[OccupyCU] [Peace-discuss] Rohn Koester's suggestion

[Ian K]

Mr. Estabrook,

Your insensitivity is mystifying and you do disservice to any movement for
which you advocate. I will no longer be receiving your emails and will
therefore not be reposting or otherwise laboring for you in anyway.

Goodbye Mr. Estabrook.

IKD



On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 1:25 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>wrote:

> You're welcome to copy my postings to your forums. --CGE
>
>
> On Nov 4, 2012, at 10:08 AM, Ian K <iankdavis at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I want everyone to take note that this conversation, while worth having,
> is a discussion among relatively few people. Is a mass email list the place
> for a discussion among 2-6 people?
>
> We have used this list as a means to organize and publicize activities.
> Broader, conversational speculation about activism is not the purpose. I
> will point, again, to the forums you may use at occupycu.org. If you
> don't think it is worth your time to bring this activist discussion to the
> local occupy's meetings or the forums we of occupycu have worked to
> maintain for a year now, then I don't think the occupy email list should be
> a venue for your conversation.  We have a space for this:
>
>
> http://occupycu.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=3&sid=87f854222c630da894d52f23a6837697
>
> IKD
>
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 5:38 PM, Michael Gaiuranos <
> michaelgaiuranos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Carl:
>>
>> Thanks for the reply. Before adding more, I want to emphasize that the
>> purpose in my responding was in what I perceive as the "call for
>> suggestions" from people who, for various reasons, can't or won't make it
>> to meetings. Hence, I am advocating for the kind of plurality that the
>> Jains (and Jung), for instance, advocate and that Berlin (in Russian
>> Thinkers) notes has historically been very difficult for humans and human
>> societies to maintain. This is not just for "humanitarian" reasons: the
>> variety present in such a plurality ultimately proves more creative, more
>> strategic, and more political WHEN the group in question can abide by the
>> surface and irreconcilable differences that such plurality presupposes. If
>> all I'm doing is cluttering up various list-servs with essentially a
>> non-public conversation, it'd be better to shift to that domain.
>>
>> Summary: [1] the ascription of a single "ultimate desire" to people (be
>> that freedom, solidarity, understanding, or universality) overgeneralizes
>> the ultimate desire of one group to the detriment of all other groups;
>> whether this plays out socially between men and women (as different groups)
>> or through groups of people (that contain men and women alike) is of
>> secondary importance.
>>
>> [2] Whatever the merits, internal logic, and moral exhortations of
>> Humboldt's argument (as you have presented it), it leaves unaddressed those
>> cases where one's SELF-constrained choices (to limit one's freedom) fails
>> or refuses to acknowledge SOCIALLY-constrained obligations. Where these
>> socially-constrained obligations get unmet I'm calling irresponsibility. We
>> can assume, with legitimate optimism, that the great mass of men will want
>> to freely choose even those social obligations as their own (i.e., it may
>> be a social injunction that I murder no one, and if I take up that
>> injunction it is because my self accepts that to be worthy of assent to),
>> even where women are concerned, but this offers no mechanism (except a
>> cynical insistence on self-interest) to prevent men (or anyone) from choose
>> not to be constrained by those things that are truly socially worth
>> keeping. It also means that culture generally will not necessarily adopt a
>> moral attitude toward neighboring cultures (internal or external).
>>
>> [3] Anachronistically torturing the Ten Commandments into an anarchist
>> manifesto unnecessarily LIMITS the range of any manifesto we might derive
>> by that process. Moreover, the liberation that followed from the exodus
>> required genocide for its implementation; any liberation as an exodus from
>> capitalism that requires genocide is not desirable, if only because we must
>> perforce be the victims of that genocide.
>>
>> ============================================
>>
>> And now, in more detail:
>>
>> [1] With regard to exclusive or non-exclusive language, first of all my
>> emphasis was not a critique of the use of the word "man". Rather, I am
>> saying exactly the opposite of what you propose, because it may be the case
>> (that is, I suspect it's very likely) that while it's likely accurate to
>> say that for many men his "...central attribute is his freedom," I won't
>> assume that for all women that their central attribute is (a desire for
>> freedom). But more than this, I'm not entirely comfortable or on-board with
>> insisting on a gender distinction of this--although one can locate plenty
>> of (admittedly only partial) cultural phenomena to support such a
>> distinction. Rather, I think there are many people (male and female alike)
>> who desire freedom (the so-called self-determination) as a central
>> attribute and others (male and female alike) who desire relationship (what
>> I called nonself-determination) as well. Still others, male and female,
>> could care less about this and are interested in abstracting a systematic
>> explanation for the world while still others (male and female alike) who
>> assert a mystical truth that makes us all into one. I'm not offering these
>> categories with sufficient distinction nor with necessary insistence, other
>> than to say that something like these irreconcilable differences of opinion
>> do exist and confront one another culturally. So, if I accept a dubious
>> gendered distinction between men (who want freedom, i.e., the right to
>> freedom from determination) and women (who want the determination, i.e.,
>> the right to determine their freedoms), then the "take away" point in all
>> of that is the irreconcilable and incommensurable value-systems involved in
>> that. Collapsing the gendered distinction of man and woman into "human
>> being" erases this into a weak (and complicitly patriarchal) universalism.
>>
>> [2]. I'm a bit unclear how exactly reprising "that while they would break
>> all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as many new social
>> bonds as possible. The isolated man is no more able to develop than the one
>> who is fettered" answers the issue of "freedom as irresponsibility" and
>> "freedom from accountability". Let's assume Humboldt intends, in the
>> rejection of State-mandated (or socially mandated) constraints so that one
>> might then freely choose one's own constraints, that the choice of such
>> constraints would not be for the sake of irresponsibility or
>> non-accountability (to the social world). If that's Humboldt's point, I
>> congratulate him for expressing an arguably socially desirable premise.
