The Nascence

05.27.13:

The May 26th through June 9th 2013 Waking Up Radio Shows discussed James K. Galbraith’s Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis. Excerpts and audio files follow.

For other excerpts visit: Waking Up Radio Audio Conversations Page.

05.30.13 -- 06.02.13

Below is a partial transcript of the * " June 2, 2013 show".

06.09.13

Below is a partial transcript of the * " June 9, 2013 show".

06.15.13

Below is a draft of the discussion planned for the * " June 16, 2013 show".

06.20.13

Below are some initial thoughts for the * " June 23, 2013 show": “Taking Issue With Wallerstein”.

06.26.13

Below are some initial thoughts for the * " June 30, 2013 show".

Below are some initial thoughts for the * " July 7, 2013 show".

WUR, Sunday, May 26th, 2013… taking alook at James K. Galbraith’s Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis

* This Train Is Moving

This train is set in motion... and it's got a speed to it...

The second time my tires were slashed, I had to call for a tow… on the way to the shop… me and the driver talked… about how dangerous are these times we’re living in…. He used the metaphor of a train for ‘the system’…

…“and it’s rolling downhill,” he said.

“Yes, it’s rolling downhill,” I echoed him.

“And it’s got a speed to it…”

“Yes, it’s got a speed to it.”

The James Galbraith book we’re looking at today – Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis – is in essence saying this… “This hierarchical world dis-order is rolling downhill… and it’s got a speed to it…”

…but the Galbraith book went to a great deal of trouble… to prove it…

…which is a good thing… as… far too many middle-ranking auxiliaries apparently need ‘proof’ to ‘see reality’… to see that nation-states are not equipped to challenge this pattern called ‘class’…

…their bodies’ truth is not yet trusted… these pundits…

…but soon it will… I trust.

So thanks are due to Galbraith… for ensuring that those pundit middle ranks who claim to speak for us… have no excuse for not framing their speech more authentically… basing it more… in reality… and the rest of us… likewise.

The Galbraith book shows how an entire world can be made to roll in a pre-determined direction… and this accomplished virtually overnight… how this train is set in motion… and so will not stop… sheer physics tells us this… without a counter-application of collective thought… which is collective might… from those it would otherwise mow… under and over and through.

So… in today’s show we’re going to take a broad look at the James Galbraith book – and we’ll draw on it in future as well, no doubt – and consider the implications of its conclusions… while using the research experience it describes to illustrate points we’ve been making about ‘language’… ‘truth’… ‘sculpting reality’… ‘seeing reality’… and, always simultaneously, running through these things… ‘seeing from the vantage of the whole.’

(Quick example: the statement of a Congressman this week saying how ‘happy-to-work’ Apple employees are… as compared with those of the Post Office… “the Post Office should be run like Apple,” he said… and of course it is one of their dearest high-list ambitions to privatize our Post Office… and so the Bernie Sanders bill in Congress to fight back and save it must be supported… strong…

…and I’m sure he would like to see our brothers and sisters who make the deliveries push themselves to exhaustion… as our brothers and sisters in China are forced to do… and deny they work for Apple… and try to con us into keeping our scope scaled small….)

But all our struggles must be seen within an accurate context… or they can be continuously extended… ad infinitum… and we’ll be treading water for eternity.

* End Wage Work

We must start saying, "We need a mass movement to end wage work..." it's the only refuge... because they can't get in front of it...

In Waking Up, I wrote that only generalized freedom can secure individual freedom… but that it’s equally true that only individual freedom can secure generalized freedom – now is that a ‘Catch-22’?… a circular trap with no way back… to wholeness?

Sometimes it seems so… that we have nowhere to go… when the professional left… who could be helping us think new thoughts… seemingly wants only to manage us more ‘efficiently’… leave a smaller ‘footprint’ on the planet… but not… remove the boot altogether.

Yet they are of good heart… so… the solution seems to be… ‘seeing reality’…

…and what does that mean? we’ll be asking…

In addition… because there may be confusion about some phrases I use, I’d like to focus some of the conclusions of the Galbraith book towards clarifying two of them…. Often, I say: “there’s only one way to end ‘power’…” which is essentially saying, “there’s only one way to reclaim our bodies.” And putting it that way may bring sufficient light to the question… but we’ll delve deeper.

And then I also say a lot: “we need a new language…” words which also could lead to confusion.

When I say, “we need a new language,” I don’t mean that I think that we should all – across all cultures – literally one day be speaking in the same tongue.… What I mean is that all of us… across cultural divides… need a language that is an opposite to ‘class’… one in which no one needs to con…in which our common earth is the lingua franca in which we visualize what we want… I think the cons will stand exposed when earth-pictures flow in our minds… as… in that light ‘power’ has no place to hide.

The story they tell themselves… these guys… and tell to us… is that we live vicariously through them… when the truth is the opposite….

Nothing is what it seems… until we make our world consciously….

Our thoughts are everything…

…which is why you’ll never hear a pundit say over the airwaves: “We need a mass movement to end wage work…” and that is why we must start saying it… not just because it’s true… but because it’s our refuge in the storm… it buys you cover over the short term… simply because they can’t say it… and so we must work our asses off to multiply the people saying it…. It’s the jump-start to a re-thinking process.

How do they know what we’re thinking… if they aren’t the ones telling us what to think? This is why they get in front so fast… of any idea that is likely to grab… our eyes… our minds… our thinking… E.g. ‘local self-sufficiency’? …or ‘new economy.’

But they can’t get in front of this.

* Humans (Acting In Concert) Do The Sculpting... Not 'Forces'

The Galbraith book shows us that it is humans acting in concert who intentionally create 'inequality...

“Falling commodity prices” means wages are being driven down…

If you look long enough down the road you’ll see that all of us get our money from the earth.

When he tells us that there is, “little scope remaining for extracting capital from the rest of the world,” we should be hearing Wallerstein’s “Head’s Up!”… i.e. we should start hearing the equivalence between these statements:

•            “The earth has been consumed.”

•            “There is a falling rate of profit globally.”

•            “Growing immiseration”… as we can only survive by borrowing…”

•            …and our growing resistance to ‘power’s pressure to impoverish us in some ways drives these processes… as we are earth we are likewise being eaten… and we possess the means… and at times as well the ‘higher-seeing’ … to fight back…”

•            “Debt crises.”

•            “Absorption / conversion of the earth into ‘products’ (‘consumerism’)”

“Piece-work”

The people are squeezed… …in debt crises…

…and if the people are squeezed…

…the earth is squeezed…

…cuz we’re paid by the piece…

…a piece of the earth…

…and with each little piece… …there’s a little bit gone…

…of earth… and us…

…and it doesn’t take long…

…when the squeeze is on… …consistently…

…when it never lets up… …and keeps us on our knees…

…we can only get up… …if each reaches hands to each…

…hand-to-hand… …mind-to-mind…

…we decide…

To me what’s significant about Inequality and Instability is not that it is apparently necessary to ‘prove’ that there is an integrated global economy designed to squeeze us… to create ‘growing inequality’… to stratify and segment the populace into ‘classes’… as, after all… that’s been the constant goal since it all began… this thing called ‘class’… is not that there are ‘macroeconomic’ ‘forces’ that trump anything that an individual nation-state tries to do… that this integrated world economy exists by impoverishment… by impoverishing its inhabitants… all this we know is where ‘hierarchy’… lust for ‘power’… and ‘ranking’ tends to go… but that Galbraith proves, by implication, that these “forces’ are organized humans… human actors that work in concert… while simultaneously toning down this truth, by using the oblique word ‘forces’ (p. 14)… (remember “Eurogroup”?)

He traces the source of the problem to the banking sector…

(One of the things that unifies the book, he says, is: “a common set of observations, relating to the critical role played by the financial sector and the international financial regime, in bringing on a vast increase in global inequality from 1980 – 2000.” (p. 18))

…the leaders of which are a very few actors… who meet globally… and act in concert… (but he persists despite this… in calling them ‘forces’) – and entities like the World Bank fund studies that show inequality appears haphazardly… or is subject to the vagaries of nation-state policy.

* Mate Our Steps

Our thought to step in concert must before-hand be in concert... tell me the question before you tell me that the answer varies...

Our taking a look at this Galbraith book gives us a good opportunity to revisit this issue of ‘truth’… Karl Popper went to great lengths to try to explain that truth is not ‘relative’… that interpretation is… relative… but the underlying earth… though infinitely complex… is what it is… and though our ability to describe it accurately in words is limited… it doesn’t change to suit our limitations or political agenda… or each time new eyes examine it… except sometimes in those minds… but minds don’t make the earth… ‘earth’ does… as Shakespeare tried to learn us…

So… when I read such things as this (as I did this week): “I am suspicious of people who claim they know the one true answer,” I reply in my mind, “Well, it very much depends on what the question is, doesn’t it?… And whether the definitions firmly hold… and are not made to distort reality…” are not those ‘float-aways’ and ‘drift-words’ like ‘communism’ or ‘democracy’ that they use to con-fuse us with… whose meanings change depending on the needs of ‘power’. Despite all these goings-on… despite all the on-going cons… there really is but one authentic ‘reality’… it’s called ‘earth’… and it’s just the ways we’re taught to see it and describe it – the lies we’re taught to keep the false-sight going ad infinitum… that vary…

…and as we are earth… we tend with her… towards health…

(… barring moving trains set to annihilate … while tricking us with smoke and mirrors to confuse our minds and make us see each other… our brothers and sisters… as the ones responsible for our downward slide away from health and happiness…)

So when a pundit tells us that making a film is “ending capitalism” I don’t know what to say… We shouldn’t have to wend our way through such confusion…

…we must find our lingua franca in the earth…

…and describe the world we want… and see ‘what-is’ clearly…

Tell me the question before you tell me that the answer varies…

We have to be able to assess what is realistic leverage in any particular political situation… if we want to be successful.

If ‘the system’ we’re wrestling with is global… if the pressure it applies, by tying every one of us in… a web of obligation… via the market… if this pressure is global… and so requires a global ‘counter-application’ of our own strategy… our resistance… and this but means we walk in concert… just as the synchronized step of walkers can bring down large structures… our thought to step in concert must before-hand be in concert… we must help each other see… our common nature… earth….

‘Seeing reality’ is perhaps seeing the physics of it all – that we are life… and life wants to live unforced… free to let thought fly unhinderedly… and not within the narrow bounds allowed… by ‘power’s fear-bound longing to be gods….

‘Seeing reality’ is to see that ‘tends’ (tendencies) … so insinuated in our lives to move a globe-entire… will not be stopped except by means of denying it our energy… restoring it to ourselves… that we must reclaim our lives is sheer physics… the sheer ‘common sense’ of life….

* Beck and Call

"...twenty million people at our beck and call..."

After the regime cleared the cities of twenty million workers [during the ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958 – 1960)], Mao boasted to a colleague that “We have twenty million people at our beck and call. What political party other than the ruling Chinese Communist Party could have done it?” (Robert K. Schaeffer quoting Mao Zedong in Red Inc.: Dictatorship and the Development of Capitalism in China, 1949 to the Present, 2012, p. 28)

When Mao said this…

…perhaps giddy with the ‘power’ of it…

…“twenty million at [his] beck and call…”

…could he foresee… …the gaseous quality…

…of the heads of ‘Plato’s Tribe’…

…who in a mere two decades leashed the world…

…by ‘simple’ means of debt…

…could at a whim decide who benefits…

…and who pays… …the dearest price…

…and who could then imagine of themselves…

…that they were ‘gods’…

…and we… …kept looking narrowly…

…survival hoops placed derisively before our eyes…

…and in our paths…

…kept jumping and kept fearing we might fail…

…not clear the ring with skin intact…

…too focused on the just-before-our-eyes to think…

…of looking back…

…and seeing… …the hoary hand of ‘power’…

…clutching its worn reins tied round the world…

…but… …many now are seeing through this play of mirrors and mind-games…

…and seeing that the way out of the maze…

…is to mate our steps together…

…and let rhythm take its course…

…work its counter-magic on the narrow aims… …and mean ambition…

…on the gross and graceless… …all-consuming-sad…

…malevolence of ‘power’…

To rebuild our freedom… we have to rebuild ourselves… starting with the building-block-thoughts… on up… and to rebuild ourselves, we have to recover our communal nature… our knowledge of ourselves… as earth.

* " June 2, 2013 show"

WUR, Sunday, June 2nd, 2013… continuing to look at James K. Galbraith’s Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis

I want to give a shout out to our brothers and sisters in Turkey. I can’t tell you how encouraging it was to hear about folks coming together across false divisions… so-called ‘intellectual labor’ and ‘middle-class’… across all the false designations of status… determined to have each others’ backs… ensure a tiny bit of beauty and rest… and earth-connection is preserved for all… communally… we need no more malls… may we very soon get to stop playing defense… and start to plan… our future freedom… as a global network… of self-determining human beings.

We're not here to help 'power' rule over the resources of the planet (including us): a big thank you to our brothers and sisters in Turkey

“…economists perpetuate the con that ‘inequality’ is built-into the ‘mental’ - ‘manual’ divide…” i.e. “‘mind’ makes income…”

Economists tell themselves that 'inequality' is built into the 'mental - manual divide'...

Last week (05.26.13 show), we concluded by saying that to rebuild our freedom we have to rebuild ourselves… from the building-block thoughts on up… while recovering our communal nature… our knowledge of ourselves as earth… in the process.

What are these “building-block thoughts”? We’ve discussed in past shows some key ones: ‘insider – outsider’… or ‘citizen’ – ‘barbarian’… ‘labor is our inevitable lot’… ‘human beings are inherently violent’… the notion that ‘worth’ must be established… ‘proven’… (you could call this the notion of ‘original sin’, perhaps…) – closely tied to ‘merit-rises’… the productivity-myth… and… ‘progress’….

In his 1955 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Simon Kuznets offered a simple, elegant argument relating inequality to the process of industrialization. Before industry, say in late-feudal Great Britain or the early northern United States, agriculture consisted largely of small freeholds, tenantry, and family farms. Income from work was limited by the natural scope of family labor and the talents and efforts of the village craftsman. Factories and city life introduced division of labor, leading to higher living standards for a rising urban working class, including factory workers and eventually professionals, engineers, and machinists. Since this group enjoyed more income than their country cousins, economic inequality rose.

Later on, migration and ultimately the industrialization of agriculture displaced the farmers from their land. As the agricultural population declined in proportion to the total, so too did the significance of the urban – rural income gap. Therefore, inequality would decline as incomes continued to rise, simply because the population transitioned from being primarily rural to primarily urban. Cities, with all their economic diversity, are naturally more unequal than the countryside, so matters would not again return to an egalitarian starting point. But Kuznets did expect that as industrialization matured, unionization and social democracy would reduce the initially high inequalities of the townsfolk, so that overall inequality would continue to decline as industrial development deepened.

