Apparently this happened while we were on the coast. My initial reaction is that this is a great example of privilege, one with deep implications:
Privilege in and of itself is difficult to talk about since it makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially those in privileged positions. Nobody likes to think that they have some kind of natural advantage in life over others, that they have it slightly easier than someone else just because of who they are. I like how Roxane Gay puts it in Bad Feminist:
We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone. Of course we resent these accusations. Look at white men when they are accused of having privilege. They tend to be immediately defensive (and, at times, understandably so). They say, “It’s not my fault I am a white man,” or “I’m [insert other condition that discounts their privilege],” instead of simply accepting that, in this regard, yes, they benefit from certain privileges others do not. To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered. (17)
And since privilege is relative, it’s not easy to see, often going unnoticed because it manifests itself as a lack of discrimination that isn’t always readily apparent until we take a broader look at society as a whole. We are, in effect, often blind to our own privilege, or that of others, until we take a closer look at how different groups are treated in similar situations.
In this case, a group of armed, white men who feel entitled to public land and more lenient sentencing for poaching and arson have taken over a federal wildlife refuge building and are currently being given a wide berth by authorities. Would the same be true if it were a group of Blank Panthers or Muslims? How about the Black Lives Matter movement? I sincerely doubt it. No other group in the US could occupy a government and have such a measured response. No other group would get such subdued and even somewhat positive media coverage, let alone a modicum of public support. If it were any other group, that just wouldn’t be the case.
Muslims are automatically labelled terrorists in the media whenever they do anything, violent or otherwise. Black men, thugs. But a white man shooting up a Planned Parenthood or movie theatre? Possibly mentally ill. And armed white men trying to expropriate public land and threatening violence if they’re confronted? Well, they’re simply patriots, militia men, anti-government protesters, etc. And police seem to show remarkably restraint when it comes to armed white men, like the recent Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Lewis Dear, who was apprehended alive after killing 3 people and wounding 9, or James Holmes, who killed 12 and wounded 30, but not so much when it comes to a black kid playing with a toy gun alone in a park.
But I digress. It’s not just about racial privilege, it’s also about political privilege and social power in the form of capital accumulation. As @nerdosyndical points out, “The armed white people trying to dissolve a national wildlife refuge are not practicing terrorism, they are practicing enclosure. They are trying to privatize public (not common) space for personal and private accumulation of capital.” Land is part of the dispute. Who gets to use it and for what. Grazing and hunting rights seem to underlie some of this, which hints at the history of US settler colonialism and process of enclosure, where common land is ‘enclosed’ and thereby restricted to the owner. These men feel entitled to this land, and they’ve taken drastic steps to assert that perceived right.
But what of Native American claims to land that was taken or promised, many of which are supported by treaties that the US government never honoured? What about Palestinians who are being forcibly removed from their land by Israeli colonizers? These are some of the questions that this incident should raise as I think they point towards the heart of the problem, capitalist class relations and how they manifest themselves.
The relative privilege that white men currently enjoy, for example, has its origins in the socio-economic paradigm the US (and arguably most of Western society) was founded upon, which from the start was created by, and mainly for, white, heterosexual, Christian, male property owners. And while there’s certainly been progress towards a more egalitarian society, the structural roots of socio-economic inequalities that create hierarchies of privilege are still buried deep within the makeup of our society and culture, hidden in plain sight. This is merely an exaggerated illustration of historical processes that have been taking shape for centuries.
The real focus, then, shouldn’t be their gender or their race so much as the underlying socio-economic framework that’s made these things the focus for so long—a complex system of social relations forming the material basis on top of which oppressive and exploitative hierarchies are built, a foundation we must recreate if we’re ever to transcend privilege and oppression.
Some of the new laws taking effect in Oregon at the beginning of the year, many of which should, at least theoretically, help protect women:
New batch of Oregon laws take effect in January
In the workplace, for example, “Domestic workers like nannies and housekeepers will be extended several new protections in 2016, including mandatory breaks, paid vacation time and recourse against harassment.” Most domestic works are women and immigrants, who are often exploited and harassed and have few legal protections and avenues of recompense.
