>
> ***** When we turn now to the actual social content of Proust, the
> hidden significance of such passions as snobbery and social climbing
> is at once revealed: so many the mystified figures of that longing
> for perfection, of an as yet unconscious Utopian impulse. At the
> same time, such social raw material, with its eternal receptions and
> drawing rooms and its profound class limitations, and the deliberate
> intention of Proust to paint a nobility in decay and on the point of
> vanishing into nothingness -- all of these things come to seem not so
> much reactionary as anticipatory. For it is precisely the leisure of
> this class, given over completely to interpersonal relationships, to
> conversation, art, and social planning (if one may so characterize
> the energy that goes into the building of a salon), fashion, love,
> which reflects in the most distorted way the possibilities of a world
> in which alienated labor will have ceased to exist, in which man's
> struggle with the external world and with his own mystified and
> external pictures of society will have given way to man's
> confrontation with himself. The Proustian leisure class is a
> caricature of that classless society: how could it be otherwise? Yet
> since it is (at least in Proust's society) the only leisure culture
> which exists, it alone can serve as a source of concrete images of
> what such a Utopia might be like....In this sense it is perhaps not
> too much to say that _gossip_ -- that meeting place of conversation
> and art, that profoundly fertile vice of both Saint-Simon and Proust
> (and indeed of Balzac as well, in a very different social milieu) --
> may itself stand as a kind of distorted figure of that passion for
> the human in its smallest details which will be ours in the
> transfigured society and the transfigured world.
>
> (Fredric Jameson, _Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical
> Theories of Literature_, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971, pp.
> 153-4) *****
>
"To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet - until they get it.
"There is the traditional epitaph written for herself by the old charwoman:
Don't mourn for me, friends, don't weep for me never,
For I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever.
This was her heaven. Like others who look forward to leisure, she conceived how nice it would be to spend her time listening-in - for there was another couplet which occurred in her poem:
With psalms and sweet music the heavens'll be ringing,
But I shall have nothing to do with the singing.
Yet it will only be for those who have to do with the singing that life will be tolerable - and how few of us can sing!
"Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy his leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
"The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.
"Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes today in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard - those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me - those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties - to solve the problem which has been set them.
"I feel sure that with a little more experience we shall use the new-found bounty of nature quite differently from the way in which the rich use it today, and will map out for ourselves a plan of life quite otherwise than theirs." (Keynes, vol. IX, pp. 327-8)
"The need for money is therefore the true need produced by the economic system, and it is the only need which the latter produces. The quantity of money becomes to an ever greater degree its sole effective quality. Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm.
"Subjectively, this appears partly in the fact that the extension of products and needs becomes a contriving and ever-calculating subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites. Private property does not know how to change crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and whim; and no eunuch flatters his despot more basely or uses more despicable means to stimulate his dulled capacity for pleasure in order to sneak a favour for himself than does the industrial eunuch ‹ the producer ‹ in order to sneak for himself a few pieces of silver, in order to charm the golden birds, out of the pockets of his dearly beloved neighbours in Christ. He puts himself at the service of the other's most depraved fancies, plays the pimp between him and his need, excites in him morbid appetites, lies in wait for each of his weaknesses ‹ all so that he can then demand the cash for this service of love. (Every product is a bait with which to seduce away the other's very being, his money; every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the glue-pot. General exploitation of communal human nature, just as every imperfection in man, is a bond with heaven ‹ an avenue giving the priest access to his heart; every need is an opportunity to approach one's neighbour under the guise of the utmost amiability and to say to him: Dear friend, I give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua non; you know the ink in which you have to sign yourself over to me; in providing for your pleasure, I fleece you.)" (Marx, EAPM, p. 306)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm
"Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognized and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.
"Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.
"This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side has also to occur on yours.
"Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition:
"My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life.
"Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be affirmed in my labor, since the latter would be an affirmation of my individual life. Labor therefore would be true, active property. Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one.
"My labor can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond all doubt." (Marx, Comments on James Mill, vol. 3, pp. 227-228)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm
Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3