Fantasies of cleaner work

A month or so ago, the wife of an assistant professor in Chinese was killed. She was hit by a truck as she crossed the street on the way to work. She worked as a cleaner at the college where I teach, where her husband is a tenure-track faculty member. I was surprised to learn that she worked as a cleaner, and somehow uncomfortable with this. It seemed to cross a divide between different kinds of work, a divide necessary for the fantasy structure of academia.

The wife of one of the professors I met in a Peru worked as a cleaner while they lived in England and he worked on his graduate degree. This also surprised and troubled me. It's easier not to think about why I find it troubling. It could have something to do with anxieties around North and South, First and Third. But I suspect that it has more to do with exposing the underlying class assumptions of academia for what we know they are, a privilege. And, perhaps more, they expose distance from dirt, shit, mess, the detritus of everyday life as central to this academic privilege. We don't touch other people's shit, not to mention our own; we just interpret it.

The daughter-in-law of one of my close faculty friends worked as a cleaner while she was in between jobs and finishing a degree. She worked for me a couple of times. This wasn't awkward, maybe because I knew that she also worked for my friend and that this was very temporary. And I wonder: most graduate students would be pretty happy with part time work that paid twenty dollars an hour. Yet, some work, work as a cleaner, seems unbecoming, unacceptable, stained, and dirty. Is it somehow more acceptable, more in keeping with academic fantasy, to employ students as cleaners, or baby-sitters, because we know that for them this is transitional work? Because really, we aren't getting bogged down in the shit and the dirt, really we are on our way up out of the cave.

Another woman who cleaned to me had quit her office job. She wanted more independence and flexibility in making her own schedule, less boring work, something that would give her a feeling of accomplishment, something that would let her have more take home pay for fewer hours.

Once, at a small dinner gathering, one faculty member mentioned that she was against the sort of hierarchical relation necessarily part of having someone work for pay in her home. Another faculty member said that her mother had worked as a cleaner her whole life and that it was decent pay off the books--what's wrong with that?

Someone recently called me to task for paying someone to clean my house. Why? If I had a wife to do it for me, would that be a problem? Or if my mother lived here? If the labor were free and ostensibly given out of care and love? It seems to me that there is a highly gendered supposition at work in the criticism of paid domestic labor, namely, that this work is done by women out of love. Women are supposed to handle the shit because they love us; it's what mothers do. When this work is treated as paid labor, we have to confront the fact that it is a burden, that no one really loves to do it. And we are then exposed to our own relationship to shit and to dirt and to our dependence for comfort on the work of others, when really we want to retain the fantasy that they love us.

When my kids are older and can share more in household labor, should I fire my housekeeper? Should she be denied of an extra 200 dollars a month so that I can acquire some kind of politically pure position?

Comments

[Bob Allen]

Aquisition of a truly politically pure position can't be attained through some individual act or non act- your post touches on the divide between mental and physical labor that a classless society would abolish- the whole notion of "the personal is political" has obfuscated the notion of collective struggle to overturn oppressive relations. It is (or has been transformed into) a way out, an escape from having to confront the possibility of a different world, or an outside to the Real of capital.

[Anonymous]

I wonder how this post connects with your post a few months ago on the necessity of overturning the comforts of neoliberalism? In other words, sacrifice as necessary for the revolutionary transformation of the system? I doubt Lenin had a housekeeper, although I believe that Marx impregnated one.

[TomE]

This is a useful and admirably honest post. I suppose there is an immediate, perhaps kneejerk, reaction to an academic such as yourself employing a housekeeper, which is rather simple : preach (directly or indirectly) that the class system shouldn't be maintained by the monied paying the less well off to clear up their mess, or get off the soapbox.

[Jodi]

Anon--Lenin had Krupskaya.

Tom E--thanks, but how exactly is not paying Rose the 200 a month that she needs maintaining the class system? would it be different if I were paying 200 a month to a research assistant?

I agree with Bob.

[TomE]

The problem here is whether the pragmatic and no doubt well intentioned action of someone otherwise critical of an overarching social/economic edifice (namely, capitalism) should be judged according to practical/immediate criteria pertaining to individuals in their employ or according to the wider ramifications of their professed belief system.

Being someone who is a Marxist but makes every sort of compromise too frequently to mention, I would hope for my own sake that people on the whole opt for the former judgement! But the strategic question should nonetheless be raised : if we are to justify having housekeepers, nannies and so on with regard to the money we 'give' them and, therefore, the money they might not otherwise receive, where precisely does our wider critique of the very system where those poorer than us are employed to clean up our mess kick in?

I do hope you realise this is anything but a self-righteous attack on your personal choices - I'm as uncomfortably culpable as the next person.

[Jodi]

There is no commodity production involved in this labor.

It is outside the official (taxed and reported) economy.

There is no extraction of surplus value.

The employee is paid above the going rate for this sort of labor in the market.

Following the view you set out, I should also not pay mechanics, plumbers, painters, chimney inspectors, or roofers. Nor should I eat in restaurants. I could not buy groceries or take my clothes to be dry cleaned.

The 'strategic question' cannot be limited to paid household labor. That is one of the primary themes of my post, a gendered theme that is particularly pressing for single working women, like myself and like the woman who cleans my house two times a month.

[patrick j. mullins]

"The employee is paid above the going rate for this sort of labor in the market. "

Oh dear, I KNEW you'd do that. (even I might)

"Following the view you set out, I should also not pay mechanics, plumbers, painters, chimney inspectors, or roofers. Nor should I eat in restaurants. I could not buy groceries or take my clothes to be dry cleaned."

And you should stop spending so much money at the OPERA and on FURS! (moderately insider silliness, TomE, she doesn't indulge herein...)

[Jodi]

Actually, Patrick, you know me TOO WELL! I do wear a fur when it is really cold. A fabulous black ranch mink. It was my mother's, who died at 63. I like thinking that I'm recycling.

On opera--the last one I saw was Turandot at the Met. It was amazing. My father got me tickets for my birthday. Paul and I stayed at the Chelsea Pines Inn when we there. Do you know it?

More seriously, should I stop paying for pedicures, get my colored, and massages, too? The upstate economy will TOTALLY COLLAPSE if I stop spending.

