CORRESPONDENCE

Response to Anthony Macris (Overland 168)
by Katle Hassani (Overland 171)

I read Anthony Macris’s ‘The New Millennium’, in Overland 168, with some interest. Although I am unconvinced that Macris has contributed any genuinely new insights in his critique of capitalism, I would still commend him for his attempt in the Capital series to detail the toll it takes on our humanity, in the dishonesties and indignities it demands we participate in. Moving on to his excerpt, ‘TCF (Textiles, Clothing and Footwear)’, however, I was very quickly disappointed—to say the least:

[S]he came face to face with a generation who had devoted all their spare time for the past twenty years to supplementing the family income at sewing machines, overlockers and buttonholers, and who were now desperate to find another job that would allow them to pay off their homes more quickly, build a granny flat if it had been paid off, or buy the dinner sets and mix masters their husbands sometimes refused to shell out for.

The exploitation of women workers for the purposes of minimising labour costs is perhaps one of capitalism’s most lucrative practices on a global scale. And in this one sentence, Macris has diminished the power of his challenge to capitalism; he has weakened his intellectual weapon by indulging and perpetuating one of the very lies his target has so insistently demanded we believe.

What luxury Macris describes! According to him, these women are not working out of genuine need or because working is important to their own sense of independence and personal achievement, but simply in order to be able to enjoy middle-class perks and privileges. Kitchen appliances and crockery to support the capitalist industry of ‘feminine consumerism’ at that.

One of the most enduring discriminatory beliefs that has ‘justified’ the consistent failure of employers to pay their female workers equal money for work equal to that performed by male colleagues—and their celerity with dispensing of female staff before male—is the idea that, while men are working to put bread on the table (and for some personal satisfaction), women are simply working for ‘pin money’. A man’s work is therefore valuable and his continued employment important because it is contributing to the betterment of a family, whereas a working woman can do without another handbag, lipstick or whatever other triviality she so desires. Macris has utterly failed to deconstruct one of capitalism’s most powerful and fundamental lies.

A large proportion of women working in any kind of employment, including that described (menial, factory), are not working to ‘supplement’ a man’s income. Rather, they themselves are the primary or sole provider in their family. Despite legislation supporting equal pay for women having been passed in many nations, there has been little commitment among employers to honouring the objective supposedly intended by this legislation.

Women, who represent half of the world’s population, do two thirds of the world’s (paid) work, earn 10 per cent of the world’s income and own only 1 per cent of the world’s property. What about taking some time to critique a system that creates (demands) such an unjust reality?

That Macris should consider he can formulate any critique of capitalism, without even acknowledging the need to deconstruct key axes of discrimination and oppression that have fed its rampant, expansionist progression into every facet of our lives, is a startling flaw.

ANTHONY MACRIS RESPONDS:

When Katle Hassani ‘commends’ me for tackling the big issues of capitalism in my novel series, Capital, it strongly suggests she has read them. I’m really not sure how, because the second novel, Capital, Volume One, Part Two, from which the extract ‘TCF’ is taken, isn’t finished and hasn’t yet been published. What is clear is that she has read this one section of a chapter, and one sentence in particular. It goes without saying that sound textual analysis is based on reading the whole text, and if it’s not available, then you should limit your judgements to what the textual evidence before you permits.

Hassani also makes basic methodological errors of interpretation. Since she uses the term ‘deconstruct’ (with all its Derridean overtones) in her approach to my work, rather than the less modish term ‘analyse’, I think it fair that we examine her comments from a poststructuralist perspective. Once again, we quickly find a basic error of analysis. She has taken a literary text, and given it a purely social science reading. ‘TCF’ is narrated in third-person subjective: an omniscient narrator takes the perspective of the protagonist, Penny, and gives her point of view. Such statements are clearly generated by a particular subject position, contain their own kind of truth and insight, and simply cannot be analysed using only criteria from the mainstream social sciences: statistical validity, etc. Also, I wonder if Hassani is familiar with contemporary critiques of social sciences discourse which have enriched the discipline by forcing it to take account of subject positions and the biases they by necessity entail. With their lack of self-reflexive awareness, her current comments indicate she hasn’t.

Now, for the TCF workers themselves. Hassani is concerned that my character Penny fails in her comments to acknowledge the efforts of full-time women workers, and how they often work for themselves, not to support a man or a family. But Penny works in an agency that deals with part-time employment (it’s mentioned in the other parts of the chapter), and many of her TCF clients are older and have families. It’s understandable her comments would be couched in those terms. And it’s understandable she might mention how such wages would “supplement” a family income. For Hassani to attack Penny’s comments on the basis of perceived sins of omission strikes me as extreme. Furthermore, Hassani’s overall position suggests that such part-time workers are somehow inferior to their full-time counterparts, which is unfair, to say the least.

Finally, not all TCF workers see their work as ‘menial’, as Hassani does. Many see themselves as highly skilled machinists who can do complicated sewing jobs with great efficiency, and are justifiably proud of their expertise. This makes their exploitation all the more degrading. I would also be curious to see some of their reactions to being told that when they buy crockery, they are supporting the “capitalist industry of ‘feminine consumerism’”. I’m not sure they would agree with Hassani on that one either.

KATTLE HASSANI AGAIN:

Macris has both wilfully misinterpreted my response and obfuscated the challenge I posed by invoking unnecessarily academic rhetoric. Fluency in post-structuralist theory and discourse is not a requirement for engaging in the discussion I have opened up. Rather than respond directly to the points I have raised, Macris has also hidden behind the evasive defence that I don't know what lies within the rest of the text, therefore my opinion is based on too little contextual knowledge to be of any value.

Macris has asserted that my position “suggests that such part-time workers are somehow inferior to their full-time counterparts”. This is a wholly baseless conclusion to form from the actual content of my response. As I stated in my piece, a genderised wage discrepancy continues to affect families. This often makes it economically non-viable for a woman to be in full-time paid employment (that is, away from the duties of maintaining capitalism’s key cell ‘the family’). It is not viable because the family cannot afford the expense of paying others to see to housework, childcare etc., and if the male is earning more than she is for his paid labour outside the home, it makes economic sense that she should be the one to cut back on those working hours. This is hardly esoteric understanding, and it is easy to perceive how these circumstances are blown out and perpetuated, resulting in more rigidly patterned, restrictive opportunities and options (or lack thereof) for everyone, especially women. The machine produces circumstances only to reinforce and reproduce them, and then points toward the existence of these circumstances to justify their validity (‘that’s just how it is’) and continuation. It is simply absurd, and frankly nonsensical, to claim that, by objecting to the text’s perpetuation of myth and trivialisation of women who are primary breadwinners (and most likely also primary labourers in the home), I am insinuating that others, who receive actual monetary payment (as opposed to a reduction in expenditure) for a smaller fraction of their labour, are inferior.

Next to the charge that I have somehow insulted these workers by describing their work as ‘menial’. The word menial seems to me completely appropriate for two reasons. The kind of work in question is irrefutably ‘low status, by which I mean not that it requires little skill, but that it is poorly paid, often performed under unpleasant working conditions and is without popular social prestige or esteem. Secondly, the term menial significantly indicates the hierarchically disadvantaged position occupied by those who execute these tasks. These are not capitalism’s masters or even middle managers; they are the systematically disempowered, subject to determination by others whose agendas are increasingly self-serving as the hierarchy is scaled. If Macris is truly concerned with the affairs or interests of such workers, he should desist from trivialising their contribution and circumstances in the first instance, and certainly refrain from offering patronising recognition from the perch of privilege that they might take pride in their skill in performing such tasks. At the very least he should engage with the actual issue I have raised and concede the destructive consequences of such myths and the role they play in maintaining the exploitative, oppressive status quo. “TCF is narrated in third-person subjective: an omniscient narrator takes the perspective of the protagonist, Penny, and gives her point of view”, Macris argued, and yet it stands that the particular section to which I openly objected is not presented to the reader as having been written to convey the character Penny’s own perception – as opposed to an ‘objective’ account of the realities facing the workers discussed. If this is in fact the case, that these perceptions are not those from beyond and above Penny, then Macris has failed in executing this distinction and in fact achieved quite the opposite effect. Is the reader expected to know that, when placed within its parent chapter, the perspectives of the excerpt are crucially shifted? For the reader encountering an extract such as TCF, the wider context of the complete work is unavailable, as Macris himself points out. Does it therefore follow that construction of meaning and significance by the reader must be resisted/postponed until such a time as the novel from which it has been taken has been read? Aside from the fact that this opens up a can of worms – when can a reader be deemed to have taken in ‘enough’ of the text’s context to be permitted an opinion (does reading Capital Volume I Part I become necessary, then Das Kapital, then some realist fiction along with a dose of nouveau roman and perhaps even a look in at Dallenbach?)? – one can hardly go about promoting an upcoming text by publishing an excerpt there from only to disallow readers the right to respond thereto. That is plainly absurd.

