Class and the Culture War Part 2: Abstract Value, Concrete Genocide

Published Sep 20, 2023, 4:00 AM

In part 2 of Mia's look at the history of class discourse, a technical argument about productive workers is warped by the Nazis and later Ronald Reagan into the ideological basis of fascism

Hi, everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming at you today, sweaty, smelly, and exhausted from my pickup truck out in the desert where I have been spending the weekend trying my best to help, along with lots of other dedicated mutual aid workers, to mitigate the damage done by an entirely preventable humanitarian crisis at the United States Southern border. People are being held in the open desert in Hakomba, where it gets hot in the day gets very cold at night, and there are children, there are old people, there are young people. All the support they're getting it's from mutual aid workers, then maybe get some water from border patrol, from federal government, and not much else. And I'm here before your podcast to ask you if you can to help. We've all spent all of our time and most of our money the last few days week trying to help, and we're all pretty broke, and we're all pretty tired. But I could really do with your support, and I'm going they give the venmos and cash apps and PayPal information for two organizations who ideally love and whose work I have seen is extremely effective and is the only thing keeping this situation from being a lot worse. And please don't think that if you don't have much money that you shouldn't give. We can do a lot with a little. So if you only have five bucks, that is great. And five bucks is are top for someone to sleep under or a few hot meals. And what we're going to buy is food, blankets, tarps, water, the things that stop people dying in the desert. Those two organizations, Border Kindness and Free Shit Collective can be found online at border Kindness and at free ship pb on Twitter. For Borderkindness, the venmo is at border hyphen Kindness. The cash app is dollar sign border Kindness cash and the xell and PayPal information is info at Borderkindness dot org. Free Ship Collective are at free Ship Collective on cash app and PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys.