[patrick j. mullins]

Oh yes, the Chelsea Pines, 2 blocks away from me, I go past it nearly every day. If you do it again, you MUST call me and we'll go to that Diner on the 9th Ave. corner or up to Cola, Intermezzo or La Belle Vie. I always thought it funny that they called it Chelsea Pines, because 'Pines' was kind of a code for Fire Island. Things like that always fascinate me, like the Provincetown Playhouse, which must be named for the resort in Rhode Island or Mass, wherever it is, but if you ask anybody, they think you are quite out of your mind--same thing happened when I did a temp job at Bates Advertising in the gorgeous Chrysler Bldg. and made various remarks about the fantastic windows which I'd never seen from inside. I was heavily stared at, and more or less encouraged to con centrate on the billing, naturally all stapled together so you couldn't really tell what it was.

[sixfootsubwoofer]

Being the "someone" who commented on the hypocrisy of your maintaining a housecleaner, I feel I should offer up an answer to your obviously rhetorical "why?".

(By the way, your refusal to directly address my comment can be interpreted in many ways, the first being that you think it unworthy of your comments, that you think my thoughts simple or stupid, the second being that it somehow made you uncomfortable. I can only assume a blend of the two, since you deigned not to directly address me but rather *use* my comment to set up another of your picayune circular discussions that briefly question, psychologize, then speciously justify your enjoyments of your own privilege.)

As a privileged academic, you have no reason not to wear furs, go to opera, and have a housecleaner. However, as a self-styled radical leftist, your enjoyments of the trappings of a bourgeoisE lifestyle are, within the logic of common sense, (if you take nothing from this comment, take the notion of "common sense", that old idea that might inspire another of your blog posts) fallacious.

Let me put it this way. A few months back, your post "Discipline? Oh, Yes!" absolutely floored me with its heedlessness. Until then, I had naively assumed that you practiced in your daily life the sort of discipline I took Zizek, in part, to mean: a rigorously efficient economy of living, an enjoyment of anti-consumption, participating as little as possible in the trappings of consumer society, etc. in order to save energy and resources to organize political change. I suppose I had a rather romantic picture or yourself and other leftist academics as being scruffy and having at least the appearance of poverty, sort of like those old photos of anarchist intellectuals squatting in abandoned buildings. To find out that such discipline was not the active foundation of your principles but rather notional fodder for your self-important psychologizing had me irate and disillusioned. I must, without irony, thank you for that. Up to that point, I had viewed leftist academics much in the way Zizek views "liberal communist" philanthropic corporations: basically the enemy of any progressive political movement, but good for allegiances in order to fight on smaller, localized levels against Empire. Now I'm wondering if your ilk are even good for that.

I feel I must briefly describe the position from which I make these vulgar statements. I come from a lower, loooower class background but have always had intellectual inclinations. Once at state university (attaining the status of college student was like climbing from a slimy cave for four years while being pulled back down by needy family members unwilling to bear witness to daylight) I fell in with the anti-consumerist/activist set. In short, I saw my fellow radicals mature in three ways: go into advertising, fly off to elitist universities to study some arcane subject, or work hard to live what they believed to be a life that was consistent with their political principles, sacrificing as much as possible to "help out their fellow man" by volunteering, organizing, and re-engineering their enjoyments to be as "anti-consumerist" as possible. I tried out all three. But after seeing that the first two were attainable, I knew that there was no question; I could only live with myself by choosing the third option. While I am aware that my position of nearly starving and living as artfully as possible in order to do what I feel is necessary for any good leftist to do is a dreadful cliche, I am also aware that your position is an even more dreadful one. We are all cliches, no? The question is whether you decide to live a cliched life that requires you to buy carbon offsets to assuage your guilt, or live a cliched life in which you ride a bike, make your own food, clean your own house, and sell your dead grandma's fur coat in order to help out that old lady next door who's eating cat food.

So, I called you to task because I feel that you epitomize the failure of progressive politics. ( I choose to ignore your knee-jerk supposition that the criticism of paid domestic labor is a gendered one. That's a diversionary tactic. Surely you read Badiou?) Why do you even study and teach Leftist Theory if you refuse to alter your mode of living? Is it a way to assuage your guilt? Wouldn't it be easier to just consult for an ad agency and put a brick in the toilet tank?

[sixfootsubwoofer]

Oh, yeah, and if you reverse the last statement of your post,("Should she be denied of an extra 200 dollars a month so that I can acquire some kind of politically pure position?) it comes out to be: "If I were to maintain "some kind"* of politically pure position, then my housekeeper would be denied an extra 200 dollars a month."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the non-Theoretical, man-on-the-street, conservative justification for capitalism? I guess I should have simply pointed that out and avoided all of the spew above, huh?

*(btw, what "kind"? are there different "kinds" of purity in relation to political positions? It is this ambiguity that I feel is the most damaging to progressive politics.)

[Patrick J. Mullins]

'and sell your dead grandma's fur coat in order to help out that old lady next door who's eating cat food.'

Oh, fuck you and the cheap shots like that. Very Arpege, who would tell someone to do it, while having her NEW furs groomed. Somebody called me back in the late 70s who was interested in a friend of mine seuxally. He talked about 'hanging onto plants' and generally screeching poverty-images, interspersed with 'let me suck your muscle.' I was so naive it took me until 2 years ago to realize he wasn't saying this hypothetically, but rather was talking about me (or possibly my friend.) Mandy Patinkin could do your part: 'You were supposed to be IMMORTAL'...Evita Dean: 'I kept my promise...now keep your distance...'

[badiouian]

Contrasting with the florid and endless torrents of discourse that come from my fellow graduate students, the economical exchanges associated with cleaning are actually refreshing. Cleaning entails a spare prose ("would you like me to clean the downstairs bathroom as well") which is less cluttered than then prevailing discourse of the human sciences. I should know, as I spend a lot of time doing both.
The elephant in the room here is humility. Simply put, too many claims are far too inflated, too many discussions to ego based, for much of theory discussion to progress in the name of anything like truth or meaning or honesty. I think old fashioned virtues like humility and service might be important, and I think they are engendered by cleaning homes. This, as well as the much more substantial paycheck then what someone working at starbucks or b&n gets, not to mention the freedom to make my own schedule, is the reason that cleaning appeals to me.
The feelings of "being a cleaner" are of course artificial. Coming from an upper middle class home, it is continually eye opening to me to see the looks one gets carrying cleaning supplies on the subway or bus. Worse yet when you are a man; breaking another cleaning stereotype. Though I have not yet pulled out Being and Event while going to a job, these kinds of juxtapositions are infinitely fruitful to me. The very arbitrariness of the interpolation at work constitutes its own play. More specifically, it is hilarious to see people who have not opened a book in ten years look down on me, the cleaning person, simply because I am holding a stick with a sponge on it.
What I am getting at is a structuration. I am happy to be structured by the experience of cleaning homes; feeling a sense of being a servant is something that keeps my more egoistical side in check (and I assume everyone else in the liberal arts wants to be seen as smart and well read as much as I do). The structuring element is even more interesting; for me it makes the capitalist system in which I toil look grossly distorted. And this funhouse mirror provides entertainment and not despair.
I will say that my perspective would be very different if I were cleaning to eat and not to buy books and pay rent.

best

[pebird]

So many verbal leftists fail to value labor, particularily when confronting it directly - it's much better not to have to employ someone and deal with the mess of economic life. Ah, the beautiful soul - sorry, it's not my resentment you have to deal with.

