'This red sun that comes from the West': Deadwood and the Spectral Proletariat

David Cunningham's excellent discussion of Deadwood as capitalist epic, in which the central subjectivity, in the historical figure of Hearst, is 'capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself...' (Marx) What interests me in Cunningham's reconstruction of this capitalist epic, in which 'heroic' entrepeneurs pit themselves against abstract forces of monopoly and market, is what he notes as the spectral place of the proletariat. If capital is the negativity of pure accumulation then, classically, this would be answered by the negativity of those who have nothing to lose but their chains.

 

In Deadwood this dialectic is not present or is left hanging; with the Cornish miners and the replacement Chinese workers reduced to mere background. The nascent collective struggles of the Cornish brutally snubbed out as they are reduced to 'bare life' in almost literal forms (as Cunningham details). If Hearst is the figural representative of capital (although the role of his psychopathic assistant Wolcott might be interesting as companion double), then the closest (I think) to a figurative representative of the proletariat is the honest prospector Ellsworth - who is killed by Hearst's men.

 

This killing, paralleling the assassination of the leaders of the miner's struggles, suggests the elimination of proletarian negativity. Writing on American labour struggles of the 1930s Mario Tronti suggested that 'this red sun that comes from the West' might incarnate a working class defined by the struggle against labour that 'the American class-struggles are more serious than European ones in that they obtain more results with less ideology.'

 

In this narrative the lack of mediations produces a sharpened struggle, which was, as Tronti notes, defeated. He also remarks on the withdrawal of American workers from struggle: 'Labor struggles are an irreplaceable instrument of self-consciousness for capital: without them it does not recognize its own adversary. Consequently, it does not know itself. And when the contradiction explodes among the parts altogether internal to the mechanism of capitalist development, again the workers do not begin to actively struggle, neither to accelerate the crisis, nor to somehow resolve it.'

 

What I want to suggest that the double resonance of Deadwood that Cunningham traces in terms of capitalism is also the resonance of the proletariat as absent/spectral in that moment and in the present moment. We could track the present moment of this reflection through the empirical fate of the US working class, traced in Jefferson Cowie's Stayin Alive, or more theoretically through the communization thesis of 'the end of programmatism' (ie, the collapse of the mediating identity of the worker). In either case, if we follow Tronti, we could see the fading of what already were relatively weak mediations. The spectral 'presence' of the proletariat in Deadwood would be this lack of mediation. This would be a dialectic of sharpened negativity, although one that Deadwood raises questions over.

 

In Tronti's analysis the 'bareness' of the history of the US working class makes possible a new reading of 'this modern sphinx, this obscure enigma, this social thing-in-itself which we know exists but which cannot be known: the American working class.' Of course, as Deadwood indicates, this bareness, this absence, could also be taken as sign of repression, dispersion, and absence, rather than enigmatic sign of future struggle. This would also be true of the tensions of the communization position, in which the absence of programmes opens out new modes of struggle, but seemingly making it hard to conceive a new 'mass' struggle that would cohere or condense the necessary power to achieve victory - what Tronti calls 'organizational strength'.

 

In Deadwood, itself truncated by its own failure as a TV series (in capitalist terms), this violent cutting off of the proletariat - its death - suggests the difficulty of the present moment. A universe of entrepreneurs, corporate and otherwise, an absent proletariat, the dominance of the forms of service work (prostitution, retail, etc.) all trace our own universe, as confined and wretched as the town of Deadwood itself. Of course the historical Deadwood would burn, which is an apocalyptic 'solution'. The fact that this is deferred by the cancellation of the series leaves us within a world that may or may not burn, a universe of the spectre which is not (only) the commodity form but the proletariat, and a universe without solution.

 

Adventures in the Land of the (Imaginary) Empirical Working-Class

Alberto Toscano has pointed out the danger of possibilities of condescension built into the splitting of the ‘Idea of the Proletariat’ (Kantian in Lyotard) from the empirical working-class for the ultra-left. The failure of the latter to ‘measure up’ to the former can license snobbery and dismissal, a problem that can be dated to Engels's Condition of the Working Class in England (following Stathis Kouvelakis). I wanted to write of a classical instance of this risk I found in HG Wells The War of the Worlds. Of course, Wells’s socialism was ‘scientific’ and had its own ‘peculiarities’, which could account for the element of ‘condescension’, nevertheless the example is worth analysing.

The scene takes place in Chapter Seven, after the Martian occupation of colonisation of the area around London. The narrator, despairingly trying to return to his wife, encounters a ‘man on Putney hill’ – a soldier he had met earlier who had managed to survive a Martian attack.

At first the narrator is impressed with the soldier’s lucid analysis of the state of the situation, as it seems the Martians have developed flying machines - “Aren’t you satisfied it is up with humanity? I am. We’re down; we’re beat.” The soldier goes on to sketch the likely future:

‘So soon as they’ve settled all our guns and ships, and smashed our railways, and done all the things they are doing over there, they will begin catching us systematic, picking the best and storing us in cages and things. That’s what they will start doing in a bit. Lord! They haven’t begun on us yet.’

Of course, the implicit allegory is not just with the Martians as colonisers, but also as a form of class rule – after all they vampirically drain the blood of humans for food (‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ Marx).

The soldier sketches a situation in which the upper- and middle-classes will form happy collaboration in this situation of subservience: ‘Well, the Martians will just be a godsend to these. Nice roomy cages, fattening food, careful breeding, no worry. After a week or so chasing about the fields and lands on empty stomachs, they'll come and be caught cheerful. They'll be quite glad after a bit.’

Instead, in the future resistance, ‘If you’ve got any drawing-room manners or a dislike to eating peas with a knife or dropping aitches, you'd better chuck ‘em away. They ain’t no further use.’ Hence, the working-class will lead the resistance to the Martians and to these 'happy collaborators' (ie the complacent middle class).

This is cast in eugenic terms as well, as the resistance will have to go literally underground: ‘We’re not going to pick up any rubbish that drifts in. Weaklings go out again.’ The ‘tame’, meanwhile, ‘in a few generations they'll be big, beautiful, rich-blooded, stupid – rubbish!’ (hence The Time-Machine). Eventually, one these ‘able-bodied, clean-minded men’ will gain control of one of the Martian machines and then ‘Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free! Fancy having it in control! What would it matter if you smashed to smithereens at the end of the run, after a bust like that? … And swish, bang, rattle, swish! Just as they are fumbling over it, swish comes the Heat-Ray, and, behold! man has come back to his own."

Impressed as he is the narrator is soon disillusioned by the man’s actual behaviour. He is digging a pointless tunnel from the cellar of the house he is hiding in to the sewers, when he could just enter the sewers. Also, he has proceeded very slowly, and so the narrator ‘had my first inkling of the gulf between his dreams and his powers.’ In fact, the man is lazy – ‘Oh, one can’t always work’ – and taken-up with drinking champagne and Thames-side burgundy. The narrator ‘resolved to leave this strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony, and to go on into London.’