rough draft Article IV (take two) of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29-2

Article IV

Marx predicted that "the contradiction between ever richer capitalists and ever poorer workers would eventually lead to the collapse of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism, by which he meant essentially the end of class warfare and exploitation and their replacement by a system in which the benefits of production were shared equitably” (Isbister, 51). But, of course this collapse is taking far too long, and destroying millions of lives the world over in the process, stagnating the lives of the poor abroad and here in America, consistently stripping the middle and lower classes of more and more options and of more and more of their power over their own lives. Leo Tolstoy argued in "What Is to Be Done?" that "it is really so simple. If I want to aid the poor, that is, to help the poor not to be poor, I ought not to make them poor" (54). As Engels suggests in "The Housing Question," the housing shortage, taken as one example of what our system forces upon the poor, is "a necessary product of the bourgeois social order... it cannot fail to be present in a society in which the great masses of the workers are exclusively dependent on wages" (44). In other words, our modern capitalist system not creates inequality not as an unfortunate byproduct but as a necessary piece. And, in response to the resulting, ever-widening gap between the upper and lower classes, it comes to those in charge to do something about it. Richard Cloward suggested the obvious, that "a federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en mass from poverty." Of course, such a thing is only necessary as long as we remain within the confines of a capitalist system; Engels does, after all, argue that the housing shortage (or, I would suggest, any of the conditions that come with being the working poor) "can be abolished... only if the whole social order from which it springs is fundamentally refashioned" (44). But, in America, to even suggest anything other than capitalism is verboten. And, that same attitude is increasingly the case around the world. So, assuming operation within our modern Consumer Capitalist system, what is to be done?

Before answering what should be a simple question we must come to an understanding, beyond even the previous argumentation in the previous articles above, of what poverty is and how people come to it. As John Isbister describes it in Promises Not Kept, "lack of income is only the beginning of an understanding of poverty... Other attributes include low life expectancy, adult illiteracy, underweight [--or in America, for example, with our subsidized, corn syrup enriched diet, overweight--] children, inadequate housing, child labor, food insecurity, and lack of access to safe water, to health services, and to sanitation." We take many of these things for granted in the core nations, here in America or in her "democratic" allies. We have our own lower classes, our own citizens who live at or below the poverty level, but for the most part, we like to believe our people are doing okay. Economist and social theorist Simon Patten suggested we have come upon a "‘new basis of civilization.’ Industrial society, he contended, had moved from a ‘pain economy,’ where the scarcity of resources demanded a struggle for subsistence, to a ‘pleasure economy,’ in which abundance was potentially available to all” (Kasson 98).

That potential is the key to understanding the American Dream and American refusal to undertake real reform to diminish the economic gap between rich and poor. Fundamentally, it must be understood that "what poverty means is the inability to make choices" (Isbister, 18). Just as the capitalist system constricts all of our options, it restricts even further the options of the poor. But, we like to think that the poor are only poor because they made the wrong choices, not because they have been exploited, not because the system requires some of us to be on the bottom, but because they screwed up. We can blame them, we can ignore them, we can pretend they do not exist, but then, to channel Niemoller, what do we do when poverty comes for us?

It is important to draw a link, and a contradiction, between the American Dream and its notion that we can all have success, that we can all be well to do if we just work hard enough and make the right choices and ideas I proposed in my essay, "For Everyone Everything." The American Dream depends on us all believing that we can have everything. It does not necessarily tell us that in order for we as individuals to achieve the Dream, someone else must be left behind, left beneath. In fact, the Protestant Ethic discussed in Article III would suggest that, hand in hand with the American Dream, we are not only allowed but encouraged to assume that the poor we leave behind deserve to be where we leave them because, as I already said above, they made the wrong choices. And, by obvious inference, if we have success, if we get rich, then we made the right choices. Capitalism under the Protestant Ethic becomes not some objective system dealing in hard currency but a measure of each and every one of us in terms of moral and spiritual currency. In "For Everyone Everything," I suggested something that should befit the American Dream, if America is not a collection of disparate individuals but rather a collective formed by those individuals. Patten's notion that we have potential abundance for all is not far off from what is possible if we are more willing to share, more willing to lift each other up... At this point in our history, it seems, we would rather lift ourselves up by our bootstraps so that we can then stomp down on everyone else, the poor here or the exploited abroad with those same boots.

John Isbister suggests that "living in a world of obscene inequality, the privileged have a moral responsibility to do what they can to improve the lot of the less privileged." This seems like a very moral attitude, a Christian attitude, and yet we claim to be a Christian nation and reject this very idea. This is why, in "For Everyone Everything," I suggested "a new approach--call it socialist if you like...

This new approach: the government exists to promote justice, i.e. to renounce, discredit and disallow racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, to ensure that those who commit crimes (and not just those who can't afford good attorneys) pay the price as our society sees fit. Also, that housing access is equal...

Remember the Universal Declaration of Human Rights quoted in the preamble above; it says:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (Article 25-1)

Human Rights Education Associates suggest:

Population growth, migration to urban areas, conflicting needs for existing land, and insufficient financial and natural resources have resulted in widespread homelessness and habitation in inadequate housing. In every country children, men and women sleep on sidewalks, under bridges, in cars, subway stations, and public parks, live in ghettos and slums, or "squat" in buildings other people have abandoned. The United Nations estimates that there are over 100 million homeless people and over 1 billion people worldwide inadequately housed.

I further argued in "For Everyone Everything" that the new approach ensure "that access to education and jobs and transportation is equal, that access to healthcare is equal.". In addition to this, the Declaration of Human Rights suggests everyone has the right to equal access to public services (Article 21-2), to social security (Article 22), to "life, liberty and security of person" (Article 3), and even to an education (Article 26-1). After all, Thomas Jefferson called the people "the only safe depositories" of government. He argued that to render them safe from that government, "their minds must be improved to a certain degree." In other words, if we want democracy or any other form of society that includes the populace in the decision making, we need to have a guarantee of education.

My own argument continued with the notion that having access to these things--to public services, to social security, to an education--is what makes "domestic tranquility," the promotion of which I listed, per the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, as another reason for the government to exist. And, my argumentation continued:

This new approach: the government exists to promote the general welfare of all of its citizens, i.e. that, as Alexander Hamilton argued in his "Report on Manufactures," 5 December 1791, "the object to which an appropriation of money is to be made" or for which a law is to be passed (I would add), "be General and not local," that the government not promote, directly or indirectly, one portion of its peoples over another, be it certain corporations, be it certain races or creeds or religions.



This new approach, put simply in perhaps some very socialist terms: for everyone everything.




John Isbister calls the poor the "people on the bottom, the people denied benefits of the society in which they live.” If government is to exist, if government is to have a purpose, then guaranteeing the benefits of society to these people... to all the people should be its purpose. The American Dream--the Capitalist Dream--is something approximating my argument; instead of "for everyone everything," it's "for everyone the potential for everything." But, that simply isn't good enough. Potential means nothing without guaranteed access.

rough draft Article IV of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”

- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 29-2

Article IV

Marx predicted that "the contradiction between ever richer capitalists and ever poorer workers would eventually lead to the collapse of the capitalist system and its replacement with socialism, by which he meant essentially the end of class warfare and exploitation and their replacement by a system in which the benefits of production were shared equitably” (Isbister, 51). But, of course this collapse is taking far too long, and destroying millions of lives the world over in the process, stagnating the lives of the poor abroad and here in America, consistently stripping the middle and lower classes of more and more options and of more and more of their power over their own lives. In response to the resulting, ever-widening gap between the upper and lower classes, it comes to those in charge to do something about it. Richard Cloward suggested the obvious, that "a federal program of income redistribution has become necessary to elevate the poor en mass from poverty." Of course, such a thing is only necessary as long as we remain within the confines of a capitalist system. And, in America, to even suggest otherwise is verboten. And, that same attitude is increasingly the case around the world. So, assuming operation within our modern Consumer Capitalist system, what is to be done?

