Товарищ Х: All Hail EmoBracelet!

'EmoBracelet' tells traders when

they need a time-out to prevent Repetitive Speculation Injury

Товарищ Х suggests a design change to the maker of the EmoBracelet, a sort of mood-ring-for-the-wrist billionaires bauble that changes color and pattern to match the purported feelings of its wearer. Have it instead flash these words of encouragement, straight from the Marxist Update masthead, "JUMP YOU FUCKER." If that does not produce the hoped-for result, perhaps a jolt of 220V mains current would do the trick. This could be sold as an accessory cord terminating in a retro hairpin connector to be plugged into the nearest wall outlet on cue.

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Товарищ Х is a political activist and composer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Political convergence between sections of the U.S. and European ruling classes

U.S. commander in chief gets ‘peace’ prize

(As I see it column)
BY BEN JOYCE

The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced October 9 that its Peace Prize recipient for 2009 is U.S. president Barack Obama “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

The committee chose to bestow this honor upon the commander in chief of the world’s most powerful imperialist armed forces—as he is deepening a multitheater war with an expanding front in Central Asia involving more than 60,000 troops in Afghanistan and regular aerial drone attacks in Pakistan. Obama has been awarded a $1.4 million prize for his work in “the abolition or reduction of standing armies” while his administration is leading the drive for stiffer economic sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

The reaction of many upon first hearing news about the committee’s choice was that it is a joke. After all, the prize is named after Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who was one of the world’s biggest armaments makers. On the face of it, the decision may seem at least contradictory. However, since the inception of the Nobel Peace Prize, nearly all of the recipients have been, with few notable exceptions, prominent representatives of or apologists for the capitalist system of class exploitation and imperialist domination.

U.S. president Woodrow Wilson was given the prize for 1919 after Washington and its allies had smashed its rivals in the first imperialist world slaughter in which millions of workers died. In 2007 Al Gore was chosen for his work in “climate change,” less than a decade after leaving the administration of President William Clinton that orchestrated brutal military assaults against Iraq, Somalia, and Yugoslavia. And in 1988 the prize committee even went as far as to grant the award to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces—a “standing army” of imperialist allies.

The selection of Barack Obama also registers the political convergence between sections of the U.S. and European ruling classes. The social layer that Obama represents—the “enlightened” meritocracy and cosmopolitan elites at the tops of “nonprofits,” NGOs, foundations, and other institutions committed to the maintenance of capitalist social relations—is converging politically with their counterparts in Europe, found in the leadership of various Social Democratic and “Socialist” parties that hold power in imperialist governments across the Atlantic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, in its majority made up of representatives from this layer, has made an attempt to shore up Obama’s image at a time when his administration faces increasing difficulties at home and abroad.

The “peace” that the Obama administration, his European counterparts, or any other wing of the ruling class are interested in obtaining is one based on the subjugation and deepening exploitation of toilers around the world.

As the worldwide capitalist depression deepens, the ruling classes in each of the imperialist countries are preparing for fiercer competition against each other, spreading imperialist wars, and increased social and political unrest as working people react to the deteriorating conditions being imposed on them. In preparation for this, Obama has extended many of the attacks on our rights, such as domestic spying programs, militarization of the borders, and arbitrary detention.

The only way to achieve peace is to take political and military power out of the hands of the war makers. It’s only by the conquest and exercise of state power by the working class against the most violent force in history—the capitalist class—and the rebuilding of society from top to bottom along lines of social solidarity and the needs of the majority, that lasting peace is possible.

Товарищ Х: Setting "a personal example of moderation"

Mukesh Ambani, India's richest man at $20 billion, is pictured here saluting the poor people of India and the world as he announces his pay cut to a mere $3 million for this year's work.

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Товарищ Х is a political activist and composer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Behind the Nobel: Obama's role and social base explained

International petty-bourgeois “merit-ocracy” awards Obama Nobel Peace Prize

excerpt below from "The Cosmopolitan ‘Meritocracy’ and
Class Stratification of Black Nationality"
a chapter of Malcolm X, Black Liberation,
and the Road to Workers Power’

BY JACK BARNES

[The] expanding layer of the comfortable middle classes, whose place in bourgeois society is registered by Obama’s election, is composed of the handsomely remunerated staffs of so-called nonprofit foundations, charities, “community organizations,” and “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs)—in the United States and worldwide; of well-placed professors and top university administrative personnel; of attorneys, lobbyists, and others. The lives and livelihoods of these growing foundation- and university-centered strata in capitalist society—who, along with bankers and businessmen, cycle back and forth into and out of government positions—are themselves largely unconnected to the production, reproduction, or circulation of social wealth. Their existence is more and more alien to the conditions of life of working people of any racial or national background.

