A thing of beauty is a joy forever

Above, from On Biblical Subjects, by Robert Dodsley, a lift the flap illustrated manuscript circa 1720 (sold for £20,000 in 2021). Robert Dodsley's son - also named Robert Dodsley - published a volume of "Old English Plays" in 1744. 

In 1816, Charles Wentworth Dilke published volume two of his Old Plays, being a continuation of Dodsley's collection. Rodwell and Martin on Bond Street was the publisher. They also published Dilke's The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy, in a Letter to Lord John Russell. 

Included in volume two of Dilke's Old Plays  was "Endymion; or, The man in the moon," a comedy by John Lyly. Two years later, Dilke's dear friend and neighbour, John Keats published his poem, "Endymion," the famous first line of which is: "A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

Klaus Fuchs, Max Beer, and Our Anonymous Pamphleteer

Klaus Fuchs makes only a cameo appearance in this tale. But because he is far better known than Jürgen Kuczynski, his relationship to the latter helps establish the milieu in which our main character operated.

Fuchs is routinely referred to pejoratively as a "spy" who "stole" atomic secrets. A more nuanced view of his activities was offered by Sir Dick Goldsmith White, Director General of MI5 from 1953 to 1956, and Head of MI6 from 1956 to 1968: "He was a scientist who got cross at the Anglo-American ploy in withholding vital information from an ally fighting a common enemy."

In 1942, Fuchs met with Jürgen Kuczynski, who was then teaching at the London School of Economics. Kuczynski introduced him to the Soviet agent, Simon Kremer (codename: "Alexander"). After meeting with Kremer several times, Fuchs's intermediary was changed to Jürgen's sister, Ursula (codename: "Sonya"), so Fuchs wouldn't need to travel to London to hand over information. Biographies of both Klaus Fuchs and Ursula Kuczynski were published in 2020: Atomic Spy: The Dark Lives of Klaus Fuchs by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan and Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben MacIntyre.

Although not as cinematic as his sister's or Fuchs's careers, Jürgen Kuczynski had his own moments of transnational intrigue, beginning in the mid 1920s with a stint as director of the American Federation of Labor's newly established statistical department. During his time with the AFL, Kuczynski developed new relative wage statistics and advised AFL president William Green on what Green proclaimed as Modern Wage Policy. In Labor Statistics and Class Struggle, Marc Linder described Kuczynski's contribution to AFL wage policy, characterizing him as "President Green's Marxist Ventriloquist." More on Kuczynski's eight-year sojourn in England can be found in "Jürgen Kuczynski: A German-Jewish Marxist Scholar in Exile" by Axel Fair-Schulz in German Scholars in Exile.

Kuczynski was a prolific writer, publishing over 4,000 articles and books during his career. In 1980, he wrote a piece for the Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte titled, "Das Verhältnis von Arbeit und Freizeit: Überlegungen zur Entwicklung vormarxscher Vorstellungen" ("The relationship between work and leisure: Reflections on the development of pre-Marxist ideas"). The last four and a half pages of the article consists mainly of long quotations from William Godwin and Karl Marx, interspersed with brief commentary, at a ratio of 3:1. Kuczynski's argument is not particularly original and, in fact, he credits Max Beer's Geschichte des Sozialismus in England (1913) for any original insights.

Like Kuczynski and Fuchs, Max Beer was a German émigré who was declared an enemy alien in England when war broke out between the two countries. In Beer's case, however, it was the First World War and he, a Jew, was safely deported back to Germany for the duration. After the war, he returned to England and published the greatly expanded History of British Socialism.

Unintentionally, Kucyzinski's gloss on Beer's interpretation reveals a subtle but significant difference between the German and English versions. In the English version, Beer greatly expanded his discussion of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, from slightly less than a page to six full pages. But the German version contained a footnote in its section on William Godwin that was not replicated in the English version. Translated, that footnote read, "This sentence was later used by the pamphleteer. See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value. III. 303." The sentence in question was, roughly, "the true wealth of man is leisure."

In the English version, Beer paraphrased Godwin's statement as "Real wealth was leisure." The pamphleteer's "beautiful" statement, "Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more" appears 128 pages later with no commentary linking it back to Godwin's idea or forward to Marx's appreciation. 

Of course, Beer's footnote was incredibly opaque unless one had a copy of Theories of Surplus Value on hand to explain who "Pamphletisten" referred to. Kuczynski's gloss on Beer's cryptic footnote was, I believe, correct:

Industrious leisure as wealth is indeed a wonderful idea that has been achieved by the [imaginative] flights of humanity into the future, an idea that Marx also happily adopted as an inheritance from the past. 