Before answering what should be a simple question we must come to an understanding, beyond even the previous argumentation in the previous articles above, of what poverty is and how people come to it. As John Isbister describes it in Promises Not Kept, "lack of income is only the beginning of an understanding of poverty... Other attributes include low life expectancy, adult illiteracy, underweight [--or in America, for example, with our subsidized, corn syrup enriched diet, overweight--] children, inadequate housing, child labor, food insecurity, and lack of access to safe water, to health services, and to sanitation." We take many of these things for granted in the core nations, here in America or in her "democratic" allies. We have our own lower classes, our own citizens who live at or below the poverty level, but for the most part, we like to believe our people are doing okay. Economist and social theorist Simon Patten suggested we have come upon a "‘new basis of civilization.’ Industrial society, he contended, had moved from a ‘pain economy,’ where the scarcity of resources demanded a struggle for subsistence, to a ‘pleasure economy,’ in which abundance was potentially available to all” (Kasson 98).

That potential is the key to understanding the American Dream and American refusal to undertake real reform to diminish the economic gap between rich and poor. Fundamentally, it must be understood that "what poverty means is the inability to make choices" (Isbister, 18). Just as the capitalist system constricts all of our options, it restricts even further the options of the poor. But, we like to think that the poor are only poor because they made the wrong choices, not because they have been exploited, not because the system requires some of us to be on the bottom, but because they screwed up. We can blame them, we can ignore them, we can pretend they do not exist, but then, to channel Niemoller, what do we do when poverty comes for us?

It is important to draw a link, and a contradiction, between the American Dream and its notion that we can all have success, that we can all be well to do if we just work hard enough and make the right choices and ideas I proposed in my essay, "For Everyone Everything." The American Dream depends on us all believing that we can have everything. It does not necessarily tell us that in order for we as individuals to achieve the Dream, someone else must be left behind, left beneath. In fact, the Protestant Ethic discussed in Article III would suggest that, hand in hand with the American Dream, we are not only allowed but encouraged to assume that the poor we leave behind deserve to be where we leave them because, as I already said above, they made the wrong choices. And, by obvious inference, if we have success, if we get rich, then we made the right choices. Capitalism under the Protestant Ethic becomes not some objective system dealing in hard currency but a measure of each and every one of us in terms of moral and spiritual currency. In "For Everyone Everything," I suggested something that should befit the American Dream, if America is not a collection of disparate individuals but rather a collective formed by those individuals. Patten's notion that we have potential abundance for all is not far off from what is possible if we are more willing to share, more willing to lift each other up... At this point in our history, it seems, we would rather lift ourselves up by our bootstraps so that we can then stomp down on everyone else, the poor here or the exploited abroad with those same boots.

John Isbister suggests that "living in a world of obscene inequality, the privileged have a moral responsibility to do what they can to improve the lot of the less privileged." This seems like a very moral attitude, a Christian attitude, and yet we claim to be a Christian nation and reject this very idea. This is why, in "For Everyone Everything," I suggested "a new approach--call it socialist if you like...

This new approach: the government exists to promote justice, i.e. to renounce, discredit and disallow racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, to ensure that those who commit crimes (and not just those who can't afford good attorneys) pay the price as our society sees fit. Also, that housing access is equal, that access to education and jobs and transportation is equal, that access to healthcare is equal.

Remember some of the terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights quoted in the preamble above:

•         “Everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of person” (Article 3)

•         “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.” (Article 21-2)

•         “Everyone, as a member of a society, has the right to social security…” (Article 22)

•         “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (Article 25-1)

•        “Everyone has a right to education.” (Article 26-1)

My own argument continued with the notion that having access to these things is what makes "domestic tranquility," the promotion of which I listed, per the preamble to the Constitution of the United States, as another reason for the government to exist. And, the argumentation continued:

This new approach: the government exists to promote the general welfare of all of its citizens, i.e. that, as Alexander Hamilton argued in his "Report on Manufactures," 5 December 1791, "the object to which an appropriation of money is to be made" or for which a law is to be passed (I would add), "be General and not local," that the government not promote, directly or indirectly, one portion of its peoples over another, be it certain corporations, be it certain races or creeds or religions.

This new approach, put simply in perhaps some very socialist terms: for everyone everything.

John Isbister calls the poor the "people on the bottom, the people denied benefits of the society in which they live.” If government is to exist, if government is to have a purpose, then guaranteeing the benefits of society to all the people should be its purpose. The American Dream--the Capitalist Dream--is something approximating my argument; instead of "for everyone everything," it's "for everyone the potential for everything." But, that simply isn't good enough. Potential means nothing without guaranteed access.

flashback to 2001: "Osama the Carrot and the Mother of All Conspiracies"

The following was written in December 2001, and distributed along with an illustration at the Alternative Press Expo in 2002.

I was reminded of this old essay of mine in light of the cheering going on in relation to the announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden. It's pathetic, knee-jerk "patriotism" in the guise of rah rah and ding dong the witch is dead, and chants of USA! USA! I am not one to cheer death like this. Just another way I am unAmerican, I guess...

Anyway, the essay, entitled Osama the Carrot and the Mother of All Conspiracies:

The problem with both your average conspiracy theorist and the average person who thinks conspiracies are just a bunch of horseshit is that they tend to think everyone involved in a conspiracy has to be entirely conscious of his role in said conspiracy to take any part in it.

Take for example the idea that a recent Osama bin Laden video may have been doctored or mistranslated. I don't necessarily contend that anyone purposely would have mistranslated it. But, when in doubt, it's very easy to hear what you want to hear, very easy to translate phrasing very foreign to your source to phrasing not just familiar to them but, in the specific case of this video, expected by them.

I took some Spanish in college. I must admit I do not remember much of it aside from some basics and a word here or there. But, knowing how verb conjugation works in that language, and understanding how the same works in English, barring good sound quality, I would have trouble picking out difference between verb tenses, say, mira, miras, miro, etc. Yet, we find here, translating a seemingly far more complicated language than Spanish to English, people take it as face value in the English transcript that bin Laden is talking about what "we" (himself included) "anticipated" (future tense) about the attack on September 11.

Now, compare the difference between the following phrases:

"We didn't anticipate that the whole building would collapse."
"We never would have guessed that the whole building would collapse"
"We never would've guessed that the whole building would've collapsed."
"I didn't anticipate that the whole building would collapse."
"I never would've guessed the whole building would've collapsed."
Etc.

Only minor variations, and you try translating those from English to any other language, and you would be tempted, not entirely consciously, to translate them all the same. They are all very much alike, about how the subject, I, he, we, you, did not know or guess what would happen.

And, a quick aside, Osama bin Laden is an engineer. He could have as casual a thought about how a building might collapse as you might or I might think about any single aspect of whatever our occupation might be. Even, taking into account a proper translation, he could have very well seen the planes strike the towers and anticipated or not anticipated then quite easily how it might go from there.

Or, God forbid, maybe he knew about it beforehand. Knowledge of a plan before an act, however much our American legal system may try to convince us otherwise, is not guilt of participation in that plan. Osama bin Laden supposedly is a terrorist. Terrorists do not strike military targets or imperialistically commercial targets like the World Trade Center. Terrorists put bombs in mailboxes. Terrorists blow up rides at Disneyland. Terrorists attack embassies. Terrorists make it so that everyday life is full of fear. Well, any fear the average American has had in recent months about possibly being victim to new attacks comes from their own idiocy, unless they were already in the line of fire to begin with. Middle America has nothing to fear from anthrax in the mail. But, our government and our media would have us believe that we are all in danger. Nevermind that they put us in that danger in the first place, if it's even there. We are not all in danger. No nation on this planet could take over America. There are far too many people here who would never stand for that. No nation on this planet could destroy us without destroying themselves.

And, commandeering those planes back in September? That was not some desperate act by people jealous of our freedoms. That was not even a first strike against our nation as a whole. The targets were simple: the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. As I've called them before, the two hearts of the American empire, military might and multinational business, money and power, the bases for two prongs of our takeover of the world (the third, twisted up in those two and so broad that it would be hard to find any center to it, would fall somewhere in the entertainment field, with our movies and our television).

We have permanent military bases in countries around the world. We have the power to freeze financial assets around the globe. We compel the world constantly to bow to our every whim. The thing is, we don't do it so dramatically as to literally make anyone get down on his knees. We do it subtly, unconsciously. We believe so forthrightly that America is the pinnacle of civilization that we cannot fathom why anyone would dare or care to live any way but how we do. We believe, rather arrogantly, that they should be and will be thankful if we give them our movies, our television, our money and our way of life.