Welcome to tag it Appened Here, a podcast about why everything absolutely sucks. I'm your host, Nia Long. I'm back again and last episode we talked about the problems with conceiving of all of labor as production from a sort of macro feminist perspective of you know, thinking about how you know, thinking of all labor, as production doesn't actually capture what most labor is. And you know, we looked at how this allowed patriarchy to become a wedge to private workers movement apart. But there's another sort of more micro problem with thinking about productive labor, and that micro problem is that people are just absolutely unable to think about productivity in anything other than moral terms. As to you know, why this is the case, I'm not going to go forward an answer. I've seen every theory from like it's Christianity, to like it's ductual feature of capitalism to its human nature or whatever. I'm I don't know, pick pick your theory about why everyone is incapable of being normal about productivity. But this turns out to be a real problem for anyone who is trying to use productive versus unproductive labor in a purely technical sense. Now, the most famous person to do this is, as some of you probably know, one, Karl Marx. And you know I was hard on Mark's last episode, but this one and the stuff that's going to follow isn't really his fault. Marx here is actually doing one of the times where he's being very reasonable and he's being very specific about what productive labor is and everyone else is being extremely unreasonable. And you know, given the incredibly dark places this is going to go, maybe this is one of those things where like, I don't know, you need to pick differ words that aren't as emotionally charged as like productive and unproductive labor. But all in all, like this, the catastrophe that's about to unfold is not Marx's fault. There was really no way that he could have known how nuts everyone was going to go over this. So what actually is the distinction between productive and unproductive labor? From Marx? So, first off, and this is very important, productive versus unproductive labor is a technical term. It has no moral content at all. All it means is that some labor produces capital for the capital owning class and some labor doesn't. That that's literally it. Here's Marx. The commodities the capitalists buys for his own private consumption are not consumed productively. They do not become factors of capital. Just as little to the service as he buys for his consumption voluntarily or through compulsion from the state, et cetera, for the sake of their useful value, They do not become a factor of capital. They are not therefore productive kinds of labor, and those who perform them are not productive workers. As you can see, this has literally nothing to do with the contents of the labor itself or morality whatsoever. If a dancer works for production company and gives a performance you know, working for the company, that's productive labor because the company has turned their capital into more capital by using the dancer to produce a commodity, which is to performance, and then selling it. Right if that same dancer puts on the same performance in the same place for a crowd of you know, just like their friends or even the same people, but who aren't paying a production company for it, Suddenly the dancer, who again is doing the same thing in the same place like even could be on the same day, is doing non productive labor because no capital is being created from it. Or, as you know, here's how Marx puts it, labor with the same content can therefore be both productive and unproductive. Milton, for example, who did Paradise Loss, was an unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who delivers hack work for his publisher is a productive worker. Later on, Milton sold the product for five dollars, and to that extent became a dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian who produces books e g. Compendium Political Economy at the instruction of his publisher is roughly speaking, a productive worker insofar as his production is subsumed under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the latter's valorization. This is a valorization of capital, which is like having capital make more capital. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her singing for money, she is to that extent a wage laborer or a commodity dealer. But the same singer when she is engaged by an entrepreneur who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she directly produces capital. A school master who educates others is not a productive worker, but a schoolmaster who was engaged as a wage laborer and an institution alongside along with others, in order to make in order through his labor to valorize the money of the entrepreneur of the knowledge mongering institution is a productive worker. Now, okay, reading a lot of Marx here, I'm focusing on Marx, you know, because whether or not someone in you know, the eighteen hundreds is a Marxist or not. And if you picked this like a random worker in the period when this is being written, the odds are really bad that they're going to be a Marxist. Marx was enormously influential, particularly in Europe as sort of social democracy swept through the Germany's and then communism sort of swept back through Europe. In the US, and Marx is also and this is something that Marx himself like takes great pains to conceal a lot of the time. Marx is a kind of medium through which the broad cultural consensus on labor was transformed into capital T theory. And in this capital T theory, productive versus unproductive labor is not a moral claim at all. It's a measure of whether any given labor produces capital for the bourgeoisie. Now, part of what Marx is trying to do here is to intervene in existing discourse about productive and unproductive labor, to turn it into useful theory instead of people just yelling stuff at each other and Marks, I feel you, buddy, oh boy. Taking this as a validation of what I'm doing. God, here's an example I'm just going to put in here of Marx being very mad about this. The self employed laborer, for example, is his own wage laborer, and his own means of production confront him in his own mind as capital. As his own capitalist, he employs himself as a wage laborer. Anomalies of this type then offer a favorable field for outpourings of drivel about productive and unproductive labor. So, you know, even in the eighteen hundreds, people are sit being incredibly normal about this. They're saying things that are great and good, and only only that they're being exceptionally good. Marx isn't slowly being driven mad by reading at all. But you know, when when it's being used as a technical category, the sort of productive versus unproductive distinction, you know, it can tell you a lot of stuff about how a capitalist economy functions. But when it inevitably becomes a moral category, things get very bad, very quickly. And so we're going to go into two times that this has gone very badly, the Nazis and Ronald Reagan. Now, the Nazis and Reagan aren't quite doing the same thing, although there's a lot of similarities, which is, you know, to be expected from a band who went to a Nazi cemetery that included a bunch of SS dudes and then gave a speech defending his actions where he said, and I quote they, which is referring to Nazi soldiers, quote they were victims just as surely as the victims and the concentration camps, which I I, I.

What the fuck, what are you even supposed to do with that? Like, I just this guy was a president of the United States. I mean, I like, I don't know it makes sense, but like it never even crossed my mind that it was like it would even be possible to have a take that is, people in the Nazi army are actually just as much victims as the people in the concentration camps. Like I, I don't know, baffling stuff by Reagan, I mean, I guess not baffling, considering how closely his administration is tied to a.

