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 ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com