[Peace-discuss] Rohn Koester's suggestion

[Michael Gaiuranos]

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 teh 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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