And, we let our government do whatever it wants to do around the world, for years covertly and now right under our upturned noses. We draw a distinction between one man grown rich off of oil and another man done just the same, one who would dare hate us, one who would dare lead us. We don't bat an eye at hearing that Dick Cheney and George W Bush will reap huge monetary benefits from not having the Taliban in the way of their oil pipeline wishes in Afghanistan. We look away as our soldiers and our allies torture and murder thousands of people on the other side of the world, all because we feel hurt and confused by the idea that anyone could possibly not like us.

We are the bully, people. We are no "world's policeman." We are the big kid on the playground who demands money and subservience from everybody else, and beats down anyone who will not comply.

But, it's so easy to leave things as they are, to just keep being what we are. As long as there's a demon out there for us to hate and hunt and kill. And, remodeling his particular corner of hell to suit our needs, well that's just a bonus once he's gone. It couldn't possibly be the reason behind it. But, to recognize that there might be ulterior motives, conscious or unconscious ones, to accept that someone might just be dangling a carrot in front of us to get us to keep marching would be to accept that maybe our way of life has a bigger downside than a few homeless people or unwanted pregnancies or rampant drug abuse. It only takes one person to ruin the world. How bad can we make it with millions banded together?

We need to open our eyes and see the bigger picture. We need to view all of this in a larger historical context, ongoing wars between Islam, Judaism, Christianity, commercialism, capitalism, democracy, socialism, every religion and every form of government, back and forth over time, all vying for some imaginary prize, all holding each other back from true enlightenment, if there even is such a thing. Nations have minds of their own outside of the individuals that comprise them. Social movements and ideas have lives of their own. Men and nations band together, often without even realizing it, or refusing to recognize it, to change the status quo, because the status quo does not work for everyone. There is no conspiracy, and there is the mother of all conspiracies, minds and hearts joined in purpose beyond conscious thought, or organized in official training camps and military bases, all to change the face of the world. And, lately, we are the enemy of that world, pushing harder and faster than anyone else in the direction the world needs not to go anymore. Globalization will not solve anything. People are different. People will remain different. If we were all the same, life would not be worth living.

Now, we need to all step back and see the big picture, that context that they don't want us to see. This war?and I use that term loosely?has been little but distraction after distraction from that big picture. We're given exciting images of explosions, personalities to follow, the American Taliban, the unfortunate CIA agent, the gaunt and evil bin Laden. We're offered "damning" evidence that is questionable at best, but as long as our president keeps telling us we will not stop and we will not fail, well, god damn, we're gonna believe him. Cause, if we dared to question him, our whole world could crumble around us, and change is frightening, even if for the better because, however better, it's still unfamiliar and unknown. And, what's scarier than that?

As long as we've got our carrot dangling in front of us, just out of reach, this war will go on. Unless we accept that we might not be able to reach our goal and there is plenty of food in plenty of other places than hanging before our eyes.

And, remember one thing.

Nothing of any import happened before September. That's what we're supposed to believe. We're in a brave new world, where it's all about the "war on terror." Our year now ending began on September 11. Nevermind our president recognizing the Taliban as a sovereign government in August, telling them to deal with us or be overthrown. Nevermind bush paying the Taliban back in march and complimenting them on their dealing with drug exports from Afghanistan. Nevermind a senator possibly murdering the girl with whom he was having an affair. Nevermind the births and deaths around the world of individuals all allegedly created equal and deserving of life as much as any of us. Nevermind whatever personal triumphs or tragedies we each may have faced in the first eight months of this year. It's all about good vs evil now, as if there were ever anything else going on.

One person can ruin the world. Millions banded together can destroy it. That's the easy part. It's saving the world that is hard.

rough draft Article III of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“Capitalist patriarchy and religious patriarchy share the following aspects: domination of men with religious or economic power over other humans and the earth; devaluation of women, workers, and other beings; and disconnection from the earth and living cultures and economies.”

- Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy

Article III

It is necessary to establish causes before solutions. Of course, claiming to definitively know either is a dangerous prospect. Nonetheless, it is important to iterate some idea of causality before ever claiming any solution, even in part. Having the latter without the former makes for a futile effort, an exercise in rhetoric more than theory.

John Isbister, in Promises Not Kept, points out the basic fact that "the modern world is what economists sometimes call rational. It is inhabited by people who are constantly trying to do the best they can for themselves, to optimize, to maximize…"  He further explains that "it is based on competition and on the laws of the marketplace that reward success." This is a fairly obvious understanding of not only our modern Consumer Capitalist system but even earlier proto-capitalist models. Still, it is important to look deeper than mere rationality (here, of course, using the loaded socio-political, economic term, without necessarily suggesting that it is indeed rational (by the dictionary definition) to subscribe to capitalism in whatever form. Isbister goes on to suggest that "the modern world is forward-looking committed to growth and improvement.” But, here this approach must differ. To suggest that the modern world, in entirety is forward-looking or committed to growth and improvement is at best a shallow measure. Well, perhaps it is committed to growth, economic growth, capitalist growth. And, perhaps it finds some "improvement" toward which to work, but improvement is an inherently subjective term, and modern consumer capitalism is hardly committed to any improvement except that in the financial ledger.

Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, suggests that the operative belief in Western civilization depends on the notion that "man was born to turn the world into a paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And, so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness." This belief that man is flawed is essential not only to Western civilization but all the Abrahamic religions and their offshoots. If we are not inherently flawed, inherently incomplete, then God, in whatever form, has no place in handing down rules by which we should live. If we are not inherently flawed, then we would be capable of living naturally and getting along. The few indigenous peoples of the world that are left are clear demonstrations of ways of life built over centuries, millennia, without the influence of God. But, rather than look to any of them when we find them to discover something old, we sweep them into our culture, allow our modern civilization to devour theirs, subsume it, exploit it, use it not for lessons in life but for resources to push the capitalist agenda. Previously, it was the colonial agenda, before that the imperialist agenda, but all these agendas are of the same cloth, the exploitation of the periphery by the core, falling right in line with World Systems Theory, with Dependency Theory. This also fits the basic Marxist model of capitalism; no man, no nation can profit without someone else losing something. We find ways of pretending the exchange is close to equal, that wages are fair. But, in the end, it is the same thing over and over again, man selling his effort (not his product) toward another man's profit. As Daniel Quinn put it in My Ishmael:

 "What [our] economy is all about: making products in order to get products. Obviously, I'm using the word product in an extended sense, but anyone in a service industry will certainly know what I'm talking about if I refer to his or her product. And for the most part, what people get for their products is money, but money is only one step removed from the products it can buy, and it's the products people want, not the little pieces of paper."

But, what is the point to all of this? One might try to argue that exploitation is natural, that it is part of our genetic makeup. Except, historically, as discussed in Article II, exploitation came after the locking up of the food, after the closing of the commons. The creation of our modern notion of private property, the notion of financial success being the measure of a man--these our recent constructs. Other mammals do not exploit as such. But, according to our modern mythology, "man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product. The world wasn't made to produce frogs or katydids or sharks or grasshoppers. It was made to produce man. Man therefore stands alone, unique and infinitely apart from all the rest" (Daniel Quinn, Ishmael, 104). This anti-Darwinist, Whiggish take on biology puts man on a pedestal, not only allowed but encouraged to control, exploit and conquer the world and all that is in it. Genesis makes it quite explicit, God instructing man on more than one occasion on how he is above the world. And, Western civilization--and, for matter most all cultures we would call "civilized"--has subscribed fully to this idea. And, if there was ever any doubt, in stepped government, in stepped religion to reinforce our place on the pedestal.

Still, there are higher pedestals and lower pedestals, those who are on top, those who are on the bottom, even while all of us are placed above the animals, above nature. Max Weber argued in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

"The tenets of Protestantism played an instrumental role in (1) legitimating individualistic profit seeking by making it a duty willed by God, (2) justifying capitalist exploitation and work discipline by making conscientious labor a sacred duty, and (3) creating a cultural climate in which poverty was seen as a result of individual failing” (Timothy Lim, Doing Comparative Politics, 107).

This accounts, of course, specifically for American Consumer Capitalism, being fueled and reinforced regularly by the Protestant ethic. But, it can be seen as representative of broader patriarchal, monotheistic notions of modern life. While here this selling of labor may happen in spite of the American dream... because of the American dream, around the world, it is virtually the same idea that drives the same voluntary submission to exploitation. And, it only succeeds as long as those being exploited feel they are choosing their role as worker, that at worst it is a stop gap measure on the way to their own capitalist success.