>> Meanwhile, it is not an understatement--particularly in the domain of sex
>> and sexual freedom--that men far and away (through infidelity,
>> prostitution, and rape) exhibit a tremendously disparately greater range of
>> (sexual) freedom; where sexual freedom is concerned, this not only informs
>> the sexual freedoms practiced by women but also those freedoms allowed to
>> women, or even what are described (in cultural discourses) as sexual
>> freedoms allowed to women, even to this day in our own country (if we're
>> going to pretend we're cutting edge in that regard). So, if Humboldt's
>> agreement is internally coherent, and it may be, that's well and good. But,
>> as someone said (it may have been Kate Ferguson Ellis herself in her study
>> of Gothic fiction, The Contested Castle, or she may have been quoting
>> someone in that work) but the separation of the spheres between the
>> (masculine) world of work and the (feminine) world of domesticity that got
>> especially pushed as the bourgeoisie rose to power required, in order to
>> work, one central and crucial assumption: his generosity and her
>> complaisance. The phenomenon of domesticate abuse, which Gothic fiction in
>> one sense represents a critique of and cry for help against, results
>> exactly where the man reneges on his part of this bargain. To see this
>> point carried out to the nth degree, one only has to read de Sade, who in
>> his own way takes the premises of the separation of the spheres (or, if you
>> prefer, the conventions of the Gothic novel) and rewrites them with a
>> tremendous enthusiasm for inverting completely every moral injunction
>> assumed (or at least expected) of the one who is expected to be generous in
>> this setting.
>>
>> In general, Humboldt has long been to my taste. But what my studies of
>> 18th century female-authored fiction made apparent was how merely tidying
>> up the exclusivist language of the era doesn't erase the problems present
>> in it. What this means for us today and now is: how do our cries for
>> freedom not issue at the expense of others (in the context of this
>> discussion, particularly at the expense of women, who will still be
>> shouldered with the task of mothering, teaching, nursing) so that "everyone
>> else" (male or female) can be free. Perhaps another way to put this is that
>> "freedom" must necessarily be "freedom from" and what is that from? Freedom
>> from the mutual obligation imposed by marriage? Freedom from culpability
>> for child support from idly fathered children?
>>
>> I'm not disregarding that Humboldt may not be saying, "freedom under all
>> circumstances, damn all of your demands," but I'm very leery that a call
>> for "freedom" that ignores specificity of what that freedom is "from,"
>> easily lapses back into reprising undesirable social patterns. And since
>> we're white males, who benefit primarily from those social patterns
>> (however much to our detriment), then I become even sketchier at any kind
>> of argument that "our freedom" is different or acceptable than other calls
>> for freedom. This whole exchange is a fabulous luxury--to say nothing of
>> all of the time and work we were able to spend reading the people involved
>> in order to have it; other people are busy staying alive. And so are we,
>> and this is a part of what it means to be alive for us. But it takes no
>> imagination at all to call this irresponsible. And it takes no imagination
>> to see how calls for freedom, whether Humboldt's or others, isn't wholly
>> irresponsible in practice or essence. The opportunity to look at the world
>> in a strictly individualistic way is not just a luxury, the demand that
>> others should do so as well is tantamount to a death sentence, since
>> society is arranged in such a way that the resources needed to support such
>> individualism are explicitly denied to them in the first place. This, if
>> you will, is why "poor" people the world over can "afford" to be generous.
>>
>> So if Humboldt's argument contains a kernel that answers the
>> noneforceability of accountability apparent in his argument (as you have
>> presented it), then that's the part to bring up, not that he abstractly
>> excludes "irresponsibility" from his notion of freedom. Obviously, he will
>> believe he does not include that. He'd be kind of ignorant to ignore that
>> his calls for freedom need to be balanced by something (if not the demands
>> of the social, since that's what wants elimination). The immediate answer
>> would be education, or more properly acculturation: you raise men who
>> already want nothing more than to "be generous" in light of women's
>> "willingness" to be complaisant. (I put "willingness" in quotation marks
>> because in the circumstances of the time, the social structures that
>> existed enforced such complaisance. Recall, women could not inherit
>> anything; if their husbands died, they had to hope for the generosity of
>> his relatives or they were turned out into the street. Recall that at the
>> time to attempt self-employment was extremely onerous, if not socially
>> humiliating--to say nothing of the travails of going into the sex trade.
>> These social structures far more aggressively extorted complaisance out of
>> women. by comparison, men only had their social reputation at work and, to
>> be sure, in the 18th century, that was a mighty force indeed. But it meant
>> only that so long as all of a man's peccadilloes or major crimes occurred
>> in the household, then no one had to know about them, and they would
>> continue unabated.)
>>
>> To be clear: "complaisance" means "the quality of being complaisant,
>> amiable, or agreeable," where "complaisant" means: "compliant, willing to
>> do what pleases others, and polite or showing respect". It is not the same
>> as "complacent."
>>
>> [3] In general, I find the arguments given for the Ten Commandments
>> anachronistic, against the tradition of interpretation accorded to them in
>> Jewish sources ("thou shalt not steal" as "thou shalt not buy and sell
>> human beings" didn't give anyone pause while buying and selling wives, for
>> instance), and gratuitously limiting in terms of what we, as human beings,
>> might demand as moral exhortations, particularly in that most of the
>> injunctions are negative ("thou shalt not"); one commentary in this regard
>> claims that greater spiritual merit accrues in the choice of NOT doing
>> something rather than by CHOOSING to do something. Kant might disagree. I
>> suggest you'd arrive at a less patriarchal, more workable vision of
>> anarchism by not yoking that vision (pre- or post-Reformation) to any
>> biblical source.
>>
>> Whatever the Torah had to say prior to its revisions by Ezra and Nehemiah
>> are now apocryphal (unless we want to accept the Samaritans long-standing
>> claim that the practice of Judaism brought back from Babylonian exile was
>> illegitimate), what we now have from circa 450BCE represents a nadir in the
>> valuation of women. It's not the only such nadir, it's just the best known
>> and most promulgated, but it guarantees that the discourse we carry on
>> (even now) is grossly distorted by patriarchal values. The demonization of
>> Eve is only the second step, which is preceded by the denial of a Creatrix.
>> The injunction against other gods has as its object especially the cults of
>> the Great Goddess (particularly Astarte). In a practical expression of
>> this, despite the injunction against lying, which you name as being opposed
>> to the Pharaonic practice of deceit, in cases of rape, the truthfulness of
>> women brought punishment down upon them; or one could say, male lying about
>> rape shielded them from punishment and thus preserved the status quo in
>> exactly the way that you describe "thou shalt not lie" as being opposed to.
>> You acknowledge that "honor thy mother and father" drops the mother, and
>> yet still call this overwhelmingly patriarchal set of commandments as the
>> root of revolution. It's a revolution that women get only dragged along in
>> at best, as mothers to the next wave of suicide bombers. (I updated the
>> social consequences.) Not that this is only true in Islamic settings; all
>> mothers in Israel give their children to the military.
