From my reading of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, Leon Trotsky, and Raymond Williams (at this time I have not read Louis Althusser and Andrew Ross yet) some literature and film come to mind which I can relate the aforementioned discourse to. Of particular interest to me, and I can see the relevancy, is class struggle, antagonism, and hegemony of the superstructure. However, In Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, the dystopia of the future has precluded class struggle and antagonism by brainwashing the proletariat soon after they are chemically hatched. Thus Marxism’s alienated labor is obviated. The hegemony of religion does not figure in either because it is non-existent in this after-Ford society. As far as the ruling class, Mustafa Mond and other world leaders have de facto totalitarian power. So Marx’s and Engles’ prediction that “the internal tensions and contradictions in capitalism would lead inevitably to its demise” does not come to realization and is averted in the Brave New World society (Leitch 648). However, in George Orwell’s 1984, the intellectuals and ruling class repress the majority and class conflict not only with brainwashing, but with violence and restrictions to literature and media too. This is to a degree exemplified in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Some theorists believe in fact that Lenin and Stalin hijacked Marxism by instituting a totalitarian regime, “and it is generally believed that he [Stalin] ordered Trotsky’s murder” (878).
Who knows what the course of history may have taken had Trotsky not met such an untimely death. In one of his essays, “Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel,” Trotsky sympathetically discusses the class struggle that Tolstoy had gone through his career (Online Marxist.org 1-11). This essay, written and published in 1908 when Tolstoy was eighty, reflects how Tolstoy tried in both his private and professional life to come to terms with class struggle inherent in capitalistic society but perhaps never overcame his superstructure class: “From the first years of his consciousness he was, as he remains to this very day, an aristocrat, in the deepest and most secret recesses of his creativeness; and this, despite all his subsequent spiritual crises” (1). I do not want to be a hypocrite—I have only completed reading one of Tolstoy’s novels—but I imagine that Tolstoy, in terms of Antonio Gramsci’s terminology was a “traditional intellectual,” and never quite actualized into an “organic intellectual” (Leitch 1000). To clarify, “traditional intellectuals are the administrators and apologists for existing and cultural institutions” while “organic intellectuals rise out of membership in social groups (or classes) that have an antagonistic relationship to established institutions and official power." According to those criteria Marx, Engels, and Gramsci are indeed organic intellectuals, while Huxley, Tolstoy, Williams, and Orwell are more traditional intellectuals. If indeed we can categorize him as an intellectual, what would we call the contemporary Oliver Stone, aside from being controversial?
English 436 Analysis #4 Marxism Part II
I give a lot of kudos to Andrew Ross for articulating exploitation of black recording artists, artists in general, adjunct and part time college professors, and primary and secondary school teachers, even though he has a seemingly secure position—he is department chair—at New York University. Ross is at odds with greed inherent in our society and corporate-like takeover of our colleges, which creates discount labor at the expense of artists and Ph.D. college professors. In the clip that Dr. Wexler posted Ross blames a lot of the unemployment condition on “two decades of deregulation.” According to Ross, employers have taken advantage of the discounted flex labor pool, and have incorporated corporate like exploitive policies regarding mental labor, viz., professors.
“One of Ross’s more trenchant charges is that many current jobs return to conditions of the sweatshop, mobilizing cultural ideas of enjoyable work to extract long hours for low pay” (Leitch 2576). In his chapter on “The Mental Labor Problem” (2578-97) which is part of his 2004 book, Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor (2578) Ross expounds on his positions. He maintains that “the largest subsidy to the arts has always come from workers themselves,” hence, the “cultural discount” (2579). Referring to the dire circumstances of adjunct and part time college professors, he points out that “Baumol and Bowen” in their 1989 study of graduate education forecast “widespread tenure-track openings in the professoriat…and may have bootlessly lured thousands into doctoral programs,” which to me in part explains the fertile environment for exploitation: oversupply of mental labor, and lack of demand from employers--universities--due in part from lack of funding, in addition to exploitive corporate tactics. Ross maintains, however, [and we have to take into consideration that this discourse was published in 2004, and the Great Recessions had not yet impacted us] “If colleges were still hiring full-time tenure-track professors, instead of part-timers and adjuncts, today’s labor supply would more closely approximate employer demand” (Leitch Note 2 2581). Ross goes on to discuss “No-Collar” jobs of a neo-bohemian” workforce whom the tech companies gladly hired while incorporating the “sweat equity” proposition of “stock options” being profitable.
Accordingly, Ross compares the free labor of techies to the public’s “romantic notion of engarreted and starving artist” (2585). Ross takes exception to the “antediluvian” and “gimcrack rationales for paying people less than they deserve” (2585). Regarding artwork, Ross points out an interesting concept that “patrons have been extracting personal prestige and profit from their own association with the labor of art” and in fact, virtually all artists did not profit from the “surplus value” created (2585). He reflects that someone like “Van Gogh” exemplifies this (2586). To make matters worse, Ross maintains that “there persists an ingrained prejudice on the left against being well-paid occupationally, whether in the arts or in the academy” (2587). Consequently, he supports the hip-hop artists for making very good compensation and being sharp enough not to be exploited like their African-American forerunners. Ross acknowledges the “crass nouveau riche version of American success, but it cannot be divorced for reparations for almost a full century in which black artists had been robbed blind of their rights and royalties by the music industry” (2587).
Ross revisits the quagmire of higher education employees—college professors—when “in the 1990s, the corporatization of higher education set in for real, and casualization began to take a heavy toll on institutions nominally built on tenure, academic freedom, and faculty governance…where a large percentage of part-time labor force was soon struggling to earn any kind of living wage (2589). Furthermore, “As for regular faculty, their salaries have stagnated against the average wage…their job security serves as window dressing for a system designed to ensure a continuous flow of cheap, easily replaceable labor” (2590-91). Ross also comments on secondary charter schools, which reduces union membership and online courses which teaches a “disaggerated student body” and maintains tighter “control over the workforce and, potentially the curriculum” (2593). However, on the optimistic side, Ross sees the potential for part-time college professors unionizing in an economy where the unions have been weakening.
Works Cited
Leitch, Vincent B. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print
Trotsky, Leon. “Tolstoy, Poet and Rebel” 26 March 2011,
Marxists.org/archive/…/Tolstoy.htm, Web
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