----- Original Message ----- From: "Mike Ballard" <swillsqueal at yahoo.com.au>
I think that getting workers to understand that they create all the wealth not found in nature, is a way of moving the balance of power to the left, thus gaining both 'everything' in terms of class consciousness and 'something' in terms of piecemeal 'practical' reforms. Just doing grunt work for the Democrats (i.e. 'boring from within') will guarantee a continual drift to the right.
****************************************
Lots of important questions here: why don't they understand; or maybe, why don't they want to understand?
In my generation we all had to read Maupassant's "The Necklace," usually in Junior High School. It is a simple, clear, straightforward story, with a twist, usually taught because its irony is impossible to miss. In order to talk about it, I have to give away the ending; so, stop reading if you want the actual shock of the ending, and read it first here. It's a short short story.
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Neck.shtml
The title is mistranslated: in French it's "La Parure": "finery," "jewelry" with a suggestion of "bling," rather than the neutral "necklace."
For those who don't want to read it or have already read it; here's the skinny. A pretty young Parisian woman who feels meant for better things than being married to a humble clerk chafes at her obscure life. To please her, her husband gets tickets to a VIP ball given by his ministry. He generously gives her money he had hoped to use for a hunting trip so that she can buy a good enough dress. She then borrows a diamond necklace from a well heeled former school friend, and goes to the ball, where she is feted and admired. When she returns home, she finds that the necklace is missing. Whether out of pride, or fear of arrest, or duty, or the lack of a sense of entitlement, or all of these -- Maupassant does not say -- the couple resolve to replace the necklace and they labor for the next twenty years to pay for it: the necklace, the usurious interest rates, the penalties.... They both work several jobs and resign themselves to the most abject poverty. Finally they succeed in paying off all their debts. The formerly beautiful woman is now an old drudge, so much so that when she runs into her old friend, the friend does not recognize her. She calls out to her friend who is horrified at the change she sees. Shyly and proudly,the woman recounts the story of the necklace. Her friend, amazed at this story, reveals that the original necklace was paste and worth a pittance compared to the debts the couple have labored all their lives to repay.
For most of my life, I have hated this story. It seemed mean-spirited and to take delight in the punishment of the hapless couple. As if Maupassant were saying, well if some idiot shop girl wants to pretend she's something she's not, she deserves to suffer her whole life. Or perhaps it was the way it was taught.
But lately I've had a change of heart. Now I see on the one hand a rich woman who wouldn't dream of loaning her poor friend a real diamond necklace, and then I see how a worthless necklace acquires value through the unending, grinding labor of the poor. Hence the title of this email: "Maupassant and the labor theory of value." (No doubt the debt "crises" is affecting my thinking. What? That house wasn't worth a half a million? Amazing!)
Maupassant does not tell us how Marthe feels when she finds out she replaced a fake necklace with a real necklace. He ends the story at the point where the rich friend reveals that the original necklace was worthless. I'm not bringing the story up to ask what Maupassant meant, but because I think the story raises the whole issue of the general attitude to work and how this affects the working man's realization of the value of his own labor.
That is, would the working class, the vast majority of people on this earth, prefer to believe: that "they create all wealth not found in nature" or that it should somehow be possible to obtain that wealth as an infant obtains nourishment, without effort, by some kind of intervention whose nature we would rather not want to know about? I think the latter is very much part of our psyche both for existential and for historical reasons. ...Also why this story has some actual depth.
Joanna