waking up - freeing ourselves from work

…[T]he Mayans just stared at him. They said they weren’t workers but people, and, besides, land wasn’t property but the heart of their communities. Having failed as a Marxist missionary, Marcos immersed himself in Mayan culture. The more he learned, the less he knew. (Naomi Klein, No Logo, p. 455)

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. (Studs Terkel, Working, p. xxii)

But it’s not just about sharing. It’s about developing a consciousness tuned to an alternative vision of the world.

As a young woman back in Detroit I once attended a lecture by writer Ntozake Shange. She said her name meant “she who comes with her own things.” That phrase dug its nails into my psyche and never let go – I think because it was a clue, and that I’ve been collecting clues my whole life, clues to the puzzle of our unhappiness here in the West.

We no longer have our own things.

I had a conversation recently with one of my son’s friends. He couldn’t even imagine a world with no market. His economic categories were entirely given to him by a system that views him, essentially, as worthless, and yet he defended them as if they were his own children being slandered. This system is what we have, he intoned. And it can change. It can rebound and become better. It all depends on what we bring to it, the thoughts we have. If we believe, in our minds, that we’re free, then we can do anything. It’s what we think that counts.

It was disorienting talking to him. Did we inhabit the same planet? What about the forty-five thousand people a month dying in the Congo so that we may continue to worship our cool electronics? I asked him. He shrugged. “You sound so pessimistic,” he said.

That silenced me.

I puzzled and puzzled over this way of seeing things – this belief in open horizons and endless possibilities within the current system. Was I just getting old and jaded? Was I projecting my personal, restricted views onto a wider global reality, coming to unwarranted conclusions that the system was dying, when it was really just my own exhausted spirit sputtering out?

And then I recalled a book I read last year about the Internet. I was attracted by the title because it evoked qualities I associate with our future: Small Pieces Loosely Joined. But the more I read – the more I sat in this author’s plush, ergonomically-correct height and angle-adjustable chair, taking in the view from his computer station, the gloomier I got.

Web conversations can be hyperthreaded because the Web, free of the drag of space and free of a permission-based social structure, unsticks our interests. The threads of our attention come unglued and are rejoined with a much thinner paste. We flit from site to site, topic to topic, according to no beat but that of our hearts. …It is not an accident that the Web is distracting. It is the Web’s hyperlinked nature to pull our attention here and there. But it is not at all clear that our new distractedness represents a weakening of our culture’s intellectual powers, a lack of focus, a diversion from the important work that needs to be done, a disruption of our very important schedule. Distraction may instead represent our interest finally finding the type of time that suits it best. Maybe when set free in a field of abundance, our hunger moves us from three meals a day to day-long grazing. Our experience of time on the Web, its ungluing and regluing of threads, may be less an artifact of the Web than the Web’s enabling our interest to find its own rhythm. Perhaps the Web isn’t shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting. …Ultimately, matter doesn’t matter. If we can be together so successfully in a world that has no atoms, no space, no uniform time, no management, and no control, then maybe we’ve been wrong about what matters in the real world in the first place. …The Web is different enough from the real world that the mistakes we’ve made about the real world don’t distract us there. Thus, our experience of the Web is closer to the truth of our lived experience than are our ideas about our lived experience. …The Web…creates a new, persistent public world that accumulates value with every interaction. It’s a world that we build simply by using it, and what is of worth stays and adds to the Web’s overall worth. (David Weinberger, p. 68-9, 174, 180, 195)

There are echoes of that young man in this. “Don’t you know that we are free? Well at least in our minds if we want to be.” Except, this isn’t Sly telling us to “Stand!” Not by a long shot.

And this whole notion of “creating value with every click” that seems to have swept judgment off its feet and suckered sanity broadscale across the nation – what are they thinking, these advocates of the brave.new.world of bits and bytes and itty bitty brains?

OK, that’s excessive – the alliteration carried me away.

But, greed aside for a moment, there’s something about these new toys that makes the consumers of them feel ‘smarter’ just because they’re using them. It’s like a “get-out-of-study-free” card, providing cover for indolence, freedom from facing the emptiness of our lives – granting the ‘user’ an illusory exemption from Fromm’s prerequisites for mastery: “discipline, concentration and patience throughout every phase of [your] life.” “Flitting from site to site, topic to topic,” is the opposite of discipline, concentration and patience. It is diversion, it does distract “from the important work that needs to be done.”

And while this restless urge to be diverted and entertained that haunts our present era seems novel, it’s really just the latest version of the “mind-worship” paradigm that’s been thinning us out for centuries. Virginia Woolf commented on it, George Orwell also. Lots of our ancestors wrote about it. Erich Fromm:

Yet, even more than self-discipline, concentration is rare in our culture. On the contrary, our culture leads to an unconcentrated and diffused mode of life, hardly paralleled anywhere else. You do many things at once; you read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything – pictures, liquor, knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. (The Art of Loving, p. 99)

As Marx said, “the less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

It sounds contradictory to call the diminishment of our minds “mind-worship,” so let me clarify.

