Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

If we offer our children nothing to define themselves by except the market, they will try to excel in the market (formal and informal, surface or underground).

Because Power is a closed system, a self-reinforcing cycle, the only way to negate it is to embrace what it has negated. We have to go outside that cycle.

Only in a planned economy in which the whole nation has rationally mastered the economic and social forces can the individual share responsibility and use creative intelligence. (Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom)

...only possible when we are living consciously, with reverence*

Our challenge here in America is to forge something new. The question is whether we’re up to the challenge. Because a people cannot survive over the long term – over the millennia – without a living culture, i.e. a culture in sync with the earth, based on freedom and wholeness for its people. How we meet this challenge will be of interest to other parts of the world facing a similar challenge. …And though cultural diversity may seem an insuperable difficulty now – when we’re barred from making living cultures – when you consider that by definition living cultures align with an inherent human nature that is joyous and free, reveres life, and respects freedom – align, therefore, with values rooted in the earth itself – I think we’ll find that unity is easier than we ever dared hope.

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers way. (Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring)

“Power is contagious,” Marilyn French said, but she added: “so is pleasure.”

Joy is our guide in these matters. What serves the cause of joy we keep.

What doesn’t is for the bone-pile.

Once I did a brief stint as the director of a neighborhood non-profit. I think I lasted maybe three months before I got canned.

Near the end of this short term, the president of the Board arranged for me to meet the retired head of the large corporation that was the non-profit’s patron. This corporation had, in fact, created the non-profit, primarily for PR purposes – you know the sort of thing: “come see what we’re doing for the community!”

I think this Board member wanted me to meet with the ex-corporate chief to pull my coat, to impress me with the affluence that awaited those who could grasp the basics of survival in hierarchies. What can I say? I do learn slow.

So there we were, sitting across the table from each other in the restaurant of a very ritzy hotel – his “home away from home.” He preferred living there, at his advanced age, than wherever his own house was.

I forget most of the conversation, something to do with a grant I’d better write one way rather than another, but then he told this story about his son, somewhat off-point, that I never forgot. I think he needed to talk about it, needed…some insight that he imagined someone from another world, someone from way outside his own experience, could provide.

What most lingers in memory about his telling of the story was his utter confusion. He told me that his son had refused the lure of corporate power in order to be an artist in Maine. The Ex-Chief seemed so lonely and lost in his dissonance (this was his son, not a common shlub like the rest of us.) “Why,” he asked, “do you think he’s doing this?” – i.e., “why would he give up wealth in order to be an artist?” He was completely unable to grasp his son’s choice. What, his manner said, could be more seductive, more appealing, than ‘Power’?

Nature is on our side. This is essentially what Marcuse meant when he said, “protest will continue because it is a biological necessity.”

A significant theme in the propaganda we’ve been conditioned with is that ‘nature’ represents the worst part of us, our ‘animal,’ ‘sensual,’ ‘unthinking,’ ‘instinctual,’ ‘brute-like,’ side. The corporate ‘Chiefs’ have bought this con themselves down to the last moan of their repressed longing. It’s a con “civilization” depends on.

But the truth is that ‘nature’ is simply ‘life’ – or ‘freedom.’ The “Rational Mind” of “civilization” is an enraged rant, a “cry of the lost,” against life itself.

We reap what we sow, but Nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit that spring from no planting of ours. (George Eliot)

Nature is open, generous, non-controlling, rich…and infinitely interesting. We become our best selves when we yield to her gravity.

But we cannot yield, we cannot stretch to our full lengths, when compressed in a box called “a job.”

Joel Bakan illustrates this continually in his book The Corporation.