What Kuznets Meant

The basic mechanism of Kuznets’s argument was thus the transition from country to town and from farm to factory as average incomes rose. The consequence was a definite relationship between inequality and income: inequality would first increase and later decline as cities swallowed the rural population. This was the inverted U that later economists would call the “Kuznets curve.” (James Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis, p. 47 – 8)

As long as you can control the definitions you can control the story… and if you control the story… you control… us… and here… in this book by Galbraith… we learn that the story economists are taught… and so tell themselves… is… essentially… that ‘inequality’ is built into the mental – manual divide… which… they tell themselves and us… is ‘natural’… and so ‘inevitable’… (of course Bentham and Townsend knew better… or were simply more honest…

Why they perpetuate the lie that there is a built-in ‘inequality’ between ‘hand and ‘mind’…

...a massive con's at work...

If we believe this myth… (…and the case must adequately be made that it is a myth…) that ‘inequality’ is a function of the mental – manual divide… and that this so-called fundamental divide is the driver of ‘progress’… then we can be easily convinced to accept the consequence: the weight of so-called ‘civilization’ being placed squarely on the backs of those who provide us our food… clothing… and natural resources… (and this in itself suggests conscious design, as there’s no intrinsic rationale for ‘paying’ corporate hacks [and the late economist David Gordon knew this, wrote about it in Fat and Mean] more than teachers… no rational reason why those who harvest our food are abused… while CEOs who rape the earth are given tax-breaks… and called ‘creators’…) It’s all a scam… as the debased and despised ‘hands’ are far more essential for sustaining life… and what surpasses this in significance?

A massive con’s at work… to drive down what those most important to us ask from life…

“There’s a child at the Tot Lot…”

There's a child at the tot lot...

There’s a child at the Tot Lot who doesn’t think I’m real…

…I’ve never seen her smile….

She watches me with faint amusement in sad eyes…

…she knows one day she’ll see…

…the ‘real’ me arise…

…from the shambles of false smiles…

…she watches carefully…

…she knows that grown-ups lie…

…that even when they sit with you their minds are elsewhere…

…and even if they say…

…you are their ‘everything’…

…to be with you it seems must be an agony…

…an endurance test of patience…

…or they’ll scream at you or beat you for imagined slights or disrespect…

…or laugh at you derisively for asking them for what they cannot give…

…she knows the truth…

…I offer…

…and she’s not buying…

…she’s no fool…

…she will not accept…

…what will be snatched away without regret…

…without the slightest acknowledgement or knowledge…

…of what treasure has been lost…

…in losing her…

…not even she will own it…

…last of all…

…will she believe it.

We are told that some must be made virtual slaves… because… “there’s no other way”… (the ‘TINA’ myth)…

The fallacy of the 'necessity' of inequality...:

We are told that some must be made virtual slaves… because… “there’s no other way”… (the ‘TINA’ myth)…

But the argument falls apart quickly on closer scrutiny… first, because we won’t accept being made slaves – though ‘power’ will never stop trying to force this… which is why they’re buying up huge tracks of Africa – and, secondly, if the idea is that ‘inequality’ is a process… a ‘generator’ leading to ‘maximum goodness’ (for most)… as Bentham tried to con us into believing… and yet, those left out of this so-called ‘goodness’ resist… or even if the con is that ‘the good life’ will come to all in due time… who will do the so-called ‘dirty work’ once ‘we’ get there… if the present hierarchical arrangement persists… of decision-making by philosopher-statesmen?

They try to make us believe… that it will done by machines… but this is absurd beyond words… and we know how it’ll go… they’ll fall back and crack that ‘whip of hierarchy’… and while we’re jumping they’ll say, “there’s no other way…” and then keep conning us with the myth… that it generates ‘progress’… or at least for those who deserve it… so keep jumping through those hoops… cuz if you stop… you’ll end up… on the bottom….

So… if betrayal is not to be our common legacy… we must think this through… and all of our thinking must rest on the premise… of solidarity… all of us… or none…. We must mate our thoughts to the common truth: not we-as-earth… not earth… are commodities… we must share our common legacies… that is the ‘physics’ of ‘equality’… balance….

'The market' under 'class' is a con in the service of 'power'...

Can we finally… bury the con that says ‘the market’ is a mechanism for fair exchange?… when we know… since class began… …there’s never been… between ‘the market’ and ‘what’s fair’… the least equivalence…

As I plunge deeper into Inequality and Instability, I continue to find things I’m grateful to Galbraith for… in addition to the ones we talked about last week… the big one being establishing… and calling our attention to… the global downward pattern of increasing disparities… as the key to seeing the whole… i.e. from the vantage of the whole… I’m realizing that his turning the spotlight on his own profession is a big deal… because ‘economics’… or, rather, controlling how we think about it… is key to their control… as life must be alive before it can be anything else… and so we all have a strong interest in how we will get… our food….

But until now… with this current manufactured crisis undermining all the cons ‘economics’ had lovingly crafted… to serve its masters… until now… the discipline was pretty unreflective… but now it’s asking questions… and Galbraith’s are arguably the most incisive….

And in Inequality and Instability he opens the door into their private chamber… shows what they were taught… how they arrived at their conclusions… and allows us all to scrutinize their process… examine their reasoning… and, particularly in the light of current events… we can see more clearly… see the holes in its facade…. We are beginning to see reality.

Using the phrase, as I did last week, that: “we are all tied in a web of obligation via the market…” I should rather have said: “tied in a web of obligation via our belief in the market…” in the notion that it’s ok for ‘power’ to have its way with us at will”… for that’s what ‘the market’ is in truth.

Let’s look at what ‘the market’ is… and what it isn’t… using the Galbraith book.

Kuznets… we glean from what Galbraith tells us… wanted to believe that ‘power’ had developed a system… a ‘mechanism’… a machine… a clockwork… that would deliver ‘prosperity’… that incomes would magically rise as the ‘nature’ of work became more about ‘mind’… and less about ‘hand’… that “‘mind’ makes income” (‘wealth’… ‘money’…) is the con…. But what he apparently couldn’t see is that what he ‘discovered’ was simply our human creativity… seized by the few who inflate their egos by absorbing us… much as the vampire-myth suggests… they eat their fellow humans…

Wherever ‘the market’ could not ‘work’… i.e. ‘freely’… “without interference”… (but Engels pointed out that ‘power’… the longing for supremacy [competition] would ever skew things to serve its interests… attempt to rig the rules [formal or manipulated… i.e. ‘de facto’… in its favor…]. ‘The market’ under class is a con in the service of ‘power’… a ‘logical’ fiction… a fiction of ‘logic’… to placate ‘the people’s’ need for ‘fairness’ and quell uprising-anger at the in fact gross inequality of it all….

He says that those who followed Kuznets lost his message… was but ‘opportunistic empiricism’… but the ‘Kuznets curve’ was itself a fiction… itself idealistic empiricism… a creation of his imagination… he sculpted it into a shape to fit the shadow of the facts he found… but was itself… untrue.

So the next piece of our study of truth… is in how to distinguish fabrications… creations of imagination… shaped to fit the facts… from truth…

Do we really have to see this pattern develop to its fullest extent... before we respond appropriate to the threat?

Their trick is to get us to realize their vision for them… “incomes naturally diversify…” ‘the market’ exists to keep the resources of the planet… private…

Their trick is to get us to realize their vision for them… move it steadily forward… which means moving ourselves steadily toward lock-down… towards a totally boxed-in state…. How to do this if not by telling us as we sleep-walk… that we’re doing the opposite… moving toward greater ‘freedom’?… defined as greater control over the available resources (including us)… guaranteeing our (their) access to them… just as Tunisians are being encouraged to believe that there’s no better definition of ‘democracy’… than having food in sufficiency…

So… we do the work of securing those ‘resources’… finding… procuring… providing… counting… categorizing… cataloguing… managing…keeping them in private hands (‘the market’)… no matter how many times the particular hands may change… their control is secured… if you keep them private… then it’s but a matter of amassing means… and total control of the earth’s resources is secured easily… so long as we’re kept jumping… twisting narrowly… in a web of obligation…

So ‘the market’ exists… to keep the resources we need to exist… private… (i.e. controlled by ‘power’… no matter the word it uses to mean that… whether ‘private’… or ‘communal’….)

So we see the tend… the pattern… and the question we must ask ourselves is… do we truly need to see it develop to its fullest extent… before we believe it? before we react to it?… and organize a resistance scaled appropriate to the threat?

‘Power’ encourages us to see all the ‘complexity’ as inherent in ‘the system’ instead of inherent in us…

...and to convert 'life' into 'thought' is called "creating wealth"...:

‘Power’ encourages us to see all the ‘complexity’ as inherent in ‘the system’ instead of inherent in us… we are infinitely creative and complex… but they exist by theft… for… if the system can own us… it can assume possession too of our attributes and achievements… all ‘power’ has to do is set up ‘the competition’… the hierarchy… and we do the rest… a strategy effortless… as long as you keep resources private… and we accepting this… they can keep us jumping for them… because we want to live…

Let’s illustrate with Kuznets…

So if ‘hierarchy’ is accepted… the ‘game’… the world… is forfeited before we can stand and look about and get our bearings… we’re born onto a ladder… or sliding down the ‘Kuznets’ curve from ‘rural’… to ‘urban’… never mind Wallerstein’s telling us we drive this process… this so-called ‘progress’… with our demand-pressure to be ‘middle-class’… to have greater security from privation.

So our movement is claimed by ‘power’ as its… the ‘system’s’…. Our power has been alienated… and credited to ‘the system’… as mediated by sheepdogs who turn our life into abstracts… to serve ‘power’…

…and to convert life to thought… in their upside-down world is called “creating wealth”…

…and this con is so critical to ‘power’s’ rule it will be well-rewarded… from our blood-made-booty… and the earth’s…

…so it’s not us being powerful in the Fantasy Land of Abstractions… it’s “Kuznets’ classic vision” that’s unfolding… holding true… ‘proving’ the value of its predictive Thought…

‘Level of development’ is equated in his thinking with ‘level of income’… remuneration tags where you are on the scale of ‘Progress’….

But who decides what your remuneration will be? ‘The market’…. By what criteria?

Essentially… to answer that question most accurately you have to factor in… the pattern… not just seize upon a moment or a slice… but see that the way that things unfold is not random… but a tendency… focused toward a goal… and this thing as its moving has momentum… moving ever-forward… forward… towards… going someplace… going… where?

Only when you see the movement of a thing do you begin to see it… see it in its place of forward-movingness…

So… on what will it smile? What frown? As long as resources are being made scarce (for us) it little matters… as long as the pattern is being reinforced… jungle-ethics will decide…. The ‘market’ as a conscious actor only matters on the macro side… to give the big push… set the big weights firm in place… that they hope cannot be overturned… and the cons as manifested in us do the rest.

…and as long as we keep believing in their story of the competition…

…keep treating it as something legitimate…

…‘power’ has little to fear from us…

…we become… ‘self-regulating’…

…as we keep ‘the market’ in ourselves…

…we keep ‘the market’ going…

…as we keep ourselves in chains.

Galbraith is describing what happens at the intersection of hierarchy with ‘power’… in “Kuznets’s classic vision”… the bullies at the top are on “upward-sloping income-inequality surfaces”… and can continuously skew things to keep it that way… as long as Supremacy is the only game we play… (this is the work the sheepdogs do for ‘power’… and it’s well-paid…) maintaining the cons turns out to be the most highly-rewarded economic activity.

All is well for folks at the top… while we at the bottom are told, “suck it up…”

Notice that this so-called "canonical Kuznets movement" strips us of our ability to be self-sufficient... so 'growing up' turns out to mean... 'staying children'...:

So… as hierarchy is accepted unquestioningly… we on the bottom have no grounds on which to register a complaint… far from it, in fact, as we’re led to believe our place on the ‘stage’ is among the ‘backward’…

When will we be done with the bizarre notion ‘stages of development… and history’? So much damage can be laid at its door… how much more must we endure?

In describing his research technique for brushing away what he doesn’t need in order to better see… the pattern… he first explains why he focuses on wages and salaries and excludes rents and profits… then he explains why he takes the further step of making ‘manufacturing’ his focus.

He reasons – essentially – that because we live in a single global economic system… there must be a systematic relation between its sectors…

To see the relationship [between “factory and farm rates of pay”], consider the basic fact that in the course of economic development people are drawn from agriculture into manufacturing in the first place by a wage differential. This differential need not be large, but it has to exist; otherwise people will not leave the farm. (James Galbraith, Inequality and Instability, p. 53)

But this… process… is not just… or necessarily… about a wage differential… but rather a ‘power’ differential… a factor of coercion… farm land is seized… or flooded by dams… ‘development’ means… “steal the people’s land…”

Notice that this so-called “canonical Kuznets movement” strips us of our ability to be self-sufficient… so ‘growing up’ turns out to mean… ‘staying children’….

What we’re really seeing in this ‘stages of development’ drumbeat is a positing unconsciously (among the academics) of an alleged equality between coercion – being forced off the land – with a ‘stage of development’. Kissinger does this consciously when he says Mao had a point in instilling discipline… by means of the Cultural Revolution… and Bentham says this when he tells us governance cannot exist without our obedience… and David Brooks the same when he tells us growing up means accepting the weight of obligation imposed by the state – all try to reinforce the lie… that it’s a sign of maturity when we resign ourselves to effective slavery….

(And… by the by as an aside… he argues that there’s nothing special about the divide between the ‘agricultural’ and ‘manufacturing’ sectors… because for him, indeed, ‘agriculture’ is just an economic category… the earth as a transfer-station or mechanism… not… his blood-relation…. And if we do see our connections what does this mean… ‘economically’? Perhaps there’s no means yet of convertibility for ‘reverence’… into an economic category… perhaps there’s a pricing lag… waiting until we can’t go back… to all our relations… but this is not an inevitability… we just need to all agree – globally – that it’s time to change tracks.)

If all ‘wealth’ under class is commodified-earth… ‘manufacturing’, indeed, provides the best indices of the degree of… and speed by which… ‘power’ is eating it… and of course fundamentally ‘inequality’ is measuring the rate of consumption of the earth.

Nothing else comes close to this clarity of the direct reflection of earth-conversion to measurable quantities… as wages and salaries in manufacturing.

As conversion proceeds apace… like vital food from the root flowing up through all the tree’s branches… or electric current through a network of conduit… ever-diversifying and multiplying… sprouting into sectors and salaries… who benefits? who pays? It hardly matters, we’re told, because ‘progress’ is unfolding.

And we buy this story out of loyalty…

…because it means our mommys and our daddys were right…

…in sacrificing our lives….

