Date: Sun, 7 Dec 1997 22:32:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: M-FEM: All Work and No Play? No Way!



The notion of _opposing_ work and play is foreign to Marx. He speaks of
"real freedom, whose activity is precisely work." (In the Grundrisse,
critiquing Smith.) Or again look at the famous list of working activities
in the German Ideology, where in communist society we hunt in the morning,
fish in the afternoon, do critical criticism in the evening, "just as I
have a mind." Indeed the idea that work is an alien force imposed on the
worker from the outside is the core manifestation of alienation diagnised
as the central flaw of capitalism in the Paris Manuscripts. 

Of course we might not agree with this productivist conception of the
good. Or we might find it incomplete. Marx seems to give no real scope to
the small-r=republican virtues of democratic self-goverannace touted by
Rousseau or the authors of the Federalist. He doesn't have any role for
erotic delight. (Probably he was too Victorian for that, although he did
shtup the maid.) He does have a romantic notion of the importance of
artistic activity--in the "real freedom" pasage I quited hos example is
composing music. 

But in any case, Marx will have none of demonizing work. What he will have
some of is a relentless attack on the degradation of productive activity
by capitalism. This nmight well be thought to be his main moral driving
force. (By the way, this is in part my answer to James H. Freedom to
consume what you like isn't a big deal for Marx. He wants freedom, but
it's freedom to work as you like.)

Now we might agree that under capitalism today there is a certain
moralizing of alienated labor precisely because it is alienated. The
unproductive poor are resented and regarded as undeserving because they
supposedly enjoy the benefits of leisure together with sensual abandon
(all those welfare mothers, high on drugs, screwing their brains out and
producing welfare- and crack-dependent babies) _at our expense_, we, the
hardworking majority whose worklives are cramped, stultified, and
alienated.

 And I think Yoshie is right if she thinks that this complex of ideas
ought to be opposed, not least because it "valorizes" alienated labor as
well as demonizing the helpless in a racist way. But whether or not we
think Marx has a complete story about the good, surely he has an important
part of it, and we should not buy into the model we are attacking but
simply reversing the value signs and saying, work bad, leisure good.

Though mind you, there's a respectable socialist tradition that does this,
starting with Marx's own son-in-law and extending through at laest Oscar
Wilde and Bettrand Russell. Today, Adam Pzrezworski is an advocate of the
view.

--Justin  

On Mon, 8 Dec 1997, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> Carrol wrote:
> >Doug is of course correct when he speaks of "too many Marxists...
> >think that play and desire are decadent," but I wish to suggest (in light
> >of Jurriaan's perspective, that such marxists are minimally correct in
> >seeing marxism having only a *negative* grip on individual behavior. That
> >is, a marxist does *not* in his/her private life engage in certain
> >practices: I can recall one from my involvement in marxist groups: a
> >comrade who tried to use marxism to deny his companion the right to break
> >off their relationship. But I don't see how marxism, for the reasons
> >given by Jurriaan, can generate positive prescriptions for the conduct
> >of sexual relationships or daily recreation that differ in any way from
> >ordinary daily practice of non-marxists.
> 
> I do not mean to offer positive description--not to mention
> prescriptions--for the correct private conducts regarding free time, play,
> desire, or anything else. I agree that such exercises are--if not
> impossible--largely speculative. But I don't think that ideas + practices
> that concern free time, play, desire, etc. fall under the rublic of
> "privacy" either. How much free time people have and what people do with it
> is social practices that become differently concretized through group and
> individual identities. I am interested in how universals become concretely
> singular and how concrete individuals and groupd are shaped by and in turn
> reshape universals. In fact this might be an area where feminism would
> productively fertilize marxism, in that one of the theoretical and
> practical strands of feminism concerns the redrawing the boundary between
> the public and the private.
> 
> How much free time workers have, to take a most telling example, is an
> index of workers' power. What individual workers do with available free
> time is not free from social forces. One might, for instance, look at mass
> cultural regimentation of leisure and how people are taught to spend their
> free time as if they were still at work. (Disneyland, video games,
> "lifetime learning," etc.)
> 
> >We can fight against the attempt of *some* marxists to condemn play and
> >desire, but I think the burden of going further, of developing a "marxist
> >theory of play" or a "marxist theory of pleasure," is on those who think
> >such a thing possible.
> 
> I happen to think such fights against the attempts of not only some
> marxists but the ideology to condemn play and desire are rather important.
> 
> Carrol wrote, I think several months ago, that we should have said and we
> should be saying, "No Pasaran!," to those cuts in welfare and other
> programs. I agree. But why did the better situated parts of the American
> working class not put up much fight against welfare cuts? Racism is one of
> the reasons, of course, since any program that is perceived to serve racial
> minorities comes under harsher attacks. But possibly a bigger reason is
> that "work" is made so "sacred" by the dominant ideology that workers,
> including those who are on welfare, cannot even *desire*. much less demand,
> the right to survival outside the labor market. This is a tragedy.
> 
> Gary talked about how a decade-long assaults on workers have produced "the
> collapse of desire" on the part of the working class. Many of us have come
> to grudgingly accept the diminished expectations, living standards, free
> time, etc. Marxists are not immune to this gloomy zeitgeist. A utopia does
> not seem to be on the horizon. History does not always feel as though it
> were on our side (though we still believe that Truth is--that is why pomo
> relativists bother some of us so much. If we were confident of our eventual
> triumph, we would not be spending so much time criticizing pomo.)  This
> must change. We must attack hegemonic ideas that say to the worker class,
> "you don't deserve this, you are not entitled to that." I hope I don't
> sound too voluntaristic, but I think this sort of ideological battle--even
> though it is primarily negative one of saying No to naysayers--is worth
> fighting.
> 
> No pasaran!
> 
> Yoshie Furuhashi