Line, Line, Line: The Secret Lives of Latter-Day Labor Heroes

Scene I: Joe is serving up soup on the two-way 'motive, guilt class, and the historical inevitability of all things. Joe is not a bum, and the bums can tell.

The soup is full of false consciousness.

The bums' sexual fantasies are better than Joe's, because they're about bums, real bums. This is also why Joe goes to the soup kitchen. Also, to eat the soup.

Joe: I am a profoundly de-centered individual!
Chair: (hands Joe a book)
(Joe never reads the book)
Joe: That's amazing! Can I enroll?
Chair: $29.99.
Bum: Praxis!

Scene II: Radical 18th Century Pro-Seminar.

Joe: Robinson Crusoe is, as, just as all about primitive, as, accumulation and proto-capitalist apologetic to imperialism and or post-colonial!
Bum: A+
Chair: Praxis!

Scene III: Joe, roaring out among the people, pride class . All the Chinese can tell he's not a Chinese. He hands out books, for free, because he knows they don't have money, because of Andy Warhol.

Joe: It is, however, precisely the notion of a series of enlarging theoretical horizons proposed here that can assign these disturbing synchronic frameworks their appropriate analytical places and dictate their proper use. This notion projects a long view of history which is inconsistent with concrete political action and class struggle only if the specificity of the horizons is not respected; thus, even if the concept of a mode of production is to be considered a synchronic one (and we will see in a moment that things are somewhat more complicated than this), at the level of historical abstraction at which such a concept is properly to be used, the lesson of a "vision" of a total system is for the short run one of the structural limits imposed on praxis rather than the latter's impossibility.

Chinese: (agitated)

Scene IV: Joe is riding in the belly of a whale. He lights a match. Just as he expected, the whale is setting: for the entire Eastern Question, resolved, once and for all. (Viz. Hos and bitches like loaves and fishes for all y'all w/ hella yella fever. [cf. collective bum dream revealed.]) The hurricane drops them in the Joe the Plumber's mom's chemical shed, where Joe the Plumber is living, until he can find an apartment with enough room for his cat, which is basically total bullshit.

Joe (the Red): One cannot without intellectual dishonesty assimilate the "production" of texts (or in Althusser's version of this homology, the "production of "new" and more scientific concepts) to the production of goods by factory workers: writing and thinking are not alienated labor in that sense, and it is surely fatuous for intellectuals to seek to glorify their tasks--which can for the most part be subsumed under the rubric of the elaboration, reproduction, or critique of ideology--by assimilating them to real work on the assembly line and to the experience of the resistance of matter in genuine manual labor.

Joe (the White): Finally!

Scene V: The tin leviathan deposits Joe, the Chinese, and Joe onto the shores of a private retirement home. Prejudices crumble, skies collide.

Secret dialectical valence:

Was: collecting life support
Is: greeted as liberators.