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Word, bro.<br>
<br>
*<br>
<br>
In regard to protecting the environment, that part about not harming
others<br>
restrains the principled libertarian from harming the environment.<br>
<br>
Although I might not readily accept notions of carbon footprints and
AGW,<br>
I could point out other much more clear and undisputable examples of <br>
uncaring capitalistic exploitation.<br>
<br>
<a
href="http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A2KJkeysS5NQ2FoAhkqJzbkF?p=baku%20oil%20fields&fr=moz35&ei=utf-8&n=30&x=wrt&fr2=sg-gac&sado=1">http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A2KJkeysS5NQ2FoAhkqJzbkF?p=baku%20oil%20fields&fr=moz35&ei=utf-8&n=30&x=wrt&fr2=sg-gac&sado=1</a><br>
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<img src="cid:part1.01090608.00090304@pigsqq.org" alt=""><br>
<img src="cid:part2.06020201.08010508@pigsqq.org" alt=""><br>
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<br>
On 11/02/12 10:22, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:FCB25AEE-2B96-4300-9515-C7D5210327F0@newsfromneptune.com"
type="cite">
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>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.
<div><br>
</div>
<div>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<br>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>==========================</div>
<div>...<span style="font-family: Times;">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.</span></div>
<div>
<p style="font-family: Times;">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.</p>
<p style="font-family: Times;">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.</p>
<p style="font-family: Times;">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."</p>
<p style="font-family: Times;">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."</p>
<p style="font-family: Times;">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."</p>
<p style="font-family: Times;">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.</p>
<p style="font-family: Times;">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.</p>
<div>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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...<br>
<br>
<br>
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<div>
<div>On Nov 1, 2012, at 8:03 PM, "E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森" <<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:ewj@pigsqq.org">ewj@pigsqq.org</a>>
wrote:</div>
<br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
<blockquote type="cite">As a dedicated workaholic I find this
partitioning of one's work and one's life<br>
as being incredibly difficult to understand. I seldom stop thinking
about my<br>
work, even when I am not thinking about my work.<br>
<br>
What is it that makes people hate their jobs?<br>
<br>
Is there some fundamental mismatch between what people do and what<br>
comes natural to them? I find it very natural to immerse myself in my
work.<br>
<br>
*<br>
<br>
I was thinking about this
MisMatch/MisAlignment/Incompatibility/Maladaptation syndrome<br>
thing in regard to the huge number of people who end up in Amerika's
Cull Pens, the prisons.<br>
<br>
Some get captured there as pawns because prisons are good business.<br>
<br>
But really the majority are there because they are MisFits. I
recognize that not<br>
all MisFits end up in the Iron Hotel...<br>
<br>
But there is something Fundamentally Wrong with a society that hates
its work and<br>
wants to spend less time working and more time not working, and
something fundamentally<br>
wrong with a society that generates so many culls.<br>
<br>
<br>
On 11/02/12 8:36, Susan Parenti wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"><br>
<blockquote type="cite">Susan, thank you so much for your
messages about this -- I can't<br>
attend the meeting tonight, but I have an idea I would like to pass<br>
along.<br>
<br>
I try to imagine the different world we would all be living in if the<br>
prediction made in 1965 by a U.S. Senate subcommittee had come true:<br>
that by the year 2000, the standard U.S. work week would be reduced to<br>
20 hours, due to efficiencies created through computerization and<br>
automation. Certainly we've realized these efficiencies, but workers<br>
in the U.S. are working longer hours than ever -- certainly longer<br>
than any other post-industrial nation in the world.<br>
<br>
Why is this? Okay, so a culture of market-driven material competition<br>
would be expected to generate obsessive, irrational behaviors about<br>
work, and just as clearly, overscheduling the employed class preempts<br>
political activism. No doubt, many more reasons could be added to this<br>
list. // Following the script of standard employment models, where<br>
routines and relationships are ready-made, requires less<br>
responsibility and courage than making free choices and dealing with<br>
the consequences. Are we promoting the harder-but-richer path of<br>
greater discretionary time, or are we using one economic crisis after<br>
another to ensure that the same tired routines are reproduced?<br>
<br>
A shorter work week would be an excellent Occupy-oriented argument and<br>
would work alongside arguments against underemployment and<br>
unemployment, and in favor of a living wage -- behind all these<br>
arguments is the need for a fairer parsing of compensation for labor<br>
and the time we dedicate to receive it. As a protest movement, a<br>
reduced work week certainly has a policy dimension, with many<br>
statistical analyses and anecdotes to support legislative reform. As a<br>
political movement, though, it can also be practiced by anyone with a<br>
full-time job, in which individuals make a commitment to take back 10<br>
or 20 hours per week, either overtly (by promoting goal-driven<br>
schedules over absolute schedules, say) or covertly (by being champion<br>
slackers). I like both approaches.<br>
<br>
Sorry again for not being at the meeting tonight -- I hope these ideas<br>
feel worthwhile and welcome at the meeting.<br>
<br>
Best Wishes,<br>
Rohn<br>
</blockquote>
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