Another law going into effect will double the statute of limitations on rape, “allowing prosecution up to 12 years after the crime occurred instead of six,” and if it happens to a minor, they’ll have until 30 to come forward. In addition, “Secretly filming someone in a place of ‘presumed privacy’ — including bathrooms and locker rooms — will be upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony in 2016.” Because that’s just fucked up and creepy.
And despite all the recent attacks on women’s reproductive rights, “Pharmacists will be allowed to prescribe birth control directly to women, saving them a trip to the doctor’s office, and insurers will be required to cover up to a 12-month supply in one purchase.”
Onwards and upwards!
Unfortunately, the new Paris agreement is far from what we need. Despite having the knowledge and technology to make and use energy sustainably, despite knowing that we have to reduce our energy usage and greenhouse emissions immediately to potentially avoid the worst case scenario, the world is settling for less because it’s easier/more profitable for those who currently own and control the means of production. As a result, the world will continue to steam towards environmental catastrophe while all the more economically developed countries are patting themselves on the back for “addressing the threat of global climate change.”
It’s certainly encouraging that steps are being made in the right direction; but we have to stop looking at this issue in terms of whether solutions are economically viable in a for-profit capitalist economy and start exploring alternatives like our lives depended on it. Instead of adopting agreements that fall short of what’s needed, we have to dismantle our existing fossil fuel infrastructure and create a whole new approach to production and distribution. And we can’t simply rely on politicians to do it for us; working-class people have to take a stand, make our voices heard, and help build the next environmentally viable economy.
A while back, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Nancy Tuana’s The Less Noble Sex and I’ve finally gotten around to reading it. It’s one of the best/most interesting books I’ve read in a long time and I highly recommend it, especially for anyone interested in the history of sexism in the West (or anyone who doubts its existence/influence, for that matter). In particular, it details how patriarchal biases about women’s innate inferiority (along with a healthy dose of Eurocentrism) have permeated philosophy, religion, and science for centuries, conditioning everything from how we interpret myths to how we view and treat women (as well as non-whites) today. For all the positive contributions of great minds like Aristotle and Darwin, there’s a lot of negative social conditioning that must be understood and ultimately undone.
I’ve long thought, for example, that most of social and legal barriers to the use of contraception, as well as a woman’s right to choose, stems from patriarchal ideology. And The Less Noble Sex has further solidified that opinion. In particular, the book details the extent which patriarchal biases on the part of philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists (the majority of which have statistically been male) have influenced their ideas and empirical observations, both shaping and reinforcing the image of man as intellectually and rationally superior to woman, limiting women to their “natural” role as mothers and caregivers, leaving the sphere of public life to the care of men.
For centuries, the dominant ideology has been that a woman’s place is the home, and anything that gives women the ability to share equally in public life and pursue things like education and careers is anathema to that. It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of those who are against these things are the ones who have the most to lose, men. Ultimately, it’s about power. Allowing women (and men) to use contraception and decide whether they want to have a child if pregnant, not to mention having those things be safe, easily accessible, and covered by insurance, takes what little power patriarchal institutions still have over women, which is why I fully support women’s reproductive rights, as well as anything that gives women an equal share in the sphere of public life.
Gandhi once said, “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.” To me, that saying reflects the reality that violence has a tendency beget more violence, a cycle with no obvious winner.
Within the sphere of geopolitics, for example, the imperialist policies and actions of nations (often over generations) both directly and indirectly sows the seeds for future violence. There’s the initial military and economic violence that’s imposed by one nation(s) onto another, and then there’s the obligatory resistance and violent retaliation on the part of those who become radicalized as a result. And violent retaliation, in turn, engenders a violent response, both as punishment and as a reassertion of power and dominance.
In essence, most violence doesn’t arise in a vacuum; and while one can feel horror at acts of terrorism and feel sympathy and compassion for the victims, one shouldn’t allow that to blind them to (1) the violence done to other communities in the name of national socio-economic interests and (2) the role of so-called legitimate violence (i.e., violence carried out by the state) in conditioning the material and ideological foundations/justifications for what’s then framed as the illegitimate use of violence (e.g., protests, uprisings, terrorists acts, etc.).
Everyone blaming ISIL will likely ignore the direct role that imperialist actions and policies of the US and Europe played in helping to give rise to ISIL in the first place; and the more we try to fight this ‘enemy’ by things like invading and bombing foreign nations, imposing harsh economic sanctions, and treating immigrants and refugees like criminals and second-class citizens, the more we radicalize those we’re trying to subdue/tame, sowing the seeds for future violence with no end in sight.
