It’s Big in Japan

Late industrial capitalist nostalgia is what happens when the dialectic dies, is put to death because PEF has determined that there is no value in its existence. In fact, its only value is what can be attained through the selling off of manufacturing’s remaining assets. What does not yield value—that is, cannot return a profit, cannot be turned into a profit—is to be disposed of with all due haste.

Asset stripping is the complete opposite of industrialized production. It takes the prostitute to make immanent to the PEFs (Stuckey more than Edward) the logic of late industrial capitalism. More than that, it is the despoiled woman who becomes the spokesperson for a (US) fin-de-siècle late industrial capitalism reduced to bare bones, the US industrial economy for which James Morse wants to assure a future has been, in Édouard Glissant’s critique of the various forms of colonial extraction, “stripped to essentials.”1

To “strip” assets, in the discourse of late-twentieth-century capitalism, is to hew to the logic of the corporate raider, the vulture capitalist, one such as Edward who, in the clearest possible terms, explains his practice to Vivian. He starts out, “I buy companies that are in financial distress,” after which he proceeds to treat Vivian with a quick, gentlemanly, “Warn me if I bore you,” to the basic, and therefore most felicitous, course in vulture capitalism:

Twenty years ago Morse Industries was a huge corporation, and even though they’re almost bankrupt today, they still have millions in assets. Real estate, equipment, inventory. Things that can be liquidated to generate cash. You understand?

Morse Industries has been in the shipbuilding business for forty years, during which it has acquired a swathe of property, which are the floundering company’s most valuable assets. Stuckey, the point man on the deal, has done his job thoroughly. In his PowerPoint presentation, Stuckey lays out the plan for acquisition:

This is the jewel in Morse’s crown. Prime industrial property straddling the Port of Long Beach and Los Angeles. We can strip out all the heavy equipment. Some of the cranes are very valuable overseas. World War II stuff that nobody builds anymore because it costs too much. The Japanese are salivating for them.

In the past Morse Industries built destroyers for the US Navy, a business that included providing ships for the Navy during World War II. The logic of PEF is ruthless, completely free of sentiment. Where Stuckey sees disposable machinery—“Some of the cranes are very valuable overseas”—others see the potential for “creation” out of this capitalist “destruction.” “The Japanese are salivating for them,” Stuckey says, almost chuckling at the prospect of offloading Morse Industries vital machinery for a quick buck. But “these cranes” have acquired, in being brought to historical life again, an ideological resonance. The “cranes” evoke, as they must, a history of catastrophic, world-altering violence.