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Four

Veblen and Gramsci

Introduction

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) had lives about as different as could be, as between two "white" men. A large part of their differences was attributable to one having been born in the U.S. Midwest and the other in Sardinia. Both, however, may be seen as having extended Marxian analysis.

The however must be accompanied by a large and political however: if confronted with that characterization of his work, Veblen would have mumbled a strong (and intricately-worded) denial, of which, more later. But Gramsci would have agreed. He was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (1921) and the founder of the party's Italian daily l'Unità (1924)--even though Mussolini and fascism had been in place for two years. He was arrested and imprisoned two years later; there he stayed until in 1937 he became so ill they released him to a hospital, where he soon died.

Gramsci's life was marked by courage and political forthrightness, even though (as will be seen when we discuss his work in subsequent meetings) the most important of his contributions were written while in the fascist prison.¹ As for Veblen, and even though I am his substantial admirer and have (I think) learned much from him, it seems appropriate to characterize his works as resembling camouflaged weapons, and his extension of Marx as covert.

This is not intended to suggest that Veblen was a coward; rather (as I have suggested elsewhere) his writings had the consistency and the chaos of a military campaign necessarily fought on so many fronts that the commanding general expects to lose, and therefore fights with less than maximum effort. That is made more understandable when one notes that Veblen's enemies included important parts of his (and our) world: nationalism and war, the business system and political oligarchy, corrupted educational and hired media system--and among other matters, a tendency on the part of the people toward self-destructive irrationality, a tendency nourished and trained by those in power.

Whatever may be true in the foregoing characterizations, and although for different reasons, both Veblen and Gramsci may be seen as having provided essential critiques and revisions, extensions, and updating of Marxian analysis. Major contributions of Gramsci were (1) to show the many ways in which the Leninist theory of revolution was inadequate for countries other than Russia--and, insufficient even for Russia, if one makes the distinction (as Gramsci did) between capturing the State and achieving the basis for a successful revolution--and (2) to specify what would be adequate. We return to that in the February 2000 classes. Now we begin to work through Veblen's main contributions for understanding our own times--about a century later than his times, which, for his writing, went from the 1890s into the early 1920s.

Thorstein Veblen: Consummate Skeptic

Max Lerner, one of the most useful commentators on Veblen, introduces his collection of essays by seeing and explaining Veblen as an outsider. Veblen was born inside, in the sense of having been born on in a successful farm family in the Midwest. But for what soon became important to him, the world of ideas and understanding, he was the proverbial outsider. Imagine him leaving the small (if good) Carleton College in Minnesota to become a graduate student in philosophy at Yale--and arriving there wearing a coonskin hat. It is likely that Veblen did that quite deliberately, mocking at least as much as being mocked. (Still . . .)

It is interesting that one of Veblen's most penetrating essays (contained in Lerner's book) concerns that group which may be seen as the historical outsiders: Jews.² After noting that the Jews have always been a tiny minority of Europe's population, Veblen points out that they also contributed a disproportionately high percentage of the leaders of Europe's intellectual achievements, whether in literature, music, art, or science. How to explain that?

Veblen argued as follows. From almost the first moment the Jews settled in Europe (having been hounded out of their Middle Eastern origins and, later, from one European country to another) they were caused to live in isolation from their fellow countryfolk--they were exiled to cities and constrained to dwell in ghettoes.

Note cities and ghettoes. Although, like all ancient peoples, the Jews were agriculturists in their early existence, they were almost entirely city folk from the medieval era on, and were ghettoized to "protect" the rest of the urban population from them. That is, they were kept outside the civilization which surrounded them; inside, in the ghetto, they followed perhaps the most rigorous of all religious dicta, ruled over by the Talmud.

The significance of that set of relationships was that the cities of Europe were the centers of what became modern civilization. The Jews, living in but not in the cities, were (so to speak) frozen in their cultural existence. Jews were not prevented from circulating in the city proper, but at the center of their lives was the virtually static life ruled over by an archaic screed.

Imagine growing up in such a setting: you are a young person, you are required to think and feel within a rigorous religious framework whose reference points are, in effect, timeless. But you are surrounded, both literally and figuratively, by a set of social processes that are moving toward modernity at an always accelerating pace. Within that set of processes are the developments of science, literature--everything. What to accept? It would be enough to make you wonder, to stop and think, to become--Veblen argues--a skeptic, doubting everything, forced to think through what seems to be to what is, and from that--at least for some--to what could be.

