Back to the Basics: Agrarian History 101

Among the legion of items glaringly absent from the mainstream political discourse in the United States is agrarianism.  This was one of the bedrock principles of the founding era, but it's demise -- in hindsight -- was predictable.  Its return is vital.

Human access to fertile land and clean water, for eons, was an assumption.  But as populations coalesced and divisions of labor in urban centers increased, not everyone was a farmer or hunter-gatherer (or both), anymore.  By the time of the early Industrial Revolution, it became quite apparent to the Lovers of Control that depriving people of these basic resources was a method of social control.  Once people are thus "proletarianized," (no land, nothing to sell but their labor), Power -- in all it's various forms -- can set the conditions whereby individuals might survive.  The "proles" will then have to seek gainful employment on Power's terms.

In the English-speaking world, most people had a vital connection to the land until the rise of the Tudor monarchs.  This coincided with the expansion of capitalism out of the Mediterranean, into the eastern Atlantic and beyond, creating a proto-global economic system.  Where rural communalism had been the basic social structure up to that point, "landlords" -- those given special privilege in the hierarchy of feudalism -- began to realize that agriculture could be made more efficient by growing New World crops like corn and minimizing labor expenses.  Rather than growing "food for the realm," landlords retained a small number of farmers to grow profits.  This made food production more efficient, and those who were allowed to remain on the land largely profited, as well.  But the vast majority of those rural communities went up in smoke (sometimes literally) when farmers who were seen as superfluous to the purposes of wealth accumulation were sent packing.  If they refused to leave, their homes would simply be burned down as they looked on.  This majority became homeless, landless, and were at the mercy of the elite-controlled market forces -- i.e., proletarianized.  They had nothing left to sell but their labor.

The old feudal system had at least a facade of mutual obligations up and down the social hierarchy, but as the capitalist revolution continued to gain ground, ownership of the land became nearly absolute, and these landowners could and did restrict access to those resources.  The rural folk who did not "make the cut" found themselves roaming the highways and byways searching for seasonal labor, often begging, or they headed for London, Edinborough, or other urban centers to try and sell their labor.

With the expansion of Britain into the global economic game of Empire, a new class seized the center of power.  Known as the "Glorious Revolution," in 1688 the merchant-banker-landowning class, (AKA the "bourgeoisie"), gained control of the British government creating an entity generally known as "King-in-Parliament," where the monarch would now have to share power with them.  Obligations to the peasant-artisan (AKA"working class") were minimized.

The empire uprooted indigenous villagers in a the New World, as well.  These villagers fought back and found themselves out-numbered and out-gunned.  Deracinated individuals from the Old Country (or their descendants), jumped at the chance to obtain some fertile land and fresh water to realize their dream of independence from dire poverty, obligation, and a brutal work-cycle forced on them when they (or their descendants) had lost their access to such resources.  A desperate struggle between these Euro-Americans and Native Americans defending their own access to land and water ensued which continues to this day.  The open violence of this struggle continues in Latin America, but it has largely moved into the courtroom in the U.S.

Often, these Anglo-Celts began their New World experience by working as slaves (indentured servitude) for several years as the price for their passage to America.  Because the British expansionist power structure needed inexpensive "shock troops" to continue the process of appropriating land from the Indians, this nascent class of agrarian producers was given some measure of self-determination and, because of the distances involved, they were able to take for themselves still more independence.

By the mid-eighteenth century, this agrarian class, many of whom were fairly well-educated -- they had read of the Demos of the Greek city-states, of the Roman Republic's representative government, of the Italian city-states of the Renaissance -- and they understood the importance of access to resources in the struggle for self-determination (AKA "independence").  If one can produce one's own food supply, one's life will be much more stable and much less threatened than if one has nothing to sell but your labor to obtain needed sustenance.  The subjugation of African slave labor -- among the most brutal of labor systems ever devised by humankind -- helped seal the deal.  There was now a permanent underclass that could be forced to produce wealth almost unconditionally, allowing more self-determination for the Euro-American Anglo-Celts as they were not needed for that purpose.  The socio-economic creation of "race" allowed for social control, dividing the producing class by skin color and ethnic origin, not unlike the way livestock is divided by breed and provenance.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the new republic of the United States had grown into a major producer of food as well as staple crops through the plantation complex.  But the Industrial Revolution, fed by machinery, immigrant labor, banker finance, and the U.S. Civil War, boomed.
Immigrants -- usually deprived of their access to fertile land and fresh water in Europe and China -- came by the millions.  Cities expanded at unprecedented rates.  The rise of Industrial Capital gave new impetus to appropriating lands already appropriated from the natives by the agrarian class.