Do you find that the work product is important to you personally? Is this reflected in how you treat the person providing the service? Might the world be a better place if everyone did so?

I fail to see any contradiction in reality - much in appearance, but we already know the left loves to spend time looking at itself and criticising others.

[Badda Being]

badiouian,

Why would your perspective be different? I mean other than because you would be a different person. Why don't you, the person that you are, drop out of school and see just how different your perspective would be? Seriously. :-)

[sixfootsubwoofer]

Patrick. What the fuck are you talking about? I could glean absolutely nothing from your verbal flouncing. Of course, the "fuck you" I understood, but you didn't have to even say that...I knew you would be thinking it.

I think it's very telling, and sadly predictable, how your flowery language breaks down to a good 'ol "fuck you" once leftist academe hypocrisy is challenged. But a coherent response would have been nice. And what does your old friend's sexual interest have to do with this? I can only assume you're on drugs or something.

Please interpret your response for me without the obscure theatre references. Since I'm working class, maybe you could use some movie references, or some Lacanian or Marxist ones. I am really very curious as to how what you said has ANY relevance to my comment.

...And my last fifty bucks says that Jodi will ignore the questions I posed....you can use the money for lunch at La Belle Vie. Or maybe two martinis at Barracuda...not including tip.

And Badda Being, thanks. You summed up my arguments exactly when you said: "Why don't you, the person that you are, drop out of school and see just how different your perspective would be? Seriously."

Of course, as I would pose it to Jodi, I would mean for it not to be literally dropping out of school, but just dropping out of the self-aggrandizing mindset of the horrendous trap that is priveleged leftist academia in order to see how different her perspective would be. Seriously.

[Seb]

See, and this could have been such a great discussion about class assumption, privilege, and whether or not someone who scrubs toilets even cares about bringing down the Empire... Instead it's devolved into typically histrionic My-Dick's-Bigger/My-Collar's-Bluer pissing contest. How charming.

Jodi, your reaction reminded me of an ongoing discussion at K-Punk about awakenings to class via academia. (Specifically, lower class kids didn't realize how fucked their kind were until they were inside the elevated-yet-oblivious inner sanctum of uni.) This was always my experience, too: unless someone fairly deliberately crosses the line (in one direction or another), people basically ignore the very existence of other classes. It's like joing AA: admitting we are uncomfortable with class (without it becoming a condescending pity-party) is the first step.

Part of it might be an American thing: good luck trying to get anyone in the States to even admit class exists! Note that you can research any statistic broken down along lines of race, religion, gender, etc. but NOT income. Europe seems more actively discoursant about its stratification, and in many other parts of the world, well, it's impossible to ignore 'cuz you can tell just by looking.

As for our budding Bakuninist... Glass houses, my friend. To chastise someone for being "self-aggrandizing" by virtue of their career, whilst constantly flexing your "working class" credentials as though it, de facto, makes you a more politically pure & better person, is simple hypocrisy. It's just like the "I'm from the streets, bitch!" posturing of so many wankstas: yeah, so who gives a fuck? Christopher Hitchens once wrote about a colleague who was a lethally-tongued Devil's Advocate, but when it came to defending himself or offering political solutions, he'd lapse into a defensive, isolationist refrain of, "You don't like me 'cuz I've not been to UNI-VAH-SITY, eh?" Hardly constructive. So many people (in both neoliberal AND leftist camps) wear their class like it's some fucking badge of honour that MEANS something.

[Jodi]

Patrick, since you are the source of all blog memory in these parts, do you think you might note this thread so that we remember how I saved 50$ to pay for drinks in NYC? Or do you insist on coffee? If so, that's fine, we can just add in some really expensive pastries, preferably made by children illegally imprisoned in dank cells underneath the Plaza. And, when we meet, you can recognize by my fur and likely some fabulous new Manolos which I'll be able to afford after a few months of ceasing to exploit someone into cleaning my house twice a month. Yippee!

[John Drabinski]

I've almost passed on posting because of the long list here, but this thing that always bothers me keeps coming up.

And, no, I don't mean the near compulsion of so many to trot out what seem to be their class-credibility cards: "my mama was..." (I'll do that at the end.) In these sorts of discussions, I'm always shocked to learn that everyone was poor and no one was middle-class and up. But we in academia know better. The field is largely comprised of well-off kids all grown up. Alas.

Not really my point.

My point is actually how objections to you (and others, in other contexts) turn on a single presupposition: there is something abject about housecleaning work. Or custodial work. That sort of pissing on working people, as it were, exposes so much anxiety about class even as someone hiring that person is critiqued for being somehow a threat to a fantasized revolution. Work is work. What is degrading about work is when that work is treated as abject, and so the person performing it is an object of derision or pity (which is just another form of derision, actually).

I wonder sometimes if Marxist minded folk, to which I'd add my name, fantasize a revolution in which suddenly no public bathrooms need to be cleaned. Or dishes be washed at restaurants. Etc. What a peculiar revolution.

For me, this sort of discussion (now so long!) degrades housekeeping work in ways no different than a cruel employer. A job is a job, people don't freak because they have to scrub a toilet. They freak because they don't have enough money to get by, or they freak because the classes above them tsk-tsk with derision or pity at their profession. Either way, tough to imagine being down with the working-class when you see what they do as disgusting and pitiable.

Pay well and be nice, which mostly means get out of they way so s/he can do the work efficiently. I really don't see the problem as a work-type and am disturbed by the implication that this is pitiable labor. It's a job.

(Mandatory class card check - turns out my mommy was a housecleaner!)

[jdean]

John, thanks, your point about abjection puts clearly and directly (and better) a theme that I was trying to express in this post: the denigration of some kinds of work. I also very much like your point about the fantasy of the revolution which I had not thought about. There is very much a way that fixating on single instances of impure practice as the site of failure helps keep the fantasy alive, "if only Jodi didn't pay someone to clean her house, the revolution would come."

