"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
Not at all successful in provoking conversation in this neighborhood of the Milky Way, I went transcendental once more, ringing up our eponymous leader via the spiritualistic legerdemain I wheedled from an aide to Senator Hillary Clinton. That ethereal transaction propitiously on the mark for a second time, I found KB in exceptionally good "spirits," I think I can say. He allowed that he was making progress in teaching the "BIG GUY" the arcana of dramatism/logology. "We're all the way up to RM," Burke boasted. Then his voice lost a bit of its sheen when he confessed, "I don't know how HE's gonna take RR, though. HE was not altogether pleased with the implications of the temporizing of essence in GM. When I fill out the Biblical nuances of that notion, coupled with my secular appropriation of the terms for order, and then have to extenuate, to boot, that brash farce at the end that follows the three tragedies, I donno. My hold on these Heavenly digs may be a bit shaky."
Consequently, I figured I'd better get to the question at hand pronto, Logie's essay on Burke, Wright, and the 1935 American Writer's Congress. I asked Burke, first off:
CE: Were you, in fact, a Communist in the mid-1930's? Logie quotes you as saying, at about that time, "I am not a joiner . . . . I can only welcome Communism by converting it to my own vocabulary. . . . [My] approach will be the approach that seems significant to me."
Yet you did assert in your NEW MASSES article in 1934: "Communism alone provides the kind of motives adequate for turning the combative potentialities of man [I'll add "thus in the original" here to appease current sensibilities down you know where] into cooperative channels. . . . The Communist orientation is the only one which successfully produces the combative-cooperative fusion under conditions of peace . . . . It does permit of its maximum harnassing [that is, "man's" "competitive genius"] to the ends of social cohesion."
Do we infer too much if we take the second passage as one that puts your imprimatur definitively on the Communist cause?
KB: It depends what you mean by "definitively." Logie's right that "I had a terrible desire to belong." I was blasted like---well, gotta watch what I say up here---I was miffed like anything at the sour reception I got that April in New York. But, whether I "was" or "was not" a Communist schematizes the issue too cleanly, doesn't it? You know what I think about schematization and entelechy, doncha? Figure it out for yourself. You've got that speech to read. It's reproduced in a book by that bruiser from Duke, what's his name? Lentricky, or somethin'. Hey, it's been a while.
CE: Yes, I've read the speech. In it, you obviously proposed an unorthodox rhetorical strategy to win hearts and minds for revolution in America. You certainly did "convert" the Communist cause to your "own vocabulary" with that one. That's what got you into so much trouble. I'll take your reference there as tentative confirmation that, as Frank Lentricchia---that's the "bruiser's" real name---and Judy Katula opined, you never were really and truly a Communist. You were far too nuanced and idiosyncratic for that kind of straight jacket, maybe an "Agro-Bohemian Marxoid," as Don Burks put it. That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.
Now that you've brought up the big speech---the most controversial of the conference---what's your view now on the validity of your proposal? Were you being too idealistic? Would use of the symbol "the people" have actually "confused" the dialectic of the matter, as your critics said, diverted attention from the focal class, those with both the economic motive and work-related power to force change in the exploitative capitalism of that day?
And while we're on the subject of "idealism," wasn't that whole Communist movement way too impractical, not nearly accommodating enough of the "competitive genius" you spoke of so elequently, for either the true believer or "fellow traveler," as that pejorative would have labeled you?
KB: First things first. As I reflect back on it, I DON'T regret suggesting the rhetorical change to "the people" as central symbol for the Party's propaganda. Remember: I didn't say party organizers couldn't, or shouldn't, continue along that line of emphasis. I was talking about what imaginative writers ought to be doing---GIVEN THE PARTICULAR 'SITUATION' WE WERE WORKING WITHIN IN THIS COUNTRY. Of great concern, especially, was the way "the people" was being used rhetorically in states like California and Louisiana in eulogistic opposition to a dislogistic construction of "the workers." Demagogues were employing "the people" as synonymous with "the common good"; "the striking worker," as emblem for greedy disruption of productive order.
Ya' see, the important thing is how to make ourselves effective in this particular, or any particular, social structure. I was trying to point out that there is a first stage where the writer's primary responsibility is to disarm people. First you knock at the door---and not until later will you become wholly precise. A sense of "relationships" is key. I still call them a "secondary reality." I got down to cases about it, at least in more detail, ten to fifteen years later with notions of "consubstantiality" and "identification." You've got to talk the other guy's language, worm your way into his---oh, I forgot, his or her---thought world before you can get them to cooperate with your cause. You gotta start where they are. And I believed then, and still believe, that highlighting "the people" was more consistent with the ideological texture of the U.S., as an introductory strategy of persuasion, than angrily harping on "the worker" right from the start.
Go about the operation by changing the cluster of associated terms circling around the symbol "the people," the "invisible adjectives," the "what goes with what." I was writing about it at the time. Exploit to the fullest the notion of persuasion as the "strategic use of ambiguity" I argued for later in GM. In the mid-'30's, American society was not like that of Russia in 1917. We had a middle class that had to be brought on board in support of the changes we had in mind. And you don't change the rhetorical climate, and consequent system of motives, in one wrenching fell swoop. Remember what I said: Rhetoric, effective and persuasive rhetoric, can as easily be defined as a prosaic, routine body of encompassing identifications as much as, or more than, one great and eloquent propanda campaign. I proposed that we, the imaginative writers, seek to change the language, maybe more subtly than the firebrands at the Congress wanted, in a way that would unite the various power centers in our polity. I don't regret offering the term "the people" as vehicle toward that end.
CE: Do you regret anything about that speech at all?
KB: Well, my emphasis on "ambition," straining to move up from the
"working class" to some kind of higher, less tedious station in life, may have gone a bit overboard. In retrospect, I see that I was serving the motive of perfection, implying that we goad workers, goad anybody, in the direction of hierarchical preferment, starting a trajectory toward the "end of whatever line" their desire and acquisitiveness might take them. In the light of what I wrote in my QJS series, RR, and "Definition of Man," I'd probably edit that part out of the speech if I gave it again. But that's basically all I'd change.
There were, to be sure, some personal work experiences I had as a young guy that help explain my antipathy toward the stuff that a lot of laborers actually have to do. I'd prefer to forget about those times, though, if you don't mind.
CE: Very interesting, thought-provoking, and revealing, Mr. Burke. But what about my question concerning Communism in general and your conspicuous, though heterodox, support of it. Hasn't history given the lie to that allegiance, rendered the Party members and supporters of the '30's dupes of a kind, acolytes at the altar of the, if you'll pardon the expression, the "god that failed"?
KB: I'll chew that one over in a little while. Gotta get ready for my next interview, the BIG ONE, not this little sidelight. Well, I take that back. I've always been interested in talking and corresponding with anyone who's interested in my work. And I still am. Tell that to my friends and readers back on earth. I still love to debate and share.
Burke faded once again into the purple mist, chants and hymns pulsating in the background.
Ed