So while I feel for the people of Paris right now, I’m frightened by all the talk of waging a pitiless war on the group responsible, since that will only lead to more violence, more racial and religious tensions, and more civilian casualties (on all sides).
The obvious response to this will assuredly be, So how should France and the world respond to these constant attacks? I think we should start by ceasing all punitive economic and military actions and occupations in the Middle East. I think the West needs to admit that it’s been meddling the region for over a century for its own socio-economic interests and stop. I also think that people need to stop treating Muslims in general as terrorists, and places like France need to reevaluate how they treat their Muslim (and immigrant in general) populations, which is often as second-class citizens.
Then, I think we need to practice patience because this kind of violence and ideology won’t disappear overnight. We can’t just start invading and/or bombing other nations every time a small group commits an act of violence like this. Invading Iraq didn’t help; it actually made things much, much worse. Same with Afghanistan, Syria, etc. It took generations to produce these problems, and it’s going to take time to fix them because it means fixing people’s lives, or at least giving them the space and time to fix it themselves.
Ultimately, we need to face the fact that there’s no easy solution here, especially a military one.
Confession time. I’m a big Lady Gaga fan. I mean, what’s not to like? I like her style, her outspokenness, and the fact that she uses her fame to promote things like gay rights and, on occasion, support working-class issues. (And I love the fact that Slavoj Zizek analyzes her theoretical contributions to cultural theory, as well as her “actual theoretical project.”) I’m not quite ‘monster’ status or anything, but I definitely like to dance around the house to “Bad Romance” or “Applause” once in a while. Her music is one of my guilty pleasures. Whenever I’m down, it lifts me up. And whenever I’m happy, it makes me want to dance (which is an admittedly rare and frightening occurrence). Lately, I’ve had a bunch of songs from her latest album, Artpop, stuck in my head; and as I was watching the video for “G.U.Y.” for the umpteenth time, I realized that today happens to be the two-year anniversary of its release. So, Happy Birthday, Artpop!
In many ways, Veterans Day is a working-class holiday, albeit a somber one. Wars are supremely tragic events that take the lives of countless living beings, both soldiers and civilians alike; and it changes many of those who are lucky enough to come out on the other side. But today is primarily about honouring those who fight our wars, wars that the ruling class declares and that the working class and poor must fight. As Eugene Debs famously said in his 1918 Canton, Ohio, speech:
They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace.
So for me, today isn’t just about celebrating military heroism. Rather, it’s about the sacrifice so many working people have made for the few at the top who, in their tangled web of geopolitics, treat human lives more like commodities in their lust for wealth and power. While every war is portrayed as a just war, they’re often the machinations of plutocrats whose primary concern is the protection of their own economic interests, not the best interests of those who fight them.
We should honour our veterans for the things they’ve had to do and give up, as well as for the physical and emotional scars they must now bear. And we should honour them further by working to subvert the imperialism that drives most wars.
I just watched this clip from the Rachel Maddow Show:
Three Republican candidates speak at anti-gay pastor’s rally
Holy fuck. This is some seriously messed up and disturbing shit. I don’t even know what to say. Part of my thinks, “These people are just a tiny, crazy minority. Nothing to worry about.” But then I think about the fact that three presidential nominees were there, which in and of itself illustrates the influence these growing number of voters have, and gives this insanity some sense of legitimacy. And then I think about how religious nutjobs in the US like Kevin Swanson have already helped to pass anti-gay legislation in places like Uganda and Nigeria, making homosexuality a crime punishable by lengthy jail sentences. And I think about how, even though being gay is no longer criminalized here, violence against the LGBTQ community is still frightfully common, which makes me worry even more for my LGBTQ friends.
I consider myself a spiritual person, but I absolutely agree with everyone who says religion is dangerous because it makes hating and oppressing others so easy when you’re 100% sure God is on your side. I love aspects of religion and philosophy. But historically, religious people seem obligated to push their beliefs and values onto the rest of society, ideas that tend to oppress and discriminate against segments of society in the name of love and acceptance. Moreover, religion as a broader social phenomenon has been more about constructing moral absolutes than personal transformation and enlightenment. In this sense, religion, as opposed to personal faith, has primarily been about control over the hearts and minds of people via dictating and then enforcing societal norms that, because of their ‘divine’ origins, are notoriously difficult to challenge, let alone amend, becoming immune to things like compassion and reason.