By 1920, the majority of people in the U.S. lived in cities.  To resist virtual enslavement, urban artisans had joined together to form labor unions utilizing the only resource they had other than their labor: each other.  The war over control and ownership of the means of production was full-throttle at this point, although the First World War had given the power structure an excuse to purge and/or outlaw those who refused to accept the appropriation of the wealth they produced with their labor.  The economic crash of 1929 was particularly devastating because so many people were city-dwellers and access to fertile land and fresh water had not been part of the urban planning, much less an urban social contract.

By the time the Great Depression was at its nadir in the mid-1930s, dire want sparked the realization that access to fertile soil and clean water could alleviate much suffering.  This neo-agrarian "back-to-the-land" movement remained in the shadows, however, as government used its access to credit (another, parallel story), to create infrastructure jobs for the society.

All went by the boards, however, with American involvement in the Second World War.  In the aftermath of that sublime conflagration, a superficial consensus of conformity to a bourgeois-dominated social order emerged in the U.S.  Power declared as its enemy any regime on the planet that might question this bourgeois domination -- a phenomenon reminiscent of the appropriation of lands from Native American peoples.  At this point, agriculture began to embrace the industrialization that had spawned other industries in the previous century.  By the 1980s, the slogan "Get big or get out" could be seen on t-shirts and billboards throughout the American Midwest.  The American Agriculture Movement, a last gasp of the old independent agrarian class, breathed its last with the "Tractorcade" to the Washington, D.C. mall in 1978.

Access to essential resources for the "rank-and-file" was nevertheless nurtured by members of the '60s' and '70s' counterculture, giving rise to a new "back-to-the-land" movement.  Urban gardens and farmers' markets have expanded on this vision in recent years, and such spaces are beginning to be incorporated into American cities from coast to coast.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the agrarian movement -- access to arable land and fresh water -- for people traditionally categorized as the "working class."  The whole concept of the "working class" is flawed in that it implies that all most people are good for is producing wealth for landowners or factory owners.  People, on the whole, are "good" for much more than that, but most have never really been given the chance to find out for themselves in the modern world; indeed, most do not even consider pursuing such a goal realistic.  This is a travesty and a tragedy, and it is completely unnecessary. 

Just as liberating enslaved people of African descent in the nineteenth century gave rise to sophisticated art and literature as well as advances in science and medicine -- phenomena such as the Harlem Renaissance, the work of people like George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington, blues, jazz, rock and roll, and on and on -- liberating the so-called "working class" from forty-plus hours of drudgery every week would produce a cultural flowering the likes of which we can scarcely imagine.  The return of agrarianism and true independence points in this direction.  I think it essential to take this journey.  The legacy of agrarianism holds great potential for realizing our true human potential and independence from power systems that squelch such things, but it is also necessary for the survival of our species, and possibly our planet, as well.
 

Capitalism, Humanity, and Adjunct Professors

Capitalism, Humanity, and Adjunct Professors

Recently, I was at a campus-wide meeting of adjunct faculty at a medium-sized suburban community college in mid-America.  It was a valuable learning experience, but not altogether for the intended reasons.  We were given good information on where our school ranks in effectiveness with its peer institutions.   Adjuncts generated a good and (largely) substantive discussion.  The skilled and knowledgeable tech guy gave a hasty but useful presentation of the new online course management system.  And the President of the college brought forth his “pep-talk,” which was obviously the same talk he had given to the full-time faculty.  He gave a budget presentation accompanied by what sounded an awful lot like a scolding.  A scolding for a group of people that the college utterly depends upon to . . . to what?  It got me thinking, again . . .

