Whether the hipster’s desire for absolute sexual freedom contains any genuinely radical conception of a different world is of course another matter, and it is possible, since the hipster lives with his hatred, that many of them are the material for an elite of storm troopers ready to follow the first truly magnetic leader whose view of mass murder is phrased in a language which reaches their emotions. But given the desperation of his condition as a psychic outlaw, the hipster is equally a candidate for the most reactionary and most radical of movements, and so it is just as possible that many hipsters will come—if the crisis deepens—to a radical comprehension of the horror of society, for even as the radical has had his incommunicable dissent confirmed in his experience by precisely the frustration, the denied opportunities, and the bitter years which his ideas have cost him, so the sexual adventurer deflected from his goal by the implacable animosity of a society constructed to deny the sexual radical as well may yet come to an equally bitter comprehension of the slow relentless inhumanity of the conservative power which controls him from without and from within. And in being so controlled, denied, and starved into the attrition of conformity, indeed the hipster may come to see that his condition is no more than an exaggeration of the human condition, and if he would be free, then everyone must be free. Yes, this is possible too, for the heart of Hip is its emphasis upon courage at the moment of crisis, and it is pleasant to think that courage contains within itself (as the explanation of its existence) some glimpse of the necessity of life to become more than it has been.
It is obviously not very possible to speculate with sharp focus on the future of the hipster. Certain possibilities must be evident, however, and the most central is that the organic growth of Hip depends on whether the Negro emerges as a dominating force in American life. Since the Negro knows more about the ugliness and danger of life than the White, it is probable that if the Negro can win his equality, he will possess a potential superiority, a superiority so feared that the fear itself has become the underground drama of domestic politics. Like all conservative political fear it is the fear of unforeseeable consequences, for the Negro’s equality would tear a profound shift into the psychology, the sexuality, and the moral imagination of every White alive.
With this possible emergence of the Negro, Hip may erupt as a psychically armed rebellion whose sexual impetus may rebound against the antisexual foundation of every organized power in America, and bring into the air such animosities, antipathies, and new conflicts of interest that the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity will no longer work. A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion, and rebellion will then be likely to replace the time of conformity. At that time, if the liberal should prove realistic in his belief that there is peaceful room for every tendency in American life, then Hip would end by being absorbed as a colorful figure in the tapestry. But if this is not the reality, and the economic, the social, the psychological, and finally the moral crises accompanying the rise of the Negro should prove insupportable, then a time is coming when every political guidepost will be gone, and millions of liberals will be faced with political dilemmas they have so far succeeded in evading, and with a view of human nature they do not wish to accept. To take the desegregation of the schools in the South as an example, it is quite likely that the reactionary sees the reality more closely than the liberal when he argues that the deeper issue is not desegregation but miscegenation. (As a radical I am of course facing in the opposite direction from the White Citizens’ Councils—obviously I believe it is the absolute human right of the Negro to mate with the White, and matings there will undoubtedly be, for there will be Negro high school boys brave enough to chance their lives.) But for the average liberal whose mind has been dulled by the committeeish cant of the professional liberal, miscegenation is not an issue because he has been told that the Negro does not desire it. So, when it comes, miscegenation will be a terror, comparable perhaps to the derangement of the American Communists when the icons to Stalin came tumbling down. The average American Communist held to the myth of Stalin for reasons which had little to do with the political evidence and everything to do with their psychic necessities. In this sense it is equally a psychic necessity for the liberal to believe that the Negro and even the reactionary Southern White eventually are fundamentally people like himself, capable of becoming good liberals too if only they can be reached by good liberal reason. What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in the people is perhaps incapable of being contained, and therefore if one wants a better world one does well to hold one’s breath, for a worse world is bound to come first, and the dilemma may well be this: given such hatred, it must either vent itself nihilistically or become turned into the cold murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state.