This reality was reflected in the presidential election results in November. Obama, of course, largely locked up the so-called Black vote. That isn’t what pushed him so decisively over the top in the race against Republican John McCain, however. Among the most striking changes from previous elections is that Obama won 52 percent of the votes from those with annual incomes of more than $200,000, whereas Democrat John Kerry had won 35 percent of this layer only four years earlier.

And for the first time in many decades, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 won more than 50% of the votes in the nation’s largely white suburbs, compared to the 41% and 47% share taken by Clinton in 1992 and 1996. What’s more, while the Republicans still dominated many suburbs populated by more established “old wealth”—places such as New Canaan and Darien, Connecticut; Saddle River and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; or Sunfish Lakes and North Oaks, Minnesota—he tallied substantial margins in towns with larger congregations of high-income professionals, the parasitic users of wealth—places such as Westport (65%), West Hartford (70%), and Greenwich (54%), Connecticut; Montclair (84%), Tenafly (64%), and Ridgewood (56%), New Jersey; Edina (56%), Minnesota; and numerous others. More than 65% of voters in Scarsdale, one of New York City’s most exclusive suburbs, voted for Obama, and Westchester County—the second wealthiest county in the state, and twelfth richest in the United States—went for Obama by a 63% margin (up from 58% for Kerry in 2004 and 56% for Clinton in 1998).

The aspiring social layer Obama is part of is bourgeois in its class interests, its values, and its world outlook. But it is not a section of the capitalist class in becoming. It is not “entrepreneurial.” It is not composed of the owners, top managers, or large debt holders of rapidly expanding new capitalist businesses—factories, farms, technology companies, or financial or commercial enterprises. The long, debt-fueled capitalist “boom” of the past three decades was marked by the stagnation of investment in capacity-expanding plant and equipment, and by an accompanying slowness in the drawing of production labor into the creation of social wealth. This stagnation of capital accumulation, together with the expansion of the middle-class layer we’re discussing, are in fact two sides of the same coin. Its members enjoy high incomes, but very few can or will pass down sizable capital through family trusts to coming generations.

Instead, this is a self-designated “enlightened meritocracy,” determined to con the world into accepting the myth that the economic and social advancement of its members is just reward for their individual intelligence, education, and “service.” Its members truly believe that their “brightness,” their “quickness,” their “contributions to public life,” their “sacrifices” (they humbly point out they could be making a lot more in business or banking) give them the right to make decisions, to administer society on behalf of the bourgeoisie—what they claim to be on behalf of the interests of “the people.” In exchange they get better and bigger homes, obscenely expensive K-through-16-plus education for their bloodline, consumer “necessities,” plus the equivalent of a “law enforcement discount” on all major financial transactions. (The killing the Obamas made on their Hyde Park manse and grounds in Chicago, generously subsidized by a big-time Daley machine fund-raiser, is but one example typical of these milieus.) And believe it or not, these bourgeois wannabes see all this as social sophistication, not the conspicuous consumption of schlock.

While the existence and expansion of these strata are largely divorced from the production process, they are very much bound up with the production and reproduction of capitalist social relations. They have a parasitic existence. To maintain their high incomes and living standards, they are dependent on skimming off a portion of surplus value—”rents”—produced by working people and appropriated by the bourgeoisie. Yet the big majority of them contribute nothing to the creation of that value, even in wasteful or socially harmful ways.

Instead, many of them pursue careers—in the universities, the media, “think tanks,” and elsewhere—that generate ideological rationalizations for class exploitation and inequality (as they strive to “reform” it, of course). Others, whether as highly paid supervisory personnel, staffers, or attorneys, administer the rulers’ efforts through foundations, “advocacy groups,” charities, and other “nonprofit” institutions, here and around the world, to postpone and buffer the explosive social and political responses by working people to our worsening living and job conditions.[footnote from original: "The trade union officialdom, despite their petty-bourgeois lifestyles and bourgeois outlook, is not really a part of this layer. They are still too connected, just by the character of their dues base and function in capitalist society, to the grit and grime of working. JB"]

This is a social layer that is insecure in its class position. It lacks the confidence exhibited by the bourgeoisie, even by the nouveau riche bourgeoisie. The propertied rulers—comprising only hundreds of families, not thousands—are a confident class (except during prerevolutionary crises or times of a rapidly accelerating breakdown of the capitalist order). Not only do they own, control, and hold the debt in perpetuity on the commanding heights of industry, banking, land, and trade. They also dominate the state and all aspects of social and political life, and finance the production of culture and the arts, including its “cutting edges.”