The President lofted a few warm fuzzies around the room before his talk on the budget.  But, it was really quite astounding, as an adjunct faculty member working at half-price with no benefits to sit and listen to a man who is largely a prop on a six-figure salary tell us that we must do more with less.  The public is not going to tolerate having to pay any more for higher education, we were told; we need to quit whining and do more.  Why?  Because these private institutions of higher learning were dumping all this money into advertising and offering vo-tech training, where we could not guarantee jobs to students because, the implication was, we teach liberal arts and social sciences that, frankly, do not add to the GDP.  Remember, this was at an institution of HIGHER learning, albeit a “mere” community college.  As for the majority of the adjunct faculty, they seemed locked in rapt attention, nodding their heads and responding the proper way at all the proper moments.  One brave adjunct raised her hand an asked, “With all due respect, can you tell us why the previous President of the college was paid 700 times more than adjunct professors who actually produce the credit hours?”  One clever fellow saw his sycophantic opportunity and answered, “Because he had to answer questions like that.”  It was the only substantive question asked during the presentation on the budget, and the President’s answer was, “Good question,” and he moved on.

Yet, there are some basic needs in the human psyche that were completely left out of the President’s, and the state legislature’s, and the Board of Regents’, and the federal government’s calculations.  Namely, the need for awareness – political and personal, health, respect, love, companionship, shelter, connection to creation; in short, the need to be the person one was born to be, which has a lot more to it than working to produce profits typically enjoyed by someone else.  This has everything to do with the underlying myths operating in the adjuncts’ meeting in Room 232.

I am a student of history, so I tend to see things in historical terms.  What I’ve studied and written about most is how the mythos of a society is created, perpetuated, and can be used by the more controlling among us to manipulate large numbers of people.  This process has been characterized by deceit.  The corruption is built into the system; a somewhat different system, known as feudalism, also employed deceit as a fundamental tool.  But now we have, for lack of a better word, capitalism – the “glorious” revolution of the bourgeoisie.  Now, capitalism has replaced feudalism, but the same structure is basically present; it’s just more fluid and, ultimately, more destructive because of the technological power that has been unleashed.  The people are told that this system has unleashed the power of the human spirit, that their chains have been thrown off, that they too can rise to the top of the heap and live in comfort and even luxury until the end of their days.  And it’s all due to this remarkable economic system.

There, in this version of the myth, exposition of its “humanity” ends.  Work, the myth says, is the answer to all of your problems.  Work harder.  Do more with less.  Work harder.  Be efficient.  Work harder.  If you step outside of the myth, it begins to look a lot like an addiction – work, must have more work, harder, harder, harder . . . etc.  And for what?  Well, profits of course.  These will make it all worthwhile.  But what if you are an adjunct professor?  Then of course you LOVE what you do and you don’t need to be paid as much.  Good question, move on . . . .  Incidentally, those who follow the adjunct’s plight and higher ed generally recognize this rhetoric as “fascist dog-whistle” for privatization.  Once this is accomplished, we can dispense with all of this liberal arts nonsense; except for a chosen elite, of course.

There was a brief time -- about a generation, maybe two -- where there was a serious attempt to control otherwise reckless bourgeois profiteering that has characterized imperial expansion since the 13th century.  (And no, I'm not a doctrinaire Marxist, I'm just an admirer of his analysis of capitalism.)  New Deal liberalism may have been the best way to minimize these excesses through regulation, but it's still corrupt at base.  How much of this is the human condition and how much can be overcome by embracing a morally sound mythos?  And if the latter is possible, how would this transpire?  I know these are abstract questions, but we're talking about a society that has long embraced an amoral mythos.  New Deal liberalism, as I point out to my students, IS the middle ground between fascism and communism -- and its effectiveness was fleeting.  The Liberals began their decline when they turned their back on the working class.  Trading in Henry Wallace for Harry Truman was a crucial moment in the decline.  But ultimately, the decline is due to a loss of a rhetorical war by the center left to the right in the U.S. (there not being any functional "left").  The rhetoric is rooted in the myths by which most Americans conduct their lives, knowingly or otherwise.

