#division of moral labor

[left-reminders]

...[P]ower corrupts. When you are in charge of a multi-million dollar company, people are less likely to tell you “no” and have no real way to hold you accountable. Price had the power to call a meeting to “ridicule an underperforming employee.” The employee did not have the power to call a meeting to ridicule Dan Price. One of the ways that human beings’ worst instincts can be kept in check is by making sure they do not have the power to abuse others without consequence. We maintain a pattern of moral conduct in part by being called out by others when we act like assholes. If nobody is able to tell the guy at the top that he’s acting like an asshole, he will probably continue to think of himself as kind and benevolent. The same dynamics occur in dictatorships—people who may have begun life as normal or idealistic are simply given too much unaccountable power and are never contradicted. 

This is one reason why capitalism is not going to “have a heart.” One problem with a system in which workers sell their labor to capitalists is that the capitalists have too much power over the workers. They might bump wages up, but ultimately the world needs not to be ruled by men who can get away with anything. According to the accusations detailed in the Times, based on dozens of interviews as well as police reports, Dan Price’s fame allowed him to get away for years with acts of physical assault. It is a familiar story. The idea of capitalism with a heart is indeed a fairy tale. It won’t happen, because capitalism is predicated on a division between a class of owners and a class of workers, and the difference in power allows abuse to flourish. We do not need generous and caring rich people who maintain their decision-making power. We need to redistribute that decision-making power. The Dan Price story provided the illusion that all we need are better bosses. While it is true, and important, to note that the rich could redistribute their wealth if they chose, and their high status is a choice rather than a product of the laws of economics, it is also the case that “more Dan Prices” will not make the world better. As we have seen, such people are often simply self-aggrandizing and even abusive in private. The only solution is to expropriate them.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter III. Economic Evolutions. — First Period. — The Division of Labor.

2. — Impotence of palliatives. — MM. Blanqui, Chevalier, Dunoyer, Rossi, and Passy.

All the remedies proposed for the fatal effects of parcellaire division may be reduced to two, which really are but one, the second being the inversion of the first: to raise the mental and moral condition of the workingman by increasing his comfort and dignity; or else, to prepare the way for his future emancipation and happiness by instruction.

We will examine successively these two systems, one of which is represented by M. Blanqui, the other by M. Chevalier.

M. Blanqui is a friend of association and progress, a writer of democratic tendencies, a professor who has a place in the hearts of the proletariat. In his opening discourse of the year 1845, M. Blanqui proclaimed, as a means of salvation, the association of labor and capital, the participation of the working man in the profits, — that is, a beginning of industrial solidarity. “Our century,” he exclaimed, “must witness the birth of the collective producer.” M. Blanqui forgets that the collective producer was born long since, as well as the collective consumer, and that the question is no longer a genetic, but a medical, one. Our task is to cause the blood proceeding from the collective digestion, instead of rushing wholly to the head, stomach, and lungs, to descend also into the legs and arms. Besides, I do not know what method M. Blanqui proposes to employ in order to realize his generous thought, — whether it be the establishment of national workshops, or the loaning of capital by the State, or the expropriation of the conductors of business enterprises and the substitution for them of industrial associations, or, finally, whether he will rest content with a recommendation of the savings bank to workingmen, in which case the participation would be put off till doomsday.

However this may be, M. Blanqui’s idea amounts simply to an increase of wages resulting from the copartnership, or at least from the interest in the business, which he confers upon the laborers. What, then, is the value to the laborer of a participation in the profits?

A mill with fifteen thousand spindles, employing three hundred hands, does not pay at present an annual dividend of twenty thousand francs. I am informed by a Mulhouse manufacturer that factory stocks in Alsace are generally below par and that this industry has already become a means of getting money by stock-jobbing instead of by labor. To SELL; to sell at the right time; to sell dear, — is the only object in view; to manufacture is only to prepare for a sale. When I assume, then, on an average, a profit of twenty thousand francs to a factory employing three hundred persons, my argument being general, I am twenty thousand francs out of the way. Nevertheless, we will admit the correctness of this amount. Dividing twenty thousand francs, the profit of the mill, by three hundred, the number of persons, and again by three hundred, the number of working days, I find an increase of pay for each person of twenty-two and one-fifth centimes, or for daily expenditure an addition of eighteen centimes, just a morsel of bread. Is it worth while, then, for this, to expropriate mill-owners and endanger the public welfare, by erecting establishments which must be insecure, since, property being divided into infinitely small shares, and being no longer supported by profit, business enterprises would lack ballast, and would be unable to weather commercial gales. And even if no expropriation was involved, what a poor prospect to offer the working class is an increase of eighteen centimes in return for centuries of economy; for no less time than this would be needed to accumulate the requisite capital, supposing that periodical suspensions of business did not periodically consume its savings!

The fact which I have just stated has been pointed out in several ways. M. Passy [13] himself took from the books of a mill in Normandy where the laborers were associated with the owner the wages of several families for a period of ten years, and he found that they averaged from twelve to fourteen hundred francs per year. He then compared the situation of mill-hands paid in proportion to the prices obtained by their employers with that of laborers who receive fixed wages, and found that the difference is almost imperceptible. This result might easily have been foreseen. Economic phenomena obey laws as abstract and immutable as those of numbers: it is only privilege, fraud, and absolutism which disturb the eternal harmony.

M. Blanqui, repentant, as it seems, at having taken this first step toward socialistic ideas, has made haste to retract his words. At the same meeting in which M. Passy demonstrated the inadequacy of cooperative association, he exclaimed: “Does it not seem that labor is a thing susceptible of organization, and that it is in the power of the State to regulate the happiness of humanity as it does the march of an army, and with an entirely mathematical precision? This is an evil tendency, a delusion which the Academy cannot oppose too strongly, because it is not only a chimera, but a dangerous sophism. Let us respect good and honest intentions; but let us not fear to say that to publish a book upon the organization of labor is to rewrite for the fiftieth time a treatise upon the quadrature of the circle or the philosopher’s stone.”

Then, carried away by his zeal, M. Blanqui finishes the destruction of his theory of cooperation, which M. Passy already had so rudely shaken, by the following example: “M. Dailly, one of the most enlightened of farmers, has drawn up an account for each piece of land and an account for each product; and he proves that within a period of thirty years the same man has never obtained equal crops from the same piece of land. The products have varied from twenty-six thousand francs to nine thousand or seven thousand francs, sometimes descending as low as three hundred francs. There are also certain products — potatoes, for instance — which fail one time in ten. How, then, with these variations and with revenues so uncertain, can we establish even distribution and uniform wages for laborers?....”

It might be answered that the variations in the product of each piece of land simply indicate that it is necessary to associate proprietors with each other after having associated laborers with proprietors, which would establish a more complete solidarity: but this would be a prejudgment on the very thing in question, which M. Blanqui definitively decides, after reflection, to be unattainable, — namely, the organization of labor. Besides, it is evident that solidarity would not add an obolus to the common wealth, and that, consequently, it does not even touch the problem of division.

In short, the profit so much envied, and often a very uncertain matter with employers, falls far short of the difference between actual wages and the wages desired; and M. Blanqui’s former plan, miserable in its results and disavowed by its author, would be a scourge to the manufacturing industry. Now, the division of labor being henceforth universally established, the argument is generalized, and leads us to the conclusion that misery is an effect of labor, as well as of idleness.

The answer to this is, and it is a favorite argument with the people: Increase the price of services; double and triple wages.

I confess that if such an increase was possible it would be a complete success, whatever M. Chevalier may have said, who needs to be slightly corrected on this point.

According to M. Chevalier, if the price of any kind of merchandise whatever is increased, other kinds will rise in a like proportion, and no one will benefit thereby.

This argument, which the economists have rehearsed for more than a century, is as false as it is old, and it belonged to M. Chevalier, as an engineer, to rectify the economic tradition. The salary of a head clerk being ten francs per day, and the wages of a workingman four, if the income of each is increased five francs, the ratio of their fortunes, which was formerly as one hundred to forty, will be thereafter as one hundred to sixty. The increase of wages, necessarily taking place by addition and not by proportion, would be, therefore, an excellent method of equalization; and the economists would deserve to have thrown back at them by the socialists the reproach of ignorance which they have bestowed upon them at random.

But I say that such an increase is impossible, and that the supposition is absurd: for, as M. Chevalier has shown very clearly elsewhere, the figure which indicates the price of the day’s labor is only an algebraic exponent without effect on the reality: and that which it is necessary first to endeavor to increase, while correcting the inequalities of distribution, is not the monetary expression, but the quantity of products. Till then every rise of wages can have no other effect than that produced by a rise of the price of wheat, wine, meat, sugar, soap, coal, etc., — that is, the effect of a scarcity. For what is wages?

It is the cost price of wheat, wine, meat, coal; it is the integrant price of all things. Let us go farther yet: wages is the proportionality of the elements which compose wealth, and which are consumed every day reproductively by the mass of laborers. Now, to double wages, in the sense in which the people understand the words, is to give to each producer a share greater than his product, which is contradictory: and if the rise pertains only to a few industries, a general disturbance in exchange ensues, — that is, a scarcity. God save me from predictions! but, in spite of my desire for the amelioration of the lot of the working class, I declare that it is impossible for strikes followed by an increase of wages to end otherwise than in a general rise in prices: that is as certain as that two and two make four. It is not by such methods that the workingmen will attain to wealth and — what is a thousand times more precious than wealth — liberty. The workingmen, supported by the favor of an indiscreet press, in demanding an increase of wages, have served monopoly much better than their own real interests: may they recognize, when their situation shall become more painful, the bitter fruit of their inexperience!

