Musings on the Problems Associated with Capitalist Apologetics and Polemics...

There is an obvious problem with capitalist apologetics and polemics. Capitaist apologists and polemicists, unlike John Locke, don't have an empirically grounded theory of how private property came to be. Historically speaking, private property and notions of private property don't really come into existence, if in somewhat ambiguous form, until the rise of agricultural societies and particularly large-scale agricultural societies. Hunter-gatherer societies, the earliest human societies, had a collective form of property and group notions of property. It must also be remembered that large scale agricultural societies tempered their conception of property with the notion that monarchs or emperors could expropriate a variety of "goods" from peasants on the ideological basis that some god figure gave them the right to do so. Monarchs, of course, were just Mafiosi who provided protection to peasants in exchange for such expropriation.

Locke is clever enough to realise that any theory of property has to be grounded in how property comes into existence. He was an empiricist after all. Locke argues that property came into existence when an individual labourer mixed his labour with the earth creating his/her/their property in the process. He argued that because property was the product of a labourer mixing his/her/their labour with the earth it could not be alienated to someone who did not mix his/her/their labour with the earth to create private property (remember all that talk of inalienable rights in the US Declaration of Independence? It comes from Locke). It thus follows that those who do not create private property through their labours have not created property and do not hold valid property rights.

The problem with so much capitalist apologetics and polemics is that they are grounded in and undergirded by metaphysical belief rather than empirical and ontological reality. Capitalist apologists and polemicists simply assert that private property exists. They don't, in other words, have a historically grounded theory about how private property came into existence in a world that initially was not divided up into private property parcels. In this regard, capitalist apologists and polemicists are akin to the demagogues of religious literalism or fundamentalism. Capitalist demagogues simply believe that private property exists, asserts that it exists, makes it holy, and maintains that those who own property, even if it is not the product of their labours, is theirs. Adam Smith's notion of the free hand, by the way, is grounded in a similar metaphysical deus ex machina and free market liberalism is, as a consequence, grounded in dogmatic assertion rather than in empirical reality. To those, like myself, who prefer empirical to dogmatic approaches, the rhetoric of capitalist fundamentalists is not any more compelling than that of fundamentalists of various sectarian stripe.

 

Thorstein Veblen grounded his arguments about the parasitism of the leisure class who do not have valid property claims in a biological notion, the instinct of workmanship. For Veblen the capitalist robber barons and their progeny, did not work and thus were not creative. Engineers, Veblen argued, did have the instinct of workmanship, did the planning, and built things that were useful to society. The leisure class, who hired engineers, simply, according to Veblen leeched off the creativity of engineers. Additionally, Veblen argues, what the leisure or leeching class bought with the monies and wealth they expropriated from real workers, was not useful. It was simply conspicuous consumption whose purpose and function was to display wealth.

It is possible to contextualise Veblen's argument about the leisure class within Locke's theory of the origins of private property by doing only limited damage to either. Locke argues that property is the product of the mixing of labour and land. Given this, the leisure class, who do not mix labour and land creating property in the process, have no right to the property they have expropriated in some way, shape, or form from those who did mix their labour with the earth creating inalienable property in the process. They thus live off the fruits of others. And that seems to be a useful way to conceptualise the workings of contemporary capitalism.

 

 

The Books of My Life: Underworld USA

Several years ago I read an article, by whom I don't recall, in an edited collection on film history, the title of which I don't recall either. In an essay grounded in an ideology of telelogy about what the author called the "little books", the writer found these "little books" wanting particularly when compared to the illustrious achievements of the film analysis and film criticism of his own era.

The "little books" the author of the essay was referring to were the "little books" published by publishers such as the BFI, Viking, Indiana University Press, the University of California Press, Studio Vista, Praeger, and Zwemmer/Tantivy/Barnes, books in the BFI's Cinema One and Cinema Two and the Movie series. These "little books" were part of the flowering of auteurist dominated film analysis and film criticism in the1960s and early 1970s. And while each of these publishers and series' published monographs on auteurs, including books on Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Georges Franju, Jean-Luc Goddard, and Alain Resnais, they also published books on film theory, including Peter Wollen's seminal book on flim theory Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, books on stars, such as Ian Cameron's book on film heavies, and books on genre including Colin McArthur's book Underworld USA (New York: Viking, Cinema One, 1972).

In retrospect McArthur's book, which was influenced by auteurist film criticism and the structuralism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, is a classic. Even at the time of its publication Underworld USA was recognised as a seminal work in the analysis of film genre. McArthur's book explores the broader historical and sociological contexts of film making, putting the lie to the notion common among contemporary film analysts that auteurists were a bunch of backward looking neo-romantics who argued that film auteurs created film universes ex nihilo. Contemporary critics of auteurist criticism appear to have read little of the classic works in the genre preferring straw men to empirical actuality. McArthur's brief monograph explores, to use a word that has become the fad of the moment in academe, the intersection between historical and sociological contexts, the collaborative nature of the Hollywood mass production line, genre, and auteurism. McArthur explores the themes and iconography (including the mise-en-scene) of the gangster film and thrillers as they intersect with the work of film auteurs including Fritz Lang, John Huston, Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Don Siegel, and Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director whose gangster films and film thrillers of the late 1950s through 1970s reflect the influence of these Hollywood genres on French filmmaking, teasing out, in the process, the themes and iconography of these directors.