We can change the people in the system (marginally effective); we can change the system (more difficult); and/or we can change the mythos underlying society (impossible, I think, to contrive). So, I will continue to speak out, educate, write, play my guitar, and enjoy life as best I can — after all, I’m an adjunct professor – I LOVE what I do.

Fraudonomics

Fraudonomics

©2012 Douglas Harvey

It is interesting that the word “fraud” has been much in the news of late, most recently attributed to Barclay’s and the LIBOR scandal, with mention of an “investigation” that could result in “prosecutions.”  As a student of history, I feel compelled to note that we’ve seen things like this before, although perhaps not on such a broad scale with such a desperate and deeply embedded defense of the capitalist system. 

John Locke described his version of a Social Contract between society and government in his Second Treatise on Government.  Many know the particulars – people are born with “natural rights”: life, liberty, and property.  Government is created by the people to protect these rights, and if it fails it is their duty to replace it.  He went on to say that if the people need to change the government, it is much easier to change the people than it is to change the form.  Locke was silent on what one should do if one was property, but we can let that go for the moment.

Locke was writing in the 1670s, although his treatises were not published until the “Glorious” Revolution in England in 1688.  You may recall this event as well – where the Catholic King James II was essentially forced out by the bourgeois Parliament, who then brought in his sister Mary and her husband William from The Netherlands to “rule” England.  The catch was that they had to share power with Parliament, dominated as it was by mercantile interests – planters, merchants, shipping interests; in short, those who were profiting from economic empire.  Locke’s “social contract” provided the rationale for this coup undertaken to gain control of the governmental resources of what was rapidly becoming the largest empire in the world.  I guess that explains what is meant by “property.”

“Glorious,” eh?  Now the Bank of London could be formed, a mechanism whereby the bourgeoisie could loan money to the government which would in turn use that money to pursue the ends of the bourgeoisie.  (King William’s royal nickname has become, after all, “Billy the Bourgeois King.”)  Repayment of the “loan” would ultimately be underwritten by British taxpayers (sound familiar?).  The first big “scandal” was the South Sea Bubble, where investors lost millions in a scheme to “develop” the Caribbean region.  Investments were secured by hyping the bulletproof nature of the investment, (it’s goin’ to the sky -- you can't lose!!!).

Meanwhile, slaves (humans that were permanently property) and indentured servants (humans that were temporarily property) were brought to the New World to produce wealth for their masters on land secured by hook or by crook from the natives.  As for the indentured servants, these were simply people who had become proletarianized, that is, they were forced off the land in their own country and had to fend for themselves the only way they could, by selling their labor (sound familiar?).  Once their service was done, they might be awarded a piece of land as a way to start anew and help provide a market for goods manufactured in Britain.  They would then hire indentures to work for them and the cycle would be perpetuated. 

Proletarianized people are dependent people.  For example, in order to support the buyers of their labor, they need to purchase the goods they produce (dwell, for a moment, on THAT absurdity).  In this system, if one can’t sell one’s labor in order to buy the goods thus produced, one is screwed.  Even if employment is obtained, it is a great struggle to join with fellow workers to force better pay and working conditions – something not be forthcoming without a fight, history has shown.  In other words, employed or not, poverty is staring you in the face. 

This absurdity remains largely unacknowledged while the prospect of poverty is said to be a good thing: one will be motivated to go to work – a notion perpetuated by those who are dependent on your labor.  In the event that that isn’t enough to get you to work, those who live off of others’ labor spend large amounts of wealth convincing the working class to purchase various and sundry products they themselves manufacture.  These products and the production of them have proven to be a significant bio-hazard as we cross the population boundary of seven billion humans.  It’s not “global warming” that’s the fraud.

Now how much would you pay!!!  But wait!!!  There’s more!!! 