Herein lies the important distinction between chattel slavery and wage slavery; the chattel slave has no choice while the wage slave has the illusion of choice. Indeed, the wage slave may have choice as far as specific occupation, the choice to apply for only certain positions, to accept or reject only certain positions. But, he does not have the choice to choose not to work at all... unless he is willing to accept the consequences within capitalist society, hunger and homelessness, but not so immediately as to necessarily frighten him directly back into the capitalist system but slow enough, gradually enough, piecemeal so that he is on the road to starvation before he realizes, on the road to homelessness before he realizes, and by the time he has come to these paths, it is likely far too late for him to turn back and accept his "proper" place in our modern capitalist society. And so you get suicide epidemics (like that in India mentioned in Article I) among farmers, whose very livelihood should make it impossible for them to suffer from hunger or want.

Church and State both serve to reinforce the values that hold one inside this system, and in theory both carry the burden of lifting up those who "fall through the cracks" of the system; but what of those who deliberately slip through the system out of protest, conscious or unconscious? What of those who are born already beneath the cracks? And, how shall Church and State lift everyone up when the system itself needs them to be down?

But, Church does not whither out of the way of this process. Instead, the poor are all too often enticed into religion as a supposed solution to their problems. God enters the picture not as cause but as solution. Religion separates man from nature, puts him into a position where exploitation is necessary, even valued, then when he is exploited, he turns again to religion for answers. And, easy answers are provided, notions of the naturally flawed condition of man, notions of original sin, of having to resist nature and instinct to be civilized.

And, the state does not whither out of the way either. Lenin suggested in State and Revolution that "the state will be able to wither away completely when society has realised the rule: ‘From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs’; i.e., when people have become accustomed to observe the fundamental rules of social life, and their labour is so productive, that they voluntarily work according to their ability." The key element here is perhaps the "voluntarily." Just as modern consumer capitalism needs the wage slave to volunteer to be exploited, this new Church-less, State-less system requires also that man act voluntarily. Except, he is not acting toward his own exploitation by others. Lenin goes on to suggest:

"'The narrow horizon of bourgeois rights,’ which compels one to calculate, with the hard heartedness of a Shylock, whether he has not worked half an hour more than another, whether he is not getting less play than another—this narrow horizon will then be left behind. There will then be no need for any exact calculation by society of the quantity of products to be distributed to each of its members; each will take freely ‘according to his needs.’”

Those who readily subscribe the notion that man is inherently flawed find it hard to accept the idea that man will not submit to greed in a socialist or communist system. They find example in Communist Russia, the Soviet Union, neglecting the basic fact that Communist Russia was not communist, and was more totalitarian than socialist. Similar example may be found in modern day China, still politically led by the Communist Party, but increasingly leaning toward capitalist goals to lift itself out of exploitative, even fascist methodology. Just because something calls itself communist does not mean that it is. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a foul smelling plant, if called a rose, will not then smell sweet. Soviet Russia is all too often cited as the singular failure of communism, of socialism, of Marxism, but the failure was not communism failing to work but in Russia failing to be communist, fueling even in this more honest portrayal the notion that man is flawed, for certainly the leaders of the Communist Party in Soviet Russia were so corrupt as to prove this notion as a rule.

Still, those who subscribe to this notion, those who turn to capitalism as the solution to man's problems—they also suggest merely by their adherence to capitalism that any individual can stand out by working hard. But, this very notion that a single individual can stand out from the crowd suggests that, also, a single corrupt leader—or even dozens or hundreds of them--cannot be presented as proof that a communist system cannot succeed... Really, the very notion of having leaders is antithetical to a communist system. Communism is the economic counterpart to pure democracy, built on the equality of individuals and, rather than man as inherently flawed, a notion more befitting the stereotypical religion (but somehow missing from it), that man is inherently good.

John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, targets atheists, saying, “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist." Yet, many an atheist has held to bonds, to oaths. If we require mythical beings and invented divine laws in order to get along, mankind is doomed. For, as long as their are differing religions competing for believers, just as capitalist exploiters compete for resources, there will never be peace. Locke suggests that "the taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion..." The problem here is that Locke finds that last detail to be a fault in our modern civilization. And, of course, so do many. Considering the argumentation and evidence above, taking clear links between Protestantism and Capitalism (as a representative example), it must be concluded that religion, especially in the form of the monotheistic religions we have dominating the globe, influences, justifies, and definitively creates an atmosphere for exploitation, of the world, of resources, of animals, of other human beings.

Still, even Marxists do not reject Capitalism outright. As John Isbister points out in Promises Not Kept, though “Karl Marx and many of his followers argued that imperialism was frequently a progressive force, breaking down rigid social structures and opening societies to capitalist development, which was a necessary step on the road to socialism and prosperity, for most people in the third world, however, it brought oppression and poverty." Unfortunately, however, as already point out above, those most exploited by modern Consumer Capitalism are also quite often the ones most likely to turn to religion, which merely fuels the extension of the system rather than produce any motion toward an exit.

rough draft Article II of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

”The expansionist imperialism of capitalism, the expression of its highest stage of development and its last phase of existence, produces the [following] economic tendencies: it transforms the entire world into the capitalist mode of production; all outmoded, pre-capitalist forms of production and society are swept away; it converts all the world's riches and means of production into capital, the working masses of all zones into wage slaves. In Africa and Asia, from the northernmost shores to the tip of South America and the South Seas, the remnant of ancient primitive communist associations, feudal systems of domination, patriarchal peasant economies, traditional forms of craftsmanship are annihilated, crushed by capital; whole peoples are destroyed and ancient cultures flattened. All are supplanted by profit mongering in its most modern form.”

– Rosa Luxembourg, The War and the Workers

Article II

As Peter Decker and Konrad Hecker ask in Das Proletariat, “why do wage laborers put up with a community that systematically degrades them into maneuverable masses of capitalistic property and the omnipresent state force apparatus?” The answer is something that has been called “false consciousness” (by Marx) or “corporate conscience” (by Luther Gulick). Whatever we call it, it could be described as a sort of apathy about one’s condition and the world around it, at least inasmuch as a worker simply goes about his day working and neglects often to even imagine that he has an alternative. Gulick suggests in Play on Democracy that this “corporate conscience” is “rendered necessary by the complex interdependence of modern life.” And, those in power would have it no other way.

Of course, the common worker cannot even fathom that he might escape this system. Decker and Konrad suggest that common workers operate under the assumption that “they have no other means,” that they have a sense that “nothing different probably remains for them than to resign themselves to it and make peace with their alternativeless situation in life.” This is the necessary condition of life in the modern civilization. As long as workers are separated from their products (as discussed in Article I), as long as the food is locked up and we must take part in our modern consumer capitalist society by becoming wage slaves, we must be alienated from the processes that are larger than us (although we must also have the illusion of participation).

In the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society, it is argued that “the apathy here is, first subjective—the felt powerlessness of ordinary people, the resignation before the enormity of events.” It is further suggested that “subjective apathy is encouraged by the objective American situation—the actual structural separation of people from power, from relevant knowledge, from pinnacles of decision-making… The very isolation of the individual—from power and community and ability to aspire—means the rise of a democracy without publics.” Cross apply this situation to all developed countries around the world. And, “with the great mass of people structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions, those institutions themselves attenuate and become, in the fashion of the vicious circle, progressively less accessible to those few who aspire to serious participation in social affairs. The vital democratic connection between community and leadership, between the mass and the several elites, has been so wrenched an perverted that disastrous politics go unchallenged time and again.” What begins as a separation in the workplace leads to detachment in all realms of modern life. As Dr. Erich Fromm once said, “our contemporary western society… tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness…”

The exact definition of this sickness is a matter for a separate debate. At this time, we must instead focus on how the workers’ position is sustained in this system. Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet argued that “it has always been necessary for the majority of men to continue to live in the pay of and in dependence on the minority which has appropriated to itself all wealth.” He suggested that this meant “slavery has therefore been perpetuated on the earth, but under a sweeter name. Among us now it is adorned with the title of service.” And, in order to maintain this system, to keep us all in “service,” those in power must distract the masses from the larger reality. As Paulo Freire suggests in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “as the oppressor minority subordinates and dominates the majority, it must divide it and keep it divided in order to remain in power.”