>>
>> I think here is a very adequate summary of the commandments, which can
>> only be numbered ten by some fancy exegeting: they describe: "the greatest
>> obligation (to worship only God), the greatest injury to a person (murder),
>> the greatest injury to family bonds (adultery), the greatest injury to
>> commerce and law (bearing false witness), the greatest intergenerational
>> obligation (honor to parents), the greatest obligation to community
>> (truthfulness), the greatest injury to moveable property (theft)"
>>
>> Let us remember that the overwhelming percentage of the text referred as
>> the 10 commandments is taken up with the first give, which exclusive
>> involve "the greatest obligation" (to worship only YHWH). The text doesn't
>> merely list injunctions but expatiates all over the place about the
>> details; calling this an injunction against religion profoundly misses the
>> mark. It's utterly unnecessary to erect some fantasy this could be the case
>> to argue on behalf of atheism. Gerda Lerner notes that prior to the cultic
>> revisions, the intolerant monotheism implicit in "worship none but YHWH"
>> became explicit and became the basis for exterminating "nonbelievers".
>> Presumably prior to that, as the Samaritans suggest and reflect, the
>> "worship only YHWH" part did not demand or imply the annihilation of one's
>> neighbors.
>>
>> As for the rest, does identifying the greatest injury to a person, family
>> bonds, commerce and law, and moveable property credibly and sufficiently
>> identify? Does the identification of these greatest injuries as murder,
>> adultery, perjury, and theft represent a credible or compelling list of
>> ultimate injuries? (It's controversial whether "bearing false witness"
>> should be understood in a legalistic term, as something like perjury, or
>> more generally, as lying.)
>>
>> I'm not claim the 10Cs are supposed to be a total moral system, so don't
>> misread what I'm saying that way. They merely point to fundamentals.
>>
>> Is murder the worst you can do to a person? (If so, why argue a moral
>> system that takes slavery as the most fundamental wrong? It would seem
>> slavery is a more pernicious crime against a person. Murder denies one the
>> capacity to live, and if man's fundamental nature is freedom, then freedom
>> not only denies the right to live, but also denies the fundamental nature
>> as well.) Is adultery the most damaging act against family bonds? (In which
>> case, why are men and women treated different in adultery?) Marriage, as an
>> institution, was imposed by one's parents. Just as one is expected to obey
>> and worship the Authority of god, so must you obey the authority of the
>> parents and not be adulterous. (This is why honor thy mother and father are
>> necessarily commandment 6). Similarly, since YHWH and parents are
>> infallible authorities, one should similarly honor judges. Even to this
>> day, it is imperative at times to lie in court for higher moral causes, or
>> simply to refuse to speak facts and be punished with contempt of court
>> charges. And, in a doctrine of anarchism, can theft really be the ultimate
>> offense against moveable property, when property is theft? The hypocrisy is
>> glaring and apparent, even without Jean Valjean's "crime".
>>
>> One might recall also that Dante reckoned sodomy, blasphemy, and usury as
>> worse than murder--and quite apart from whether I agree with him or not,
>> the idea that murder is the worst thing you can do to someone belies a lack
>> of imagination.
>>
>> What particularly underlies all of these injunctions is the opposite of
>> the antiauthoritarianism you name, and I doubt that's merely because at
>> some historical point we totally got the 10C's backward. The issue isn't
>> historical accuracy, of course, but current utility. Do we get anywhere
>> socially by this deliberate misreading of the 10Cs? The very fact of
>> resorting to them may be irremediably indicted with authoritarianism. To
>> make something useable out of them would involve changing them so
>> completely that one would better have started from scratch, just as people
>> try to rescue the Golden Rule from its moral ambiguities, when one might
>> more simply recall the Eastern moral injunction, "harm none."  Doesn't get
>> much more straightforward than that.
>>
>> I'm not sure if it's helpful to go far enough backward in time, prior to
>> a capitalism and religion uninfected by the inputs that helped construct
>> both since the 18th century in the areas that called themselves
>> civilization. My point was that the swapping of the metaphor of Mother (as
>> State) in place of the metaphor of Father (as State) is a difference of
>> emphasis rather than kind, and particularly problematic in view of
>> "civilization's" rampant sexism (patriarchal structuring).
>>
>> I realize this is a bit "alongside" your response, but then so was your
>> response. We can say that authoritarianism is a human problem, not a
>> judeochristian or capitalistic problem, and that judeochristianity (and
>> Islam) and capitalism (particularly as it was practiced by the Fathers of
>> Industry and Fathers of Science who were probably more oppressively awful
>> to their own families than Kings were to their subjects on average) reflect
>> in the main (with whatever lip service otherwise was seen as necessary) the
>> human problem of authoritarianism. That leaves authoritarianism as a
>> problem to be solved regardless in our metaphors for the State as we (all
>> of us) discourse to try to find alternatives to it.
>>
>> Thinking of the myth of the Garden of Eden, it is clear that that's a
>> narrative written by children, not parents. Children blame their parents
>> for everything. It is parents who fucked everything up, and children can
>> only try to make the best of a bad situation. it's also apparently a myth
>> written by boys, because Mom is particularly blamed for fucking things up.
>> No parent, and certainly no mother (except a genuine traitor to her own
>> kin) ever would have written that myth. Had a parent written it, they would
>> have insisted they did their best, would have insisted nothing else could
>> have been done, and so forth. It's no accident, I contend, that this shows
>> up later in the book of Job, where YHWH says, "Who are you to question me."
>> But I'm bogging down in details now. (In point of fact, when one looks at
>> some of the oldest myths in the world, our status as "child" relative to
>> Nature is certainly an accurate "starting point". Other world myths,
>> however, don't demonize the divine parents, who themselves are a later set
>> of figures compared to a vast undifferentiated Nature in the earliest
>> myths--usually identified as female, yes, but sometimes bisexual or
>> asexual).
>>
>> The point I want to make is that the biblical template has a
>> schizophrenically parentalistic (not just paternalistic) emphasis. In
>> Genesis 1, written later, the children blame the parents for the original
>> condition. In Genesis 2, written first, the father already browbeats his
>> children and demands their unflinching obedience. In part, this is because
>> children grow up into parents. But the bottom line for us, searching for
>> alternatives to the current undesirable social order, means that we remain
>> stuck on either side of authoritarianism--either we blame others for
>> fucking up or we make excuses for our own fucking up.