When we say that ‘products’ are ‘stored labor,’ we’re also saying that they are ‘concentrated invention,’ brought to us by those Grand Wizards of the Mighty Con, concentrated ‘wealth.’ And we bought it. We bought their prettily packaged lie that not only are they themselves really, really smart, but through their ‘magic,’ their system, they’ve graciously identified for us all the other really, really smart people out there (none of whom, of course, are us), and together they’ve kept us safe, made our lives easy, etc. etc.

But buying this lie requires us to be amazed and impressed with the awesomeness of all these really smart people (who are ‘not us’). And their distinctiveness in the brains department must stand in stark contrast with our own leveled-out conventionality.

“Mind-worship” means ‘people-diminishment.’

Flitting site to site, marveling at the miracle of weightlessness and instant access to ‘information,’ is the twenty-first century version of praying at the altar, or paying tribute to the king. But unlike what is true in the realm of love, in politics: “the more (of my soul) I give to thee, the less I have.”

As I write these words, Barack Obama is rolling through his first week as President-Elect. The San Francisco Chronicle not only now allows him to be above the fold (it was a constant irritation during the campaign to witness their graceless gyrations to deny him this ‘honor’), but the day after the election the entire front page was just a photo of him. Acknowledging that the man is gold right now, every business that can is trying to cash in.

All to say, that on November fifth I bought myself a copy. In the entertainment section there was a “Letters” column in response to an article about the candidates’ favorite books. A reader wrote in to say that he doubted very much that the candidates had actually read these books. Curious as to which books raised his doubts, I went to the Internet. In Barack’s * case it was Mo.by.Dick by the great Herman Melville. The reader wrote, “I am very skeptical. They are obviously made to impress; they are pretentious.”

“Pretentious.” I mulled the word for a moment. The very same gloom I felt reading Small Pieces descended. I cried a little for Melville. There it is, the terror of every writer – irrelevance, oblivion. You read Virginia Woolf’s diaries and you find it: "what difference does a book make?" I asked myself that question, obviously, as I started writing this.

As a youth Tesla contracted cholera and was bedridden for nine months. Barely able to move, all he could do was read. He recounts:

One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark.Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears… (Autobiography, p. 26)

Hello?! Melville wrote to be read. And like all writers he was essentially an inventor. His work, as Tesla said, “is like that of the planter – for the future…” He was writing for us. “Camerado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man.”

Full of life now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now with you.)

Walt Whitman wrote for us. When we commune with the ancestors, when we absorb their thought, we become bigger: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” We need them. Like water. Like food. Soul-death is as real as physical death. “Whoever you are! Claim your own at any hazard!” Exclamation point. This is not a casual matter, this handing over to the podrunks of our access to the ancestors, to invention, to our right to be large.

The ‘fact’ that we “don’t have the time” to read and think about what our ancestors desperately want us to know should be sufficient indictment of this mad, upside-down world to warrant our calling for an immediate ‘time-out!’ to re-think things; for us to say, “whoa! Wait a minute. Slow this sucker down! We are definitely off-track.” But we “don’t have the time” to even notice the track, or that we’re being railroaded. Herded.

(And, by the way, of course Barack has read, and loves, Mo.by.Dick. I mean, come on dude! Are you blind? To say that Barack is large is stingy understatement. And, just so you know, for a person of color in the belly of the beast, I have to tell you, Melville is good news.)

Being large, in terms of “our own values” means resisting the values that require our diminishment, that say: leave it to the experts; accept style over substance; wear the false face; consume but do not act; acquiesce in the commodification of everything; abandon your fellow and think only of yourself, in the narrowest possible sense; be as little as possible and ask for as little as possible, so that power is not threatened; co-sign the belief that a thinned-out existence is an acceptable compromise to be ‘safe’ or ‘secure.’

Thinning us out is the only way we can be controlled. If we refused to relinquish the fullness of nature, in us and all else, if we demanded it for ourselves and for our children, then these values derived from the manual-mental divide could never be imposed.

Podrunks must sow, in us, the seeds of contempt for the natural world, and for the natural world in us, to keep us separated from our sources of power: the ancestors, the earth, and each other.

This impulse is also partly what drives the ‘branding’-mania of the big corporations, * “hollowing ‘things’ out” in order to fill them with the ‘thoughts,’ the meanings, of those who see themselves as Reified Mind (“the brains of the operation,” the prime mover behind the created world of ‘men.’) Their propaganda machinery promotes ‘hollowness’ in all things. The material world, materiality, nature, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t ‘count.’
Corporations are proud to produce ‘nothing:’

What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but images of their brands. Their real work lay not in manufacturing but in marketing. This formula, needless to say, has proved enormously profitable, and its success has companies competing in a race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least, has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race. (Naomi Klein, No Logo, p. 4)

Of course, this is only ‘profitable’ because they can shunt responsibility for the physical bodies of the human beings who do produce things onto sub-contractors who will work those human beings ruthlessly, with a brutality in some ways worse than slavery.

“Before the war we owned the negroes. If a man had a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him; if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.” (A Southern employer explaining the benefits of convict leasing to reformer George Washington Cable in 1883, cited in Worse Than Slavery by David M. Oshinsky, p. 55)

“What has the economist to do with inventiveness? Have not all inventions fallen into his lap without any effort on his part? Has one of them cost him anything?”
“I’ve always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.” *
“One dies, get another.”

