Futures and Pasts

I associate William F Buckley with pornography and spiders. Coming from a left liberal family this is probably putting  a kind face on what the older generations of my family thought of him. But I am too young to have experienced the animosity they held towards Buckley when he was at his height,  so instead I knew him as the punchline to two great Woody Allen jokes.

The first is in Bananas where Allen’s character– Fielding Mellish– is at a newstand buying pornography, finds The National Review in the pornography section and buys it to cover up the other obscene material he purchased;

The second- not on the internet- is in Annie Hall when Alvy Singer comes over to Annie Hall’s apartment to kill a spider. When he gets there he notices a copy of the National Review and reacts with horror. Annie tells him she is trying out new things. Alvy replies:  ” Then why don’t  you get William F. Buckley to kill the spider.”

Both jokes are hilarious, but they treat Buckley better then he deserved. As the following exchanges with Vidal and Chomsky demonstrate: he was a toff, racist, jingoist, classist, proto-fascist with ideas far more obscene then the worst pornography and a magazine that wasn’t even worth wiping your ass with. Its a shame there are so many more where he came from.

The videos are also a depressing reminder that there used to be Leftists on TV worth a damn, who could obliterate the gibberish the right wing calls an argument. Yet, somehow Buckley’s follows are hegemonic and DLC hacks represent the Left. That is the real tragedy.

Edward W. Said’s Traveling Theory and Traveling Theory Reconsidered both examined how Lukacs’s idea of reification was adapted and transformed by  theorists in different contexts. In the former Said argued that reification was domesticated by academia, in the later he argued it was also radicalized by Adorno and Fanon.

Pier Paulo Pasolini offers an intriguing parallel in his discussion of how the genre of Italian neo-realism traveled:

“Italian neo-realism moved into France and England. It has not finished. The only place it is dead is in Italy. It has changed its nature and become a different cultural entity, but it has continued in France with Godard and in the new English cinema. The odd thing is that after moving into France and England particularly via the myth of Rosselini, neo-realism is appearing again in Italy with the younger directors; Bertolucci and Bellocchio are carrying on Italian neo-realism filtered back via Godard and the English cinema.”

He continues;

“I think you can see the English cinema is very much influenced by neo-realism. I was in England just a while ago and saw Poor Cow– even a child could see it is a produce of Italian neo-realism which has moved in a different context.”

What is interesting in both instances is why and how these important counter hegemonic ideas/genre…forms… traveled and what their ramifications were. The academic realm demands more in depth studies on them. The cultural realm demands modern equivalents.

I more anti-Oedipus then pro-Oedipus, but I do love speculation.

Following up on my earlier post about Pasolini’s unacknowledged influence on Bertolucci’s The Conformist– I came across this Pasolini comment on his influence on Bertolucci:

“I think more then being influenced by me, he reacted against me. I was rather like a father to him, and so he reacted against me…Maybe I gave him something indefinable, but he was always able to tell the authentic from the inauthentic. I always had a very general influence on him, and as regards his style he is completely different from me. His real master is Godard.”

This new information indicates that because 1) Bertolucci is extremely Oedipul and 2) Pasolini’s influence on Bertolucci was general and not the stylistic influence of Godard he jettisoned in The Conformist,  perhaps there is some substance to my speculation that Pasolini is the only father Bertolucci did not kill in The Conformist.

I synthesized my post on Hilary Clinton with my other posts on Marx. The fine people at Long Sunday were good enough to post it. Check it out.

Ralph Nader announced he is entering the presidential race today. The liberal blogs responded with opprobrium. Reed Hunt does so here. DHinMI really lets him have it; “For making America and the world bear the risks and potential costs of his actions, Ralph Nader should be judged one of the most unethical politicians in America” here. This singling out would seem to go against DHinMI’s later admission that Nader was a necessary but not sufficient cause of Gore loosing the 2000 election. But, even if you do grant that Nader was a cause of Gore loosing, that does not make him anymore ethically or morally responsible for the cluster fuck of the Bush administration then the rest of us. This fact can easily be obfuscated if the blame is pinned on him. If Ralph Nader didn’t exist he would have to be invented. Long live the cult of the Goreacle.