The methodology to this can be varied, of course. We might find ourselves being told about terrorists on the other side of the world bent on destroying us. We might find ourselves caught up in wars abroad that have no direct link to our nation and especially not to our everyday lives. We could be distracted by partisan politics and partisan news pulling us back and forth (or more likely, reinforcing our position farther and farther to one side or the other). But, it doesn’t have to be social or cultural upheaval that distracts us. We might simply find ourselves distracted by the latest reality show on television, or in more “innocent” times, we could find ourselves distracted by amusements like freak or carnival shows. Whatever the distraction is, “it is in the interest of the oppressor to weaken the oppressed still further, to isolate them, to create and deepen rifts among them…the more alienated people are, the easier it is to divide them and keep them divided” (Freire, 141-2).

As far as the more innocent distraction goes, amusement parks and the like, one could look back to the early days of Coney Island. Maxim Gorky, in response to middle and working class folk escaping their humdrum lives at Coney Island, “pronounced it a ‘marsh of glittering boredom,’ particularly pernicious because it stupefied the working people, poisoned their souls, and reinforced their subjection… In an age of mass culture, amusement emerged as the new opiate of the people.” (Kasson 108-9). A Russian revolutionary, Marxist terminology again, yes. But, such things are necessary when discussing matters of workers and the distraction that keeps us from even noticing the false consciousness that keeps us from noticing the alternativeless conditions of our lives…

This is as good a place as any to discuss, albeit briefly, the simplest terms of Marxism for the lay person reading this. Marxism is a methodology for study, an approach to historiography that focuses on class warfare, i.e. disputes between the various classes that are inherent to the existence of those classes as separate entities. In a capitalist system, the bourgeoisie as a class must maintain position over the proletariat class. Again, in simpler terms, the employer has to keep the worker down. There is simply no other way to profit but to pay the worker less than his output is worth or (alternatively) to charge a consumer more for said output than it is worth. In terms of the current discussion, the existence of amusements or distractions allow for the lower classes to remain beneath the upper classes. The occasional amusement, nightly lulling doses of television, the occasional film or theater outing, carnival rides, music… these things raise the spirit of the worker long enough that he doesn’t mind so much when he has to return to his daily labor.

Outside of amusement, there is the distraction of purported terrorism or war. As Freire’s argument continues, “for the oppressors to keep the oppressed from perceiving their strategy… the former must convince the latter that they are being ‘defended’ against the demonic action of ‘marginals, rowdies, and enemies of God’” (146). Whether it is the new immigrant, which in American history for example has been from various places depending on the decade. Lately, the fear is of the Muslim, “creeping shariah” and the like. Middle America is not simply afraid of terrorists out to kill us but Muslim immigrants who are out to alter our culture. For that matter, there is plenty of fear to go around regarding our own President and his attempts to undermine our Constitution, to destroy our very way of life.

But, it has always been like this; the new and unknown scares us. And, it’s not always the immigrants; After World War I (or II for that matter) redefined gender roles horrified American men. And, regarding the aforementioned Coney Island, James Gibbons Huneker was disturbed by the surrender of reason that went hand in hand with attending such amusements. He suggested that the “unreality” of such an experience was “greedily craved by the mob as alcohol by the dipsomaniac.” In modern terms, that’s essentially alcoholism. Huneker feared this unruly mob, out for amusement as opposed to the self-improvement of old genteel culture. Notably, he suggested in New Cosmopolis that “once en masse, humanity sheds its civilization and becomes half child, half savage… It will lynch an innocent man or glorify a scamp politician with equal facility.” And, in what situation does history give us lynchings but when one group hated or feared another, a perfect example of the necessary division within the lower classes.

If not the opportunity of temporary amusement apart from the workday, there might be an increase in wages. Decker and Konrad suggest this is a case of “a bit more wages [that] is supposed to compel appreciative docility” toward employers. And, of course, there’s the idea, especially in America, that any of us can advance further in our careers, that any one of us can be rich and successful if we just work hard enough. There is a distinct Protestant ethic in play here that will be discussed further in Article III. For now, it is well enough to establish the notion that a worker given the idea that he might advance is more likely to continue working rather than to sabotage his factory or office or strike en masse with his fellow workers. If amusement and distraction are not enough for him to return to work when it comes time for that, then the possibility that he might one day be a higher class of worker will be enough.

And, this would all be a workable system as long as no worker ever noticed, as long as the false consciousness is perfectly maintained. But, in no society has this ever been the case. And, secondary to that, there is the matter of there being enough employment for every individual who needs it. When one is out of work, one is less likely (perhaps) to be docile, to simply go along to get along. Absent government assistance, the unemployed have a far greater struggle in everyday life than can be distracted from with simple amusements or illusory distractions. Arguably, wage labor loses to the practice of slavery here in caring for the worker rather than simply employing him. Though, it comes from a racist perspective and supports a position that should be long left behind by enlightened society, James Henry Hammond’s Mudsill Theory speech contains an interesting distinction between slavery and wage labor. He says:

“…the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and "operatives," as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns.”

The capitalist wage labor system, even if it succeeds with a false consciousness, still results in unemployment, in homelessness, hunger. In short, there is inevitable discontent whether the system succeeds or not. Marx and Engels suggests that “the modern worker… sinks ever deeper beneath the circumstances of his own class.

“The worker becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more quickly than population and wealth. It should not be obvious that the bourgeoisie is incapable of continuing as the ruling class of society and of enforcing its own conditions of life on society as sovereign law. It is incapable of ruling because it is incapable of assuring its slave any kind of existence within his slavery, because it is forced to let him sink into a condition where it must feed him, instead of being fed by him.”

And, brining all of this back into politics, choosing our governmental officials still is not enough to alter the system. Lenin, in State and Revolution, suggests that “Marx splendidly grasped this essence of capitalist democracy, when, in analysing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed were allowed, once every few years, to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class should be in parliament to represent and repress them!”

A Representative government will not get the necessary work done. Only pure democracy (or, practically speaking, as national populations tend to be too large for such a thing to work, whatever system we can find that is close to it, Participation Democracy, Participatory Politics and Economics (Parpolity and Parecon), just to name a couple) can take into account the needs of the proletariat sufficiently.

The original SDS sought “the establishment of a democracy of individual participation governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation” (Port Huron Statement). Is the possibility of participation in life-changing decision making such a horrible thing to have in the common man? Is independence?

an addendum to article I of "on wage slavery and notions of socialism"

An important notion as to the use of language on “equality” is missing from the early part of Article I, so the following will serve as a second draft of the beginning of said Article:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence

Article I

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (Article 1). The Declaration also recognizes “the inherent dignity and… equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” suggesting such things are “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (preamble). Our own Declaration of Independence here in America as asserts that “all men are created equal” or at least suggests that we believe as much. But, it is important to note that in utilizing such language, Thomas Jefferson, a noted slaveholder, did not mean to suggest that, literally, all men are created equal. Rather, in the parlance of the Old World, the landed gentry were created equal, or more precisely, the white, property-owning males were created equal, and some more equal than others. But, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which the United States is an adoptee, has no such limitation. Indeed, even here, we have moved past the intention of the language in our Declaration of Independence to a more cosmopolitan understanding; with our 14^th Amendment, with Supreme Court decisions like that in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, with the Civil Rights Act, we have progressed beyond the presumption in that little word “all” and have come to a place where, perhaps, we can actually mean it literally.

John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government described the state of nature as one of “equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.” He does go on to limit his notions of who should be equal in specifically dismissing the atheist, but, again, as with our Declaration of Independence, let us assume that the original intent and the theoretical basis of the language have separated as we have advanced. Locke suggested that we are all “born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties” and that we “should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” With the existence of the State, we come easily to the point where such lack of subordination or subjection is inherently impossible. Not because of racist or propertied-favoring or classist (necessarily) distinctions, but because the very notion of civilization—taken as constructed under Locke’s idea of the Social Construct or taken as something perhaps more sinister (even a warlord requires administrators and organization having undertaken charge of a population with enough numbers)—requires that some be subordinated by others, that some be in charge, some make the decisions and some simply follow along to get along.

The rest shall remain as it for now, though of course when all these pieces are done, there will be much editing necessary to produce a cohesive whole.

rough draft Article I of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” – Declaration of Independence

Article I

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” (Article 1). The Declaration also recognizes “the inherent dignity and… equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” suggesting such things are “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (preamble).

