"We Write for the Workers"
Submitted by Ed Appel on Tue, 2005-10-04 13:43
I want to take up now John Logie's article, "'We Write for the Workers': Authorship and Communism in Kenneth Burke and Robert Wright." This essay, like the other two in this spring 2005 issue of the KBJournal, is a worthy treatment of an important theme in Burke studies, deserving of attention and comment. I'll get to some of its salient features as a critique in later posts. I want, first of all, to play devil's advocate for those who censured Burke for his Marxoid "sins" at the 1935 American Writers Congress in New York City. Burke's (in)famous speech at that conference plays an important role in Logie's treatise, as well as in the lore and mythology of Burke's life and ideological development.
Burke's speech to that gathering of largely recognized and established authors and left-leaning intellectuals was entitled "Revolutionary Symbolism in America." In it, Burke proposed, as you'll recall, that the key term in Marxist propaganda in the U.S. be changed from "the workers" to "the people." Following Burke's address, Allen Porter "argue[d] that Burke's proposed substitution of 'people' for 'worker' has 'historically . . . been the ruse of the exploiting class to confuse the issue.'" More pointedly, Friedrich Wolf complained that "'substitution of the symbol "people" confuses the interests of this fundamental and all-important class and renders a picture of society that is not merely un-Marxian but one which history has provern to be necessary for the continuation of power of the exploiting class.'"
Porter and Wolf had, it seems to me, something of a point. The implied dialectic of the symbol "the workers," in opposition, of course, to capitalistic owners and management, gets blurred and fuzzed up with substitution of the term "the people," an "inclusive" terminology as Logie makes clear---this at a time when the working class was still battling for the right to organize, let alone reap the monetary benefits that later became standard in the labor contracts of the '50's and beyond.
Plumping for the term "the people" reminds me of Rush Limbaugh's recurrent charge in our day that "Liberals and Democrats want to divide us," talking all the time about Blacks against Whites, poor against rich. "We're all Americans," Limbaugh assures us. Yes, and when we think of ourselves as all in one homogenized category of that kind, the corporate interests and the wealthy in general can make off with everything in the store. The ruling class does so via the Republicans' tax cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy, and the postponed payment for the war in Iraq, the bill for which won't come due for them or us, but rather for a later generation, realities this administration hides behind its obfuscating rhetoric.
The same kind of generalized obfuscation infuses Bush's recurrent, all-embracing, globally-explanatory declaration, "WE are at war." As James Fallows pointed out on C-Span a week ago, "WE" are not all at war. Our troops are at war. Their families and loved ones are at war. But the rest of us aren't being called on to sacrifice ANYTHING, especially the well-to-do, who are profiting in spades from the policies of the Bushies.
Burke took note of this same kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand in his reproof of the wealthy profiteer who says, "We're at war, you know," lumping himself or herself in with the soldiers dying at the front. "Implied identification": The "we" will do it every time, sometimes to a good end, other times not.
Burke, of course, seems to be working toward what in his 1935 speech? "The purification of war," n'est pas? It's a noble goal, but a distinction has to be made between justified self-assertion where injustic reigns, and a program of non-confrontation implicit in a one-term-fits-all rhetorical approach that "euphemistically" (see ATH) glosses over unacceptable realities.
What say you, devotees of a once-Marxist literary critic, philosopher, rhetorician, and placard-carrier?
Ed
Comments
Thanks to Rene for her provocative and insightful post.
Since I am in the process of actually reposting commentaries on the articles in the second edition of the KBJOURNAL, brief essays of mine we lost during the change-over to our new format, what follows is a series of responses I made at a time when we weren't getting input from others on these fine publications. You'll see that I took an unorthodox step toward stimulating some dialogue in respect to the Spring, 2005, content. Thus a reprise.
Because I am risibly denominated the "conversation editor" of this august publication, and since I've been conspicuously deficient in inducing terrestrial symbol-users into animated exchange on the fine articles featured in this issue of the KBJOURNAL, I thought I'd borrow a tack made famous recently by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. She's allowed that she's been in contact with Eleanor Roosevelt, and has been aided greatly by the insight and wisdom this great lady has vouchsafed her. I called Clinton's senatorial office to ask about the particulars of such novel contact. Although I didn't get to talk with the Senator herself, one of her aides did apprise me of the spiritualistic methodology in question. That was all I needed. I forthwith proceeded to channel our mutual hero, Kenneth Burke, somewhere in the nether reaches of the afterlife. Much to my delight, I found that Burke had lost nothing of his flair for vivacious dialogue. What follows is as close an approximation of the brief conversation I had with him, feverishly scribbled on a notepad as I inquired and listened.
