[Milton-L] Milton and Marx

[Carrol Cox]

Nancy Charlton wrote:
> 
> Hello all --
> 
> Brooks reflects upon his conversation with a trucker he met at a truck
> stop in VA, describes his dedication to his work, and uses this as the
> point of departure for a look at the values that determine social
> class in the USA. What is called (in varying tones of derisiveness)
> the "working class," concludes Brooks, defines itself by "the moral
> centrality of work" (term from sociologist Michele Lamont). They do
> "hard things," as opposed to those who must persuade and hence work
> with words, whom they regard as lying and manipulative. They see
> social class in moral rather than economic terms
> 

Class is a relation and a process, NOT an identity, and the bulk of the
u.s. working class (about 85%+ of the population) does _not_ engage in
hard physical labor. Brooks is simply spouting sheer nonsense.

> To exemplify further--and this is why I'm sending this to
> Milton-L--Brooks observes:
> 
>      Karl Marx once observed that “Milton produced Paradise Lost for
>      the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an
>      activity of his nature." Here was a guy that had found in
>      trucking the activity of his essential nature.

> Why silkworms? Exotic and precious, perhaps; but did PL flow from
> Milton's gut like material to enclose a pupa?  Was he a hard worker or
> a manipulator?

We are reading Karl Marx here, not Richard Crashaw. The point of
comparison is very simple: both Milton and the silk worm PRODUCE.
Nothing else about the silk worm is relevant, since Marx is not
concerned with either psychology or aesthetics here but with the nature
of capitalist production -- more specifically, with the difference
between productive and unproductive labor under capitalism. Let's have
some more context. (It comes from the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63
(second rough draft of Capital):

****It emerges from what has been said so far that to be productive
labour is a determination of labour which has at first absolutely
nothing to do with the particular content of the labour, its specific
utility or the peculiar use value in which it is represented.

The same kind of labour can be productive or unproductive.

E.g. Milton, who did the Paradise Lost for £5, was an unproductive
worker. But a writer who does factory labour for his publisher is a
productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason as
a silkworm produces silk. It was an expression of his own nature. Later
on he sold the product for £5. But the Leipzig proletarian of literature
who assembles books (such as compendia of political economy) under the
direction of his publisher is a productive worker, for his production is
from the outset subsumed under capital, and only takes place so that
capital may valorise itself. A singer who sells her songs on her own
account is an unproductive worker. But the same singer, engaged by an
impresario, who has her sing in order to make money, is a productive
worker. For she produces capital.'**** (MECW 34, p 136)

Notice, Marx does _not_ distinguish class on the basis of the kind of
work done but on the kinds of relations involved. So both the trucker
and the hack reporter for the NYT are working class. If either has
contempt for the other, so much the better for capital.

Also, "his nature" for Marx would be historicized, not some mystical
"essence" as with Brooks.

Carrol