>>
>> But we know from statistic that abused children don't always (or even
>> often) grow up into abusers. The myth that we're doomed to become what we
>> hated as children (the authoritarianism we rejected as unfair) is just
>> that, a myth. And so long as we stay stuck in a choice of metaphors between
>> Father, Mother, or Son (patriarchy excuses Daughters from participating,
>> except as future Mothers, so there is no need to ask them their opinion),
>> as the only major organizing metaphors you can pull out of the bible
>> (consider again the Ten Commandments), then we'll stay stuck. Hence I
>> reject any impulse to make a virtue (or even a necessity) of the vice of
>> the bible.
>>
>> On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 5:54 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Michael--
>>
>>
>> Without attempting to respond to your whole argument, I'd offer the
>> following remarks:
>>
>>
>> [1] The sentence in question (it's an important one) - "For Humboldt as
>> for Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man's central attribute is his
>> freedom" - comes from a text written more than 40 years ago, when care to
>> avoid exclusivist language was not so pronounced, so to speak. The meaning
>> of the passage would be unaffected, were it to read "...the human being's
>> central attribute is her/his freedom." And the change would not affect the
>> rest of Chomsky's argument (nor yours). (See Noam Chomsky, "Government in
>> the Future," Seven Stories Press.)
>>
>>
>> [2] The classical liberal concept of freedom - which Chomsky thinks leads
>> on to anarchism in an age of industrial capitalism - as an essential
>> element of human nature would be opposed to irresponsibility and license,
>> as contrary to that human nature. "...a classical liberal doctrine ... is
>> not primitive individualis[m], in the style of for example Rousseau. So
>> Rousseau extols the savage who lives within himself, but Humboldt's vision
>> is entirely different: '...the whole tenor of the ideas and arguments
>> unfolded in this essay might fairly be reduced to this: that while they
>> would break all fetters in human society, they would attempt to find as
>> many new social bonds as possible. The isolated man is no more able to
>> develop than the one who is fettered.'"
>>
>>
>> [3] The notion of the state that you describe is I think less
>> "judeochristian-esque" than capitalist. If you'll forgive my quoting myself
>> from a seven-year-old article, here's the briefest of sketches of how I
>> think we got from one to the other <
>> http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/03/29/the-subversive-commandments/>:
>>
>>
>> The Subversive Commandments
>>
>> Ignoring government assaults on the Bill of Rights (for which,
>> admittedly, the remedy under the present US Constitution is impeachment,
>> the responsibility of Congress) the US Supreme Court has instead fastened
>> its attention on a political fetish-object: the Ten Commandments. In the
>> midst of an illegal war, a torture scandal, and lawless administration
>> actions — such as imprisoning an American citizen, Jose Padilla, for almost
>> three years now without trial or charge — the court recently heard
>> arguments on the question (as the New York Times put it), "what does it
>> mean for the government to display a copy of the Ten Commandments? … a
>> six-foot red granite monument that has sat since 1961 on the grounds of the
>> Texas Capitol, and framed copies of the Ten Commandments that were hung
>> five years ago on the walls of two Kentucky courthouses."
>>
>> In an impressive confirmation of the Postmodernist-cum-Humpty-Dumpty
>> theory of the meaning of words ("The question is," said Humpty Dumpty,
>> "which is to be master — that’s all"), both sides (as we say) tell us what
>> the Ten Commandments mean. Conservatives defend the postings in Kentucky
>> and Texas on the grounds that the Ten Commandments "formed the foundation
>> of American legal tradition." Liberals on the other hand insist that the
>> posting is an "establishment of religion," contrary to the first amendment
>> to the Constitution. In fact, both are wrong: the Ten Commandments in their
>> historical setting are a revolutionary manifesto, dedicated to the
>> overthrow of traditional authority and religion.
>>
>> The Ten Commandments (unnumbered) were written down perhaps as early as
>> the fifth century BCE in two passages in the Hebrew bible (Exodus 20:1-17
>> and Deuteronomy 5:6-21), but they represent a view that goes back perhaps
>> another eight centuries to the beginnings of the people of Israel — who
>> were probably not originally what we would call "an ethnic group." As
>> described by Norman Gottwald in his magisterial _The Tribes of Yahweh_, the
>> Israelites as a people began in a revolution of slaves against the
>> Egyptian empire, a massive rejection of the society of the time. That
>> society was one of authority and religion, presided over by a king whose
>> position was guaranteed by the gods. The Hebrews (the word seems originally
>> to have meant "outlaws") rejected both the kings and the gods.
>>
>> The Exodus events of perhaps the thirteenth century BCE were not so much
>> a migration (as is pictured in the bible story) but a "going out" (exodus)
>> from a society and its assumptions. The Ten Commandments are a proclamation
>> of that revolution, a "Declaration of Independence of Liberated Israel."
>>
>> The text begins with the presentation of a liberator, styled YHWH (a form
>> of the Hebrew verb "to be"), "who brought you out of the house of slavery."
>> YHWH is not a god in the sense of the surrounding society. Gods guarantee
>> authority, and YHWH destroys it: "You shall have no gods." Idolatry is the
>> greatest sin in Judaism, Christianity and Islam because it means bowing
>> down before symbols of oppression. Even an image of YHWH is forbidden — the
>> only image of YHWH is humanity (Genesis 1:26). To "misuse" the name of YHWH
>> is not a matter of saying "goddamn": it is to use the name to wield
>> numinous power, as was done with the names of the gods — that is to say, it
>> is to practice religion. The Ten Commandments forbid religion (Exodus 20:
>> 1-7).
>>
>> The commandment about the sabbath has nothing to do with going to church.
>> On that day, "You shall not do any work": it is a commandment against the
>> idolatry of work. The revolutionary Israelites were slaves, valued only for
>> their work. "We are people, but you have forgotten it." The next
>> commandment is similar. "Honor your parents" has nothing to do with
>> obedience: it means not to discard people just because they are too old to
>> work.
>>
>> The rest of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:8-17) are a picture of the
>> society that was being rejected, a society that claimed the power of life
>> and death ("You shall not kill"). The commandment against adultery is not
>> primarily about sex (the Hebrew bible isn’t very interested in sex) and the
>> commandment against stealing is not about property — they’re against
>> stealing people. Biblical scholars have recognized for many years that
>> these commandments are condemnations of the powerful who invaded households
>> to steal concubines and slaves.
>>
>> Such a society is based on greed ("You shall not covet") and requires the
>> protection of lies ("You shall not bear false witness"). The Ten
>> Commandments sketch the sort of society that the Israelites thought
>> themselves called upon by YHWH to construct. The commandments are not
>> primarily individual but communal, a demand for a just community, without
>> the domination and stratification of most previous (and most subsequent)
>> civilization.
