March 10, 2014: Joel's biography of Rage Against The Machine is now available. If you’re interested in checking out his book, you can visit: Joel’s site or: the Blabbermouth site.
[…see also: Staying Focused on Designing A Future… On Not Getting Divided… where partial transcripts of The Waking Up Radio Show are located.]
Conversation with Joel McIver:
The Waking Up Radio show of March 16, 2014 will include discussion of Joel's book. Please join us.
The transcript for this show can be found at: “Miklos Nyiszli’s Lessons On Class”.
British writer Joel McIver is the author of several books on rock music and is currently researching for his upcoming biography of Rage Against The Machine. The theme of ending a system that serves the few brought him to Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work, and he got in touch. We spoke on 09.02.13. His questions to me are italicized.
What led you to write Waking Up?
I think I’ve been pondering ‘work’ my whole life, one way or another. And now that I’m a grandma of a two-year-old, and get to play with a lot of two-year-olds, I see that it’s a question we all start out with, under ‘class’. We start out honoring our body’s truth: listening to what it tells us feels right, and what it tells us doesn’t, but we get subjected during the course of our lives to a lot of propaganda that convinces us to distrust that original ‘truth’, our original questions that arise from the conflict between what our bodies tell us, and what we’re told we must do to be ‘successful.’ In my case I always loved words, but could find no way to honor that love, and live. It took an injury when I was working as an electrician to lead me back to writing, and to beginning to read more seriously about the issue of ‘work’.
What is your personal history when it comes to this subject?
I started out jumping through the traditional hoops – grades, higher education. After which, if you’re a person of conscience, you’re faced with the challenge of how to “make a living” without violating your principles. I think I’ve explored almost every available route to doing that, so I’ve done a lot of different jobs, most of which had nothing to do with my love of writing and words. When a job did involve those affinities – writing grants or whatever – they were serving someone else’s agenda. And it’s difficult to believe in one’s gifts, until you wake up, when they aren’t offered monetary compensation.
What is the nature of the system for which we work?
This is an interesting question, more complicated than it seems.
Because the means it employs – acquisitiveness – is what we see, often the Left tends to reduce it to these observable practices, confusing means for ends. But I believe that what it is, is evident in its results: hierarchy, ranking, class, the privatization of planetary resources, the systematic removal from the hands of we-the-people of the means to reproduce our lives independent of those in whose hands the wealth of the planet has been placed… i.e. we are made effective ‘slaves’… ‘slaves’ in the sense that we are not self-determinative. So I would say that it is a mechanism for appropriating planetary wealth and concentrating it in the hands of an infinitesimal few in order to maintain the dependence of virtually the entire population of the earth on that infinitesimal few.
But the question is made more complicated by our implication in it. Hierarchy by definition creates layers of reward (‘salary’ and ‘recognition’) and punishment (‘low or no wages’ and ‘invisibility’), and all of us to some degree serve as representatives, or manifestations, of ‘the system’ as well. It was in fact Jeremy Bentham, writing around the turn of the nineteenth century, that explained to ‘power’ how to accomplish this: how to implicate us in our own ‘management’ (enmeshment). Bentham provided the guidance to ‘power’ – not seen with the level of clarity and detail he offered since Plato – for how a tiny few can control the vast majority, by means of such ‘layering’ techniques and other mechanisms of social control – guidance that reflected and up-dated Plato.
All to say, the system’s fundamental goal and nature is not accumulation for accumulation’s sake, but rather to establish rigid, fixed class divisions… i.e. its goal is fundamentally totalitarian.
And ‘wage work’, therefore – by which I mean coerced work – is the crux of our diminishment as human beings in a class system, and as such, ending this practice (of forcing us to market our gifts) would usher in our freedom.
What is the currency of that system?
I believe that human beings are the key wealth that must be kept in private hands. It is only by commodifying the energy of human beings that the system – based on reproducing increasing disparities… creating ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ – can exist.
Surely everyone should expect to have to work?
Jeremy Bentham, the British philosopher, said in 1781 that “labour is our inevitable lot” – but it is not. And the very absence of any discussion of the question – of whether it makes sense to commodify human energy – seems to me to speak to the existence of an organised elite determined to thwart our beginning to have these discussions, generally, across the globe.
How an issue is framed biases our responses to it… and our experience obviously does as well.
Sweet Content
Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex’d?
O punishment!
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex’d
To add to golden numbers golden numbers?
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour bears a lovely face;
Then hey nonny nonny – hey nonny nonny!