CONVERSATION EDITOR: Ed Appel here. Thank you, Mr. Burke, for taking time---may I call it "time"?---to speak with me. You must have infinitely more important things to concern you at this stage in your, uh, life, I suppose I could say.
KENNETH BURKE: We'll have to keep this session short. I have an appointment with the BIG SHOT in just a few minutes, if I may use that temporal terministic screen around these parts.
CE: I'll be brief for now. First off, Mr. Burke, are you surprised to be here? You said in that video at the Burke Conference in Airlie that you didn't believe in an afterlife. What gives with your continued availability for an interview like this one? Is there life after death for all of us?
KB: I'm not sure. All I know is, the BIG SHOT said HE needed me for further interrogation. HE knew all along I was giving HIM a lot of press. HE just didn't know whether I was giving HIM GOOD press. You see, even HE couldn'[t understand exactly what I was saying. You know, it's the same thing Sidney Hook (I'd use that scatological reference to that bastard my family shouted out anytime his sorry backside came up in a conversation, but I try to watch my language around here if I can) carped about in that review of ATTITUDES. THE LORD knew all along that you and a ton of other small fry were calling me a theologian, but when Wax-N-Wayne Booth came out with those pieces saying the same blessed thing---up here everything is blessed---HE really took notice. You remember Wax-N-Wayne. I'm still dancin' with tears in my eyes!
CE: Yes, I recall Mr. Booth. He delivered a laudatory plenary speech about you at our trienniel Burke Conference---yes, your work is still vitally alive and doing well a dozen years after you left us---in Pittsburgh in 1996. (Not that that date has much cache up where you are, I'm sure.) Now, what I'm here for in this conversation---whatever "here" means in a confab like this one---is your considered views, in reflection, on your speech in 1935 before the First American Writer's Congress. We have a fine article in our second edition of the KBJOURNAL on you and Richard Wright in respect to that event. By the way, did you know the Burke Society is now sponsoring an electronic journal devoted to further exploring, applying, and perpetuating your philosophy of life and language?
KB: Yes I do. Tell Clarke and Mark I approve of what they're doing.
That's what I said to Samuel Southwell, and it goes double for them and the KBJ.
CE: Before we get into the particulars of the speech itself, and your appraisal of what you said back then from your current, shall we say "lofty," vantage point, John Logie---he's the author---mentioned something Norman Podhoretz said about you. Podhoretz was on the sidewalk watching that Mayday parade you were marching in in the mid-'30's. You were ostensibly carrying, and enthusiastically waving around, a placard that proclaimed, "We Write for the Workers." Critic Harold Rosenberg, Podhoretz recalled, was incredulous. Rosenberg shouted sarcastically from the sidelines, "Kenneth, you write for the WORKERS?" He no doubt had your arcane prose style in mind. You, it is reported, yelled back, "It's an ambiguity in the preposition FOR!" Was the sign you were carrying a "strategic use of ambiguity for persuasive purposes," a definition of rhetoric you later made famous in your GRAMMAR OF MOTIVES? And were you, at that juncture, a "fierce little man"? That's what Podhoretz called you.
KB: I don't care what that turncoat, right-wing sonofabitch called me. He went over to the capitalists with that little COMMENTARY Magazine of his.
CE: But didn't that little magazine, myopic and one-sided as it's been, contribute to the "full dialectic" you've always called for? What about that?
KB: Sure, it's made it's contribution. From up here, in the realm of the "adequate idea," the undeniable parliamentary role it plays earns some credit. But down there in the trenches, its pinched "motivational recipe" was not, and is not, "mixed" enough, sufficient for the times and for the mixed-motive symbol/mind/body merger of man---and I guess I ought to say woman, too.
CE: What about the "ambiguity" you spoke of, and your current take on your 1935 speech? What have you got to say on those counts?
KB: Time---there's a joke right there---time's up. Gotta go. See whether you can ring me up, another metaphor the need for which I've permanently escaped, later.
Burke disappeared into a deep, dim purple, with meditative humming in the background, but with an occasional PRO NOBIS and GRATIA distinctly audible in the distance.
Ed