John Locke, in his Second Treatise on Government described the state of nature as one of “equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.” He suggested that we are all “born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties” and that we “should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection.” With the existence of the State, we come easily to the point where such lack of subordination or subjection is inherently impossible. The very notion of civilization—taken as constructed under Locke’s idea of the Social Construct or taken as something perhaps more sinister (even a warlord requires administrators and organization having undertaken charge of a population with enough numbers)—requires that some be subordinated by others, that some be in charge, some make the decisions and some simply follow along to get along.

Now, in indigenous peoples around the world—those few who have been allowed to remain inasmuch as they can—we can see various versions of this, some more controlling than others, some leaning toward complexity like our own industrialized, capitalistic society, some depending only on temporary reigns (if that is even the word to use) of a “big man” who is little more than an arbiter of disputes. Societies around the world and throughout history range, of course, from despotic to utopian, from Takers to Leavers (to borrow the parlance of Daniel Quinn). Inevitably, as civilization takes on more complexity, takes on more numbers, there is found inequality. Unfortunately, it is, arguably, an inherently human trait to want more, to want more food, to want more influence… to want more money in the modern age. The truth of this trait’s inherency is the subject for a separate tract; for now, let us assume that this impulse toward increasing consumption is natural. In Marxist terms, let us assume then that “the essential condition or the existence and for the rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of private individuals, the formation and expansion of capital” (emphasis mine). The world has the resources, but there are some of us (whether it be the natural condition or not; more on that in Article III) who choose to use more of those resources than others do. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, “the Earth provides enough resources for everyone’s need, but not for some people’s greed.” Is is this greed that gives us capitalism, and that, quite unrestrained, has brought us to an era of conspicuous consumption by the richer folk of the world, the Core (taking into account the terminology of World Systems Theory) conspiring unconsciously (and far too often consciously) to keep down the Periphery, the poor peoples of the world who work in our factories, who farm our staple products, who serve as cannon fodder for political leaders and religious ideologues.

Natural or not, at a certain point, capitalist development became inevitable. Even Marxist notions allow for, nay, require capitalist development. As John Isbister puts it, “Marx himself believed that capitalism was a necessary stage in social evolution, for although it was exploitative, it was the only mode capable of developing the productive resources of a country… Socialism, he believed, would follow the self-destruction of the mature capitalist system… Marx was a student of capitalism, not of communism.” It is inherent in the theoretical construct of Marxism that a society progresses (with all the positive notions that word entails, but of course with some negative connotations as well, given reality) toward capitalism. At some point, at or around that point we would call the beginning of civilization, when the agricultural revolution rears its head and we decide we need surplus and we need to lock up our food, power settles into the hands of the priests and the politicians, those who hold the key to the food stores and open the chutes only when the rest of us work for our “share.” But, it isn’t a “fair” share. Earlier, before the agricultural revolution, or on small communes around world today, or among certain indigenous tribes today, there might be such a thing as a “fair” share. But, in a capitalist world, or in the world slouching toward capitalism, fairness was gradually and consistently eroded. Vandana Shiva refers to the closing of the Commons, the point in a society’s development in which common land, common property is appropriated for government-dictated use. She suggests in Earth Democracy that “the transformation of common property rights into private property rights implicitly denies the right to survival for large sections of society.” She further argues that “the globalized free market economy, which dominates our lives, is based on rules that extinguish and deny access to life and livelihoods by generating scarcity.”

To understand this, one must realize that the sustenance economy has been throughout human history the primary means of survival. Only, as civilization developed, this became an still becomes less and less true. As Shiva puts it, “nature shrinks as capital grows.”  But, capitalism must have more fuel to expand. This fuel comes in an increasing amount of resources consumed, the increasing amount of wage laborers employed or enslaved (the negligible difference between those two options in the face of Global Capitalism will be discussed more fully in Article II). And, perhaps an even greater human toll than enslavement—resources depletion, when the more powerful nations have the infrastructure to redistribute to themselves the resources of those they can push around, leads to food shortages, to starving peoples around the world, to political unrest… and not necessarily to the Marxist revolution that is supposed to be the natural response to this capitalist accumulation. Capitalism may lift some up—and under the guise of the American Dream, or whatever version thereof so many other capitalist States must have, there is a sense that it can lift anyone up if one just puts in the work—but it must also put others down. Simon-Nicholas Henri Linguet argued that it was “ the impossibility of living by any other means that compels our farm laborers to till the soil whose fruits they will not eat, and our masons to construct buildings in which they will not live.” He went on to further suggest that it is “ want that drags them to those markets where they await masters who will do them the kindness of buying them.  It is want that compels them to go down on their knees to the rich man in order to get from him permission to enrich him.” This easy comparison between wage slavery, wage labor, and chattel slavery will be discussed further in Article II, but it is necessary to hint at it now in order to understand that equality is simply not possible in our modern world because we have adopted systems and practices that mandate inequality to operate.

We have locked away the food (to borrow from Quinn) and closed the Commons (to borrow from Shiva). And, as a result, “the more the poor [have been] dispossessed of their means to provide their own sustenance, the more they [have] had to turn to the market to buy what they had formerly produced themselves” (Shiva). Now, if wages were sufficient enough that every worker could readily afford the same supplies, the same foodstuffs, the same shelter, the same healthcare… or if not the same then at least sufficient amounts of these things, then this would not necessarily be a negative thing. But, wages are not equal. Too many live in poverty, even those who have work. And, this leads not toward some increased effort to achieve and rise up out of poverty—though, logically, that is a possibility—but more often dire consequences. Poverty.com says:

About 25,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every three and a half seconds, as you can see on this display. Unfortunately, it is children who die most often.

Yet there is plenty of food in the world for everyone. The problem is that hungry people are trapped in severe poverty. They lack the money to buy enough food to nourish themselves. Being constantly malnourished, they become weaker and often sick. This makes them increasingly less able to work, which then makes them even poorer and hungrier. This downward spiral often continues until death for them and their families.

One has to wonder why more people are not enraged by the notion that there is food enough for everyone—in fact, there is arguably a limited amount of biomatter, making it impossible for the world to sustain more life than it can feed, as tautological as that should sound—and yet some go hungry. And, while a lot of the rest of us get to eat, we deplete the world of vital resources in order to have surplus that gets, at least in part, wasted. We find comfort in the notion that our modern agriculture is efficient—and, given the aforementioned supply of food enough to feed everyone, it would seem that we need only advance our means of distribution, except then State borders get in the way, varied local politics get in the way, and again, greed rears its head as well. Vandana Shiva describes how in 2002, 47% of children’s deaths in India were the result of a lack of food even as 65 million tons sat rotting in storage containers. She says: “we now have a world where the grain giants take our food at half the price that the poor pay for it and dump it on someone else’s market.”

But, it is worth mentioning that modern industrial agriculture wears a misleading mask. “The efficiency and productivity of industrial agriculture hides the costs of depletion of soils, exploitation of groundwater, erosion, and extinction of biodiversity” (Shiva). And, our “better” use of modern agriculture in developed nations supplies us with our choice of food in the grocery aisle, leading us to ignore the exploitation and disenfranchisement of farmers around the world who in the past could have has a successful sustenance farming livelihood. And, in 2004, 16,000 farmers committed suicide in India. Shiva suggests this suicide epidemic amounts to “the genocide of small farmers through the rules of globalization.”

Basic Marxist terminology must be understood to continue. Essentially, as Marx put it in his Theories of Surplus Value, “the rich have taken possession of all the conditions of production; [hence] the alienation of the conditions of production, which in their simplest form are the natural elements themselves.” Taken further, John Isbister has this to say in Promises Not Kept:

 The feudal classes were transformed into capitalist classes by the process of ‘alienation’ of labor… They ‘enclosed’ the commons—that is, they fenced off the land and drove the serfs from it. This was the alienation, or separation, of labor from the means of production. In feudalism, workers had assured access to land and to tools; it was their birthright. Capitalism arose when the workers lost this access and were left with nothing but their own hands.

Thus arose the two fundamental capitalist classes: the working class, which did not own or have access to any of the means of production and therefore had to enter into a wage contract with the capitalists, and the capitalist class, which owned the means of production and hired the workers for wages. Capitalist exploitation occurred through the wage, which represented much less than the full value of what the workers produced.

