Gender, The Wire, and the Limits of the Producerist Critique of Modern Political Economy

Labor Gender, The Wire, and the Limits of the Producerist Critique of Modern Political Economy Thomas Jessen Adams During its ive-season HBO run, David Simon and Ed Burns’s serial drama The Wire inspired superlative praise from critics and scholars alike. As Nicholas Kulish wrote on the New York Times opinion page, “if Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch ‘The Wire,’ unless, that is, he was already writing for it.” 1 The Wire’s critical success is not hard to understand. The focused themes of each season—police, unions, politics, schools, and media—give the show an intellectual arc that appeals to media scholars and critics. The show is equally entertaining, with individual episodes impressively shot, illed with well-written dialogue, strongly developed characters, and generally evincing an entertainment value that rivals the best and most compelling of police procedural dramas. For those on the progressive and labor left, the show has developed a cult status as well, both because of its aforementioned qualities — indeed, the show’s popularity among those of us who consider ourselves progressives cannot be divorced from the fact that it is good, solid entertainment—and its astute analyses of modern American politics, economics, and racism. The show’s gritty depiction of the modern deindustrialized city, its unabashed criticism of neoliberal disinvestment in social programs, and general disdain for identity politics has driven it to almost mythic status among many progressive thinkers. At the same time, The Wire often evinced nostalgia for a past of unionized jobs, government that works, and a more economically and socially functional version of the urban experience that appeals to critics of the post-1970s right turn in American politics, economics, and social life. The Wire’s analysis of the interrelationships among the state, market capitalism, labor, racism, and the urban environment rivals that of many academic experts and certainly has gained a larger audience and a longer reach. The show has inspired overwhelmingly popular courses at universities around the country and a host of high-powered and well-publicized academic conferences. For evidence of its growing 1. Nicholas Kulish, “Television You Can’t Put Down,” New York Times, September 10, 2006. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Volume 10, Issue 1 DOI 10.1215/15476715-1898738 © 2013 by Labor and Working-Class History Association 29 Published by Duke University Press Labor LA BO R 10 : 1 30 cultural sway, we need look no further than the White House, where Barack Obama is an admitted fan, telling TV Guide in 2007 that the show ranks alongside M*A*S*H as one of his two all-time favorites (though his continued adherence to an essentially neoliberal worldview is evidence that he has perhaps not taken some of the show’s lessons to heart).2 Despite the impressiveness of The Wire’s analysis, this essay argues that the show’s vision of American political economy is at times dated and nostalgic, while grounded in a producerist narrative that is politically counterproductive and centered on a vision of labor and political economy that devalues, both culturally and economically, the “traditional” work of women—work that is increasingly the central experience of the twenty-irst-century working class, female and male alike. Simon and Burns are master storytellers, and they draw the audience in with compelling characters and a sweeping narrative arc. The show is especially impressive in its unwillingness to resort to “culture of poverty” rhetoric and its insistence on the structural nature of economic inequality and racism. Rather than a city populated by damaged African American psyches, unmarriagable black men, welfare moms, and continual cycles of poverty caused by the cultural arrested development of the urban poor, Simon and Burns’s Baltimore is far removed from the late twentieth-century social policy consensus of the black underclass.3 Rather, the show is explicit in arguing that declines in funding for education, public housing, and community policing, combined with containerization on Baltimore’s waterfront, high-level corruption, and real estate and neighborhood speculation engendered by the white middle-class rediscovery of the city are the causes of urban decline and poverty. Despite its enormous sophistication, the political economic analysis posed by The Wire is above all else grounded in a lament for a largely destroyed, and occasionally mythical, urban past. Each season evinces nostalgia for a lost world. In season 5, the decline of the metropolitan newspaper and the devolution of news to entertainment is given a large slice of blame for a citizenry unwilling or unable to pay attention to the corruption, violence, and economic dislocation in their midst. Seemingly banal events such as city council hearings and school board meetings get short shrift in favor of what the editor continually refers to as “the Dickensian aspect” of urban life. The implication here, of course, is that as newspapers and local media move away from covering the everyday, mundane locales of governance in favor of melodramatic stories of impoverished baseball fans and invented serial killers, the urban citizenry becomes decreasingly aware and media functions less as a check on urban corruption and more as simply an entertainment outlet. 2. Danny Spiegel, “What I’m Watching: Presidential Candidate Edition,” TV Guide, December 3, 2007. 