Returning to Macris’ claims that I can’t have read the larger (con)text (neither the whole chapter which includes TCF, let alone Volume I Part II), I need only explain that, contrary to Macris’ assertions, Capital Volume I Part II is in fact published in full (and publicly accessible) at http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/uploads/approved/adt-NUWS20030505.145103/public/03Chapter2.pdf. As such, I have met with the excerpt in question from the position of one who has close knowledge not only of Macris’ previously published novel, but also of the very novel in question.
This raises another interesting point regarding Macris’ dealing with the question of part-time employment in his response to my letter. He claims, in defence of the comments to which I so objected, that “Penny works in an agency that deals with part-time employment (it’s mentioned in the other parts of the chapter)”. Unfortunately this argument doesn’t hold water. Throughout the entire chapter from which TCF is taken there is no single indication that the agency deals in part-time work exclusively. In fact, quite the opposite is true. In 58 pages, the only mentions ever made of part-time work are firstly in reference to Penny’s own terms of employment, and then when she provides a client with details of two positions – positions Penny makes a point of qualifying as part-time, thereby reinforcing, along with the wider context of the chapter, that this is not to be assumed otherwise, as this is not the only or even most common type of work she is involved with finding. While it is almost certain that changes have been made to Capital Volume I Part II, it is noteworthy that none are evident in any of the excerpts Macris has had published (wittingly).

To see my words “feminine consumerism” met with such a reaction comes as something of a surprise to me. I had assumed that the irony of this phrase would be readily recognised, and I regret this assumption if it were in fact not strongly founded. Though it is curious that Macris chides me for not engaging competently with theoretical discourse, and yet when a statement that unequivocally invokes feminism (and, more particularly, key feminist texts that address market forces, economic structures and employment trends in their scope), Macris himself abandons fluency in both these discourses and common nuance.

Finally, Macris has stated that my objection “on the basis of perceived sins of omission” strikes him as “extreme”. Skirting responsibility for the significance (in Riffaterian terms) of his own text and evading direct discussion of the actual issues I sought to address, he also fails here to acknowledge the expectations incurred by a work with such claims and ambitions as his Capital series. This harmful ignorance and oblivious privilege is all the more destructive when its source claims to be topically informed – or at least concerned – beyond acceptance of such myths. This is, after all, “a novel not about novels” but about the “larger questions of the social whole”, such as “the changing structure of labour and its implications for social justice” (Macris, 2001).

For a real insight into such questions and the ways in which capitalism encroaches on our everyday life etc, I would direct readers to the exceptional piece Working Poor, published in Overland 170 (in striking juxtaposition to TCF), where real life stories are told by real life people trying to survive meaningfully in conditions of economic brutality that are a feature of the current capitalist socio-economic landscape. Here we find, amongst others, a textiles piece-worker who labours 15 hours a day in ‘paid’ employment, clearing $3–$5 each hour. When she, her husband and her kids are up till dawn sewing T-shirts that will be sold for thirty-three times what she is paid to produce them, it is unlikely that they are calculating when they will be able to afford to buy new dinnerware or build a granny flat to stick out the back of a house they own. As Claude Simon said: reality is far superior to fiction.