The meritocracy, to the contrary, is not confident. Dependent on cadging from the capitalists a portion of the wealth created by the exploited producers, these privileged aspirants to bourgeois affluence—a lifestyle they are convinced “society” owes them—nonetheless fear at some point being pushed back toward the conditions of the working classes. On the one hand, due to their very size as a stratum of society—it’s millions, if not tens of millions in the United States today—they recognize that the rulers find them useful to bolster illusions in the supposedly limitless “careers open to talent” under capitalism. At the same time, and despite their shameless self-promotion, many of them also sense that since they serve no essential economic or political functions in the production and reproduction of surplus value, they live at the forbearance of the bourgeoisie. In the end, large numbers of them are expendable, especially at times of deepening social crisis.

The capitalist rulers are utterly pragmatic in their policies, but they do have class policies. They do what they deem necessary to defend their profits, their property, and above all their class dictatorship. They use that dictatorship—they use their state power: their cops, their courts, their armed forces, their currency, and their border controls.

In contrast, this “meritocratic” middle layer has no class policy course of its own. To the degree they commit themselves to a course of action—often camouflaged as caring, feeling, thoughtful, and above all very intelligent—such policies are in fact derivative of the needs and demands of their bourgeois patrons. Despite the Obama campaign’s mantra of “change,” for example, the Obama administration is relying on exactly the same top Wall Street bankers and financiers as its predecessors, in fact, the very same moneyed interests—even the same individuals—who are the architects of today’s accelerating capitalist economic and financial crisis. And more than any other administration in the history of U.S. imperialism, its foreign, military, and “domestic security” policies are stamped by near total deference to the top echelons of the professional officer corps of the U.S. armed forces.

This is the social layer from which Barack Obama emerged. Not from the majority proletarian Black nationality. Not from the producing small-business milieu, the petty bourgeoisie. And not from the bourgeoisie. It is with the class interests and world outlook of this increasingly multinational “meritocracy” that Obama identifies.

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Mike Italie's 2002 article demolishing another "humanitarian imperialist," Nobel Peace Prize winner (Jimmy Carter), can be enjoyed here.

An excerpt: "Carter’s speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony was consistent with his record as a war president of a liberal stripe. Alongside the usual empty pacifist blather that "we will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children," Carter endorsed the fundamentals of George Bush’s policy all along the line. He warned Iraq that it must disarm because "the world insists that this be done." Later he told a CNN interviewer that if Iraq does not disarm, then a U.S. bombing campaign and invasion would not be "unprovoked."

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Political cynicism: bulwark of bourgeois rule

Cynicism and American Politics

Written by Mark Rahman

When Bill Maher, the comedian turned political commmentator, was recently asked on CNN if he thought Sarah Palin has a future as a presidential candidate he opined, “I don’t know about a presidential candidate, but I would never put anything past this stupid country.” When angry callers asked Maher to clarify what he meant by his statement they were met with the curt response: “I don’t need to clarify, it is!”

Sadly Maher’s sentiment finds echoes among many who identify themselves as “liberal” and “progressive.” Paradoxically it is a view that is utterly reactionary, unscientific, and elitist to its core. After all, like everyone else in the mainstream media, Bill is no Marxist. As he once put it, “Of course Capitalism is good, I am not a Communist.”

Cynicism is a very useful tool for those in power. Although it inherently expresses a sense of dissatisfaction, it offers nothing as a way out. The charade of the two-party system has done a lot of damage to American workers’ perception of politics in general, and created a situation where cynicism and apparent apathy is widespread. Just listen to a little bit of the late, great, George Carlin and you’ll see just how deep-rooted it has become.

The two-corporate-party setup in the US tends to churn up a lot of political confusion. The lack of a fundamental difference between the two parties reduces much of the political discussion to extremely petty issues.

Writer Gore Vidal expressed this quite well when he said: “We only have one political party in the US, and that is the property party, which essentially is corporate America, which has two right wings, one called Republican and one called Democrat. I can’t say I like either of them.” We couldn’t have said it better -- no wonder most American workers are alienated from politics!