3. For a historical critique of this rhetoric, see Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880 –1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). See also Adolph Reed Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 179–97; Dean E. Robinson, “‘The Black Family’ and US Social Policy: Moynihan’s Unintended Legacy,” Revue Francaise D’Etudes Américaines 97 (2003): 118 –28. Published by Duke University Press Labor A d a m s / G e n d e r, Th e Wire, a n d M o d e r n P oli t ic al E c o n o m y 31 Similarly, seasons 3 and 4, in their focus on politics and education, both demonstrate the show’s nostalgia. The decline of community policing in season 3, epitomized by Detective McNulty’s desire to walk the beat and the effort of Major Colvin, one of the show’s overt heroes, to decriminalize drugs, was indicative of this perspective. The politics of law and order and urban elections that demand low-level arrests and reportable statistics rather than promote community trust and effective investigation from the police—and proscribe Colvin’s attempt to put a metaphorical brown paper bag over drug violence—implicitly lead the viewer to conclude that this is not how the world used to be. Similarly, season 4 shows us underfunded schools, overpopulated classrooms, and untrained teachers, all of which are rightfully blamed on the growing budget deicits that come from urban capital light. Season 2 is the most backward looking of all, and the storyline’s emphasis on unions, labor politics, and the decline of shipping and industry demonstrates the overall nostalgia of the show, especially in relation to political economy. The season ends with union leader Frank Sobotka opining, “We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hands in the next guy’s pocket.” Sobotka’s producerist lament is all too common, both within the show’s overarching nostalgic vision and more importantly in popular responses to economic crises, unemployment, and workplace exploitation. Indeed, I was struck by the utter similarity of Sobotka’s lament to a letter written by an unemployed Los Angeles man named Glen Snyder to Lyndon Johnson at the height of the postwar economic boom in 1965. Snyder told Johnson, “The only jobs that are open are carwashing, dishwashing, bell-hopping, house cleaning, it used to be we would make things.”4 While Snyder placed blame on the number of married women who took men’s jobs (arguing to Johnson that “married women should not work, unless for unusual situations. Mothers shouldn’t work at all”), the basic idea put forth by both Snyder and Sobotka remains the same—making things, industrial, producerist labor, is the hallmark of a prosperous American working class.5 In an interview with Bill Moyers, Simon echoed Sobotka and conirmed that he was expressing his understanding of modern political economy. As he told Moyers, “we knew that character cited what was ailing post-industrial America . . . that people were trading crap and calling it gold, and that’s what The Wire was about. It was about that which is—has no value, being emphasized as being meaningful. And that which is—has genuine meaning, being given low regard.”6 Indeed, as Lorrie Moore approvingly 4. Glen W. Snyder to Lyndon Johnson, March 1, 1964, May – September, box 163, RG 174, General Records of the Department of Labor, Ofice of the Secretary of Labor, Records of Secretary W. Willard Wirtz, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. 5. Ibid. 6. David Simon, interview with Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, April 17, 2009, www.pbs.org/moyers/ journal/04172009/transcript1.html. Published by Duke University Press Labor LA BO R 10 : 1 32 wrote about this line of interpretation in the New York Review of Books, “his torment and lament—that this country once made things—is the nation’s own.”7 Sobotka’s, Simon’s, and Snyder’s lament, that the root of the decline of the American working class and perhaps the decline of America as a whole lies in the fact that we do not make anything anymore, is far too common in American progressive discourse. Certainly they are correct that the vast majority of the American working class no longer is engaged in production; instead, they serve and service others. One of the major problems with this narrative is the assumption that service work is naturally low wage and unskilled, an idea predicated on the hallmark postwar Fordist belief that industrial work necessarily leads to increased working-class prosperity. Indeed, historians and critics have often tacitly assumed, like Sobotka, Simon, and Snyder, that the heavy manufacturing jobs that characterized the labor of the male postwar working class in the Midwest, East Coast, and Paciic Coast were naturally connected to high wages. On the contrary, the middle-class wages and working-class prosperity associated with postwar industrial labor did not derive from the character of the work, but rather from a growing interventionist state and a long and bloody history of labor organizing. Neither of these factors had anything intrinsic to do with the kind of work that Americans did—the fact that they “ma[d]e shit.” Besides being ahistorical, this declension narrative is also questionable politically. Conceiving of working-class prosperity as closely connected to producerist occupations leads us to the problematic position of believing that the return and protection of these jobs rather than the mass organization of expanding low-wage industries, particularly