waking up - freeing ourselves from work

 

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 6)

Confidence is Everything – The Need for Theory

 

(This section of the book will be discussed in part in the Waking Up Radio show of June 16, 2013…. The transcript of this show is posted on: To Rebuild Our Freedom: Taking A Look At the Galbraith Book… and What It Means To Defer To 'The Economy' … :

P.S.: In Waking Up I used the word ‘worker’… of course today I see it as an economic category designed by ‘power’ for us to sit in… and when someone opens a cage door and beckons… I don’t walk in….)

 

 

* "Marx appealed to our reasoning, but it's our hearts that are broken."

 

* "Only in a planned economy…"

 

* "…how do you know what to make of anything without theory?…"

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work

 

Preface

 

I. Being Bossed

 

II. The Two Winds

(1): "Alchemy"

(2): "The State"

(3): "Capital"

(4): "Science"

(5): "Values"

(6): "Theory"

(7): "The Ancestors"

(8): "Our Bodies"

(9): "Solidarity"

 

III. Progress

(1): "The Lost Child"

(2): "Nesucom"

(3): "Us Vs. Machine"

(4): "Being 'Smart'"

(5): "Force"

(6): "Complicity"

(7): "What is Progress?"

 

IV. Culture

(1): "The 'Culture Con'"

(2): "We Are All Tribal"

(3): "We Are All Artists"

(4): "Cauldron of Resistance"

 

V. The Plan

(1): "Preface"

(2): "Seeing Reality" - i

(3): "Seeing Reality" - ii

(4): "Seeing Reality" - iii

(5): "Planning" - i

(6): "Planning - ii

(7): "Planning"- iii

(8): "Taking Action" - i

(9): "Taking Action" - ii

(10): "Taking Action"- iii

(11): "Taking Action"- iv

(12): "Taking Action" - v

(13): "Taking Action"- vi

Confidence is Everything – The Need for Theory

 

There’s a moment in the memoir of a computer programmer when she meditates on where wealth comes from:

 

If wealth could not arise like life out of the primordial soup, where else did it come from? How had the efforts of fifteen people [the author and fourteen other programmers] gone on to become (according to the company’s publicity department) “the sixth-largest independent software company in the world?” (Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine, p. 158)

She’s a good person. Like Utah Phillips, she wants to make a living, not a killing. She continues:

And what was I doing to spread around the wealth? With my little virtual company expanding and contracting, never paying a salary – what was I doing? I looked back at my rebellious [younger] self who had hated the venture capitalists. Though it’s difficult to like people with extraordinary amounts of money, still I had to admit: they weren’t just sitting on their yachts. (p. 158)

There is deep confusion – intended, of course – in America about what wealth is and where it comes from. Given the Promethean work of our ancestors to keep holding the light steady on this matter, it’s rather disheartening to find ourselves, after literally thousands of years of their efforts, still boggled.

 

The dictionary in this computer gives us this fragment on “Prometheus”:

“Prometheus”: a demigod, one of the Titans, who was worshiped by craftsmen. When Zeus hid fire from man, Prometheus stole it by trickery and returned it to earth. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock where an eagle fed each day on his liver, which grew again each night; he was rescued by Hercules.

Probing further we find:

“Hercules”: in Roman mythology, the son of Jupiter and a mortal woman, Alcmene. He was noted for his courage and great strength and was required to perform twelve near-impossible tasks, called the labors of Hercules. Greek equivalent Heracles.

 

“Jupiter”: Roman Mythology the chief god of the Roman state religion, originally a sky god associated with thunder and lightning. His wife was Juno. Also called Jove. Greek equivalent Zeus. [ORIGIN: Latin, from Jovis pater, literally ‘Father Jove.’]

 

“Alcmene”: in Greek mythology, wife of Amphitryon. While her husband was away at war, Zeus visited Alcmene disguised as Amphitryon. She later gave birth to two sons, Hercules and Iphicles.

So, “the chief god of the Roman state religion” essentially raped a commoner, out of which union Hercules was born who grew up to defend the common people.