As sympathetic towards religion as I am, I’m also aware of religion’s proclivity to fall into absolutism and dogmatism, as well as its historical reliance on things like authority and tradition over evidence and rationality. Religion may be “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions”; but it’s also the impetus for a great deal of intolerance and oppression. It’s a double-edged sword that, like the personification of wisdom, Manjushri, has the potential to cut through our greed, aversion, and delusion; but which more often than not seems to be used to oppress and kill those who are different and/or don’t hold the same beliefs and values. And this kind of thing makes me embarrassed to have religious and spiritual interests. I don’t want to be associated with such people.
We absolutely can’t let this kind of misguided bigotry go unchallenged, even when they cry out that they’re being persecuted for their beliefs. We can’t let people like this hide behind the banner of religion, as if that somehow makes their ideas immune to criticism and justifies their threats of violence against others. We must continue to stand up against homophobia, as well as against racism, sexism, and all other forms of discrimination. To quote an apt line from John Stuart Mills, “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”
I had a rather crazy train of thought yesterday.
It started with the realization that one of the things that irritates me the most about the majority of the jobs I’ve had (predominately in manufacturing and retail) is the way management perceives and treats their employees, not so much as people but as robots. It’s all about things like coming in on time and efficiency. You’re punished if you’re late. You’re punished if you’re not productive enough or if you don’t pick up the slack for someone else. You’re punished if you socialize too much on the one had, and you’re talked to like a child on the other, like each day you forget how to do your job and have to be reminded again and again what it is you’re supposed to be doing. The list goes on.
It’s even more apparent where I currently work, because managers and supervisors are explicitly forbidden to fraternize with workers outside of work, where workers generally feel like themselves because they can actually be themselves. Any kind of real human-to-human contact in that sense is strictly taboo; and I hate not being treated like a person. I’m not a fucking robot. I care about doing my job well and being recognized for it. I care when I’m being overworked and pitted against my fellow co-workers so that someone else can make more $. I care about the way someone talks to me, whether they’re telling me what to do or about their day, just as much as I care about being able to interact with other human beings even when that interaction doesn’t include a monetary a transaction.
I’ve been reading one of the books Katya, a professor at PSU, gave me called Station Eleven; and there’s one part that I read this morning which kind of perfectly (and I suppose sadly) sums up my daily experience. Clark, a corporate coach of sorts, is interviewing Dahlia, the employee of a certain CEO who Clark is trying to help be a less shitty boss, and Dahlia is musing about how “adulthood’s full of ghosts”:
“I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that.”
“You don’t think he likes his job then.”
“Correct,” she said, “but I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep? He was nodding, taking down as much as he could. “Do you think he’d describe himself as unhappy in his work?”
“No,” Dahlia said, “because I think people like him think work is supposed to be drudgery punctuated by very occasional moments of happiness, but when I say happiness, I mostly mean distraction. You know what I mean?”
“No, please elaborate.”
“Okay, say you go into the break room,” she said, “and a couple of people you like are there, say someone’s telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone’s so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don’t know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o’clock the day’s just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o’clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that’s what happens in your life.” (163)
Clark realizes that she’s describing his life for the past couple of years, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life; and I realized I’ve definitely felt like that, too. In fact, that’s pretty much how I feel most of the time. And thinking about that, I can’t help but recall passages like this from Marx:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
And within this economic structure, there exists a number of contradictions and inequalities that I think ultimately lead to the indignity of labour vs. capital, conditioning most work into drudgery and most workers into ‘sleepwalkers’ because capitalism not only estranges and alienates the worker’s relationship to the products of their labour, but it estranges and alienates the worker’s relationship to the act of production itself.
As Marx discerned with such clarity, the worker’s labour becomes “external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” As a consequence, the worker “only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844).