Canst drink the waters of the crisped spring?
O sweet content!
Swimst thou in wealth, yet sink’st in thine own tears?
O punishment!
Then he that patiently want’s burden bears,
No burden bears, but is a king, a king!
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour bears a lovely face;
Then hey nonny nonny – hey nonny nonny!
(Thomas Dekker, 1575 – 1641)
Until I entered the trades I’m not sure I would have understood or appreciated what Thomas Dekker knew and appreciated. What he knew… and what George Sand knew:
Yet Nature is eternally young, beautiful, and generous. She sheds poetry and beauty upon all beings, upon all plants which are allowed to develop fully in the country. She possesses the secret of happiness, and no one has been able to steal it from her. The happiest of men would be he who, working intelligently and laboring with his hands, drawing comfort and liberty from the exercise of his intelligent strength, should have time to live through his heart and his brain, to comprehend his own work and that of God. (George Sand, The Haunted Pool)
They knew that it is ‘force’… the pressure of ‘necessity’… that weights our backs with worry… it is ‘the whip’ of command over us that wears raw our nerves… and that, under the command of our own intelligence, our own powers of analysis – and sweetened with the honey of communion… ‘work’ once again becomes but ‘life’.
If we agree that ending coerced work would usher in freedom from necessity, or generalised human leisure, why do we not believe we can achieve it? Particularly as the arc of history does bend toward generalised human freedom – and it’s bending fast right now because of the internet. These times present us with altogether new terms for our resistance: the capacity to unify globally, within a single generation, and our thoughts must catch up to these new terms.
Who are the shadowy paymasters who enslave us?
I used the term ‘pitiful power-drunk few’, and drew on the vampire image – people who feed on other people – to describe them in Waking Up, but it’s not accurate to paint them as malevolent. I believe these ten thousand guys or so are not malevolent but rather loyal to their ‘tribe’ (though going by results alone it’s difficult to tell the difference.) They certainly don’t see themselves as malevolent. Jeremy Bentham believed he was “the most benevolent man who ever lived…” despite devoting his life to trying to figure out how to make the majority better servants to their ‘betters’. If anyone’s a villain it might be Plato. And I give constant thanks to Karl Popper and his work The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, for helping me to understand ‘power’s motives. He wrote during the spread of fascism across Europe and was trying to call attention to the roots of totalitarian thinking in Plato.
Plato set the goal lo! these many years ago – rigid, fixed, class divisions (“no change”) – writing to defeat a vigorous anti-slavery movement… and we will ever face a totalitarian threat, until we consciously move beyond it, by ending ‘class’, the wage work system.
But these people are not evil?
These would-be ‘philosopher-statesmen’ are born into a carefully-sculpted reality, an experience that creates a belief in inherent (‘natural’) class divisions. From their perspective… and Plato’s… ‘the people’ are child-like, if not beasts, requiring patriarchal guidance. And, of course, it must be a very heady feeling to feel one is part of a governance structure for the world.
Isn’t it a normal human trait to want to conquer and succeed, corporately as everywhere else?
A recent examination of archaeological evidence found that prior to 13,000 years ago, human remains bore no evidence of violence. The author argued that war was an ‘invention,’ like ‘art’. In Man Makes Himself, V. Gordon Childe described the ‘invention’ of slavery in the discovery that human beings could be domesticated like non-human animals. But these were self-reinforcing departures from an inherent tendency toward co-operation, sharing and mutual aid. Petr Kropotkin illustrates this in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, arguing that mutual aid is an evolutionary advantage across species.
Do you suggest a socialist model for your new society?
Jeremy Bentham warned ‘power’ about the importance of “controlling the lexicon”… which means controlling the definitions, i.e. controlling the very thoughts we can think. What I’ve learned, with the help of Karl Popper and others, is that a key tactic of ‘power’ is to seize upon ideas that reflect our deep human longing for solidarity… for sharing and cooperation… for good fellowship – and try to own them, turn them into concepts that ‘do work’ for ‘power’ itself. This is certainly true for the words ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. So I believe it’s time to describe – using ‘earth-terms’ – the future we want, describe it in very concrete terms that cannot be co-opted.
Why has no large-scale socialist society lasted long?
I think because we have been misled… encouraged… to define the problem inaccurately, as not one fundamentally of ‘class’, management, rank and hierarchy… but rather, of greed. This misdirection is of course convenient for ‘power’ and intentional. Moreover, because ‘power’ is global, our future freedom can only be achieved by working together as a global humanity.