Using the above as metaphor, “fire” is the great communal mind – “knowledge,” “invention,” the wisdom of the ancestors – that the state continually attempts to usurp, to steal from the people.

I like to think of myself as a member of the Tribe of Hercules – not card-carrying yet, but maybe one day – that seeks to keep Prometheus alive. Among us walks Eduardo Galeano, who has some insights for Ellen:

 

Today, utterly bloated, finance capital has put the productive system to work for it, while it plays with the real economy like a cat with a mouse.
Every crash on the stock exchange is a catastrophe for small investors who swallowed the line and bet their savings on the financial lottery. And it’s a catastrophe for the poorest barrios of the global village, whose residents suffer the consequences without ever knowing what caused them: in a single blow each “market correction” empties their plates and wipes out their jobs. But rarely do crises on the stock exchange fatally wound the suffering millionaires who, day after day, backs bent over their computers, fingertips calloused from the keyboards, redistribute the worlds' wealth by moving money, setting interest rates, and deciding the value of labor, commodities, and currencies. They are the only workers who could refute the anonymous scribe who wrote on a wall in Montevideo: “He who works has no time to make money.” (Upside Down, p. 158-9)

“Though it’s difficult to like people with extraordinary amounts of money, still I had to admit: they weren’t just sitting on their yachts.”

It’s bizarre when you think about it, this reverence for “hard work” irrespective of what the work is. By this logic – and the current governor of the state where I live has admitted he’s bought into it * – Hitler is admirable because he “worked hard.”

No, those who obsessively seek ‘opportunities’ for their venture capital; those who slice and dice fictitious funds, dilute and pollute pooled mortgages into toxic brews they call ‘derivatives;’ those who ‘ingeniously’ invent ways to manipulate the energy supply to sow bottlenecks and reap ‘profits;’ those with a flair for dropping workers down shafts – it’s true, they aren’t laying about on yachts. Would they were. *

 

The ancestors did not steadfastly procure and package their ‘figuring out’ for it to molder on shelves and dissolve into dust. They wrote for us. They worked for us. They are rooting for us. It’s incumbent on us, therefore, to pay attention; but beyond this, to synthesize and advance their gift – to use it, shape it to fit our particular challenges.

The vast vault of waiting communal wisdom, the ancestors’ collective ‘longing,’ can only be realized if we tap into it.

The discriminator in any nugget we may happen upon that allows us to distinguish gold from not-gold is a solid core of love and solidarity with the “yet unborn these.”

 

But I propose another discriminator: a set of values, a theory. It could be argued (I am arguing) that it is for want of a theory that synthesizes and advances the longing of the ancestors for our freedom – for generalized human freedom – that we are held back.

 

Now of course we already have a quite excellent theory – the labor theory of value – given us by a giant figure for working people, Karl Marx. Its’ power to explain is unparalleled along our circuitous path towards freedom. So why hasn’t it become the practical, popular tool he intended it to be?

But that’s like asking why my well-built boat won’t float when it’s sitting in the backyard, when it can’t reach the sea and the sea can’t reach it; shit – the sea don’t even know it’s there.

And why doesn’t it? Why don’t we? There’s the reasons we’ve already discussed: the blinders the mass media and the state install on every noble cranium, the tunnel vision of the job, the slash-and-burn on worker solidarity done by all of the above. But rotating the question a good quarter turn produces another vantage, another lens to look through.

While we can use Marx’s designs to inform our own, we need to build our own boat, based on what we see around us, and where we find ourselves today.

 

Emily Dickinson has said:

To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it –
Block it up
With Other – and ‘twill yawn the more –
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air

There is a gap between the theories developed to advance our consciousness as powerful historical subjects, and our lived reality. There is a mismatch between the assumptions the theories make about our experience, and our experience.

The theory that we can seize in our hands and apply to the problem of the “democratic introjection of the masters,” must offer a closer correspondence between what’s in our heads and what’s in our hands. The theory crafted to impact our present reality must recognize the extent of our investment in our present dilemmas as we live them, and the depth of our trauma. It must comprehend our constraints, complicity and pain, and see our rich cultures.