Bunch of sort of Nazis who became like anti communists while here were always anti coomicist, but who became part of sort of like institutional anti communism and like the post war era. But god, what a terrible thing I'm getting my shots in at Reagan now because this is about to get so incredibly bleak. So yay, so okay. So the Right is able to sort of, you know, very successful in fact, in transforming this distinction between productive and non productive labor into a moral category, and then they infuse it with anti Semitism, and through this sort of I don't know, the horror of anti Semitism, productive labor is transformed into you know, productive and unproductive members of society. And this is one of the origins of sort of Nazi race science and race craft. You know, they have their attempt to quote unquote purify their race, which relies on a distinction between sort of productive and non productive members of society who's like quote unquote value and productive capacity you know, come to be seen as like genetically heritable, which you know, from the Nazi perspective, they are like, oh, this is stuff, this is heritable. We need to do eugenics and mass exterminations of you know, increasing numbers of disabled, queer communists and especially Jewish and Groma people to ensure that only the quote unquote like productive members society remain and like pass down their traits. And this is fucking horrible. But this is also too simple for an explanation for what actually happens. In order to actually fully grasp the depths of what's happening here and how this stuff functions, we need to go deeper into specifically looking at anti Semitism, And in order to do this, I'm going to turn to the great sort of the great social theorist moist pistone Dressed in Peace died a few years ago. Apparently a great guy. I don't know, but yeah, postone and his essay Anti Semitism and National Socialism. This is something I recommend people read it in full. It's a bit theoretically intense. It's also like one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read. But I think it's important to understand what national socialism actually was and what it's what it's sort of ideological basis was, because it, oh boy, not only has it not gone away, it you know, it's it's it's it's it's doing. It's doing it's doing a lot of the sort of work that we've we've been sort of discussing. Okay, so what what what is what is pistone actually talking about? So postone sees Nazi anti Semitism not just as you know, the sort of socialism of fools where like Jewish people get substituted for capitalists to see the worker and okay, like yeah, it's like it's it serves as function to some extent, but for postone, like Nazi anti Semitism is its own sort of horrific, incomplete anti capitalist system. It's this sort of ghastly aryan mirror of like Marxism, and you know, okay, so, so to to get an understanding of what he means by this, because this is something that is you know, like it's it's it's deeply it's kind of theoretically intense, but it's worth it. So in Marxism, this the central mystery of the commodity is that a commodity is a well, I mean, central mystery isn't the right word, but this is this is one of the one of the opening things in capital is that, you know, this is this is this thing called the commodity fetish. You have a commodity. A commodity is simultaneously a concrete physical object that nonetheless contains within it an abstract social relation. It has at the same time a use value, which is like, you know, the thing that makes it useful. Right, Like take a pencil, right, pencil, it has a used value. The use value is that you can like use it to write things, right, and you can use it to erase things. But the pencil also has an exchange value. And the exchange value, you know, is the value quote unquote that you use it to compare it to other commodities. Right, it's like how much is this thing? How much is this thing worth? How much is this compared to like other commodities, And this is a that's simply an enormous that's that's kind of a simplication of it. But what's happening here is that the sort of the exchange value that lets you compare how much a pencil is worth and how much a bracelet is worth. Right, that's not an actual characteristic of the pencil or the bracelet. That is a serious you know that that's an embedded social relation, right, is an embedded capitalist social relation that allows a commodity to be compared to all other commodities by again like embedding this capitalist social relation into it. The important part for our purposes is that the commodity has at the same time a concrete component, which is the physical object, and an abstract component, which is the sort of capitalist social relation embedded in the pencil that makes it appear to have value. Here's pistone, as indicated above. On the logical level of the analysis of the commodity, the quote double character allows the commodity to appear as a purely material entity rather than as an objectification of mediated social relations. So this is a more complicated way of saying what I've sort of been trying to get at, which is that the commodity, you know, because it's a physical object, right. The commodity fetish allows the commodity to appear as if it's just a pure physical object instead of something that is produced by capitalism and contains within it capitalist social relations that give it value. So we'll back back back to pistone. Relatedly, it allows concrete labor to appear as a purely cial creative process separate from capitalist social relations. On the logical level of capital, the double character labor process and valorization process. And by valorization process he means the process that turns, you know, capital into more capital. So the fact that there's both a labor process, and a valorization process allows industrial production to appear as a purely material, creative process, separable from capital. The manifest form of the concrete is now more organic. Industrial capital can then appear as linear descendant of quote natural artismal labor as quote organically rooted in opposition to rootless, quote parasitic finance capital. You can see here where the whole sort of productive versus unproductive labor distinction has ended up right. It's been transformed into the sort of organic concrete rooted like productive national worker and like entrepreneur versus like