September 20, 2023 • 32 mins
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
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:21):
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
(00:45):
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
(01:05):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:51):
Collective are at free Ship Collective on cash app and
PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:08):
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
(03:34):
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
(03:57):
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
(04:19):
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.
(04:39):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:24):
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
(05:45):
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
(06:06):
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
(06:28):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:11):
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
(07:32):
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.
(07:53):
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
(08:15):
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,
(08:35):
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,
(08:56):
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
(09:20):
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,
(09:42):
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
(10:04):
just as surely as the victims and the concentration camps,
which I I, I.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
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
(10:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
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.
(11:08):
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
(11:30):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:18):
simple for an explanation for what actually happens. In order
to actually fully grasp the depths of what's happening here
(12:40):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:28):
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,
(13:49):
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
(14:12):
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
(14:35):
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
(14:56):
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,
(15:17):
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
(15:40):
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,
(16:02):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:46):
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
(17:09):
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
(17:32):
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
(17:55):
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.
(18:16):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:03):
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
(19:23):
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
(19:45):
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
(20:06):
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,
(20:33):
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.
(20:53):
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.
(21:14):
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
(21:37):
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
(21:59):
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
(22:33):
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.
(22:55):
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
(23:16):
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
(23:39):
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
(24:01):
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
(24:24):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:08):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:15):
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
(26:38):
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
(26:59):
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
(27:20):
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
(27:40):
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
(28:02):
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,
(28:25):
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
(28:46):
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
(29:06):
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
(29:27):
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,
(29:49):
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
(30:13):
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
(30:36):
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
(30:59):
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
(31:20):
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
(31:42):
Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 3 (31:53):
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
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Speaker 2 (31:58):
Thanks for listening.
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
(00:21):
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
(00:45):
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
(01:05):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:51):
Collective are at free Ship Collective on cash app and
PayPal and at free shippbe on Twitter. Thank you very much, guys.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
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
(02:23):
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
(02:46):
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
(03:08):
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
(03:34):
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
(03:57):
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
(04:19):
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.
(04:39):
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
(05:01):
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
(05:24):
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
(05:45):
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
(06:06):
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
(06:28):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:11):
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
(07:32):
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.
(07:53):
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
(08:15):
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,
(08:35):
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,
(08:56):
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
(09:20):
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,
(09:42):
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
(10:04):
just as surely as the victims and the concentration camps,
which I I, I.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
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
(10:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
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.
(11:08):
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
(11:30):
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
(11:53):
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
(12:18):
simple for an explanation for what actually happens. In order
to actually fully grasp the depths of what's happening here
(12:40):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:28):
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,
(13:49):
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
(14:12):
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
(14:35):
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
(14:56):
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,
(15:17):
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
(15:40):
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,
(16:02):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:46):
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
(17:09):
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
(17:32):
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
(17:55):
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.
(18:16):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:03):
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
(19:23):
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
(19:45):
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
(20:06):
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,
(20:33):
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.
(20:53):
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.
(21:14):
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
(21:37):
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
(21:59):
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
(22:33):
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.
(22:55):
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
(23:16):
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
(23:39):
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
(24:01):
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
(24:24):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:08):
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
(25:31):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:15):
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
(26:38):
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
(26:59):
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
(27:20):
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
(27:40):
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
(28:02):
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,
(28:25):
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
(28:46):
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
(29:06):
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
(29:27):
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,
(29:49):
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
(30:13):
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
(30:36):
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
(30:59):
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
(31:20):
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
(31:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
Thanks for listening.
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