I think your point about middle class-ness ties in well with Seb's point about denying class: on one side, Americans want to deny it, particularly the way that class privilege enables some of us to be academics; on the other hand, under pressure, we'll adopt a fantasy structure to protect our ability to deny--we are really working class; and, even if our parents weren't, then, well graduate students really are the proletariat.

How should left academics deal with the realities of class? We have our academic and theoretical approaches and mechanisms. To my mind, that's not nothing. Marxist economics puts pressure on neoliberal orthodoxy. Marxist political theorists emphasize the omissions and/or the ideological structure of liberalism, etc... But what about in how we live our lives, lives that are more privileged than 90 percent of what happens on the planet, yet, if we are honest, lives that are also not as materially rich as people we went to school with (who earn zillions and so make us feel less valuable, less valued, and maybe even deludely exploited). We don't like thinking about our place in the superstructure--I teach in a private school and so help maintain the structure of power. We might hope to be training future cadres, but most folks want a secure living, not a revolution.

[hugh]

I'm going to suggest a different aspect of this anxiety, which isn't directly about class.

Isn't there a kind of American self-reliance, that has invested the nuclear family's home with the aura of Thoreau's shack in the woods?

I think it's in that context that a certain anxiety about cleaners (and nannies) arises. The work they do is a kind of domestic labour that the family is supposed to be able to take care of for itself.

This idea that every family should be able to fend for itself runs into lots of problems in practice, especially in single parent families, or when neither parent would prefer to devote the major part of their waking hours to domestic labour. Nonetheless, I think it's an idea that is still present in many people's psyches (such as mine), and that also has political consequences.

[Seb]

Sorry to drag this on further, but I'm enjoying it too much to quit...

John, you made the Blue Ribbon point in this conversation. To imply that one kind of work is below or more ignoble than another is an insult and an admission of defeat by neoliberalism. This is regardless of whether the derision comes from some rich prick OR a so-called leftist who has lost track of what solidarity & fraternity means.

When I was living in North America, whenever I heard a friend bitching about trouble finding work, it wasn't that there were no jobs - there just weren't any jobs they'd deign to do. Tellingly, all such people also claimed to be wealth-despising lefties.

Hugh also makes a good point. Whenever there's talk of nannies, nurses, or housekeepers, it's assumed that the employer hired them because they're rich enough to choose not to perform said tasks. Very little is said about the chance that such tasks just wouldn't get done without that extra hand, e.g. a single working parent with a toddler who gives a little cash to a neighbour to watch their kid during the day. Does this make them a failure as a head of household?

Again, something I've found fairly specific to the American psyche is the idea of poverty (or simply below-upper-middle-class-ness) as personal failure - that if you're poor, YOU fucked up somehow. In this light, any anger directed at those with hired help is born not of class resentment, but of envy. And that's just ugly.

[patrick j. mullins]

"think it's very telling, and sadly predictable, how your flowery language breaks down to a good 'ol "fuck you" once leftist academe hypocrisy is challenged."

I do apologize for the 'fuck you', as it was not meant to be interpreted as a breakdown in flowery language, for which I have long been justly celebrated. Hypocrisy is everywhere, dear urchin, we all suffer from it and try to do the least wickedness we can, but I find that people on the both the right and left are about equally hypocritical and it is my purpose in upholding the ideals of the National Honor Society to inform them at all times of this fact. They are not usually as comfortable with this state of affairs as I am, so that's why I get the professional fees, while continuing to live artistically, root Coleus, and make my own meals--why Saturday my friend Anna and I saved on Rum Cake at Amy Ruth's in Harlem because I had made an apple pie made from Feral Apples gathered (by myself!) from the superb General Theological Seminary's ancient apple tree, then cooked with sugar till tender and marinated in sherry for 48 hours, then covered in English Custard and some Port Wine Sauce used for a Fig Dessert the previous week.

To make this 'make your own meals' not just campy and even prolish, I occasionally eat just a can of sardines with ketchup as I did last night. I didn't even have any beverage except tap water with it!

'But a coherent response would have been nice. And what does your old friend's sexual interest have to do with this?'

He wasn't my friend, my friend was the street violinist that he'd first set his hopes on (Jimmy still does this, and he is a distinctly aging adolescent to be thinking he can be an Iggy Pop type doing Bach and Saint-Saens on the Grand Concourse for an indefinite future), or at least that could be it...

"I can only assume you're on drugs or something. "

Such talk is commonplace in the chat rooms and is not a form of living artistically. Don't talk ugly now, I want you to be nice boys and girls...

'sadly telling'

Jodi, this is another one of my pet peeves in writing, because people never use it in speech--I mean the 'sadly', because they are using it most of the time for someone's performance level. At the ballet forum they use it constantly and embarassingly, as in 'sadly, Merrill was no longer featured in 'Diamonds' once Farrell had returned.' This is somehow related to 'what went so terribly, terribly wrong' which I also hate, as in a 1994 theater headline "What Went So Terribly Terribly Wrong with 'The Red Shoes'" Along these high-toned lines, 'incomparable' is okay if used infrequently, but it is still peculiarly mostly a written, not spoken, term.

I hope things go better for you, sixfootsubwoofer, you're young enough to be able to get somewhere you'll be happy. In the meantime, if you are so impressed with your own lifestyle, you needn't go about bugging people about theirs. In any case, 'my last fifty dollars' will cover Jodi and Paul at La Belle Vie, but not quite me and the waiter...Traxus4420 and I went there and got past bewildered waiters for about $15 apiece. Then we went to the seminary garden and had my Bakewell Tart, which you could make at home too!

Now, now, you see, there are those who brag constantly about their luxuries and berate and talk about 'revolutionary politics' to poor students while doing nothing but blogging and drinking, so that this case of taking Jodi to task is interesting when compared to the last time a blogger was taken to task for 'having privilege'. In that case, the blogger was so rude I often fantasized I was Jehu and could talk her eunuchs into throwing her out of her palace...but alas, the old queen Jezebel took her time before an execution, and painted her eyes, 'adorned herself' as the books always say, just the way Socrates practised a flute tune just hours before the hemlock was brought in...but no, the eunuchs were locked into the same mindset as her ladyship was, who was to enervated to put on rouge, and she had to be dealt with by stronger bisexuals like me and Dejan!

Now, I don't always agree with everything Jodi writes about, but she has the ability to listen and also to learn as well as teach, not just throw a deaf ear at you and determine that you have not satisfied her dogma fix for the day. Because there are others perfectly willing to waste your time like there's no tomorrow...and tomorrow never comes...

