffs out and feasts on the bits of bloody meat that are the pomo references (to Freud, for example, or Queer Theory or Billy Budd), these mere flashes that, as Jameson explained, create an illusion of content without the substance, empty passing mentions scattered through the otherwise formulaic dialogue and scenes precisely to distract, delight and defang the submissive critic who has lost her mind.

Tony Soprano is the entrepreneurial Archie Bunker, criminalised for glamour and fashionable intertextuality, but also for ideology's sake, for television's purpose is to disguise the reality of social life in the guise of exposing it, and among the things television must, and the Sopranos does expertly, conceal is the distance between the mythic condition of the small businessman/entrepreneur in the US and the real situation.

But putting Willis' particular case of commodity fanaticism and the details of the individual commodity which has provoked it aside for the moment, clearly much had changed in both mainstream and progressive dissident attitudes toward corporate mass culture since the days (beginning in the 70s) when feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist critics, radical and reformist, began seriously (in the academy and in a growing field of hip journalism) to look at both popular culture and mass culture commodities in search of an understanding of the symbolic and ideological aspects of class rule and the reproduction of social relations of inequality, opression and exploitation. At some point - not so long ago, perhaps 1999 - a rival function of cultural criticism, disguised as the perfection of this critical, emancipatory project, arose, and now we see that the dominant production, in both academia and hip journalism, is purely promotional, a branch of marketing. Culture critics who have lost their minds and succumbed to commodity fanaticism have reverted to the deployment, on culture commodities, not of the arsenal of critical practises developed by the radical criticism of the 70s, 80s and 90s, but of scarcely updated criteria of literary criticism and art appreciation established in the 19th century, from various formalisms to moral functionalism which in its current incarnation proposes to evaluate television programmes and movies almost solely with regard to the mass media's imagined social function of delivering democratic representation.

This latter position holds - reasonably enough - that one must welcome something like Queer Eye for a Straight Guy if only because the increased visibility of likeable gay men on television seems to reduce expressions of homophobia and violence against gay men. Not every claim of this kind is true, but the type of claim and its argument is undeniably valid, though not as a defence against full interpretation and critical exegesis of the culture commodity which has this positive trait. Unsurprisingly, however, the logic is rarely accepted thoroughly by those who deploy it, but is usually deployed opportunistically (a characteristic of commodity fanaticism is this opportunistic shuffling of criteria, axioms and critical practises) - programmes are not open to criticism, usually, on the grounds that they fail to perform such positive functions. It is a merit but not after all an obligation for television "art". And worse, the criterion can, under the influence of passionate enough commodity fanaticism, be called upon in a distorted way to justify programmes and movies which actually demonstrably incite or aggravate prejudices, hatred and violence against people conforming to a type presented as such, on the grounds that the type derives from and reflects "reality" and that real people referred to by this fictional type (say, clockers) benefit from being visible on television even if presented as terrifying, heartless, dangerous and needing to be incarcerated or annihilated, so best to be down with from the safety of the other side of the fictional bullet proof flat screen of the tv.

HOPE II: Can Disaster Capitalists Save Haiti?

Can low-paying garment industry save Haiti?

By JONATHAN M. KATZ, Associated Press Writer – Sun Feb 21, 5:24 pm ET

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Jordanie Pinquie Rebeca leans forward and guides a piece of suit-jacket wool and its silky lining into a sewing machine, where — bat! bat! bat! — they're bound together to be hemmed.

If she does this for eight hours, she will earn $3.09. Her boss will ship the pinstriped suit she helped make to the United States, tariff-free. There a shopper will buy it from JoS. A. Bank Clothiers for $550.

In the quest to rebuild Haiti, the international community and business leaders are dusting off a pre-quake plan to expand its low-wage garment assembly industry as a linchpin of recovery. President Barack Obama's administration is on board, encouraging U.S. retailers to obtain from Haiti at least 1 percent of the clothes they sell.

But will that save a reeling country whose economy must be built from scratch?

Few Haitians have steady incomes, and unemployment is unmeasurable; before the quake it was estimated at between 60 and 80 percent. In cities, most scrape by selling in the streets, doing odd jobs or relying on remittances from abroad that make up a quarter of Haiti's $7 billion gross domestic product.