Convinced of the uselessness, or rather, of the fatal effects, of an increase of wages, and seeing clearly that the question is wholly organic and not at all commercial, M. Chevalier attacks the problem at the other end. He asks for the working class, first of all, instruction, and proposes extensive reforms in this direction.

Instruction! this is also M. Arago’s word to the workingmen; it is the principle of all progress. Instruction!.... It should be known once for all what may be expected from it in the solution of the problem before us; it should be known, I say, not whether it is desirable that all should receive it, — this no one doubts, — but whether it is possible.

To clearly comprehend the complete significance of M. Chevalier’s views, a knowledge of his methods is indispensable.

M. Chevalier, long accustomed to discipline, first by his polytechnic studies, then by his St. Simonian connections, and finally by his position in the University, does not seem to admit that a pupil can have any other inclination than to obey the regulations, a sectarian any other thought than that of his chief, a public functionary any other opinion than that of the government. This may be a conception of order as respectable as any other, and I hear upon this subject no expressions of approval or censure. Has M. Chevalier an idea to offer peculiar to himself? On the principle that all that is not forbidden by law is allowed, he hastens to the front to deliver his opinion, and then abandons it to give his adhesion, if there is occasion, to the opinion of authority. It was thus that M. Chevalier, before settling down in the bosom of the Constitution, joined M. Enfantin: it was thus that he gave his views upon canals, railroads, finance, property, long before the administration had adopted any system in relation to the construction of railways, the changing of the rate of interest on bonds, patents, literary property, etc.

M. Chevalier, then, is not a blind admirer of the University system of instruction, — far from it; and until the appearance of the new order of things, he does not hesitate to say what he thinks. His opinions are of the most radical.

M. Villemain had said in his report: “The object of the higher education is to prepare in advance a choice of men to occupy and serve in all the positions of the administration, the magistracy, the bar and the various liberal professions, including the higher ranks and learned specialties of the army and navy.”

“The higher education,” thereupon observes M. Chevalier, [14] “is designed also to prepare men some of whom shall be farmers, others manufacturers, these merchants, and those private engineers. Now, in the official programme, all these classes are forgotten. The omission is of considerable importance; for, indeed, industry in its various forms, agriculture, commerce, are neither accessories nor accidents in a State: they are its chief dependence.... If the University desires to justify its name, it must provide a course in these things; else an industrial university will be established in opposition to it.... We shall have altar against altar, etc....”

And as it is characteristic of a luminous idea to throw light on all questions connected with it, professional instruction furnishes M. Chevalier with a very expeditious method of deciding, incidentally, the quarrel between the clergy and the University on liberty of education.

“It must be admitted that a very great concession is made to the clergy in allowing Latin to serve as the basis of education. The clergy know Latin as well as the University; it is their own tongue. Their tuition, moreover, is cheaper; hence they must inevitably draw a large portion of our youth into their small seminaries and their schools of a higher grade....”

The conclusion of course follows: change the course of study, and you decatholicize the realm; and as the clergy know only Latin and the Bible, when they have among them neither masters of art, nor farmers, nor accountants; when, of their forty thousand priests, there are not twenty, perhaps, with the ability to make a plan or forge a nail, — we soon shall see which the fathers of families will choose, industry or the breviary, and whether they do not regard labor as the most beautiful language in which to pray to God.

Thus would end this ridiculous opposition between religious education and profane science, between the spiritual and the temporal, between reason and faith, between altar and throne, old rubrics henceforth meaningless, but with which they still impose upon the good nature of the public, until it takes offence.

M. Chevalier does not insist, however, on this solution: he knows that religion and monarchy are two powers which, though continually quarrelling, cannot exist without each other; and that he may not awaken suspicion, he launches out into another revolutionary idea, — equality.

“France is in a position to furnish the polytechnic school with twenty times as many scholars as enter at present (the average being one hundred and seventy-six, this would amount to three thousand five hundred and twenty). The University has but to say the word.... If my opinion was of any weight, I should maintain that mathematical capacity is much less special than is commonly supposed. I remember the success with which children, taken at random, so to speak, from the pavements of Paris, follow the teaching of La Martiniere by the method of Captain Tabareau.”

If the higher education, reconstructed according to the views of M. Chevalier, was sought after by all young French men instead of by only ninety thousand as commonly, there would be no exaggeration in raising the estimate of the number of minds mathematically inclined from three thousand five hundred and twenty to ten thousand; but, by the same argument, we should have ten thousand artists, philologists, and philosophers; ten thousand doctors, physicians, chemists, and naturalists; ten thousand economists, legists, and administrators; twenty thousand manufacturers, foremen, merchants, and accountants; forty thousand farmers, wine-growers, miners, etc., — in all, one hundred thousand specialists a year, or about one-third of our youth. The rest, having, instead of special adaptations, only mingled adaptations, would be distributed indifferently elsewhere.

It is certain that so powerful an impetus given to intelligence would quicken the progress of equality, and I do not doubt that such is the secret desire of M. Chevalier. But that is precisely what troubles me: capacity is never wanting, any more than population, and the problem is to find employment for the one and bread for the other. In vain does M. Chevalier tell us: “The higher education would give less ground for the complaint that it throws into society crowds of ambitious persons without any means of satisfying their desires, and interested in the overthrow of the State; people without employment and unable to get any, good for nothing and believing themselves fit for anything, especially for the direction of public affairs. Scientific studies do not so inflate the mind. They enlighten and regulate it at once; they fit men for practical life....” Such language, I reply, is good to use with patriarchs: a professor of political economy should have more respect for his position and his audience. The government has only one hundred and twenty offices annually at its disposal for one hundred and seventy-six students admitted to the polytechnic school: what, then, would be its embarrassment if the number of admissions was ten thousand, or even, taking M. Chevalier’s figures, three thousand five hundred? And, to generalize, the whole number of civil positions is sixty thousand, or three thousand vacancies annually; what dismay would the government be thrown into if, suddenly adopting the reformatory ideas of M. Chevalier, it should find itself besieged by fifty thousand office-seekers! The following objection has often been made to republicans without eliciting a reply: When everybody shall have the electoral privilege, will the deputies do any better, and will the proletariat be further advanced? I ask the same question of M. Chevalier: When each academic year shall bring you one hundred thousand fitted men, what will you do with them?

To provide for these interesting young people, you will go down to the lowest round of the ladder. You will oblige the young man, after fifteen years of lofty study, to begin, no longer as now with the offices of aspirant engineer, sub-lieutenant of artillery, second lieutenant, deputy, comptroller, general guardian, etc., but with the ignoble positions of pioneer, train-soldier, dredger, cabin-boy, fagot-maker, and exciseman. There he will wait, until death, thinning the ranks, enables him to advance a step. Under such circumstances a man, a graduate of the polytechnic school and capable of becoming a Vauban, may die a laborer on a second class road, or a corporal in a regiment

Oh! how much more prudent Catholicism has shown itself, and how far it has surpassed you all, St. Simonians, republicans, university men, economists, in the knowledge of man and society! The priest knows that our life is but a voyage, and that our perfection cannot be realized here below; and he contents himself with outlining on earth an education which must be completed in heaven. The man whom religion has moulded, content to know, do, and obtain what suffices for his earthly destiny, never can become a source of embarrassment to the government: rather would he be a martyr. O beloved religion! is it necessary that a bourgeoisie which stands in such need of you should disown you?...

Into what terrible struggles of pride and misery does this mania for universal instruction plunge us! Of what use is professional education, of what good are agricultural and commercial schools, if your students have neither employment nor capital? And what need to cram one’s self till the age of twenty with all sorts of knowledge, then to fasten the threads of a mule-jenny or pick coal at the bottom of a pit? What! you have by your own confession only three thousand positions annually to bestow upon fifty thousand possible capacities, and yet you talk of establishing schools! Cling rather to your system of exclusion and privilege, a system as old as the world, the support of dynasties and patriciates, a veritable machine for gelding men in order to secure the pleasures of a caste of Sultans. Set a high price upon your teaching, multiply obstacles, drive away, by lengthy tests, the son of the proletaire whom hunger does not permit to wait, and protect with all your power the ecclesiastical schools, where the students are taught to labor for the other life, to cultivate resignation, to fast, to respect those in high places, to love the king, and to pray to God. For every useless study sooner or later becomes an abandoned study: knowledge is poison to slaves.

Surely M. Chevalier has too much sagacity not to have seen the consequences of his idea. But he has spoken from the bottom of his heart, and we can only applaud his good intentions: men must first be men; after that, he may live who can.

Thus we advance at random, guided by Providence, who never warns us except with a blow: this is the beginning and end of political economy.

Contrary to M. Chevalier, professor of political economy at the College of France, M. Dunoyer, an economist of the Institute, does not wish instruction to be organized. The organization of instruction is a species of organization of labor; therefore, no organization. Instruction, observes M. Dunoyer, is a profession, not a function of the State; like all professions, it ought to be and remain free. It is communism, it is socialism, it is the revolutionary tendency, whose principal agents have been Robespierre, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and M. Guizot, which have thrown into our midst these fatal ideas of the centralization and absorption of all activity in the State. The press is very free, and the pen of the journalist is an object of merchandise; religion, too, is very free, and every wearer of a gown, be it short or long, who knows how to excite public curiosity, can draw an audience about him. M. Lacordaire has his devotees, M. Leroux his apostles, M. Buchez his convent. Why, then, should not instruction also be free? If the right of the instructed, like that of the buyer, is unquestionable, and that of the instructor, who is only a variety of the seller, is its correlative, it is impossible to infringe upon the liberty of instruction without doing violence to the most precious of liberties, that of the conscience. And then, adds M. Dunoyer, if the State owes instruction to everybody, it will soon be maintained that it owes labor; then lodging; then shelter.... Where does that lead to?

