File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9711, message 234


Date: Mon, 24 Nov 1997 19:07:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Justin Schwartz <jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Derrida


On Mon, 24 Nov 1997, James Heartfield wrote:

> origins in the realm of production. The redirection of resources from
> productive investment to unproductive consumption is the material basis
> of the endless play of difference that Derrida celbrates. The
> reorientation from work to play is not programmatic but descriptive.
> Homo Ludens is the modern bourgeois, long since abandoned his historic
> role as captain of industry, warming instead to his life of the sublime
> and the erotic.

This is what comes of drawing ones conclusions about the behavior of
social classes from reading French philosophy. One advantage of the sort
of education I have had--Princeton and Cambridge, among other snob
degrees--is personal acquaintance with a good many members of the real
bourgeoisie. My college classmates included Edo Agnelli and William Ford.
In law school at a considerable less ritzy place, Ohio State, I have
brushed near acquaintance with a good many capitalist slimeballs. My
experience leads me to the conclusoon that James H's picture of the
postmodern capitalist class as a bunch of Eloi, traipsing lightly from art
opening to orgy, is absurd. You find that the capitalist class is not
merely hardworking but actually workaholic, which is fairly striking for a
bunch of people who do not, actually _have_ to work. Bill Gates has more
money than he could spend if he unloaded it at the rate of a million
dollars an hour. But he puts in 16 hours days at the office.

If you wanta  more accurate picture of the ruling class's behavior you
might read, for example, Barbarians at the Gates (about RJR Nabisco), or
Predator's Ball, or any of a number excellent accounbts of the tediously
Protestant Ethical behavior of the corporate elite. 

Sure, they support a number of bohemian layabouts and idle social
butterflies, but this is not new. You can see the type depicted in Henry
James or Mark Twain's The Gilded Age and ruthlessly lampooned in Veblen's
Theory of the Leisure Class.

I don't say that hard work makes the predators more deserving of their
ill-gotten gains. But I suggest that our generalizations be based on fact,
not on French philosophy. 

--Justin





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