waking up - freeing ourselves from work

[We are at a crossroads.]

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 2)

The Role of the State as Enforcer

 

* "The only way podrunks could shove this monolith down our throats was through...the deus ex machina of the state."

 

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work

 

Preface

 

I. Being Bossed

 

II. The Two Winds

(1): "Alchemy"

(2): "The State"

(3): "Capital"

(4): "Science"

(5): "Values"

(6): "Theory"

(7): "The Ancestors"

(8): "Our Bodies"

(9): "Solidarity"

 

III. Progress

(1): "The Lost Child"

(2): "Nesucom"

(3): "Us Vs. Machine"

(4): "Being 'Smart'"

(5): "Force"

(6): "Complicity"

(7): "What is Progress?"

 

IV. Culture

(1): "The 'Culture Con'"

(2): "We Are All Tribal"

(3): "We Are All Artists"

(4): "Cauldron of Resistance"

 

V. The Plan

(1): "Preface"

(2): "Seeing Reality" - i

(3): "Seeing Reality" - ii

(4): "Seeing Reality" - iii

(5): "Planning" - i

(6): "Planning - ii

(7): "Planning"- iii

(8): "Taking Action" - i

(9): "Taking Action" - ii

(10): "Taking Action"- iii

(11): "Taking Action"- iv

(12): "Taking Action" - v

(13): "Taking Action"- vi

 

The Role of the State as Enforcer

 

So how did we go from being people to being workers?

 

Just as the manual-mental divide and submission to external authority are not ‘natural,’ nor is it natural for human beings to treat themselves as commodities. What Karl Polanyi showed us is that such a perverse result required the intervention of the state.

 

When all work is shared together, when we are all ‘One,’ there’s no meddling with the books, because the oversight is open, transparent, and available to all.

No one is exempted from the work of feeding the group. No one is exalted as “the brains of the operation,” possessed of magical powers of prediction – so special that he or she must be excused from the mere grunt work of the majority.

I’m a fan of director Brad Bird (particularly The Iron Giant) so don’t get me wrong. But in his recent films he seems to be polishing the message that the conventionality of the hoard smothers, makes it impossible to recognize, the truly special few.

This is one of those scams perpetrated on the essential goodness of the many intended to invert truth. It’s exactly backwards. In reality it’s the few who need to believe they are masters of the universe that impose on the many the dream of conventionality. We sleepwalk through life for no reason at all. We collectively live this dream, which explains the punch of a film like The Matrix. The shock of essential truth can bowl you over. We so rarely see it.

 

‘Politics’ begins with the first ‘priest’ able to convince his tribe to let him advocate on their behalf with the spirit world – whether for rain or game or fertility. Perhaps that priest was the metaphorical serpent in the garden, convincing us that knowledge was something that lay outside ourselves.

 

Political power is the ability to induce others to labor (while exempting yourself) – which means it is effectively limitless. And the more labor you can compel, the more political power you have.

The wage is only one way to compel labor. However you can get others to work for you – whether through love, violence, or simply confusion – if their work preserves, or ensures the continuance of, things as they are (that is to say, your exemption), and you have compelled it, it counts for you as political power.

Though it may be a tiny amount, most of us have some. Most of us are complicit in this system, and given in exchange for our complicity some infinitesimal portion of political power.

The wife who withholds her ‘love’ until the husband finds work wields her tiny bit, and the husband who demands and receives his wife’s unpaid work at home – likewise.

Compelled labor in class society is qualitatively different from the freedom of uncoerced labor – premised on the ‘tribe’ – typical of non-class societies, the type of labor which, if we continue on the planet, will one day return to fashion – but with a very different technological backdrop.

 

‘Modern’ class society ushered in the commodity form, a neat trick I definitely recommend you explore further. * The trick of it lies in its appearance as one thing while being another; hence its victims (as it was first being imposed in England of the 16th century) said it presented a “counterfeit countenance [face]” to the world.

 

"Oh what a goodly outside falsehood hath."

 

Look at any bought object you rely on, a cell-phone say, * and quite invisible are the relations of exploitation necessary for it to have been painfully assembled and shipped to some outlet for you to discover as if it blossomed there on that shelf as naturally as wildflowers on warm hills (I accept the possible existence of wild things as an act of faith, trapped as I am in tightly-packed urban America.)

