Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 15:21:17 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Derrida


In message <Pine.3.07.9711241953.A12183-c100000-AT-login>, Justin Schwartz
<jschwart-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us> writes
>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. 

Doug makes a similar point. At the risk of descending into a
definitional dispute I guess some of these differences depend on who you
are calling the capitalist class, bearing in mind the increasing
diversity between ownership of capital and practical management of
business. But even allowing that some innovators do get excited by their
activities, I am a bit surprised to hear that old saw about hard-working
capitalists here. Is that the labour of superintendence? 

In social terms, of course it does not matter what the specific
activities of the capitalists consist in, coupon clipping or ranting
down telephones, the point is that capitalist consumption is
unproductive. 

Justin, ever true to the no-nonsense school of analytic philosophy,
demands, like Gradgrind 'the facts', not fancy French philosophy (which
one imagines comes even lower on the scale from fancy French lingerie).
But I wouldn't be interested in French philosophy (or German sociology
or American cultural studies) if I did not think that these ideas did
not articulate real conditions (albeit in the fetish form that Dave B
rightly indicates). 

The facts are these: ever greater sums are being redirected from
investment funds to the capitalist's consumption funds. That is the
*material basis* of the current boom in the art market in London and New
York, of the spectacular rise of financial speculation, of the growth of
the University sector, of the re-packaging of those metropolitan centres
as 'cities of culture'. As markers of the redirection of resources out
of production, they are decadent (in the scientific rather than the
moral meaning of the term) features of a capitalist class that is
holding back from investing in new production (not wishing to overstate
that trend).

Are we just talking about the hangers on rather than the real
captialists? Well maybe, but the retinue of hangers-on is growing
because, like flies round shit, they are drawn to the large amounts of
money that the capitalists are throwing around. When I look at Bill
Gates or his nerdy English equivalent Richard Branson, I can't help but
notice that the old work ethic has undergone some modification. The idea
that work is fun and not a chore, that as the management gurus are wont
to say these days, the boundaries between work and play are breaking
down, doubtless describes their life-styles, but is a gross imposition
upon ours. 

But don't be deceived by the number of people working late into the
night. As all good managers know, they are putting in their 'vanity
time', and as all workers know, work is where you hang out these days.
Just because you are at your desk does not mean that you are working.

Fraternally
-- 
James Heartfield


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