And skepticism is the basic element of not only science but all creative thinking. Thus, in becoming (shall we say) disproportionately skeptical, the outsider Jews became disproportionately intellectual. This is not to say that any and all outsiders become so inclined and able. More is involved, much of it mysterious (unless, if then, revealed on the psychoanalyst's couch, etc.), much of it having to do with native abilities, and so on.

But given the latter elements, whatever they may be (and they exist in all peoples, everywhere, as possibilities)³ skepticism in itself is much nourished by the ongoing tensions of the lives of European Jews. And, finally to make the point and close this prolonged observation, Veblen, too, was an outsider, and (as in our heading) a consummate skeptic--and an extraordinarily original thinker who used his skepticism as a platform for exposing what he called the force and fraud of his status quo--and for deflating the hot air balloons of ideology and pretense.⁴ Luckily for us.⁵

Before turning to his major works, here some suggestions as to what seem to me to be a good order in which to read Veblen--with which many who respect Veblen would disagree.

Veblen wrote eleven books, and numberless articles and reviews. His first and most famous book was The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) followed by The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), then The Instinct of Workmanship (1914), Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915), The Nature of Peace (1917), and his last book, in 1923, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise. There have also been several books of his collected essays, the most important of which is that which is concerned entirely with economics: The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. (And his book on the university was mentioned in an earlier note.)

As in my recommendations concerning Marx, I propose that you not start with "at the beginning"; rather, for our purposes I think it best to begin with Instinct of Workmanship, thence to The Theory of Business Enterprise and Absentee Ownership. And that's how I'll begin and continue in what follows.⁶

Veblen and Human Nature

Like Marx, Veblen believed that social understanding required historical understanding, whatever else is also needed; and like Marx, he took serious thought to what makes our species tick. Contrary to popular notions, neither Marx nor Veblen was an economic determinist; both, however, took economic life as central in determining human behavior, energized principally--but not solely--by production and reproduction. It is difficult to see how any species could survive otherwise. We have seen what Marx had to say in these respects; now, a taste of Veblen:

The economic life history of any community is its life history in so far as it is shaped by men's interest in the material means of life. This economic interest has counted for much in shaping the cultural growth of communities . . . . The economic interest goes with men through life . . . . It affects the cultural structure at all points, so that all institutions may be said to be in some measure economic institutions.⁷

In The Theory of the Leisure Class, the basic concepts were the leisure class,conspicuous consumption, and pecuniary emulation. The last--emulation--is the root of conspicuous consumption, and the inspiration for that emulation is the leisure class. And what is that class?

It is what Marx called the ruling class, but which Veblen--always camouflaging his terms to protect himself (while also confusing his potential supporters)--uses to characterize those exempt from industrial employment: that is, who own and control the means of production, the business class (and their political and religious cohorts). And it is important to understand that when Veblen uses the word industry he is referring to those who do the work; when he uses the term business the reference is to those who own and sell what was produced through industry.

That takes us to a key argument of Veblen regarding human nature, the need for self-respect and dignity.⁸

[T]he usual basis of self-respect is the respect accorded by one's neighbors. Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows. Apparent exceptions to the rule are met with, especially among people with strong religious convictions. But these apparent exceptions are scarcely real exceptions, since such persons commonly fall back on the putative approbation of some supernatural witness to their deeds. (Instinct, p. 30)

Veblen goes on with a most prescient discussion for our time, one that helps to explain the success of consumerism and, its other side, the weakening of solidaristic efforts. He saw the members of each subgroup below the leisure class (what we today vaguely call the middle class and even the poor) as straining to lose their identity with their own group (or class) while seeking to be identified with the group immediately above their own--that is, closer to the leisure class. Something like the behavior that (in the 1920s, when consumerism began in the United States) came to be called keeping up with the Joneses.

The picture thus drawn is one of increasingly pervasive and deepening discontent and striving--precisely what modern advertising seeks to spread and deepen. In that social process, the standard of living becomes the level of those above one's own group: a carrot in front of the donkey's nose. Veblen called this--in 1914, mind you--pecuniary emulation:⁹

. . . an ideal of consumption that lies just beyond our reach; or to reach which requires some strain emotional and financial. The motive is emulation--the stimulation of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves.

