[Peace-discuss] Rohn Koester's suggestion

["E. Wayne Johnson 朱稳森"]

Word, bro.

*

In regard to protecting the environment, that part about not harming others
restrains the principled libertarian from harming the environment.

Although I might not readily accept notions of carbon footprints and AGW,
I could point out other much more clear and undisputable examples of
uncaring capitalistic exploitation.

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>





On 11/02/12 10:22, C. G. Estabrook 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 
> <mailto: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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