Not directly from Godwin, however, but from an anonymous pamphleteer who wrote a generation later and who, as Beer rightly suspects, adopted the idea of leisure as the wealth of the nation from Godwin. 

I suspect (that ol' hermeneutics of suspicion) that both Beer and Kuczynski were avoiding something, probably unconsciously, that would be unflattering to Karl Marx. For Beer, the clues are more explicit. Instead of expanding on an idea hinted at in a footnote, he eliminated it. For Kuczynski, Marx's "happy adoption" of the "wonderful idea" as "an inheritance from the past" elides the uncomfortable conclusion that Marx credited the pamphlet's "wealth is disposable time" nowhere in his published work but effusively in his unpublished writings. 

I don't mean this as crying foul. Marx made an analytical contribution that far surpassed Godwin's and Dilke's boldly-stated convictions. The standards for crediting sources are not written in stone. And, presumably, Marx fully intended to publish Theories of Surplus Value, which contained an extensive review of the pamphlet. He just never got around to finishing it.

The spectre of "plagiarism" haunts Marx's appropriation of the idea that wealth is disposable time for several reasons. First, Friedrich Engels brought up the matter of the pamphlet that "Marx saved from falling into oblivion" in the context of refuting accusations of plagiarism from Karl Rodbertus and his acolyte. Later, along with Karl Kautsky, Engels again refuted Anton Menger's charges that Marx was deliberately deficient in citing his sources. Oddly enough, Engels and Kautsky ignored Menger's disparagement of Engels's earlier claim that Marx's views on surplus value had been influenced by the pamphlet "which," according to Menger, "contains only faint hints of the theory."

Beer was ambivalent about Herbert Foxwell's introduction to Menger's book. In 1913, he wrote, "As a result of the author's passionate anti-Marxianism, I was thrown into a polemical mood during the lecture, which seemed to me to be a poor preparation for scientific research. I therefore soon put the book down..." Six years later, he referred to Foxwell's introduction as the only "adequate exposition" of the writings of Gray, Thompson, Hodgskin, and Bray, whose works were "almost unattainable."  Beer had little else to say about Menger's The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour other than to complain that Menger spread the exaggerated view of William Thompson's importance he received from Adolf Held's  Zwei Bucher Zur Socialen Geschichte Englands.

Giancarlo de Vivo said back in 2019 that The Source and Remedy "has not received the attention it deserves" considering Marx's own claims. Having immersed myself in Marx's appropriation and elaboration on the pamphlet's themes, I would put the case much stronger. Close attention to the pamphlet's influence on Marx fundamentally transforms what we know about the development of Marx's thought and what he meant by the contradiction between the forces and relations of production.

The more this contradiction develops...

The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. 

 

Behind the Billboards

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM: Roi had to restrain himself on art because after the birth of the twins he was at Foster and Kleiser, billboard advertising. Because they knew that I had a camera and was a photographer, they asked him to do billboards. You know, to go out and photograph them. He did very good shots. And all I could see of it was from Twin Peaks. He would tell me in what direction the light was. I guessed at the exposure. He did it on 4 x 7 film and he did a darned good job. He took it downtown to a place for development. One day he came home and said, "You know, there's a new girl at Marshios now, and she comes halfway across the counter." Guess who that was. Dorthea [sic] Lange. And we became acquainted with Dorthea Lange. He then introduced Dorthea to Maynard Dixon, who was also at Foster and Kleiser. This is the way artists had to earn a living. It was just problematical what they did on the side, but they all did something, you know. - Oral history interview with Imogen Cunningham, 1975 June 9

The twins, Padraic and Rondal Partridge, were born in 1917. As a child, Rondal Partridge spent time in Dorothea and Maynard's household. He later became Lange's assistant for her photography work with the New Deal's Farm Security Administration. 

Dorothea Lange by Rondal Partridge

Of particular interest to me is a series of photos Lange (and Partridge) took along U.S. highway 99 in California. She described the project in a "general caption": 

The billboards along highway 99 that Dorothea Lange photographed - along with a much later one by Ron Partridge - make up the visual backbone of my pop-up book, Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading. Not surprisingly many of those billboards bore the Foster and Kleiser logo. The company was the largest billboard company in California. Three of Lange's photos that I featured in Marx's Fetters were of billboards for the National Association of Manufacturer's "American Way" propaganda campaign.

 

The N.A.M. had been the most ardent opponent of the 8-hour day and vigorously  promoted the so-called lump-of-labor fallacy myth to discredit advocates of shorter hours and "educate the educators" in the nation's college economics departments. It stands to reason that they should take credit for the world's shortest working hours once the stock market crash and Great Depression had forcibly reduced hours.