But if all the mommys stayed…

…and if all the daddys played…

…then they’d see…

…true wealth is what they gave…

…true wealth is what they gained…

…in true wealth they’d get repaid…

…when they see…

…sun rising…

…in their children’s eyes.

To rebuild our freedom, we have to reclaim our children… but many false hopes will be dangled… as we painstakingly find our way to truth… for instance, ‘public banking’ does not upend this tend… to rigid, fixed class divisions….

So as we said in Beginning Again… we must look at what underpins that tend… and before we can resist we have to see it where it exists…

…and at the most basic and so most determinative expression… it’s in how we treat our children…

Our wholesale, gross abandonment of them, then… is a key structural underpinning.

* " June 9, 2013 show"

WUR, Sunday, June 9th, 2013… continuing to look at James K. Galbraith’s Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis

'Power' (coercion) drives down the cost of food... to subsidize... everything else...:

Before we begin… let’s send our thanks again… to our courageous brothers and sisters in Turkey… risking their lives and their limbs… to begin to live as free humans… our debt to you can only be repaid in that same… incalculable currency.

‘Power’ (coercion) drives down the cost of food… to subsidize… everything else…

Today we’ll be talking about the irrationality of ‘class’… and how this irrationality is manifested in ‘the market’… hopefully thereby de-mystifying ‘economy’… so that we can start ‘seeing reality’… see that… behind the con ‘market forces’… ‘power’ hides… and suggest that if we can see this… we can develop the certainty that we can… and must… move ‘ending the class system’ to the forefront of our activism.

And we’ll be suggesting… that only by ‘power’ driving down the cost of producing food… i.e. insuring that ‘hands’ are subject to extremely harsh discipline… can ‘power’ coerce… by means of this debasement… the subsidization… of everything else.

And we’ll note how the ‘Kuznets hypothesis’… as presented in the James Galbraith book we’ve been discussing in recent shows… about how the ‘labor market’ gets structured… to reward some… punish others… to… in essence… create ‘winners’ and ‘losers’… while it may ‘fit’ some of the facts (while ignoring others)… errs in its interpretation… and that to say that under a hierarchical ordering of the world… there must be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’… isn’t saying much….

So, we’ll be elaborating on a point made last week, that Kuznets sculpted a theory to fit the facts he could see… but that his argument was itself… faulty.

When hierarchy squeezes us… and we react to it… this does indeed produce a ‘movement’… a pattern academics may leap upon… and create… as creativity is endless… an entire language filled with abstract concepts to explain this pattern… and these abstract concepts then become the actors… after which… it does indeed seem… that the grand theory thus imagined into being… has successfully converted the study of us… we of flesh-and-blood… our ‘movement’… into a ‘science’… just as Bentham wanted…

…but what Kuznets didn’t ‘see’… accurately… was the squeezing…

…He sees our ‘movement’… the earth-given demand in us to be free… our reaction to hierarchy… and attempts to capture it in abstracts… after which… it becomes ‘sectors’ reacting… ‘us’ as a collectivity abstracted from reality… and our longing is transformed by the magic of the inventive mind… into ‘science’… and used to divide us… a perfect storm of confusion… because it ‘fits’… and ‘it’ behaves ‘predictably’… and… a bonus… we… our true power… get disappeared in the process.

But, most significantly, while our… we-the-people’s… force is dissolved into abstract concepts, the machinations of the philosopher-statesmen are… consciously (by them)… kept hidden.

What Kuznets failed to recognize was the reality of ‘force’… ‘power’… sculpting a reality that its academics would seize upon and treat as ‘natural’… providing cover for ‘power’ to hide in….

For example, Galbraith tells us that, for economists, the convention is to treat ‘nation-state’ as the unit of analysis… as if the global economy doesn’t exist… as if Polanyi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein had never written… now why does he suppose that is?… How does he explain it?

In an integrated economy, the forces that operate on unemployment rates may extend over many horizons, from the near neighborhood to the entire world. This is just plain common sense. But it is neglected common sense, and the literature on unemployment in Europe ignores it, concentrating without reflection on national characteristics and national unemployment rates. (James K. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis, p. 166)

Now, we can either choose to believe that consistent and repeated obliviousness is mere accident… or consider that it’s planned.

The irrationality of this is dismissed… by the discipline… so ‘power’ can stay hidden. ‘Economics’ pretends… that it exists to facilitate efficient management… so that overall… and looking long… ‘the people’ can benefit… but its blatant and determined short-sightedness and blindness… always missing the obvious and getting things wrong… all falls into place… when you see that ‘economy’… is a con.

Economists are stuck in unconscious assumptions... of 'natural' hierarchical divides...

What Kuznets apparently didn’t ask is how is ‘the economy’ getting structured hierarchically? Once you… or rather are taught to… assume that it happens ‘naturally’ (“stages of development…) you’re stuck in ‘power’s trap of ideology… in which ‘power’ hides behind so-called ‘market forces’… telling us over and over that money and credit are not determinative… O No!… They aren’t shaping it… its’ results ‘magically’ spring… from ‘the market’!

And hidden below… what we’re never told… it’s ‘power’ driving ‘sectors’ down low… it’s ‘power’ doing the pricing… while its sheepdogs concoct cakes and cakes of cons… and religiously apply… the icing.

What price can our minds and hands command… in ‘the market’? ‘Power’ pretends market forces determine it… They hide… they hide… they hide… Why does ‘hand’ always land… on the bottom? They decide what ‘labor’ can command… and then pronounce the result… ‘economic development’!

So… (as we asked last week…) what (or ‘who’…) determines who gets wooed… and in what way ‘wooed’… and who gets booted… and with what boot?

‘Power’ would have us believe… we do…. Here’s a quote from Galbraith… first quoting Bush from a 2007 attempt to con us… and then Ben Bernanke:

The fact is that income inequality is real; it’s been rising for more than 25 years. The reason is clear: We have an economy that increasingly rewards education, and skills because of that education. (George W. Bush, speaking in 2007, quoted on p. 147)

And Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, a veteran economist, gave himself over to reflections on the same topic a month later:

Three principles seem to be broadly accepted in our society: that economic opportunity should be as widely distributed and as equal as possible; that economic outcomes need not be equal but should be linked to the contributions each person makes… and that people should receive some insurance against the most adverse economic outcomes.

…Thus the prevailing view on the political right.

What is striking about these concerns, though, is how little they reflect the actual phenomena of rising inequality in America from the mid-1970s to the present. (James K. Galbraith, Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis, p. 147)

If, as we said last week, maintaining the cons is the most highly rewarded economic activity, this priority should be reflected in the ‘winning sectors’ James Galbraith identifies and discusses in his Chapter 6… on the U.S… an excerpt of which you can read on the Nascence website…

In recent decades in America, economic inequality increased. This was, however, not some general social process, widely spread across the structures of pay and income. It was, rather, mainly due to extravagant gains by those in finance and in the leading sectors of the day: information technology in the 1990s, and the military and mortgage booms of the 2000s. What is astonishing, however, is how few people actually enjoyed the income gains. At their peak of expansion, the winning sectors did not generate many jobs; at best their success facilitated job creation in the many sectors that did not, themselves, experience rising wages….

The deeper issue with inequality of this type is surely instability. That which rises like a rocket above the plain also eventually falls back to earth. And the problem with the trick of generating prosperity through inequality is simply that it cannot be continually repeated. The false starts to economic expansion since the Great Crisis in 2008 – so quickly depleted by rising oil and food prices – are a sign that bubbles are no longer a plausible way to generate economic growth. (p. 148 – 9)

Thus Galbraith found, what we know by now, that in the 1990s the winner was ‘info tech’, in the 2000s, military and finance … and… just after what David Gordon and his colleagues called ‘the Cold Bath treatment’ in After the Waste Land… the heightened level of organization and determination to ‘discipline’ us… in the 1970s and 1980s… the ‘winners’ then were those in ‘supervision’…

So… what is just as revealing for our objective to see ‘power’s vision… as the observation that some sectors of the economy are preferenced over others… is the tendency it had to bloat ‘supervision’ and ‘management’… a tend David M. Gordon identified and discussed in his book Fat and Mean: the Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial “Downsizing”.

'Profits'... in our mother-tongue funds but diminishment...

So… do ‘winners’ emerge in a haphazard manner?… or because ‘skill’ is being advanced?… who decides what is a ‘profit center’ in the global enterprise called ‘class’? I’ve been arguing it’s determined by what ‘power’ needs at any particular moment… and that it knows what it needs because it knows where it’s going… that it has a vision… which to achieve depends… on controlling the populace.

And we’ll ask, “well, then, what is a true view of ‘economics’… i.e. as a class construct?” And the answer also relates to a point earlier made… that our growing resistance to ‘power’s pressure to impoverish us… …our being born onto a ladder… in some ways drives these processes… this so-called ‘progress’….

And we’ll consider the possibility that what so-called ‘profits’ really fund… is the trashing of the planet… and of course ‘class’ ideologies… the conditioning of us to accept diminishment… the loss of our gifts… which is true wealth…

…so we’ll ask what is meant… in this context… i.e. in the context of the ‘privatization project’ of ‘power’… by a ‘falling rate of profit’… what does “falling profits” (globally) mean structurally?… we’ll be asking.

True wealth was stolen...

When I was nine or so… I went on a field trip to a farm… fruit orchards he had… this man… he talked to us about the trees… and then he picked a peach… and gave us each a piece. It was… revelation… I realized… I’d never eaten… a real peach… (not ‘peach’ as our ancestors named it…) before that day… and yet… look! …look at all those trees… enough for a sea of little girls like me.

And now… history not just repeats… but spirals into even deeper inequality… and it could be… unlike even me… my grandchild may never know the crisp ambrosia-sweet of a Fuji apple… or that heaven unfolds on the tongue when you taste… just picked…a strawberry sweetened by the sun.

True wealth was stolen… and in its stead was given… a web of obligation… and endless confusion… a life-long puzzle called “why… when the earth is so bountiful… do a infinitesimal few want to hoard this rich profusion… that the earth provides us freely… no ‘proofs’ asked or needed… that one is ‘deserving’… how could such gross mean smallness be… this violation of solidarity… that warps our world and keeps us all so small?”

Each human being is meant to grow and spread a vast canopy… we want to accomplish things… so just imagine how it will be… when our world is about applying our gifts to the problems defined by our own intelligence… (and ‘reason’…) and not to those assigned to it by ‘power?’

What makes the prospect of reclaiming our lives feel daunting is that we don’t have access to each other’s voices… all of our inter-communications are mediated – we are told what to think… what are the base parameters of appropriate discourse… what is allowable ‘thought’ – by the media. These are the assumptions that cross politics… that lie, in fact, beneath ‘politics’… that constitute the premises of ‘politics’ itself… which we are (implicitly) told we must never challenge.

So… how do we develop unmediated discourse? How do we reclaim our own thoughts… using an authentic earth-based language? How do we throw off the yoke of the master’s hold called “serving ‘progress’”? And how do we reclaim our children? How do we develop the certainty that we must be free… globally?

There’s nothing ‘radical’ about any of this – unless it’s radical to restore ourselves to health and happiness…

…we’re merely putting an upside-down world back on its feet again… allowing our world to rest on a restored, healthy, grown-up and self-sufficient populace…

Last week we said that true wealth is mommies staying and daddies playing with our children… but of course mommies can’t stay and daddies can’t play if they’re working all day.

Reclaiming our lives… a mass movement to end wage work… means… i.e. is the same as… reclaiming our children… as we cannot reclaim our children unless we own ourselves… again…

…and… if we own ourselves… then they (our children) are free to own themselves… they won’t have to turn themselves into commodities to please us… we can free them from captivity… by releasing ourselves.

So what holds us back? It is the fear that we cannot feed and cloth ourselves that inhibits us… but this is knowledge we’ve had for millennia… so this fear is baseless… this manufactured problem called ‘over-production’ means the earth’s abundance has been hoarded by the few… but we run the systems – of gathering, keeping, managing and distributing – so we simply have to agree to share.

So the real problem is our atomization… and so… finding ways to come together… in large enough numbers to begin discussing it… the consequences of letting it continue to exist… this atomization… and the space opened up when we overcome it….

It starts in the cities… as there numbers exist… with all of us bumping together… and it just makes sense… to take the burden off the countryside to feed us. The farm has been weighted with us for far too long… and the thing is… we want to do it… we’re eager to engage with life again…

…and ‘power’ knows it… look at the violence with which UC-Berkeley hoards it’s so-called proprietary hold on land – denying even a tiny piece to youth who simply want to help things grow… plants… and their brothers and sisters…

So… why do pundits… on the progressive end… fear to say what… once we start the process of analysis… will quickly be seen as obvious…?

If we truly covet knowledge then we need the earth to teach us… need the way of soils and sun… the animals… and all our sistren and brethren… all truth resides within them… and life is set to share it – as we possess the gift of empathy….

But…

…many of us have been children so long… we’re afraid to grow up… abused so long we’re afraid to trust our brothers and sisters… stroked so long we’re afraid to lose the recognition…

…but many of us are not… many of us are so ready we’d walk tomorrow easily in that new day… and do the work of twelve like-minded souls to see it flourish…

…and that’s what will secure our generalized human freedom… that so many of are ready… so many of us now want it…

…we just need to have some general ideas for how to start… and share these ideas globally… to seed and sprout in the particular soils where they’re planted… and let curiosity, love, and love-of-fun do the rest….

The means exist for us to solve our own problems... and only we can solve them...

Curiosity has ever been released in the world… it’s not going any place anytime soon… ‘life’ problem-solves by nature… and we as ‘life’ are the same… so being free just means a longer reach-out to the world… a stretch up and outwards of our curiosity… the means are there now to fully unleash it… expand and advance our problem-solving… our methods for understanding the nature of things…

…it’s just a matter of our willingness to share on a global level… on a bigger scale than that in which we’ve been trained to think in…

…but the distance-problem… thanks to Nikola and his many tribesmen… and women… has been solved… and we can help each other globally with ease… an advantage ‘power’ hoards as it does everything.

There’s an article in the May 30th 2013 Daily Californian, UC – Berkeley’s student paper, called: “Project enlists online volunteers to sort bug data.”

“Insect aficionados from across the world can now become part of a UC Berkeley entomology research team through a new citizen science project, which officially launched May 22… the original process, which included photographing each species and manually inputting antique label information for the 1 million specimens, was impossible with [the coordinator’s] small staff…. [Then] a… graduate student… reached out to Zooniverse, a citizen science Web portal that now hosts more than a dozen projects.

On Zooniverse, laypeople can help research projects by volunteering to complete laborious tasks in bite-sized chunks… Zooniverse helped create ‘Notes From Nature’ to complete the original goal of digitizing 1 million bugs in five years. The project made its beta launch this spring and rapidly gained experienced participants from the Zooniverse community.”