Contempt for the actual sources of wealth – human invention, the earth, and human labor – is at the hub of their propaganda. And while, superficially, Orwellian ‘branding’ seems like bluster or bravado or arrogance only, a way of saying: “I can put whatever meaning I want on anything, and by so doing I define it, I own it, I make it what it is.” And though certainly it is Orwellian (i.e., the opposite of what it pretends to be), and carries an intent to conceal, to con: ‘War’ is ‘Peace,’ ‘Scorched Earth’ is ‘Green Trees,’ ‘Environmental Destruction’ is ‘Environmental Protection,’ the brutality of slave labor is casually dismissed with a ‘swoosh’ logo – there’s a deadly seriousness behind this game, a very heavy hand behind the ‘weightlessness.’ For if we ever shake off the propaganda and wake up, it’s “game over” for all their cons.

Grandmother is not impressed with all these cons. She’s growing tired of us, I fear, and I, for one, would hasten to reassure: “We hear you. Some of us aren’t deaf. Give us but a little more time, and we will find the rhyme that rights this gross imbalance, dissolve this dissonance that dominance makes. We will.”

Their goal has been to shape us to fit effortlessly into their dreams of dollar signs dancing merrily across spreadsheets. And to a great degree we have complied.

Towards the end of his life, the great labor leader Eugene V. Debs, when asked to name his greatest regret replied, “under our Constitution, the American people can have almost anything they want, but it just seems they don’t want much of anything at all.” *

We have subsumed our interests to those of capital, bought the lie that our interests coincide.

Now some may argue that we quite reasonably made a deal. The social contract. In exchange for a job, we agreed not to “want much of anything at all.” They wanted consumers. We became consumers. They wanted us to accept the cool electronics without asking how we got them so cheap. We didn’t ask. And as they became ‘lighter,’ as they got out of the business of actually making things and into the business of “thinking about what things ‘mean,’” in order to sell them to us, we happily joined their metaphysical project – at least those among us who could afford to. Of course now, at this juncture, fewer and fewer of us can afford to. But we are left with this legacy of ‘lightness,’ with an endless search for hollowed out ‘meaning’ and shallow symbolism. “What does the ‘swoosh’ mean?” – like it matters.

Enough with this living in our heads! We need different standards, a different set of values. We cannot claim ourselves and continue to be them. As capital – estranged labor – has gotten lighter, so have we. We have grafted onto our faces the big, open mouth of the podrunks. We have become, we embody, their dream of limitless acquisition with every descent into the bottomless hunger of “hyperthreaded” “day-long grazing” through an abstract “field of abundance.” We mimic their greed, their inability to be sated. A capitalist wet dream scaled to fit the pauper. This is the cartoon version of H.G. Wells’ thinned-out, ‘brain-in-a-bottle’ existence. The privileged few click through their days completely oblivious to the many hands making their lives light. And, make no mistake, their lives, the clickers, those “inconvenienced by space,” their lives are light, as insubstantial as avatars.

We are only ever reflecting capital. It’s time to start reflecting ourselves.

We want falsehood to remove its fucking mask! We’re tired of lies and illusion and deconstructing crimes. We have way better things to do with our lives.

…like… how ‘bout actually living? – not in cyberspace, but in physical space. There are ancestors with answers, just waiting for us to glance their way:

All that matters is that the opportunity for genuine activity be restored to the individual; that the purposes of society and of his own become identical, not ideologically but in reality; and that he apply his effort and reason actively to the work he is doing, as something for which he can feel responsible because it has meaning and purpose in terms of his human ends. We must replace manipulation of men by active and intelligent co-operation, and expand the principle of government of the people, by the people, for the people, from the formal political to the economic sphere. (Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, p. 271)

A lot of us know that this is what we want: to engage in genuine activity that has “meaning and purpose in terms of human ends.” But those who descend into the bottomless abyss of the Internet, never to be seen again (at least in terms of being intact souls), have in many ways given up on the dream of making their own physical environments in favor of ‘creating’ a personal realm of threaded thoughts. This ‘solution’ has a short shelf life, however. Eventually even the most dedicated ‘surfer,’ the most addicted ‘virtual liver’ will collapse into the boredom, the living-death, which awaits those of us too battered or lost to begin rebuilding souls left in limbo.

But in this ‘threaded’ business there is this: we are becoming one world, in reality, not as an abstraction – one world in the sense Tesla saw: we are sharing thoughts simultaneously. And that’s not nothing. It certainly was critical to us getting Barack elected. Once the expanded human power and agency is out there, you can’t stuff it back in.

Continue to "The Two Winds" - Part 6

* It’s impossible to read Dreams From My Father without embracing him as family.

* Naomi Klein writes about this in No Logo.

* Lawrence Summers wrote this in a memo when he was at the World Bank.

* Ralph Nader reminded us of Debs’ words recently on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!

Nascence to End Work

waking up - freeing ourselves from work

Chapter II: The Two Winds (Part 5)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work