Newsgroups: bit.listserv.history
Date:         Mon, 27 Jul 1992 19:51:52 EDT
From:         "Daniel A. Foss" <DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU>
Subject:      RE: Selling cars to Japan (17): An open letter to Haines Brown
              (response)

Hello, Haines;

   New Capitalist Society has two main social categories, capitalists and
office workers. Industrial workers, marginal service workers, and family
farmers are decisively less important. Notably, industrial workers have lost
the importance they had in class-struggle politics in the US through the 1950s
and even later in Europe. Class struggle becomes a matter of international
politics, since the surplus supporting the capitalists and office workers alike
is increasingly extracted from workers in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and other
"Newly Industrializing Countries."

   Classes and class struggle are situated in material reproduction, the
appropriation and production of products by workers (including productive
consumption, the using up of products in another stage of production) and the
consumption of products, which calls for further production (leaving aside how
the need for such products, including the articles of everyday life, the types
of buildings used and inhabited, styles, and so on, got there in the first
place).

   Office workers do not produce products, they use them up both in doing their
jobs and in household consumption. What office workers make is mental life,
data sets, documents, software, text of books and periodicals, the non-material
"content" of cultural artifacts in general. (It has been argued that the
distinction between form and content is naive, but this is a pretty naive set
of definitions of the terms I am using). Cultural artifacts such as books and
compact discs cannot be explained in terms of the useful oversimplifications
such as "value" and "surplus value" in which Marx analyzed capitalist material
reproduction, specifically the production and circulation of commoddities, 130
years ago.

   The former central contradiction of capitalism, class exploitation, that
is, the production by the working class of products out of the proceeds of the
sale of which the capitalists lived parasitically and accumulated the
unconsumed surplus value, becomes internationalized hence irrelevant to
politics. The new contradiction, which opposes office workers to capitalists,
assumes new and weird forms, since it is situated within cultural reproduction,
that is, the innovation, recording, transmission, reproduction, storage, and
losing, of society's mental life.

   What emerges can be described very simply, though its origins cannot and the
explanations including mine are necssarily almost always wrong, having to be
constantly reworked. That simple description, using the words of US Seator Bill
Bradley (Democrat, New Jersey), July 13, 1992, is "We face a crisis of
Meaning." Back in February, you may recall, I suggested that "hyposemia," the
sense that something called Meaning was draining out of social relations, was
assuming crisis proportions. What this "really means" takes a lot of analysis
and is necessarily disputable. But from kook's crackpot notion to politician's
platitute in five or six months is pretty good, huh?

   Even the President of the United States, who is the last to know anything,
has called this a "weird year."

DAF
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