In the post-apocalyptic landscape, the place of commercial activity is always worth noting. When the world has been turned upside down, whether by plague or natural catastrophe, locating the material and ideological remnants of an impulse toward buying and selling, and especially reinvestment, is a telling sign of how intimately the features of the present have been made to appear unthinkably natural.
There are many interesting features of Dick's 1965 novel Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb: Walter Dangerfield, the preserver of culture who remains in orbit around the Earth transmitting radio signals to the listeners down below; or Hoppy Harrington, the phocomelus who tries to use his psychic powers to compensate for his physical handicap in order to punish the able-bodied around him; or the ultimate cause of the nuclear destruction, which remains a mystery despite reappearing, or seeming to reappear, at the end of the novel.
But for all of its features that seem rare for a Dick novel, and for all the features that are familiar, I was struck by the sole African American character Stuart McConchie. On the fringes of a main narrative about psychosis and transmigrating identities, McConchie's character becomes the driving force for the rebirth of capital, overcoming the hesitations of those around him who have become resigned to simple survival.
As the other survivors in the San Francisco Bay area scrounge for food or medicine, McConchie finds himself hoarding money, stuffing bills into pillow cases:
Combating the simplistic notion that hoarding money is the essence of capitalism, Marx, in Volume One of Capital states:
Years after the nuclear explosions, as society begins to rebuild, McConchie finds himself back in a familiar position. He has abandoned the bags of cash and become the salesman of small, electronic vermin traps designed to catch the hyper-intelligent cats and rats. Moved by the entrepreneurial spirit, and disgruntled by the lack of job mobility, McConchie approaches his boss, and maker of the traps, Dean Hardy, and suggests taking the business from the city to the surrounding rural areas. In response to Hardy's reluctance, McConchie explains:
McConchie wastes no time extolling the virtues of Gill's Gold Label cigarettes, which he describes as "first in its field." Gill notes how happy this commercial discourse makes him and how long ("seven years") it had been since he had heard similar talk:
Here we have the transition from handicraft manufacturing to automated production. On the one hand, we might read this transition as Marx does:
But what I want to highlight is the specific vehicle of this ideology. What does it mean for the novel to use an African American, one who serves a marginalized place in a system when functioning, whose role as salesman is a by-product of the automated production process, whose racial lineage contains the systematic and brutal exploitation of a labor force for the purposes of accumulation and expansion; what does it mean for this character to be the driving force of capital expansion in the post-apocalypse?
I want to suggest two answers to this complicated question. Perhaps we could read this as an ironic commentary on the racial turmoil of the mid-60's: the race thought to be naturally uncivilized becomes the vehicle for reinstating a form of civility thought to be lost in the nuclear catastrophe. The novel would then attempt to position itself on the right side of history.
But I want to point toward a more complicated reading along the lines of, "Why do people recreate the conditions of their own subjugation?" One response might want to turn to Lacan's discussion of the "compulsion of repetition" to shore up an ambitious reading identifying a latent feature of the modern human that returns again and again to the traumatic alienation of capital, incapable, even in the most extreme conditions, of imagining a new mode of living.
An equally ambitious reading could turn to Hegel's discussion of the master and bondsman. In this reading, the subject of capital, McConchie, you, I, are all in the place of bondsman. In the place of master is the system of capital with its myriad components, material and personal. Supersession of this relationship is incapable if the two sides do not achieve mutual recognition, if they do not "recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another."
The reproduction of capital by McConchie in Dr. Bloodmoney would therefore be a byproduct of the impossibility of recognition by a system that functions through subjects but does not take a stabilized subject position. Capital is the master incapable of experiencing absolute fear, even in the face of mass death. It persists in its impersonal lordly place structurally incapable of recognizing its infinite working bondsmen, who without this recognition find themselves returning again and again to their structurally subservient place.
There are many interesting features of Dick's 1965 novel Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb: Walter Dangerfield, the preserver of culture who remains in orbit around the Earth transmitting radio signals to the listeners down below; or Hoppy Harrington, the phocomelus who tries to use his psychic powers to compensate for his physical handicap in order to punish the able-bodied around him; or the ultimate cause of the nuclear destruction, which remains a mystery despite reappearing, or seeming to reappear, at the end of the novel.
But for all of its features that seem rare for a Dick novel, and for all the features that are familiar, I was struck by the sole African American character Stuart McConchie. On the fringes of a main narrative about psychosis and transmigrating identities, McConchie's character becomes the driving force for the rebirth of capital, overcoming the hesitations of those around him who have become resigned to simple survival.
As the other survivors in the San Francisco Bay area scrounge for food or medicine, McConchie finds himself hoarding money, stuffing bills into pillow cases:
"...in five days he had collected thousands of dollars in money from the pockets of dead people he had found in the ruins of houses...from their pockets and from the houses themselves. Others scavengers had been after food and different objects such as knives and guns, and it made him uneasy that he alone wanted money."Despite a latent realization that the "money was worthless," the next scene finds McConchie scurrying into the street to collect money from a purse. McConchie is unwilling to part with his money, or try to utilize it for any transactions. He simply hoards it and resigns himself to eating dead rats, an image that calls to mind the miser.
