Date: Sun, 7 Dec 1997 13:03:41 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: M-TH: All work and no play


On the hard-working capitalists question:

I think that there are different levels of analysis being confused here.

1. The activity of the capitalists is not productive labour. Whether
they are somnambulent or hyperactive in their own behaviour is of no
great moment, since neither the one nor the other kind of activity is
making any appreciable contribution to humanity.

2. The inner life of the capitalist class, and arising out of that their
ideological view of the rest of society, does depend on the ratio of the
capitalists' own consumption fund and the rate of investment, ie the
division of the surplus product between luxury consumption and
productive application. In the early period of capitalist development
their ethos was ascetic as most of the surplus was directed towards
reinvestment. The more that capital threw up barriers to reinvstmnt, the
greater was the waste of the surplus product on the decadent consumption
patterns of a parassitic class.

3. All of this is quite distinct, of course, from the questions of state
regulation and function, or on those of the roles of the overseers
within the capitalist firm, as Jerry rightly says. So when Doug asks
about the ruling class as a whole, that is quite a different question
from the capitalist class narrowly defined as the owners of capital. In
an abolute sense that is who the ruling class is. But its active process
of ruling is supplemented in a great many ways and by all sorts of
functionaries.

Impressionistically, though, I would say that those capitalists who rush
around a lot, pretending to be working very hard, but rarely achieving
anything, seem to set the standard for the political leaders, too. Since
Blair was elected, there has been the appearance of a great deal of
activity, but it would be difficult to say exactly what had been
achieved. I suspect the same could be said of Clinton.

The ideology of work-as-play seems to suit the infantilism that one
finds in a senile capitalist class.
-- 
James Heartfield


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