Ron Partridge had also photographed the "World's Shortest Hours" billboard mounted on the side of a dilapidated pipe and plumbing supply shop that also bore the legend, "We Buy Junk." The "World's Highest Standard of Living" billboard was made famous by Margaret Bourke-White's LIFE magazine photo of African-American Ohio River flood survivors lined up for relief supplies in Louisville, KY.  

A few years past a quarter of a century after Lange's highway 99 billboard photos, Ron Partridge photographed a "New Chevy" billboard looming over piles of wrecked cars in Emeryville, California. Again the Foster and Kleiser logo appears discreetly just below the car's image.

It seems to me that this image is a companion to two others by Partridge, "Pave it and Paint it Green" and "El Camino Real, Palo Alto." For about four years my family lived on Tioga Court in Palo Alto, just a short bike ride from El Camino. The rubber stamp shop is probably the one I got a one-day job cleaning up along with my buddy and next door neighbor, Carl Coffee.

Perhaps it is not possible to fit into American life. American Life is a billboard; individual life in the U.S. includes something nameless that takes place in the weeds behind it. - Harold Rosenberg

Back to Dorothea Lange and highway 99 in the 1930s, there are 14 images in the Library of Congress collection of "Billboard along U.S. 99 behind which three destitute families of migrants are camped. Kern County, California" or "possibly related" to it. In my book, I fused two of the "possibly-related" images to show both the front and back of the billboard at the same time. The billboard company was Foster and Kleiser.

The images in Marx's Fetters do not illustrate Marx's text. Instead they allude to a complementary narrative of conspicuous consumption, progressive obsolescence, and "keeping the consumer dissatisfied" as the 20th century counterpart to Marx's 19th century analysis of capital's inevitable tendency to overproduction. In the weeds behind the prosperity boasting billboards are - literally - destitute families, junk shops, eroded landscapes, and auto wrecking yards.

In lieu of a theoretical essay to accompany the images, I will offer a reading list. The first two are satirical pieces by Kenneth Burke, the next two are affirmations of the wasteful practices Burke satirizes in his two essays. The two affirmative essays could be read as satire, which is to say they are cynical affirmations. The last three links are to my thoughts from early 2022 about Herbert Marcuse's, Thorstein Veblen's, and Georg Simmel's theoretical reflections on reification, consumerism, and planned obsolescence. The Marcuse post contains a hint about the connection between the Marx text in my pop-up book and planned obsolescence.

Waste - The Future of Prosperity 1930

Recipe for Prosperity: "Borrow. Buy. Waste. Want." 1956

Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption? 1928

Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied 1929

Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence

Expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers...

On that "deep feeling that something is wrong..."

The Book is Not for Selling.

"This is an amazing and unique work of art." – Martin Nicolaus.

I had my first inquiry from someone who wanted to buy a copy of my new pop-up book. This presented me with a dilemma because I had never intended to sell copies of the book. The rationale for not selling appears in the book – on pages eight and eleven. The nature of capital is that "real wealth must take on a specific form distinct from itself, absolutely not identical with it, in order to become an object of production at all." And...

...real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.

Real wealth thus cannot be measured in money. Any price I attached to the book would be arbitrary. Why not $62,885,000? "But you are not Andy Warhol!" O.K., then $62,885? $6,289? $62.89 plus shipping? A banana duct taped to a wall sold for $6.2 million last week.

In The Unknown Unknown Marx, I wrote: Toward the end of his 1968 essay, "The Unknown Marx," Martin Nicolaus quoted Marx's enumeration of four barriers to production under capital that "expose the basis of overproduction, the fundamental contradiction of developed capital." Nicolaus qualified what Marx meant by overproduction to be "[not] simply ‘excess inventory’; rather, he means excess productive power more generally."

Marx's enumeration of those barriers – the infamous 'fetters' on the development of the productive forces – provides the text of page eight of my book.

Page eight of Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading

"It "would require a book," Nicolaus then observed, to present "a proper analysis of the implications of these rather cryptic theses." In lieu of that analysis, he offered a synopsis that "these four ‘limits’ represent no more than different aspects of the contradiction between ‘forces of production’ and ‘social relations of production’."

My contention is that the decoder ring for those 'cryptic theses' appears in the enigmatic statement, "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." The paragraph in which that statement appears gives a concise explanation of what it means. Two paragraphs earlier, Marx had quoted from the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulities, "Wealth is disposable time and nothing more..." 