Garments are central to the economic growth plan commissioned by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last year, a 19-page report written by Oxford University economics professor Paul Collier and promoted by former President Bill Clinton as special envoy to the impoverished nation.

They say the sector could quickly produce hundreds of thousands of jobs thanks chiefly to two things: an existing preferential trade deal with the nearby United States, and cheap Haitian labor.

The deal is the Haiti Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act, or "HOPE II." Passed by the U.S. Congress in 2008, it lets Haiti export textiles duty-free to the U.S. for a decade. Last year, $513 million worth of Haitian-made apparel, the bulk of exports, was shipped with labels including Hanes and New Balance. Factory profit margins average about 22 percent, according to Washington-based Nathan Associates Inc.

The cheap labor is Jordanie Pinquie Rebeca, and others like her.

During a recent shift at the South Korean-owned factory where she works six days a week, employees softly sang a Creole hymn beneath the hot fluorescent lights: "Lord, take my hand. Bring me through."

It was HOPE II that persuaded the bosses to move their Dominican plant and rename it DKDR Haiti SA. Nearly all the 1,200 people still working there after the quake make the new "outsourcing" minimum wage of 125 gourdes a day, about $3.09 — approximately the same as the minimum wage in 1984 and worth less than half its previous purchasing power.

Pay was even lower last year when lawmakers raised the country's minimum from $1.72 a day to almost $5 in response to protests. But owners complained, and President Rene Preval refused to enact the law. A compromise allowed non-garment workers to receive the higher minimum, but stuck factory workers with the "outsourcing" wage.

DKDR complied but cut production-based incentives, according to general manager Chun Ho Lee. Producing 600 pieces in a day used to yield a worker a bonus of $2.47. Now it's worth $1.23.

Rebeca, though stylish in her paperboy hat and spaghetti-strap dress, sleeps on the street and barely eats. With a day's pay she can buy a cupful of rice and transport via group taxi, and pay down debt on her now-destroyed apartment. Anything left over goes to cell phone minutes to call her boyfriend, who was evacuated to the Dominican Republic with a leg fracture sustained in the quake, or her 4-year-old son, Mike, whom she sent to live with relatives in the countryside.

Meanwhile, holding that low-paying job makes it tough to get handouts from relief workers.

"The foreigners are giving people food outside, but I can't get anything. I have to stay here working all day," she said.

All sides agree that garment-industry wages are too low to feed, clothe and house workers and their families. Even factory owners acknowledge that reality — though they deny running sweatshops and say the businesses have an important role.

"It's not enough to make a decent living, but it's the first step" toward economic recovery, said George Sassine, president of the Association of Industries of Haiti.

Others said relying too much on clothing assembly is risky.

"The garment sector is creating trouble for the economy because of social tensions and the low wages," said prominent Haitian economist Kesner Pharel.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, himself an economist, said that while the garment industry shouldn't be ignored, increased investment should be sought in more enduring sectors such as agriculture and tourism.

Still others fear a return to darker times: Under the brutal Duvalier dictatorships that ended in the mid-1980s, a small elite reaped the profits from facilities that assembled garments, baseballs and toys for sale in the U.S.

Last month's earthquake cracked the metal-roofed DKDR building's walls and prompted a costly, two-week shutdown. Another company's factory, west of the capital in Carrefour, collapsed entirely, killing at least 300 workers.

But garment industry production has already rebounded to 80 or 90 percent of capacity, and the boosters' enthusiasm is unshaken.

In a recent opinion piece published in The New York Times, Collier likened the moment to the opening of the American West: "The earthquake could usher in such a boom in Haiti."

There are currently 25,000 garment jobs, three-quarters less than there were 20 years ago. Most are in the same industrial park where DKDR's plant is located. Owners want to expand to two new sites outside Port-au-Prince in line with government wishes to reduce pressure in the debris-choked capital where most of the 200,000 quake victims died.

At an October investors conference, Clinton laid out a vision for Haiti's economy in which garments play a central role: "The rich will get richer, but there will be a much, much bigger middle class, with poor people pouring into it at a rapid rate."

For Haitians like Rebeca, who is unable to find other work, the chances of making that leap seem dim.

"We're just fighting to survive," she said, sewing.

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