>>
>> Three-quarters of the history of Christianity had gone by before the Ten
>> Commandments became, on the eve of the Reformation, the primary expression
>> of morality in western Europe — and then only after a revolutionary
>> reinterpretation, as the modern attempt to discover their original intent
>> (as the lawyers would say) shows. For over a thousand years, the tradition
>> of the seven deadly sins, from late antiquity, formed the basis of
>> Christian moral exhortation — not the Ten Commandments. The historian John
>> Bossy writes, "For Chaucer, and indeed for Dante, these had been a high
>> doctrine, to be left to divines; there were still in the sixteenth century
>> quite well-informed Catholics … who had never heard of them … [the]
>> transition to the Ten Commandments as the moral system of the West … may
>> fairly be described as revolutionary."
>>
>> What prompted the revolution in moral theory was the rise of capitalism,
>> as can be seen in the reinterpretation of the crucial commandment in the
>> early modern world, that about "honoring your father" ("and your mother" —
>> set aside for obvious reasons). An entire structure of obedience is spun
>> out of it — and the other commandments are reinterpreted in its light — now
>> that the (quite different) notions of of authority in the thousand-year
>> reign of feudalism are coming to an end. Protestants and Catholics
>> alike rather suddenly turned to the Commandments, wrenched from their
>> historical context and twisted in an authoritarian direction.
>>
>> The Ten Commandments in their proper historical context commend atheism
>> in regard to the religion of the gods and anarchism in respect to the laws
>> of the kings. Arising from a revolutionary people, they support the
>> overthrow of authoritarian structures in the name of human community. That
>> sounds pretty good to me.
>>
>>
>> Regards, CGE
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 2, 2012, at 2:33 PM, Michael Gaiuranos <michaelgaiuranos at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> CG and Generally:
>>
>> A wonderfully long reply I will not do justice to here now, but I want to
>> add two points as contextualizations. And since I'm often fatally
>> long-winded, here they are summarized: (1) any discussion of the character
>> of the State (and our relationship to it) will be improved by finding
>> alternatives to the judeochristian-esque elements of the discourse that
>> inform our discussions of the State; (2) To the extent that "freedom"
>> socially functions as "irresponsibility" or "license," then those who are
>> asked to bear the costs of that irresponsibility or license have a claim
>> against such a conceptualization.
>>
>> Both of these are offers (additions, not substitutions) that we all have
>> necessarily partial understandings of the needs, goals, purposes called for
>> in social action, so let's not fight about the truth of those partial
>> understandings but instead draw on their variety as inputs for collective
>> doing-together.
>>
>> ===============
>> (1). Part of what is at stake in Carl's reply and the discourse of what
>> social action could be taken (or wants to be taken locally/collectively)
>> involves the details of the metaphor used to describe the State. At the
>> risk of hijacking the point (especially amongst those who see religion as a
>> waste of time), I'm going to distinguish our (unfortunately) familiar
>> notion of the Divine (colloquially known in judeochristian/Islamic terms as
>> god) with a less familiar conception (known broadly elsewhere as the
>> Supreme Consciousness--and specifically Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita).
>>
>> I propose there is a justness in bringing this up not because anyone here
>> believes this but because the judeochristian sense of the divine is,
>> itself, already a symptom of an outlook (as Krishna is also a symptom of a
>> different outlook) that underpins vast tracts of other discourses where we
>> live. Yahweh and Krishna (one could substitute Vishnu, Shiva, Kali,
>> Brahman, Brahma here--and the fact that one can do this substitution shows
>> the difference of discourse) are symbols of the broader cultural discourse.
>> because they are cultural fictions, perhaps the discourse shows up in its
>> purist form.
>>
>> The root difference between Yahweh and Krishna (as a metaphor for the
>> State): humankind serves Yahweh, while Krishna serves humankind. With
>> Yahweh, the State works in mysterious ways and we are enjoined to work in
>> the ignorance of faith, grateful for whatever beneficences befall us,
>> uncomplaining at whatever rigors are asked or exacted upon us, and never
>> questioning (or, if we do, getting reminded of the Book of Job) that we are
>> small petty things who don't and can't understand. Of course, in all of
>> this, Yahweh (the State) claims to love us, claims that any violence it
>> practices upon us is for our own good, and so on. At root is the ultimate
>> mystery we can and do ask, "Why again do You need me for anything?" Why in
>> the world does the all-powerful, all-knowing State need me for anything?
>> One can sense here exactly an article of bad faith. If my labor (or worship
>> is required, then Yahweh cannot be so all-powerful. At worst, this is a
>> trick to deny my agency and extort my obedience (if not loyalty). How can
>> the State require our worship if we are nothing and can accomplish nothing
>> without It ... and so on. Sheer pragmatism dictates to us its better really
>> to act as if Yahweh (the State) doesn't exist. Certainly one should never
>> ask anything of It--at best, you will be ignored; at worst, you might get
>> Its attention. &c.
>>
>> In contrast, Krishna provides an image of the State first and foremost
>> not as a permanent truth but simply the current manifestation. Here, the
>> State serves as our charioteer; the State serves us, ever ready to answer,
>> to each according to her needs, the questions of what is to be done. The
>> existential circumstance of this--the metaphysics behind Krishna as an
>> image--could be brought in to complicate this more. But when Krishna is
>> asked if he would explain something, he replies, "I would be delighted."
>> Transparency is his metier. Assisting the ends of humankind is his
>> elemental purpose. In this metaphor, the status of the individual is very
>> different as well, and the answers, "Why should I worship You" are various,
>> but one of the first is (as Buddha said explicitly), "Don't worship me."
>> The details of this for the individual I leave to some other time, but it
>> makes a seque to my second point, which is briefer.
>>
>> Summary: (1) the discussion of the character of the State (and our
>> relationship to it) may be improved by ferretting out the
>> judeochristian-esque elements of the discourse that inform our discussions
>> of it.
>>
>> (2). Central to CG's reply is the sentence: "For Humboldt as for
>> Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man's central attribute is his
>> freedom."
>>
>> Emphasis on "man". I hear this, and I think of the demand (by men)
>> especially since the enlightenment for women to remain in the home, to
>> remain innocent (i.e., ignorant), and all the rest. This isn't just a
>> euroamerican phenomenon of course, but we're in a euroamerican context
>> presently, sot hat's what I speak to. nor am I simply pointing to the
>> androcentricity of the whole argument here. To a very great degree, the
>> notion of freedom (particularly as described in CG's reply) is freedom from
>> determination, freedom from "unnatural" constrains--and its exactly that
>> that leads to libertarianism and a need to rescue Humboldt etc from their
>> logical opposition to the "unnatural constraint" of a State. This "desire
>> for freedom" (legitimate or not) manifests continuously in our culture as a
>> desire for irresponsibility, a desire for non-accountability, a desire
>> for--to put it in a word--license, more than liberty. This is how my friend
>> Neil jokingly paraphrased "libertarians as Republicans who want to do
>> drugs."
