The seven minute clip shown above from the movie Glenngary Glenn Ross, depicts capitalism at is best, or depending on your perspective maybe at its worst. Alec Baldwin’s character is sent to give a pep talk gone wrong to the lowly, proletariat, office workers of the real estate business. The audience knows immediately that there is a definite class distinction between the workers, and the new man who has entered the scene when they hear the words “the rich get richer, who belongs to the BMW?”(Glenngary Glenn Ross) These men aren’t used to seeing expensive cars around their workplace because evidently, their work isn’t worth the kind of salary that allows for expensive things.
Immediately the workers and the new man in town begin to establish their hierarchy. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser claims “all the agents of production, exploitation and repression must in one way or another be ‘steeped in this ideology in order to perform their tasks ‘conscientiously’” (1337). Each player must know his role in the game, and abide by it. Alec Baldwin’s character starts our saying, “Lets talk about something important.” (Glenngary Glenn Ross) implying that anything the office workers had to say or do is unimportant. “The tasks of the exploited (the proletariats), of the exploiters (the capitalists), and of the exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers)” (1337) are easily identifiable: the workers are the exploited, the rich man delivering insults is the exploiter, and Mitch and Murray, the faceless owners of the company are the auxiliaries.
Ultimately each worker sits down and complies with Alec Baldwin’s character once faced with the threat of losing their job, which indirectly means losing their livelihood. The ability to keep labor power in such a large business “is ensured by giving labour power the material means with which to reproduce itself: by wages” (1336). Even though the clip already establishes that the office workers salaries aren’t nearly as much as the man who is threatening them, the workers still value their lowly salary enough to stay and listen to the exploiter’s vulgar motivation tactics. The salary becomes a way to scare the workers into doing exactly what the company wants, its equitable to a young child being threatened with the removal of television from their daily routine. In this scene, the workers are being reduced to the existence of a child. Althusser also mentions that “this quantity of value (wages) necessary for the reproduction of labour power is determined not by the needs of a ‘biological’ guaranteed Minimum Wage alone, but by the needs of a historical minimum – i.e. a historically variable minimum” (1336). These workers have accepted their minimum, as has Alec Baldwin’s character. The difference is that Alec Balwdin’s character has a minimum salary of what he claims to be $970,000. The worker’s salary is so meager that he declines to say what it is (Glenngary Glenn Ross).
The workers are deemed to be losers, absolutely valueless numerous times in the clip. However they all remain in their chairs, acting like sponges made specifically to absorb Alec Baldwin’s demeaning comments. Why don’t they get up and leave? Perhaps because of something Andrew Ross mentioned in “The Mental Labor Problem,” because “being trained in the habit of embracing nonmonetary rewards- job gratification is self-actualizing – as compensation. As a result of this training, low compensation for a high workload can become a rationalized feature of the job” (2590). These men don’t see anything wrong with the job they have at and, in fact, they want to keep it so badly that they will subject themselves to anything and everything Alec Baldwin’s character can spit out at them. They have accepted their high workload and low paycheck, and they value it.
The workers allow Alec Baldwin’s character to go so far as attacking their home personas and their family life. In capitalism’s eyes, as well as the rich man in the clip’s eyes, the relationship to money is all that matters. The rich man makes statements like, “You’re a nice guy? Good father? Go home and play with your kids. If you want to work here, close” and “ If you can’t play in the man’s game, you can’t close them, then go home and tell your wife your troubles” (Glenngary Glenn Ross). In the world of capitalism, Alec Baldwin’s character is making some valid remarks. Capitalism “has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Marx 659). The relation to one’s career, to one’s salary, to the work at hand has torn apart the relation that individuals in the family have with one another. The focus is all about work, and value. In this way, the individual has become commodified; all the office workers have become are products that produce some kind of monetary benefit for the company.
In a way, the essence of this whole clip can be identified in the words of Karl Marx, “the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour-time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital” (671). The office workers as well as the rich man are all caught up in the self-expansion of capital. For them and for us all, the option still stands: work and produce capital or get fired and try to mooch off of someone who works and produces capital until you can produce it on your own again.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.
Marx, Karl. "Capital, Volume 1." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.
Marx, Karl. "The Communist Manifesto." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.
Ross, Andrew. "The Mental Labor Problem." Ed. Vincent Leitch. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2010. Print.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-AXTx4PcKI