In order to be rid of the annoying need for resources and markets, using micro-chip technology, bad loans can be made and sold at a very high speed.  With complicit governments and regulators on board, these loans will ultimately be covered by . . . ta dah!  The workers!  Or, better still, loans can be made to governments (unwitting or complicit) that they can’t possibly repay.  When the due date arrives, governmental functions become privatized and these predatory capitalists obtain new market sectors. Hello Greece!  I got some land in Florida . . . 

See how well these free markets work!!!

Consider, for a moment, the cultures replaced by this system, including the societies from whom those in perpetual servitude were taken.  They had not developed this bourgeois notion of accumulation to any great extent.  Villagers in much of North America, for instance, would travel frequently, making their annual rounds to a wide variety of food sources.  It was not unusual for even the most sedentary of them to move entire villages every few years.  Accumulation, under these circumstances, was a detriment, and yet poverty in terms of hunger, a lack of shelter, isolation, etc., were virtually unknown.  Laboring for sustenance was not something one spent a lot of time on.  

Fear of famine was virtually non-existent.  Europeans remarked that indigenous Americans could be found playing a ball-game in lieu of stockpiling food.  Why?  The land was rich, food was plentiful – it will be there tomorrow.  As for material goods – why would you want more than you need?  You just have to move the stuff around and it gets in the way.  Immersed in the bounty of the earth, indigenous peoples were time rich.  Do you have time to make an arrowhead out of stone or moccasins from brain-tanned deer hide and porcupine quills? 

Lucky us!!!  Capitalism has given us so much free time!!!

The economic system currently dominating the world is based on fraud.  It has finally come down to a kind of shell game that relies on blatant deception – a ponzi scheme – to stay afloat.  In addition, we are altering the planet in ways we are only beginning to understand, and it could quite possibly be disastrous for the only home we will ever have -- the home out of which we emerged.  What can our hunter-gatherer / village agriculturalist forebears teach us about backing out of this blind alley Big Capital has taken us down?  Simplifying our lives and immersing ourselves in our surroundings is surely a part of the answer.  Arresting and jailing the fraudsters and "occupying" the corrupt system must be a part of it as well.

Douglas Harvey

July 15, 2012

Trickled-On Economics

“Trickled On” Economics

©2012 Douglas S. Harvey

One thing about an election year, particularly this one, is that it reveals the fallacy that humanity has somehow emerged from “mere animal conditions.”  We may have comfortable homes, climate-control, exo-skeletons (known as automobiles) to allow us to move about rapidly and move objects many times our own weight, etc.  But beavers, ants, and foxes have these things.  One thing that humans have the capacity for, if they strive to use it, is being able to see life from another’s viewpoint – we have the capacity for compassion.  If anything would allow us to rise from a “mere animal condition,” it is this compassion.  But under the capitalist model, currently the dominant paradigm in the world, the priority is put on expropriating land and labor in order for a small group to accumulate wealth they did not produce.  In our deluded national narrative, these people are said to be “job creators.”  In fact, their access to wealth and power has allowed them to create a sort of neo-feudal system that can be aptly called, “Trickled-On Economics.”

In this dominant paradigm headed by Big Capital, compassion is highly discouraged.  There is a tendency among the politicians, managers, and overseers of capitalist institutions to live like there is no tomorrow and pretend like there was no yesterday.  After all, the working class – those who actually produce wealth – can be depended upon for a source of insurance in the event the gaming schemes of Big Capital fail.  This attitude of borrow now (“leverage” if you are rich), worry later, unlike the wealth itself, has trickled down, or should I say “trickled on” the general public.

