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Popular Culture Review
dismissed because, in Whitman’s vision, they are illusions. The poet’s manifesto
calls not for a change of habit or a change in the distribution of wealth. It calls for
a change of mind.
Whitman’s Critique of the Labor Theory of Value
For Whitman to express his vision in poetry he must reform the labor theory
of value. As stated, the primary difference between conservative and radical
reformers in the first half of the nineteenth century was a conflicting view of this
labor theory. For conservatives, capital had as much if not more value than that of
labor because this “class” organized and oversaw the production of a product for
overall profit. By this argument, capital formed the “head” of an organic process
of production. This argument inspired conservative reformers Uke Joseph Brewster
to argue that a moral reform of the working classes would benefit the whole “body”
of production. This argument, however, also embraced a hierarchy of production
which placed capital in the position of those who “know.”
Radicals, on the other hand, interpreted the labor theory differently. According
to reformers like Mike Walsh, labor’s value is a direct outgrowth of those who
made a product. By this argument, capital was no better than “parasites” who
wrongly profited from the sweat of the producing classes’ brow. This reformist
premise required the divisive poUtics of “haves” and “have-nots” and excluded
capital from the legitimacy of the production process. Though Whitman and his
new theory of value would acknowledge certain elements of the conservative and
radical programs, he would emphatically deny their politics of hierarchy and
divisiveness.
Whitman carefully flattens the illusion of hierarchy while maintaining the
“roles” of each participant in the production process. In the poem which would
become “Song of Myself,” he carefully hsts a seemingly disparate collection of
occupations and social positions: carpenter, deacon, gentleman, connoisseur,
pavingman, canal-boy, conductor, performers, drover, opium-eater, prostitute, farecollector, floorman, and concludes the piece with “and these one and all tend inward
to me, and I tend outward to them/ And such as it is to be of these...I am (257325).” Here we see Whitman playing the “referee” he mentioned in his introduction.
Specifically, the poet allows diversity to flow through him and, in the process,
flattens the hierarchy that would divide them (there is no seemingly order to the
hst) while maintaining their individuahty. In fact, the only judgment Whitman
makes is when he chastises those who mock the prostitute, “miserable! I do not
laugh at your oaths nor jeer at you [the prostitute].” Whitman’s only judgment,
then, is to editorialize against the hierarchy his characters seek to impose on his
Ust. In his poem “A Song for Occupations,”^^Whitman also approaches this antihierarchical theme. In this piece, the poet answers the rhetorical questions of “is it