The argument of M. Dunoyer is irrefutable: to organize instruction is to give to every citizen a pledge of liberal employment and comfortable wages; the two are as intimately connected as the circulation of the arteries and the veins. But M. Dunoyer’s theory implies also that progress belongs only to a certain select portion of humanity, and that barbarism is the eternal lot of nine-tenths of the human race. It is this which constitutes, according to M. Dunoyer, the very essence of society, which manifests itself in three stages, religion, hierarchy, and beggary. So that in this system, which is that of Destutt de Tracy, Montesquieu, and Plato, the antinomy of division, like that of value, is without solution.

It is a source of inexpressible pleasure to me, I confess, to see M. Chevalier, a defender of the centralization of instruction, opposed by M. Dunoyer, a defender of liberty; M. Dunoyer in his turn antagonized by M. Guizot; M. Guizot, the representative of the centralizers, contradicting the Charter, which posits liberty as a principle; the Charter trampled under foot by the University men, who lay sole claim to the privilege of teaching, regardless of the express command of the Gospel to the priests: Go and teach. And above all this tumult of economists, legislators, ministers, academicians, professors, and priests, economic Providence giving the lie to the Gospel, and shouting: Pedagogues! what use am I to make of your instruction?

Who will relieve us of this anxiety? M. Rossi leans toward eclecticism: Too little divided, he says, labor remains unproductive; too much divided, it degrades man. Wisdom lies between these extremes; in medio virtus. Unfortunately this intermediate wisdom is only a small amount of poverty joined with a small amount of wealth, so that the condition is not modified in the least. The proportion of good and evil, instead of being as one hundred to one hundred, becomes as fifty to fifty: in this we may take, once for all, the measure of eclecticism. For the rest, M. Rossi’s juste-milieu is in direct opposition to the great economic law: To produce with the least possible expense the greatest possible quantity of values.... Now, how can labor fulfil its destiny without an extreme division? Let us look farther, if you please.

“All economic systems and hypotheses,” says M. Rossi, “belong to the economist, but the intelligent, free, responsible man is under the control of the moral law... Political economy is only a science which examines the relations of things, and draws conclusions therefrom. It examines the effects of labor; in the application of labor, you should consider the importance of the object in view. When the application of labor is unfavorable to an object higher than the production of wealth, it should not be applied... Suppose that it would increase the national wealth to compel children to labor fifteen hours a day: morality would say that that is not allowable. Does that prove that political economy is false? No; that proves that you confound things which should be kept separate.”

If M. Rossi had a little more of that Gallic simplicity so difficult for foreigners to acquire, he would very summarily have thrown his tongue to the dogs, as Madame de Sevigne said. But a professor must talk, talk, talk, not for the sake of saying anything, but in order to avoid silence. M. Rossi takes three turns around the question, then lies down: that is enough to make certain people believe that he has answered it.

It is surely a sad symptom for a science when, in developing itself according to its own principles, it reaches its object just in time to be contradicted by another; as, for example, when the postulates of political economy are found to be opposed to those of morality, for I suppose that morality is a science as well as political economy. What, then, is human knowledge, if all its affirmations destroy each other, and on what shall we rely? Divided labor is a slave’s occupation, but it alone is really productive; undivided labor belongs to the free man, but it does not pay its expenses. On the one hand, political economy tells us to be rich; on the other, morality tells us to be free; and M. Rossi, speaking in the name of both, warns us at the same time that we can be neither free nor rich, for to be but half of either is to be neither. M. Rossi’s doctrine, then, far from satisfying this double desire of humanity, is open to the objection that, to avoid exclusiveness, it strips us of everything: it is, under another form, the history of the representative system.

But the antagonism is even more profound than M. Rossi has supposed. For since, according to universal experience (on this point in harmony with theory), wages decrease in proportion to the division of labor, it is clear that, in submitting ourselves to parcellaire slavery, we thereby shall not obtain wealth; we shall only change men into machines: witness the laboring population of the two worlds. And since, on the other hand, without the division of labor, society falls back into barbarism, it is evident also that, by sacrificing wealth, we shall not obtain liberty: witness all the wandering tribes of Asia and Africa. Therefore it is necessary — economic science and morality absolutely command it — for us to solve the problem of division: now, where are the economists? More than thirty years ago, Lemontey, developing a remark of Smith, exposed the demoralizing and homicidal influence of the division of labor. What has been the reply; what investigations have been made; what remedies proposed; has the question even been understood?

Every year the economists report, with an exactness which I would commend more highly if I did not see that it is always fruitless, the commercial condition of the States of Europe. They know how many yards of cloth, pieces of silk, pounds of iron, have been manufactured; what has been the consumption per head of wheat, wine, sugar, meat: it might be said that to them the ultimate of science is to publish inventories, and the object of their labor is to become general comptrollers of nations. Never did such a mass of material offer so fine a field for investigation. What has been found; what new principle has sprung from this mass; what solution of the many problems of long standing has been reached; what new direction have studies taken?

One question, among others, seems to have been prepared for a final judgment, — pauperism. Pauperism, of all the phenomena of the civilized world, is today the best known: we know pretty nearly whence it comes, when and how it arrives, and what it costs; its proportion at various stages of civilization has been calculated, and we have convinced ourselves that all the specifics with which it hitherto has been fought have been impotent. Pauperism has been divided into genera, species, and varieties: it is a complete natural history, one of the most important branches of anthropology. Well I the unquestionable result of all the facts collected, unseen, shunned, covered by the economists with their silence, is that pauperism is constitutional and chronic in society as long as the antagonism between labor and capital continues, and that this antagonism can end only by the absolute negation of political economy. What issue from this labyrinth have the economists discovered?

This last point deserves a moment’s attention.

In primitive communism misery, as I have observed in a preceding paragraph, is the universal condition.

Labor is war declared upon this misery.

Labor organizes itself, first by division, next by machinery, then by competition, etc.

Now, the question is whether it is not in the essence of this organization, as given us by political economy, at the same time that it puts an end to the misery of some, to aggravate that of others in a fatal and unavoidable manner. These are the terms in which the question of pauperism must be stated, and for this reason we have undertaken to solve it.

What means, then, this eternal babble of the economists about the improvidence of laborers, their idleness, their want of dignity, their ignorance, their debauchery, their early marriages, etc.? All these vices and excesses are only the cloak of pauperism; but the cause, the original cause which inexorably holds four-fifths of the human race in disgrace, — what is it? Did not Nature make all men equally gross, averse to labor, wanton, and wild? Did not patrician and proletaire spring from the same clay? Then how happens it that, after so many centuries, and in spite of so many miracles of industry, science, and art, comfort and culture have not become the inheritance of all? How happens it that in Paris and London, centres of social wealth, poverty is as hideous as in the days of Caesar and Agricola? Why, by the side of this refined aristocracy, has the mass remained so uncultivated? It is laid to the vices of the people: but the vices of the upper class appear to be no less; perhaps they are even greater. The original stain affected all alike: how happens it, once more, that the baptism of civilization has not been equally efficacious for all? Does this not show that progress itself is a privilege, and that the man who has neither wagon nor horse is forced to flounder about for ever in the mud? What do I say? The totally destitute man has no desire to improve: he has fallen so low that ambition even is extinguished in his heart.

“Of all the private virtues,” observes M. Dunoyer with infinite reason, “the most necessary, that which gives us all the others in succession, is the passion for well-being, is the violent desire to extricate one’s self from misery and abjection, is that spirit of emulation and dignity which does not permit men to rest content with an inferior situation.... But this sentiment, which seems so natural, is unfortunately much less common than is thought. There are few reproaches which the generality of men deserve less than that which ascetic moralists bring against them of being too fond of their comforts: the opposite reproach might be brought against them with infinitely more justice.... There is even in the nature of men this very remarkable feature, that the less their knowledge and resources, the less desire they have of acquiring these. The most miserable savages and the least enlightened of men are precisely those in whom it is most difficult to arouse wants, those in whom it is hardest to inspire the desire to rise out of their condition; so that man must already have gained a certain degree of comfort by his labor, before he can feel with any keenness that need of improving his condition, of perfecting his existence, which I call the love of well-being.” [15]

Thus the misery of the laboring classes arises in general from their lack of heart and mind, or, as M. Passy has said somewhere, from the weakness, the inertia of their moral and intellectual faculties. This inertia is due to the fact that the said laboring classes, still half savage, do not have a sufficiently ardent desire to ameliorate their condition: this M. Dunoyer shows. But as this absence of desire is itself the effect of misery, it follows that misery and apathy are each other’s effect and cause, and that the proletariat turns in a circle.

To rise out of this abyss there must be either well-being, — that is, a gradual increase of wages, — or intelligence and courage, — that is, a gradual development of faculties: two things diametrically opposed to the degradation of soul and body which is the natural effect of the division of labor. The misfortune of the proletariat, then, is wholly providential, and to undertake to extinguish it in the present state of political economy would be to produce a revolutionary whirlwind.

For it is not without a profound reason, rooted in the loftiest considerations of morality, that the universal conscience, expressing itself by turns through the selfishness of the rich and the apathy of the proletariat, denies a reward to the man whose whole function is that of a lever and spring. If, by some impossibility, material well-being could fall to the lot of the parcellaire laborer, we should see something monstrous happen: the laborers employed at disagreeable tasks would become like those Romans, gorged with the wealth of the world, whose brutalized minds became incapable of devising new pleasures. Well-being without education stupefies people and makes them insolent: this was noticed in the most ancient times. Incrassatus est, et recalcitravit, says

Deuteronomy. For the rest, the parcellaire laborer has judged himself: he is content, provided he has bread, a pallet to sleep on, and plenty of liquor on Sunday. Any other condition would be prejudicial to him, and would endanger public order.

