by
Zadie Smith
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Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit.
The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your long walk would have had no meaning were it not for this pit at the end of it. You peer over the precipice: a burst of ethereal noise crashes over you. In the pit is a great choir, like the one you joined for two months in Wellington in which you were the only black woman.
Howard hurried to the door, but then turned just before he opened it. ‘Oh – Keeks – ’ His face was childish, apologetic, completely inadequate. It made Kiki suddenly despair. It was a face that placed them right alongside every other middle-aged couple on the block – the raging wife, the rueful husband. She thought: How did we get to the same place as everybody else?
Awful pretty with those provocative schoolgirl’s bangs running into light brown waves of sumptuous hair, which curved over her left eye like Veronica Lake’s and continued all the way down to her miniature hips. For the life of him Jack could never figure out why women of a certain age cut off all their hair like that.
lol
[...] He had offered them a Rembrandt who was neither a rule breaker nor an original but rather a conformist; he had asked them to ask themselves what they meant by ‘genius’ and, in the perplexed silence, replaced the familiar rebel master of historical fame with Howard’s own vision of a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested. Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion. He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’. ‘Art is the Western myth,’ announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.’ Everybody wrote that down.
‘Well, if you really feel like that, then you need to get your fellow employees together and implement some kind of direct action.’
‘I don’t even know what that is.’
Over their toast and coffee, Levi’s father explained the principles of direct action as it was practised between 1970 and 1980 by Howard and his friends. He spoke at length about someone called Gramsci and some people called the Situationists. Levi nodded quickly and regularly, as he had learned to do when his father made speeches of this kind. He felt his eyelids tugging low and his spoon heavy in his hand.
‘I don’t think that’s how things go down now,’ Levi said at last, gently, not wanting to disappoint his father, but needing to catch the bus. It was a nice enough story, but it was making him late for work.
lol
‘The stupid thing is,’ continued Jerome, fiddling with a ring on his pinkie finger, ‘Kiki still loves him. It’s so obvious. I just don’t get that – how you can love someone who says no to the world like that – I mean, so consistently? It’s only when I’m away from home and I’m talking to non-family people that I can see how psychotic he is. The only music in the house now is, like, Japanese electro. Soon we’ll just have to tap on pieces of wood. This is a guy who wooed his wife by singing half of The Magic Flute outside her apartment. Now he won’t even let her have a painting she likes in the house. Because of some deranged theory in his head, everybody else has to suffer. It’s such a denial of joy – I don’t even know how you can stand living there.’
‘It’s a Wellington thing – it’s a student thing,’ said Victoria rapidly, coming up on her elbows. ‘It’s our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon’s class is ‘‘The tomato’s nature versus the tomato’s nurture’’, and Jane Colman’s class is ‘‘To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory’’ – she’s such a silly bitch that woman – and Professor Gilman’s class is ‘‘The tomato is structured like an aubergine’’, and Professor Kellas’s class is basically ‘‘There is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself ’’, and Erskine Jegede’s class is ‘‘The post-colonial tomato as eaten by Naipaul’’. And so on. So you say, ‘What class have you got coming up?’ and the person says ‘Tomatoes 1670-1900.’ Or whatever.’
‘I haven’t had my period in three months – did you even know that? I’m acting crazy and emotional all the time. My body’s telling me the show’s over. That’s real. And I’m not going to be getting any thinner or any younger, my ass is gonna hit the ground, if it hasn’t already – and I want to be with somebody who can still see me in here. I’m still in here. And I don’t want to be resented or despised for changing . . . I’d rather be alone. I don’t want someone to have contempt for who I’ve become. I’ve watched you become too. And I feel like I’ve done my best to honour the past, and what you were and what you are now – but you want something more than that, something new. I can’t be new. Baby, we had a good run.’ Weeping, she lifted his palm and kissed it in the centre. ‘Thirty years – almost all of them really happy. That’s a lifetime, it’s incredible. Most people don’t get that. But maybe this is just over, you know? Maybe it’s over . . .’
Howard, crying himself now, got up from where he lay and sat behind his wife. He stretched his arms around her solid nakedness. In a whisper he began begging for – and, as the sun set, received – the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
[...] today’s working class differs not only in industrial composition and regional concentration from that of the 1960s and 1970s, but in ethnic and racial content as well. The terrain on which the working class and the oppressed fight necessarily changes as the structure and contours of global and domestic capitalism change. It will be argued here that the process of disintegration of the old industrial corridors and regions has been replaced by new and mostly different geographic patterns and structures of concentration with the potential for advances in working-class organization and rebellion.
The late 1970s would see the beginning of the neoliberal era after a decade or more of labor rebellion, low growth, and declining productivity combined with rising inflation—known as “stagflation.” Characterized by deregulation of industry, privatization of public services, cuts in the welfare state, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, undermining of labor rights, and a general emphasis on “the market” as the salvation of the economy, neoliberalism emerged in the United States as the Democratic Carter administration and Congress defeated labor law reform and passed measures to deregulate truck and air transportation. It would accelerate under Reagan and again under Clinton to become the new norm of economic policy and business preference. Neoliberalism was, as David Harvey has argued, a project to restore class power to the economic elite.
In the period beginning in the 1980s, globalization accelerated, and outsourcing and various forms of workforce “flexibility” increased, along with internationalized production through global value chains (GVC). These developments appeared to fragment and dissolve the power of the traditional working class across much of the industrial North. Yet, under the very same pressures of global competition, just-in-time-driven logistics systems restructured and integrated the movement of materials within the United States (and around the world), and, beginning in the mid-1990s, the biggest wave of mergers and acquisitions in American history reshaped and consolidated capital as businesses sought to reassert their power in global markets and increase control over the workforce. As a consequence, it will be argued here, capitalism has entered a new phase in which the working class is both restructured and, along with capital itself, consolidated, that is, forced together in new ways.
potentially useful summary
Technology, including that in the actual production process, also plays a role in this beyond surveillance, but, as is almost always the case, not as a substitute for the burdens of labor but as the enabler and enforcer of its intensification. Given the limits on the length of the workday imposed by law, cus- tom, or union agreement, as Marx put it, “machinery becomes in the hands of capital the objective means, systematically employed, for squeezing out more labor in a given time.” Since Marx’s day, works by Nobel, Braverman, and others have shown that the design and use of technology is socially constructed to intensify management control, reduce worker skills, and increase efficiency and output. As Noble put it writing about post–World War II developments in automation, the concerns of those who designed and deployed the new technology were “reflected in a general devaluation of human skills and a distrust of human workers and in an ongoing effort to eliminate both” in the name of efficiency and, of course, reducing human toil.
typo: Nobel/Noble