When the elections roll around, the decision as to which politician to support often boils down to their personality traits rather than their platform. Incredibly, polls show that Americans have consistently elected the presidential candidates that they would rather have a beer with since Reagan. In the case of Sarah Palin this is all too true. Being the first woman and “regular hockey mom” to come so close to the Presidency, she is of serious symbolic importance to many women, who rightly are disgusted by the glass ceiling for women under this system.

The same is true of Barack Obama. What he symbolizes for millions of poor and working class Americans, and especially minorities, is extraordinary and cannot be underestimated. If the mainstream narrative is to be believed, his Presidency ushers in a “post-racial” era in US politics. But has there really been any fundamental stray from the policies of Bush? The fact is, despite the color of Obama’s skin, he and the Democratic Party represent the very same people behind the Bush presidency.

One major reason for the current apathy is that millions of people feel that they have nothing to vote “for.” After all, as Michael Moore once put it, the lesser evil is still evil! Many people have given up on simply voting “against” the “other” party.

What is needed in the US is a party that represents working people. Such a party could be the political expression of the labor movement to combat the attacks of both the Republicans and Democrats. Such a party would go far in combatting the cynical and apathetic attitudesof many toward politics, as there would finally be a force led by workers in the interests of workers, particularly the most exploited sections of society, minorities, immigrants and women.

What excuse would anyone have to be apathetic or cynical if such a party existed? Of course, many mass labor parties around the world have had time to develop a strong bureaucratic crust on top, which acts against the interests of the workers they are supposed to represent, but their power is increasingly being challenged by the rank and file. An American mass party of Labor would be forged in flames that most careerists and bureaucrats are terrified of, the flames of struggle!

A Labor Party would drastically change the dynamics of American politics. American workers would quickly reclaim the militant traditions of labor battles that once shook the country. This may seem like ancient history to some, especially those like Bill Maher, but history has a funny tendency of repeating itself on an even higher level than before.

Folks like Bill Maher, while being astute commentarists on the absurdities of the system, have no faith in or even the remotest conception of the potential power of the working class to change society. Once American workers have a mass political party of their own, Maher and co. will have to find other things to joke about.

For communists the question is always "What is to be done?"

Defenders of "True American Values":
The Communist Party in North Carolina

by Mary E. Triece

a review of

Gregory S. Taylor. The History of the North Carolina Communist Party. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 258 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57003-802-0.

The History of the North Carolina Party by Gregory S. Taylor offers a window into the efforts of the North Carolina Communist Party (NCCP) and further dispels stereotypes that early twentieth-century Communists were dangerous radicals bent on destroying everything American. Rather, Taylor illustrates, they were "a small group of dedicated activists who sought to undermine the plutocratic dominance and expand the benefits of the state's progressivism" (pp. 2-3). The book begins with the Communist Party's initial foray into the state in 1928 and continues through its disappointing demise by the early 1960s. Taylor's purpose is to offer the "first in-depth assessment of the North Carolina Communist Party, its successes, its failures, and its impact on the state and nation." He explains that members "did not see themselves as enemies of the nation but rather as heroic fighters defending true American values by standing against perceived fascist threats to freedom, liberty, and the American way of life" (p. 5). Taylor concludes the book with an assessment of the efforts of NCCP activists as "laudable," if not heroic (p. 215).

Taylor's study is significant for its detailed chronology of the Communist Party's efforts in North Carolina, particularly the organization's involvement in the 1929 strike in Gastonia and its civil rights and student activism. Taylor covers the Gastonia strike in greater depth than previous studies by accessing Comintern files recently made available to the public. Relying on reports written by African American party organizers John H. Owens and Otto Hall, Taylor sheds light on the challenges of organizing black workers during the Gastonia strike. In his short visit to Gastonia, Owens met with black mill workers to discover why they were not involved in the strike. He found that since white workers had not included blacks in the union, they "feared striking would be equivalent to quitting" (p. 29). Black workers also informed Owens that after three of them had initially joined the union, "mill security forced them back to work at gunpoint" (p. 29). Taylor illustrates the similarly frustrating experiences of Hall by drawing on the organizer's report of his experiences: "The attitude of these cracker strikers toward the Negro has not been changed a bit. Our comrades down here have retreated before them on the Negro question and have let them have their way" (p. 34). According to Hall, African American workers' resistance to the strike was understandable and indicated a failure on the part of party organizers.