At Lyons there is a class of men who, under cover of the monopoly given them by the city government, receive higher pay than college professors or the head-clerks of the government ministers: I mean the porters. The price of loading and unloading at certain wharves in Lyons, according to the schedule of the Rigues or porters’ associations, is thirty centimes per hundred kilogrammes. At this rate, it is not seldom that a man earns twelve, fifteen, and even twenty francs a day: he only has to carry forty or fifty sacks from a vessel to a warehouse. It is but a few hours’ work. What a favorable condition this would be for the development of intelligence, as well for children as for parents, if, of itself and the leisure which it brings, wealth was a moralizing principle! But this is not the case: the porters of Lyons are today what they always have been, drunken, dissolute, brutal, insolent, selfish, and base. It is a painful thing to say, but I look upon the following declaration as a duty, because it is the truth: one of the first reforms to be effected among the laboring classes will be the reduction of the wages of some at the same time that we raise those of others. Monopoly does not gain in respectability by belonging to the lowest classes of people, especially when it serves to maintain only the grossest individualism. The revolt of the silk-workers met with no sympathy, but rather hostility, from the porters and the river population generally. Nothing that happens off the wharves has any power to move them. Beasts of burden fashioned in advance for despotism, they will not mingle with politics as long as their privilege is maintained. Nevertheless, I ought to say in their defence that, some time ago, the necessities of competition having brought their prices down, more social sentiments began to awaken in these gross natures: a few more reductions seasoned with a little poverty, and the Rigues of Lyons will be chosen as the storming-party when the time comes for assaulting the bastilles.

In short, it is impossible, contradictory, in the present system of society, for the proletariat to secure well-being through education or education through well-being. For, without considering the fact that the proletaire, a human machine, is as unfit for comfort as for education, it is demonstrated, on the one hand, that his wages continually tend to go down rather than up, and, on the other, that the cultivation of his mind, if it were possible, would be useless to him; so that he always inclines towards barbarism and misery. Everything that has been attempted of late years in France and England with a view to the amelioration of the condition of the poor in the matters of the labor of women and children and of primary instruction, unless it was the fruit of some hidden thought of radicalism, has been done contrary to economic ideas and to the prejudice of the established order. Progress, to the mass of laborers, is always the book sealed with the seven seals; and it is not by legislative misconstructions that the relentless enigma will be solved.

For the rest, if the economists, by exclusive attention to their old routine, have finally lost all knowledge of the present state of things, it cannot be said that the socialists have better solved the antinomy which division of labor raised. Quite the contrary, they have stopped with negation; for is it not perpetual negation to oppose, for instance, the uniformity of parcellaire labor with a so-called variety in which each one can change his occupation ten, fifteen, twenty times a day at will?

As if to change ten, fifteen, twenty times a day from one kind of divided labor to another was to make labor synthetic; as if, consequently, twenty fractions of the day’s work of a manual laborer could be equal to the day’s work of an artist! Even if such industrial vaulting was practicable, — and it may be asserted in advance that it would disappear in the presence of the necessity of making laborers responsible and therefore functions personal, — it would not change at all the physical, moral, and intellectual condition of the laborer; the dissipation would only be a surer guarantee of his incapacity and, consequently, his dependence. This is admitted, moreover, by the organizers, communists, and others. So far are they from pretending to solve the antinomy of division that all of them admit, as an essential condition of organization, the hierarchy of labor, — that is, the classification of laborers into parcellaires and generalizers or organizers, — and in all utopias the distinction of capacities, the basis or everlasting excuse for inequality of goods, is admitted as a pivot. Those reformers whose schemes have nothing to recommend them but logic, and who, after having complained of the simplism, monotony, uniformity, and extreme division of labor, then propose a plurality as a SYNTHESIS, — such inventors, I say, are judged already, and ought to be sent back to school.

But you, critic, the reader undoubtedly will ask, what is your solution? Show us this synthesis which, retaining the responsibility, the personality, in short, the specialty of the laborer, will unite extreme division and the greatest variety in one complex and harmonious whole.

My reply is ready: Interrogate facts, consult humanity: we can choose no better guide. After the oscillations of value, division of labor is the economic fact which influences most perceptibly profits and wages. It is the first stake driven by Providence into the soil of industry, the starting-point of the immense triangulation which finally must determine the right and duty of each and all. Let us, then, follow our guides, without which we can only wander and lose ourselves.

Tu longe seggere, et vestigia semper adora.

[racefortheironthrone]

I once read the reason why merchants were so ill seen in pre-modern times was because there was a lack of understanding on how they buying a product from a place of production and selling at a place of consumption added value to the product and thus entitled the merchant to selling at a profit something he did not produce. My question is (and I undertand it is quite out of your area of expertise): do you think the Bronze Age civilizations would have shared such a view, or would they have interpreted merchants and their trade closer to how we do, given those civilizations dependance on the commerce of copper and tin?

I don't think it's a question of not understanding - I think it's a question of disagreeing that buying low and selling high as opposed to actually contributing physical labor creates a moral right of ownership.

I would highly recommend Jacob Soll's book on this point, because one of the things he points out is that this attitude or belief was incredibly common across pre-modern societies from Western Europe all the way to Japan and China, in part because these societies were overwhelmingly agricultural economies where the farmer was respected because they were vital to survival, such that even the aristocratic elite tended to espouse a kind of pastoral "gentleman farmer" ideal and despise the values of merchants.

In these contexts, Soll notes, the idea that merchants and other middlemen had economic (and thus moral and cultural) value was something that had to be actively asserted and argued for, and he uncovers a literature on the subject that goes as far back as Cicero and all the way through the Middle Ages and beyond. At the same time, it was an incredibly divisive and contested topic that the merchants didn't win a lot of the time - hence the Church getting behind Aquinas' concept of the "just price," hence why Renaissance bankers had to reverse-engineer lending at interest to get around prohibitions on usury, etc.

[todaysdocument]

Statement on Woman's Rights from an Iowa Woman

Record Group 46: Records of the U.S. Senate Series: Petitions and Related Documents That Were Presented, Read, or Tabled File Unit: Petitions and Memorials, Resolutions of State Legislatures, and Related Documents which were Presented, Read, or Tabled during the 65th Congress

This statement, printed by the Iowa Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage and signed by a woman from Dubuque, Iowa, asks Congress to oppose the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It lists the rights that women have and why they do not need the vote, including that it would be a burden and would be "demoralizing to our government and our womanhood."

[handwritten] We Women Opposed to Woman Suffrage would appreciate your standing by us and opposing the Anthony Amendment. [/handwritten] Woman's Rights THERE is one point on which the suffragists and anti-suffragists can agree,--that is, being free American citizens and intelligent human beings, we are entitled to equal [italics] rights [/italics] with men. We have a [italics] right [/italics] to put on men's clothing; we have a [italics] right [/italics] to ask men in marriage; we have a [italics] right to become soldiers and fight on the field for our country; we have a [italics] right [/italics] to work in coal mines, or in constructive building. We have a [italics] right [/italics] to enter the political field and demand a place in our congressional halls. We have a [italics] right [/italics] to aspire even to be elected President of the United States. For are we not as intelligent as men, and entitled to [italics] equal rights [/italics] with them? But being [italics] women [/italics] and not men, we, the large majority of the women of our country, claim the [italics] right [/italics] to keep our own identity and the [italics] right [/italics] not to have a political life thrust upon us. This is so much vital work for women to do in this world of ours, that no [italics] man [/italics] can do, that we have the [italics] right [/italics] to call for a division of labor. We are the Mothers of all the men, and to a large extent have the making and molding of their characters, physically, mentally, morally and religiously; that duty is demanded of us [italics] now [/italics] as in all times past, and will devolve upon us as long as mankind exists. Have we not the [italics] right [/italics] to call upon men to take the burden of government and politics into their hands and make our laws and enforce them? Can we not trust them? The "Majority Rules", and it would be a crime to force the ballot upon the large majority of the women of our country who do not want it. We have a [italics] right [/italics] to call upon the Representatives and Senators of our country to do all in their power by voice and vote to protect us from the burden of the ballot. We do not ask these [italics] rights [/italics] from any spirit of opposition or malice, but from a deep religious and moral conviction that vote by women (with the politics entailed) will be harmful and demoralizing to our government and our womanhood. AN IOWA WOMAN [handwritten] Miss A. J. [illegible] [/handwritten] Iowa Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage. [illegible logo] [handwritten] Yours cordially (Miss) Kate Keith [illegible} 1471 Main St Sept 21 1918 DuBuque Ia [/handwritten]

[zoobus]

The practice of wives, consorts, or retainers following a husband, lord, or ruler in death has been attested at many points in history and in every region of the world, including Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In the Confucian cultures of China and Korea and the Hindu cultures of India and Indonesia, however, a woman's suicide following the death of her husband was widely venerated as the highest manifestation of female chastity—through rituals, commemorative hagiographies, and public monuments that bestowed the significance of a religious cult on the virtue of sexual loyalty to one husband. In both India and China the sexuality of women was considered a dangerous social force, and widows who were not under the control of a husband aroused much suspicion and anxiety because they were understood to be especially prone to transgression. In both cultures, handbooks and oral maxims based on moral regulations from ancient ritual texts instructed all women to preserve their chastity through practices of gender separation, female seclusion, veiling, and gendered divisions of labor.

Another type of suicide prevalent in the Chosŏn era and during the Japanese occupation of Korea was chaste suicide. There are many accounts from the Chosŏn era of women taking their own lives to follow their recently deceased husbands into death. This practice was strongly based on Confucian virtues of the ideal wife of chaste wife (yŏlbu). Beginning early in the Chosŏn era, widows would not remarry but instead commit themselves to lifelong service to her deceased husband’s family. Moreover, a deepening Confucianization from the seventeenth century rendered the ideal of chaste women more prominent and instrumental, and the concept of women’s fidelity became gradually enmeshed with the idea of bodily self sacrifice, serving as the ultimate proof of chaste widowhood and criterion for wifely virtue.