>>
>> The point, of course, is that this freedom (as license, more than
>> liberty--and, to be sure, it's not like no one has not commented on this:
>> HG Wells for one asserted that a reduction of liberty leads to an increase
>> of freedom)--this freedom occurs in a social context, where the
>> self-determining men do so if not at the expense of women then in the
>> general absence of them. Neumann's Origins and History of Consciousness
>> (and Campbell's hero mythos) takes as fundamental the need to separate from
>> the "determination" of "mother"--and thus, generally, any determination of
>> women in general. Thus, the demands of women must--if one is to
>> existentially express "man is in his essence [as] a free, searching,
>> self-perfecting being,
>> "--be ignored or, worse, combatively denied or denigrated to achieve that
>> "freedom".
>>
>>
>> The answer to this does not ineluctably lead to the conclusion that women
>> must also be thought of as "in her essence a free, searching,
>> self-perfecting being". If women would be rid of the shackles that
>> patriarchy place on them--and it's hard to imagine they wouldn't want
>> that--then what "freedom" means for women in that sense is different than
>> what freedom means in Humboldt's sense etc (for men). I don't think it's
>> overreading CG's response to say that one (implicit) metaphor to express
>> the point he is making--to rescue the logically anti-statist view of
>> Humboldt etc from that to revisit it in our contemporaneous setting--is an
>> image of state as Mother. Except to say that the metaphor of Krishna as
>> State is not the metaphor of Mother as State, it seems obvious that
>> judeochristian conceit of Father as All explicitly hides the implicit labor
>> of the Mother. This is all for show, it always has been, for She must be
>> there, because She always has been and is and will be. Covertly shifting
>> the emphasis of the State's character from the overbearing metaphor of
>> Father to a nurturing, supportive metaphor of Mother as State may seem
>> exciting for men who want to be supported while fleeing from the
>> determination of women to experience an essential freedom, but it does
>> nothing to desiccate the socially problematic equation of women with Mother
>> that would leave the shackles in place so men may pursue freedom).
>>
>> Against the desire for non-determination by others (what would positively
>> be called self-determination), there is also the deep desire for
>> relationship with others, which necessarily presupposes and cannot get rid
>> of determination. Our most familiar image of this, if we've experienced it,
>> arises precisely in nondysfunctional families, where the diversity of human
>> expression gets subsumed under the notion, "We're a family." Sometimes
>> motehrs make this argument, sometimes fathers, so it's not merely a
>> gendered issue. The claim to throw off the determinants of the State in
>> order to be free is simply a restatement of, "So long, Mom. Gotta jet."
>> Even the Christian hero (Jesus) spits on his mother (so to speak) on the
>> cross. But this says nothing for what the "mother" is supposed to do. If
>> the impulse to "relationship" gets ensconced in our culture primarily with
>> Woman, who is asked to keep together the family, then advocating freedom
>> becomes a denigration of woman. Either we may say negatively that Woman
>> (with a capital "W" this is referring to no specific women) "doesn't want
>> freedom" or (positively) that She wants relationship, interdependence. The
>> often proposed "solution" of interdependence as for the problem of too much
>> dependance and or independence thus misses the mark. It only address half
>> (if that) of the problem.
>>
>> The inadequacy of this shows on the social plane where "interdependence"
>> should manifest as "community". And (in point of fact) we ARE
>> interdependent in this sense; my well-being is a function of my
>> interdependent social well-being, but the recognition of that in the social
>> domain is so vitiated that (1) finding allies who agree is rare, and (2)
>> trying to model my behavior on that premise gets misread in light of the
>> lack of recognition. (I'm covertly pointing back to Krishna as a metaphor
>> of State rather than Mother by saying this, because Krishna emphasizes how
>> our ignorance, our partial understanding, of social reality becomes the
>> source of all woe). The various calls by feminists to acknowledge a
>> "female" sense of relationship points to this, but I will insist that
>> "interdependence" (as constructed in a patriarchal culture) does not avoid
>> the pitfalls of patriarchal culture yet. A call for "interdependence" thus
>> looks like a demand to put on chains, because it is read as a resistance to
>> "freedom" (just as we read in CG's reply that self-determination becomes
>> the right to pick which chains one wants to wear). Clearly, it's the
>> terminology int he discourse that's the first chain, and I'd sooner try
>> without that as a first step.
>>
>>
>> And since I limited myself to the man/woman part of the equation involved
>> in "
>> And, since man is in his essence a free, searching, self-perfecting
>> being, " I necessarily left out the issues of class and race that would
>> equally and fruitfully be brought in as a further qualification of too much
>> unbridled enthusiasm for freedom and the State as a means for attaining
>> that.
>>
>> Summary: To the extent that freedom is irresponsibility or license, those
>> asked to bear the costs of that irresponsibility have a claim to raise
>> against such a conceptualization of "freedom".
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 9:22 PM, C. G. Estabrook <carl at newsfromneptune.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> From the Enlightenment & the rise of capitalism we've lived in a world in
>> which what makes us human - our purposeful work of head and hands - is
>> taken out of our control. We have to sell our work - better, rent it - to
>> the owners of capital if we want to eat regularly ("get a job"): we work
>> under their direction. This is alienation - an objective situation, not
>> just a psychological state.
>>
>>
>> That this situation is an insult to human nature - and seen to be such
>> for generations - was pointed in the first lecture I ever heard Noam
>> Chomsky delicer, "Government in  the Future" (1971). A selection follows.
>> --CGE
>>
>>
>> ==========================
>>
>> ...One of the earliest and most brilliant expositions of this position
>> is in Wilhelm Von Humboldt's "Limits of State Action", which was written in
>> 1792, though not published for 60 or 70 years after that. In his view: "The
>> state tends to make man an instrument to serve its arbitrary ends,
>> overlooking his individual purposes. And, since man is in his essence a
>> free, searching, self-perfecting being, it follows that the state is a
>> profoundly anti-human institution." That is, its actions, its existence,
>> are ultimately incompatible with the full harmonious development of human
>> potential in its richest diversity. Hence incompatible with what Humboldt,
>> and in the following century Marx, Bakunin, Mill, and many others, what
>> they see as the true end of man. And for the record I think that this is an
>> accurate description.