VI
No matter what its horrors the twentieth century is a vastly exciting century for its tendency is to reduce all of life to its ultimate alternatives. One can well wonder if the last war of them all will be between the blacks and the whites, or between the women and the men, or between the beautiful and ugly, the pillagers and managers, or the rebels and the regulators. Which of course is carrying speculation beyond the point where speculation is still serious, and yet despair at the monotony and bleakness of the future have become so ingrained in the radical temper that the radical is in danger of abdicating from all imagination. What a man feels is the impulse for his creative effort, and if an alien but nonetheless passionate instinct about the meaning of life has come so unexpectedly from a virtually illiterate people, come out of the most intense conditions of exploitation, cruelty, violence, frustration, and lust, and yet has succeeded as an instinct in keeping this tortured people alive, then it is perhaps possible that the Negro holds more of the tail of the expanding elephant of truth than the radical, and if this is so, the radical humanist could do worse than to brood upon the phenomenon. For if a revolutionary time should come again, there would be a crucial difference if someone had already delineated a neo-Marxian calculus aimed at comprehending every circuit and process of society from ukase to kiss as the communications of human energy—a calculus capable of translating the economic relations of man into his psychological relations and then back again, his productive relations thereby embracing his sexual relations as well, until the crises of capitalism in the twentieth century would yet be understood as the unconscious adaptations of a society to solve its economic imbalance at the expense of a new mass psychological imbalance. It is almost beyond the imagination to conceive of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged, and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its imprisonments, expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action where the body of Marxist thought, and particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital (that first of the major psychologies to approach the mystery of social cruelty so simply and practically as to say that we are a collective body of humans whose life-energy is wasted, displaced, and procedurally stolen as it passes from one of us to another)—where particularly the epic grandeur of Das Kapital would find its place in an even more godlike view of human justice and injustice, in some more excruciating vision of those intimate and institutional processes which lead to our creations and disasters, our growth, our attrition, and our rebellion.
From Surplus Value to the Mass Media
(1959)
NO ONE CAN WORK his way through Das Kapital without etching on his mind forever the knowledge that profit must come from loss—the lost energy of one human being paying for the comfort of another; if the process has become ten times more subtle, complex, and untraceable in the modern economy, and conceivably a hundred times more resistant to the careful analysis of the isolated radical, it is perhaps now necessary that some of us be so brash as to cut a trail of speculation across subjects as vast as the title of this piece.
Let me start with a trivial discrepancy. Today one can buy a can of fr
ozen orange juice sufficient to make a quart for 30 cents. A carton of prepared orange juice, equal in quality, costs 45 cents. The difference in price is certainly not to be found by the value of the container, nor in the additional cost of labor and machinery which is required to squeeze the oranges, since the process which produces frozen orange juice is if anything more complex—the oranges must first be squeezed and then frozen. Of course orange juice which comes in quart cartons is more expensive to ship, but it is doubtful if this added cost could account for more than 2 or 3 cents in the price. (The factors are complex, but may reduce themselves as follows: The distributor for cartons of prepared orange juice is generally the milk companies, who are saved most of the costs of local distribution by delivering the orange juice on their milk route. While the cost of shipping whole oranges is greater, because of their bulk, than cans of frozen juice, it must be remembered that the largest expense in freight charges is loading and unloading, and the majority of freshly picked oranges have in any case to be shipped by freight to a freezer plant, converted, and shipped again.) What is most likely is that the price is arrived at by some kind of developed if more or less unconscious estimation by the entrepreneur of what it is worth to the consumer not to be bothered with opening a can, mixing the frozen muddle with three cans of water, and shaking. It is probable that the additional 12 or 13 cents of unnecessary price rise has been calculated in some such ratio as this: The consumer’s private productive time is worth much more to him than his social working time, because his private productive time, that is, the time necessary to perform his household functions, is time taken away from his leisure. If he earns $3 an hour by his labor, it is probable that he values his leisure time as worth ideally two or three times as much, let us say arbitrarily $6 an hour, or 10 cents a minute. Since it would take three or four minutes to turn frozen orange juice into drinkable orange juice, it may well be that a covert set of values in the consumer equates the saving of 3 or 4 minutes to a saving of 30 or 40 ideal cents of his pleasure time. To pay an extra 12 actual cents in order to save this 40 ideal cents seems fitting to his concept of value. Of course, he has been deprived of 10 actual cents—the extra comfort should have deprived him of no more than 2 of his actual cents. So the profit was extracted here from a disproportionate exploitation of the consumer’s need to protect his pleasure time rather than from an inadequate repayment to the worker for his labor. (Such contradictions to this thesis as the spate of Do-It-Yourself hobbies, or magazine articles about the problem of what to do with leisure, are of too serious a nature to dismiss with a remark—it can however be suggested that the general hypothesis may not be contradicted: the man who is bored with his leisure time, or so industrious as to work at handicrafts, can still resent inroads upon his leisure which he has not chosen. Indeed it might be argued that the tendency to be attracted to private labor-saving devices is greatest in the man who doesn’t know what to do with himself when he is at home.)
