historiblogography

comrade hanson on bourgeois decadence

I have decided: Victor Davis Hanson is a brilliant deep-cover agent of the Comintern, convincing conservative magazines to give him space for undiluted Marxist class analysis. Take his most recent offering, with the uber-Marxian headline, "Our Spoiled and Unhappy Global Elites":

Not long ago Pepsi Cola’s chief operating officer, Indra Nooyi, gave an address to the graduating class at Columbia Business School. In it, she metaphorically likened America to the middle finger on the global hand...Pepsi is a $27 billion company. Those who run it, like Nooyi, make big money from its global sales and take-no-prisoners marketing approach...

Arundhati Roy, the Booker-prize-winning novelist, has developed a second career critiquing the United States, especially its promotion of the free markets and capitalism that she believes are the catalysts for righteous hatred against America.

Roy doesn’t quite get that the reason that the UK recognizes an Indian novelist like her, writing halfway across the globe — and that she is able to jet over to the United States for lucrative speaking engagements, and that her books are mass-produced and hawked aggressively over global Internet book marts — is precisely the system that this child of capitalism so vehemently detests...

So it is not just the West per se that has enriched these megaphones, but the hard-driving, over-hyped culture of the West, as exemplified by marquee sports, highbrow publishers, and the Pepsi Corporation.

In other words, Khan, Roy, and Nooyi are, by their own volition, knee-deep in the supposed greed of the West in a way that most ordinary Americans surely are not. Maligned Americans on the tractor in Kansas or walking the beat in the Bronx have not a clue about the privileges that a Roy or Nooyi enjoy — and they are not whining, complaining, or biting the hand that feeds them far less well.

No, these ungracious operators all seem to gravitate to, profit from, and then spite the paradigm that created rich global business, media, publishing, and entertainment conglomerates — and themselves.

Couldn't be clearer: The decadence of the bourgeoisie results from the conditions of global capitalism itself. Ideology embodies a false consciousness; servants of the Pepsi Corporation, pretending to leftist politics and global sensitivity, in fact serve a corporation that accumulates the surpluses produced by global labor. The mode of production, and its implications, negate the meaningless political statements of the managerial and creative classes, parasites on the parasite of capital.

Somebody get this man a Mao jacket, quick.

ADDED LATER: The other thing I now realize, given his recurring paeans to the importance of agriculture in forming personal and societal character, is that Comrade Hanson doesn't just offer us diagnosis and etitology; his intellectual labor also implies a prescription. Evacuate the cities! Teach all to embrace agricultural labor! (Look closely for soft hands and eyeglasses -- these are the latte-sippers!)

A shame Saloth Sar is no longer with us. He probably had a berth waiting for him at the Hoover Institution.

posted by Chris Bray @ 3:38 PM