As Cary Wolfe shows in his “Ezra Pound and the Politics of Patronage,” Pound ’s fascism turns out to be an expression of an Emersonian individualism as a precondition for a “lyric” economy, something close to what the critic Jed Rasula calls, in another context, an “economy of attention,” over and against a capital economy. Emerson writes, “I guard my [lyric] moods as anxiously as a miser his money. For company, business, my own household chores untune and disqualify me for writing” (cite Wolfe, 36). But Wolfe’s analysis also demonstrates Pound’s singular failure as an administrator, his “politics of patronage,” as exemplified in his “Patria Mia” and other articles, presuming that the administration of public space was solely an aesthetic issue (“the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or some system of ethics or economics”) and not a material one.
[T]he ultimate irony and central contradiction of Pound’s patronage model is that it makes the artist dependent on that very economic structure Pound deplored, only now it is not the artist but those democratic others who must pay the price commanded by the permanent [lyric “mood”] property of art. For the economic fact is that the capital of the patron depends upon that very economic system, and upon the exploitation of those who create its wealth – and so, therefore, does the artist and the art which was supposed to be that system’s antithesis. If no abstract labor, then no exchange value; if no exchange value, then no surplus value; if no surplus value, then no capital; if no capital, then no patron; and if no patron, then no “free” artist, no “permanent” aesthetic property. Under patronage, the artist isn’t really independent; rather it is simply another kind of dependence – dependence, in this case, upon the continued existence of an aristocracy of capital. (Wolfe, 41)
Pound’s admiration of Mussolini stems from his misperception of the fascist dictatorship as a guarantee of permanence for the aesthetic within the social body, a way of outdistancing, in a sense, the capitalist anarchy of exchange. As administrators of capital, Monroe and Lowell were able to exploit the prank that had since ceased to matter much to Pound the newly-clad Vorticist.
Patrick
-----Original Message----- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Monday, April 10, 2000 12:43 AM Subject: Re: Council of Canadians
>
>
>kenneth.mackendrick at utoronto.ca wrote:
>
>> Ok - what would the problem be for the Bank of Canada to buy up the loans
from
>> private institutions? Then the "public" debt would be owed to "public"
bank?
>> This is done for RRSP's (say, when you use your RRSP to purchase a
house) - why
>> can't a (theoretically democratic) national bank do the same thing? If
the gov
>> needs money, it's just stupid to go to a private institution.
>>
>> somewhat perplexed,
>> ken
>
>I think one of the economists on the list better take the time to
>answer this in some detail. Through years of reading Pound,
>Pound's critics, and some of Pound's sources I know to mly
>own satisfaction (a) how impossible this is (b) how politically
>dangerous it is and (c) how appealing it can be to someone
>outraged by conditions but not familiar enough with the
>right history and with counter-arguments.
>
>>From the *Cantos*
>
> A factory
> has also anothe aspect, which we call the financial aspect
> It gives people the power to buy (wages, dividends
> which are power to buy) but it is also the cause of prices
> or values, financial, I mean financial values
> It pays workers, and pays *for* material.
> What it pays in wages and dividends
> stays fluid, as power to buy, and this power is less,
> per forza, damn blast your intellex, is less
> than the total payments made by the factory
> (as wages, dividends AND payments for raw material
> bank charges, etcetera)
> and all, that is the whole, that is the total
> of these is added into the total of prices
> caused by that factory, any damn factory
> and there is and must be therefore a clog
> and the power to purchase can never
> (under the present system) catch up with
> prices at large,
>
> and the light became so bright and so blindin'
> in this layer of paradise
> that the mind of man was bewildered.
> (Canto XXXVIII)
>
>And, in the Pound tradition, one unclogs it with money created by
>the state, which is what Ken is proposing. But the state of course
>must be prepared to make that money be honored. Hence, from
>a later Canto:
>
> Story told by the mezzo-yit:
> That they were to have a consortium
> and one of the potbellies says:
> will come in for 12 million"
> And another: three millyum for my cut;
> And another: we will take eight;
> And the Boss [Mussolini] said: but what will you
> DO with that money?"
> "But! but! signore, you do not ask a man
> what he will *do* with his money.
> That is a personal matter.
> And the Boss said: but what will you do?
> You won't really need all that money
> because you are all for the *confine*."
> (Canto XLI)
>
>>From the state loaning money to the state (i.e., issuing
>fiat money) almost always flows some form of authoritarian
>utopia.
>
>Carrol
>
>
>