in service, along with the reinvigoration of a state with at least a modicum of prolabor policy is the answer to the growing economic dislocation of countless Americans. We see this problem most forcefully in season 2 with the relationship between Nick Sobotka and his girlfriend Aimee. Nick is living in his mother’s basement while Aimee works in a beauty salon. They go to view a new condo development in a rapidly gentrifying, historically working-class neighborhood, but are aghast at the price tag. The Wire’s analysis of these events is uncomplicated. Nick is not getting enough hours on the docks, leading to the emasculating situation where he is forced to live with his mother and unable to support his girlfriend. As a result, he takes up narcotics smuggling for the drug kingpin “the Greek.” The blame here lies, according to Simon, solely with the decline of the port. If Nick could only get enough hours, he would be able to move out of the house and support his girlfriend like a true man should. Nowhere is it ever suggested that another cause for the couple’s problems might lie in the fact that Aimee is likely making near minimum wage in the hair salon. What if Aimee’s job cutting hair paid her a living or even, dare I say, a family wage? Certainly, the traditional gender prerogatives of the family might be upset, but 7. Lorrie Moore, “In the Life of ‘The Wire,’ ” New York Review of Books, October 14, 2010, www .nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/14/life-wire/?page=2. Published by Duke University Press Labor A d a m s / G e n d e r, Th e Wire, a n d M o d e r n P oli t ic al E c o n o m y 33 the general dislocation of modern urban life would be felt to a decidedly lesser degree. Indeed, even for a traditionally blue-collar city like Baltimore, the US Labor Department’s most recent job report on the city makes this predicament clear. While more than two hundred thousand workers in the Baltimore-Towson metropolitan statistical area are employed in service jobs averaging a little more than $10 an hour, the area’s traditional and rapidly declining industrial employment in manufacturing, construction, and shipping supports barely one hundred thousand workers, whose wages average nearly $20 an hour.8 It is in these service jobs, which are no more naturally low waged than unloading ships or cutting steel, where, for better or worse, the future of the American working class lies. My analysis of the show’s producerist impulse is not meant to be taken as a criticism but rather as a caveat. One of The Wire’s greatest strengths is its ability to entertainingly demonstrate to a relatively wide audience that there were recent moments in American history where the working class had a degree of prosperity and cities did not face monthly budget crises that necessitate choosing whether education, housing, public safety, or basic sanitation should be the most underfunded city service. However, in the inal analysis, its producerism makes the show not about the future direction of American political economy and class conlict; instead, it is a lament for a previous working world that will never return —the jobs in the port are not coming back. This picture is further complicated by the implicitly gendered nature of producerism. While men produce physical commodities and support their families, women serve, either in the household or the marketplace. The Wire asks us to remember fondly an era of working-class prosperity grounded in largely male-headed households, producerist occupations, and men’s union membership. When we recall this lost era we should keep our eyes on a future where a character like Aimee can realistically imagine supporting herself and a family by serving rather than “mak[ing] shit.” In Treme, his 2010 HBO series about post-Katrina New Orleans, Simon himself points the way past the producerist and gendered narrative that dominates The Wire’s critique of modern urban political economy. As he told the New York Times, “lots of American places used to make things. Detroit used to make cars. Baltimore used to make steel and ships. New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments.”9 In this instance, Simon explicitly recognizes that making things does not necessarily have to mean making physical things: the commodities we make and sell can be experiences, moments, feelings, services, and ideas—not simply tangible objects. The Wire’s ability to entertainingly present a distinctly class-based analysis of urban society to a modern popular culture that eschews even the mention of struc8. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “May 2009 Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Area Occupational and Wage Estimates: Baltimore-Towson, MD,” www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_12580.htm#53 –0000. 9. Wyatt Mason, “The HBO Auteur,” New York Times Magazine, March 17, 2010, www.nytimes .com/2010/03/21/magazine/21simon-t.html?pagewanted=all. Published by Duke University Press Labor LA BO R 10 : 1 34 tural inequality is unsurpassed. However, the political economy, structure, and experience of the working class as it exists at the dawn of the twenty-irst century—service based, historically gendered female, and devalued both economically and culturally precisely because of its disconnect from the United States’s producerist past — still awaits auteurs who possess the same skill, vision, and intelligence that Burns and Simon brought to deindustrializing Baltimore. Published by Duke University Press