So here we have an example of a fairly innocuous manufactured problem… the hierarchical top-down thinking of UC – Berkeley… the sine qua non of atomization for ‘power’… and therefore the force of its supporting ideologies… inhibited it’s ability to seek help from freely-associating humans. But a young person… oblivious to the muck she was wading into… blithely reached out to grab the obvious solution… and… when the method is to tap into the people’s power… to attempt is but to do… and as the project nestled under ‘power’s wing… it called the question… and a quiet concession by ‘power’ to the force of the collective was made… a concession which in wider social circles it would never make.

And the truth is the problems we face are wholly caused by ‘power’… and that only we can solve them… it’s in ‘power’s interest to keep us burdened with them… and diverted from our seeing… them.

We know that ‘power’ exists only by staying hidden… and this means generally within lies and ideologies that it feeds to us via the school system… but secrecy becomes even more essential for it in the age of the Internet… when we can find and share the ancestors who left behind their guidance and deep longing to lead us from the trap onto the path to being free…

…so the new face of state violence must be hidden… either within ideology pumped up within us… or within clandestine actors…

…paid to create opportunities for seemingly legitimate state repressive action….

It is because they fear our thought that media becomes the private instrument of ‘power’… ‘power’… whether in the form of governments, or corporate interests… it’s remaining private that is the key… to keeping our thought tracking narrowly…

This need of ‘power’ for secrecy must be remembered when we’re told… or find ourselves fearing that the problems of the world are too massive for us to solve all on our own without masters…

…but the opposite is true… ‘power’s need for secrecy inhibits our ability to solve our earth and social problems… secrecy is only in ‘power’s interests… we want transparency… with transparency problems become hiccups… all difficulties are but easy when they’re known…

…and as an example let’s look at the military’s assaults on women…

The preferencing of 'mind' over 'hand'... as key to 'power's rule... supercedes money in priority...

…in a world of instant communication… all that’s needed is the bright light of encouraged and accurate reporting… reporting that’s supported at every point in the occurrence… whether incipient… onset… in progress… or effectuated… truth is carried into light…

…and if brought into a collected form… and reviewed by all and discussed… problems like this and other such would wither…

…and in another example… budget travesties… here in the Berkeley schools we’re witnessing money being diverted from a popular farm and gardening project to fund publicity campaigns for health agencies (April – May, 2013, California Teacher)… you’d have a hard time finding one parent of a small child who would think this makes sense…

…but we are rarely even told of such decisions… and those in charge prefer that we don’t ask… but once we arrive at the time when we decide… we’ll base our decision on what brings true health and happiness – defined as being self-determinative.

Returning to this issue of ‘the market’… and how it’s used to make and maintain ‘class’… and then the issue of how we can be sure of it… so we can finally develop the certainty… to begin a process of organizing… for the future we need… to be self-determining…

Almost twenty years ago, economist David M. Gordon tried to call our attention to a seemingly irrational inflation of supervisory personnel in large corporations:

And so there has been a massive income shift, within the total category of wage-and-salary employee compensation, from production and nonsupervisory earnings to nonproduction and supervisory salaries…. [Between 1973 and 1993]… nonproduction and supervisory compensation as a percentage of national income increased by almost eight percentage points, from 16.2 to 24.1 percent – almost two and a half times the Social Security shift, more than three times that for interest payments, more than seven times the reallocation resulting from the defense buildup. Where is the attention and public debate over that massive transfer And where is the proper concern about the impact of the push for more at the top on the persistent squeeze of production-workers’ wages? (David M. Gordon, Fat and Mean: the Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial “Downsizing”, 1996, p. 81 – 3)

David Gordon asked, “why is nobody talking about this… and then it only got worse… the preferencing of so-called ‘management’ or ‘supervision’… a version of the preferencing of ‘mind’ over ‘hand’… which we also see in the elevation of ‘high’… or ‘info’…tech… over ‘hand’…

Although David Gordon tended to see the seemingly irrational expansion of supervisory personnel as a death spiral resulting from the ‘stick’ strategy of ‘power’ beginning around 1970… driving wages ever-down… down… down… destroying the dream of security… a self-liquidating cycle of ‘stick’ – disaffection – more ‘stick’ – anger – more ‘stick’ – refusal – and then onward to ‘generating something new’…

What David Gordon almost twenty years ago ‘proved’… is that money has never been the primary motive of ‘power’… so if ‘money’ does not provide the guidance for what shape their decisions should make… what does?… is what we long ago should have been asking…

"Jakarta pays the check."

Last week we said that maintaining the cons turns out to be the most highly-rewarded economic activity… and in previous shows we’ve argued that the Plato-driven ‘citizen’ – ‘barbarian’ division… in any of the many guises of ‘mental’ – ‘manual’ ‘labor’… ‘insider’ – ‘outside’ provides the key divide…

…so preserving this con must necessarily be highly remunerated…

More than a decade ago The New York Times hosted a small roundtable on “The Ailing Economy,” subsequently publishing large extracts from the discussion. Participants included Felix G. Rohatyn, senior partner in the Wall Street firm Lazard Freres and a major economic policy adviser in centrist Democratic Party circles; and Walter B. Wriston, then chairman of Citicorp and Citibank and a member of President Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board. I also joined in the conversation. Moderated by the late Times’ economics columnist Leonard Silk, we roamed widely over the economy’s problems in the early 1980s and various prescriptions for their solution.

At one point in the discussion, talking about some of the structural sources of stagnant productivity in the U.S. economy, we turned to the huge size of U.S. corporate bureaucracies. I cited some recent management consultant studies that had suggested that as many as 50 percent of corporate managerial and supervisory personnel were redundant. We could apparently trim huge chunks of fat off the top and middle layers of those corporations, this seemed to imply, and the corporations would be able to function just as effectively at much lower cost.

One might have expected the participant from the business sector to rise to the bait, defending the citadels of U.S. capitalism. But they scarcely batted an eyelash. “I wouldn’t know” if expenditures for executive personnel are “wasted,” Walter Wriston replied. “The chances are half of it is,” he joked. “[Figuring out] which half is the difficult problem.”

I call it the “bureaucratic burden” --- the massive size and cost of the managerial and supervisory apparatus of private U.S. corporations. It’s one of the most stunning features of the U.S. economy. (David M. Gordon, Fat and Mean: the Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial “Downsizing”, 1996, p. 33)

Let’s consider the reaction of Walter Wriston as we ponder this question:

What does “falling profits” (globally) mean structurally… i.e. in terms of the ‘privatization project’ of ‘power’?

I took a class once that required me to write a paper on what was then called ‘interlocking directorships’… all these ‘power’-guys sitting on each other’s boards and whatnot… and I chose Citibank… I don’t remember much about it… but what I retained from that paper was this: Walter Wriston saying, “Jakarta pays the check.”

As a child reading this I wondered what he meant… and now I think it can help us… with “falling rate of profit”… along with Wriston’s blasé reaction… to David’s news of bloated management…. These guys know what world they’re making… one in which only certain of us… do the serious paying.

“Falling rate of profit” means we’ve been squeezed as much as we can be… but it also means ‘power’s slip is hanging… the underpinnings are getting exposed… we’ve fallen as low as we’re going to go… and we’re seeing the duplicity… in the tattered package called ‘economy’…

Under a hierarchical ordering of the world… there must be ‘winners’ and ‘losers’…

…now, we don’t ask a train that never had brakes that’s speeding downhill, “please stop”… no, we get off… we start building a new track… and we don’t look back…

Poorly-remunerated 'hand' subsidizes highly-remunerated 'mind'...

To rebuild our freedom we have to feel confident in our ability to get our food… a confidence dependent on our breaking down the atomization and reinforcing our self-created interconnections… i.e. we have to begin working together parallel to and independent from… as much as possible… ‘power’… which many among us are doing or starting to do… I just heard the courage of our brothers and sisters in Turkey has inspired a like-effort here in San Francisco… and the courage of folks working for Wal-Mart descending by the thousands upon its shareholders’ meeting… facing the fear of losing their livelihoods… fills me with hope…

…our challenge now is to begin consciously building our linkages globally… to begin seeing what we do as moving towards… as building… an entirely new society… one that replaces the current horror of a ‘class’-based ordering of the world…

…with one consciously designed for mutual aid, help, health, and happiness…

The confidence to begin organizing on the scale we need to win this thing… for ourselves and succeeding generations… something we’re not accustomed to doing… comes, I think, from facing reality… we have to trust our eyes… mind’s eye and otherwise… accepting all the evidence, as presented – highly condensed – by Galbraith… that the pattern is a weight that is sinking us all… and our responsibility to life as life… is to redouble our efforts to remove that weight… which requires mobilizing on the scale at which the weight is being applied… i.e. globally….

For ‘profits’ to exist, we have to turn our backs on our gifts… diminishing them… for the shabby goal of reinforcing illusions… for in reality… good food… eating well… is… or should be… a joy supreme… and we owe those and that which provides it… the same joy in their lives that we all prize…

…dismissing this reality… conditioning us to relinquish it… on this all the ‘profits’ rest… the trashing of food… the trashing of those who get our food… if all this true worth were not driven down as low as possible… treated as nothing… all the so-called ‘profit’ throughout all the other sectors would not exist… and we’ll find in time that the collective efforts of most of the highly-remunerated ‘sectors’… but trashes the planet… in the name of ‘conquering’ the earth…

and… this subsidization… of devastation… could not occur otherwise, than by the diminishment of true wealth… in our eyes…

If you can convince us all… that those who provide us our food… our joy… our happiness… aren’t worth much… then you can steal those ‘products’ at cut-throat rates… and use that pain to underwrite… fund… all the cons ‘power’ depends upon… to finesse all the alienation and theft… of the people’s power… our true wealth… the earth’s gifts to us all… naturally… indiscriminate….

To rebuild our freedom we have to start seeing reality… and seeing reality requires outing ‘power’… understanding how it hides… behind the lie ‘market forces’.

* " Draft of the planned June 16, 2013 show"

June 16, 2013: On today's Waking Up Radio Show we continued our discussion of what it means to defer always to ‘the economy’… asking how we can begin translating the issues encompassed by that word into our mother-tongue… an earth-based language. This discussion builds on Confidence is Everything – The Need for Theory from Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work… which was my first wade into these waters…

Does a 'wage work'system tend toward totalitarianism? Why aren't we discussing it?..

Once again I’d like to begin with an expression of gratitude for the courage and strength of our sisters and brothers in Turkey… and to add as well these words: whatever you decide know this… ‘power’ never forgets… will never let go determination to recover whatever they (temporarily… to their minds…) strategically relinquished… they will return in time to grab it back again… and more besides… grab everything we have that speaks to us of freedom… and the only ‘win’ we can achieve with any degree of permanence is the end of ‘power’… i.e. the end of concentrated ‘conquering’ energy… we have to face and eliminate that threat… and that threat is global… these so-called ‘kings’ convene in global bodies and converse together… their goal in common… to control the ‘cattle’… and we can only face them by concentrating our energy… linking hands globally… matching our thoughts and steps together… the time is now to begin discussing this.

No doubt ‘power’ schools itself in these global bodies to learn restraint…. It’s been clear to them at least since Bentham that discipline should be internal… overt violence is a losing play… they know it… our implied consent… our tacit obedience… is the only way to corral us over time… What did Kissinger say? How did he put it?

Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus. (Henry Kissinger, On China, p. 13)

The violence of the police you’re witnessing cannot be sustained… ‘power’ believes it should be used only in great extremity… and its goal is to appear benign… perhaps even mostly to itself.

I suspect ‘power’ tells itself that ‘force’… ‘coercion’… the enormous amount of violence used to force us off the land… and “‘compel us to ‘come in’”… by means of the various ‘enclosure’ movements over the centuries of final-stage-‘class’… destroying our ability to be self-sufficient… that this ‘original sin’ was (and continues to be)… an unfortunate ‘necessity’… to get the ‘engine of progress’ going… after which… once it’s rolling… ‘force’ can be withdrawn… if we’ve been well-taught… have become, therefore, ‘self-regulating’… (and… earth-knows at times we have to… jump through those hoops… Ted Fishman, quoted in Red Inc. reported from his visit to Chinese factories that “the ranks of managers are remarkably thin by Western standards. Depending on the work, you might see 15 managers for 5,000 workers, an indication of how incredibly well self-managed they are.” [p. 141])

…otherwise… absent our quiescence…

…they’d inevitably encounter difficulties sustaining the ‘happy-face-ideology’ that it’s all “for us”… that the ‘intelligent’ ones among us will ‘get it’ that we’re ‘benefiting’… though, certainly, ‘civilization’ has its costs…

But ideology is also coercion… is also massive suppression….

We're captured by cons... in the absence of alternative thoughts...

Today we’re going to be talking about the consequences of quiescence… and arguing that we have allowed certain ‘economic’ cons to sway and hold us… because we don’t hear alternative thoughts… because we’ve been betrayed… perhaps most insidiously by averred left pundits who tell us we challenge ‘power’ best by becoming peerless ‘rationalists’….

Apropos this I find Noam Chomsky’s rhetoric most insidious (this is a reference to his speech last week at the July 7, 2013 ‘Left Forum’ in New York City….)… and I don’t just mean that he never sits down… till he’s served around a heavy dose of doom-and-gloom. More derailing of a successful strategy… is that his speech generally reinforces the legitimacy of a narrow nation-state focus for our activism… on what is called ‘U.S. capitalism’… legitimating the notion that the problem is greed for money… not greed for ‘power’….

This matters because it defines strategic focus… and ‘guaranteed-leads’ to the solution “let’s make the economy fairer”… we’ll discuss this later… but the most disturbing tend I hear in Chomsky is the attempt to divert us from trusting our hearts… our clogged lungs and jagged breathing…. I even hear him… and this definitely raises my suspicion… along with David Brooks using terms and phrases used in our Waking Up discussions… e.g. acknowledging that to ‘power’ we are ‘cattle’… and that ‘power’ must stay hidden to exist… but redirecting them… away from a movement for our due leisure… and into… in Chomsky’s case… the search for perfect reason (subtly expressed)… away, that is, from a global mass movement… supporting each other with the single broad goal of reclaimed leisure… and into a notion of becoming ‘better’ ‘scientific rationalists’… now there’s a project to divert you for a lifetime… the endless search for ‘interesting’ things to dissect… now this could be but Chomsky’s predilection only… but, these days, I suspect all such coincidence…

The myth of 'sustainable growth and development... and the myth of 'mind-makes-wealth'...