Not the somewhat dubious article on May ‘68 in today’s Independent- Egalite! Liberte! Sexualite- which jettisoned the egalite and the liberte,  reducing the whole to do to the fact the French hadn’t freaked out, and then put out, like their contemporaries in England and the USA. But, something that took place in France that year, which displays the sexual abandon the French so desperately needed. Perhaps this is really what trigged the May days;

Today it struck me that Pasolini’s definition of conformity is a concise summary of how I remember Marcello, the conformist in Bertolucci’s Il Conformista.

Today’s Guardian has an interview with Bertolucci about the film. He has this to say about it:

“The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference. In that last scene, he understands why he became a fascist – even the worst fascist of all – because he wanted to hide and forget what he feels are his differences in his deep, deep consciousness. It’s like realising that even fascists have a sub-consciousness.”

With the Freudian influence the movie has, you could then say the conformist’s repression of his difference articulates Pasolini’s point;

You could say it [conformism] is the decadence of integration into society. The average man is proud of being what he is and wants everyone else to be the same. He is reductive; he doesn’t believe in passion and sincerity, he doesn’t believe in people revealing themselves and confessing because the average man is not supposed to do these things. But the other characteristic, equal and opposite, is that this consciousness is not a class consciousness, it’s a moralistic, not a political consciousness.

Yet, Pasolini only makes a brief appearance in the Bertolucci interview, where it is mentioned that they were friends and that Bertolucci worked for Pasolini. Instead, the majority of the article focuses on Bertolucci’s Freudian theory that his work was an attempt to kill both his biological father; Attilo Bertoluci, and his cinematic father; Jean-Luc Godard.

In Godard’s case this is played out in his rejection of Il Conformista with the note he gave Bertolucci that read; ‘You have to fight against individualism and capitalism.’ Bertolucci attributes this break to the oblique fact that “I had finished the period in which to be able to communicate would be considered a mortal sin. He had not.”

The unclear meaning of this leaves room for speculating that Pasolini’s influence is unacknowledged. For in contrast to Godard, Pasolini’s conception of capitalist conformity is that it eradicates individuality and communication, and in doing so stymies political consciousness for morality.  Does this make Pasolini the father Bertolucci’s hasn’t killed? or is his just a massive unacknowledged influence? What i know of Bertolucci’s later works would seem to confirm both. Further, does Bertolucci’s reductive Freudian interpretation wreak of another type of conformism that evacuates broader social, cultural or historical influences?

Caught this while browsing through Pasolini on Pasolini. Because its Pasolini, its tempting to view his definition of conformism from the framework of the Gramscian elaboration of hegemony as common sense, countered with his own revolutionary artistic moral aesthetic;

” Interviewer: You seem to feel that conformism is an essential feature of the average man… what do you think it is, and is the essential of the average man not to realize what he is?

Pasolini: You could say it is the decadence of integration into society. The average man is proud of being what he is and wants everyone else to be the same. He is reductive; he doesn’t believe in passion and sincerity, he doesn’t believe in people revealing themselves and confessing because the average man is not supposed to do these things. But the other characteristic, equal and opposite, is that this consciousness is not a class consciousness, it’s a moralistic, not a political consciousness.”

Those interested in learning about Pasolini should read this

The professor of my Marx class made a telling connection between a passage in Capital and the new Hilary Clinton ad.  Since I was also struck by the rank absurdity of the new Clinton ad, and wish I had made the analogy, this post will relate and elaborate on it.

