MORIBUND CAPITALISM AND THE CANNIBALIZATION OF PUBLIC SPACE

Two recent events -- an incident in a shopping mall in upstate New York, and an evening discussion of Frank Sinatra and the Popular Front at the Brecht Forum in New York City -- were the catalysts that prompted the following reflections. In these times of war and crisis, we are driven more and more to think about fundamentals, and to link the present situation to underlying structural factors.¹

During his March 7 talk on Sinatra,² S&S Editorial Board member Gerald Meyer distributed copies of "The House I Live In," music by Earl Robinson, lyrics by Abel Meeropol. The song, sung by both Paul Robeson and Sinatra and made into a short movie by the latter, was a symbol of the Popular Front, and I was glad to have been reconnected with it. On rereading (and relearning) the words, I am struck by the magnificence of what was accomplished by Popular Front culture (the failure to "make it stick" will of course be addressed below). The goal was nothing less than to establish a link between an opening to progressive social change, on the one hand, and the deepest roots and symbols of American culture, on the other. This was, of course, a quintessentially Gramscian project (in a period when the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci was not yet well known outside of Italy): to build the hegemony of the working class and all allied subaltern strata of a country's population, across the full spectrum running from workplace and political organization to culture, education, and popular psychology. The working class begins to establish its potential to take charge of society and guide its destiny when -- and only when -- it emerges as the force with the capacity to carry forward the entire tradition of a society's accumulated scientific, cultural and historical knowledge. This long march to hegemony links up with the "popular front" concept at the point where the working class reaches out, across class lines, to all social sectors in which the social heritage resides.

Lines from "The House I Live In" convey the messages of class solidarity within diversity: "all races and religions"; "the worker by my side"; "the right to speak my mind out"; "especially the people, that's America to me." What concerns the present inquiry, however, is another aspect of the song: a feeling throughout of belonging. The first-person narrator has a strong sense of being part of everything around him/her, including the physical space, all of which answers the question, "What is America to me?" It is not a matter of "ownership," unless "ownership" is understood in a new, popular, transcendent sense. This passage, from the song's bridge section, captures the feeling:

The things I see about me,
The big things and the small,
The little corner newsstand and the house a mile tall,
The wedding in the churchyard, the laughter and the tears,
The dream that's been a-growing for 150 years.³

The burden of these images is a powerful sense of public space. Our country is a place that we all share; it belongs to all of us, in a sense of belonging that transcends mere "ownership" (as noted above). The streets, the houses, the parks are ours. (Note the similarity in this respect to Woodie Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land.") Collective proprietary consciousness in relation to U. S. society was undoubtedly a factor in drawing the ire of the right against both Sinatra and the song in the high years of the Cold War, along with its anti-racism and call for worker solidarity.

Now fast forward sixty years, and we see the extent to which the balance of forces has shifted against the working-class community, as capitalism has matured and degenerated. In place of "the grocer and the butcher and the people that I meet" (another image from "The House I Live In"), the U. S. landscape is dotted with superhighways and shopping malls. The malls have become a central element in daily existence; they are an activity, almost a way of life. They encourage almost total goal orientation⁴; one goes there to shop, not to meet people (unless by pre-arrangement); there is no community, no chance of simply running into people one knows. There is therefore no spontaneity, and above all no sense of belonging. Abel Meeropol could not have written a line about "the parking lot, the food court, the boutiques that I see." The mall is not a community of people; its patrons are passive consumers (those who have money, at any rate), not members. But the central characteristic of malls is that they are private property: not only the shops themselves, but the spaces connecting them are alienated from the people who use them and the users are therefore subject to the whims of their corporate owners. The mall incident mentioned above drives this fact home.

Here it is. According to a Reuters report, on March 3 a man, Stephen Downs, was arrested for trespassing in a mall in the town of Guilderland, New York, near Albany. He was wearing a T-shirt with the message, "Give Peace A Chance," which he in fact had just purchased at the mall. He was confronted by security guards who ordered him to remove the shirt. When he refused, police were summoned. According to Reuters, "Downs said police tried to convince him he was wrong" in refusing to remove the T-shirt, because the mall "was like a private house and . . . I was acting poorly." Downs was arraigned, entered a not guilty plea, and was released on his own recognizance. He faces up to a year in prison if convicted.