>>
>> The modern conservative tends to regard himself as the lineal descendant
>> of the classical liberal in this sense, but I think that can be maintained
>> only from an extremely superficial point of view, as one can see by
>> studying more carefully the fundamental ideas of classical libertarian
>> thought as expressed, in my opinion, in its most profound form by Humboldt.
>>
>> I think the issues are of really quite considerable contemporary
>> significance, and if you don't mind what may appear to be a somewhat
>> antiquarian excursion, I'd like to expand on them.
>>
>> For Humboldt as for Rousseau, and before him the Cartesians, man's
>> central attribute is his freedom. "To enquire and to create, these are the
>> centers around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve."
>> "But," he goes on to say, "all moral cultures spring solely and immediately
>> from the inner life of the soul and can never be produced by external and
>> artificial contrivances. The cultivation of the understanding, as of any
>> man's other faculties, is generally achieved by his own activity, his own
>> ingenuity, or his own methods of using the discoveries of others."
>>
>> Well, from these assumptions, quite obviously, an educational theory
>> follows and he develops it, but I won't pursue it. But also far more
>> follows. Humboldt goes on to develop at least the rudiments of a theory of
>> exploitation and of alienated labour that suggests in significant ways, I
>> think, the early Marx. Humboldt in fact continues these comments that I
>> quoted, about the cultivation of the understanding through spontaneous
>> action, in the following way: He says, "Man never regards what he possesses
>> as so much his own, as what he does and the laborer who tends the garden is
>> perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys
>> its fruits. And since truly human action is that which flows from inner
>> impulse, it seems as if all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into
>> artists, that is men who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by
>> their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their
>> intellect, ennoble their character, and exult and refine their pleasures;
>> and so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though
>> beautiful in themselves, so often go to degrade it." "Freedom is
>> undoubtedly the indispensable condition without which even the pursuits
>> most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing
>> such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man's free
>> choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter
>> into his very being but remains alien to his true nature. He does not
>> perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness.
>> And if a man acts in a mechanical way, reacting to external demands or
>> instruction, rather than in ways determined by his own interests and
>> energies and power," he says, "we may admire what he does, but we despise
>> what he is."
>>
>> For Humboldt then, man is born to enquire and create, and when a man or a
>> child chooses to enquire or create out of its own free choice, then he
>> becomes, in his own terms, "an artist rather than a tool of production or a
>> well trained parrot". This is the essence of his concept of human nature.
>> And I think that it is very revealing and interesting compared with Marx,
>> with the early Marx manuscripts, and particularly his account of "the
>> alienation of labour when work is external to the worker, not part of his
>> nature, so that he does not fulfill himself in his work but denies himself
>> and is physically exhausted and mentally debased. This alienated labour
>> that casts some of the workers back into a barbarous kind of work and turns
>> others into machines, thus depriving man of his species character, of free
>> conscious activity and productive life." Recall also Marx's well known and
>> often quoted reference to a higher form of society, in which labour has
>> become not only a means of life but also the highest want in life. And
>> recall also his repeated criticism of the specialized labour which,
>> "mutilates the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrades him to
>> become a mere appurtenance of the machine, makes his work such a torment
>> that its essential meaning is destroyed, estranges from him the
>> intellectual potentialities of the labour process in very proportion to the
>> extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power."
>>
>> Robert Tucker for one has rightly emphasized that Marx sees the
>> revolutionary more as a frustrated producer, than as a dis-satisfied
>> consumer. And this, far more radical, critique of capitalist relations of
>> production, flows directly, often in the same words, from the libertarian
>> thought of The Enlightenment. For this reason, I think, one must say that
>> classical liberal ideas, in their essence though not in the way they
>> developed, are profoundly anti-capitalist. The essence of these ideas must
>> be destroyed for them to serve as an ideology of modern industrial
>> capitalism.
>>
>> Writing in the 1780's and early 1790's, Humboldt had no conception of the
>> forms that industrial capitalism would take. Consequently, in this classic
>> of classical liberalism, he stresses the problem of limiting state power,
>> and he is not overly concerned with the dangers of private power. The
>> reason is that he believes in and speaks of the essential equality of
>> condition of private citizens, and of course he has no idea, writing in
>> 1790, of the ways in which the notion of private person would come to be
>> reinterpreted in the era of corporate capitalism. "He did not foresee", I
>> now quote the anarchist historian Rudolf Rocker: "he did not foresee that
>> democracy, with its model of equality of all citizens before the law, and
>> liberalism, with its right of man over his own person, both would be
>> wrecked on the realities of capitalistic economy." Humboldt did not foresee
>> that in a predatory capitalistic economy, state intervention would be an
>> absolute necessity. To preserve human existence. To prevent the destruction
>> of the physical environment. I speak optimistically of course.
>>
>> As Karl Polanyi for one has pointed out: "The self-adjusting market could
>> not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural
>> substance of society. It would have physically destroyed man and
>> transformed his surroundings into a wilderness." I think that's correct.
>> Humboldt also did not foresee the consequences of the commodity character
>> of labor. The doctrine, again in Polanyi's words, "that it is not for the
>> commodity to decide where it should be offered for sale, to what purpose
>> it should be used, at what price it should be allowed to change hands, in
>> what manner it should be consumed or destroyed." But the commodity in this
>> case is of course human life. And social protection was therefore a minimal
>> necessity to constrain the irrational and destructive workings of the
>> classical free market.
>>
>> Nor did Humboldt understand in 1790 that capitalistic economic relations
>> perpetuated a form of bondage which, long before that in fact, as early as
>> 1767, Simon Linguet had declared to be "even worse than slavery," writing
>> :"it is the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our
>> farm labourers to till the soil, whose fruits they will not eat, and our
>> masons to construct buildings in which they will not live. It is want that
>> drags them to those markets where they await masters, who will do them
>> the kindness of buying them. It is want that compels them to go down on
>> their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich
>> him. What effective gain has the suppression of slavery brought him? 'He is
>> free,' you say. That is his misfortune. These men, it is said, have no
>> master. They have one, and the most terrible, the most imperious of
>> masters: that is, need. It is this that that reduces them to the most cruel
>> dependence." And if there is something degrading to human nature in the
>> idea of bondage, as every spokesman for the enlightenment would insist,
>> then it would follow that a new emancipation must be awaited, what Fourier
>> referred to as the third and last emancipatory phase of history. The first
>> having made serfs out of slaves, the second wage earners out of serfs and
>> the third which will transform the proletariat freemen by eliminating the
>> commodity character of labour, ending wage slavery and bringing the
>> commercial, industrial and financial institutions, under democratic control.
