Marx & Engels, Alan Titchmarsh & the Trousers Question
For rather obscure reasons North Korean TV is showing Alan Titchmarsh gardening programmes first aired on the BBC a good while ago. What their appeal to the North Korean masses might be is also obscure but whatever it is, it won’t be Titchmarsh’s trousers which have been pixelated.
While its difficult to imagine that Titchmarsh has ever worn anything as plebeian as a pair of jeans, North Korea is very touchy about anything that might even look like them. They are a symbol of Western bourgeois decadence.
The relationship between North Korea and Marxism seems to me non-existent since any materialist understanding of the matter jeans are hard waring items suitable for proletarian labour.
However I have had a look at what Marx and Engels thought on the Trousers Question.
Engels in the Condition of the Working in England in 1844 noted that trousers of fustian or ‘other heavy cotton goods’ were worn underlining that ‘Fustian has become the proverbial costume of the working-men’.
Marx looked at the Trousers Question theoretically. Writing on the invariably controversial issues of productive and unproductive labour in the Economic Manuscripts. He argued that the ‘jobbing tailor(who works for me at my home) is not a productive labourer, although the labour provides me with the product, the trousers. If this seems odd Marx is looking at how much value and indeed surplus value was created by artisan trouser production as he described.
Perhaps on reflection North Korean TV has a point and trousers are a complex issue best avoided
Leave a Reply