Not a post about Etta James as cultural producer

... But she did write the theme song for the base (ment). I don't know why, but it really seems to fit. Here's a video of some people dancing to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT3jSAOuEWs.

I don't actually want to talk about Etta James as a cultural producer, although that would probably be fun. Instead, I have two long quotes from Marx that that are bugging me, and that I think Williams might shed some light on.

These are from Capital, volume 1. In the first quote, he seems to be saying that the social relations of the base make resistance impossible:

"It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once it is fully developed, breaks down all resistance" (899, my emphasis).

Then, thirty pages later, these very conditions provide the framework for class consciousness and revolution:

"Along with the constant decrease in the number of constant magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, and degradation grows; but with this there also grows the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united, and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated" (929).

It's pretty clear to me that the seeming contradiction here emerges because Marx is talking about different moments in the development of capitalism. Once the capital and power is consolidated in few enough hands, and the pain and suffering of the masses reaches a certain point, the very conditions that prohibited resistance become those that further it.

At the moment though, it seems capitalism has pulled a fast one on us. The consolidation of capital under the new regime of flexible accumulation appears to us differently. Richard Ohmann's work on Print Culture provides an illuminating instance of this1. Media conglomerates, for instance, still appear to be made up of many small enterprises, though the power and capital are concentrated in the hands of an elite few. A multiplicity of products, produced for diversity rather than mass, give consumers the illusion of choice, and dull the pain and suffering. The debt accumulated from the purchase of these products becomes a fictitious entity, labeled and re-labeled within the market until it seems to have no bearing on everyday life. And finally, the style of work required for manufacturing these niche products appears to re-unite the worker with the labour from which he was originally alienated. So how do we re-imagine the process Marx describes under these circumstances? Is the current economic crisis the "bursting of the integument"?

1. Ohmann, Richard. “Epochal Change: Print Culture and Economics.” from Politics of Knowledge. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003.

Marx quotes come fromthe Penguin edition. I haven't got it on me right now so I can't do a proper citation.