>>
>> These are all things that Humboldt in his classical liberal doctrine did
>> not express and didn't see, but I think that he might have accepted these
>> conclusions. He does, for example, agree that state intervention in social
>> life is legitimate "if freedom would destroy the very conditions without
>> which not only freedom but even existence itself would be inconceivable"
>> which are precisely the circumstances that arise in an unconstrained
>> capitalist economy and he does, as in remarks that I quoted,
>> vigorously condemn the alienation of labour. In any event, his criticism of
>> bureaucracy and the autocratic state stands as a very eloquent forewarning
>> of some of the most dismal aspects of modern history, and the important
>> point is that the basis of his critique is applicable to a far broader
>> range of coercive institutions than he imagined, in particular to
>> the institutions of industrial capitalism.
>>
>> Though he expresses a classical liberal doctrine, Humboldt is no
>> primitive individualist, in the style of for example Rousseau. So Rousseau
>> extols the savage who lives within himself, but Humboldt's vision is
>> entirely different. He sums up his remarks as follows, he says "the whole
>> tenor of the ideas and arguments unfolded in this essay might fairly be
>> reduced to this: that while they would break all fetters in human society,
>> they would attempt to find as many new social bonds as possible. The
>> isolated man is no more able to develop than the one who is fettered." and
>> he in fact looks forwards to a community of free association, without
>> coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free
>> men can create and inquire, achieve the highest development of their
>> powers. In fact, far ahead of his time, he presents an anarchist vision
>> that is appropriate, perhaps, to the next stage of industrial society. We
>> can perhaps look forward to a day, when these various strands will be
>> brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social
>> form that barely exists today, though its elements can perhaps be
>> perceived, for example in the guarantee of individual rights, that has
>> achieved so far its fullest realization (though still tragically flawed in
>> the western democracies), or in the Israeli kibbutzim, or in the
>> experiments with workers' councils in Yugoslavia, or in the effort to
>> awaken popular consciousness and to create a new involvement in the social
>> process, which is a fundamental element in the third world revolutions,
>> coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practice.
>>
>> So let me summarize this first point. The first point of the state that I
>> want to setup as a reference, classical liberal, its doctrine is that the
>> state function should be drastically limited, but this familiar
>> characterization is a very superficial one. More deeply, the classical
>> liberal view develops from a certain concept of human nature: one that
>> stresses the importance of diversity and free creation. And therefore this
>> view is in fundamental opposition to industrial capitalism, with its wage
>> slavery, its alienated labour and its hierarchic and authoritarian
>> principles of social and economic organisation. At least in its Humboldtian
>> form, classical liberal thought is opposed as well to the concepts
>> of possessive individualism, which are intrinsic to capitalist ideology. So
>> it seeks to eliminate social fetters, but to replace them by social bonds,
>> not by competitive greed, not by predatory individualism, not of course by
>> corporate empires, state or private. Classical libertarian thought seems to
>> me therefore to lead directly to libertarian socialism or anarchism, if you
>> like, when combined with an understanding of industrial capitalism...
>>
>> On Nov 1, 2012, at 8:03 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <ewj at pigsqq.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> As a dedicated workaholic I find this partitioning of one's work and
>> one's life
>> as being incredibly difficult to understand.  I seldom stop thinking
>> about my
>> work, even when I am not thinking about my work.
>>
>> What is it that makes people hate their jobs?
>>
>> Is there some fundamental mismatch between what people do and what
>> comes natural to them?  I find it very natural to immerse myself in my
>> work.
>>
>> *
>>
>> I was thinking about this
>> MisMatch/MisAlignment/Incompatibility/Maladaptation syndrome
>> thing in regard to the huge number of people who end up in Amerika's Cull
>> Pens, the prisons.
>>
>> Some get captured there as pawns because prisons are good business.
>>
>> But really the majority are there because they are MisFits.  I recognize
>> that not
>> all MisFits end up in the Iron Hotel...
>>
>> But there is something Fundamentally Wrong with a society that hates its
>> work and
>> wants to spend less time working and more time not working, and something
>> fundamentally
>> wrong with a society that generates so many culls.
>>
>>
>> On 11/02/12 8:36, Susan Parenti wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> Susan, thank you so much for your messages about this -- I can't
>> attend the meeting tonight, but I have an idea I would like to pass
>> along.
>>
>> I try to imagine the different world we would all be living in if the
>> prediction made in 1965 by a U.S. Senate subcommittee had come true:
>> that by the year 2000, the standard U.S. work week would be reduced to
>> 20 hours, due to efficiencies created through computerization and
>> automation. Certainly we've realized these efficiencies, but workers
>> in the U.S. are working longer hours than ever -- certainly longer
>> than any other post-industrial nation in the world.
>>
>> Why is this? Okay, so a culture of market-driven material competition
>> would be expected to generate obsessive, irrational behaviors about
>> work, and just as clearly, overscheduling the employed class preempts
>> political activism. No doubt, many more reasons could be added to this
>> list. // Following the script of standard employment models, where
>> routines and relationships are ready-made, requires less
>> responsibility and courage than making free choices and dealing with
>> the consequences. Are we promoting the harder-but-richer path of
>> greater discretionary time, or are we using one economic crisis after
>> another to ensure that the same tired routines are reproduced?
>>
>> A shorter work week would be an excellent Occupy-oriented argument and
>> would work alongside arguments against underemployment and
>> unemployment, and in favor of a living wage -- behind all these
>> arguments is the need for a fairer parsing of compensation for labor
>> and the time we dedicate to receive it. As a protest movement, a
>> reduced work week certainly has a policy dimension, with many
>> statistical analyses and anecdotes to support legislative reform. As a
>> political movement, though, it can also be practiced by anyone with a
>> full-time job, in which individuals make a commitment to take back 10
>> or 20 hours per week, either overtly (by promoting goal-driven
>> schedules over absolute schedules, say) or covertly (by being champion
>> slackers). I like both approaches.
>>
>> Sorry again for not being at the meeting tonight -- I hope these ideas
>> feel worthwhile and welcome at the meeting.
>>
>> Best Wishes,
>> Rohn
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> OccupyCU at lists.chambana.net
>> http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/occupycu
>>
>>
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