Taylor's coverage of the challenges faced by the NCCP as it took up civil rights activism reminds readers of the Communist Party's place at the forefront of this issue. Taylor details the NCCP's anti-lynching campaigns, demonstrations, and an anti-lynching conference held in October 1930. At a September 1930 demonstration, three thousand gathered to hear Communist Party candidates speak about their commitment to end lynching. Drawing on Comintern files, Taylor provides a cursory discussion of party pamphlets, flyers, and a small booklet, "Down with Lynch Law" distributed to those gathered. Also insightful is Taylor's reliance on the lesser-studied Communist Party publication Southern Worker as he documents the NCCP's involvement in the case of the Scottsboro boys. Racism remained a stubborn obstacle for the NCCP and as Taylor's research illustrates, often stood in the way of organizing workers for tangible gains.

Taylor extends our knowledge of student radicalism with his examination of Communist Party activism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, in particular the efforts of individuals such as Junius Scales and Hans Freistadt. Taylor draws on insightful documents such as the Communist Student Bulletin, found in the Junius Scales Papers at UNC, and the North Carolina Labor Youth League's publication Fightin' Words, located in the North Carolina Collection at UNC. Remarkable among the activists' efforts were those to achieve integration at UNC as early as 1949. Taylor asserts that the NCCP was a "noted, vocal, and early advocate of integration," and the Labor Youth League and its publications likewise worked to promote this goal (p. 195). The party's paper, Fighter for Peace, also directed criticism at Jim Crow and, as the Korean War heated up, "attacked militarism on campus" (p. 197). Of the paper, Taylor writes, these "masterpieces of Communist propaganda brilliantly used issues dear to the hearts of the mostly white student body and wove those issues in with concerns dear to the Communist Party" (p. 197). Taylor's account of the NCCP's efforts at UNC also highlights the injustice and red-baiting faced by faculty and students alike who spoke out in support of issues like world peace and civil rights.

Taylor's carefully written narrative of the NCCP legitimates the hard work and valiant efforts of Communist activists in the South. Its strength comes from Taylor's use of numerous archival materials, including the recently-made-available Comintern files, and lesser-known publications, which enable him to explore the NCCP through all of its ups and downs. Taylor also resurrects small but significant newspapers such as the Chadwick-Hoskin Worker, the shop paper of the Chadwick-Hoskin Mill, and Textile Workers Voice, published for Erwin Mill workers, which detail rhetorical attempts by activists to reach workers. Taylor provides description of the papers' contents, but falls short on deeper analysis, leaving unexplored the party's symbolic efforts to achieve workplace justice. For instance, Taylor describes the efforts of the "popular" Textile Workers Voice to address strike issues and the problem of segregation. The Chadwick-Hoskin Worker provided the "Communist vision of capitalism" (p. 77) and took up the issue of militarism. Left wanting is an analysis of the strategies used by the papers to gain adherence to issues; that is, the description needs to be deepened by asking "how" and "why" questions. What images were relied upon and why? What metaphors were employed and why? How did the paper appeal to readers? How did the paper define the "enemy" and the "hero?" What connections, if any, were made between workers' concerns and the Communist Party? Exploring some of these questions would lead to a fuller understanding of the ways that organizations attempted to persuade individuals and prompt action. Rather than conclude, as Taylor does of the Textile Workers Voice, that the "impact of the paper was minimal" (p. 173) due to the fact only a few workers joined the party, exploring the questions suggested above would provide insight into the ability of activists to draw from a storehouse of symbolic resources to win converts and convince their audience to take risks; a formidable task for any activist.

Furthermore, providing such an assessment necessarily requires the author to make judgments regarding historical efforts at social change, something that historians need not shy away from. Taylor does a fine job relating the strengths and weaknesses of the NCCP with clarity, if not scholarly detachment. His narrative would come to life, however, with assessments of the party that go beyond simply labeling strengths and weakness. For instance, Taylor's introduction initiates a potentially insightful analysis of Junius Scales's skills at persuasion, where he mentions Scales's use of the myth of Horatius to describe Communist Party efforts. Taylor might usefully have taken up the use of particular myths, common storylines, or vivid imagery by activists in an effort to assess not only what worked and what did not, but also why efforts succeeded or failed. In this way, Taylor and other historians might make their scholarship useful not only in uncovering previously ignored efforts, but in providing insights for those who continue to struggle for justice today.

Most notable in Taylor's narrative is his resurrection of the indefatigable efforts by ordinary people to obtain such basic goals as safe housing, decent education, unemployment insurance, hot lunches for school children, and the right to organize in a state marked by rural poverty and deep-seated racism. Some of these individuals, like balladeer Ella Mae Wiggins, sacrificed their lives. Others, such as Junius Scales, spent time in jail, while Hans Freistadt's academic career in the United States was threatened. Such efforts were more than laudable; they were indeed heroic.
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Mary E. Triece is Associate Professor at the School of Communication of University of Akron. She has published two books, On The Picket Line (University of Illinois Press, 2007), which won the Bonnie Ritter award, and Protest and Popular Culture (Westview Press, 2001). This review was first published by H-Southern-Industry (October 2009) under a Creative Commons license.

