Subject:	Marxist Person
From:	Judygran@aol.com
Date:		Sun, 29 Nov 1998 20:07:29 -0800


I've been enjoying the various "Person" stories
tremendously. What an amazingly collection of brilliant 
and talented folk make up this newsgroup. From Silicon
Valley-speak to Minnesotan to lumberjack talk to Italian-
American--I'm impressed beyond words. And I've been 
walking around with a smile on my face for the last week
just thinking about these vignettes.

Mary Ellen said I could post a Marxist Person story
if I wrote a Legal Person story first. I'm working on it, 
but the Marxist version popped out first. I'm going
to be away all next week, so I thought I'd better send it
while I have time. 

Judith

               The Dialectic of Pon Farr

                   by Marxist Person

        As this tale of revolutionary 
proletarian struggle begins, Kirk and Spock 
are in a "shuttlecraft," a vessel that 
exemplifies the high organic composition of 
capital in the United Federation of Planets, a 
hegemonic state formation with a relentlessly 
colonialist and imperialist agenda.  So 
thoroughly permeated by science and 
automation has the industrial production 
process become at this stage of late 
commodity capital that Kirk, though 
nominally a "Captain of Industry," has been 
reduced, as that Marx foresaw so cogently in 
the *Grundrisse,* to the role of technical 
"overseer and regulator" for capital.

        Spock, on the other hand, is a 
member of the intelligentsia who is so totally 
lacking in working class consciousness that 
he prides himself on his "independent 
professional" status, unaware that he is, in 
reality, merely a cog in the industrial 
machine. In short, both men experience the 
alienation of labor that inevitably 
accompanies capitalist relations of 
production through the reified mediations of 
wage labor, private property, and exchange. 

        The shuttlecraft crashes on a planet 
on the periphery of the world capitalist 
market, thus signalling that the disintegration 
of Federation monopoly capital is at hand. 
The planet appears to be devoid of social 
formations and fixed capital, and thus the 
two men are forced into a new object-
relation with nature in which they must 
confront the production process in its most 
elementary form. They seek refuge from the 
elements in a cave.

         The resulting material dialectic  
produces a revolutionary transformation in 
Spock, who suddenly gains proletarian 
consciousness and understands that 
underneath the veneer of his so-called 
professional status, he is nothing but a wage 
slave. Like workers everywhere who 
organize to impose their own needs on 
capital, Spock resolves to become an agent 
of counter-hegemonic praxis.

        Recognizing Marx's dictum in 
Volume I of *Capital* that the the first 
means of production with which we act upon 
nature is our own body, Spock's 
revolutionary action takes the form of sexual 
congress. He is drawn toward the ovoid 
shapes of Kirk's rear end--an aesthetic that 
the neo-Hegelians, disregarding Althusser's 
plea that we recognize such subjective 
desires as wholly constituted by material 
forces, would trace to Vulcan utilitarianism. 
But regardless of one's analysis of the 
underlying problematic, it is clear that Spock 
is on the brink of an upheaval that is truly 
revolutionary. In short, he is hotsky to 
Trotsky. 

        Kirk at first is reluctant to join Spock 
in the recomposition of the working class. 
Heavily influenced by the false consciousness 
of the patriarchal rural bourgeoisie, he does 
not believe he can achieve a libidinal cathexis 
through this particular praxis. Kirk's 
numerous relationships with women starkly 
illustrate Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of the 
sexual division of labor as an exploitative set 
of social relations in which a non-producer 
appropriates the products and services of the 
producers. As the Johnson-Forrest tendency 
and the Wages for Housework movement 
have explicated so convincingly, such 
relationships are no less exploitative merely 
because the producers' labor is unwaged.

        Nevertheless, like lords of capitalism 
everywhere, Kirk is unwilling to lose the 
workers' labor power, and on this planet, 
even the most primitive accumulation now 
depends on Spock. Given the choice of 
socialism or barbarism, Kirk yields to the 
logic of the  class struggle.

        Kirk's body becomes a use-value for 
Spock and vice-versa. They soon recognize, 
as Marx did centuries earlier in the *German 
Ideology,* that Federation technology has 
reduced the need for socially necessary labor 
virtually to zero, and that the time has come 
to abandon the creation of surplus value in 
favor of leisure and self-realization. In sum, 
they create their own Communist utopia.

        At this juncture, Dr. McCoy, a health 
care industry magnate with his roots in the 
Southern plantation bourgeoisie, arrives and 
is distressed to find that the workers' 
revolution has left him behind. He flirts with 
Fourth International tendencies, charges 
Spock with vanguardism and in turn is 
accused by Spock of social-democratic 
deviationism and craft union consciousness. 
The three men briefly consider forming a 
Popular Front. However, McCoy ultimately 
realizes that Kirk and Spock have formed a 
new mode of production, a reciprocal 
mediation between the material, productive 
base and the sensuous sphere reminiscent of 
Gramsci's problematic of a new hegemony 
and leaves them to their unalienated 
relationship.

The End

Acknowledgment: I owe the phrase "hotsky to
Trotsky" to my friend Jane, who first raised my
slash consciousness and introduced me to
the K/S problematic.