There’s a scene toward the beginning of the James Cameron film Aliens in which the hero Ripley is being grilled to determine her guilt or competence in the destruction of an expensive piece of aviation equipment… and as the weight of the negative reactions around the table starts accumulating, she says: “OK, I see where this is going,”… i.e., “at this point there’s nothing I can do to turn this around…” i.e. she saw reality… she had certainty…

Well, I believe that we here in the U.S. should be looking around the global table, paying attention to the reactions of states around the planet to resource-contraction… see that governments everywhere are whispering in their citizens’ ears… or clubbing us with sticks… depending… about the ‘necessity’ of lowering our expectations… we… who could barely make ends meet as it was… are being told… ‘hold your breathes and squeeze in’… squeeze into those too-tight budgets….

And I say to them: “we didn’t make this mess, you did. We, on the contrary, made all the wealth… which you used to destroy our happiness and health… it’s time for us to ‘down-size’ you… and in the spiritual and material space that opens in your place… finally… we can start to live…”

So, in this show we hope to debunk the myth of ‘sustainable growth and development’… and the myth of “mind makes wealth”… ‘sustainable growth’ because it has such a hold on progressive thinking… distracting us from the only truly viable alternative… generalized human freedom. And ‘power’s already begun… grabbing that concept… fleeing with it at a run… returning with something far distant… from what it was… (and they’re doing this as ill with the word ‘communal’… and by-the-by we really have to get… that ‘power’ is exceedingly strategic and systematic… and that that’s the way you get… to your goal… and that we have to be likewise systematic… although as open… as they are closed… ‘open’ is our ace in the hole…)

…yet… as they return with our poor bedraggled concept… as it still bears its name… the unconscious amaze of many may take years to invade our conscious mind… by which time… we’ll be fried.

Because they know it’s a deeply held and shared goal… to live in balance as we did once… before the horror of ‘class’ transformed us… into watchers stuck in dull acquiescence… fed like pets while others plan the world…

…but how then if none are labeled ‘out’… none ‘in’… will the dirty work get done? Who will produce the food… fuel the military machine so the philosopher-statesmen can play at being kings?

Today we’ll address this question and others as we continue our probing… as we have in the last three shows… of this notion of ‘the economy’.

We’ll begin by summarizing what we’ve learned in examining Galbraith.

...drumbeat suggestive injunctions...

We see now the tend… thanks to James Galbraith and his book Inequality and Instability… and that it has momentum… which can only mean that it has a destination… …a destination-shape they are trying to make with bags of money as the scalpel… to realize a plan of ever-tightening totalitarianism…

…and we see the hand behind that plan… leading to that destination… as they gather in their boards of global finance… using money and credit and interest rates… to sculpt a world based on rank and ‘place’…

…a world where thoughts are given… and we-the-people perform with precision… and utter, complete… predictability… and willingness to set aside our souls… nothing less would let their troubled hearts rest… …or so they think.

And a destination means a plan… because you can’t reach one… without it… and their plan is the key to determining their policy… which means we can see it unfold systematically… and see that if we don’t intervene globally… we will be carried to that destination… like a boat swept helplessly downstream… if we don’t convene globally… (electronically…) and begin seeing another vision… a world in which we-the-people make our own decisions… and downsize… for all time… for all life… the philosopher-statesmen’….

And a destination underway… by those who play at being kings… means that we… their so-called ‘subjects’… are either taken by the hand… or booted… in order to move us to it…

…and as we are excused from this discussion… as we are but a factor in their calculations… we must ask ourselves these questions: “do we want this? Do we want to drift… asleep… through malevolent schemes? Do we want a world based on making tight spaces for our sisters and brothers to squeeze into? A world of making ‘winners’ and ‘losers’? Do we want a world of ‘rank’?”

And to keep us being subjects means… they must provide the thoughts we think… and these thoughts… the cons… must be repeated… across the political spectrum… ad infinitum… And this they learned from Bentham… that the people will believe with certainty… only if these are the only thoughts we hear…. And these thoughts are either pounded like a drumbeat in our ears… or radiate quietly from the rigid structures around us: grades… ranks… tests… monitoring… differential access to survival… differential access to the ‘good life’…

And these thoughts must never be called into question… must ever be heard without exception… and this means they must never allow us to think… must give us our thoughts… through their media and academic pundits… and our own thought consequently… cannot develop…

Here are the drumbeat suggestive injunctions: “protect the economy; fix the state; work hard and be productive; find your passion or your calling; earn your chance at a little rest; respect authority, it knows best; trust the experts to tell you true… to tell us who deserves due credit… and who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’… accept that rank reflects true merit… and true merit steadfast service; let our reason rule your heart, and let your heart be quiet; let our quest for perfection be your guide… as you are small and ignorant… and we are large and wise.”

All this can be determined… just by seeing… Galbraith’s pattern.

The myth is that 'progress' secures existence... this is what 'wage work' means...

And Galbraith also showed us how economists think… the unconscious cons of ‘class’ that grant it legitimacy… e.g. ‘progress’ means accepting that ‘inequality is built into the mental – manual divide’; ‘rank is ‘natural’…

We concluded that… to rebuild our freedom we have to see reality… and that seeing reality means seeing the tend… privatization… creating ever-greater disparities… and rising inequality…. In sum, we have to:

•            …see the tend… see where it’s headed – i.e. captive populations… a secured caste of captive hands that provide the food… the fuel… the base on which the global game of ‘supremacy’ can be played… an army runs on food… and clearly ‘power’ sees we-the-people… as its troops… made willing to serve… to obey… to do… to do what we’re told… when we’re told to… and despite what we tell ourselves we think… all this is what ‘wage work’ means… it means we serve unquestioningly… and though we may be confused as to who we give our allegiance to… the results speak true… whatever the ideology ‘power’ uses….

•            …see that the tend is global;

•            …see the con ‘progress’ is being used to divide us… to seize our land… control our hands;

•            …see that we’re hurting our children…

Seeing the tend means seeing the upside-down nature of ‘class’… that it runs counter to life – to what life needs for health…

As children we’re all taught the ‘stages of history’ ‘progress’-myth… which is essentially that ‘inequality’ is built into the mental-manual division… that this is a con to control ‘hands’ must be clearly seen… a lot of us still deeply believe in the distinction… and think that ‘mental labor’ is ‘better’… and ask: “who will do the manual labor if not those most fitted to it?”

(Of course the ‘urban farmers’ threaten the viability of this myth… and we’re seeing some erosion today of it… but the challenge is scale and coordination… and how to support a vast urban population…

…but… to rebuild our freedom we have to feel confident in our ability to get our food… and that means a network of folks… globally… who are committed to seeing this through…)

One day of a global mass strike and we will see... that we are everything...

Economists… as reflected in Kuznets… are taught there is something magical about so-called ‘mental labor’… that it “creates wealth”… and so would… as it encompassed more and more of the global population… create generalized ‘prosperity’…

(…economists believe… they are contributing… to the furthering… of ‘progress’… …the key con of ‘the market’ is that… through it… the ‘best’ arise… is identified… and so promotes the lie ‘progress’… when, in reality… it exists to ensure our common earth is made private… i.e. that they control all the resources of the planet… and if they control all the resources… they control… us… [so their strategy is to control both our minds… and our stomachs (bodies)]… …based in the fallacy of the ‘necessity’ of ‘inequality’…)

…and this being so, we find ourselves swayed by those who claim the world is organized to let ‘mind’ lead… and because we hear this like a drumbeat throughout our lives… we ignore the evidence of our eyes that this ship is sinking… and taking down all life… which is why Galbraith is important… he calls our attention to the obvious and tells us, “don’t ignore it!”

So the happy-prate-patter about ‘growth’ that is ‘sustainable’… when nothing has changed… and we are still chained… with statesmen at helms… holding the leashes… is sheer lunacy…

The pattern Galbraith identified must be placed side-by-side with the left-happy-talk… it should be a reality-check for progressive pundits… who say they want ‘power’s ‘economic model’ to shift… to something more ‘sustainably’ ‘economic’… when the helmsmen at the ships of state are in a race… and to them our place is only at the oars… and have nothing of interest to them to say… they will not stop… their goal is ‘rule’… to be a player among players is the place they choose… it’s time for us to say we too will choose…the lives we live… but that means working and planning in concert… as they do… and, most importantly… taking steps in sync…

The key con of 'the market' that 'the best arise'... is to hide the creation of a permanent 'underclass'... how else provide food cheap?

But far from this being what is being recommended on the Left… instead we hear reinforcement of the standard cons about a so-called ‘free market’… as if such a thing exists. When will we force these guys to switch to earth-terms… the people’s tongue… our mother tongue in which we put ourselves… life… first… a tongue in which to speak of our being free… not ‘the market’.

We-the-people are the source of the energy that fuels ‘economic activity’… and where do we-the-people come by this wealth? From the earth of course! But her store has suffered grievous loss… ‘power’s feasted on her flesh as if she could automatically regenerate it… as if ‘power’s simply wanting… could simply make it so… so like a loveless child… but earth cannot be eaten infinitely… and we are earth no less than the birds swinging through the trees… and we deserve to be just that free…

There’s no such thing as a ‘free market’ when what we see is the cost of food production being driven down artificially… ‘extra-economically’… and driving down the cost of providing food to the populace is accomplished by intentionally degrading some among us… targeted for our artificially-structured vulnerabilities. This is called creating (sculpting) ‘class’… creating so-called ‘winners’ and so-called ‘losers’… using the mechanism of the so-called ‘market’… sanctioned by the blind eyes of government… the state.

E.g. ‘payday loans’… no effective minimum wage… withdrawal of hope for material improvement [let’s use ‘material’ instead of ‘economic’… it’s more earth-friendly…] via credit-mechanisms… destroying the possibility of home ownership… which carries with it possibilities for income-generation and improvement of material conditions… even if only slightly it can be a critical margin… because it provides a base from which to generate income… ‘under the table’… in informal networks of mutual aid and bartering…

But ‘power’ want our provenance established… wants every one of us to possess clear, identifiable, masters… preferably discernable at a glance… which is why the notion of a racial caste was so appealing to them… and why they’ve now turned to ‘info-tech’ to solve this ‘problem’ of our resistance to being managed… perhaps embedded chips… like they tried to convince us to install in our pets… perhaps as a test… of our ‘malleability’…

Point being… they want a permanent underclass of despised and kept-pushed-down….

…they’ve always wanted this… and Galbraith has ‘proven’ they’re well on their way… and we’ve yet to even say… let’s discuss it… this clear pattern….

This determination to have a permanent class solution is deeply set… and has been their consistent and lively interest for almost three centuries… or longer…

We’ve seen since class began consistently repeated attempts to create a permanent ‘underclass’… or ‘outsider caste’… who have no chance of seeing above the high fence erected to convince us to rein in our ambition… to scale low our hope that necessarily comes… with having a vista… they want it settled once and for all… so… the issue of authoritarian rule will never be past-tense… till we decide to act together as a global populace… to consciously put it behind us…

You do the math… if all the economic activity we see depends on ‘cheap’ and degraded ‘hands’… and they’re disappearing… as we learned five years ago from Wallerstein… as we grow up and see what they’re doing… give ourselves higher vistas to see… what will be the means for providing food cheap? They may allow a few contained sporadic attempts at so-called ‘self-sufficiency’ projects… urban farms… backyard gardens… and such… but they will fight tooth-and-nail generalized human freedom. How will the game of ‘supremacy’ be played… if they can’t drive us to produce the things they need to keep playing kings?

“Who will do ‘the dirty work’ they want to know… Well, let’s tell them… let’s not wait for our cage-assignment… Let’s begin to think this through off-leash… pretend to be ‘freely-associating-humans’ until we wake up seeing that it’s true.

Because it's remunerated well... it seems as if the 'mind-work' is actually generating wealth...

Because it’s remunerated well… it seems as if the mind work is actually generating wealth… the force of ‘what-is’ is so powerful… and so consistent across the political spectrum… that simple truth is hard to see…

Waking Up includes my first wade through these murky waters… or maybe thick air is a better image… as it’s very much swirling around inside of us… coloring how we see things… limiting our sense of possibilities…

What confuses is that the word ‘wealth’ or ‘worth’ is confused in us… into our sense of personal worth… our once true ‘earth-sense’ has been remodeled… shaped to fit ignoble aims… the bottomless lust of statesmen … but our original ‘worth’ is always ready to return… and each one of us is in a different moment of that rebirth with every breath we take… each breath… we’re in a slightly different place… still… the attempt at synchronized step… not only must be made to save our earth… it is a deeply felt urge…

In Waking Up I wrote poetically because there’s no other way to describe it… out right to live our lives authentically… we’ve all been trained to think in the master’s tongue… which is a language at odds with feeling…

George Eliot spoke the truth: “feeling’s a kind of knowledge…” You have to feel it in your body… your right to be free… but if you don’t… that problem’s not insuperable … the earth continuously tries to reclaim her own… that too is a tend toward which we bend.

I’ve been trying to find the words to break the code on ‘worth’… ‘value’… ‘wealth’… to strip away the sham… see true ‘worth’ at last… by translating the seeming ‘economic verities’… of ‘class’… into earth-terms…

If, as I wrote in Waking Up, ‘wealth’ is human labor made manifest… then ‘hiring people’ is betrayal of self… and our brothers and sisters. It may be that this wisdom is only approachable and possessed in words such as this:

Hamlet: …while, to my shame, I see

The imminent death of twenty thousand men, [he’s commenting on a Norwegian army on its way “to gain a little patch of ground”]

That for a fantasy and trick of fame, [trifle]

Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot,

Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,

Which is not tomb enough and continent [a sufficient receptacle]

To hide the slain?

(Hamlet, III:8)

Shakespeare is all about explaining ‘power’ and helping us to distinguish true from false wealth… I think it bothered him – as it does most of us reared under the regimen of the ‘class’ system – that the knowledge of true wealth seemed so hard to hang onto – such that we would sacrifice our lives and our children’s… for a trick of vision (fame)… for some illusory gain of ‘power’…

The struggle between ruling elites for ‘power’… in this case the throne of England… in Shakespeare’s King John… inspires these musings in the character the Bastard, who has just witnessed the righteous motivation of the King of France fold upon being made… a suitable offer:

Bastard: Mad world! mad kings! mad composition! [agreement]

John, to stop Arthur’s title in the whole,

Hath willingly departed with a part,

And France, whose armour conscience buckled on,

Whom zeal and charity brought to the field

As God’s own soldier, rounded [whispered] in the ear

With that same purpose-changer, that sly devil,

That daily break-vow, he that wins of all,

Who, having no external thing to lose

But the word ‘maid,’ cheats the poor maid of that

That smooth-fac’d gentleman, tickling Commodity, [flattering self-interest]

Commodity, the bias of the world;

Made to run even upon even ground,

Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias, [drawing into evil]

This sway of motion, this Commodity,

Makes it take head from all indifferency, [out of all moderation]

From all direction, purpose, course, intent.

And this same bias, this Commodity,

This bawd, this broker [go-between], this all-changing word,

Clapp’d on the outward eye of fickle France,

Hath drawn him from his own determin’d aid,

From a resolv’d and honourable war, [determined upon]

To a most base and vile-concluded peace.