In order for objects to be produced and sold as commodities, including human labor, we have to be stripped of all means of providing for ourselves independent of those who want us to work for them.

And given how unnatural the ‘request,’ I’m sure you appreciate it took some time, and a lot of violence.

Imagine asking it of any other undomesticated animal:
“Dear Mr. Wolf, would you mind very much if we removed your teeth? In exchange we’ll give you this lovely harness and allow you to pull for us. We’ll also give you food, shelter, and perhaps health care (if you agree to work extra for it), but only while we need you. Of course when we don’t, you’ll be cut loose and on your own…The fact that you no longer have teeth is your problem.”

 

* "...the deus ex machina of the state..."
The commodity form leads to the rigid imposition of fixed divisions in society: the separation of conception from execution, the manual-mental divide, and the submission to external authority – all of which are alien to our natures as living things. The only way podrunks could shove this monolith down our throats was through “extra-economic” means. Karl Polanyi explains this definitively in describing the deus ex machina of the state.

The new law provided that in the future no outdoor relief should be given. Its administration was national and differentiated. In this respect also it was a thoroughgoing reform. Aid-in-wages was, of course, discontinued. The workhouse test was reintroduced, but in a new sense. It was now left to the applicant to decide whether he was so utterly destitute of all means that he would voluntarily repair to a shelter which was deliberately made into a place of horror. The workhouse was invested with a stigma; and staying in it was made a psychological and moral torture…  It was at the behest of these laws that compassion was removed from the hearts, and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of secular religion. The mechanism of the market was asserting itself and clamoring for its completion: human labor had to be made a commodity. (The Great Transformation, p. 101-2)

We were forced into this deal. The common lands, the use of which had been guaranteed since the inception of class society, were enclosed and privatized. Podrunks – across time, space, and nation – go mad when you talk about preserving or extending the commons. Privatization is their mania. They are the big, wide-open mouths that Erich Fromm wrote about so compellingly in The Art of Loving.

In Joel Bakan’s The Corporation:

Michael Walker, an economist who heads the Fraser Institute…responded with an enthusiastic “Absolutely!” when asked whether he believed every square inch of the planet should be under private control. (p. 114)

They can never be sated. They are never full. They can never have enough.

None of us commoners, either of Europe or anywhere else – signed up willingly for slavery. We were forced off the land, our commons enclosed or destroyed, for the express purpose of turning us into “workers.”

 

No, the tense is wrong. This ‘past’ is not ‘past.’ The only way the current system can continue is if privatization and dispossession continue, without cessation. Podrunks can never be ‘done’ with land grabs and slum-building; else, whence their ‘profits’?

Barack Obama describes beautifully what this process does to people, and our cultures:

Yet for all that poverty [in Djakarta], there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.
It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld [housing project in Chicago] so desperate. …How could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?
Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River [in Chicago], joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair. (Dreams From My Father, p. 183-4)

What was astonishing to me as I read Barack Obama’s memoir was not the broad sweep of what he knew – an ease of grasp I’m still struggling to attain – but the heart with which he ‘knew.’

Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar at Yale University, explains the podrunks’ impoverishment imperative in this way:

The issue is not whether capitalism will continue to exist or not. It’s doomed. The issue is what will replace it. 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 produce surplus value that ends up in a few hands. This results in polarization. If thirty percent of Indians or the Chinese are middle class…a lot more money has to go into their hands. So the world level of profits declines with the growth of the middle class globally. And they consume an enormous amount of goods – food and energy – so you see prices go way up because there are more people who can afford to buy those products. Now there could be a substitution – Americans consume less as the Chinese consume more – but there’s resistance to that…One way is to reduce labor costs…bring in rural populations at lower wages, but we’re running out of them. Within the next twenty-five years they’ll be wiped out. (Interview on Against the Grain, KPFA Radio, April 28 and 29, 2008)

As capitalism runs out of sixteen year-old girls in Djakarta, Cavite, Lagos, Sao Paulo, Tijuana, with their dexterous fingers and endurance, fresh from the farmlands their governments grab, the families their governments impoverish, with their good hearts and heroic shoulders, whatever will capitalism do?