The alienation of the worker from his product is essential to modern capitalism. Further complicating things, as I wrote a few years back,

…social relationships are defined by the values placed on commodities. Labor is traded for money which is traded for commodities. The social nature of society is destroyed by the abstraction of commodities--the separation of use-value and exchange-value (e.g. a pearl of no use worth more than a wrench of practical use). The purchaser of an item is alienated from a social relationship with the maker of said item, creating a "false consciousness" as to the nature of capitalism and the value of material goods and human life (or the social or societal value thereof).

Producers are separated from what they produce, and the true value of a given thing is lost. “When markets are replaced by the market, society is replaced by capital and the market becomes the anonymous face of corporations, real people, exchanging what they create and what they need, are replaced by the abstract and invisible hand of the market” (Shiva). And, we trust blindly in this hand that is already invisible and pretend that inequality is the result of inefficiency, the result of simple human failings instead of grand human schemes.

the rough draft beginning of "On Wage Slavery and Notions of Socialism"

“Unbecoming to a gentleman, too, and vulgar are the means of livelihood of all hired workmen whom we pay for mere manual labour, not for artistic skill; for in their case the very wage they receive is a pledge of their slavery.”
– Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis

Preamble

To the extent that
• Slavery and wage labour are comparable
• Capitalism inherently produces sizeable inequality
And
• Private Property and the pursuit of same has produced in modern man a near necessity to step on his fellow man to achieve “success”

Inasmuch as the United States
• Was formed to “establish Justice,” to “insure domestic Tranquility,” to “provide for the common defence,” and to “promote the general Welfare” of her people, to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”
• Voted in General Assembly of the United Nations in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which proclaims that
• “Everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of person” (Article 3)
• “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude…” (Article 4)
• “Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.” (Article 23-1)
• “Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.” (Article 21-2)
• “Everyone , as a member of a society, has the right to social security…” (Article 22)
• “Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.” (Article 23-2)
• “Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.” (Article 23-3)
• “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” (Article 23-4)
• “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (Article 25-1)
• “Everyone has a right to education.” (Article 26-1)
And, inasmuch as the United States
• Makes war abroad in the name of “democracy” and “freedom” when millions live in poverty here at home
• Regularly supports and promotes an economic system that alienates the common worker from that he produces
And
• Distances us all from our political leadership, from governmental decisionmaking, from having power over our own lives

I must contend that a better system must be found, must be enacted and must be maintained to create a greater livelihood for a greater number of people. As I wrote in a recent essay, “It cannot simply be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. We must look past even that Marxist slogan. Instead, in this modern age, with all of the advances we have achieved already, we should be able to make available everything to everyone.” In simpler terms, “for everyone everything.” Call it an impractical dream if you like, but there’s a quotation (attributed to different people at different times) about ambition that is appropriate here: “Aim at the sun and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if you had aimed at an object on a level with yourself.” The point is, simply because some idealistic notion of society is perhaps impractical, is perhaps even impossible is no reason not to aim for it. By aiming for something better than we have, we can do little but improve upon our status quo.

Note: Despite specific reference to our Constitution, to forego American exceptionalism, let me, for the most part, speak universally as much as possible from here on. This is not, necessarily, an argument for the deconstruction of America, her government, her infrastructure, or her people (en masse), but rather a deconstruction and reconstruction of an idea, a promotion of ideal government who cares for her people when they are in need, who provides for them when they cannot provide for themselves housing, food, healthcare and even employment (and, dare I say it, purpose). Consider the following not a call for deconstruction or destruction but a call for creation, a call for action, for positive developments on behalf of mankind, citizens local and abroad, people of all walks of life all across the surface of this earth.

This piece may tend toward cynicism concerning capitalism, negativity toward modern life and the unkept promises of notions like the American Dream, but at its core is a hopeful spirit, an idea of something better than we humans far too often seem capable.

Food as a Weapon in the Third-World War - Losing Food Sovereignty, Enclosing the Commons, and Losing our Way of Life in the Wake of Mother Culture and Her Civilization

In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, it’s suggested that “any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion” (1). In that book and its sequel, My Ishmael, Quinn refers to our “locking up the food” after the agricultural revolution. This same act went on to become Vandana Shiva’s “enclosure of the commons.” Essentially, civilization decided that man should not necessarily toil in the fields for his food but should work many varied jobs, fulfill many varied roles, and earn money to pay for his food instead. This results, as we will see, in starvation and poverty and death for those who should be making a living… or perhaps simply subsisting on their farming. This results in “food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries” (2). The market economy “proposes its own expansion as the solution to [this] ecological and social crisis it has engendered” (3); when this new system fails, the obvious solution: more of the same. This is only one aspect of what Quinn calls Mother Culture, a counter to Mother Nature that came with civilization, but it is in our modern age possibly one of the most dangerous. Nations do not simply go on expansionist, Imperialist military campaigns anymore, with overt violence, so the war on the Third-World (hereafter referred to as the Third-World War) is fought instead with neocolonial, globalist policies that bring monocultures and fatal agricultural and political policies. As Shiva puts it, “at a time when a quarter of the world’s population is threatened with starvation due to erosion of soil fertility, water, and genetic diversity, chasing the mirage of unending growth becomes a major source of genocide. Killing people through the destruction of nature is an invisible form of violence which threatens justice, peace, and survival” (4). She goes on to point out how editor and author Claude Alvares calls this destruction the Third-World War, “a war waged in peacetime, without comparison but involving the largest number of deaths and the largest number of soldiers without uniforms” (5). We have taken agriculture, fundamentally built on keeping us alive, responsible for growing the human population of the world almost exponentially, and today we use it to control the world, to control its people, to narrow the focus of power to a handful of corporations at the expense of livelihoods and lives, “those who die in the shadow of capital” (6). While Imperialism brought for the Imperialists “railways and roads, it brought new technology, and for some, it brought educational opportunities, for most people in the third-world, however, it brought oppression and poverty” (7). We control the use of seed and allow nature itself to be patented, we mandate the growing of monocultures at the expense of soil, at the expense of water, and when these things result in poverty and starvation, we ignore the Third-World individuals as long as we in the First-World have wondrous choice in the Grocery Store. Food, or the control of it, is a weapon in this new Third-World War, and Food Sovereignty, taking back the Commons, unlocking the food—that is the only way for the Third-World to have any victory.

The most obvious (lately) way we control the world’s food is not some overt action, like when Serb and Muslim sides in Bosnia would interfere with UN relief efforts to each other (8). Instead, what has become obvious—to those paying attention anyway—started quite subtly; farming gradually drifted into the hands of a small group of agribusinesses, agricultural giants pushed their way into Third-World countries—Dole and Chiquita suing their way into Jamaica’s banana market (9), for example—and some of those corporations, like Monsanto, were allowed to patent life (10), and take not only control but also ownership of seed itself. Daniel Quinn suggests that Mother Culture has taught us that “the world was made for us [so] it belongs to us, and we can do what we damn well please with it” (11). And so, when Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s canola crop was contaminated with Monsanto’s Round Up ready canola, it was not Schmeiser who sued the contaminator but the contaminator who sued Schmeiser, for “intellectual property theft” (12). Ultimately, Schmeiser was forced to destroy his stored seed on the chance it might all be contaminated with Monsanto’s. Shiva argues that this “robs us of our human right and human duty to be seed savers” (13). W. R. Grace claimed a patent on the use of the neem tree for controlling pests and diseases in agriculture, something that had been going on in India for over 2000 years. After a decade-long campaign, Shiva and more than 100,000 others involved, got the European Patent Office to revoke the patent (14). While this comes across as a success, the fact that it took a decade, the fact that W. R. Grace—and in other cases, Monsanto and others—could get the patent in the first place is key to understanding the trouble here. Humans managed for a long time without agriculture at all; we hunted and we gathered. Eventually, groups of us became more sedentary and started planting seeds for things we wanted to eat instead of just gathering what was around. And, with the agricultural revolution, we let farming be a specialty for some and we locked up the food, made the rest of us earn it through work. Or, as Shiva describes it—though she seems to be referring specifically to a more recent, more capitalist addition to this—we enclosed the commons; instead of letting the world be the world and our farms be our farms, we assigned ownership, we conquered the natural world just as we would conquer the political world in the form of various empires. We twisted the natural order around until we held godlike sway over the genetic makeup of seed and we patented it. But, that wasn’t enough. As with the Grace example above, we started allowing patents on seed varieties and methodologies that already existed. And, we made laws—in India, as Shiva describes repeatedly, in Earth Democracy, but many other places as well; for example, in Iraq, Bremer’s 100 Orders include, in Order 81, material that “deals specifically with Plant Variety Protection (PVP) because it is designed to protect the commercial interests of corporate seed companies” (15)—laws that leave the farmer in no position but to submit to agribusiness. Saving seed, a tradition older really than farming (i.e. organized agriculture) itself, has become illegal in places. In 1997, RiceTec was granted a patent on basmati rice lines and grains, which Shiva points out “has been grown for centuries on the subcontinent” (16). RiceTec’s patent included genes developed by farmers and “allowed RiceTec to collect royalties from farmers growing varieties developed by them and their forefathers” (17). This one took four years to overturn. In Ireland, seed potato growers were disallowed in the early 1990s from trading in reproductive material with other seed potato growers, merchants or farmers (18). In 1994, the Plant Variety Act here in America was amended to “eliminate farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed and establish an absolute monarchy for the seed industry” (19). And the list goes on. We have made it illegal for farmers to save, store or even sell their own seed. And, Monsanto has even purchased the company—Delta & Pine Land—that developed the so-called “terminator” seed which will simply die after one generation, making farmers even more dependent on purchasing new seed time and time again (20). While some farmers fight—according to Shiva, some 5 million peasants in India have “taken a pledge to continue to save and exchange seed” regardless of any law that says they cannot, such as the Seed Act of 2004 (21)—in the meantime, there are further issues than just ownership.