And why rail I on this Commodity?

But for because he hath not woo’d me yet.

Not that I have the power to clutch my hand

When his fair angels would salute my palm;

But for my hand, as unattempted yet, [for = because; unattempted = untempted]

Like a poor beggar, raileth on the rich.

Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail

And say there is no sin but to be rich;

And being rich, my virtue then shall be

To say there is no vice but beggary.

Since kings break faith upon Commodity, [upon = inconsequence of]

Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee?

(King John, Act II, Scene 1)

He uses ‘commodity’ to mean being tempted to self-betrayal… and what better proof of the truth of his words… than to see how we walk through our days so thoughtlessly… so forgetful of ‘self’… begging to be used…

They set the weight... the thoughts... that bend the world its way...

So we see that since ‘class’ began… ‘wealth’ has been a slippery concept… defined by those who had the lead… to bend reality such that we would necessarily – because the world was slanted… tumble after them…

In King John… a note at the back explains the allusions of ‘bias’… that it partly refers to a game of ‘bowls’… in which he who places the lead calls the tune…

In this the world is compared to the bowl in the game of bowls. Within the bowl is lead, which makes it turn, when rolled, toward this heavier side. The word bias is derived from the French ‘biais.’ (Yale Shakespeare, King John, p. 109)

And ‘biais’ as an adjective means slanting, sloping, askew, oblique; and as a noun means obliquity, slope, or (figuratively, shift or subterfuge… and ‘biaisment’ means shift or evasion; and ‘biaiser’ means to slope or slant, to lean on one side or to use shifts or evasions… I think we could also say… “to unbalance”…

…and all of us have simply been sliding around in that bowl for millennia… at the whim of the guys who set the weight…

True wealth is thus ever skewed based on the egos and madness of these tiny few… and as they have made the words… the concepts… the thoughts… which are the most important weight… that roll around in our heads… we tend to see ‘wealth’ as they tell us to…

“Why are we so easily led?” I imagine Shakespeare probably said… “why do so few still own the mother tongue… the earth… and through her know true worth?”

But he also knew the answer… as he also felt at times that even he had difficulty… hanging onto ‘self’… reality…

The world was made before him… and before him it was slanted… and we each all have our own role here to play… …to un-bias it…

…and set it right again….

So do criteria exist to help us distinguish ‘earth-truth’ – that which allows every human being to be self-determining… have the leisure and resources we need… to let ‘curiosity’… ‘interest’… and other earth-given-gifts lead?… instead of ‘necessity’… or ‘need’?… or “‘power’-lust-to-be-a-philosopher-king-greed’”?… ruling over… the globe… pretending to be supreme… disguising self-interest as service… telling us (essentially)… that it’s in our interest to remain as children… letting the ‘grown-ups’ make the decisions… and then con us into doing the work to realize them… harnessing our true power… while claiming that without them its worthless…–

…how to distinguish this… in proposed ‘solutions’?… ‘solutions’ for extricating ourselves from this global mess… of poisoned earth… and us… likewise… both discarded and trashed with such extravagance…

… how to distinguish this from what promotes health, leisure, and happiness? …not for an artificially-elevated few… but for all?

•            Does it force us off our land? Does it cause ‘earth-damage’… now or in the future?

•            Does it inhibit individual independence? i.e. is ‘force’ a factor?

            Healthy souls need a chance… to sit on earth they care for and feel it bear their weight… to have the option of being alone… and the option to congregate… which can be chosen or changed… as one’s soul dictates…

            So e.g…. no one could dupe us into believing we have no choice but to support the nuclear power industry… their attempt to do so we’d find funny…

•            And the flip side is… does it promote health and exuberance… happiness… for individual and collective humans?

•            A seeming ‘complexity’ in the rationale means… it’s consigned to the bottom of the ‘pile of possibilities’…

How do we know this?… because we’re picturing free humans…. Take that seed… that plant… what does it need to be protected?….

And… if we foster a sense of abundance… as we move into that day that enables self-creation… it could minimize minor arguments… so we’ll make lists of opportunities… that identify where help is needed… whether to give or to receive… and to be broadly-made will be so exciting!… Coffee Cruises… learning to listen to diverse ways … helping to heal polluted bays… traveling with the earth and sky… This is the time… to let longing fly.

But the challenge to tackle right away… is overcoming the fear… a belief only… that we have to sacrifice our leisure… the possession of our bodies… for some ‘good’ they tell us matters more than our lives… so we’ll learn to see through all such lies… and trust our body’s truth… that what we have when we’re relaxed… is not just our right… but our due.

* " Initial thoughts for the June 23, 2013 show": “Taking Issue With Wallerstein”

June 20, 2013: On our upcoming (June 23rd) show we’ll be examining some recent thoughts on this matter of ‘the future’ that I recently heard from Immanuel Wallerstein… perhaps taking issue with them a bit… to the degree we get fuller access to his comments… and we’ll be discussing ‘capitalism’ as ‘ideology’… and we’ll be asking… “How do we know that a wage work system… leads to totalitarianism?” We'll also discuss a section of Palmers’ Chat… As We Take Our Earth Back… A Call To Reclaim… Our Earth… Our Thoughts… Our Minds… It’s Time …that recalls Hesiod… (it's noted in the Table of Contents of Palmers' Chat…, "The Plan, Pt. 4… 'Seeing Reality'" , and Blog 48: The Responsibility of the Intellectual. )

WUR, Sunday, June 23rd, 2013: Taking issue with Wallerstein… discussing ‘capitalism’ as ‘ideology’… and… “How do we know that a wage work system… leads to totalitarianism?”

At least we have agreement that "'capitalism' is doomed"...

Let’s send some thanks and love to all the folks rising up… in Turkey… and now Brazil… thank you… thank you… thank you…. I have no words to express my grief at what you… and all of us… have suffered under the regime of ‘class’…or to express my joy at your courage in facing it… and transforming it into love and true power…

…and we know what makes it to the airwaves is but the tip of a huge insurgent ‘below’… we all know people are waking up globally… but we aren’t told what’s going on in Sweden… or Egypt… or China… or South Africa… or Canada… or the Ukraine… until the numbers are such ‘power’ can no longer pretend… it doesn’t exist…

And it’s important not to forget in this context… Galbraith’s point about the inability of nation-states to effect… to any great extent… the global tend called ‘growing disparities’ consequent to ‘capitalism’s [‘power’s] end…. As long as nations restrict their actions to those sanctioned by the ‘global market’… the degree to which… within that mindset… government policy can intervene in global tendencies… is limited to ‘non-existent’.

“We can’t all be Denmark… or… what are the'resources' we need for 'the future'?”

On today’s show we’ll be examining some recent thoughts on this matter of ‘the future’ that I recently heard from Immanuel Wallerstein… taking issue with them a bit… and we’ll be discussing ‘capitalism’ as ‘ideology’… and we’ll be asking… “How do we know that a wage work system… leads to totalitarianism?” … and I'll be arguing that a key barrier to moving forward with our global solidarity… is the fondness of 'mind-workers' for inventing ideologies…

We cannot let these guys tell us what is ‘wealth’… We cannot let them tell us it’s determined by a quantity or quantities… or some selection of commodities… by sums of labor-dense-stuff… packed… into the soul’s absence… and… we cannot let them tell us there must be differential access to this stuff… because… or so they tell us: “We can’t all be Denmark…”

“We can’t all be Denmark…” I heard Immanuel Wallerstein say ·** on my way home from last week’s radio show…. He was speaking at the June 7, 2013 Left Forum… with his usual straightforwardness and clarity… which I so appreciate… except… in this brief excerpt of his advice… I couldn’t make sense of why on earth… I would want to be Denmark… (which to say is not in any way to disparage Denmark…)

But… thanks to him… we seem to at last have consensus that “‘capitalism’ is doomed’”… I know because I heard – at this same event – even Richard Wolff say it… quite unabashedly, by the way… despite his having just written a book supposedly telling us how to ‘cure’ ‘it’… ‘U.S. capitalism’, whatever that is… he’s even admitted that what we’re trying to move beyond is global… and that a narrow nation-state focus is insufficient for anything like a useful strategy leading to a future that’s free…. Such is the degree to which more and more of us are now ‘seeing reality…’ that even Richard Wolff is forced to concede.

While Immanuel Wallerstein acknowledges that ‘democracy’ has never existed… he still poses it – or some future realized form of it – as the alternative to an ever-growing totalitarianism…. So… along with the professional left generally… his advice boils down to, apparently: “let’s make democracy real.”

But in Beginning Again (p. 34) I wrote that “democracy is a politics of want… of manufactured scarcity…” and that it exists at the expense… of individual power…. And Wallerstein’s words suggest he may be in agreement… as he seems to believe in this notion of ‘scarcity.’ Now… Hesiod, a farmer, knew better… and this a few thousand years ago, too….

He wrote:

For the gods keep hidden the livelihood of men.

Otherwise you might easily do enough work in a day to have enough for a full year with no further need to be working,

and might immediately hang up your rudder in the smoke of the fireplace

and release your oxen and hardworking mules from their labor.

(Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 42 – 46, R. M. Frazer translation)

What good is your argument, he asked, and your fat tastes, if “there is not a sufficiency stored within of seasonably gathered grain, earth’s produce, the fruit of Demeter?” (From section on Hesiod in Palmers’ Chat… As We Take Our Earth Back… A Call To Reclaim… Our Earth… Our Thoughts… Our Minds… It’s Time

If you study the ways of Demeter, Hesiod told us… Demeter, goddess of the corn… and know her secrets… then you will know “…how much more the half is than the whole….”.

Now every year our plum tree in one day gives plums enough to keep us in jam… I’m swimming in it as we speak… for a whole year… and that’s a single tree… in low-income Berkeley… covered in concrete…. So… you know and I know… the earth is rich and generous.

The system coming to an end is not 'capitalism'... but 'class'...

But… back to Wallerstein…

Now that we, apparently, are all agreed that “‘capitalism’ is doomed”… as it’s so tattered and besmattered (smirched with dirt)… that even ‘power,’ Wallerstein tells us… is done with the concept… has relinquished it and wiped its hands without comment… the issue now is… “what comes after it?”… or… “what do we do about it?”… ‘it’ being ‘the end of the exponential eating of the earth’… which is what the tag ‘capitalism’ meant in earth-terms…

(…it matters how you frame things…

…one way you’re interring abstract concepts…

…or pronouncing bankers punished for their greed…

…in the other…

…we’re standing with grandmother…

…and if we see…

…that we are she…

…the next thing is…

…we’re standing with ourselves…

…and then we’re free…)

(Last week we said that Shakespeare calls our attention to “‘the commodity’ as self-betrayal”… self-betrayal is how they get us in the cage.)

(And when Christian Parenti says… at this same Left Forum… that the state exists to secure the resources that ‘corporations’ need… what he fails to see… or neglects to mention… or omits… is that we are the key resource the state secures for ‘power’s use… that…

…the state exists for disciplining we-the-people… to sooth our restless longing to be free… to gently place the yoke… or order us with stern command… and heavy stick… depending… to accept it… or leash… or carpeted lush captive quarters… depending… as determined by what ‘power’ needs…

A recent report from Turkey noted that our Turkish brothers and sisters in Gezi Park all sang together… imagine if we called a one-day global General Strike… and in that day a time was chosen to sing a common song… when all the world would harmonize together… feel our souls in synchronized rhythm… and make the truth of global oneness for that one sweet moment concrete truth…

…and once we pick the day and time we tell all of our brothers and sisters… each one we see each day… about that moment… when the world will sing as one… and further our common vision of the world we want…)

Wallerstein… for reasons we’ve been exploring… is using the master’s tongue… and true wealth… true worth… cannot be expressed in the master’s tongue…

(…the master’s tongue is directive… not expressive… a tongue for reining-in and controlling… not releasing and freeing-up energy…)

When Immanuel said that all ‘systems’… (and by this word means… essentially… ‘systems of thought’…) have a certain life-span… exist for but a bit and then pass on… I agree… for this reason… they are premised on force… and force… in whatever form… can’t be sustained over time… because it doesn’t feel right… we resist it… we resist it… and so ‘power’ has to reinvent it… the rationalization for it is re-packaged….

(This is what Victor Hugo, perhaps, was describing but not seeing when he said:

The counterfeits of the past take assumed names, and are fond of calling themselves the future. That spectre, the past, not infrequently falsifies its passport. Let us be ready for the snare. Let us beware. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VI – XI)

And I just heard over the airwaves a quote attributed to George Bernard Shaw that says essentially the same thing: “Revolutions never lift the burden of tyranny, they merely shift it to another’s shoulders.”

It may be that Hugo and Shaw failed to see the reason why the dead keep trying to… not only walk but woo us… is that this vampire has for centuries hoarded all the certainty… and the means to keep us from harboring any of our own. And hobbled by the ‘progress-myth’ the ‘class’-trained ‘intellectual’ seldom sees it… sees that it’s not a matter of our moving through a stage of growth… but rather of our getting ‘power’ off our backs…. This was my challenge to Marcuse… in Beginning Again… who was making the same point Hugo and Shaw and many others make… about the ‘past’ seemingly reinventing itself time and again… despite… our efforts to move beyond it.)

…so… returning to the point I’m making as to why ‘ideologies’ come and go… because the cons applied to keep them alive are invariably exposed and resisted… they depend on coerced belief…. And Bentham explained how that installation of thought could be accomplished… but what Wallerstein did not say… and I hope he will consider and keep us apprised of his conclusions… is that ‘the system’ that’s coming to an end is not ‘capitalism’… which is but an ideology of class… but rather it is ‘class’ itself which… at long last and hallelujah!… with jagged breath is facing its demise…

We are in transition… and with this, at least, with Immanuel… and with Popper before him… I think we-of-good-heart can agree: it’s up to us…to not just bend that arc… but take it all the way this time… to freedom…

'Capitalism' as ideology...

In that news report about the song sung in Gezi Park… we were told it was from Les Miserables… which is what put me in mind to take up Hugo… for me he’s a treat I seldom eat… but I’m so glad that I this time took the hint… and for the synchronicity of being led to it… for as I was thinking about what Wallerstein said I read this:

In the nineteenth century the religious idea is undergoing a crisis. We are unlearning certain things, and we do well [to]… provided that while unlearning one thing we are learning another. No vacuum in the human heart! Certain forms are torn down, and it is well that they should be, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VI – XI)

There’s a sense in which ‘the economy’… or more particularly… ‘capitalism’ is just such an orthodoxy as this one Hugo speaks of….

Is it not orthodoxy to believe in notions like ‘developing the productive forces’… to view as righteous the transmuting… in our minds… of violent consumption (read: ‘trashing’) of the resources of the planet… into ‘progress’… beliefs shared across the political spectrum?…

…while living in balance… and possessing leisure (ourselves… our lives)… we’re conditioned to see as ‘backward’?