 

* "...it's our hearts that are broken..."

 

So what’s missing in Marx’s theory is what’s missing in us: solid, intact souls.
Marx appealed to our reasoning, but it’s our hearts that are broken.

 

Our theory must explain how we will restore our souls – it must show the way to wholeness.

 

We are the walking wounded. What has been insufficiently weighed and measured is our great grief at having been stripped bare and stood in the rain. Such treatment cannot happen to a soul without leaving its indelible mark. And what do we tell children to do, or any suffering spirit for that matter, if they experience abuse? To speak it.

Marlon Riggs devised a relevant formula: “Anger unvented becomes pain, unspoken becomes rage, released becomes violence, cha cha cha.” (Repeat.)

Pain requires recognition, and a joining of hands, in order to heal.

In Ousmane Sembene’s great novel about the struggle of Senegalese workers to unionize, one character says:

“Real misfortune is not just a matter of being hungry and thirsty; it is a matter of knowing that there are people who want you to be hungry and thirsty – and that is the way it is with us.” (God’s Bits of Wood, p. 101)

And that is the way it is with us.

When human solidarity is broken, a chasm opens in the soul, pain rushes in and sprays its seeds that lodge like thorns, they tear and chafe and wear away a resistance buried much too deep to reach.

And when we join with the masters in raping the earth and our fellows, it’s not a comfortable thing to scrutinize our image in the mirror. Much more likely the mirror will be put away on a shelf to gather dust when it offers no way out.

 

In Marxist theory our spiritual imbalance is supposedly righted when we’re handed the reins to the horse. But you look at the reins and they’re slick with blood, you turn around and there’s no seat to sit on, you look behind and… what is the horse pulling?

These are not small matters.

Or imagine being offered a seat at the head of the table but the room has no air, the chair hurts your back, the table wobbles, and the menu is sweetened greed poured over crushed ancestral dreams. Then you get up to leave you and the house is on fire and you realize you should have paid better attention when James Baldwin warned against integrating into a burning house.

 

Illusion up to now has been a semi-comfortable thing here in America. At least for those with jobs that pay enough to cover the bills. And it does seem that a little ‘discomfort’ may be a necessary lens in order to ‘see’ reality, “creatures of illusion as we are.”

‘Fortunately’ crises are sprouting in abundance at present, providing us an extraordinarily rich opportunity for waking up.

 

There’s a scene in the film Thelma and Louise when a depressed Louise is sitting in the T-bird alone and notices two women, older versions of herself, watching her through a window, and we have one of those “is this all there is?” moments, when you see the trajectory of her life condensed into a second. In that moment it seems it will occur to her that the life she’d been living was not really living at all, and that the path opening up may actually be an affirmative one. We learn later that the same process has been happening with Thelma as well, when she says to Louise, “Are you awake? …Me too. I feel awake – wide awake. I don’t remember ever feeling this awake. You know what I mean? Everything looks different. You ever feel like that too? Like you got something to look forward to?” And when she fears Louise is having second thoughts, and she tells her, “Something’s crossed over in me and I can’t go back. I mean, I just couldn’t live,” I felt a dull ache in my stomach at the uncomfortable truth that in this system, as it’s currently constituted, freedom is not an option.

But it’s hard to face that reality without the support of a theory that points to the door and illuminates the view.

* "...how do you know what to make of anything without theory..."

How do we know what to make of anything without theory?

Theory’s not a crutch. It’s a lens that renders focus from distortion. And unless, and until, we get focused, we are but so much dust to the winds from above.

 

When the computer programmer went back to the corporate headquarters of the software company she helped found, she credited venture capitalists for ‘creating’ the very building she stood staring at, the incomes of the people who worked there, the ‘expansion’ of economies globally – for cranking out ‘jobs’ and ‘consumer products.’

