Blue Jay Way: Where Will Critical Culture Come From?: Responses
Willis, Ellen
WHEN MARSHALL BERMAN laments the decline of critical culture in America, he omits the implied and crucial qualifier: democratic. For there is no shortage of critical culture on the right,...
...WHEN MARSHALL BERMAN laments the decline of critical culture in America, he omits the implied and crucial qualifier: democratic...
...If historical experience is any guide, it won't start with poor and working-class people who are overwhelmed with struggling to make ends meet...
...There can be no democratic critical culture that does not confront the corporation— its authoritarian hierarchy, its robotizing cult of efficiency, its glorification of endless, compulsive work, its contempt for workers' rights, its colonization of every activity from publishing to education and health care...
...In other DISSENT / Winter 2000 • 43 SYMPOSIUM words, we need a new labor movement, one that contests not only the distribution of profits but the prerogatives of corporate management and the organization of work...
...Where is the pressure for such a movement to come from...
...In the sixties critical culture inspired social movements...
...Without some inkling that things might be different—and better—criticism doesn't lead to struggle, but rather to pessimism and despair, or at best to gestures of individual rebellion against nature or fate...
...The proximate cause of this paralysis is the failure of the Russian Revolution—not just the fall of the Soviet Union, in effect the demolition of a building long since emptied and crumbling, but the devastating conversion of emancipatory theory into totalitarian practice, in one country after another—coupled with the absorption of social democracy into liberalism...
...It is paralyzed by the culture of celebration and its constant assertion that we have reached the end of history: that capitalism is the final solution to the class problem— imperfect, perhaps, as the weather is imperfect, but inevitable and on the whole benign...
...For there is no shortage of critical culture on the right, where free-market radicals inveigh against the remnants of state power and cultural conservatives attack every aspect of post-sixties culture from no-fault divorce to sexually permissive television shows...
...Convinced that what exists is all there is, most people will prefer to make the best of it...
...It could develop within the infrastructure of existing unions, or outside it, or both...
...None of this holds today...
...The left, in contrast, has run in panic from the cultural radical legacy of the sixties and is desperate to identify itself with "the majority of working families," or whatever is currently code for "normal people...
...The left, at this moment, has lost that indispensable ability to connect what is with what could be...
...Yet without the belief that it is possible to imagine an alternative social and economic structure, there can be no democratic critical culture...
...This is the triumphalist claim, but is it true...
...Corporations, for their part, impose authoritarian discipline and inhumane working conditions on employees of all classes...
...two full-time incomes are needed to support children decently...
...The majority of Americans enjoyed middleclass incomes (with one wage-earner able to support an entire household), job security, social benefits, viable public institutions like schools and libraries...
...America's "prosperity" applies to a shrinking minority...
...The prosperity of the fifties and sixties offered that freedom to an unparalleled extent...
...If their experience doesn't quite jibe with the cultural common sense, they figure it must be their own fault: ironically, even Marshall Berman worries, if only rhetorically, about being a malcontent...
...From a democratic perspective the test of a thriving economy is not simply the rate of growth or the number of available jobs, but the prospect of freedom from the tyranny of scarcity...
...With the collapse of the Marxist paradigm, the left has no ready answers to capitalist triumphalism...
...Other potential rebels are writers, artists, and even scientists at odds with the relentless corporate devaluation of all work that doesn't immediately inflate the bottom line...
...that liberal democracy as we know it is the best political system to which human beings can aspire...
...The prerequisite for a critical culture is a sense of possibility...
...ELLEN W1LLis's latest book is Don't Think, Smile: Notes on a Decade of Denial...
...that visions of cultural transformation are at best idle fantasy, at worst blueprints for tyranny...
...For our present culture and our capitalist political economy are, while not without their disjunctions, fundamentally intertwined...
...Furthermore, time and money were fungible: people could trade off a certain degree of affluence for less work and more freedom, making possible mass bohemianism, social experiment, leisure to reflect on one's quality of life...
...The recent moves toward unionizing of doctors, psychologists, and graduate students suggest one source of restlessness with the present regime—the increasingly proletarianized professionals whose sense of entitlement to autonomy and respect is being violated by corporatization...
...B B ERMAN APPEARS to deny that connection when he asserts his cultural disappoint ment while conceding, "Our economy is thriving...
...and even the upper middle class cannot trade money for time but is required to work as many hours to maintain its class position as the rest of the population works merely to survive...
...temporary jobs without security or benefits are becoming the norm...
...this time, I believe, it will have to be the other way around...
...public goods deteriorate or disappear...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