As for the 'theater reference', you seemed to be capable of somehow knowing that that's what it was despite the blights of Extended Proletarianism. And you somehow didn't know they'd made a movie of it with Miz Madonner? Lawdie! So chic of you!

Also, didn't it ever occur to you that even if Jodi does post about a lot of things she does that are pretty accomplished--trips and books, etc.--that all this takes a lot of time, and the purpose of hiring someone to clean your house is probably due to not wanting to live in squalour. If this is not by-the-book prole-ism, then this is not the 60's either, so we'll just have to realize that new forms of lives are being lived. She might well feel as I do, when I have time to do it: Cleaning your own floors and working on your own house is actually a lot more energizing than having to sit at some goddam screen and concentrate on stuff for long periods of time.

But you see I even literally had a cat-food person neighbour. She had been in advertising, making $4000 a month, which was good money at the time, and plenty left over after rent. My apartment smelled like dead mice for 2 years, I noticed, until a gas leak forced the management to break in to her apartment, in which she'd taken shits directly on the floor and turned the living room into a garbage dump of food, liquor bottles in the hundreds. This caused a huge epidemic of cockroaches on 3 floors and 15 apartments, as well as stinking to high heaven. Oh my God! I worked with the landlords to have her evicted! And we succeeded, because she did not care one whit to clean it up, and was offered this opportunity. Talk about needing a housekeeper for the little young lady next door who eats cat food! Hell, she wasn't even over 30, Jesus God, I think she may have been Mafia, though, didn't show up at court. Still took 2 months to get her out, and when they bagged up her stuff, it was 40 lawn bags stacked from floor to ceiling in her kitchen. I rescued a plant in there, but it had blight and soon perished.

[jdean]

Hugh--the thing about the fantasy of reliant families is the way it (for Patrick's sake I'll add "sadly") relies on suppressing the gendered nature of work. Thoreau is alone. No kids.

I'll add that it's very weird to see how self-described leftists move into the celebration of mere subsistence as a kind of purity, so much so that it seems like Marxism is anti-technology, anti-industry, and pro primitive agriculture (this comments doesn't apply to you, Hugh).

Patrick--when I come to New York (and I have no idea when that will be), I want the desert you just described. Now I am absolutely starving. Which might up my purity ranking, so that's a good thing.

[Badda Being]

sixfootsubwoofer,

What I meant was that I really *don't* understand why badiouian's perspective would (should) be different.

I like what John said.

[seto]

Even if sixfootsubwoofer's tone was off-putting, i would be interested to read jodi respond to what he wrote. It seems like his comment pushes the discussion in a challenging direction by asking questions few on the left are willing to even entertain, let alone take seriously. The tone and quality of responses to subwoofer seem to exemplify this refusal (again, i do not like the way subwoofer state the position either, but i think there is something substantive in what he wrote). i also think anon's connecting the post on paying someone to clean to the one on sacrificing neo-liberal comforts is good. What is it that we are to sacrifice? Jodi, how do you reconcile these two posts/positions?

When subwoofer writes:

"I called you to task because I feel that you epitomize the failure of progressive politics."

Can you defend against such a claim? Not as an individual, but ina more general sense. For it does seem like the contradiction subwoofer is getting at does render the left politically ineffective. I think it misses the point to get bent out of shape over hypocracy. It just indivudalises and moralises politics, but there is a contradiction in that is an element of jodi's position, but it is not a personal failing. It speaks to the current political terrain of capitalism and sovereignty.

Politically speaking it seems like this type of contradiction is paralysing also when discussion of it devolves into the question of individual or personal integrity or 'goodness'. Perhaps what is at stake is not whether or not we are 'good' people, but how the contradiction of our politics and lifestyle is itself a political issue? As long as we only think of defending our egos we can't talk about politics terms.

Without becoming individually defensive, how can we genuinely respond to subwoofer's point?

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"but there is a contradiction in that is an element of jodi's position, but it is not a personal failing. It speaks to the current political terrain of capitalism and sovereignty."

Of course--but we all have this contradiction, and a part of being adult is understanding that there's plenty of heavy lifting for all of us to do, but that we can't always do it. People who are successful always have to put up with more flack than those who tolerate rude flats even when they don't have to. And part of growing up is refusing that bullshit about 'only the good die young.' It's true that there really is a kind of 'youth idealism' many of us go through, and we think that is worth suffering for and sacrificing for. Later on, we still think it's worth something, but then we go ahead and look out for Number 1, just as is normal and without which you won't realize your potential to do anything, whether pleasure-loving or do-good-loving. They've been having a series of articles at WaPo on Mother Teresa, whose business was always about trappings of poverty. What's worse is the Susan Jacoby wrote such an ignorant critique of Mother Teresa that one couldn't get past the pitifulness of how WaPo would hire writers that bad! She didn't even recognize the fact that Mother Teresa really did operate these hospital places and oversee a large amount of healing of the most underpriviliged. From a distance, I find her admirable, but never would have let her ashram-inducing presence near me. She did good despite her atrocious condemnation and guilt-giving. No elevators, no cinema, no TV for the AIDS shelter guys in New York, tea and soup for the nurses who went to work for her and were into this scene (I knew one, she was insufferable and instructed me on how the 'vibrations' at her Pumpkin Hollow, New York ashram were different from the sidewalks of Manhattan. These people were so pitiful they made me turn off a Ravel cassette while I helped them paint a cabin, because they'd rather hear swami-type music. At first, they told me I could play it, but then said 'well, if we have a problem with it, we'll let you know.' Sixfootsubwoofer and Arpege Chabert are forms of Mother Teresa, and the 'tone and quality' have a lot to do with it. As long as shrewishness and berating work, saying things like 'some people are going to have to get their feelings hurt', then naturally one decides that immediately one must take care of hurting these types feelings, lest they misunderstand the meaning of hypocrisy.

[seto]

The point is not that the contradiction is 'bad.' I know that the absence of hypocrisy is idealism. I'm trying to take that insight seriously. To say to the acknowledgment of the contradiction: "Of course--but we all have this contradiction" misses the point. The dismissal ("of course") is actually the point where we should be talking about politics, not about how to be good people. Yes, we all have the contradiction (at least us privileged types). What does the contradiction tell us about the political terrain? What does it mean for political action? How do we act consequentially given the stakes that the contradiction implies? That being that to 'really' be politically consequential we'd have to do something very different from what "is normal and without which you won't realize your potential to do anything." What do we do when the stakes of political seem to be life itself? Can we get beyond defending our 'individuality'?