In that interview Wallerstein added that when production – making things – can no longer return the rate of profit podrunks want, provide their raison d’etre, they redirect their ‘capital’ to finance, “which is simply speculation, which leads to high unemployment, wider disparities, and debt.”

 

We are at a crossroads.

 

Our dilemma today is an interesting one – we’re confronted by a “mystery” to which the solution is known, and has been known for centuries.

The solution is “a mass movement to end wage work.”

Think about all the energy the podrunks expend to convince us we are nothing and they are all.
Hungry?
A corporation will give you food.
Cold?
Some company must provide your coat – or fuel your humble abode.
Want a house?
Prostrate yourself before a bank.
It’s impossible to maintain the illusion of freedom. When was the last time you saw an undomesticated animal waiting in line to be seen, to speak, for permission to think?
“Can I…? Is it possible to… Um… I’d really like to… Why not? Please? But I’ve been waiting…”
The more desperate our dependence, the more bloated with self-importance they grow.

Remember Bush at the $800-a-plate fundraising dinner: "This is an impressive crowd – the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites, I call you my base."

And check out the photo essay Vincent Bugliosi put together in The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. Now that we’re in the final months of his abominable romp over the dead, dying and exhausted he’s finally not grinning so much. Maybe he feels the wind from below breathing down his neck. I hope so.

 

In the Introduction to his 1972 book Working, Studs Terkel wrote:

Perhaps it is time the ‘work ethic’ was redefined and its idea reclaimed from the banal men who invoke it. In a world of… an almost runaway technology, things are increasingly making things. It is for our species, it would seem, to go on to other matters. Human matters. (p. xxii)

 In the margin I wrote: “Indeed! And so why haven’t we? It may seem a silly question, but it’s long past time for us to ask it.”

 

In the “political preface” to Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse summarized the main difficulty we have in the West envisioning and then working for our non-authoritarian, non-hierarchical future without bosses. He said:

No philosophy, no theory can undo the democratic introjection of the masters into their subjects…[Still…] protest will continue because it is a biological necessity…But in the administered society, the biological necessity does not immediately issue in action; organization demands counter-organization. Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.

Most of us are complicit in this system, and given in return some infinitesimal portion of political power, a restricted realm to ‘rule,’ an illusion of control – which we fiercely defend in proportion to its absence in ‘reality,’ in the wider realm of ‘work.’

When we stop and consider why ‘being in control’ matters so much to us from our ‘superior’ Western perch atop the world, why we demand such obedience from our children, regiment their lives, teach them the rule of the clock before they even know their numbers, why we screechingly insist on having the last word – it doesn’t take much effort to tree that bear. We know “shit runs downhill.” But we blame ourselves nonetheless. After all, shouldn’t we be more controlled than that?

I love Michael Moore. When he asked the question, “why are we so violent?” – his answer was, essentially, “because they want us to be,” want us to stay caught in, as Stanley Tookie Williams wrote, our “personal dramas called ‘survival’” – and not just because it takes the focus off the pitiful-power-drunk-few.

More important even than this is the side effect of our demoralization. When you humiliate your child it can spiritually paralyze you for days or weeks afterward. If it happens often enough you may never get over it. And there’s of course the bonus for the podrunks that you could be passing the destabilization on to future generations.

 

Once as a student I visited New York with a friend. We drove down in his car and crashed in his buddy’s apartment. Friend and I stretched out on the floor and we all stayed up late talking politics and whatever.

Buddy had a pregnant wife and two small children, a boy about six and a girl about five, and the following morning when Buddy drove us around in his car, I was in the front seat, and his children were in the back.

The window was down and the wind streamed around the little girl’s exhilarated face. She was so infectiously vibrant, so happy to be riding in a car with her daddy. Her love was a palpable thing, her wanting to please almost painful to watch.

Her brother did something, violated some rule, and the little girl dutifully ‘told’ on him.

Far from appreciating the offering, her father scathingly called her “an agent of the state,” and launched into a long lecture intended, I’m sure, to politically educate her.

The effect on the little girl was electric.
Crestfallen, ashamed, her entire body said, “‘failure’, I didn’t please him after all.”

