… each class has to take the interests of the other class into consideration: the workers must acknowledge the importance of profitability, because only a sufficient level of profits and investment will secure future employment and income increases; and the capitalists must accept the need for wages and welfare state expenditures, because these will secure effective demand and a healthy, well-trained well-housed and happy working class.
- Claus Offe, “Competitive Party Democracy and the Keynesian Welfare State”
One couldn’t imagine a clearer cinematic illustration and satire of the class compromise that Offe diagnoses in the Keynesian Welfare State than the 50s Ealing comedy Man in the White Suit. Alec Guiness plays an eccentric amateur inventor without class identity, a chemistry genuis without the credentials for a lab job so he serves as a laborer sneaking experiments when he can. His in-betweenness is paralleled in his class sympathy (oblivious of the class solidarity the workers project upon him, equally unaware of the industrialists’ superior status). But it’s his invention which casts him most as an outsider, a durable fiber that threatens to cripple Lancashire’s cloth industry. Hijinks ensue as both industrialists (one of whom must have served as the basis for the Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns) and workers try to stop the invention from coming to the light of day. Both Guiness’s acting and MacKendrick’s direction (the editing during the suit-tearing scene, for instance) captures the pathos of misunderstood genius effectively. The Marginal Revolution guys may be commemorating Ayn Rand, but here is far more art and more realism in lauding the human will to create than Rand every could manage.
No comments have been added to this post yet.