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De-revisionist Harvey Klehr weighs-in here.

Edgar A. Poe (1809-1849) A Marxist View

Poe was born 200 years ago, and died 160 years ago this week. He is an "acquired taste", and is usually acquired by teenage boys who grow up to become critical theorists.

Poe's truth goes marching on. Had he been born 30 years later, he might have had the career of a Hearst, or at least a William Dean Howells. His idea of a national monthly literary magazine had only to wait for the organization of a nation-wide capitalist market after the U.S. Civil War.

For all the politics, my thoughts this week about Poe's work are about those aspects of it that have always thrilled the teenage boys: the cyphers, the social disasters, the frustrated carnalities, the grandiose rhetorical flourishes. And of course the great moral point groped-toward by the Antebellum southern intelligentsia: It is later than we think...

Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America. By Terence Whalen. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xii, 328. $55.00

reviewed by SCOTT S. DERRICK
Rice University

excerpts:

Terence Whalen's impressive Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses is an important and carefully researched book on Poe, and it should appeal to a broad range of academic readers. Whalen is a remarkably well versed Poe scholar in terms of both primary and secondary texts. His elegantly and lucidly written book contains a broad array of historical discussions, all of which come to have consequences for U.S. literary production in general and for Poe's writing in particular. This book is sure to crucially influence the future shape of Poe studies. It offers important commentaries on such topics as Poe's relations to antebellum racism, northern literary hegemony, cryptology ....

Whalen works to demonstrate the determining power of relations of production ....
....For Whalen, in some ways a refreshingly old-fashioned Marxist critic, such relations mark most of social life. As a consequence, his book profitably focuses attention on such diverse topics as U.S. currency debates, on the role of information in the antebellum U.S. economy, and on the crucial need to develop more contextually responsive understandings of both northern and southern racism. The scope of these discussions will make the book valuable for readers not actively engaged in Poe scholarship. Though the book does delve into quite specific debates in Poe criticism, Poe becomes, in some sense, the text's representative subject as much as its final focus.

Because Whalen's fusion of wide-ranging antebellum history and Poe's professional agonies is such a generally successful one, the book is of methodological interest in terms of its account of the relation of literature and culture. The idea that figures such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, and, later, Henry James were traumatized by the literary marketplace is certainly not a new one. Whalen's contribution lies in his success in making questions of literary production internal to so many issues in Poe criticism and to so much of Poe's literary output. In ignoring many conventional biographical concerns in Poe scholarship as matters of "mere intimacy," Whalen produces a case worth considering for the perhaps scandalous proposition that, "from the standpoint of the commercial writer, nothing is more intimate than production" (p. 22). It remains to be seen how successfully this argument might be extended to other nineteenth-century figures whose relation to the market seems less abjectly unsuccessful. Whalen's vision of Poe as generally a captive figure obsessed....

I am also struck by the near total absence in the book of references to gender, which mediates in important ways the relations of most nineteenth century male writers to the market. The implications of gender can be psychological and belong to what Whalen dismisses as "intimacy," but gender also operates, I would argue, like race, as a material, public fact. Absense gender considerations, though perhaps not totally unexpected in the context of a Marxist analysis, strikes me as a troubling feature of a generally fine and compelling book that I recommend with enthusiasm. ---

The table of contents from Whalen's book gives a good sense of its breadth and usefulness:

Pt. 1 Capitalism and Literature
Ch. 1 Introduction: Minor Writing and the Capital Reader
Ch. 2 The Horrid Laws of Political Economy
Ch. 3 Fables of Circulation: Poe's influence on the Messenger
Ch. 4 Poe and the Masses
Pt. 2 Race and Region
Ch. 5 Average Racism: Poe, Slavery, and the Wages of Literary Nationalism
Ch. 6 Subtle Barbarians: The Southern Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe
Pt. 3 Mass Culture
Ch. 7 The Code for Gold: Poe and Cryptography
Ch. 8 Culture of Surfaces
Ch. 9 The Investigating Angel: Poe, Babbage, and "The Power of Words"

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Amateur video tour of Poe's Baltimore house on Oct. 7, 160th anniversary of his death.

Requiescat in pace