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.