As Marxist as They Wanna Be

I’m about halfway through Zuboff and Maxmin’s The Support Economy now. They continue to point to how the nature of production has undergone major changes in recent years, and cite many statistics and studies to support their contention. For example: in 1997, “31 percent of employees said that they bring work home at least once a week, compared to 20 percent in 1977, while those who say they never bring work home decreased by 16 percent” (125). Furthermore, “68 percent of [The National Study of the Changing Workforce] respondents in 1997 agreed that their jobs require them to work very fast, compared to 55 percent in 1977; 88 percent agreed that their jobs required that their jobs require them to to work very hard, compared to 70 percent in 1977; and 60 percent agreed that there is never enough time to get everything done on the job, compared to 40 percent in 1977” (125).

They couple these observations to an argument that the nature of consumption is undergoing profound changes, as well, from a model of mass consumption to a model of individuated consumption. The Baffler has done brilliant work following, analyzing, and satirizing this shift: anyone who’s read the writing of Thomas Frank will find instantly familiar the results of a survey conducted by “a New York City market-research firm”; namely, that “teens said their most valued traits are ‘individuality’ and ‘uniqueness’ — ‘being truly uniquely themselves'” (169). Zuboff and Maxmin summarize their argument as follows: “In the twentieth century, managerial capitalism created unprecedented wealth with an enterprise logic invented for the dreams of a mass society. It emphasized consumption and mass production. Its success unleashed the large-scale forces associated with health, education, communication, mobility, and so on. These forces transformed populations. They engendered a psychological reformation that imbued many people around the world, and especially within its industrial core, with an abiding sense of individuality and a deep impulse toward psychological self-determination” (174). Now, I’m absolutely dying here to use this passage as the foundation for an economic reading of the expressivist and individualist pedagogies typically ascribed to Peter Elbow (heck, there’s probably a book-length project in there about how contemporary capitalism formed and informed the reflective personal essay assignment; something along the lines of Raymond Williams’s brilliant Culture and Society), but I’ll have to hold off until I think through it more adequately — and there’s also something in there about re-understanding Marx’s arguments that capitalism drives itself into perpetual crisis: the effects of mass production and mass consumption have ultimately begun to destroy mass production and mass consumption.

I deeply respect and admire Peter’s work (and think he’s a terrifically kind and generous person), and I think his ideas are often misrepresented, both by his followers and by his detractors, as a sort of be-your-own-unique-self-with-your-own-unique-voice touchy-feely essentialism. So my interest was sparked when Zuboff and Maxmin quoted Tristine Rainer’s observations on writing memoirs and autobiography: “We’re trying to figure out how to live our own lives in a tremendously complicated world with too many choices and no clear guidelines. The only thing we can go on is other people’s actual, lived experiences” (165). Implicit here is the bookstore commodification of those “actual, lived experiences” in what Zuboff and Maxmin note that The New York Times has called “the age of the literary memoir” (164), but if you haven’t guessed already, that reference to “actual, lived experiences” set me off for another reason: because it’s one of the ways to construct class that really bugs me for its apparent essentialism. Most common among those scholars who place themselves into the field of “working-class studies”, it’s a construction of class that says, “I’m working class because I’ve had these unique experiences that other people simply couldn’t understand. I’m authentic in a way that people who aren’t working-class can never be.” This seems to me just as problematic as the “It’s a [insert cultural group here] thing; you wouldn’t understand” dismissal of any possible experiential common ground. However, what Zuboff and Maxmin have shown me is how the authenticity/lived-experience model of class is, at its core, economic, and furthermore how it might line up with Bourdieu’s relational infinitude of classes based largely on individuated combinations of consumptive and productive practices, and perhaps even with Gibson-Graham’s infinitely fractured and anti-monolithic economy, and maybe even ways in which I might connect all that stuff to understandings of various writing pedagogies.

So hey, all you comp scholars out there: was Pierre Bourdieu a thoroughgoing member of the Peter Elbow school of expressivist writing? Is David Bartholomae’s social-epistemic understanding of writing instruction fundamentally flawed by its theoretical alliegance to the underpinnings of a now-superceded orthodox Marxism? Is Min-Zhan Lu really not as poststructural as she might wanna be? C’mon, let’s break this down.