Then, and remembering that he wrote the Instinct as the Gilded Age was reaching its climax but well before the 1920s began, he foresaw the nature of normal behavior today:

The standard of pecuniary emulation is flexible; and especially it is indefinitely extensible, if only time is allowed for habituation to any increase in pecuniary ability and for acquiring facility in the new and larger scale of expenditure that follows such an increase. It is much more difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an accession of wealth.

Seeing things in Veblen's way is a way of also seeing that in addition to the exploitation of workers in production--and the associated demoralization--that modern capitalism also has the need and (through the media) the ability to carry people back to their adolescence, with its insecurities, its strivings, its single-minded aggressiveness--its dangers to one and all.

Before bringing this section of our discussion to an end (to be continued in the classes of 2000), some important additional observations, which will be pursued again later: Veblen's views of human nature were by no means entirely negative. In his Instinct he sees us as having two sides--constructive and destructive. The constructive side of us--the instinct of workmanship--is what prods us to nourish each other, to learn, to create (whether in technology or the arts, etc.); the destructive side--the instinct of sportsmanship--which he called predatory, is that which brings out the worst in us, as killers, as rulers, as those exempt from industrial pursuits. It is the leisure class that preys on all others, playing out their role through exploit, prowess, fraud, and force, rather than through any direct contributions to production or learning or anything worthwhile. And he made it crystal clear that capitalism, nationalism, and imperialism (always using different words than those) bring out the worst in us.

In keeping with the anthropology of his time (and going beyond it), Veblen saw modern institutions as having arisen out of the earlier savage and barbarian social formations (where savage refers to hunting and fighting for maintenance, and barbarian as having gone beyond that to domesticated agriculture, with village life, etc.). But he saw the hunters and fighters as naturally having gone on to rule over barbarian society and, as well, over subsequent civilized society, despite (and in part because of) its greater complexities and strengths. We'll let it go at that for now, except for one final quotation from Instinct (p. 14):

H]unting and fighting are of a predatory nature; the warrior and hunter alike reap where they have not strewn. Their aggressive assertion of force and sagacity differs obviously from the women's assiduous and uneventful shaping of materials (e.g., farming, cloth-making, pottery); it ("men's work") is not to be accounted productive labor, but rather an acquisition of substance by seizure . . . [and] any effort that does not involve an assertion of prowess comes to be unworthy of man.

Notes

1. The forthrightness was lessened only to the degree that everything he wrote had to pass a prison censor, which led him to use terms unlikely to arouse the ire of the guards--e.g., ideological hegemony.  Return

2. "On the Intellectual Preeminence of the Jews in Modern Europe," in Max Lerner, The Portable Veblen.  Return

3. Which reminds me to quote the deservedly eminent biologist Stephen Jay Gould on Einstein: "I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." Food for thought there.  Return

4. In addition to going after business and the State, and among others, he punctured the balloons combining ideology with the pretense of academicians (including, of course, economists) in his The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (1918). It was written in 1908, but not published for ten years--and then only after substituting the above bland subtitle, (A Memorandum . . .) for Veblen's original one, which was A Study in Total Depravity. Veblen was fired from at least two universities, both times for allegedly having affairs with other faculty members' wives. Had that charge been applied to all faculty members, it would have resulted in the mass firings of a good number of the professors of all U.S. colleges and universities. Then and now. So it goes.  Return

5. Those wishing to understand Veblen as a person may look for a recent book by Elizabeth and Henry Jorgensen, Thorstein Veblen: Victorian Firebrand (1999). The major work on Veblen is Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (1934). Although Dorfman refers to Veblen's persona and his times (as well as his works), he doesn't probe into Veblen's life as deeply as the Jorgensens. This is not to say that they agree fully with my own observations.  Return

6. I have written a small book, Thorstein Veblen (1964), whose aim was to bring together all of Veblen's writings in such a way that those not knowing his positions could get an overall idea and then go on guided by their own interests. The book has been republished just recently by Transaction Publishers (1999)--as a classic. I'm not sure whether I should feel flattered or begin to look for my mortician-to-be--or both.  Return

7. Note: (has counted for) much not all. From The Place of Science, pp. 76-77.  Return

8. A need, when you reflect on it, that is shared with many other animals. When you walk through a zoo and regard, say, the tigers or the bears, and you see them walking madly in circles (and so on), you are seeing animals in a real sense gone crazy. They are well fed, they are safe, and--having been robbed of what Marx would call their species-being--they have lost themselves.  Return

9. The quotations that follow are taken from Instinct, pp. 102-104.  Return
 

Aug 8, 2000