The new  Clinton ad is running in Ohio. I believe it was introduced following Clinton’s speech in Youngstown,  a steel town which has been particularly devastated by the affects of globalization (as this Springsteen video documents.) This ties in with the Ad’s purpose; to appeal to the traditional democratic base of lower income workers i.e. the working class.  But the content of the ad backfires because Clinton’s attempt to identify with working class people is made palpably ludicrous; first by her patronizing empathy; then by the way she identifies with their lives:

Here is the video you should watch it, just to see the end. But if you can’t be bothered, here is the text for the crucial part:

You pour coffee, fix hair, you work the night shift at the local hospital,” says the announcer in the 30-second spot, ‘Night Shift,’ over footage of workers on the job.

“You’re often overworked, underpaid, and sometimes overlooked. But not by everyone. One candidate has put forth an American family agenda to make things easier for everyone who works so hard. ….”

The ad ends with a photo of Clinton working at her desk at night. “She understands. She’s worked the night shift, too.”

Now of course the “night shift” that Clinton works is qualitatively different then the people who work the night shift that the ad is aimed at. As my prof. noted this distinction reflects Marx biting passage where the capitalist attempts to identify themselves with the worker by claiming that they also contribute to the valorization process:

Our capitalist, who is at home in his vulgar economy, exclaims: “Oh! but I advanced my money for the express purpose of making more money.” The way to Hell is paved with good intentions, and he might just as easily have intended to make money, without producing at all. [14] He threatens all sorts of things. He won’t be caught napping again. In future he will buy the commodities in the market, instead of manufacturing them himself. But if all his brother capitalists were to do the same, where would he find his commodities in the market? And his money he cannot eat. He tries persuasion. “Consider my abstinence; I might have played ducks and drakes with the 15 shillings; but instead of that I consumed it productively, and made yarn with it.” Very well, and by way of reward he is now in possession of good yarn instead of a bad conscience; and as for playing the part of a miser, it would never do for him to relapse into such bad ways as that; we have seen before to what results such asceticism leads. Besides, where nothing is, the king has lost his rights; whatever may be the merit of his abstinence, there is nothing wherewith specially to remunerate it, because the value of the product is merely the sum of the values of the commodities that were thrown into the process of production. Let him therefore console’ himself with the reflection that virtue is its own reward, But no, he becomes importunate. He says: “The yarn is of no use to me: I produced it for sale.” In that case let him sell it, or, still better, let him for the future produce only things for satisfying his personal wants, a remedy that his physician MacCulloch has already prescribed as infallible against an epidemic of over-production. He now gets obstinate. “Can the labourer,” he asks, “merely with his arms and legs, produce commodities out of nothing? Did I not supply him with the materials, by means of which, and in which alone, his labour could be embodied? And as the greater part of society consists of such ne’er-do-wells, have I not rendered society incalculable service by my instruments of production, my cotton and my spindle, and not only society, but the labourer also, whom in addition I have provided with the necessaries of life? And am I to be allowed nothing in return for all this service?” Well, but has not the labourer rendered him the equivalent service of changing his cotton and spindle into yarn? Moreover, there is here no question of service. [15] A service is nothing more than the useful effect of a use-value, be it of a commodity, or be it of labour. [16] But here we are dealing with exchange-value. The capitalist paid to the labourer a value of 3 shillings, and the labourer gave him back an exact equivalent in the value of 3 shillings, added by him to the cotton: he gave him value for value. Our friend, up to this time so purse-proud, suddenly assumes the modest demeanour of his own workman, and exclaims: “Have I myself not worked? Have I not performed the labour of superintendence and of overlooking the spinner? And does not this labour, too, create value?” His overlooker and his manager try to hide their smiles. Meanwhile, after a hearty laugh, he re-assumes his usual mien. Though he chanted to us the whole creed of the economists, in reality, he says, he would not give a brass farthing for it. He leaves this and all such like subterfuges and juggling tricks to the professors of Political Economy, who are paid for it. He himself is a practical man; and though he does not always consider what he says outside his business, yet in his business he knows what he is about. “

