"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 Clarke for giving us insight into Burke's personal problem with the concept of "the worker." (Clarke had said that Burke revealed, during his series of interviews at the U. of Iowa, that he had been employed in a shipyard during WWI, with some really smelly chemicals befouling the workplace. On his way home each day on the trolley, Burke was persona non grata, he said, to those sitting around him. Other passengers would put as much space between Burke and themselves as they could.) That noisome experience KB had during World War I clarifies Burke's displeasure with conventional Marxist termonology as sdomething that went perhaps beyond ideology, even beyond the requirements of rhetoric and propaganda. "The worker" as focal notion just didn't "smell" right to him.
Of course, I can only channel forth how Burke feels now about his reference to "ambition" in that 1935 address. He currently seems a little queasy about it, and, given RR and the "Definition" (the symbol-using animal as "rotten with perfection"), I can understand why.
Anyway, I did get back in touch with KB after the INTERVIEW ON HIGH he was going to that cut short my last talk with him. I posed once again that question about his commitment to Communism back in the '30's, of whatever heretical, standard, or nonstandard form it may have taken. Burke had seen a lot of historical water flow over the dam in the following half century. Hed he been wrong, too gullible, too idealistic, or what? Look what Stalin did, was doing even in the mid-'30's. Look at Mao's China. Look at the collapse of the Soviet state and empire in 1989. What have you got to say for your collectivist vision from your present vantage point, the vision you marched for as a young man?
This is the gravamen of what Burke had to say in answer:
KB: I can be accused of misinterpreting the connection between Marxist Communism as a political and economic doctrine, and the kind of "balance" between the competitive and cooperative motives required by the symbol-using---and don't forget symbol-"misusing"---animal in social interrelationships, fundamental human impulses I acknowledged in that speech. Competitive requirements, the goads to hierarchy, I've come to see, are not, were not, "satisfied" sufficiently by Marxist regimentation as it came to be implemented in practice. Both Stalin and Mao were bastards in the way they did it, to be sure, maybe unnecessarily so; but still and all, Communism contained an inherent temptation to just such criminality. It was Procrustean. I'll admit all that.
So I was wrong in the short term---but only in the short term. In the long term---and it's turning out not to be very long at that---some variant of Marxist cooperation will, must, come to the fore, or humankind isn't gonna make it. What were the odds I gave you in that Boston hotel room (up here, I can remember most everything, if not everbody's name right off the bat!)? I said it was 50-50 that the human race might survive in anyways near a decent condition. And with what almost unfettered capitalism is now doing in the U.S. and globally with its hyper-competitive emphasis (yes, I can see what's going on down there), I may have been too optimistic.
Remember: Motives are shorthand terms for situations. Ultimately, perceptions of the global, ecological (see?---I was right about that little word in 1937!) situation are going to be sharply, violently altered by the Unanswerable Opponent, the sheer brute materials of the world as it is in its structure and function. Greater cooperation, far greater cooperation and self-restraint, will become the order of the day, or else. (Or else---there's a dramatistic notion if there ever was one.) Capitalism, as a more or less unmodified economic doctrine, contains within itself the seeds of its own demise, because it's programmatically open to full-throttle entelechy.
Now, that's very human for the dramatic animal. I don't say it's not. It's what that Crusius fella once said: There's not a good "fit," maybe not even a sufficient enough fit, between symbol-using animals and a small planetary habitat with finite resources. One way or the other, though, the grandiose mix of motives of the human animal are going to have to come to terms with that animalistic dependency on a viable, sustainable habitat. Some variant of human cooperation-cum-competition-cum-restraint closer to Marxism than capitalism will force itslf down your throats, like it or not.
Gotta run, if I may use that quaint expression. Tell the gang in the KBS I'm thinkin' about 'em. They're goin' to Penn State soon, where my papers are, right? Tell 'em I'll be there in "spirit"!
Once again, Burke melted into the purple mist, to the accompaniment of musical sounds beyond my powers of description.
Ed