No offense Patrick, but I'd like to read jodi's thoughts on this.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"No offense Patrick, but I'd like to read jodi's thoughts on this."

You did too mean offense, and ordinarily I'd let it slip by, but not this time, NO! You behave as if I were trying to answer for her. In that case, do not respond to what I've written. You merely prove the contradition and make me ignore totally your points about when the political becomes life itself! You are boorish!

[seto]

correction in the third to last sentence of my last comment. It should read:

What do we do when the stakes of political *action* seem to be life itself.

Sorry Patrick, I didn't mean to upset you like that.

[Jodi]

First, I don't see a contradiction.

Second, I did answer the point: paying someone to clean one's house is not commodity production or exploitation. Opposition to neoliberalism is not the same thing as opposition to paying people for their work.

Third, why are these comments so consistently refusing to acknowledge the gendered aspect of this work?

Fourth, do the politically pure also think that left failure is encapsulated in leftists who pay mechanics for fixing their cars?

[badiouian]

Badda Being my goal is not to be more proletatian. I clean because it is enjoyable, flexible schedule and generally I appreciate the value of things like shutting the fuck up and scrubbing a toilet bowl.
I do not quit my real life and clean full time for several reasons. First, the money aint great. Second, I enjoy taking classes and interacting with people on the humanities side of the fence-- why not do something I enjoy? Third, there simply are not enough hours to make enough money cleaning with my current employer to support myself.
Finally and most importantly, this morning on the way to a job I was reading Adorno, Notes to Literature. In his criticism of Brecht, Adorno notes that Brechtian language never enters the real world of the proletariat, it always sounds hollow and contrived. "One may play at anything" he concludes, "but not at being a member of the proletariat."

[badiouian]

One more point, sorry to belabor this.
After the revoloution comes, or the messiah comes or whatever, there will still be cleaning people. There is a real confusion here between functional differentiation, which might be neccesary, and what Bourdieu calls distinction. The thing we are looking forward to is less the state where the are no cleaning ladies than the one where someone can say they clean houses part time and work as a professor in a research university the rest of the time. Re the commenters who say that I am not authentically cleaning houses because I come from an upper middle class background, that is exactly the point. The point is to have someone clean for you and not look down on them or categorize them as somehow inferior. Beyond this, in many cleaning businesses (not the one i work for) there are explotation issues. That has got to go, but there is no reason in the world not to get down and scrub.

[Jodi]

Badouian--I like your point very much. It applies well to my initial post: the problem is not that people (in the examples I used, women) are cleaning and being paid for their work; the problem is the disjuncture between cleaning and academia, between physical and mental labor, between work that might require people to see, smell, and touch shit and work that lets them analyze and interpret it without getting stained. So, people could work as cleaners and as professors. One possible step in that direction is improving pay for cleaners. Another step involves respecting cleaners and their work so that, for example, there is nothing odd or surprising about faculty partners working as cleaners. It would be no different from partners working as journalists or artists or social workers or librarians or computer consultants.

[Badda Being]

badiouian, I'm just not sure why the enjoyable aspect of cleaning would be lost if you quit school, if that's what you meant (and it probably isn't). I'm not questioning your Leftist credentials or anything like that.

[badiouian]

i meant i enjoy school, why give that up? there is no good reason to do so.

[badiouian]

Apologies for the many comments.
But there is something missing i feel compelled to point out. When someone cleans for you it is a form of material intimacy. They can find all sorts of things abut you from your debts to your vibrator. Do you want someone from your social mileau finding this stuff or someone from a different part of society, or even the world, that you do not have to interact with outside of this context.
I would connect this immediately with the popular trope of the maid stealing from her (or his) employer. This kind of closeness might foster a pervasive distrust. Who is this other that invades my domesticity even while establishing it?
There is a real paradox here. To establish the home means to have the home invaded.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"This kind of closeness might foster a pervasive distrust. Who is this other that invades my domesticity even while establishing it?
There is a real paradox here. To establish the home means to have the home invaded."

Yes, and this can be effected in many ways. In my temp job days, I met a lady who was part of Rockefeller Group who hired me to come up to one of the upper-middle-class suburbs to clean her house. They had suffered the death of their daughter, and their was still a son, but apparently there was something about the thing in which they'd depended on the daughter for housecleaning, and had left it disorganized for several years. But the kitchen was so disgustingly filthy that I went mad cleaning it up, these were those types that take home every ketchup plastic and salt packet from Burger King and I wasn't supposed to throw those out. But I didn't know this in my zeal to make the kitchen at least sanitary, which it most definitely was not. So I actually cleaned it, when I was not quite supposed to really clean it. In the bedrooms all drawers were hanging out, filled with things they were unable to throw away, so they even put the telephone in hanging-out drawers, since no room on any table space. I also wouldn't get drunk with the employer, who had decorated the rest of her kitchen floor with 40 or so empty wine bottles, so I was not invited to continue such domestic work.

I had not thought through the numbers of odd jobs as a cleaner I have had, but the others were more interested in actually having a job done, rather than pretending to do so. They wanted their kitchen and utensils clean, not just the idea of getting things clean from a dirtiness they'd grown to love and get fully acclimated to.

[McKenzie Wark]

In some circles, cleaning houses for bourgeois leftists is considered pretty cushy work. One you get them trained they are pretty acceptable bosses and tend to tolerate a fairly human approach to work:

"sorry i can't clean tomorrow, my kid has his big game on."
"oh... OK then."

Then they do that hand wringing thing, which is always good for a laugh.

[Jodi]

Patrick, I find it interesting and odd that you have a had at least two experiences with people who were really extremely messy and lax about keeping things clean (the ketchup people and the woman with the horrible dead mouse emanating from her apartment).

The point about intimacy is important. It seems that the willingness of one to expose oneself to another without shame could mean that the other is not one before whom one could feel shame, the other is unequal. The other's gaze doesn't matter. But, that is too easy, isn't it? Because there is a vulnerability on the part of the person exposed, and however uncomfortable one might feel, moving beyond that vulnerability requires trust or a fiduciary leap.

[sixfootsubwoofer]

Seto, thank you very much for being the only one here to acknowledge the substance of my post, as well as seconding my request that Jodi answer, or at least acknowledge, the questions I have posed to her, which are of course questions posed not just to *her*, but to all of those in her position. I feel she has put herself to task by creating this blog, by putting herself forward to the public and out of the sanctuary of the academy. It seems to me that by making her thoughts and life public, she has a minimal responsibility, as a leftist as well as a human being, to acknowledge her challengers.