If ideologies fall they must either be replaced with new ones… or truth must finally be allowed to live… to stand unbent and move unencumbered… i.e. we must return to wholeness….

Rather than our hearts being filled… they must be allowed to find their flow through a self-determined process of exploration… to find their levels in subtle balance with the earth….

As a fervent intellectual of class… a believer in the myth of ‘progress’… Hugo seemed weighted at times with a ‘presumed preeminence of ‘mind’’… with the ideas folks said motivated them… instead of the results of their actions… e.g. in noting that ‘excess’ children were turned over to the monastic life and worked like mules… the most relevant fact is that food was provided… ‘hands’ delivered up the harvest… while for themselves they asked little… (this is realized self-betrayal…)

…but on the other hand he knew… and told us true… “facts are stubborn things… and hard to baffle…”

A wage-work system means narrowed vision...

When we concluded last week by saying that ‘earth-truth’ is that which allows every human being to be self-determining… to have the leisure and the resources we need to let curiosity and interest… our earth-gifts… lead… instead of ‘need’ or ‘power-lust-greed’… these ‘resources’ we need are not the same ‘resources’ that Wallerstein means when he says that “‘resources’ don’t exist” for all of us to “be Denmark”….

There is a common myopia among the so-called ‘Western’-trained… so-called ‘mind’-‘worker’… so-called ‘privileged’ strain of left professional… which clouds their vision… inhibits their ability to see… the full range of human expressive qualities and ways of being… the rich diversity of joy… and even of‘peace’… to have one’s heart filled with unburdened easy laughter… nostrils filled with dense enveloping green… mind filled with helping others build or craft a structure that merges perfectly color, line and practicality… these are the ‘resources’ I mean… enlivening still further vital leisure and necessary conviviality and good things to eat and nestle in our care… to watch a studded sky and know… the horror of drone-pollution is no more… these are the ‘resources’ I mean that we will experience commonly.

When I was a young woman just out of university… a woman I’d met at school who came to be a friend said to me that she counted herself among the fortunate to have escaped my fate of being black…. I heard her words in silent shock… it had simply never occurred to me that she… a left academic… well-read and sensitive… could possibly not see the degree to which her so-called ‘privilege’ damaged her.

This was a new thought for me… that sat in a slight depression in my soul… hollowed out for the purpose… for decades… for decades I would take it out and worry it again… and wonder at it… that she could not see that damage.

A wage-work system means we do not know each other… a wage work system means narrowed vision… a wage-work system means slipping into rutted lanes… where every time you try to move you roll back in again.

It is the center of a packaged set of bending tendencies… that turns us back to see only one way… one thing… the comfort of one possible ‘self’….

Limits narrowed artificially is a defining quality of totalitarianism… expressed in microcosm in the nuclear family… and found in every institution of ‘class’… and most of us are so much in and of it… we cannot see beyond it… until the force that bends those tendencies falls in… and we begin to see each other.

We have a 'left' / 'right' version of the same story... 'progress'..

I think it would be helpful to revisit Herbert Marcuse’s words (from Eros and Civilization) that I quoted in Waking Up (p. 200 – 201… "The Plan, Pt. 4… 'Seeing Reality'" )… about “the responsibility of the intellectual” [which is also the title of my Blog 48: The Responsibility of the Intellectual. ]…

…asking the question… “how would we translate his words… so very prescient… into our mother tongue?”

To the degree to which organized labor operates in defense of the status quo, and to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines, intellectual skills and capabilities become social and political factors. Today, the organized refusal to cooperate of the scientists, mathematicians, technicians, industrial psychologists and public opinion pollsters may well accomplish what a strike, even a large-scale strike, can no longer accomplish but once accomplished, namely, the beginning of the reversal, the preparation of the ground for political action. That the idea appears utterly unrealistic does not reduce the political responsibility involved in the position and function of the intellectual in contemporary industrial society. The intellectual refusal may find support in another catalyst, the instinctual refusal among the youth in protest. It is their lives which are at stake, and if not their lives, their mental health and their capacity to function as unmutilated humans. Their protest will continue because it is a biological necessity. (Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. xxv)

When he says, “to the degree to which the share of labor in the material process of production declines, intellectual skills and capabilities become social and political factors…” in earth-terms he’s saying: “to the degree the resources of the planet have been consumed and made private… and ‘power’ does not need us anymore to achieve these ends… and as its sine qua non of hierarchy and private control means they cannot feed us… and we must, then, necessarily… stomachs growling… get restless… what the ‘mind-workers’ do at that moment… this moment we’re in… could be determinative.” So what his words advise… and prophesy… most importantly… is a return of ‘heart’… of solidarity… to our global society.

...so a tiny few can play 'dress-up' in ill-fitting robes...

But… just to clarify what’s been happening to us… is it really a matter of having worked ourselves out of a job?… of being so amazingly efficient and inventive… creating the machines that reduce the need for… so many of us… and now as a result so many of us are lolling listlessly about the planet… reducing ourselves to redundancy?

To put it this way disappears ‘power’s logic and agency… hides it in some alleged inevitable process… called ‘the development of technology’…

…when… if conscious actors who shield themselves are returned to the picture… and so-called ‘natural’ tendencies are exposed as theft… it may be we could see all the machines and marvelous technology… so hungry for fuel, water, and energy… as the residual husks of a feeding frenzy… and our rich earth… in trouble below… is now decomposing flesh and bare bones… and that when we’re told the venom-topped tale that too many of us have over-stayed our hall passes… that we are the laggards… the dull ones… who consume resources but contribute nothing… except to the joint effort ‘destroying the planet’… the truth is in fact that the point of it all is the crafting of rigid… fixed… ‘class’….

And below the radar-screen of mainstream-media… the constant pressure never lets up… on our most vulnerable sisters and brothers… to accept the thankless role of bearing the burden… with their ‘unskilled’ and so ‘not-worth-much’ brutal ‘hand’-labor… so the ‘really smart ones can ‘save the planet’….

So what is actually behind… the manly phrases and lines… like “developing the productive forces”… is a systematic crafting of ‘two worlds’… and a con-job unparalleled… to keep us performing our given tasks… with our minds managed in such a way… that these roles… continuously made and re-made… get fixed in place….

So the point is not ‘progress’… or ‘benefiting the people’… not ‘developing forces’ so ‘economies’ can ‘grow’… not ‘managing most efficiently’ planetary resources… but rather for a tiny few to play ‘dress-up’… in ill-fitting robes….

And so the true point of Marcuse’s words… which scream out to be heard… is the plea that we see… our future is in our global solidarity.

·** I heard the replay of his remarks on KPFA.

* " The June 30, 2013 show"

WUR, Sunday, June 30th, 2013: ‘Mind-work’ on the margin” … and… “‘mind-work’ as the margin”… and… continuing our discussion of the connection between the wage work system and totalitarianism… Draft

A wage work system negates any attempt... to pursue happiness...

Nelson Mandela… I know you’ve done so much… but we need your influence now… so please get well… ‘power’s plan for us is malevolent… and we are rising to challenge it… but we haven’t yet achieved global momentum… we need your influence now… so please get well… it’s not time yet to rest. We send you strength and love… just as you have given us.

And we’re sending love and strength to our brothers and sisters in Egypt… who have paid so dearly… and are now determining… to not settle for re-packaged tyranny… our hearts are with you… and Brazil… and Turkey… and China…

…and here in the U.S. with our brothers and sisters in North Carolina… who are taking part in a NAACP-sponsored action called “Moral Mondays” ¨** – facing the threat of arrest and harassment – standing up to a state government trying to wipe out the meager income protections that exist there… drive down the quality of life still further… hundreds arrested so far… Stay Strong… we salute you this morning…

I also heard this week about the retaliatory firings of folks abused by Wal-Mart and we will be asking during this show… is this stress ‘happiness’?

Why are we giving our allegiance to a wage-work system that we can now clearly see is not just abuse but an anachronism… (always was… but now we can see it…) it negates any attempt… to pursue happiness…

And before we begin I also want to comment on something that is part of the global tend to expand the growing gap between them ‘the market’ – i.e., the weight ‘power’ places to keep us subjugated and to shape the world it wants – …the global tend to expand the growing gap between them ‘the market’ smiles upon… and them it sees as its spittoon or punching bag… keeps drenching us (as per its customary tactic) till we agree to not want much of anything at all… beyond what ‘power’ gives us… but this time will be different… I trust… as this time will see a forging of a global solidarity….

My comment is this… the attempt to placate our uprisings with promises of new infrastructure… libraries… buses and like stuff… is the policy counterpart in ‘power’s thinking to the neutron bomb of old… which killed people but left infrastructure standing… they do not care about us… and in many cases they literally do not want us around….

So when I hear the Brazilian state tell Brazilians, “just relax we’ll buy you buses…” and here in Oakland folks abused by BART and AC Transit are told likewise… I recall my trip cross-country where I marveled at the glory of the libraries… in all the struggling cities…. There is a plan… don’t doubt it… in which the cities being made for ‘not-us’ but for the future iteration of ‘citizen’… the ones who fulfill their given roles without complaint… who are either beat-down… or elevated… as their so-called ‘merit’… as determined by ‘the market’ (or some new name that they give it)… places them… some will get the stick… others the carrot… while the dress-up gods look down upon us… and yet feel no calm within their troubled hearts….

But this is just my nightmare… never fear… we will not let it happen….

––––

What in a wage work system speaks to us as 'happiness'?

Today’s show will be about … “‘mind-work’ on the margin” … and… “‘mind-work’ as the margin”… a margin in that artificially elevated ‘middle’ that tends towards ‘power’…. We’ll be asking several questions… e.g….

• Why does it matter what so-called ‘mind-workers’ do? …and…

• As we in the U.S. have a codified right to ‘pursue happiness’… are we on the Left abdicating our responsibility in not seizing this advantage… and forging a model for moving beyond ‘power’ that serves as beacon for the world? …and…

• Are pundits on the Left more deceived or deceivers… in following lockstep the gods of ‘rationalism’? …and…

• What could they do to move toward true solidarity?

• So… we are asking… essentially… what is ‘solidarity’… and what is ‘betrayal’? And how do you tell the difference?

…and… we’ll be continuing our discussion of the connection between the wage work system and totalitarianism… and ask, “Is there anything at all about this wage system that speaks to us as ‘happiness’?

I have been arguing that while our future is global… we here in the so-called ‘West’ have a particular role to play attendant upon our greater responsibility… bestowed on us (unintentionally) by our so-called ‘masters’… in assigning to the region… or at least the light-skinned within it (broadly speaking)… the broad designation ‘mind-workers’….

So… in living where the ‘mind-work’ is… or… being in the ‘knowledge sectors’… which condemns those of us within them (and of course without) with darker skin… ‘outsiders’… consigned to the so-called ‘hand labor’ sectors… weighted with the thankless role of being… the ‘brute-force’ for the world…

(…and… recall… this ‘brute force’ allows us to eat…

…and light our homes…

…and fire our cook-stoves…

…so those who bring these necessaries are in the truth the heroes…

…on them existence rests….

So when we stop and think we see…

…that the enormous force of ‘states’…

…whether with official status…

…or the ones that lurk in shadow…

…is designed to push ‘hand labor’ low…

…artificially…

…and then the dollars flow… up from all this pain…

…to the so-called ‘workers with the brains’…

…who invent amusing toys which ad nauseam we’re told is “making money”…

…and that the thoughts they have is ‘wealth’…

…and that from them proceeds ‘the good life’…

…when in reality…

…all we have sprouts from that seed ‘brute labor’…

…and the earth…

…forever… they hope… priced artificially low…

…by ‘the market’… we’re told….

And all the marvels of technology… which make ‘our’ lives so easy…

[…if you ignore the silent horrors that are so suffocating…]

…‘power’ ‘owns’…

…and so steals undue credit.)

(They so want to seem to save us, don’t they?…

…to think, “how enlightened is their guidance! …

…and their management of the world!”…

…and to think, “how hard they work!…

…to save us from ourselves…

…though of course the dullards cannot see it…

…see that the world they are making…

…neatly packaged and efficient…

…is the most benign and perfect of machines…

(…if the dim-witted would only stop complaining…)”

…‘benign’, they think, because they tend it…

…because they know best… into infinity…

…looking down from Mount Olympus…

…making surgical adjustments…

…via issued commands to their emissaries…

…and overseers to impose…

…the greatest happiness on us…

…if only we would see…

…how perfectly happy we should be…

…that they… the best minds of the very best…

…are taking on all the difficulty… all the complexity… for us…

…to achieve the greatest ‘good’…

…if only we could see it…

…all for us…

…so we can remain as children…

…innocently play…

…mindlessly frolic…

…“feed our bellies like the beasts”…

…keep our lives tenuous and brief…

…easily released…

…as we go peacefully to our beds…

…to our beds without complaint…

…as good dogs go… we go quietly…

…letting go our useless worry…

…ignoring nagging thoughts…

…that ask why exactly did we live…

…when we forfeited our dreams and longing…

…so new energy can step in…

…take our places…

…in the boxes…

…where we keep… work … work… working…

…on and on…

…into infinity….

––––

The codified right to 'pursue happiness' is an advantage that carries greater responsibility...

I have been arguing that while our future is global… we here in the so-called ‘West’ have a particular role to play attendant upon our greater responsibility… and as sheer happenstance has placed me in the U.S… I feel bound to attest… that our codified right to “pursue ‘happiness’”…

(…the Declaration of Independence says, “that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it…” language Bentham warned against, by the way, as it suggested precisely what we’ll see Hugo is advancing [below]… an equivalence in significance for determining our lives between the demands of the body politic… and the demands of the soul… which demands… for love… equal standing…)

…is an advantage… that carries with it even greater responsibility… perhaps the greatest of them all… the honor of being first to forward as a mass the demand… for an end to concentrated ‘power’… and a welcoming in… of global freedom. (But I will gladly follow Egypt… if it should be that way… that it ends where it began….)

Last week I argued… as I did earlier in Revealing Division… that a key barrier to achieving our global solidarity… is the fondness of ‘mind-workers’ for inventing ideologies… contributing (…unconsciously and so unintentionally…) convenient content for ‘power’s con that the world ‘must’ have division… because ‘technological complexity’ requires it…. When, rather, I believe the truth is that we all are bursting with creativity… and that ‘power’ exists by stealing some (a very small sum) of our creativeness… then elevating it in ‘the market’… calling it ‘wealth’ and pricing it high… then telling us the market is responsible for its existence… that we are driven because of ‘it’ to be creative… and, that the further goad of ‘keeping products (‘wealth’) private’ is the companion piece… a ‘linked-necessary’… for ‘creation’ even being in the first place…

…then uses the scam-entire as whip to drive us….