Marx's amendment of the phrase from identity to contingency is decisive. Disposable time is necessary for the development of wealth but not sufficient. This contingency returns with a vengence in the four barriers, culminating in the assertion that "real wealth has to take on a specific form distinct from itself... to become an object of production at all."

The whole development of wealth...

Incidentally, a book has to take on a specific form distinct from itself, too – a 'book proposal' – for it to become an object of publication at all. Which is, of course, another reason my pop-up book is not for sale. The concept of the book, however, is available for free: The more the contradition develops: footnotes to "Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading" -- a pop-up book. A neat feature of that post is that if you click on one of the photos to enlarge it, you get a menu of photos that you can scroll through as a slide show. I also want to make it possible for people to assemble their own copy. I have a workshop scheduled for March and another one in the proposal stage for the end of May. I intend to make pdf files available of the page images and of the cut and fold diagrams.

Here is my cnc cutting machine doing its thing:

Coming Up For Air

 Like Punxsutawney Phil, I’ve started to come out of my hole after last week’s trauma. I was angry at Everybody, including myself.

Party politics of any sort will be a distant concern for a while. What is not is the burgeoning war in the ME. We should lean hard into support for an aid cut-off to Israel. Everything. Note that what’s in question here is not the material effect of the aid, but the political one inside Israel. We need to recognize the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Zionists, and seek Jewish allies rather than pre-judge or stereotype them.

Sure, other things are important too, and the incoming Administration will be setting all sorts of fires that will beg to be put out. In politics, focus and repetition count for the most. It will pay to focus on Palestine (and Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran).

Sadly, the Left has a clear field here, besides the agitation among Muslim organizations. Most important, EVERYBODY WILL KNOW WE ARE RIGHT. That’s a political advantage.

The specter of Trump’s wreckage of democratic institutions certainly looks threatening, but it will prove to be related to the ME. Defying the incoming Administration on Israel will be a challenge to the full spectrum of Federal lawless enforcement bodies on which MAGA power depends. Success on the former breeds success on the latter. You beat something with something else. Back in the day, the anti-war movement opened up all sorts of collateral doors.

Democratic Party voices these days can be pretty sickening. I read somewhere that MSNBC is hemorrhaging viewers. The only talker I still watch (in reduced doses these days), Chris Hayes, said the other night, “I wouldn’t watch me.” Joy Reid is just a hack. Rachel Maddow gives me hives. Lawrence O’Donnell, smart and sometimes insightful, is on too late; I can only take so much rehash of the day.

The Party establishment — its elite pols, consultants, donors — has discredited itself. Of course it wants to blame the Woke or the Left, like it always does. Recognizing the opening, Bernie with his unerring political instincts, plunged in the knife. Would that we could all help to exploit this opportunity. Topic A for moral, strategic, and tactical reasons is still Israel’s expanding rampage in the ME.

Politics After the Fascism Debate

By Max B. Sawicky

Here is a sample from my Substack.

The key antagonists on Trump and fascism, the ones I have noticed, include Corey Robin, John Ganz, Timothy Snyder, Samuel Moyn, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. Except for Ganz, they are all credentialed professors at well-regarded universities. No disrespect for Ganz; I tend to agree with him the most. I have high regard for all of them.

In another sense, however, the entire debate seems off. It is focused on relating, or distinguishing, Trump and the MAGA movement to or from historical analogs in Germany and Italy. To me it reads like a pissing contest for academics. I respect the scholarly activity, but the implied politics leaves me cold.

There is no lack of fascism-mongering among some Democratic Party voices, not to mention MSNBC, but their alternative, per Billie Holiday, is as cold as yesterday’s mashed potatoes.

What matters the most? I would say the combined threats of the U.S. government fomenting massively destructive wars around the world and an authoritarian regime trampling over U.S. law to violate the basic rights of people here at home. A friend likes to distinguish authoritarianism from fascism by suggesting the latter entails a mass mobilization of non-governmental forces to extend its own myriad oppressions. I’d take that as a useful amendment. Any heightened activation of the viciousness we can already see among heavily-armed U.S. citizens obviously makes everything worse.

We can see hints of all this in the coming order. As I’ve said before, if we were at the point where all the horrors were fully in play, it could be too late to do anything about it.

What matters the most is whether and to what extent this all comes to pass, not on whether anybody wins an academic prize for the best analysis of the fascist roots of the MAGA movement. The incentives facing scholars are not conducive to vigorous politics.

“He who has not learned from history is doomed to repeat it.” O.K., but he who becomes absorbed in history is doomed to political paralysis, or doomed to a guest appearance on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow.

