Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Subject: Re: Factory Music ETC
>
>Whatever one wishes to make of them, these quotation fit into our
>discussion
>of Pound's attitude towards workers; they may help us to understand better
>the genesis of the "factory music" idea:
>
>     "If you don't believe that Mussolini is driven by
>a vast and deep "concern" or will for the welfare
>of Italy, not Italy as a bureaucracy, or Italy as a
>state machinery stuck up on top of the people, but
>for Italy organic, composed of the last ploughman
>and the last girl in the olive-yards, then you will
>have a great deal of trouble about he un-Jeffersonian
>details of his surfaces."
>      JEFF and/ or MUSS, Ch. 6, "Intelligentsias" (publ. 1935)

What indeed are we to make of such quotes as this?  We can discuss Pound's
attitude toward  "factory music" separately.  But what does this say about
Pound's attitude toward the factory WORKER, or toward workers in general?



Should we not see this particular quote in the context of  Pound's interest
in  fascism as a restoration of feudalism?



Pound often expressed praise for feudal systems of organizing the peasants,
which where praised by the Confucian philosospher Mencius (See his Mencius
[Mang Tze], in the Selected Prose).  Such an approach on Pound's part does
not bode well for any alleged concern he might have had for the "little
guy."

Pound might be excused for parroting Mencian truisms concerning the moral
treatment of farmers in a bygone "golden age," if we assume that he was
totally ignorant of the economic conditions in feudal and pre-feudal China.
However, his supposed sympathy for the contemporary Italian agricultural
worker must be more seriously questioned.

Pound, in supporting Mussolini wholeheartedly, gave his backing to a man who
claimed to support the interests of agricultural workers.  One of the great
problems in Pound's thought is in the attempt to maintain feudal forms in a
post-feudal economic environment.  Mussolini did indeed deliver decrees
which were ostensibly designed to protect the
living standards of such workers.

The Italian leader publicly stated
that he was concerned about the effect which rising rents and retail
prices was having on their incomes.  Did Pound simply fall for it?


Salvemini observes that

  It would, of course, have been iniquitous to reduce
  wages and salaries without at the same time reducing
  the cost of living.  Therefore, Mussolini forthwith fought
  two more "battles."  The landlord, who in spite of orders
  given them in 1927, had been raising rents, were again
  ordered to cut them by ten per cent; retail prices were
  again ordered to go down.  But in July 1934 the Supreme
  Court ruled that no landlord was obliged to cut down
  rents as a result of the order given by Mussolini in
  1930!  Such cuts were purely optional.  The only  cuts
   that were not optional were the wage cuts.
       (Salvemini, 193-194).

Of course, Mussolini did nothing to address this problem, so the workers
were left out in the cold, and unable to protest, since trade unionism was
emasculted under fascism.

If Mussolini could be defended on the grounds that, due to the state of
the world economy, wage reductions were necessary, Pound never made such an
argument, or even admitted that such reductions had been made.  If Pound had
advanced a moral argument in favor of wage reductions "for the good of
society,"  then there could be no
justification for allowing landlords to enrich themselves and raise rents
during a time of deprivation for the agricultural laborer.

In practice, says Salvemini,

"The commandments of Mussolini are only respected at the workers expense."

Pound's equation of Mussolini's fascism and Mencian feudalism (made in his
essay "Mang Tze") is
probably no accident.  Both Pound and the enemies of Fascism saw a
great similarity between that system and the medieval method of
organizing socio-economic relations.  As George Seldes points out, "free
labor throughout the world is anti-fascist--seeing in Italian, German, and
other forms of Fascism a return to medieval serfdom..."  (Seldes,
294).

Mussolini, Pound, and the supporters of fascism really cared not at all for
the worker. Seldes quotes a number of observers who share a belief in the
equation "fascism equals feudalism."

It was said by the late William Bolitho that the Duce's agricultural program
was making serfs out Italian farm labour.  More recently Prof. W.Y. Elliot
of Harvard summed up the situation as follows:
"Fascism has succeeded in depriving the laborer of the
  weapon of free association and the right to strike and
  has reduced him, for the time being, to a condition of
  State-controlled serfdom," and in October, 1934, the
  secretary of the British Trade Union Congress, Water
  Citrine declared:  "[Under Fascism] trade-unionism
  has been crushed, and the status of the citizen has been reduced to that
of a serf."
    (Seldes, 293-294).

If we believed that Pound was engaged in a sincere search for economic
truths, we would have to wonder why he fixated on outdated feudal and
physiocratic modes of thought, especially given that he had read Adam Smith,
Douglas, and Gessell.  These three thinkers were part of a long tradition
which had debunked physiocratic ideas concerning land, and embraced the
labor theory of value.

  We see the great advance made by Adam Smith  as compared with the
Physiocrats, in the analysis of surplus value and hence of capital.
  In their view only one kind of concrete labour--
  agricultural labour--creates surplus value.  Thus,
  what they examine is the use value of labour, not
  labour time, general social labour which is the sole
  source of value....   But to Adam Smith it is general
  social labour no matter in what use value it appears, the
  mere quantity of labour, which creates value.  Surplus
  value, whether in the form of profit or rent, or in the
  secondary form of interest is nothing but a part of this
  labour, which the owners of the material conditions of
  labour appropriate in exchange with living labour.  The
  Physiocrats consequently only see surplus value in the
  form of land rent.  To Adam Smith, rent, profit and
   interest are only different forms of surplus value.
    (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, 126).

Pound would seem then, not to have even advanced to the stage of
thought arrived at by Adam Smith.  The poet's economic thought, in its
essential theoretical basis, appears frozen in a Physiocratic moment.


Pound's hybrid theories are not characterized by a totally
unadulterated Confucian medieval view; rather, they are fraught with
tensions, ambiguities and contradictions, due to the poet's attempt to
impose the feudal economic world view on a complex modern economic
situation.

Given the REALTITES of Confucio-Mencian feudalism, and of Italian fascism,
how can it be seriously argued that Pound cared at all for a social system
which would benefit the "little guy"?

----Wei

http://www.geocities.com/weienlin/poundindex.html
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