Is hiring people “spreading the wealth around?” – if it’s the government doing the hiring, perhaps. But, climbing to a higher perch, if ‘wealth’ is the ancestors, the earth and each other, communing and fertilizing within us, then obviously, no, whoever does the hiring. If ‘wealth’ is human labor made manifest, then obviously, no. The notion that hiring people is ‘sharing the wealth’ with them’ is illusion, a myth, a con. And while I’m writing about global capitalism, this is no less true when the business is small and the market is local, though the smaller and more local the business, the less destructive of true wealth it is.

 

I believe we have three sources of power: the ancestors, the earth, and each other – roughly corresponding to mind (fire, past), body (earth, future), and spirit (wind, present), as well as capital, land, and labor; and that the podrunks have subjugated us by dividing us from our sources of power.

In the case of the ancestors, this is done by denying us their plain language, rewriting history, and by creating laws and rules that allow the seizure of our common legacies, both physical and cultural.

I’m not saying anything new. Fifty plus years ago, Erich Fromm wrote:

Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and in large numbers…
What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. Our civilization offers many palliatives which help people to be consciously unaware of this aloneness: first of all the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others. Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with his fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as “When the individual feels, the community reels”; or “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today,” or, as the crowning statement: “Everybody is happy nowadays.” Man’s happiness today consists in “having fun.” Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and “taking in” commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies – all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones – and the eternally disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption…Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain. (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 77-9)

 

Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his “personality package” with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume. (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p. 95)

“Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature.”

So what is needed beyond these insights that will move the elephant? – You know the cautionary tale about the elephant chained to a stake, year after year, until, when the stake is removed and the elephant could walk away, it doesn’t. Well, the question for our age, for where we are now, we representatives of global humanity, is: What will enable the elephant to recall its power? The assumption must always be that it will, because it is our biological inheritance. The issue, then, is: when do we begin to trust it?

We have to confront the depth of our brainwashing – and the depth of our grief.

 

Kevin Danaher, promoting an upcoming “Green Festival” on the KPFA radio program Living Room with Kris Welch, * said that “the green economy is going to be the next economy,” that “[it] generates more jobs.” For him the key question is “how did you generate the surplus? Did you exploit people? Did you exploit nature?”

And just now I heard left economist Doug Henwood basically concur on his radio program Behind the News, * speaking hopefully about the potential of “green economics” to address our twin current crises, ecological and financial, because it promises, he believes, “just and sustainable economic growth.”

Both of these honorable men, unless I misconstrue, seem to be saying that we can ‘reform’ capitalism, make it “just and sustainable,” we need not abolish it. I think these statements emerge from the depths of the cons: because “nothing else seems possible,” “we must make do with what we have.” This is the wishful thinking of “mind-workers” who cannot truly believe common folk capable of seizing and shaping our own world. We need capitalism because it organizes production for us. How else will it get organized? they wonder. Yet the factory workers of Paris had no doubts about their ability to run the factory without masters. So why does Doug?

The key word in the above is ‘organize.’ As Marcuse said, “organization demands counter-organization.” Fromm suggests the same:

* "...only in a planned economy..."

Today the vast majority of the people not only have no control over the whole of the economic machine, but they have little chance to develop genuine initiative and spontaneity at the particular job they are doing. They are “employed,” and nothing more is expected from them than that they do what they are told. 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 in his work. All that matters is that the opportunity for genuine activity be restored to the individual; that the purposes of society and of his own become identical, not ideologically but in reality; and that he apply his effort and reason actively to the work he is doing, as something for which he can feel responsible because it has meaning and purpose in terms of his human ends. We must replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent co-operation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, from the formal political to the economic sphere. (Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, p. 271):

Now does a “green economy” accomplish this? Obviously, “no.” So why do our good-hearted brothers and sisters, who care as passionately as I do about the ailing planet and our suffering fellows of all species, not cut to the heart of the problem, as Fromm does, and Marcuse does, and Marx does, and Polanyi does, and Dickinson, and Melville, and Woolf do? So many countless, unnamed, unheralded ancestors have told us, over and over and over, that “human intelligence is like water, air, and fire – it cannot be bought or sold.” So why do we persist in not believing them? And if we do, if we believe them, why do we not act?