Surely our society is one of our own making, and exploitation in the workplace effectively our own fault?
We unwillingly reproduce the terms of our own enslavement, which is why thinking through how this happens, i.e. developing an accurate analysis of how it is we find ourselves nose to the grindstone… in survival mode… unable to develop our earth-given gifts, is a necessary first step – because the terms need to be established before change can occur. So when Rage-Against-The-Machine calls for a revolution, there needs to be discussion both of the basic premises of the system that exists, and simultaneously discussion of what the basic premises of that new world will be. The problem needs to be defined accurately in order for us to see the contours of its alternative.
People often feel crushed by their jobs because of the vertical boss-dominating-underling hierarchy of the corporations in which they work. But isn’t that structure necessary?
Some people think that hierarchy is natural… and that corporations, or organizations in general, reflect this supposed key divide between those who need to be guided and those who gravitate to leadership and control. It’s possible you could have said of me as a young woman that I tended to hang back and require guidance, but what a person is at any one time does not define them. Over the course of our lifetimes, all of us go back and forth between many roles. Studies on ‘hierarchy’ tend to be snapshots, reflect moments in time, abstracted out of the movement and flow and trajectories of our lives.
The few cannot govern such that the interests of the many are honored. The more who directly participate in decision-making, the more perspectives are represented, the better the decisions.
In Waking Up, you mentioned a general strike as an objective. On this scale, the general strike you’re calling for is effectively a revolution.
As John Trudell said, we don’t want revolution: we want evolution, because with revolution you just get back to where you started. I think of the progressive claiming and developing of our unique gifts as a spiral, sweeping ever out – embracing more and more – and up, as we develop them. I like the way Maxim Gorky put it:
I know the time will come when people will wonder at their own beauty, when each will be like a star to all the others. The earth will be peopled with free men, great in their freedom. The hearts of all will be open, and every heart will be innocent of envy and malice. Then life will be transformed into the great service of Man, and Man will have become something fine and exalted, for all things are attainable to those who are free. Then people will live in truth and freedom for the sake of beauty, and the best people will be accounted those whose hearts are most capable of embracing the world and of loving it, those who are most free, for in them lies the greatest beauty. They will be great people, those of the new life!…
And for the sake of that life I am ready to do anything at all. (Maxim Gorky, Mother, Chapter XXIV)
This future will be the opposite of what we have now, because now everything is based on our selling our gifts. The opposite of that is expressing our gifts rather than alienating them. As Emily Dickinson said, ‘Reduce no human spirit to disgrace of price’. What we are born with is inherently co-operative, curious and joy-seeking. In the world that we create, power will be indistinguishable from beauty, and ‘work’ indistinguishable from ‘life’.
Define power in this context.
The image I use for ‘power’ (meaning, this narrow elite of ‘philosopher-king’-hopefuls) is an invisible boulder sitting on top of all of us. Now, ‘power’ must conceal itself to exist, Bentham schooled ‘power’ well on this, so this heavy weight of ‘power’ is never consciously seen or acknowledged. It’s never discussed, so it’s invisible to us. All that is discussed, and so all we see are these stunted versions of ourselves… bent, deformed and damaged. But once organized ‘power’ is off our backs, we can begin to grow straight again.
Are corporations, and the relative freedom in which they operate when it comes to making money, the root of the problem?
How the problem is defined is critical. Alfred O. Hirschman in The Passions and The Interests, pointed out, quoting de Tocqueville, that if you can get the many chasing money, it leaves the few who play the higher stakes of ‘power’ freer to pursue their ambition. And that ambition is global supremacy… and in this global game of ‘power’, we-the-people serve as fuel. Our lives – consigned as they’ve been to ‘power’s purposes, have ‘historically’ (i.e. from the perspective of self-creation) – been nullified. But the Internet, thanks to Nikola Tesla and his tribe, has finally shifted the terms in our favor.
If we see the problem as being caused by corporations, then the solution put forward is to limit the corporations’ ability to make profits, which will do nothing to return our earth-given gifts to our exclusive use. Corporations serve as privatizing means for ‘power’: consolidating the resources of the planet in private hands. So we need to ask ourselves what would put those resources in our hands.
And of course the most determinative resource for how the world is shaped is ‘we-the-people’.
Isn’t the problem simply the fact that most of us can’t visualise any other way of life than getting up every morning to go and work in return for a monthly salary?