As Jungwon Kim explains, a wife’s loyalty to her husband was deemed to be equivalent to a man’s loyalty to the king, and both were considered essential for social order. Although some Confucian scholars spoke against valuing widow suicide over staying alive to serve the surviving family, most literati esteemed it as the highest expression of wifely duty.

Every time someone hints that they think without Christians we wouldn't have misogyny or price women at their virginity, I fight the urge to derail with widow suicide worship. Imagine what "choosing suicide" in such a period would be like. Imagine how this practice would shape society even after it ended. The clownish ignorance and arrogance that Christianity owns the ability to systematically oppress is exactly that - arrogant, ignorant, clownish.

Side note, I don't care for this second source suggesting that widows killing themselves in a collectivist culture that explicitly tied their worth to killing themselves was an act of selfish egoism on the woman's part.

[kaelio]

one of my favorite Onion articles ever

I support the occupation, and the occupation alone, because when we start to support the troops, we pave the way for irrelevant concerns about their families back at home. Before you know it, questions about who is and isn't going to be home in time for Christmas will be interfering with the crucial decision-making process of our commander-in-chief.

I'd like to ask those currently trumpeting their support for the troops a question: Have you ever actually met any of these soldiers in person? Well, I have, and believe me, they are no more impressive than any other low-level functionary of a large institution.

In all honesty, my soul swells with pride at the thought of the military-strategy papers and cost-analysis reports in which the troops are represented as numerical figures. But, as for the men and women—well, in almost every respect, they are average. Although they are no less intelligent than any other American, it is certainly fair to say they lack the ability to devise the complex strategies and tactics to manage their own divisions, much less grasp the nuanced reasons for their deployment.

It is ridiculous that my "heart" is somehow morally or ethically obliged to "go out" to the troops. In fact, had the troops not been put to productive labor by the sheer might and institutional authority of the U.S. military, a good number of them would be sitting around bars, drinking and gambling. In short, we shouldn't view the troops as objects of sympathy, because their very contribution to our society is their ability to carry out simple commands on a battlefield.

[friezaglasiencold]

What are your opinions of biotechnology? I know you don't particularly care for Cell, but tech like that could have its uses. Your own personal creatures in the Frieza Force, fit with whatever genes you wish to give them. There are also androids, who've proven time and time again to be formidable, and completely obedient if done correctly. The only issue I can think of is the budget, but I imagine that money is not a problem with you.

I can see plenty of possible applications, but all come with pitfalls. An android made to fulfill a certain task may not have the wherewithal to effectively problem-solve if a scenario changes... a creature bred for war might turn on its commanders... cyborg enhancements, the logical next step, are an entirely different bag of unpleasantries.

Then there's the matter of funding and organizing a new research division, acquiring the resources and labor to create the things, allotting valuable budget for the inevitability of backfire--not to mention the issues that arise with automated labor. Regardless of what my public appearance may suggest it *is* in my best interest to consider the morale of my underlings, and it would take a considerable blow were I to threaten their job security by introducing an entirely new, genetically superior workforce.

All that, plus the fact that I'm already working on the fringes of intergalactic law; I'd rather not be dragged into some irritating string of suits.

I think we're doing just fine as is, though it's something to be considered. If I can find a suitable middle ground, one that doesn't cause me any unnecessary angst, I might try to incorporate it, one way or the other.

[st-just]

I've come around to side-eyeing the whole "division of household chores is invisible labor by women" conversation because it's usually rooted in the woman assuming a ridiculously high standard of cleanliness and then imposing it on the family, no negotiations allowed. You strapped on that extraneous mental load on yourself, mate. The "campaign of exhaustion" is the wages of crying wolf on things that didn't need nearly this narrow of tolerances. "Incessant judging" is not communication, either.

re this reblog, I think?

So I mean like, sure that probably happens? Though the 'no negotiations allowed' bit does kind of loop around back to this probably being the kind of thing where you have a clear and honest discussion of it before you move in together.

(I mean, or follow the example my living situations tend to fall into, where when things fall below an acceptable threshold one roommate will make a big show of cleaning common areas over the course of a couple days, and everyone else will thus be morally compelled to make their own similar contribution of a similar level over the next week or so with no actual management or coordination needed. But, like, the clear and honest communication thing probably a better idea.)

That said:

It's just absolutely undeniably the case that in a multigender household social judgement about its cleanliness or lack thereof is going to fall massively disproportionately on the women involved. Hell even when it's just guys people judge their mothers or girlfriends who live elsewhere for their kitchen half the time.

Like, no matter what level you're trying to maintain, household management to maintain things at that level is labor. If everyone buys their own groceries, cleans their own dishes, does their own laundry, etc this isn't nearly so much of an issue but like, lets be real it's not like the division of labor for taking care of the other party's shit isn't gendered here too.

[spacefinch]

Octonauts Star Trek AU: Crew Profiles

Captain Barnacles:

Full name: Bernard “Barnacles” Barnes

Species: Human

Home country: Canada (Manitoba)

Rank: Captain of the USS Nautilus

Family: Bianca (sister), Orson (nephew), Ursa (niece)

Favorite instrument: Accordian

Kwazii

Full name: Kwazii Hawkins

Species: Human (partly cybernetic)

Home planet: irrelevant (he was born on a starship)

Rank: Commander (First Officer of the Nautilus)

Family: John “Calico Jack” Hawkins (grandfather)

Favorite instrument: Also irrelevant. He’d rather sing space shanties.

Shellington:

Full name: Dr. Shellington Holmes

Species: Human

Home country: Scotland

Rank: Second Officer (Science Division), Lt. Commander

Family: Pearl (sister), Periwinkle (nephew)

Peso

Full name: Dr. Peso Morales

Species: Human

Home country: Chile

Rank: Chief Medical Officer

Family: Too many to name. His brother Pinto is a Starfleet ensign.

Dashi

Full name: Dashi Omura

Species: Trill (joined, fifth host of her symbiont)

Home planet: Trill

Rank: Lt. Commander (Chief of Operations)

Family: Koshi (sister)

Tweak

Full name: Ida “Tweak” Lagos

Species: Half human (father’s side), half Bajoran (mother’s side)

Home planet: Bajor (raised in Florida, on Earth)

Rank: Lieutenant (Chief Engineer)

Family: Marshall “Marsh” Fen (father)

Professor Inkling

Full name: Unknown

Species: Humanoid (very long lived)

Home planet: Unknown

Rank: Lieutenant

Family: Squirt (nephew)

Tunip

Full name: Tunip Holmes

Species: Unknown (bipedal, piscine)

Home planet: CLASSIFIED

Rank: None

Family: Shellington Holmes (adoptive father), Barrot, Tominnow, Grouber, Codish, Pikato, and Halibeet (siblings)

Notes:

Tweak is properly addressed as “Lieutenant Ida.” (As per Bajoran customs, the surname comes first.)

Inkling is the oldest crew member, Tunip and his siblings are the youngest.

Yes, Shellington chose his name for himself. He is completely cisgender. He just wanted a different name. He would like to know why this is hard to understand.

By contrast, Kwazii is trans and has had the same first name his entire life.

Everyone has autism, anxiety, ADHD, or some combination of the above.

Everyone has also broken the Prime Directive at least once.

You would think that Kwazii would be guilty of breaking the Prime Directive, but it’s actually Peso and Shellington.

Behind the scenes for the names:

Barnacles: Purely going off vibes. “Bernard” seems like a good first name for him, and my idea was that “Barnacles” is a nickname that comes from his surname.

Kwazii: “Hawkins” is after Jim Hawkins from Treasure Island/Treasure Planet. Both stories involve sailing, adventure, and pirates.

Peso: Literally just looked up a bunch of Spanish surnames and decided “Morales” was the best.

Shellington. Looked up several Scottish surnames, and Holmes fit best. Bonus points because in the books, Shellington actually dresses up as Sherlock Holmes.

Dashi: Her last name comes from the Omura’s whale— one of the featured animals in The Octonauts and the Ring of Fire.

Tweak: “Ida” means “work” or “labor” in several languages. “Lagos” is Greek for rabbit or hare.

Inkling: I don’t know. I couldn’t think of a surname for him. He’s like Guianan. No other name. Just Inkling. That’s it.

The Vegimals: Since they are Shellington’s adopted children, they share his last name.

[feministdragon]

women, read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it's only like 5 pages u can just open the readmore it's only like fourteen minutes. do it right now i'm very extremely serious. it'll change your life

tl:dr: The concept of Progressivism was invented in order to rein in the explosion of belief in freedom and equality of human beings in the early 1700s

"Sometimes—not very often—a particularly cogent argument against reigning political common sense presents such a shock to the system that it becomes necessary to create an entire body of theory to refute it.

Such interventions are themselves events, in the philosophical sense; that is, they reveal aspects of reality that had been largely invisible but, once revealed, seem so entirely obvious that they can never be unseen. Much of the work of the intellectual Right is identifying, and heading off, such challenges.

Let us offer three examples.