Combating the simplistic notion that hoarding money is the essence of capitalism, Marx, in Volume One of Capital states:
"Withdrawn from circulation, [a sum of money becomes] petrified into a hoard, and though [it remains] in that state till doomsday, not a single farthing would accrue to [it]."Of course, here Marx has put aside the idea of an interest bearing account, presuming a fairly simplistic banking system that may be unrecognizable to us now. But his point about circulation remains. In a footnote, Marx further clarifies why hoarding money prevents it from performing its funciton as capital capable of producing surplus value:
"Exclusion of money from circulation would also exclude absolutely its self-expansion as capital, while accumulation of a hoard in the shape of commodities would be sheer tomfoolery."Circulation is the key word here, a point that Marx explores further in Volume Two. McConchie's hoarding of money is nothing but the misrecognition of wealth under capital, of what distinguishes the black salesman from the white owner. One of the key differences is the ability for the white owner to have accumulated enough money to actually get rid of some of it through the process of circulation, whether of buying more materials or hiring more laborers.
Years after the nuclear explosions, as society begins to rebuild, McConchie finds himself back in a familiar position. He has abandoned the bags of cash and become the salesman of small, electronic vermin traps designed to catch the hyper-intelligent cats and rats. Moved by the entrepreneurial spirit, and disgruntled by the lack of job mobility, McConchie approaches his boss, and maker of the traps, Dean Hardy, and suggests taking the business from the city to the surrounding rural areas. In response to Hardy's reluctance, McConchie explains:
“Listen, I’ve got my eye on the big time; I don’t want to mess around with selling any more—I’m fed up with it. I sold aluminum pots and pans and encyclopedias and TV sets and now these vermin traps. They're good traps and people want them, but I just feel there has to be something else for me."McConchie sets out on his own, arriving in Marin County, the central seat of main narrative revolving around the scheming phocomelus. Upon arrival, McConchie approaches Andrew Gill, who runs "the largest commercial enterprise in West Marin." His small batches of hand rolled cigarettes and distilled brandy are predominantly sold in the Bay Area, but are said to slowly trickle toward the East Coast.
McConchie wastes no time extolling the virtues of Gill's Gold Label cigarettes, which he describes as "first in its field." Gill notes how happy this commercial discourse makes him and how long ("seven years") it had been since he had heard similar talk:
"Perhaps the world, at last, was really beginning to regain some of its old forms, its civilities and customs and preoccupations, all that had gone into it to make it what it was. This, he thought, this talk by McConchie; it’s authentic. It’s a survival, not a simulation; this man has somehow managed to preserve his viewpoint, his enthusiasm, through all that has happened—he is still planning, cogitating, bullshitting ... nothing can or will stop him."In this passage, the business discourse becomes an indicator of approaching civility: McConchie, the black salesman, is unstoppably carrying the fire of capital back into a dark world, and with it, necessarily, civility. Gill, initially content to persist as a small manufacturer with a few employees, is soon convinced by McConchie to not only utilize a "systemaic network of outlets" to distribute his goods all the way to North Carolina by integrating with the burgeoning mail system, but also to introduce mechanization (electronic cigarette-rolling machines) into the production process.
Here we have the transition from handicraft manufacturing to automated production. On the one hand, we might read this transition as Marx does:
"Entirely new branches of production, erecting new fields of labor, are also formed as the direct result either of machinery or of the general industrial changes brought about by it."In a landscape devastated by hydrogen bombs, the potential for machine production to not only proliferate the material comfort provided by cigarettes but also to spread to other areas signals the re-birth of civilization. On this reading, the novel equates civilization, or society, with capitalism. Rebuilding is inevitably to recreate the operations of capital. With this reading, capital has been thoroughly naturalized, a historically necessary component of any form of human progress.
But what I want to highlight is the specific vehicle of this ideology. What does it mean for the novel to use an African American, one who serves a marginalized place in a system when functioning, whose role as salesman is a by-product of the automated production process, whose racial lineage contains the systematic and brutal exploitation of a labor force for the purposes of accumulation and expansion; what does it mean for this character to be the driving force of capital expansion in the post-apocalypse?
I want to suggest two answers to this complicated question. Perhaps we could read this as an ironic commentary on the racial turmoil of the mid-60's: the race thought to be naturally uncivilized becomes the vehicle for reinstating a form of civility thought to be lost in the nuclear catastrophe. The novel would then attempt to position itself on the right side of history.
But I want to point toward a more complicated reading along the lines of, "Why do people recreate the conditions of their own subjugation?" One response might want to turn to Lacan's discussion of the "compulsion of repetition" to shore up an ambitious reading identifying a latent feature of the modern human that returns again and again to the traumatic alienation of capital, incapable, even in the most extreme conditions, of imagining a new mode of living.
An equally ambitious reading could turn to Hegel's discussion of the master and bondsman. In this reading, the subject of capital, McConchie, you, I, are all in the place of bondsman. In the place of master is the system of capital with its myriad components, material and personal. Supersession of this relationship is incapable if the two sides do not achieve mutual recognition, if they do not "recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another."
The reproduction of capital by McConchie in Dr. Bloodmoney would therefore be a byproduct of the impossibility of recognition by a system that functions through subjects but does not take a stabilized subject position. Capital is the master incapable of experiencing absolute fear, even in the face of mass death. It persists in its impersonal lordly place structurally incapable of recognizing its infinite working bondsmen, who without this recognition find themselves returning again and again to their structurally subservient place.
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