Our original truth and our unique gifts are ever with us, awaiting the conditions that validate them. I think we-the-people long to use our gifts, long for good-fellowship, long for that world based on different operating premises, but we never hear this truth expressed anywhere. The media does not allow discussions about ending class, ending the wage work system, over the airwaves. But there’s a very real hunger for a world beyond rank, division and coercion. When Occupy-Oakland was just starting, in 2011, they called for a general strike and within days, 20,000 people came. The initial excitement was profound, the sense that what was being challenged was the core of the system itself. But then, as happens until we frame a more conscious resistance, there was infiltration, there were acts of violence, and ‘power’ had its necessary cover for dismantling the encampment.
Do people generally assume that they can’t give up their boring job because they need the money?
Definitely. People have to survive. That doesn’t mean that we can’t think about the broader global frame for how we should live our lives, and how to shift that frame to allow self-creation, at the same time. I think it’s a process of giving ourselves permission, of taking ourselves seriously, of honoring our gifts, and trusting the source of those gifts – essentially re-directing our allegiance to these sources, and away from ‘power’. When enough people begin discussing how a world based on generalized human freedom (leisure) could work, and want to see a demonstration of how this world could work, there will be one. There is no technological or material reason why we sell our human gifts to the system.
We don’t have a ‘knowledge’ problem, we have a ‘power’ problem.
So what concrete steps should people take?
We need to get discussions going of what the fundamental premises of this system are, and therefore what the opposite premises would be. These discussions would open up a spiritual and mental space for those who want to create a world based on those opposite operating premises. When the Egyptian revolution happened in 2011, they identified three initial operating premises: no division, no violence, no leaders. Those are useful beginning premises but I’ve argued that we should substitute ‘coercion’ for ‘violence’ in our thinking… in our defining of the problem… if our goal is to end ‘power, because ‘coercion’ points squarely at ‘power’… while ‘violence’ (‘power’ has ensured) points to us….
So perhaps the basic operating premises of those of us who want to establish a very different world… a future that’s free… must be: “no division… no coercion… no leaders…” – because our ultimate goal is for the species to grow… and if that movement were defined as “a mass movement to end wage work”, it would be very difficult for agent provocateurs to undermine.
Why do we need so much discussion?
Plato said that the most dangerous thing of all is to let the people think: ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ means that our thoughts are mightier than the sword. One authentic thought leads to the next and to the next until power can’t contain them any more.
Where could people go to set up this new life?
Public land, if sufficient numbers called for it, could be designated ‘communal,’ as perhaps part of a pilot project to test the viability of self-sufficient Earthship communities.
What would these new communities look like?
Michael Reynolds, the architect and designer of a solar-powered house called the Earthship, offers us a model for a community that is self-sufficient, requires zero energy inputs, recycles its own waste and so on. I use the ‘Earthship’ as a device to make the case that there are no technological or material reasons why we sell our human energy. I believe we need that psychic space that discussion opens up for those who wish to build a self-sufficient community to do so. It’s our future – working together freely, co-operatively, not under conditions of coercion.
So who will do the dirty work if this utopian ideal comes to pass?
Dirty work won’t exist, because work can’t be dirty when you’re working with your natural gifts. That poem by Thomas Dekker – “Work apace, apace, apace, apace; Honest labour bears a lovely face…” – captures the truth of our bodies well. It was fun working on a crew as an electrician. I still miss it. It feels good to work with our hands, just as it does with our brains. We deserve it all.
Major change is at hand, then?
I believe so. It feels like an endgame, with the necessary convergence of both environmental and economic crises, and with the Internet providing the means for our thought, our powers of analysis, to be shared and grow at a rate which it couldn’t before. ‘Power’ counts on being able to suppress alternative ways of thinking before they can build, which now can’t happen. Immanuel Wallerstein has written that the US is a wounded tiger and not a paper one. Well, I believe that this ‘power’ system, this system of class, is also a wounded tiger, which means that it’s extremely dangerous because it’s struggling for its very survival.
What’s the bigger picture here?
As Immanuel Wallerstein also said, the problem isn’t capitalism or corporations: “Capitalism is doomed. It’s no longer possible to have serious accumulation of capital because the costs are too high in terms of purchasing power. Capitalism as a system depends on lots of people working to create surplus value that ends up in the hands of the few, which results in polarisation. The issue is… what will replace capitalism.” Our thoughts give us permission to go through that door to a very different future.
(Interested readers can find Joel McIver at: www.joelmciver.co.uk)
NEWSE (The Nascence to End Work Savings Endowment)
P.O. Box 3952
Berkeley, CA 94703
phone: 510.420.8054
Well, all right now, make us know it.