 

When my son was a toddler and I a welfare mom, we sometimes hung out with two other single moms and their toddlers on a patch of grass, an oversized divider, alongside a busy street. Walking back to our apartments one of the children toddled ahead off the curb and his mother unceremoniously snatched him back and began hitting his legs. He instantly began crying.

I asked why she didn’t simply talk to him.
Her response was one I’m sure you’ve heard often, the essence of it being: “violence works.” “The heavy hand sends a lasting message.”
But it’s never the message we tell ourselves that it is.

 

There was a PBS television show once, hosted by a married couple, called “Say It With Sign.” Its purpose was to help viewers learn sign language. During the course of one season the woman got pregnant and the couple became proud parents, thereafter sharing stories about the baby on the show.
One story stuck with me.

They said it surprised them to discover that, only months old, their child not only recognized signs but could communicate using them, signing “bottle,” for example, when she wanted her bottle.

Babies understand language long before their vocal cords allow them to speak it.

Our children (we) are brilliant, and so much more sensitive than we know.
When I first read Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good, I found her book – which microscopically analyzed familial dynamics even to the point of attributing Hitler’s rise to them – very useful personally but limited politically. Her response to that reaction was to say that:

It would be an easy matter to misunderstand my claim that the untold deep humiliation and mistreatment Hitler suffered at his father’s hands without being allowed to respond was responsible for his insatiable hatred. Someone may object by saying that an individual human being cannot destroy an entire people on such a scale, that the economic crisis and the humiliation suffered by the Weimar Republic contributed to producing the catastrophe. There can be no doubt that this is true, but it was not “crises” and “systems” that did the killing, it was human beings – human beings whose fathers were able to point with pride to the obedience instilled in their little ones at a very early age. (p. 264)

Miller is examining the same underlying reality that Marcuse is describing when he writes about “the democratic introjection of the masters into their subjects” – but from the perspective of the child who will become an adult:

It is easy for those who have never become aware of having been victims, since they grew up believing in the principles of being brave and self-controlled, to succumb to the danger of taking revenge on the next generation because they themselves have been unconsciously victimized. But if their anger is followed by grief over having been a victim, then they can also mourn the fact that their parents were victims too, and they will no longer have to persecute their children. The ability to grieve will bring them closer to their children. (Alice Miller, For Your Own Good, p. 273-4)

Marcuse, in explicating this same phenomenon, writes:

But the very scope and effectiveness of the democratic introjection have suppressed the historical subject, the agent of revolution: free people are not in need of liberation, and the oppressed are not strong enough to liberate themselves. These conditions redefine the concept of Utopia: liberation is the most realistic, the most concrete of all historical possibilities and at the same time the most rationally and effectively repressed – the most abstract and remote possibility. (Eros and Civilization, p. xv) *

Our bodies know the truth, which is why “liberation is the most realistic… of all historical possibilities.” But because our bodies’ truth is “at the same time the most rationally and effectively repressed,” liberation seems to retreat from view proportionally as we approach it.

In Miller’s terms, there is a built-in emotional check – in our allegiance to our parents – that stops the child from becoming aware of and therefore feeling that healing anger that could liberate her from unconscious patterns.

The “historical subject” – aware, conscious – in Miller’s case is the angry child, understanding that he or she has been treated abominably. That child can liberate herself from the mental chains forged in the abusive environment of early childhood. That child can become a subject, an active participant in shaping her own destiny. That child has consciousness.

The “historical subject” – aware, conscious – in Marcuse’s case is the angry worker, understanding that he or she has been treated abominably. That worker can liberate herself from the mental chains forged in the abusive environment of class society. That worker can become a subject, an active participant in shaping her own destiny. That worker has consciousness.

 

But Marcuse is not convinced that the relatively privileged Western “worker” can ever become angry that she or he is caged, ever become aware that we are not free.

The stories we tell ourselves – or are conditioned to believe – are everything. Consciousness is everything – “command exists but with obedience.”

But as obedience is systematically sown and harvested in each one of us, first by loving hands and then by the dispassionate hands of bosses and government officials, none of which are beneficiaries of this system, all of which are just like you and me: unconscious functionaries of a system that abuses us, how are we ever to escape it?