In a similar way, our value system as a society (at least in the West) is geared towards consumption and how much stuff a person can buy, as well their efficiency in the production process, not so much the value of the person themselves. In the end, we tend not to even value ourselves. Rather, we value symbols and representations of value, of status and material gain, instead of our intrinsic worth as individuals. We’re judged more by what we do and how much we get paid to do it, regardless of whether or not we’re actually happy. And I think people often ignore, or else fail to realize, the tremendous role our ‘social existence’ plays in conditioning our culture, our values, and, ultimately, our very sense of happiness and self-worth.
It makes me realize that one of the things I like about monastic life (aside from the spiritual aspects, of course) is that it reflects in many ways the kind of classless society I want to live in: where everyone is of one heart and mind, holding everything in common and distributing to each according to need; where a person’s time is unmortgaged and one feels free to do nothing without feeling guilty; where, from the rising of the sun to its setting, I truly feel at home and connected to the world around me.
Then today, I read this article in Open Culture, which touches on a lot of what I was thinking about yesterday:
Why must we all work long hours to earn the right to live? Why must only the wealthy have a access to leisure, aesthetic pleasure, self-actualization…? Everyone seems to have an answer, according to their political or theological bent. One economic bogeyman, so-called “trickle-down” economics, or “Reaganomics,” actually predates our 40th president by a few hundred years at least. The notion that we must better ourselves—or simply survive—by toiling to increase the wealth and property of already wealthy men was perhaps first comprehensively articulated in the 18th-century doctrine of “improvement.” In order to justify privatizing common land and forcing the peasantry into jobbing for them, English landlords attempted to show in treatise after treatise that 1) the peasants were lazy, immoral, and unproductive, and 2) they were better off working for others. As a corollary, most argued that landowners should be given the utmost social and political privilege so that their largesse could benefit everyone.
This scheme necessitated a complete redefinition of what it meant to work. In his study, The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements, historian W.E. Tate quotes from several of the “improvement” treatises, many written by Puritans who argued that “the poor are of two classes, the industrious poor who are content to work for their betters, and the idle poor who prefer to work for themselves.” Tate’s summation perfectly articulates the early modern redefinition of “work” as the creation of profit for owners. Such work is virtuous, “industrious,” and leads to contentment. Other kinds of work, leisurely, domestic, pleasurable, subsistence, or otherwise, qualifies—in an Orwellian turn of phrase—as “idleness.” (We hear echoes of this rhetoric in the language of “deserving” and “undeserving” poor.) It was this language, and its legal and social repercussions, that Max Weber later documented in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Karl Marx reacted to in Das Capital, and feminists have shown to be a consolidation of patriarchal power and further exclusion of women from economic participation.
Along with Marx, various others have raised significant objections to Protestant, capitalist definitions of work, including Thomas Paine, the Fabians, agrarians, and anarchists. In the twentieth century, we can add two significant names to an already distinguished list of dissenters: Buckminster Fuller and Bertrand Russell. Both challenged the notion that we must have wage-earning jobs in order to live, and that we are not entitled to indulge our passions and interests unless we do so for monetary profit or have independent wealth. In a New York Times column on Russell’s 1932 essay “In Praise of Idleness,” Gary Gutting writes, “For most of us, a paying job is still utterly essential — as masses of unemployed people know all too well. But in our economic system, most of us inevitably see our work as a means to something else: it makes a living, but it doesn’t make a life.”
In far too many cases in fact, the work we must do to survive robs us of the ability to live by ruining our health, consuming all our precious time, and degrading our environment. In his essay, Russell argued that “there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from what has always been preached.” His “arguments for laziness,” as he called them, begin with definitions of what we mean by “work,” which might be characterized as the difference between labor and management:
What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Russell further divides the second category into “those who give orders” and “those who give advice as to what orders should be given.” This latter kind of work, he says, “is called politics,” and requires no real “knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given,” but only the ability to manipulate: “the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.” Russell then discusses a “third class of men” at the top, “more respected than either of the classes of the workers”—the landowners, who “are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work.” The idleness of landowners, he writes, “is only rendered possible by the industry of others. Indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.”
