WORK & WORKING PEOPLE IN POPULAR CULTURE talking to Russ about Franz Kafka, whose work would seem to fall right into Russ’s sweet spot of critical inquiry, but as far as I know he also never wrote anything about Kafka. That sweet spot seems to have been a blind spot for Russ, possibly because exactly during Russ’s formative years in the immediate postwar period, Kafka’s reputation emerged in tandem with philosophical existentialism and a sort of religio-mystical universalism that suited the postwar years, eager to escape historical entanglements, while the economy began to boom. Yet for a decade before his death in 1924 Kafka was a highly regarded labor lawyer at the Worker’s Accident Compensation insurance company in Prague, where he wrote detailed descriptions of industrial injuries and regularly visited factories and examined the conditions of labor first-hand. His best friend and first biographer Max Brod included some of his accident reports in his biography, the first, in 1937, but postwar scholarship fled into all other directions. Kafka’s most famous work, with which you’re all familiar, The Metamorphosis of 1915, describes Gregor Samsa who has turned into a ‘monstrous vermin’ or big bug and cannot get out of bed and thus cannot catch his train or report to work as a travelling salesman, whose boss then almost immediately shows up at his home to reprimand him.
Kafka’s work deserves a reading along the lines of Russ Harrison’s studies of Bukowski and Bernhard, surfacing the socio-economic and historical contexts; somehow Kafka seemed to escape Russ’s full attention (the name didn’t begin with B, so it was not to be, I guess). Yet he was aware of that affinity: in his brilliant book on Patricia Highsmith (1997), he makes a brief comparison of her work to Kafka and illuminates his own method of exploring in critically neglected or misunderstood popular authors “the contrast between surface simplicity and hidden complexity” (18). Russ’s work surfaces in fiction the ‘hidden complexities’ of class and labor in their historical settings and implications. Next semester, I’ll be teaching an Honors College Seminar on Kafka in World Literature that will bring this perspective into a focus on Kafka and his influence. For what it’s worth, though it’s not an official thing, that seminar, inspired by Russ’s work, will also be dedicated to my colleague Russ Harrison, scholar and friend.
Neil Donahue is a professor and former chair in Hofstra University’s Comparative Literature Dept. For the next 9 years, Neil served as Associate Dean of Honors College, and since July 2016 has been Vice Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs and Internationalization.
Though set in his room at home, the story reflects the dehumanizing effects of work and, if viewed from that angle, anticipates Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). In fact, Gregor’s transformation enacts in full-body fashion Georg Lukacs’s notion of the “reification of consciousness” (or thingification of thinking, if you will) as a condition of industrial labor, the transformation of the worker into an object, a commodity, an estranged by-product of the mass-production process. Kafka’s Metamorphosis constitutes on one level a critique of Taylorism, that is, the work Principles of Scientific Management by American Frederick Winslow Taylor that came out in 1911 and revolutionized the industrial workplace worldwide by inserting the individual into an equation, a calculus of productivity over time, without regard for human needs, a notion later mocked in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), where the hero suffers a nervous breakdown on the conveyor belt and gets pulled literally into the vast machinery of the plant while still manically trying to turn the bolts and perform his one assigned task on the conveyor belt. Yet Kafka’s critique of Taylorism was not recognized as such at the time, and hardly since: a gap persisted for many decades between interpretations of Kafka’s writing and his actual life and job. In the early 1980s, long before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain, while studying in Germany, I got to visit Prague, where located the sites of Kafka’s life, including his office, where I met the man who worked there then, who gave me a tour but couldn’t otherwise provide much insight. Yet that visit to Prague grounded my understanding of Kafka’s work in his work (i.e. at the office) and historical moment. In the early 2000s, Kafka’s office writings from his job were at last published in German and then in English, finally bringing this aspect of his world more fully into view.
REGIONAL LABOR REVIEW, vol. 23, no.2 (Spring/Summer 2021). © 2021 Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University
In Search of an Autonomous and Meaningful Work Life By George Caffentzis
Capitalism, through the imposition of alienating work activities whose only purposes is to make profit for the capitalists, destroys the possibility of a life that’s creative, self-determined and worth living. There were undoubtedly biographical reasons for this very strong feeling Russ had, present in all of his writings, that work in capitalism is the antithesis of life. At the beginning of his unpublished novel The Shop, dedicated to the life of his father as a shopkeeper, he quotes him saying that: “The only difference between this job and a prison is that here they let you out at six o'clock in the afternoon.” Russ complained that he never asked his father who the “they” were. George Caffentzis
In the novel, Russ tells us that his father passed his time in the shop reading books and was almost annoyed when customers came in – making money, despite himself. Russ struggled throughout his life not to repeat his father's destiny. Instead of only reading books, he wrote them and he taught them and he wrote about the great refusers of work like Charles Bukowski.
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’d like to start by speaking from a place of biography. In 1965, I was a student at City College of New York, attending courses on the classic languages. It’s there that I first met Russell Harrison, who became my oldest friend. From that time on, we never lost touch with each other. What brought us together were shared intellectual, political interests and antagonisms, and also the fact that we both felt like outsiders: I coming from a Greek immigrant family and Russ from a Jewish family.
Against the American Dream, Russ’s main analytic work, is centered on the idea that, through mechanization and deskilling, work in America has become a totally meaningless activity. Henry Chinaski, the protagonist in Bukowski’s main novels, working at the post office in Factotum, is the embodiment of the alienated worker who is constantly striving to avoid giving his time to jobs that destroy people's lives and human relations.
Our relationship intensified in 1974, after an absence of several years, when I helped launching a political journal called Zero Work. The title expressed the idea, common in the Italian new left, that at the center of contemporary revolutionary politics, we must place our refusal to foster capitalistic development and the refusal of the capitalist organization of work.
Russ did his best to contribute to the making of a world where what we do is motivated by desire, rather than by the need for survival. I think that at Hofstra he came the closest to realizing his desire for work that has some meaning and is a rewarding activity. H prepared with passion his classes on Brecht, and often spoke about them. His death is a great loss to all of us.
This was a counter tendency to the traditional orthodox Marxist and communist idea that capitalist development is progressive –because, by increasing the productivity of labor it creates material foundations for the future communist society. The Italian new left rejected this view that had shaped the politics of the Communist Party in Italy and other communist parties around the world. It insisted on working class autonomy, that is, the idea that the working class has no interest in the development of capitalism nor in the parties of the left that made a historical compromise with capitalism.
George Caffentzis is an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. Among his many books and articlesy – on topics ranging from the death penalty, to peak oil, and the philosophy of money – are Clipped Coins, Abused Words, and Civil Government: John Locke’s Philosophy of Money; Exciting the Industry of Mankind: George Berkeley’s Philosophy of Money, and recently: In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism.
Russ was extremely interested in this perspective and this refusal. And we had a lot of discussions of its implications that, in a way, continued until his death. He was especially interested in the concept of refusal of work, which resonated with his own critique of capitalist society.
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REGIONAL LABOR REVIEW, vol. 23, no.2 (Spring/Summer 2021). © 2021 Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University
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