We’ve all been infected by the state. Subliminally we know it, feel like Sigourney Weaver in James Cameron’s Aliens waking from her implantation nightmare, or like the revolutionaries in Matrix Revolutions trying to stop the Mr. Smith virus, or like Ed Tom in No Country For Old Men when he says, “I feel outmatched.” Whenever solidarity is broken, it takes a toll on spirit, leaving a fog of hopelessness in its wake, the feeling that it’s everywhere and there’s no escape. Or, most demoralizing of all, that “it’s in me and I don’t know how to get it out of me” – when we hurt our children, boss our ‘subordinates,’ hound the homeless – even when we close our gates and don’t come out, even then.

This system is structured to wear us down, make us complicit, and force us against our will to merge with what we find abhorrent.

 

This upside-down world is policed subtly by the wage relation – wolves with no teeth can’t even feed themselves, let alone bite – and blatantly by the state. And while it may seem, when we’re children, that the state exists to provide services like education and fire suppression, or protection from “the bad guys,” its primary function is to keep us separated, to make sure we don’t assert our right to our sources of power: the ancestors, the earth, and each other – and in the case of the first, to ensure that we make no claim on our collective inheritance from the ancestors without the state’s prior approval.

You may go to school and learn that 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.” But if you take it upon yourself to make self-directed use of that legacy, you will be punished.

The kids were delightful, intelligent, passionate, and defiant. One told me she had asked the school’s administration for permission to put up posters containing [those] words from the Declaration…Far from rewarding her interest in history and politics, …administrators not only denied her request, but threatened her with “forced transfer” to another school should she post them anyway. (Derrick Jenson, Endgame, Vol. I, p. 179)

Think too of the enormous energy the so-called masters devoted to preventing the so-called American slaves from learning to read, in order to circumvent access to one of our few remaining routes to the work of the ancestors – to our collective inheritance from the ancestors (which is what “knowledge” is.)

Blocking access to the collective history and heritage of working people serves multiple purposes for the podrunks. The most essential, perhaps, is that it restricts the realm of the possible. ‘What is” is made to seem ‘all there is.’ “‘Disparities’ must always have existed. ‘Poverty’ will always be with us.” The historical moment when: “compassion was removed from the hearts, and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest happiness of the greatest number…” is made to stretch on infinitely into the future – to lend credence to the fanciful TINA * problem, as well as to capitalism’s favorite slogan, “you are on your own.” 

As with so many underpinnings of class rule, separating us from ourselves locks us into demoralization. By atomizing us and then blocking access to our sources of power – sources that will fuel the alternative to ‘what is’ – we’re made to feel so much ‘less’ than what we are.

Resistance to this diminishment is not only with us now, it’s always been there. There’s a continuous stream of resistance, a continuous stream of ancestors, reaching out to us, inviting us in. We are not alone.

But if we never learn that – if we never learn the names of the Indian peoples whose blood soaks the soil beneath our feet, or the name of the humble Liverpool shipping clerk * who stood up to King Leopold’s perpetration of genocide in the ‘Congo,’ or about the helicopter pilot who refused to cooperate with the massacre of Vietnamese people (Hugh Thompson), or the Russian soldiers who turned their rifles on their own officers when ordered to shoot down women in the streets – if we never get to think about the courage of countless, nameless multitudes, to take them in, become them, become large like Walt Whitman – “I am large, I contain multitudes” – to ponder those who stood up to the politics of power-worship, greed and division… If we’re denied access to the inheritance of our common courage, we feel more crazy, more alienated and alone.

The charade, by keeping us ‘less,’ keeps us easier to control. And the denial of our common stories (which would of course make us ‘more,’ bigger than our individual selves) helps to keep us at each other’s throats and thoroughly confused – so that we’re not only historically but currently alone. “No love no where, not a single soul who really cares” – aren’t these the messages that beat endlessly in our heads?

 

And making certain we don’t know whom we really owe for the creation of our world, presents us with a larger counterfeit countenance, the corporation itself, which conceals its thievery and parades our inventions and our earth as its personal creations and property.

 

Keeping our ancestors from us – their courage, beauty and sheer goodness (“fearful is the seductive power of goodness!” said Bertolt Brecht in The Caucasian Chalk Circle) – damages both the ‘targeted’ and the ‘privileged’ of class society, in ways similar and dissimilar.

 

One of the reasons I needed Spike Lee’s films was to receive proof that as a Black person I was indeed beautiful and brilliant . ** There I was up on the big screen so it must be so.