That said, I apologize if my tone was "off-putting". To me, it wasn't. I was as respectful as I feel it necessary to have been under the circumstances. When one is confronted with ideas or actions they believe to be hypocritical, should one tread with cat-feet around their own indignation? I made no personal attacks, I don't know Jodi. I wasn't saying she should sell her ma's fur coat, I was actually recounting an incident in my past in which a friend sold *hers* in order to help out a neighbor . In any case, I wouldn't bother to bring Jodi to task if I didn't have some respect for her, if not as a leftist, then at least as a scholar. I sort of romantically view all leftists as being in an estranged family, and if you can't be a little rough with the ones you love in order to get through to them, you probably don't really love them, right? Maybe the tone was so off-putting that Jodi felt it necessary to ignore my comments, but I think that is a lame excuse. I'm hardly raving here, and I do think my questions were valid ones.

I'm still amazed, as I was in college, at how the educated condescend to one another with such careful modulation. I take the response by Seb to have just such a condescension. It only spells out the obvious for him to speak of me "flexing my working class muscles". If you even *mention* that you're working class among a group of upper-mids, the eyes start rolling. Of course I'm aware of that. It is the working class' fear of being perceived as self-righteous that keeps them quiet!! If I had said I was studying queer theory at Cambridge, could Seb have dismissed my challenges as easily? Seb's interpretation of my comment is weak in that I never said being working class puts me in a more politically pure position. I said that *the way I choose to live my life NOW* skews me a little more parallel to what I perceive, as well as countless other thinkers, to be leftist principles. I'm not *impressed* with my life, and I don't *envy* the academics that I am challenging. I'm simply doing what a system of theory has shown me is the only way to change things, as painful at times as it may be for me.

My comments had nothing to do with the nature of housecleaning as labor. All the responses that followed about the joys of paid domestic housecleaning, how it's "OK by me", or how it is deeeeply interesting from your educated POV, totally ignored my point. More diversion, the stock-in-trade of the media as well as privvy leftist academe. (And Jodi's constant attempts to re-orient the subject back to gender are soooo troubling for me. Please Jodi, read your Badiou. How are we to ever be on the same page politically if we keep bringing up our genitals and our appearances?)

There are just TWO POINTS that I wish to clarify that I hope all of you take with you from this, and then I'll shut up and everyone can go back to the psychologizing. (And I DON"T feel I speak from a "pure" position, I just think that I speak from one which very few of you have experienced. I am attempting to sound as least self-righteous as I can. I think a good leftist believes in absolute equality, so it would be hypocritical of me to do so. I speak no "working class wisdom" or truth here, just my opinions and passions.)

1) I feel that Jodi's lifestyle is at absolute odds with her stated desire to help create an alternative to capitalism. I see no difference in Jodi's bourgeois habits and Senator Craig's getting busted for soliciting a blowjob after he denounces homosexuality. If Jodi is so against capitalism, why does she contribute so much to its continuance?

I'm sure this is still a big debate among Leftist Theorists, but it seems to me from my non-matriculated understanding of the subject that the only thing to bring it crashing down is to simply STOP buying shit and using people for their labor. YES, I believe that if everyone stopped paying their housecleaners, the housecleaners would go hungry, get pissed and organize some sort of group to make their plight known. YES if we all stopped buying books newspapers records cars art....all but the essentials, then things would get so bad the world would have no choice but to re-organize itself from the bottom up. YES, I know that I and my ilk would be the first to get killed in a mob or starve while the college professors cringe within the gates of Columbia U. Call it simple, call it crazy, call it "working class wisdom". Just don't throw theory at the problem, maybe use some...common sense? "Buy Nothing Day"? Such absolute privileged pap!! No better than those dreadful Gap (RED) ads, simply an ad for a lifestyle-you-can-buy as opposed to a real principle. How about "Buy Only What You Absolutely Need Life"?

And I know Jodi really thinks she "needs" the housecleaner. Shit, I need a housecleaner. I work forty hours a week, organize bicycle advocacy groups, read a ton of books, take care of my neighbor's kids, bust my ass to save for my old age...this blogging shit is a LUXURY to me. I should actually be out helping people instead of trying to convince you all to do the same here right now. Even if I could afford a housecleaner, I could not allow myself to have one NOT because someone was doing my dirty work, but because I consider it a bourgeois pleasure that is adding to the world's troubles. Why does one family deserve to have someone clean up their shit and not other families? If you think that what you do is so important to the world that you don't have time to clean up after yourself, then you're just being selfish and lazy. Wouldn't a mother say the same to her teenage son? As a leftist it is not enough to simply acknowledge that even I, at the bottom of the income bracket, enjoy privileges that 90% of the world will never know. I must DO something. Acknowledgement without action is the ruling class' modus operandi since the beginning of time. Which leads to me to:

2) You use the arcane language (NOT CONCEPTS) that pays your bills to create a fence around yourself that enables you to dismiss people like me.

Now that Zizek has convinced some Leftist intellectuals that they are as much a part of the problem as anyone else, that they maintain capitalism in order to be able to make a nice living denouncing it, said leftist intellectuals think they get off the hook by simply taking him into their fold. Zizek's stroke of genius in both getting well paid, and in creating the seeds to get the proletariat so pissed off that they actually DO something about global capitalism was precisely this.

Any PAID Zizekian is basically a charlatan. You guys are just priests and he's your new Jesus, I'm sorry. It seems to me that Leftist Theory should end with his challenge to Leftists of "you believe what I'm saying, you implicate yourself in the order of things, and yet you spend your time endlessly interpreting and philosophizing about what I say instead of actually getting off your ass and cleaning your house, making your own fun, using creativity to make your pleasures inexpensive, and helping to (hippy slogan be damned) change the world for the better."

Leftist Intellectuals readily acknowledge that they live privileged lives, but what do they do about it? Write another paper on housecleaning as a gendered profession? Go to a conference on the other side of the world to meet other affluent intellectuals and sell them your books? This makes absolutely no sense. To further the dissemination of your arcane discourse, to promote yourself and your own particular ideas in order to maintain your privilege does absolutely nothing to attain global equality. And the only way you can justify this, to keep your repressed guilt at bay, is to ignore that fact and tell yourself something like "I'm contributing to a system of thought that will be drawn upon in, say, a hundred years, that will help show the proletariat how to rise up!! Now I'm gonna go to Starbucks and write that paper about Kristeva, maybe grade some student papers. Oh, fuck it. I"ll let the assistant do it."