The power of the U.S. presidency is greatest in the field of foreign policy, especially in the use of massively lethal military force. That is why I say a peace movement is the top priority now. To work for peace, we will also need to defend our civil liberties.

The lead item on the peace agenda is cutting off aid to Israel, which would matter more for the implied political signal than for its material impact. We have been here before. Way back in the mid-1960s, the apparent constituency for peace was invisible. Students for a Democratic Society and a few other groups began their efforts mostly in isolation, not least under continual harassment from the Federal government and its lawless enforcement bodies. We are in a better position now because U.S. Muslim communities, importantly including Jewish allies, are natural advocates for peace, but we face the new obstacle of a pro-war Zionist lobby that squashes dissent on college campuses and tends to curb Palestine-sympathetic messages everywhere else.

The Democratic Party is hopelessly compromised for this cause. At the same time, third party projects are hopeless and facilitate Republican Party rule. The reason for the latter is simple: the electoral rules for national office (the presidency and Congress) render such efforts counter-productive. We are about to find out exactly how much worse the Trump Administration will be for Palestine and for Muslims everywhere.

I’ve thought there is more space for 3rd parties in state and local elections. The dilemma there is that failure to hold onto state government power now imperils reproductive rights, a big deal in my book. In some places with very narrow legislative majorities, such as my own state of Virginia, this will matter.

Otherwise, my current thinking is the Working Families Party is the way to go. A separate ballot line in general elections, following vigorous primary campaigns, allows the peace vote to be fully manifested without sabotaging efforts to block the Right. But prior to that, organizing without much concern for party politics is the near-term priority. When the anti-war movement gets big, the establishment politicians will pay attention and the movement can begin to swing its electoral weight.

Before its slide towards irrelevance, Democratic Socialists of America was a natural vehicle for this sort of work. But its current leadership cannot bring itself to stand up an intelligent posture regarding national elections. What we get instead are moralistic, abstentionist messages in super-Left guise.

Where I live, in Loudoun County, VA, our Democratic member of Congress was forced to retire due to illness. Her replacement is one Suhas Subramanyam, a Democratic state senator. Here are all of the Democratic candidates to replace Suhas in the Virginia state senate:

1. Hurunnessa Fariad

2. Ibraheem Samirah

3. Puja Khanna

4. Buta Biberaj

5. Kannan Srinivasan

6. Sreedhar NagiReddi

Do you get the picture? It tells me that right here at home in Loudoun is a place to start. To the best of my knowledge, Samirah is the most progressive of the group, though not necessarily one who can win.

The Prodigal Son Returns

By Max B. Sawicky

Hi EconoPeeps. I launched this cockamamie blog for my pals when I had to abandon my own and work for the Federal government (Government Accountability Office, not CIA). Then my webhost "1 and 1" (now Ionos) erased the entire blog, which I had been doing since about 2004. I was delinquent in a monthly payment and they failed to warn me.

Now I'm retired but still writing. I have a substack to which I've been posting regularly. Subscriptions are free and there is no segregation of paid from free subscribers. I tell people I don't need donations but they make me happy. 

I was dithering on how and when to restore my own website, but I've noticed this one seems to be going strong, one of the few genuine blogs still running. So I'm going to cross-post here for a while. It will be quite different from The Sandwichman's erudite, scholarly commentaries on Marx and such. I don't want to step on his toes, but with blogs I learned a long time ago that volume matters. So I'm going to amplify it on EconoSpeak.

The more the contradition develops: footnotes to "Marx's Fetters: a remedial reading" -- a pop-up book

Last June, I posted a book proposal to EconoSpeak: Marx's Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading. It was a lightly revised version of a proposal that I had earlier sent to two publishers who had rejected it. I realized that I didn't really wnat to endure the ordeal of pitching the book to successive prospects only to win the opportunity, if successful, to work tediously on a manuscript that would appeal to few readers and earn me little or no royalties.

Instead, I made this pop-up book. (Click on the images to enlarge.) I think it was the right choice. I intend to produce 1000 [1001] copies of the book, the numbers alluding to 1000 cranes and 1001 Arabian Nights. As I mention in the introduction below, the method for this project comes from Walter Benjamin. In addition to "theory of knowledge; theory of progress" text mentioned in the intro, my approach also inspired by his "Attested Auditor of Books" from One Way Street and his reflections on "the various modes of communication" in Some Motifs in Baudelaire. The graphic theme of the billboards is another story that will have to wait for another post: Behind the Billboards.

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Notebook VII, Grundrisse

Notebook IV, Grundrisse

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Notebook IV, Grundrisse

Notebook VII, Grundrisse

Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

Capital, volume 3