Lately I've been wondering what happened to Doug. Is this a fad or an Althusserian 'epistemological break'???
***** from Doug Henwood, _Wall Street_ (NY: Verso, 1997)
In higher rentier consciousness, production disappears from view. This is apparent not only in ruling-class thinking, but even among its supposed critics. Many postmodern cultural theorists, for whom class is an obsolete concept left over from when production mattered most, see the world as one of identities and desires formed and expressed in the sphere of consumption. "Capital," complained Andrew Ross (1988, quoted in Hawkes, 1996, p. 8), "or rather our imaginary of Capital, still belongs for the most part to a demonology of the Other. This is a demonology that inhibits understanding and action as much as it artificially keeps alive older forms of _ressentiment_ that have little or no purchase on postmodern consumer society." [31] Capital becomes fictive, a product of imagination rather than a real social relation; all antagonism disappears, and money becomes not a form of coercion, but a realm of desire, even of freedom. This is unsurprising coming from capital's house intellectuals, but it seems to infect even its opponents. Forms meant to disseminate these mystifying temptations -- the media, advertising, PR -- become the principal objects of study in themselves, overshadowing relations of property and power.
Immateriality simplifies the work of apologists, as it complicates that of critics [Yoshie: How nicely put!]. Interest-bearing capital is a "godsend" to bourgeois economists, who yearn to represent capital as an independent source of value in production -- which therefore _earns_ its profits just as workers earn their wages. Interest, especially in its compounded form, "appears as a Moloch demanding the whole world as a sacrifice belonging to it of right, whose legitimate demands, arising from its very nature, are however never met and are always frustrated by a mysterious fate" (Marx 1971, p. 456). But reformers who aim to transform or abolish credit "without touching upon real capitalist production [are] merely attacking one of its consequences." Interest-bearing capital is a distillation of capital as a social form, not some phenomenon above or apart from it. Therefore, abolishing interest and interest-bearing capital, Marx (1971, p. 472) argued, "means the abolition of capital and of capitalist production itself."
[31] Ross seems to have evolved away from this position, with his more recent interest in the sweatshop reality behind the glitz of the fashion industry.
Hawkes, Daivd (1996). _Ideology_ (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
Marx, Karl (1971). _Theories of Surplus Value_, vol. 3, translated by Jack Cohen and S.W. Ryazankaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers).
(237) *****
retrofitting the post-Foucauldian Marxist chronotope,
Yoshie