In the 1680s, a Huron-Wendat statesman named Kondiaronk, who had been to Europe and was intimately familiar with French and English settler society, engaged in a series of debates with the French governor of Quebec, and one of his chief aides, a certain Lahontan. In them he presented the argument that punitive law and the whole apparatus of the state exist not because of some fundamental flaw in human nature but owing to the existence of another set of institutions—private property, money—that by their very nature drive people to act in such ways as to make coercive measures necessary. Equality, he argued, is thus the condition for any meaningful freedom. These debates were later turned into a book by Lahontan, which in the first decades of the eighteenth century was wildly successful. It became a play that ran for twenty years in Paris, and seemingly every Enlightenment thinker wrote an imitation. Eventually, these arguments—and the broader indigenous critique of French society—grew so powerful that defenders of the existing social order such as Turgot and Adam Smith effectively had to invent the notion of social evolution as a direct riposte. Those who first came up with the argument that human societies could be organized according to stages of development, each with their own char-acteristic technologies and forms of organization, were quite explicit that that’s what they were about. “Everyone loves freedom and equality,” noted Turgot; the question is how much of either is consistent with an advanced commercial society based on a sophisticated division of labor. The resulting theories of social evolution dominated the nineteenth century, and are still very much with us, if in slightly modified form, today.

In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, the anarchist critique of the liberal state—that the rule of law was ultimately based on arbitrary violence, and ultimately, simply a secularized version of an all-powerful God that could create morality because it stood outside it—was taken so seriously by defenders of the state that right-wing legal theorists like Carl Schmitt ultimately came up with the intellectual armature for fascism. Schmitt ends his most famous work, Political Theology, with a rant against Bakunin, whose rejection of “decision-ism”—the arbitrary authority to create a legal order, but therefore also to set it aside—was ultimately, he claimed, every bit as arbitrary as the authority Bakunin claimed to be opposing. Schmitt’s very conception of political theology, foundational for almost all contemporary right-wing thought, was an attempt to answer Bakunin’s God and the State.

The challenge posed by Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution arguably runs deeper still, since it’s not just about the nature of government, but the nature of nature—that is, reality—itself.

Theories of social evolution, what Turgot first christened “progress,” might have begun as a way of defusing the challenge of the indigenous critique, but they soon began to take a more virulent form, as hardcore liberals like Herbert Spencer began to represent social evolution not just as a matter of increasing complexity, differentiation, and integration, but as a kind of Hobbesian struggle for survival. The phrase “survival of the fittest” was actually coined in 1852 by Spencer, to describe human history—and ultimately, one assumes, to justify European genocide and colonialism. It was only taken up by Darwin some ten years later, when, in The Origin of Species, he used it as a way of describing the forms of natural selection he had identified in his famous expedition to the Galapagos Islands.

At the time Kropotkin was writing, in the 1880s and ’90s, Darwin’s ideas had been taken up by market liberals, most notoriously his “bulldog” Thomas Huxley, and the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, to propound what’s often called a “gladiatorial view” of natural history. Species duke it out like boxers in a ring or bond traders on a market floor; the strong prevail.

Kropotkin’s response—that cooperation is just as decisive a factor in natural selection than competition—was not entirely original. He never pretended that it was. In fact he was not only drawing on the best biological, anthropological, archaeological, and historical knowledge available in his day, including his own explorations of Siberia, but also on an alternative Russian school of evolutionary theory which held that the English hypercompetitive school was based, as he put it, “a tissue of absurdities”: men like “Kessler, Severtsov, Menzbir, Brandt—four great Russian zoologists, and a 5th lesser one, Poliakov, and finally myself, a simple traveler.”

Still, we must give Kropotkin credit. He was much more than a simpler traveler. Such men had been successfully ignored by English Darwinians, in the heyday of empire—and, indeed, by almost every-one else. Kropotkin’s shot across the bows was not. In part, this was no doubt because he presented his scientific findings in a larger political context, in a form that made it impossible to deny just how much the reigning version of Darwinian science was itself not just an unconscious reflection of taken-for-granted liberal categories. (As Marx so famously put it, “The anatomy of Man is the key to the anatomy of the ape.”) It was an attempt to catapult the views of the commercial classes into universality. Darwinism at that time was still a conscious, militant political intervention to reshape common sense; a centrist insurgency, one might say, or perhaps better, a would-be centrist insurgency, since it was aimed at creating a new center. It was not yet common sense; it was an attempt to create a new universal common sense. If it was not, ultimately, completely successful, it was in a certain measure because of the very power of Kropotkin’s counterargument.

It is not difficult to see what made these liberal intellectuals so uneasy. Consider the famous passage from Mutual Aid, which really deserves to be quoted in full:

"It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy—an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and men in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and men alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.... It is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience—be it only at the stage of an instinct—of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependence of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed."

One need only consider the virulence of the reaction. At least two fields of study (admittedly, overlapping ones) sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, have since been created specifically to reconcile Kropotkin’s points about cooperation between animals with the assumption that we are all ultimately driven by, as Dawkins was ultimately to put it, our “selfish genes.” When the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane reportedly said that he would be willing to lay down his life to save “two brothers, four half-brothers or eight first cousins,” he was simply parroting the kind of “scientific” calculus that was introduced everywhere to answer Kropotkin, in the same way that progress was invented to check Kondiaronk, or the doctrine of the state of exception, to check Bakunin. The phrase “selfish gene” was not chosen fortuitously. Kropotkin had revealed behavior in the natural world that was exactly the opposite of selfishness: the entire game of Darwinists now is to find some reason, any reason, to continue to insist that even the most playful, loving, whimsical, heroically self-sacrificing, or sociable behavior is really selfish after all.

The efforts of the intellectual right to meet the enormity of the challenge presented by Kropotkin’s theory are understandable. As we have already pointed out, this is precisely what they are supposed to be doing. This is why they are referred to as “reactionaries.” They don’t really believe in political creativity as a value in itself—in fact they find it profoundly dangerous. As a result, right-wing intellectuals are mainly there to react to ideas put forward by the Left. But what about the intellectual Left?

This is where things get a bit confusing. While the right-wing intellectuals sought to neutralize Kropotkin’s evolutionary holism by developing entire intellectual systems, the Marxist Left pretended that his intervention had never occurred. One might even hazard to say that the Marxist response to Kropotkin’s emphasis on cooperative federalism was to further develop the aspects of Marx’s own theory that pulled most sharply in the other direction: that is, its most productivist and progressivist aspects. Rich insights from Mutual Aid were at best ignored and, at worst, brushed off with a patronizing chuckle. There has been such a persistent tendency in Marxist scholarship, and by extension, left-leaning scholarship in general, of ridiculing Kropotkin’s “lifeboat socialism” and “naive utopianism” that a renowned biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, felt compelled to insist, in a famous essay, that “Kropotkin was no crackpot.”

There are two possible explanations for this strategic dismissal.

One is pure sectarianism. As already noted, Kropotkin’s intellectual intervention was part of a larger political project. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth saw the foundations of the welfare state, whose key institutions were, indeed, largely created by mutual aid groups, entirely independently of the state, then gradually coopted by states and political parties. Most right and left intellectuals were perfectly aligned on this one: Bismarck fully admitted he created German social welfare institutions as a “bribe” to the working class so they would not become socialists; socialists insisted that anything from social insurance to public libraries be run not by the neighborhood and syndical groups that had actually created them but by top-down vanguardist parties. In this context both saw writing off Kropotkin’s ethical socialist proposals as tomfoolery as a paramount imperative. It’s also worth remembering that—partly for this very reason—in the period between 1900 and 1917, anarchist and libertarian Marxist ideas were much more popular among the working class themselves than the Marxism of Lenin and Kautsky. It took the victory of Lenin’s branch of the Bolshevik party in Russia (at the time, considered the right wing of the Bolsheviks), and the suppression of the Soviets, Proletkult, and other bottom-up initia-tives in the Soviet Union itself, to finally put these debates to rest.

There’s another possible explanation though, one that has more to do with what might be called the “positionality” of both traditional Marxism and contemporary social theory. What is the role of a radical intellectual? Most intellectuals still do claim to be radicals of some sort or another. In theory they all agree with Marx that it’s not enough to understand the world; the point is to change it. But what does this actually mean in practice?

In one important paragraph of Mutual Aid, Kropotkin offers a suggestion: the role of a radical scholar is to “restore the real pro-portion between conflict and union.” This might sound obscure, but he clarifies. Radical scholars are “bound to enter a minute analysis of the thousands of facts and faint indications accidentally preserved in the relics of the past; to interpret them with the aid of contemporary ethnology; and after having heard so much about what used to divide men, to reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which used to unite them.”

One of the authors still remembers his youthful excitement after reading these lines. How different from the lifeless training received in the nation-centered academy! This recommendation should be read together with that of Karl Marx, whose energy went into understanding the organization and development of capitalist commodity production. In Capital, the only real attention to cooperation is an examination of cooperative activities as forms and consequences of factory production, where workers “merely form a particular mode of existence of capital.” It would seem that two projects complement each other very well. Kropotkin aimed to understand precisely what it was that an alienated worker had lost. But to integrate the two would mean to understand how even capitalism is ultimately founded on communism (“mutual aid”), even if it’s a communism it does not acknowledge; how communism is not an abstract, distant ideal, impossible to maintain, but a lived practical reality we all engage in daily, to different degrees, and that even factories could not operate without it—even if much of it operates on the sly, between the cracks, or shifts, or informally, or in what’s not said, or entirely subversively. It’s become fashionable lately to say that capitalism has entered a new phase in which it has become parasitical of forms of creative cooperation, largely on the internet.

This is nonsense. It has always been so.