When you consider the enormous effort of suppression applied to preventing us from seeing it, it can’t be denied that ours is a powerful beauty indeed. “Ours” meaning working people of all hues and accents. Elvis, Janis, James, and Marlon electrified everyday folks because their personas and portrayals showed the truth of everyday people, vital and potent.

Still, it remains true that it‘s the darker-skinned among us who are apparently the most threatening. “Long ago” (“when I was a green beginner”) there was a television show called The Green Hornet. I was six or so at the time and, trust me, me and my brothers did not gather excitedly round the black and white to watch Van Williams. I had to travel to the Internet to even recollect that name. But nobody has any trouble remembering the name of Bruce Lee (“Kato”?).”

Is there any rational reason why Bruce Lee should be anybody’s “sidekick”? Come on.

And for an intense micro-to-macro story of how the state suppresses dark-skinned access to the power of the ancestors, read Stanley Tookie Williams’ Blue Rage, Black Redemption.

In [Miss Atkins’] class, reading and writing seemed to be prohibited, but we were provided with mounds of clay, papier-mâché, puzzles, and all kinds of noneducational items. Pencils and erasers were nowhere to be found. There were shelves of books that the students did not read. They seemed to be there just to decorate the classroom. I got on Miss Atkins’ nerves, bothering her each day about letting me read a book. The more she refused, the more determined I was to read the literature on those shelves… In my “reading world,” there was no poverty, no discrimination, no violence, no racism, no pain… Thievery became necessary to allow me to pilfer a book off the school library shelf and avoid being busted by Miss Atkins… All I wanted to do was become educated, not to battle with a deranged teacher over my Constitutional right to read schoolbooks. (p. 30–32)

Certainly there’s no doubt that members of “targeted groups” are given the steepest, rockiest roads to our ancestors’ blood, sweat, tears, and love. But access is hindered for all.

I remember the awe I felt looking up at the bridgehead of the Bay Bridge where it’s buttressed on the streets of San Francisco, considering how much sacrifice by so many working people was ‘required’ to make that work.

That same hour I walked further and found the following engraved words on the Sailors Union of the Pacific building:

You can put me in jail, but you cannot give me narrower quarters than as a seaman I have always had. You cannot give me coarser food than I have always eaten. You cannot make me lonelier than I have always been.

“Let ‘em come,” I found out later were his next words – Andrew Furuseth (1854 – 1938) – “let ‘em come” – so much history all around us, so unknown…

 

As Howard Zinn labored long to show us, we are not taught our own history. That’s not what school is for.

Few among us know our laboring ancestors – or all our relations as living things. The state sets it up that way.

Derrick Jensen has said that it’s no surprise we don’t defend the land we live on, because we don’t really live there. We live in the Internet, in our cars, in personal dramas and public ones, in celebrity gossip, and private pain, around conference tables and construction sites, on our couches, and in our heads.

On the radio just now someone said, “You can’t fight for what you don’t love, and you can’t love what you don’t know.” (This of course has immediate personal implications as well.)

If we knew and loved our ancestors – the working people who built our world – we would know that James Boggs foretold a future of villages, in which we would “simply walk out on the streets and get milk and honey.”

If we knew and loved our ancestors we would know that their legacy is a wisdom unbounded by lies about race, sex and nation; we would learn our true place in the world – among all life, across all time and false divisions; we would learn that our ancestors want more for us, and for our children, than to live out our lives as slaves.

“For human intelligence is like water, air, and fire – it cannot be bought or sold,” wrote Robert Crowley in 1550. *

“…Reduce no human spirit to disgrace of price,” says Emily three hundred years later.

If it feels like we’ve been treading water for century upon long century, it’s because our ancestors, their works, cultural and physical, have been taken from us, leaving us horribly disfigured and diminished – and when I say “we,” I mean: “we who do the work,” the wind from below.

This “we” means that our unity as working people, no matter what the nationality, gender or ethnicity stamped upon us by our various states, is exponentially more significant in charting our future than those arbitrary labels. The wind does not stop at “borders” writ in devil-dust, and root about in its pockets for passports. The wind is in us, in our hands, and in the earth that animates them.

 

 

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 3

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)