At any rate, if the hypothesis sketched here should prove to have any economic validity, the consequences are worth remarking. When the source of profit is extracted more and more (at one remove or another) from the consumer’s at-home working time, the consumer is paying a disproportionate amount for the desire to work a little less in his leisure time. Over the economy as a whole, this particular germ of profit may still be minuscule, but it is not at all trivial once one includes the expenses of the war economy whose costs are paid by taxation, an indirect extraction of leisure time from the general consumer, who then has noticeably less money in his leisure to pursue the sports, occupations, and amusements which will restore to his body the energy he has spent in labor. (To take the matter into its real complexity, the conflicting anxieties of living in a war-and-pleasure-oriented environment opens most men and women to a daily spate of psychic havoc whose damages can be repaired only by the adequate exercise of a personal leisure appropriate to each, exactly that leisure which the war economy must impoverish.) By this logic, the root of capitalist exploitation has shifted from the proletariat-at-work to the mass-at-leisure who now may lose so much as four or five ideal hours of extra leisure a day. The old exploitation was vertical—the poor supported the rich. To this vertical exploitation must now be added the horizontal exploitation of the mass by the State and by Monopoly, a secondary exploitation which is becoming more essential to a modern capitalist economy than the direct exploitation of the proletariat. If the origin of this secondary exploitation has come out of the proliferation of the machine with its consequent and relative reduction of the size of the proletariat and the amount of surplus value to be accumulated, the exploitation of mass leisure has been accelerated by the relative contraction of the world market. Through the postwar years, prosperity has been maintained in America by invading the wage earner in his home. Nineteenth-century capitalism could still find its profit in the factory; when the worker was done, his body might be fatigued but his mind could look for a diversion which was relatively free of the industry for which he worked. So soon, however, as the surplus labor of the proletariat comes to be replaced by the leisure value given up by the consumer, the real expropriator of the wage earner has to become the mass media, for if the domination of leisure time is more significant to the health of the economy than the exploitation of the working time, the stability of the economy derives more from manipulating the psychic character of leisure than forcibly subjecting the working class to its productive role. It is likely that the survival of capitalism is no longer possible without the creation in the consumer of a series of psychically disruptive needs which circle about such wants and emotions as the desire for excessive security, the alleviation of guilt, the lust for comfort and new commodity, and a consequent allegiance to the vast lie about the essential health of the State and the economy, an elaborated fiction whose bewildering interplay of real and false detail must devil the mass into a progressively more imperfect apperception of reality and thus drive them closer to apathy, psychosis, and violence. Nineteenth-century capitalism exhausted the life of millions of workers; twentieth-century capitalism can well end by destroying the mind of civilized man.
If there is a future for the radical spirit, which often enough one can doubt, it can come only from a new revolutionary vision of society, its sicknesses, its strengths, its conflicts, contradictions and radiations, its self-created incapacity to solve its evasions of human justice. There is the root of social problem. An injustice half corrected results in no more than a new sense of injustice and suppressed violence in both parties, which is why revolutionary situations are meaningful and liberal situations are not, for liberal solutions end by compromising a society in the nausea of its past and so bog the mass mind further into the institutionalization of social habits and methods for which no one has faith, and from which one cannot extract the psychic marrow of culture upon which everyone in a civilization must depend. If this revolutionary vision is to be captured by any of us in a work or works, one can guess that this time it will explore not nearly so far into that jungle of political economy which Marx charted and so opened to rapid development, but rather will engage the empty words, dead themes, and sentimental voids of that mass media whose internal contradictions twist and quarter us between the lust of the economy (which radiates a greed to consume into us, with sex as the invisible salesman) and the guilt of the economy which must chill us with authority, charities for cancer, and all reminder that the mass consumer is only on drunken furlough from the ordering disciplines of church, FBI, and war.
Quick Evaluations on the Talent in the Room
(1959)
THE ONLY ONE of my contemporaries who I felt had more talent than myself was James Jones. And he has also been the one writer of my time for whom I felt any love. We saw each other only six or eight times over the years, but it always gave me a boost to know that Jim was in town. He carried his charge with him, he had the talent to turn a night of heavy drinking into a great time. I felt then and can still say now that F
rom Here to Eternity has been the best American novel since the war, and if it is ridden with faults, ignorances, and a smudge of the sentimental, it has also the force of few novels one could name. What was unique about Jones was that he had come out of nowhere, self-taught, a clunk in his lacks, but the only one of us who had the beer-guts of a broken-glass brawl. What must next be said is sad, for Jones has sold out badly over the years. There is not a man alive he cannot charm if he chooses to, and the connection of that gift to his huge success made him a slave of our time, for it handcuffed the rebel in him. Like Styron, like myself, like Kerouac, he has been running for president as well as sticking at his work, and it was near tragic to watch the process as he imprisoned his anger, and dwindled without it.
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Page 8