But take the measure of this story… as compared to ‘power’s tall tale… and we’ll find it fits the facts of our lives very well… see no adjustments needed… no tweaking… bending… or cutting-out wholesale of these facts… and that it’s the story we should use… because it’s true.

And the biggest snipping-out of all… in ‘power’s house of horrors… is the burying of ‘true wealth’… in suppressing the true power of the people.

(And I should clarify that when I say that ‘the market’ “prices ‘mind-work’ high and ‘hand-work’ low”… this is obviously a tendency that has been centuries in the making… it’s already a tend well in place… so it in fact is effectuated simply by making sure that ‘hand-labor’… the work that brings us our food… and fuel… and everything we need to literally exist… by making sure that it’s priced low… by beating down people…. And… true… that is not ‘the market’… that is often the extra-legal action of states… often hidden or shadow ‘states’… but the result is what we need to be looking at… not the terminology… not the language… which ‘power’ owns… and has always used since it owned it… to confuse us… lead us astray…)

––––

We have no means to know ourselves except through these mediations of 'mind-workers'...

Last week we said that true wealth… true worth… cannot be expressed in the ‘master’s tongue – and this ‘master’s tongue is often called ‘rationalism’ – a linear kind of thinking fond of classification… and abstractification… as ‘classification’ … and abstractification… snips out the most important things to be dismissed… for ‘power’ to rule us… it snips out ‘feeling’… and it snips out us… and so it snips out caring for each other… and our plant and animal friends… and our earth-entire… and replaces it with ‘struggle for existence and / or recognition…’ depending on one’s ‘standing’… in the market.

We’ve been conditioned to see ‘rationalism’ as the key to efficiently managing the resources of the planet… and so the key to any chance of freeing ourselves from necessity… i.e. hunger… and having any chance of comfort… i.e. security…

And so we cling to those who claim to be it… rationalism… ‘Mind’ personified… and distrust our own common… intuitive… ‘feelingness’… and in no small part because we’ve not been allowed to sit with it… i.e., have leisure… and it’s been so manipulated… seized and used as entertainment… made victim of the ‘making-use’ voracity of ‘class’….

Depersonalizing the story… e.g. using the phrase, “the rate of profit declines with the growth of the middle class globally…” as opposed to: “we resist diminishment…” and… “they cannot keep pushing us when we push back…”

…depersonalizing the story …inventing abstract concepts… and presenting them as ‘forces’… that then become the ‘actors’… what are given agency in the story…

…contributes to a cloud of confusion in which we are not shown ourselves back to ourselves… and so never get to know what we are… and often question our existence… as we’re kept… here in the ‘West’… so atomized… and have no means to know ourselves except… through these mediations of ‘mind-workers’… and…

…converted to abstract concepts… we’re led to see ourselves as passive subjects… drifting through the musings of pundits… buffeted about by mysterious larger ‘forces’… which we then need ‘mind-workers’ to explain for us… which reinforcing structural dependence…

…but the truth is not complex… the truth is ‘divide and conquer’ conquers us on every level… and we regain access to ourselves… our power… by regaining access to each other… our brothers and sisters… and the earth… and to prevent that pundits play a critical role….

––––

To achieve a broad existence on earth... to realize in ourselves more and more of this truth called 'the infinite'...[is also] Tesla's sense... feeling... of science...

I’d been pondering that word ‘bias’ we spoke of last week… along with the comment: “to be broadly-made will be so exciting…” when I read this:

Let us not take anything away from the human mind; suppression is evil. We must reform and transform. Certain faculties of man are directed towards the Unknown; thought, meditation, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, meditation, prayer, these are the great, mysterious pointings of the needle. Let us respect them. Whither tend these majestic irradiations of the soul? into the shadow, that is, towards the light.

The grandeur of democracy is that it denies nothing and renounces nothing of humanity. Close by the rights of Man, side by side with them, at least, are the rights of the Soul.

To crush out fanaticisms and revere the Infinite, such is the law. Let us not confine ourselves to falling prostrate beneath the tree of Creation and contemplating its vast ramifications full of stars. We have a duty to perform, to cultivate the human soul, to defend mystery against miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd; to admit nothing that is inexplicable excepting what is necessary, to purify faith and obliterate superstition from the face of religion, to remove the vermin from the garden of God. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VII – V)

Now this opens with words very like my opening poem in Waking Up: “There’s an earlier wholeness… for which our souls long… our interior compass tends towards it… and what’s called ‘reality’ feels wrong…”

…and moves through notions very like what Nikola Tesla told us:

Every living thing is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance. There is no constellation or nebula, no sun or planet, in all the depths of limitless space, no passing wanderer of the starry heavens, that does not exercise some control over its destiny – not in the vague and delusive sense of astrology, but in the rigid and positive meaning of physical science.

More than this can be said. There is no thing endowed with life – from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the numblest creature – in all this world that does not sway it in turn. Whatever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and universal motion results. (Nikola Tesla, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, p. A-172)

…and closes with a statement of a project that Tesla, I suspect – and I – depending on the definitions… believe we’re part of… “to obliterate superstition from the face of religion…” I think Hugo’s ‘religion’ is the equivalent to Tesla’s sense (feeling) of ‘science’… and that lies… superstition… cons (e.g. ‘economy’)… are vermin in the garden of God… the infinite….

Last week I challenged us to see ‘the market’ or ‘the economy’ as orthodoxy… a fraud… i.e. a pollution of reason and of faith (as Hugo uses these terms) in the garden of God… and ‘God’ is the name Hugo gives to ‘the infinite’… which has many names.

To achieve a broad existence on earth… is this not what our souls… our bodies… our minds… our wholeness… is hungering for? …to realize in ourselves more and more of this truth called ‘the infinite’?

‘Excellence’…a step in the realization of this truth… is its own reward… we need no ‘drivers’ to it… the human soul cleaves to the questions it owns… and seeks those others who also own them… seeks to mate and match them… and develop those questions… and the fleetness of our thought is such that we can further many projects all at once… just as Marx saw clearly in his youth… the soul tends to bigness.

––––

Words matter... and feeling excised means 'performance'... on the job... and under orders...

So… to my pundit brothers and sisters of the progressive persuasion… and I mean of course the ones who are of good heart and sincere in their intentions… this may express the meeting point of my concerns:

…words matter… and I say this with the end-point ‘freedom’ at the forefront of my mind… words matter because we-the-people want and need words to matter… are tired of meaningless chatter and empty speech… when language – words – our first creation and our best… because on them depend the meeting of all challenge… the first word of ‘success’ in our survival… our ‘chief arm’… as Kropotkin put it… in our struggle not just for life and health… but for life and health exuberant… the conditions that allow the flowering of all our gifts without exception… depend on it… on language that cements our bonds because it’s honest….

Language is the first thing ‘power’ stole from us when it turned words to betrayal… and weighted them with lies… then language ceased to matter much… except as entertainment… as mere mind-gymnastics or diversion to see who could tell the biggest lies… but for sharing hearts and strengthening ties between us… words became meaningless…

…for knitting us together… they were lost.

So do not say what sounds nice and means nothing… use abstract concepts full of air… then blow this effervescence into our faces… or up into the skies… to pop as nothing… forgotten in due time… or make them into animatrons relating to each other only… sneering at mere life… and laughing at us for not knowing the perverse logic that creates them… telling us we’re dull-witted for not grasping it… that we’d be ‘smarter’ if we cared about dead objects… when instead our eyes drift to the skies and we wonder… “how long?”… and how to get beyond this reign of death… and back to reverence for the earth… and for each other.

Words matter…. So before you bombard us with glib chatter… please pause and look into your hearts and see that ‘content’… and if you find nothing… please be silent.

And if you look into your heart and learn that you don’t care about us… we-the-people… please don’t share your empty thoughts… but rather repair to home-base… and repair.

Conning us requires a heart-in-hiding… as does a so-called ‘rational mind’… which is but ‘Mind’ objectified… ‘Mind’ truncated with feeling excised….

And a mind without feeling is a mind to be used… as Alice Miller told us… for any purpose to which ‘authority’ (‘weight’) turns it….

(Think about what wage work does… when we’re on the job… when we’re told to excise feeling… so that we may be… more useful… to ‘authority’….)

––––

We are defined by the structures we are born into... we have to be the ones who design them..

So what could on-the-Left ‘mind-workers’ do to move toward true solidarity? …the ‘mind-workers’ who see themselves as ‘helping’ us… as providing the information and the ‘understanding’ that we-the-people need… to insert ourselves as actors… in that far-away long-distant ‘some day’… that never comes…

…is there some better use pundits could devote their ‘thinking’ to?

…that might even as a bonus restore excised bits and lead them back to wholeness…?

In what follows I suggest that the answer to that question lies in taking personal ownership of the actual, physical earth they see around them…

…what amount of it would allow true fellowship to flourish?

…and what would true fellowship look like… given our technological inheritance?

Hugo used the word ‘community’ in the way I use ‘fellowship.’ He believed that only in perfect community lies the true body politic… and that only in the true body politic can justice exist…. He wrote:

Where community exists, there likewise exists the true body politic, and where the latter is, there too is justice. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VII – IV)

…and… as ever and everywhere under ‘class’, we can recognize in this example how critical Bentham’s notion of keeping a hold on the lexicon… controlling the definitions… and, as a sub-set and function of this… as a means of getting to… and being in… our freedom… likewise we must put on the table and keep our hands on… what we want… the fundamentals of village design…

(…let’s start talking about it before… ‘power’ does… let’s get this conversation well under way…)

…designing the basic components of village life that support communal verve… that constitute, therefore, the framework for our lives….

(We are defined by the structures we are born into… we have to be the ones who design them.)

I think we have to design a ‘high-minimum’ standard of ‘village life’ that we ensure becomes the basis of every village that exists… once we have our freedom… (and I don’t mean coercion when I say that word ‘ensure’…)

I found an interesting 13th century version of this in the George C. Homans book English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century…. He found a “thorough-going equality in the use of all the resources of the village….” (p. 83) There were even common stewards and common bulls and boars called the ‘free bull’… and the ‘free boar’… so-named because they roamed about freely… fertilizing females as needed… I’m sure across the world there’s innumerable examples of such identification of resources shared in common… that comprise a version of the ‘ideal-communal-village’….

Now obviously the common resources of today are expanded… we have as our communal legacy… the development of communications and transportation technology… but this doesn’t mean we may not also want a common ram (…which I mention as… I’m particularly fond of sheep cheese… though resigned to never having means for keeping it about the house….)

Point being… there once was interest in identifying the components of a decent village worthy of the name…

…we’ll one day return to this question…

…of the good life.

Hugo, again, is relevant…. He tells us:

For ourselves… we will only say that we do not comprehend either man as a starting-point, or progress as the goal, without those two forces which are the two great motors, faith and love.

Progress is the aim, the ideal is the model.

What is the ideal? It is God.

Ideal, absolute, perfection, the infinite – these are identical words. (Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, Book VII – VI)

So… his ‘progress’ and his ‘perfection’ is not the ‘progress’ and ‘perfection’ of these ‘power’-guys… and their pundit-helpers… adorers and adepts… of rarified concepts… of ‘Mind’ as supreme ‘object’… their damaged soul’s chief artifact….

What our ‘pundit-helpers’ don’t get… is that the world we want hasn’t even partially existed yet… not since class began… and that we have to begin envisioning it… and discussing it… so as to turn our world onto a new track…

What they don’t get… is that we want a complete flip…

…and being thus… so oblivious… means…

…they feel no hunger for it… as Robert Shaw… the writer and actor saw and said… so many decades hence… “these guys ain’t bothered…”

Mr. Slattery asked: “Father Rockingham why can’t we just grow our own food? Why can’t we just do that now?”…

“Because those who could manage it, could organize it, could start it, don’t care to,” said the old man. “They’re not bothered,” said the old man.

“Ah,” they all said. And nodded their heads. “Ah yes. That’s it.”

(Robert Shaw, The Flag, quoted in Blog 39: “Round And Round And Round We Go But Not Merrily”)

Simple as that… “…these guys ain’t bothered…” they’re fine… to their minds they’re livin’ large… they’re having a good time… being treated like ‘mind’ personified… when ‘heart’ is what we need… not phony thinking…

…and for ‘heart’…

…we need each other.

Somehow we have to see ourselves… because if we can see ourselves… we will want ourselves… want… fiercely… as Robert Shaw did… to lose no more children to this system….

We have to want ourselves to not throw ourselves away.

The great voices… our great ancestors… who did not throw themselves away… (and who wanted the same for us…) who were our spokespersons… gave us what we need… to end ‘class’…. If that’s not what you’re doing… you official spokespeople over the airwaves… then why are you wasting our time… a.k.a…. our lives?

Why I love Robert Shaw...

¨** This was a news item on the June 26, 2013 Democracy Now!

* " The July 07, 2013 show" (Return to top)

(Part 2 of this discussion (beginning with the July 7, 2013 The Waking Up Radio Radio Show) is posted at: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2) …and Part 3 at: Classifying Will Not Bring 'Class' To A Close

…continue on to part 2…

* …return to top…

Nascence to End Work

Beginning To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 1):

Taking a Look At The Galbraith Book… and What It Means To Defer To 'The Economy'

(These discussions are excerpted from The Waking Up Radio Show

…beginning with the July 7, 2013 show at: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2)

and beginning with the July 28, 2013 show at: Classifying Will Not Bring ‘Class’ To A Close: The Case For Not Labeling Our Future Freedom …and beginning with the August 25, 2013 show at:

Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided…and…

Bentham's Strategic Verities)…and…

Conversation with Joel McIver …and…

See also: Excerpts from Galbraith's Inequality and Instability

"Getting To Our Future Freedom")

“…economists perpetuate the con that ‘inequality’ is built-into the ‘mental’ - ‘manual’ divide…” i.e. “‘mind’ makes income…”

What Kuznets Meant

We are told that some must be made virtual slaves… because… “there’s no other way”… (the ‘TINA’ myth)…

The fallacy of the 'necessity' of inequality...:

‘Power’ encourages us to see all the ‘complexity’ as inherent in ‘the system’ instead of inherent in us…

...and to convert 'life' into 'thought' is called "creating wealth"...:

Notice that this so-called "canonical Kuznets movement" strips us of our ability to be self-sufficient... so 'growing up' turns out to mean... 'staying children'...:

'Power' (coercion) drives down the cost of food... to subsidize... everything else...:

“We can’t all be Denmark… or… what are the'resources' we need for 'the future'?”

(Part 2 of this discussion (beginning with the July 7, 2013 The Waking Up Radio Radio Show) is posted at: To Rebuild Our Freedom (Pt. 2) …and Part 3 at: Classifying Will Not Bring 'Class' To A Close