Sunday, June 11, 2006
I wouldn't mind synthesizing her
I mentioned the question of middle class guilt playing a role in Marx's conversion to revolution.
Francis Wheen's biography certainly indicates that Marx always remained very concerned with middle class repectibility. Loyal fans of DC may remember being directed towards a comments section where I compared hiring a maid to, ahem, "employing" a whore. There, my antagonist asked "Do Socialists and/or Marxists not employ maids?".
He could have scored a very nice rhetorical point if he'd only known, as I did not, that Marx himself did indeed have a maid, despite his sometimes dire penury (only offset by subventions from Engels, themselves coming out of the surplus value expropriated out of the workers in Engels' cotton factory in Manchester - it sort of sounds like I'm taking the piss here but I'm not). Apparently he was partly motivated by a certain "status anxiety". Not only this, but in a typically dialectical manoeuvre he may even have "synthesized" my maid-prostitute parallel by putting a bun in "the help's" oven - just to be clear, I mean by impregnating her. (I think there's an article by Terrell Carver floating around contesting Wheen's claim.)
Francis Wheen's biography certainly indicates that Marx always remained very concerned with middle class repectibility. Loyal fans of DC may remember being directed towards a comments section where I compared hiring a maid to, ahem, "employing" a whore. There, my antagonist asked "Do Socialists and/or Marxists not employ maids?".
He could have scored a very nice rhetorical point if he'd only known, as I did not, that Marx himself did indeed have a maid, despite his sometimes dire penury (only offset by subventions from Engels, themselves coming out of the surplus value expropriated out of the workers in Engels' cotton factory in Manchester - it sort of sounds like I'm taking the piss here but I'm not). Apparently he was partly motivated by a certain "status anxiety". Not only this, but in a typically dialectical manoeuvre he may even have "synthesized" my maid-prostitute parallel by putting a bun in "the help's" oven - just to be clear, I mean by impregnating her. (I think there's an article by Terrell Carver floating around contesting Wheen's claim.)