rootless parasitic finance capital. This is unbelievably dangerous because now having set the concrete against the abstract, the fascist proceeds to turn the abstract into a people, which is Jewish people. The result of this is that in the fascist mind, the sort of concrete productive worker and the entrepreneurs stand against the abstract anti national finance capital personified in the figure of the jew. Here's postona again of what happened next. The extermination of European jeury is the indication that it is far too simple to deal with Nazism as a mass movement with anti capitalist overtones. Which shed that husk in the nineteen thirty four Rome push. At the latest, once dead served its purpose in state power have been seized. In the first place, ideological forms of thought are not simply conscious manipulations. In the second place, this view misunderstands the nature of Nazi anti capitalism, the extent to which it was intrinsically bound to the anti Semitic worldview. Auschwitz indicates that connection. It is true that the somewhat too concrete and Plebeian quote unquote anti capitalism of the essay was dispensed with by nineteen thirty four, not, however, the anti Semitic thrust the knowledge quote unquote that the source of evil is abstract the Jew. A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced, which unfortunately has to take the form of the production of goods of use values. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract. The extermination camps were not a terrible version of the factory. The extermination camps were not a terrible version of such a factory, but rather should be seen as its grotesque aryan quote anti capitalist and negation. Auschewist was a factory to quote unquote destroy value, that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to liberate the concrete from the abstract. The first step was a dehumanize, that is, to rip away the quote unquote mask of humanity, of qualitative specificity, and reveal the Jews for quote what they really are shadows Cipher's numbered abstractions. The second step was to then eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke, trying in the process to rest away the last remains of the concrete material use value, clothes, gold hair, soap. Auschwitz, not the Nazi seizure of power in nineteen thirty three, was the real German Revolution. The attempted to overthrow not merely of a political order, but of the existing social formation. By this one deed, the world was to be made safe from the tyranny of the abstract. In the process, the Nazis quote unquote liberated themselves from humanity. The Nazis lost the war against the Soviet Union, America and Britain. They won their war, their revolution against the European Jews. And this ideology, this pitting of the abstract against the concrete is so powerful that it was never defeated. By the time the Nazis were defeated militarily, they had, you know, by the combined might of five of the largest empires in human history, they had already won, and their ideology never went away. If you look closely, you can still see it moving throughout the world. You can see it in the left making exactly the same mistakes it made before, waging war against the abstract in the name of an anti capitalism that can never end with the actual destruction of capitalism in that specific form. You can see it in a right that openly espouses these exact same ideas, in the form of pitting their nationalists and patriots against the glblists, in the way it pits national American or Russian or Hungarian workers against George Soros. It is the basis of all modern right wing thought. And when we come back from ADS, we're going to talk about right wing thoughts other basis Ronald Reagan's rampant racism. We've now seen one way that the productive and unproductive working distinction can be turned into unfathomable right wing violence. And now we're going to take a look at another one, which is the myth of the welfare queen. So one of the ways that Reagan eventually took power was by I mean literally he was doing this for like a decade. He does it for like twenty fucking years. It's insufferable, is screaming about the myth of the welfare queen. So the welfare queen for people who like, I don't know, we're too young to like remember what I mean. I wasn't around for the original height of it, but like I fucking remember from when I was a kid. It's this sort of like mythical racist caricature of like a black woman who lives off of scamming the welfare system. And you can see what's happening here pretty clearly, right, This is not like a particularly subtle political maneuver. The plan is to pit you know, sort of so called like productive workers and entrepreneurs versus people on welfare and through through the sort of incredible power of racism and specifically misogyn noir, which is, you know, through the power of America. Is just like specific a bideen casured to black woman, the identity of the worker is transformed into a racial category. So what you're actually dealing with is this opposition Reagan is trying to between quote unquote like productive white people who like work for a living or whatever, and you know black welfare queens quote unquote who are dependent on the state and don't work. And this is this is this is sort of Reagan's framing of it. Now, if you go back to the sort of older Marxist conception of class, right, like unemployed black people are like unambiguously part of the working class. And this is something that Reagan understood. Now, part of what was going on here actually was Reagan attempting to sort of crack down on black welfare activists who were doing a lot of you know, really incredible organizing, ranging from sort of like you know, organizing mass protests to like doing squats to doing like full it's full on building occupations and Reagan and more so the people sort of around Reagan by the end because you know, by like by like term two, Reagan has like basically checked out. You know. But but the people around Reagan can see which way the wind is blowing, and you know, they are busy sort of like lining up every fan they can find to make the wind blow a bit stronger, And the way that the winds are blowing is that a bunch of people are about to be spat out of the capitalist system and too increasingly precarious service jobs or just no jobs at all. And as the sort of crisis dynamics emerged and intensified, and