You basically use some kind of circular, not "logic", but reasoning to justify your upper class affects. Jodi obviously thought it beneath her to respond directly to my comment. She ignored me as a person and used my challenge to further her own BRAND of discourse. To her, I'm not a person, but an abstraction, someone who doesn't "get" the intricacies of Theory, an unwashed blip that sprang up on her clean monitor. I must be scrubbed away by turning my point into a "gendered" one, by "digging deeper" into why I said what I said instead of addressing the substance of what I said. Notice that the only response she gave was basically a hysterical one. She just made fun of me. Maybe I am only worthy of a joke, a communist cartoon character. But all I know is that I constantly read Jodi referring to her guilt, her discomfort at having her fantasies of academia disturbed. I have no time for such luxurious guilt, and believe me, I wish I did. I do feel guilty that I have a Netflix account. But I feel real, palpable fear that someone who is supposed to represent leftist principles and Leftist Theory will only make fun of me instead of at least acknowledging me.

...Ok, maybe I did rave a little bit there, but why should I care? My blogging here has nothing to do with how I pay my bills. I have no decorum to maintain. I only have strongly held beliefs backed by theories I have worked hard to learn in my spare time.

So, one more time, Jodi. I'm asking you (are you with me, seto? please don't leave me hanging...) these simple questions. You can ignore me if you want and incrementally bring up the answers in your future blog posts if it makes you more comfortable. But I very much want to know:

Why do you even study and teach Leftist Theory if you refuse to alter your mode of living? Is it a way to assuage your guilt?

[Seb]

Ahoy, Mr. SixFoot...

I came off as condescending, did I? Only because of what you assume my status in society it. Am I bourgeois? Do I come from, or still occupy, a cushy stratum of society? Did I even go to college? Do I have a job - let alone a good one?

Don't know, eh? So forgive me if I remain unimpressed by someone who thinks that being a delibrately penniless, miserable sod; being the kind of person who actually wracks their conscience for having a NetFlix account, is making the world a better place. (Could it be you and I are actually rather alike in how we lead our lives, and ergo I won't buy any of your arguments from experience?) Had you been a queer thoery grad student at Cambridge, yes, I WOULD have dismissed you as easily, because you're a hectoring bore.

The fact of the matter is that any leftist who has time to write about theory (or practice) in the blogosphere is not out in the streets prepping for the revolution. I include myself in that hypocrisy, and I seriously doubt I will ever be on the front lines of whatever phantom movement we're all fantisizing will materialize. (Note that Marx called communism a "spectre"; does that mean, by its very nature, it cannot actually exist?) Because I abhor violence more than I loathe capitalism, I can't do what I honestly think it'll take to change the system.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"if you can't be a little rough with the ones you love in order to get through to them, you probably don't really love them, right?"

One of the typical Arpege-type Marxist bullshit twaddles.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"I'm hardly raving here, and I do think my questions were valid ones."

No, you are raving. Now I'll finish your post, each new sentence of which brings new repugnance.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"Zizek's stroke of genius in both getting well paid, and in creating the seeds to get the proletariat so pissed off that they actually DO something about global capitalism was precisely this."

Oh yes, oh yes, only Zizek had the genius, he breathlessly said. This is so PURE, just like you said it wouldn't be, you are NOTHING but a fucking menace. Typical MOTHER TERESA crap.

May all your efforts meet with total failure, and you and your self-righteous bullshit rot in hell.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"your own particular ideas in order to maintain your privilege does absolutely nothing to attain global equality. "

That's one thing good about having to go to all those boring conferences. Global equality is in NO WAY DESIRABLE. That's the most essential idiocy of all systems that take such an ignorant idea seriously.

You have reserved the right to froth at the mouth in all your boring working-class credentials.

[Patrick J. Mullins]

"I have no time for such luxurious guilt, and believe me, I wish I did."

You DO???? You mean after the revolution and everybody settles down to being 20 billion poppies sprouting (and EQUALLY?)

"I do feel guilty that I have a Netflix account."

AS WELL YOU SHOULD! I don't have Netflix account, nor do I even have a DVD player or even speakers on my computer! You hypocritical BORE! I use the New York Public Library and watch VHS's. I don't have cable, and I don't go around like some street evangelist who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.

You are a rude and nasty creep. You said I sounded 'as if on drugs'. Well, dear, I wish that you would consider getting some. And I take back any well-wishing I had for you. I see it absolutely necessary to fight the true hard-core barbarian like you, and only somebody no longer prone to all these cheap quilt trips fresh from the unwashed is going to start the counter-revolution!

Aux armes, citoyens!

[patrick j. mullins]

"I have no time for such luxurious guilt, and believe me, I wish I did."

Eh bien? The pure working-class leftist like sixfoot always forgets there are people around not interested in such thuggery and not worried about being 'a proper leftist'. You are some 'cartoon commie'.

"But I feel real, palpable fear that someone who is supposed to represent leftist principles and Leftist Theory will only make fun of me instead of at least acknowledging me."

You feel 'real, palpable fear' from those whose life-styles you repudiate? Well, isn't that something.

"...Ok, maybe I did rave a little bit there, but why should I care? My blogging here has nothing to do with how I pay my bills. I have no decorum to maintain."

And you certainly don't! This is one of the few times it becomes quite easy, even necessary, to say, 'Thank God for the Ruling Class!'

Did you ever have any decorum? Did you then throw it out? This is the most incredible rot I've read since the 9/11 truth people started trying to infect people.

[patrick j. mullins]

"this blogging shit is a LUXURY to me. I should actually be out helping people instead of trying to convince you all to do the same here right now."

You certainly SHOULD! It's high time you got a job too!

[badiouian]

I do not think the problem with SFSW is so much that he is *wrong* per se. It is more like his argument is hackneyed and tells us something we already know. Reheating old marxist tropes, SFSW ignores the MANY MANY people who have dealt productively with the these issues. I personally would begin with Adorno, as indicated previously, who made no attempt to bring down the system or to live a freetarian lifestyle. While this may place me at odds with Badiou, the inspiration for my typepad alias, I would say that there is real merit to the Adorno position, and in some ways it is more humane to rattle the cage of meaning than to starve and kill millions of people on the unproven assumption that the plot of a certain nineteenth century german book might play itself out. Finally I ask SFSW how he distinguishes himself from those evangelicals who want the entire world to be nuked, beggining with the middle east, in order for the plot of "Left Behind" to get played out in real life.
Perhaps we should save the messianic nuking of the world for made for tv drama, which you can rent on neflix.