The “gospel of work” Russell outlines is, he writes, “the morality of the Slave State,” and the kinds of murderous toil that developed under its rule—actual chattel slavery, fifteen hour workdays in abominable conditions, child labor—has been “disastrous.” Work looks very different today than it did even in Russell’s time, but even in modernity, when labor movements have managed to gather some increasingly precarious amount of social security and leisure time for working people, the amount of work forced upon the majority of us is unnecessary for human thriving and in fact counter to it—the result of a still-successful capitalist propaganda campaign: if we aren’t laboring for wages to increase the profits of others, the logic still dictates, we will fall to sloth and vice and fail to earn our keep. “Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do,” goes the Protestant proverb Russell quotes at the beginning of his essay. On the contrary, he concludes,
…in a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity.
The less we are forced to labor, the more we can do good work in our idleness, and we can all labor less, Russell argues, because “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all” instead of “overwork for some and starvation for others.”
A few decades later, visionary architect, inventor, and theorist Buckminster Fuller would make exactly the same argument, in similar terms, against the “specious notion that everybody has to earn a living.” Fuller articulated his ideas on work and non-work throughout his long career. He put them most succinctly in a 1970 New York magazine “Environmental Teach-In”:
It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest…. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist.
Many people are paid very little to do backbreaking labor; many others paid quite a lot to do very little. The creation of surplus jobs leads to redundancy, inefficiency, and the bureaucratic waste we hear so many politicians rail against: “we have inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors”—all to satisfy a dubious moral imperative and to make a small number of rich people even richer.
What should we do instead? We should continue our education, and do what we please, Fuller argues: “The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” We should all, in other words, work for ourselves, performing the kind of labor we deem necessary for our quality of life and our social arrangements, rather than the kinds of labor dictated to us governments, landowners, and corporate executives. And we can all do so, Fuller thought, and all flourish similarly. Fuller called the technological and evolutionary advancement that enables us to do more with less “euphemeralization.” In Critical Path, a visionary work on human development, he claimed “It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.”
Sound utopian? Perhaps. But Fuller’s far-reaching path out of reliance on fossil fuels and into a sustainable future has never been tried, for some depressingly obvious reasons and some less obvious. Neither Russell nor Fuller argued for the abolition—or inevitable self-destruction—of capitalism and the rise of a workers’ paradise. (Russell gave up his early enthusiasm for communism.) Neither does Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, who in his New York Times commentary on Russell asserts that “Capitalism, with its devotion to profit, is not in itself evil.” Most Marxists on the other hand would argue that devotion to profit can never be benign. But there are many middle ways between state communism and our current religious devotion to supply-side capitalism, such as robust democratic socialism or a basic income guarantee. In any case, what most dissenters against modern notions of work share in common is the conviction that education should produce critical thinkers and self-directed individuals, and not, as Gutting puts it, “be primarily for training workers or consumers”—and that doing work we love for the sake of our own personal fulfillment should not be the exclusive preserve of a propertied leisure class.
I couldn’t have expressed it any better myself.
I’m really happy that Bernie Sanders has been doing so well in the polls. I thought he did OK in the debate; and I like that he’s using his platform as a presidential candidate to talk about things like universal healthcare, the threat of global climate change, and the treat of capital accumulation (i.e., the consolidation of capital in the hands of large corporations and uber-rich individuals who own the majority of the earth’s wealth). He’s exciting young people, drawing huge crowds wherever he goes, and getting the term ‘socialist’ out there in a positive way. And I’m happy that a lot of people I personally know are behind him for that reason.
That said, I’m too cynical to get as excited and throw my full support behind him. For one, he’s not really a socialist in the sense that he stills supports a capitalist system, albeit a more regulated one, rather than a true socialist alternative where opportunity is socialized and the economy becomes a part of the commons. In addition, his strong support of US drone strikes in places like Syria that kill innocent people, as well as his support of Israel along with his relative silence on Israeli apartheid of Palestinians, bothers me. I’d prefer a real socialist like Kshama Sawant to Sanders any day. Also, I have no illusions that anyone elected to the White House, socialist or otherwise, can implement the kind of policies I think we need, not only to transition to a more socialist economy, but to help us survive the threats we face due to climate change and the socio-economic inequality created by capitalism. Our Roman-style republic was specifically designed to be difficult to change.
But like I said, I’m truly happy that his message is getting out there and inspiring a lot of people, and I hope it continues. I just hope that energy can be harnessed into a working-class mass movement rather than simply funnelled into the Democratic Party and die of entropy.
leaves in the forest 