A Decent Factory

Finding myself reading, once again, the film criticism of Stanley Kauffman from the year 2005, and coming across a review of a documentary called A Decent Factory, about a Nokia cellphone assembly factory in China, I paused at a passage in which Kauffmann poses a challenge to one of Karl Marx's better-known observations on Labor. Kauffmann mentions the working conditions in the factory:

"As far as the workers' comments are concerned, the only complaint we hear is about the food, which they find poor. They often slip out at night to buy food. And one woman reports a fight that another of the women had with a rough-tongued female supervisor. The one true grievance we do not hear from any of the women: we learn it from one of the bosses in a matter-of-fact way. The average pay is only about half the legal minimum wage. The factory had been built in China because labor is cheap, and it is being further cheapened. When the inspectors later report this fact back in Finland, management promises to do something about it.

"As the film progresses, expectation of exposé dwindles. Half salary is hardly a trifling matter, but the factory seems well enough run and is apparently a haven for some of the young women whose homes are a lot less attractive. Why, then, is the picture chilling? Because it is a calm reminder of an inevitability. The sight of long lines of young women doing tiny bits of attachment work or packing hour after hour, day after day, is saddening. The fact that the factory conditions are decent, as the title says wryly, makes it even sadder. Marx said that the alienation of labor--the gap between the worker and his work--is an evil of capitalism, but this is too limited: factories like this one flourish everywhere under every system. Marx's percept is not a charge against a system but a condition of modernity. Thousands of factories around the world where the attaching and packing go on and on--it's like Chaplin's Modern Times without Charlie."(1)

I'm not certain whether or not Kauffmann is being disingenuous here. He knew enough about Marx's idea of alienation to recognize it in the Nokia factory, but he must've known that China is only nominally a Marxist society. Finland (or, for that matter, the USA) is closer to being a Marxist society that communist China. Besides, China has embraced market capitalism on an unprecedented scale in order to expand its economy. This has created, as Marx predicted, enormous inequalities in China that didn't exist before - inequalities between people who want nothing more than a decent life and people who want impossibly more than they will never need.

Marx put it succinctly: a worker in a capitalist society "does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs."

Marx knew that as long as the nature of work, which reduces the worker himself to a commodity, remains the same, work will forever be reduced to an utterly depersonalized and soul-destroying repetition of manual tasks. Almost seven years ago, I wrote about Oscar Wilde's brilliant pamphlet, which is utterly forgotten today, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":

Wilde's vision of Socialism is unorthodox and often unrealistic. At times, when he discusses work and the freedom from work that he believes Socialism promises, he sounds like Eric Hoffer's remark about the modern "worldwide revulsion for work. To the new generation, 'la dolce vita' is not a life of plenty but a life of as little effort as possible."

Wilde believed that some time in the future all menial labor will be performed by machines, and men and women would be completely free from toil, suffering, and pain. He seems to think that work itself, and not just the motive behind it, will be eradicated under Socialism. I don't think that any socialist thinks this way. Work, which is mostly mindless toil, even for the middle class, will attain its true purpose once the motive behind it (making a living) is changed. Work, I think, is essential to living when it places the individual in the position of realizing that he is not simply an individual, but a part of a huge organism that is more than the sum of its parts. Soldiers find this out, whether they serve in combat or not. And its why they are willing to lay down their lives. They recognize probably more directly than anyone else the meaning of human brotherhood.

Marx elaborates: "Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."

Wilde concludes his essay in quite uncharted territory:

"It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development."

Wilde even defends his "scheme" against the charge of Utopianism:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 4, 2005. It is well known that Chaplin had "communist sympathies." In Modern Times, there is a scene in which a truck carrying a load of lumber passes him and the red flag hanging off the end of the load falls on the ground in front of Charlie. He picks it up and, waving it, chases after the truck. Just then a large group of communists waving their red flags rounds the corner and marches right behind Charlie. The police arrive and Charlie is arrested.
(2) "A Brotherhood of One" May 10, 2012.

He Said, #Me Said

Sigmund Freud is one of those intellectual mountains that have to be scaled before anyone can call themselves an educated person. He is also one of my heroes. Whatever has happened to his myriad "theories" - which are nothing but empirical postulations based on extensive and documented study - about human psychology in the eighty years since his death, psychoanalysis is an important and legitimate field of scientific research largely thanks to Freud. Of course, it was not as Science that Freud's writings first attracted my interest almost 40 years ago. My mother had been the beneficiary of several years of psychoanalytic treatment, for reasons that are related to the point I wish to make.

