This post is about industrial revanchism. Carles takes advantage of a ribald visual pun to interrogate the possibilities for the dying manufacturing base to mount a rear-guard action, as it were, against the insurgent services industry in the U.S. Namely, can American Apparel, a manufacturer infamous for its combining progressive-seeming labor policies with retrograde sexist advertising campaigns for its products, turn the tide against the offshoring of apparel making to so-called third-world countries and instigate a U.S. revival in the moribund Fordist industrial base? As Carles asks, "Is Am Appy ‘revolutionary’ or are they exploiting women?" The implicit answer,as always, is "both/and": it is doing both, predicating the revolution on female exploitation, so that antiquated, Second Internationalist notions of the composition of the revolutionary class can once again be advanced to the fore and doom themselves to failure. That is to say, American Apparel advances a limited revolution that functions as a devolution, protecting its tenuous hold on the industrial firmament that is threatened by incipient globalization and the irresistible sweep of post-Fordist reform. All the old loyalities, epitomized by the objectification of women within the domestic sphere in a safely isolated nuclear family, are being swept away. Now, post-Fordist industry has produced a labile, mobile worker, with no allegiances to the firm that promises its workers nothing in return. American Apparel wishes to stand athwart history and say no to these changes, but can only do so but embracing "backward" (pun intended) social formations along with seemingly outdated methods for organizing the productive forces.
Fittingly, the term "ass," as Carles uses it in this post, is dialogic in its deployment, at once evoking the heavy laboring animals of the pre-industrial era of primitive accumulation as well as the overdetermined sexual fetish of the female gluteal muscles in the post-industrial era. Procreative "labor" in the sense of sexual attraction to vaginal coitus is subordinated to the fruitless expenditure inherent in anal fetishization, a metaphoric if not metonymic indication of the pressure to banish productivity from the now hegemonic consumerist desire. The calculatingly lascivious categorization of female posteriors from several geographic locations that have seen their industrial base decimated underscores the point that Carles wishes to emphasize: not only that "Am Appy [is] the future of marketing" but that this evolution is experienced by the nascent class formations as both sexually titillating and ethically nauseating: Thus Carles's inquiry "R u turned on or disgusted?" is yet another trick question. In the welter of contradictions that is post-postmodern subjectivity, one must already be disgusted to become turned on. Fascination is synthesized with repulsion; the abject becomes the glamorous; the fashion industry reaches the zero degree and casually brushes it aside. "Do the top 10 butts deserve more than a goodie bag worth $300?" Carles asks. Do women deserve to be prostituted in order to resurrect the working class? Or can we finally "turn our backs" on such ideas and forge a working class revolutionary movement that can upend all forms of domination and subjection?
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