Value from Obligation

Abstract

During her visit to America in the midst of the Depression, Stein thought that the nation was demonstrating signs of becoming a mass public. Giving up on that which makes them most modern, Americans seem to have been turning towards Roosevelt and the New Deal to cure their economic and social ills. Economic crisis calls the government out of hiding, according to Stein, and alters the subjective landscape of producers: no longer do workers freely contract their labour; now they are ‘employed’. In ‘The Capital and Capitals of the United States’, Stein says that ‘[t]here is nothing that makes any one know more quickly that they are employees that is that they are employed and not on their own or a hired man than when the government is where everybody always knows about it’ (HWW 75).

Thank you for a name.

Thank nobody for the same.

(GHA 206)