[PEN-L:2680] Duke University's literature department

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Jan 29 08:14:23 PST 1999


rc&am wrote:


>i like the phrase 'late capitalism', meself.... but i don't think this has
>much of an optimistic tone about it at all. bill lear mentioned a similar
>distaste for teh phrase 'late capitalism' recently as well.

Late implies that it's ending, and that a dawn might even be around the corner. I find both kind of hard to believe, even making allowances for the scale of historical time.


>it's the only way i know to talk about a revolution within capitalism, to
>distinguish real subsumption from formal, and to allow me to talk about
>this in
>ways that unsettle many of the presumptions about marx's analysis of
>capitalism, both by marxists and non-marxists, that i find plainly odd. like
>for instance, that productive labour is manual labour, that commodities are
>necessarily tangible objects,

Marx devotes quite a bit of space in TSV to mocking Adam Smith's idea that productive labor is that which produces a "vendible commodity." Today we're all quite aware of the commodification of intangible things, from financial "products" to feelings. Hell, there's that girl in the recent Levi's ad who even commodifies capitalism itself, and sells it like another product.

Doug



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