This is a worthy intellectual project. For some reason, almost no one is interested in carrying it out. Instead of examining how the relations of hierarchy and exploitation are reproduced, refused, and entangled with relations of mutual aid, how relations of care become continuous with relations of violence, but nonetheless hold together systems of violence so that they don’t entirely fall apart, both traditional Marxism and contemporary social theory have stubbornly dismissed pretty much anything suggestive of generosity, cooperation, or altruism as some kind of bourgeois illusion. Conflict and egoistic calcula-tion proved to be more interesting than “union.” (Similarly, it is fairly common for academic leftists to write about Carl Schmitt or Turgot, while is almost impossible to find those who write about Bakunin and Kondiaronk.) As Marx himself complained, under the capitalist mode of production, to exist is to accumulate for the last few decades we have heard little else than relentless exhortations on cynical strategies used to increase our respective (social, cultural, or material) capital. These are framed as critiques. But if all you’re willing to talk about is that which you claim to stand against, if all you can imagine is what you claim to stand against, then in what sense do you actually stand against it? Sometimes it seems as if the academic Left has ended up as a result gradually internalizing and reproducing all the most distressing aspects of the neoliberal economism it claims to oppose, to the point where, reading many such analyses (we’re going to be nice and not mention any names), one finds oneself asking, how different all of this really is from the sociobiological hypothesis that our behavior is governed by “selfish genes!”

Admittedly, this kind of internalization of the enemy reached its heyday in the 1980s and ’90s, when the global Left was in full retreat. Things have moved on. Is Kropotkin relevant again? Well, obviously, Kropotkin was always relevant, but this book is being released in the belief that there is a new, radicalized generation, many of whom have never been exposed to these ideas directly, but who show all signs of being able to make a more clear-minded assessment of the global situation than their parents and grandparents, if only because they know that if they don’t, the world in store for them will soon become an absolute hellscape.

It’s already beginning to happen. The political relevance of ideas first espoused in Mutual Aid is being rediscovered by the new generations of social movements across the planet. The ongoing social revolution in Democratic Federation of Northeast Syria (Rojava) has been profoundly influenced by Kropotkin’s writings about social ecology and cooperative federalism, in part via the works of Murray Bookchin, in part by going back to the source, in large part too by drawing on their own Kurdish traditions and revolutionary experience.

Kurdish revolutionaries have taken on the task of constructing a new social science antagonistic to knowledge structures of capitalist moder-nity. Those involved in collective projects of sociology of freedom and jineoloji have indeed begun to “reconstruct stone by stone the institutions which used to unite” people and struggles. In the Global North, everywhere from various occupy movements to solidarity projects confronting the Covid-19 pandemic, mutual aid has emerged as a key phrase used by activists and mainstream journalists alike. At present, mutual aid is invoked in migrant solidarity mobilizations in Greece and in the organization of Zapatista society in Chiapas. Even scholars are rumored to occasionally use it.

When Mutual Aid was first released in 1902, there were few scientists courageous enough to challenge the idea that capitalism and nationalism were rooted in human nature, or that the authority of states was ultimately inviolable. Most who did were, indeed, written off as crackpots or, if they were too obviously important to be dismissed in this way, like Albert Einstein, as “eccentrics” whose political views had about as much significance as their unusual hairstyles. The rest of the world though is moving along. Will the scientists—even, possibly, the social scientists—eventually follow?

We write this introduction during a wave of global popular re-volt against racism and state violence, as public authorities spew venom against “anarchists” in much the way they did in Kropotkin’s time. It seems a peculiarly fitting moment to raise a glass to that old “despiser of law and private property” who changed the face of science in ways that continue to affect us today. Pyotr Kropotkin’s scholarship was careful and colorful, insightful and revolutionary. It has also aged unusually well. Kropotkin’s rejection of both capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, his predictions of where the latter might lead, have been vindicated time and time again. Looking back at most of the arguments that raged in his day, there’s really no question about who was actually right.

Obviously, there are still those who virulently disagree on this count. Some are clinging to the dream of boarding ships long since passed. Others are well paid to think the things they do. As for the authors of this modest introduction, many decades after first encountering this delightful book, we find ourselves—once again—surprised by just how deeply we agree with its central argument. The only viable alternative to capitalist barbarism is stateless socialism, a product, as the great geographer never ceased to remind us, “of tendencies that are apparent now in the society” and that were “always, in some sense, imminent in the present.”

To create a new world, we can only start by rediscovering what is and his always been right before our eyes.

--Introduction to Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid, An Illuminated Factor of Evolution", by Andrej Grubacic & David Graeber

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andrej-grubacic-david-graeber-introduction-to-mutual-aid

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Joseph (Jake) Klein

Published: Nov 15, 2023

From top-to-bottom, society has conditioned us to think kindness is an unmitigated good. The golden rule to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” is one of the most remembered lines of Jesus, but the lesson is near ubiquitous across both the world’s religions and secular moral philosophy. To be kind is one of the first lessons we teach our children. Our greatest works of fiction have focused on the heroism of kindness. Even our advertising frequently uses the morality of kindness to ingratiate us to brands.

But far from an unmitigated good, kindness has a dark side. The once virtuous cell of kindness has metastasized into a cancer. The evolution of kindness, manifested in the unparalleled cooperative ability of mankind, enabled the development of civilization.

In contemporary times, however, pathological kindness has become one of the greatest threats to bring about its destruction.

In the beginning, kindness was not a luxury, but a need. To escape the poverty and starvation inherent to the state of nature, humanity had no choice but to learn to be kind to each other in order to successfully cooperate and produce what they needed to survive. As the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained, “[w]e may call consciousness of kind, sense of community, or sense of belonging together the acknowledgment of the fact that all other human beings are potential collaborators in the struggle for survival because they are capable of recognizing the mutual benefits of cooperation, while the animals lack this faculty.”

“However,” Mises continues, kindness was not developed as a virtue purely in the abstract. “we must not forget that the primary facts that bring about such consciousness or such a sense are the two mentioned above. In a hypothetical world in which the division of labor would not increase productivity, there would not be any society. There would not be any sentiments of benevolence and good will.”

Kindness became a virtue precisely because it’s productive. But, in a world of abundance, kindness instead now often eats away at the resources of society. In a prosperous, advanced society where individuals have moved up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, expressions of kindness towards those who cannot or will not help themselves has been able to develop as a dominant virtue.

Kindness towards those who cannot help themselves is indeed a virtue; anyone of us could fall into this situation through no fault of our own. But kindness towards those who will not help themselves, who seek to leech off of us rather than contribute to society’s progress, is where virtue slips into vice. Most dangerously, those who are successful at taking advantage of society’s kindness rarely admit they will not help themselves, but wear the mask of those who cannot.

When a scammer takes advantage of your kindness to profit at your expense, we all know they’re the bad guy. But when someone claims victimhood and takes advantage of you by passing laws and regulations, we’re supposed to call that the justice of democracy.

This is the politics of Leftism, from the Jacobins through classical Marxism and now wearing its more fashionable woke regalia. A class group or cultural group (including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) flips morality on its head by claiming itself as oppressed—those who cannot help themselves—and appeals to the vice of kindness to gain legal advantages over other groups and redistribute resources towards itself.

To be clear, not everyone on the Left is a manipulative leech. Numerically most will be manipulated hosts. But their manipulators fit a personality type known as the dark tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, machiavellianism, and sadism. Amongst other traits, dark tetrad types tend to present with a sense of entitlement and a victim mentality. Studies have demonstrated a strong link between the dark tetrad personality and politically correct authoritarian behavior, which includes a belief in censorship of words and ideas deemed offensive by the authoritarian, that those who utter these words and ideas should be punished for it, and a belief that alleged perpetrators of crimes against a victim group should be treated as guilty before proving their innocence.

Distinguished evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins brilliantly explains in the video below how evolution leads to the existence of such dark tetrad behavior. A world full of kind people is evolutionarily unstable as it creates an incentive to take advantage of the productive ability of the kind masses. But if those who live by leeching off of others become dominant in society then it’s just as evolutionarily unstable, as society collapses from its inability to produce. A society mostly full of kind people, but with a few leeches, can last for the long run.

In an era where victimhood culture is becoming dominant, we are moving into unstable space. It wouldn’t be the first time such an unstable arrangement had the opportunity to destroy a civilization—just look at the Soviet Union. While dark tetrad personalities only constitute about 7% of the international population, in the contemporary West the leech’s activism appears to have led to a far larger percentage of their hosts accepting their destructive ideas. These hosts are overrepresented amongst the world’s upper classes given that being higher on Maslow’s Hierarchy provides more of an opportunity to extend pathological kindness. Rob Henderson has famously labeled this phenomenon “luxury beliefs.”

So what do we do about this problem? You read it already: it’s time to stop being kind to people. Not everyone, obviously, kindness is usually a virtue and should be extended to everyone who wishes to cooperate to build our shared society in peace and productivity, and should also extend to the many well-intentioned hosts of bad ideas who know not what they do.

But when it comes to the leeches, it’s time to cease acting as if it’s a moral virtue to extend endless kindness to those who seek to gain at your expense. Feeding their victimhood and entitlement is what provides an incentive for them to continue; like training an animal, when the rewards cease the behavior will follow.

As the French economist Frédéric Bastiat put it, “[w]hen, then, does plunder stop? It stops when it becomes more painful and more dangerous than labor.”

Yes, many already express hostility and disgust towards the woke and mock them online (and sometimes in person), but how many speak of it with clarity as a moral virtue to do so? To make the leech’s hosts stop feeding them, they must understand that their overextended kindness is a moral evil.

At least one woman understood this: Ayn Rand. Rand spoke of the “virtue of selfishness,” pioneering clickbait tactics with an intentionally provocative phrase designed to grab people and force them to think, but that when explained becomes more agreeable than at first glance. “Selfishness” to Rand did not mean gaining at another’s expense, as the leeches (or “parasites," in her words) do, but acting in one’s long-term rational self-interest. That includes being kind to those who work cooperatively with us to make the world a better place, which is most people most of the time. But to be virtuously selfish, in Rand’s view, one must oppose altruism: self-sacrifice for another’s gain.

