Late Industrial Capitalism 2: Nostalgia and Grievance

Edward Lewis is in the business of buying up “distressed companies.” The reason, in Lewis’s predatory logic, these companies are in financial distress is that they are anachronistic. This point is driven home to Edward relentlessly by his henchman Philip Stuckey, an unscrupulous postindustrial capitalist. Or, we might say, the most scrupulous postindustrial capitalist because he is totally immune to nostalgia. Stuckey is in no way sentimental about the demise of American manufacturing or anything that smacks of the residual. Edward and Stuckey belong to the era before, as Jameson would say, capital became relentlessly “pure.” That moment when capital still “tolerated” modes of production incommensurate with itself.

Late industrial capitalism is the plaintive cry emanating from an already destroyed mode of economic production. Late industrial capitalism is, as such, unscientific, a ruined mode of production that is already antiquated and will soon meet the fate of obsolescence it so richly deserves. And we know that Marx set great store by the science of capitalism. Late industrial capital insists that, all evidence to the contrary, it is still possible to “make things in America,” that a devastated manufacturing base, if it is left unmolested by PEF, can be resuscitated. In some places, at least. In some industries, surely. That the dignity of honest white labor can be restored, all economic trends and indicators to the contrary.

“Making things in America” as innately ideological, the perpetration of an economic false consciousness on that constituency—white workers (intensely masculinized)—most receptive to it. Those for whom “globalization” resonates as a historic grievance, as economic evidence that it is the Other who is “stealing jobs from Americans.” The politics of grievance brought to a new pitch of intensity by a wealthy white speculator—hotelier, global land speculator (in the United States, Asia, Europe), failed Atlantic City casino mogul—who has never handled a piece of machinery in his life. No matter; this politician was skilled enough in the cynical ability to turn the politics of white grievance into a potent form of political capital that it catapulted him right into the White House. Such is the power of perceived injury, a power mobilized with injurious consequences for the Other.

A singular form of economic conversion this is: the ability to meld economic nostalgia with white political grievance and to make out of this blend a resonant, volatile, nationalist ideological cocktail. “Making things in America” resonates because it diverts attention from the hard economic truths of postindustrial capital. If nostalgia cannot be assigned an economic value, the ideology of white ressentiment is, politically, at least, measurable. It translates into votes. The articulation of nostalgia makes of the discourse of nostalgia itself the cathected object. Nostalgia becomes the Kantian thing in itself: das Ding an sich.