The World is a Vampire: On Sinners

I love this picture so much and have always wanted to use it.

 

I am going to get to Sinners but before I get there I need to say a little about my own particular history with the music known as the blues. 

The Spectacle Goes to the Movies: The Pop Life of Debord

 

As someone who teaches philosophy at a regional public university, which is to say a school without a lot of students who could ever imagine majoring in philosophy, I have never found a pop culture reference to philosophy I did not like. I have talked about Breaking Bad and work, Fight Club and alienation, and Get Out and W.E.B. Dubois to name a few. I have never done anything with The Matrix though. I have never shown it or screened it. 

Workers of the World, Divide! Work and the Constitution of the People

 

Pictures from Princeton (where this paper was presented)

This might be the worst place to begin, but in February Marjorie Taylor-Greene stated the following about the Department of Government Efficiency's cuts of the jobs of government workers across a broad swath of office and programs, from USAID to the NOAA, “Those are not real jobs producing federal revenue, by the way. They're consuming taxpayer dollars. Those jobs are paid for by the American tax people, who work real jobs, earn real income, pay federal taxes and then pay these federal employees." This is a terrible place to begin, because as is often case during the Trump years, we have a statement which seems so outlandish, so beyond the pale of what generally counts as political discourse, that it is tempting to discount it entirely as hyperbole if not insanity. However, I would like to argue that this extreme point can be situated in a broader logic that is at the core of right wing populism, both here in the US, and elsewhere. This core is what I would call “right workerism,” a claim for the virtues of work, for both the individual, people are worthwhile because of their ability to work, and as the constitution of the people, the people, the nation, is defined as a nation of workers. I am calling this right workerism, to contrast it , in the sharpest terms possible with left workerism, in which work, labor, functions as a point of antagonism between workers and capitalists. Work no longer functions as a point of division, between capitalists and workers, exploiter and exploited, but draws new lines of demarcation between “true” and “false” workers. I will return to this point, but first I would like to situate Representative Greene’s statement within this a larger logic, offering both a historical genesis and a conceptual genesis of right workerism.