As former Goodyear Tire CEO Sam Gibara said, “If you really did what you wanted to do that suits your personal thoughts and your personal priorities, you’d act differently. But as a CEO you cannot do that…”

…Though Edward Ivey acknowledged in his report that “a human fatality is really beyond value, subjectively,” that, “it is really impossible to put a value on human life,” he knew it was equally impossible for him not to put a value on a human life for the purpose of his analysis…

…some people in advertising are honest about what they do. “I’m sucking Satan’s pecker” is how Chris Hooper, a highly successful television ad director and voice-over artist, describes his work for the likes of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and other major corporations. Hooper says his job is to create “images that are trying to sell products to people that they don’t really need” and that “encourage very sophomoric behavior, irresponsible, hedonistic, egotistical, narcissistic behavior.” Despite this he carries on… (The Corporation, p. 51, 64, 125-6)

When your job requires you to act contrary to your principles, what’s the price tag on that?

Look around you at the world made by our obeisance to ‘Power’ and let the cost fully register in your consciousness.

And though the pull of ‘nature’ is all-powerful ultimately, over the short term in which we live our lives, the pull of “the job” wins out.

And I was astounded that my [childhood] friend would defend this particular racist folly. [The Vietnam War] What for? For his job at the post-office? And the answer came back at once, alas – yes. For his job at the post-office. (James Baldwin, No Name In the Street, p. 19)

Except for those brave few who live their art, follow their wholeness, listen to their bodies, choose a different path.

* ...living consciously, with reverence

If I had to summarize our future in a few words it would be these: “living consciously, with reverence.”

To get a different world, we have to live a different world, harbor a different world in our bodies. Now.

But, put simply, “the job” does not allow this.

We have sacrificed ourselves on the altar of Individualism and Narrow Self-Interest because other options have been systematically closed off. Organized ‘Power’ closed them off and only Organized Freedom, people, us – heeding the call of our future – can open them up again.

‘The job’ is the linchpin of a diseased system that cannot be made healthy. If we want our children to have access to their full selves, if we want them to have a bio-rich, healthy planet, if we want to focus our human capacities on cooperation rather than war, if we want to choose life over death, we will have to make a commitment to sit down with each other, ask the relevant questions, and continue meeting until we’ve answered them.

In essence, we will have to organize a campaign of mutual aid and fellowship. But we can only do this on a society-wide scale if we:

Reduce our consumption and end our support of corporations.

Move away from individual solutions and toward communal solutions.

Reduce the amount of time we give to the job, and eventually leave it behind altogether.

Refuse Division Work, embrace Culture Work, and say, “the job that must be done requires all of us, or none.”

This section that concludes the book will be a discussion of the “tactics for beginning to think communally” within the framework of the four, already-mentioned, “starting-point strategies.”

The “tactics for beginning to think communally” are about planning:

A community anchor, someone willing to put her home (temporarily) at the disposal of a movement (and by “community,” I mean the small, micro-village you’re building, your small collection of neighbors and friends.)

A community inventory of skills, services and products.

A process of community healing from the abuse dealt to us all by this system – taking Myles Horton’s advice to share stories and food.

A process of developing a community consciousness that sees the reality of ‘Power’-worship and commits to withdrawing psychically from it.

A community inventory of need: shelter, food, health care, childcare, joy.

A short-term community plan for mutual support in beginning to meet those needs.

A longer-term Community Exit Strategy (a CoExiSt) for withdrawing from participation in that which is unworthy of us.

And the “starting-point strategies” are about action:

Consumer boycott of big corporations;

Using websites to build the movement, develop product and services exchanges, and strengthen our Crews’ mutual support systems;

Building ambassador bridges to the bulwarks of our mission: the architects of earthships, the natural educators, the Zapatista transistors who interface with the state, and the local organic farmers;

Claiming the commons: articulating communal needs like a Great Hall with a communal kitchen, laundry and bathrooms; a communal farm, woods, orchard and garden; free online access, domain name registration, and web page hosting; communal solar power generation and distribution; a charging station for our retrofitted bedroom-vehicles that have solar panels and AC power;

The General Strike.

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 9

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 8)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work