The State (and the family and the workplace) is the means of transmission of the Mr. Smith virus – the host. To say this doesn’t mean that all efforts to govern ourselves non-hierarchically are doomed to failure, just as the abolition of wage-work doesn’t mean that no one will work. Abolishing wage work simply means returning to reality from our long dream. As Polanyi told us sixty-four years ago:

The crucial point is this: labor, land, and money are essential elements of industry; they also must be organized in markets; in fact, these markets form an absolutely vital part of the economic system. But labor, land, and money are obviously not commodities; the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them. In other words, according to the empirical definition of a commodity they are not commodities. (The Great Transformation, p. 72)

In other words, our economic system is erected on illusions.

To the suppression of this truth the full weight of the state has been concentrated.

But our bodies know the truth of it, which is why, once fully trapped or trained, we sleep-walk our way through life, waiting for it to be over.

Unless one awakes, at which point one of those Thelma and Louise moments occurs when you realize, “I can’t go back;” because, as Walter Lundquist says, in Working, “Once you wake up the human animal you can’t put it back to sleep again.”

 

So, to our sleeping elephant: “what do you require, my love?”

I suspect you require a few fellows with faith, who bring a few more, who bring a few more, until a veritable cascade of elephants makes sleep impossible. David Bodanis said, in E=MC2, that, “the interesting thing is that almost anything that steadily accumulates will turn out to grow in terms of simple squared numbers.” Tesla puts it this way:

Let me tell you of another comforting feature. The progress in a measured time is nowadays more rapid and greater than it ever was before. This is quite in accordance with the fundamental law of motions, which commands acceleration and increase of momentum or accumulation of energy under the action of a continuously acting force and tendency, and is the more true as every advance weakens the elements tending to produce friction and retardation. For after all, what is progress, or – more correctly – development, or evolution, if not a movement, infinitely complex and often unscrutinizable, it is true, but nevertheless exactly determined in quantity as well as in quality of motion by the physical conditions and laws governing? (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, A-102)

Once we get going, and we are already going, and have been for centuries, we will get to where biology – the hand bending the moral arc – tends: to freedom. So those of us who see this course, and believe in it as our inheritance, and feel the restless responsibility to help “weaken the elements tending to produce friction and retardation” – i.e. the depth of our brainwashing and the depth of our grief – are becoming the critical mass.

 

But the majority lack confidence in the possibility of movement. Barack once observed (in Dreams): “the continuing struggle to align…our heartfelt desires with a workable plan – [doesn’t] self-esteem finally depend on just this?”

Just as the sickness self-reinforces – the family, the job, the state – so does our bend toward balance: the circle of ‘longing,’ leading to ‘theory,’ leading to certainty, leading to ‘a workable plan,’ leading to…‘self-esteem’… leading to a wider circle of longing.

And as Barack has also told us: “in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty.”

 

Certainty.

You do the analysis, and then you know – or…sometimes, you just know.

Now ‘knowing’ doesn’t necessarily mean being ‘correct’ – correct analysis leading to correct conclusions – but it generally does cause others to take a closer look, giving ideas that are great, that are timely, that are for the moment they speak to, juice.

At this moment, the correctness of Barack’s analysis has borne magical fruit – we have sudden visible proof of the truth of alchemy.

In transitional moments truth has wings – things are abruptly, when they seemed not. And theory lightens the load for truth – it allows freer movement, it allows momentum to build faster.

What was it that made Thomas Paine such a force if not certainty?

The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom, but of a continent – of at least one eighth part of the habitable globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, even to the end of time, by the proceedings now. Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full-grown characters…
[T]he independence of this country on Britain or any other…is now the main and only object worthy of contention, and…like all other truths discovered by necessity, will appear clearer and stronger every day.
First. Because it will come to that one time or other.
Secondly. Because, the longer it is delayed the harder it will be to accomplish.
(Thomas Paine, Common Sense)

“The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.” And – it will happen. Period.

So the only question is: how much pain? How much stress? How much fear and dislocation? How much confusion? How much grief, before goodness has the last word?

 

 

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 7

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)