In his great book, The Tangled Bank, Stanley Edgar Hyman examined four men, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, James Frazer, and Sigmund Freud, and their achievements as imaginative thinkers, as creative artists whose great leaps in the dark contributed immensely to our understanding of humanity and our history. Whatever their specific scholarly and scientific contributions to their various fields, they were brilliant writers - managing to communicate in clear German and English prose the most complex concepts and ideas.

One of the hallmarks of a genius is his ability to recognize when he has made a mistake and to at least attempt to correct it. One of the first theories put forward by Freud was based on the analysis of dozens of subjects, women suffering from some form of neurosis (or "hysteria" as it was called at the time). Freud discovered that one of the consistencies between almost every individual case was the sexual abuse of the women at an early age by a male family member, usually the father. The abuse was suppressed by the child, made into a great lifelong secret until the effects of its suppression, a traumatic childhood event, resurfaced in the form of neurotic mental problems in later life.

Freud called his theory, "The Seduction Theory" and his research into the subject was published in 1896. Not long after he posited this theory, however, Freud decided to amend it. He decided that the claims of sexual abuse made by many of his female patients were actually admissions of sexual fantasy: that the women had childhood fantasies of a sexual nature that they later regarded as inappropriate, suppressed them, and that, when the women reached maturity, these fantasies resurfaced as remembered events in their childhood.

Freud's alteration of his original theory has been interpreted by some scholars and psychologists as an act of moral and intellectual cowardice. They argue that Freud knew that his Seduction Theory would cause enormous controversy in genteel European society, especially among men who were fathers of daughters. They argue that, faced with an awareness of the controversy that his feminine neurosis theory might bring about, Freud decided to backtrack and redefine the basis of his theory.

The change in Freud's theory was tied to his broader "Oedipal Theory" that applied to both women and men. Children engage in sexual fantasies that involve the adults in proximity to them. With boys, it is the mother who invariably becomes their first object of sexual desire, and it affects their whole sexual lives. One-third of the subjects in his initial Seduction Theory study were men. But Freud then argued that it was the mother, not the father, who was the seducer, in fact or in fantasy, for both infant boys and girls. The simple fact that his theory was named for the character from classical Greek drama reveals the extent to which Freud's theories were embraced as confirmation of existing poetic concepts. Artists - poets, playwrights and novelists, painters, sculptors and architects, even composers - found their oldest understanding of human behavior reinforced by Freud's rich metaphors and symbolism.

With the establishment of women's rights and the rise of Feminism, however, the most serious challenges of Freud's theories have come to the forefront. And his alteration of the Seduction Theory, and its underlying motivation, has come under serious scrutiny. Some now see Freud's suppression of evidence of sexual abuse by the father as simply his reluctance to challenge the patriarchal structure of turn-of-the-century European society. His theories that sexuality and sexual desire (the "libido") were at the root of nearly all human behavior had been controversial enough. Now that his theories were becoming established as scientific fact, he didn't want to further threaten the status quo. So he came up with a different interpretation of the cause of adult neurosis.

Whatever the true reason for the change of Freud's theory, accusations of sexual abuse are by now taken much more seriously. The #MeToo movement has effectively ended the careers of powerful men - from A-List actors to Hollywood Mogul producers to senators - based on accusations alone, on what "She said." Some of the critics of the movement, forgetting about the impact of this Moment in our sexual history, wonder why the accusers waited so long to bring their charges forward, citing the legal statute of limitations. The statute exists because eyewitness testimony is fraught with errors even when it is fresh in the memory. Over time, especially over several years, such testimony is subject to further errors from the interplay of memory and experience.

Yesterday a woman who has brought charges of sexual assault against a nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court asked that before she subjects herself to a public hearing in which the accused will be present, the FBI should investigate her claims. Not to corroborate her story but to establish her veracity. According to the protocols of the #MeToo movement, the nomination should be withdrawn and another candidate selected. If the career of Minnesota senator Al Franken could have been ended by accusations of misconduct alone, then why is this Supreme Court nominee still under serious consideration? Of course the process has become "politicized" - it was politicized from the beginning. Everything is politicized now. Justice Kavanaugh's nomination is toast. Stick a fork in it.

[Postscript September 21, 2018.

Since making the above post I have heard two arguments in support of Justice Kavanaugh. The first came from a group of "Republican women" who were careful not to denigrate the woman making the accusation of attempted rape against Kavanaugh, but attacked "the Democrats" for waiting until the eleventh hour to produce her letter. Then they said that every man shouldn't be held responsible for acts they committed when they were 17, inferring that attempted rape is an act that all men commit at that age.

The second argument was that simply giving Kavanaugh's accuser a hearing will encourage other women to come forward with similar accusations every time a man is nominated or runs for public office, inferring that the accuser is an opportunistic liar

My answer to both of these arguments is NOMINATE/VOTE FOR WOMEN ONLY. They can be trusted because they don't have penises.]