Forcing farmers to grow certain crops (patented or not) results in monocultures, far from the variety there has been with traditional agriculture. Shiva uses the example of rice in India, how in the various climates of the subcontinent there have been many different strains of rice developed; “there are varieties to fit thousands of ecological niches all over the country, from the temperate high hills of the Himalayas to the tropical lowlands to deep-water and salt-water marshes of the sea coasts” (22). But, now, farmers are growing fewer strains and this lack of biodiversity, combined especially with no more intercropping, means less sustainability. While “genetic diversity provides security for the farmer against pests, disease, and unexpected climatic conditions” (23), this system demands that a farmer maintain a very specific, modern quality to his land to harvest his crops. This involves chemical fertilizers, the use of which “has led to the growing crisis of soil erosion and depleted soil quality” (24), and modern irrigation, both of which damage the land itself, ruining it for future generations of plants and people.

And, these chemical fertilizers cost money, as does modern irrigation, as do modern seeds. So farmers, who used to be able to save their own seeds and let nature (or intercropping) take care of much of the watering and fertilizing, are now paying out of pocket to maintain what should be a subsistence way of life. And, of course, it goes without saying, all this so they can produce far more than ever before, because this is not just subsistence farming but a support system for the whole First-World. These farmers are now producing not for themselves but for export, and putting more money into it than they ever had to before. And, so these farmers are put into debt, find themselves living impoverished lives, going hungry when they are the ones feeding the world. I deliberately have not mentioned NGOs like the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank, the organizations that often drive all of these new policies into these Third-World nations, because while they are the tools we and Mother Culture use to push new agendas, I would argue that they are not themselves the problem but yet another symptom, a self-promoting part of a destructive way of life that it is getting harder and harder to back down from. But, here I must reference the WTO in the case of Lee Kyung Hae. In 2003, the WTO held a meeting in Cancun. Lee and other farmers and peasants from around the world—Lee himself from Korea, where the WTO had forced the opening of “its rice markets to dumping by US agribusiness giants like Cargill and ConAgra” (25)—camped near the site of the meeting and marched upon it on the morning of its first day. They came to a barricade and Lee Kyung Hae, wearing a sign which read “WTO kills farmers,” climbed it and stabbed himself. He had a note with him that read, “I am taking my own life so others may live” (26). Sixteen thousand farmers in India committed suicide during 2004 alone, as “the policies of corporate-driven globalized and industrialized agriculture deliberately destroy small farms, dispossess small farmers, and render them disposable” (27).

Daniel Quinn argues that we “believe profoundly that, however bad things are now, they’re still infinitely preferable to what came before” (28). We have conquered the natural world, mandated that we work for our food, and we are consistently destroying the means by which we get it, but still, we take the Whiggish approach; this is what history has been leading us to, so it must be the right way of doing things. As long as we in the First-World can go to our local grocery store and find a great variety of choices, we don’t take the time to care whose lives were destroyed in getting those choices to us. Vandana Shiva argues that “patents on life and the rhetoric of the ‘ownership society’ in which everything—water, biodiversity, cells, genes, animals, plants—is property express a worldview in which life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood” (29). I would add humans to that list. This worldview devalues and essentially dehumanizes the Third-World individual, and small farmers, even here in the First-World, are losing the Third-World War. There are those who stand up against the patents, those who still trade seed (like Via Campesina, which states that “food sovereignty is the right of peoples to develop and maintain their own food systems” (30)) even where it has been made illegal, and there are those like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (31) who are demanding their legal right to have land and have the use of it, without being dictated to by NGOs or agribusiness corporations. Shiva suggests that “liberation in our genocidal times is, first and foremost, the freedom to stay alive” (32). But, we cannot simply be content with ourselves being alive. We must support the Third-World in this war; when the MST marches onto a piece of land, chanting “Occupy! Resist! Produce!” the individuals must know that they have support around the world. When an Indian or a Korean or even an American farmer, impoverished by debt growing our food, is at the point where taking his own life seems like his only viable option, he needs to believe that we will make it better, that we can take back food sovereignty for farmers, that we can give the commons back to the people, that we will not let life itself be patented and owned by corporations who care more about the bottom line than the lives of billions of individuals the world over. We need to reject Mother Culture, reject the dark recesses dug into our world by globalization, as “the discussion on ‘food power’ consequently not an exception but a symptom of a general global situation” (33). We must demand sustainability over overconsumption, demand a right to sustenance, demand biodiversity, demand nourishment over destruction, peace and life over war and death, demand democracy over corporate greed.

(1) Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, New York: Bantam, 1992, 138.
(2) Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review, 2000, 43.
(3) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 50.
(4) Ibid, 52.
(5) Ibid, citing Alvares’ “Deadly Development,” Development Forum 11:7 (1973), 3. Alvares and Shiva, of course, do not use my hyphenated “Third-World War.”
(6) Chatterjee, Piya, “Teas’s Fortunes and Famines: Global Capital, Women Workers, and Survival in Indian Plantation Country,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, edited by Amalia L. Cabexas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, Boulder: Paradigm, 2007, 58.
(7) Isbister, John, Promises Not Kept: Poverty and the Betrayal of Third World Development, 6th ed, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 99. The hyphen, again, is mine.
(8) Maass, Peter, “Bosnian Factions Using Food as a Weapon; Serb, Muslim Sides Interfere With U.N. Relief Deliveries but for Different Reasons,” The Washington Post 17 February 1993.
(9) Life and Debt, Stephanie Black, director, 2001.
(10) Interestingly, Monsanto points out on its own blog that, “in actuality the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent #141,072 with a claim to yeast. This was actually one of the first food production related patents–the yeast was for beer production to reduce spoilage of the beer.” (http://www.monsantoblog.com/2009/06/19/seed-patent-history/)
(11) Quinn, 63.
(12) Shiva, 94. The Schmeiser case is also a big part of the documentary The Future of Food, Deborah Koons Garcia, director, 2004.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, 146.
(15) Truong Sun Traveler, “Food as a Weapon – The Rape of Iraq,” Daily Kos 9 April 2008. Citing Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1447).
(16) Shiva, 147.
(17) Ibid, 148.
(18) Shiva, 149.
(19) Ibid, 150.
(20) F. William Engdahl, “Monsanto buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company,” Geopolitics – Geoeconomics 27 August 2006. (http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/Monsanto/monsanto.html)
(21) Shiva, 151.
(22) Ibid, 98.
(23) Ibid, 100.
(24) Shiva, 100.
(25) Ibid, 77.
(26) Shiva, 76.
(27) Ibid, 120.
(28) Quinn, 221.
(29) Shiva, 3.
(30) Camila Montecinos, “The Seeds of Sovereignty,” New International September 2010, 13.
(31) Raiz Forte (Strong Roots), Global Exchange, producer, 2001.
(32) Shiva, 185.
(33) Peter Wallensteen, “Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food,” Journal of Peace Research 13:4 (1976), 277.