We have seen that both Clinton and the capitalist claim affinity with the workers. Like the working class in Ohio, Clinton works the night shift. Like the workers in his textile mill the capitalist also works to organize them. But the crucial difference between Clinton and the night shift worker in Ohio and the capitalist and his worker is of course choice vs coercion.  In Marxian terminology, Clinton and the capitalists activities possess personal use-value, while the workers are forced to alienate their use-value, turn it into exchange value and produce the surplus value the capitalist appropriates as profit. So, Whereas Clinton chooses to check her email at night and the capitalist chooses to produce yarn, the night shift worker in Ohio and the textile worker do not choose to work under inhumane conditions.

Yet, the perversity of this comparison is illuminating. For, in highlighting the comparison between Clinton and the capitalist, two important points are revealed. The first is that like a law of gravity the neo-liberal candidates world view mirrors the capitalists. The second is that this world view, or at least the way it is articulated in what could be a disingenuous manner, cannot discuss matters such as class or economic coercion. Here the capitalist truly meets American political discourse.

Following up on the earlier post, Marx continues his exposition on the working day by offering examples of how workers lives are consumed by the labour process. They serve to demonstrate and give emotional resonance to the plight of the worker.

Although Marx’s examples seem anachronistic to those of us in the west, they are only too presient for the subterranean sweat shops, immigrant farm workers and workers of the global south who have taken our place and whose lives are consumed by the current manifestation of the capitalist labour process. Viewed in this light the example of Mary Anne Walkey has countless contemporaries;

“employed in a highly respectable dressmaking establishment, exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story was now revealed once again. These girls work, on average, 16 1/2 hours without a break, during the season often 30 hours, and the flow of their failing “labour power” is maintained  by occasional supplies of sherry, port or coffee. It was the height of the season. It was necessary, in the twinkling of an eye, to conjure up magnificent dresses for the noble ladies invited to the ball in honour of the newly imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkey had worked uninterruptedly for 261/2 hours, with sixty other girls, thirty in each room. The rooms provided only 1/3 of the necessary quantity of air, measured in cubic feet. At night the girls slept in pairs in the stifling holes into which a bedroom was divided by wooden partitions. And this was one of the better millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne Walkey fell ill on the friday and died on the Sunday, without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having finished off the bit of finery she was working on.”

These and many other examples, which include 7 year olds working 16 hour days, leads Marx to his definition of a working day;

“What is a working day? What is the length of time during which capital may consume the labor-power whose daily value it has paid for? how far may the working day be extended beyond the amount of labour-time necessary for the reproduction of labour-power itself? We have seen that capital’s reply to these questions is this; the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of a few hours of rest with which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing its services. Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other then labour-power for the duration of his whole life, and that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital. Time for education, for intellectual developement, for the fufillment of social functions, for social intercourse, for the free play of the vital forces of his body and his mind, ever the rest time of Sunday (and that in the country of Sabbatarians)- what foolishness! But in its blind and measureless drive, its insatiable appetite for surplus labour, capital oversteps not only the moral but even the merely physical limits of the working day. It usurps the time for growth development and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over meal times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself, so that food is added to the worker as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, and grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed  for the restoration, renewal and refreshement of the vital forces to the exact amount of torpor essential to the revival of an absolutely  exhausted organism. It is not the normal maintenance of labour-power which determines the limits of the working day here, but rather the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory and painful it may be, which determines the limits of the worker’s period of rest. Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power, in the same way that a greedy farmer snatches more produce from the soil by robbing it of its fertility.”

I believe this passage also demonstrates the underlying humanist concern of Marx.  For its main focus is on the dehumanization of the worker and the fact that he/she is treated as a means to the end of the further accumulation of capital. In contrast his idea of freedom is not for the worker to be treated as a means to the end of the further perpetuation of the bureaucratic Leninist/Stalinist state, but that they possess freedom from necessity and the freedom to pursue the edifying activities which the labour-process prevents. This is what being fully human means.