people tend to forget this. But Reagan's term started with him nuking the economy, setting off a recession and jacking employment up to ten percent. But you know, as this unfolds, Reagan sees a perfect opportunity to sever what Marks would call the industrial reserve army. Who are you know, all the people who've been spat out of the capitalist system and forced to face sort of precarity and unemployment. He sees an opportunity to like to split these people from workers who held onto their jobs. And the way you do this is by talking about class in a way that's really about race. This new sort of moral division of like productive non productive worker is incredibly racialized, which is to say that, like, I mean, it's just it's just really racist. There's no sort of I don't know, there's no I'm I'm not gonna do the circumlocution on that ship it is. It is really racist, and it's it's specifically designed to pit white workers against black workers. And it's also this is something we should point out here, like reality has no effect on on the sort of like dash repropaganda value. But like the people who are on welfare who are working like they're off, they're working a lot, they're working really shit jobs. They're working more than the people who aren't on welfare in a lot of cases. What's happening here, right is this is this, this, this entire thing is very specifically designed to pit white workers against black workers by invoking racial prejudice and slightly more subtly, it's designed to remove black workers from the category of labor altogether through you know, the sort of sort of means of America's like deep in abiding hatred of black women. Now back in sort of reality, and again bearing in mind, reality has no effect on this bullshit, but you know, back in reality, like the actual biggest welfare cheat of the modern era is Brett Farr, former quarterback in the Minnesota Vikings. Please send all complaints at irite, Okay on Twitter, far managed to spend seventy seven million dollars of welfare money on a bunch of bullshit that includes like trying to get a multimillion dollar volleyball facility built at his daughter's school. The actual woman who was like the model for the first like welfare queen thing like may have stolen eight thousand dollars. But you know this, this doesn't matter at all because again, like reality's ability to combat propaganda is incredibly weak. And you know, and the other thing that's that's important to understand about this, right is this was never actually about the money, and this is something that people use to try to combat this stuff, right, which people will point out and they're right that like, yeah, like you know, in order in order to like quote unquote combat welfare fraud, like you spend more money try to combat the fraud than you save on the fraud. But that's not the point. That's not the point at all. The point is again, like turning white workers against black workers happen to be unemployed, and it works incredibly well because they tap into two just really powerful wells of emotion racism, and they happen to do a second one, which is people hating work. But because this is the right the way they tap into people hating work was they transform it into the seething hatred and resentment at the possibility of someone not having to have the suffering that you have and doing the thing that you always want to do, which is not work, and then tying that to, oh, these people don't have to suffer the way that I do because they're living off of like the product of my labor. And you know, you can you can see the sort of ghosts right of like an anti capitalist critique of labor, which is like, yeah, there are a bunch of people who like don't work a fucking day in their lives off the prophecy proceeds of our labors. They wear a bunch of suits and they you know, they they're like seventeenth generation like descendants of the Walton family or whatever. But you know, this is this is the sort of right wing version of it. And so through the sort of lens of racism and through the sort of transformation of class and productivity like into into sort of like pure race discourse, they've managed to sort of, you know, they've managed to completely transform the way people think about class. And this is a this is a big part of the reason why the way Americans think about class is so incredibly messed up, and it's a big part of the reason why you know, the United States has spent i mean, spent the next fifty years doing this unbelie evenly merciless like ruthless purge and just like mass infliction of suffering on the poorest people in the US. It's because of this shit. And this is also the reason that no one, you know, if you're fucking reading the New York Times, right, you will never hear anybody talk about black workers. They will only ever talk about white workers. And this is because that ideological project, the ideological project that Reagan was attempting to do, was a big part of it was again about an attempt to expel black workers from the popular collective imagination of the working class. And it fucking worked. If you're a white pundit, you can do this thing. You can make an entire career off of study and quote unquote the working class only ever talk to white people, because that's the only part of the working class that like exists, to these people that they even will pretend matters. And then you know, never mentioned black workers even existing at all, much less like engage with black workers is like the core of the workers movements, and no one outside of like actual leftist circles or even bad and I no one, no one even thinks this is fucking weird, right, And you can get away with this ship because you know, eighty percent of all discourse about class is really about race or gender. And you know eighty percent of all discourse but race is fucking white people talking to other white people. And that's what we're going to end for today. We will we will come back to the sort of ruling class reaction to this another time. But in the meantime, this has been naked Happen here. Go out into the world and make something that's not this one. It could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.

Thanks for listening.

It Could Happen Here

It Could Happen Here started as an exploration of the possibility of a new civil war. Now a daily sh 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 1,182 clip(s)