European anti-Americanism is neither new nor persuasive

The global phenomenon of anti-Americanism is quite worrying, but it is not actually of recent genesis. I just read a magazine article entitled "Why Europe Resents America." It rehearsed most of the familiar reasons — its chief novelty being that it was published in 1950. European anti-Americanism is a combination of sensible concerns, ignorance, misapprehension and an inferiority complex wedded to a superiority complex. The question of whether Europe or America is "superior" is actually jejune. The rather boring truth of the matter is that most "Western" countries (including some eastern ones) are, when viewed within the global context, pretty much alike in terms of political structures and material culture, and it is probable that one group is good at some things and less good at others. The attitude of many European intellectuals depends upon embracing improbable stereotypes and magnifying relatively small cultural differences.

The champion anti-Americans of the moment are perhaps French intellectuals. In their current analysis two evidences of the inferiority of American "culture" are the stipulated facts that (a) Americans are fat and (b) Americans work too much. Discussion of (a) usually involves the excoriation of McDonald's, which is of course wildly successful in France as elsewhere. Discussion of (b) invests quasi-religious virtue in a three-hour lunch-break, a 35 hour workweek, long paid vacations and job-security as a social entitlement. (In America, only college professors and federal judges are protected by a bulletproof tenure against the natural guerdon of incompetence.)

Everything in France needs its theory, and this summer fecklessness was finally "theorized" by a French intellectual, Corinne Maier, who published a blockbuster book allusively entitled "Bonjour Paresse" ("Hello, Laziness" or probably better "Welcome, Sloth!"). The librarians at Firestone have been uncharacteristically, un-Americanly indolent, and the book is not yet to be found there. For the moment, one is thrown back upon that great French invention, Amazon.fr. But I hope that "Bonjour Paresse" will soon take its place next to another of Maier's books, one with possibly the most repellent book title I have encountered in half a century of scholarly reading — "Le Général de Gaulle à la lumière de Jacques Lacan."

Maier's own work profile is distinctly French. She is a psychoanalyst who works part time as a senior economist in the electric company. We don't get many of those here in central Jersey. Her anti-Americanism is mild and implicit. Her book is a terrific spoof rejoinder to the library of American "inspirational" self-help books — "Leadership Secrets of the World's Most Successful CEOs," etc. — that seem to be as popular in Paris as in Pasadena. Her solemn industrial advice is to do as little as possible while assiduously eschewing all impulses toward initiative or responsibility. Screw the "system" by working as little as possible. Dilberts of the world, unite.

Here Maier appears to swear off, cold turkey, the opium of the intellectuals, to wit, the Marxism that has been the dominant and domineering addiction of French pundits for the better part of a century. Marx was very clear in his idea that what created value was work. A worker in the Widget Factory makes a widget. The widget is worth a dollar, but the factory owner pays the worker only 50 cents a widget. The other 50 cents is "surplus value," and it is pocketed by the capitalist, who happens to own the necessary "means of production" (huge, complicated and expensive Widgit Machines) but who has done no actual work. Yet if matters could be so arranged that the worker was one of the communal owners both of the factory and of the raw materials needed to make widgets . . . well, you get the drift.

This "surplus value" is a most mysterious substance, like phlogiston or ectoplasm. One of the things that ended my career as an idealistic young socialist was the failed attempt to read Kautsky's "Theories of Surplus Value." This is deep stuff, compared with which the Christian doctrine of the hypostatic union seems simple and transparent. If Dan Rather thinks Karl Rove is operating a "fog machine," he ought to check out Karl Kautsky; but I digress. I still agree with the old Marxists that it is work — hard work — that creates social value. It will be a pity if that becomes to European intellectuals simply another offensive American attitude, but I doubt if it will prove much of a barrier to those millions of the world's down-and-outs who would gladly trade one of their kidneys for a green card. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays.