Is Bruce A Classical Marxist ?  

"Caught In The Web" has some entertaining (if you are a fan of Bruce Sterling like I am, anyway) ruminations on Bruce's recent talk about connectivity and poverty, claiming Bruce sounds like a classical Marxist - Heffernan (on Sterling) on Twitter.

Bruce pokes a lot of fun at Marxists, so I'm not sure they'd appreciate this characterisation (especially those who already view him as an agent of the liberal elite) - and while he does occasionally come off sounding like a Marxist (his recent "Bruno Argento" column springing to mind) he usually seems to reside (in my mind anyway) in the uneasy land between the libertarians and the anarchists...

Bruce Sterling, a hero to many of us, who study media critically, has recently gained traction among the New York Times reading crowd thanks to Virginia Heffernan’s blog post this past week on “connectivity as poverty.”

She was echoing the sentiments expressed by Sterling at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, that the poor relish their connections and connectivity (the capacity to connect) because they have nothing else. Here’s how Heffernan describes it:

Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Though Heffernan thinks that Sterling’s position is Nietzschean, which I can see, I ultimately think that the position is far more evocative of Marx.

Now some (or many) of you may think, Who cares? Let me briefly lay out the stakes. If Sterling’s stance is Nietzschean, that is to say, “a disdain for regular people,” than there would be a kind of implicit alternative within Sterling’s position. Now granted, I’m taking Sterling at Heffernan’s word (and thus may be misrepresenting him), but Nietzsche’s “disdain for the regular person” is not so much an antipathy but more so a phobia for what he frequently calls “slave morality.” Slave morality can be defined orienting one’s actions (thus developing his her ethics) by taking on the conditions and assumptions of the dominator. In other words, it is the trap of attempting to act ethically within the dominator’s rules. It becomes a trap, in which the slave actively invests in his own domination via ethics. (The most glaring example of this, according to Nietzsche, was Christianity. You can see why.)

Now, I’m not so sure Sterling is coming from such a place. In fact, as I noted earlier, I see him being more classically Marxist. The idyllic life of solitude imagined by Sterling is straight out of ideals of the Enlightenment–culture, leisure and most importanty autonomy (leaving the free-thinking, rational being time and space to think). Marx, at the end of “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848) quotes from The German Ideology, which so strikes a hauntingly similar note to Heffrenan’s characterization of Sterling.

to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.

Marx’s argument is that the human being, in a truly utopian-socialist society, would be free to do whatever s/he pleases without it becoming obligatory, and thus alienating, as wage-labor ultimately will be. Despite what people may think of when they hear “communism” or “socialism,” which is some idea about forced sharing, the vision of Marx is completely embedded in the Enlightenment discourse of individual self-realization and expression.