This incident speaks volumes about the state of civil liberties in the United States, in which a profoundly authoritarian government -- despite all of its libertarian "free market" rhetoric -- has used the opportunity provided by the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 to undermine the "right to speak my mind out" in horrendous ways.⁵ Our present interest, however, is in the concept of the mall as being "like a private house," in which people must behave in ways acceptable to the house's owner -- who is clearly not us! Apparently, "giving peace a chance" does not meet this criterion.

As always, the S&S project seeks to get down to underlying fundamentals. While it is necessary to expose and publicize atrocities, we seek also to understand what they signify for the nature and transformations of the core capitalist reality. The long-range goal of removing capitalism permanently from the life of human society requires nothing less. We must resist the ever-present temptation to accept the core reality as something natural, eternal, unquestioned. Socialists, of course, do not make this mistake explicitly, but it can sometimes appear in implicit and hidden forms, which is why continual engagement with political economy is vital.

Capitalism is a powerful, because subtle, system of exploitation. For healthy reproduction of this system, the illusion of independence, citizenship and full competence of the worker must be strong. The market for labor power must be "thick," in the sense that the coercive relation through which surplus value is extracted must appear as an equal exchange, at values that are determined in impersonal markets; this is the "valorization of labor power," the role of market mystification in occluding, and therefore enabling, perpetuation of the exploitation on which capitalist power rests.

The real autonomy of sellers of labor power, in turn, rests on the existence of a household sector: a private space not under the control of capitalists, within which adult workers are sovereign, and from which they emerge as market equals to engage in the defining exchange of labor power for wages. Capital cannot absorb this labor power-producing sector, as it does continually in the case of small-scale goods-producing sectors, without undermining its own legitimation and existence.

Now further refine this picture by noting the role of public space. This is part of the "public sector," a concept that plays an ideological role associated with the classless distinction between "public" and "private," but it can also be used to define something different from (capitalist) state power, but also from "private space" or "civil society." The crucial insights: a) capital requires an exterior sphere in order to function and reproduce itself adequately; b) this exterior has two moments -- the household, and (for want of a better term) the public space. These two moments, in turn, require each other for their own validity and legitimating roles. Without public space, where people experience "the air of feeling free" ("The House I Live In"), the autonomy of the household sector wears thin; if I can't walk on neutral ground between my home and the capitalist workplace -- if the principle of capitalist overlordship reaches directly to my doorstep -- then the real illusion on which capitalist power rests may be threatened, and undermined. And conversely, without the household sector, public space would be empty of subjects that give it meaning. It is the resonance between the two moments of the exteriority of capital that make the system work.

Systemic crisis is implied if either of the two exterior "sectors" of the capitalist process is weakened. Late capitalist accumulation, in fact, has weakened both. The working-class household is threatened by the increasing length of the workday, the deterioration of the value of labor power to the point where the social norm requires two adults working full time to sustain a family, the increasing commodification of household activity, the loss of competence in consumption with the coming to dominance of "high-tech" goods that induce passivity and lack of comprehension -- the list could go on. And most recently, the "mallification" of American life is progressively undermining public space, by extending the authoritarian reaches of capitalist power beyond the traditionally defined workplace to the very streets and public places that have enabled people to define their existence outside of capitalist control. This is the deeper meaning of the arrest of Mr. Downs for the unspeakable crime of wearing a T-shirt with a slogan opposing imperialist war.

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1. See the Call for Papers, for a special issue of SCIENCE & SOCIETY on "The Deep Structure of the Present Moment" (S&S, Summer 2003).

2. See Gerald Meyer, "Frank Sinatra: The Popular Front and an American Icon," S&S, Fall 2002.

3. If we are to carry the song forward into a new era, this last line clearly must change. "For 230 years" doesn't work as poetry; "o'er the centuries and the years" works perhaps too well! The folk process is clearly needed here. I would also point out that, unlike so many songs from the Popular Front period, "The House I Live In" has no gender bias, no one-sided pronouns or references requiring change.

4. An apparent exception to this is the new custom of teenagers "hanging out" in malls. Since these young people do not, for the most part, have real money to spend, the sense of disempowerment and passivity involved in this makes it the exception that proves the rule.

5. The Patriot II Act, currently under development by the Bush Administration, contains an amendment to 8 U.S.C. 1481, to expand the grounds on which a U. S. citizen can be forced to relinquish citizenship. Previously, one had to serve in a foreign army to warrant this punishment; in the new proposal, a person can have citizenship removed and be expatriated if he/she "becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a terrorist organization" (italics added). Who, for this purpose, is "the United States"?

 

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