Unkindness towards those who deserve it needn’t and shouldn’t be a permanent attitude. Those willing to stop using victimhood as a weapon should be met with forgiveness. Perhaps they should even be treated with disproportionate kindness to encourage others to also give up their maladaptive beliefs. We want to reward people who stop their pathological behavior and join the cooperative harmony of human civilization. But until then, we must be brave. We must be willing to be seen as black sheep in order to fix society’s broken morality.

Don’t be kind to those who seek your destruction, and know and say loudly that you are right not to do it.

==

It's not a kindness to help people avoid living in reality. It's not kindness to lie in order to deprive grown adults of the opportunity to live in the real world.

We don't lie to the religious any more. We don't pretend to pray with them because they'd be offended otherwise. We don't say that their faith is reason enough to believe an obvious lie.

Stop letting people manipulate you into lying for their benefit.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Chapter III. Economic Evolutions. — First Period. — The Division of Labor.

The fundamental idea, the dominant category, of political economy is VALUE.

Value reaches its positive determination by a series of oscillations between supply and demand.

Consequently, value appears successively under three aspects: useful value, exchangeable value, and synthetic, or social, value, which is true value. The first term gives birth to the second in contradiction to it, and the two together, absorbing each other in reciprocal penetration, produce the third: so that the contradiction or antagonism of ideas appears as the point of departure of all economic science, allowing us to say of it, parodying the sentence of Tertullian in relation to the Gospel, Credo quia absurdum: There is, in social economy, a latent truth wherever there is an apparent contradiction, Credo quia contrarium.

From the point of view of political economy, then, social progress consists in a continuous solution of the problem of the constitution of values, or of the proportionality and solidarity of products.

But while in Nature the synthesis of opposites is contemporary with their opposition, in society the antithetic elements seem to appear at long intervals, and to reach solution only after long and tumultuous agitation. Thus there is no example — the idea even is inconceivable — of a valley without a hill, a left without a right, a north pole without a south pole, a stick with but one end, or two ends without a middle, etc. The human body, with its so perfectly antithetic dichotomy, is formed integrally at the very moment of conception; it refuses to be put together and arranged piece by piece, like the garment patterned after it which, later, is to cover it. [10]

In society, on the contrary, as well as in the mind, so far from the idea reaching its complete realization at a single bound, a sort of abyss separates, so to speak, the two antinomical positions, and even when these are recognized at last, we still do not see what the synthesis will be. The primitive concepts must be fertilized, so to speak, by burning controversy and passionate struggle; bloody battles will be the preliminaries of peace. At the present moment, Europe, weary of war and discussion, awaits a reconciling principle; and it is the vague perception of this situation which induces the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences to ask, “What are the general facts which govern the relations of profits to wages and determine their oscillations?” in other words, what are the most salient episodes and the most remarkable phases of the war between labor and capital?

If, then, I demonstrate that political economy, with all its contradictory hypotheses and equivocal conclusions, is nothing but an organization of privilege and misery, I shall have proved thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an organization of labor and equality, since, as has been said, every systematic contradiction is the announcement of a composition; further, I shall have fixed the bases of this composition. Then, indeed, to unfold the system of economical contradictions is to lay the foundations of universal association; to show how the products of collective labor come out of society is to explain how it will be possible to make them return to it; to exhibit the genesis of the problems of production and distribution is to prepare the way for their solution. All these propositions are identical and equally evident.

[sataniccapitalist]

The agenda, revealed during the campaign's Monday press conference, is:

Abolishing poverty as the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S.

A living minimum wage of at least $15+/hour (indexed for inflation)

Full and expanded voting rights

No more voter suppression

Guaranteed workers' rights and labor rights

Healthcare for all

Affordable, adequate housing

Strong social welfare and safety net programs

An end to gun violence, profit, and proliferation

Fully protected women's rights

Environmental justice that secures clean air and water

Justice for all Indigenous nations

Fully funded public education

Just immigration laws

Addressing militarism and the war economy

Standing for peace not war; an immediate cease-fire in Gaza that allows humanitarian relief, the release of all hostages, and peace with justice to be pursued; and an end to genocide around the world

An end to hate, division, and the extremist political agenda

[haggishlyhagging]

In the Biblical story the knowledge which is forbidden to humankind is of a dual nature: it is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, and it is sexual knowledge. When human beings acquire the knowledge of good and evil, they take upon themselves the obligation for making moral decisions, having lost their innocence and with it their ability to carry out the will of God without moral considerations. Fallen humanity, in this act of acquiring a higher level of "knowing," assumes the burden of distinguishing between good and evil and of choosing the good in order to be saved. The other aspect of knowledge is sexual knowledge; that is made clear in the line describing one of the consequences of the Fall, "and they knew they were naked" (Gen. 3:7). In this, the consequences of Adam and Eve's transgression fall with uneven weight upon the woman. The consequence of sexual knowledge is to sever female sexuality from procreation. God puts enmity between the snake and the woman (Gen. 3:15). In the historical context of the times of the writing of Genesis, the snake was clearly associated with the fertility goddess and symbolically represented her. Thus, by God's command, the free and open sexuality of the fertility-goddess was to be forbidden to fallen woman. The way her sexuality was to find expression was in motherhood. Her sexuality was so defined as to serve her motherly function, and it was limited by two conditions: she was to be subordinate to her husband, and she would bring forth her children in pain.

But there remained the tree of life, in the center of the Garden. Implicit in the human couple's tasting the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge was that they would aspire to acquiring the mystery of the tree of life, the knowledge of immortality, which is reserved to God. That implication is made clear both in the earlier-cited command forbidding the fruit and in God's punishment "for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return"(Gen. 3:19). To aspire to the knowledge of God is the supreme hubris; the punishment for it is mortality. But God is merciful and redemptive, and so in Eve's punishment there is also a redemptive aspect. Once and forever, creativity (and with it the secret of immortality) is severed from procreativity. Creativity is reserved to God; procreativity of human beings is the lot of women. The curse on Eve makes of it a painful and subordinate lot.

But there is another side to the story of the Fall. God's curse on Adam ends with assigning him to mortality. Yet in the very next line Adam re-names his wife Eve "because she was the mother of all living." This is the profound recognition that in her now lies the only immortality to which human beings can aspire—the immortality of generation. Here is the redemptive aspect of the Biblical doctrine of the division of labor between the sexes: not only shall man work in the sweat of his brow and woman give birth in pain, but mortal men and women depend on the redemptive, life-giving function of the mother for the only immortality they shall ever experience.

-Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy

[perkwunos]

Passages from a manuscript I wrote in August 2020:

A pure separation between will and its empirical contents becomes unbridgeable: there is no way to properly consider how the contingent sequences of acts and their effects can become the object of the purely formal will. Any “rational” nonempirical laws of moral practice are empty and useless--or close to useless. It can have the utility of serving as an apology, a kind of rationalizing smokescreen, for the unintelligent submission of current standards and institutions.

To continue using Marx’s term, we must further investigate what concrete labor may be, i.e. what our activity can be recognized as outside its representations on the market, by which such concrete activity becomes reduced to the abstract labor embodied in commodities. Of course, our concrete labor under capitalist conditions is to a great extent determined by how it will be represented on the market (and therefore reduced to abstraction)--but this determination is not total. We are not here dealing with physical laws, but with highly contingent historical phenomena. To see phenomena as historical is to understand them as containing spontaneity that may change the structure along which they had been set, and so as not fully determined and defined by this phenomena.

The most concrete meaning of the term “science” must refer to the behavior of humans dependent on a communal network of practices and culture as they interact with their environment. This activity must be understood in terms of the purposive guidance of the agents of the experiments and research. The impartiality and neutral observations of science are in fact highly specialized and powerful acts of desire. As Dewey put it, “the work of observation and description forms a constituent division of labor within thought” (203). Such “mere observation, pure brute description” is a purposive artifice of “instrumental character” (204). It must also be defined by the organic continuity of the scientific agent with their world, by which meanings can become genuinely indexical to the dynamics of the world.

[seasurfacefullofclouds1]

Larries don’t believe in free will either, they think Louis’ existence is to ensure fulfilment of Harry’s life’s needs. Don’t worry about them, all of their logic is convulated.

Louis has also said he doesn’t like greedy musicians who make live music unaffordable for fans. How come Larries don’t go pester Harry to listen to what “his husband” says and be less greedy?

How come Larries don’t go to Harry and ask him to leave the label that mistreated Louis? How come they never ask him to leave his friends, employees who openly make fun of Louis?

The only criticism is towards Louis not liking the same things as Harry? It’s not the 70s, even if they were in a romantic relationship, they can like different music.

Many Larries have an almost chauvinistic conception of a romantic relationship, because they simply cannot reconcile the reality and the incongruity of facts with the mythology of Larry that exist in their minds.

It’s like a collective hallucinatory interpretation of reality: “If we all agree that something didn’t happen, or did, then our version of events is stronger than what actually exists. We can overcome reality.”

What I mean by chauvinism is Larries’ tacit acceptance of the unequal division that exists between two people who are in identical careers.

In any other real or fictitious relationship, we as liberated 21st century human beings generally expect partners to be mutually supportive, with a division of labor financially, mentally, emotionally, and in intimacy and public stance. We expect partners to uphold their end of morality and ethics. We expect their loyalty.

“Being closeted” is not an excuse for abusing your partner. “Being closeted” is not an excuse for working with people who actively harm your partner. “Being closeted” isn’t a valid reason to have opposing ethical views of the human condition, or of capitalism.

In trying to adhere to their Larryverse, Larries inadvertently advocate for one partner to carry the burden of abuse, much like the marital social contract of the 1950’s— women should do all of the domestic heavy-lifting, withstand criticism and judgment, but shut up about major household financial decisions.