The so-called “debt crisis” currently providing rationale for cutting social programs was created by capitalists manipulating the housing and financial markets for short-term profit, a scheme that crashed the global economy.  While they were doing that, working class people struggled with a steady decline in income resulting from off-shoring American manufacturing, union sell-outs, and outright union-busting.  To make up for this decline, they were handed credit cards, deregulated during the Reagan years, and usurious lending became the order of the day.  In addition, instead of providing education for its citizens as some social welfare states of western and northern Europe have done, the student loan industry was created, with student loan giant Sallie Mae becoming a for-profit corporation by 1995.  As if this was not enough (it never is), for-profit health care, starring Big Pharma, has become ensconced in Congress, K-Street, and Wall Street.  Also, moving in from the desert is a dust devil known as the for-profit prison system.  Examples of profiteering from others’ misfortune, or indeed manufacturing misfortune for profit, (note: I do not even broach the war profiteering game in this essay), has no limit in the capitalist paradigm.

            With the declining share of wealth enjoyed by the working class, it was logically reasoned that higher education was a way out of mind-numbing, dead-end jobs and into a better life.   Both federally-insured and private loans for education skyrocketed.  For some, this better life came to pass, for others it became a trap and in some cases a death-trap.  Student loans do not have bankruptcy protection, and the collection agency can seize your home, your social security, your disability income – pretty much anything they want to seize.  There are numerous horror stories out there, including many suicides.  Indeed, as Alan Collinge has written in his book The Student Loan Scam, defaulted loans are more lucrative than those not in default because assets can be seized. 

            Credit card debt, which now ranks behind student loans in consumer debt as of the summer of 2010, is the result of falling wages and job loss.  By 2012, there were well over a half billion credit cards in use in the U.S. alone.  That is double the total population of the country.  Bankruptcies were down in 2011; with a mere 1.37 million filings in the U.S. (it was 1.55 in 2010).  Many bankruptcies were brought about by medical bills contracted in a system that preys on the sick. 

            A compassionate set of policies that would address these issues would not include taking billions of dollars in tax revenue from the working class and handing it over to Wall Street bankers to cover their failed schemes and scams as has been done more than once since 2008.  In this paradigm of the Bean-counter, we can hand $700 billion at a pop over to criminals in suits, but we cannot help struggling college graduates or families stranded without gainful employment.

            It is not hard to see that the issue is systemic.  Capitalism has no built-in moral code other than maximizing profits.  Whatever morality exists is brought to the table by individuals, but the system itself does not reward compassion; indeed, ruthlessness and cruelty are central features of the game.  Capital has been engaged in a long-term struggle to deprive people of access to the resources they need to build a good life for themselves.  It creates an environment that allows a small group or even one person to live extremely well on the backs of those whose access to resources they control.  Once people become separated from the resources that they need to live, they must re-acquire them on terms favorable to the capitalist.  In some cases, the result is modern-day slavery.  The separation of people from the resource base is a central theme in the human history of the world and at the heart of our systemic problem today.

            This system has led to the abuse of the non-human resources, as well.  Humans and their resources are, ultimately, not separate at all.  Labor is the interaction of humans with the non-human world and the results are often very beautiful, profound, poignant, moving, powerful, and on and on – in a word: art.  Forcing human beings to interact with resources on terms favorable to the Capitalist is hardly emerging from “mere animal conditions.”  It results in environmental degradation of both human and non-human.  Degrading and dangerous sweatshops, mines, oil rigs, etc., have increased because of deregulation and defunding of safety oversight.  Environmental oversight has been rolled back, defunded, or ignored.  These underscore the systemic nature of the dual expropriation of labor and resources for the sake of the wealth accumulation of a very few.  

From mountain-top mining to clear-cutting rainforests, the systemic unsustainable use of resources creates an oppositional relationship between humans and their environment.  “Man vs. Nature” is a conflict drilled into our heads from an early age, but it is this term “Versus” that needs to be questioned and studied.  A political economic system in which compassion features predominately would institutionalize such introspection.  We have examples from our past.  Agriculture, for instance, traditionally employed the concept of “husbandry.”  Farms were once places where abundance was possible for all species involved and sustaining this human and non-human natural order was the priority. Under capitalism, agriculture has industrialized and cold, hard numbers dominate decision-making processes. 

Under a more humane system, labor would be an extension of the production of nature; indeed, human labor IS an expression of nature.  But its usurpation by a few is like the felling of the forests, the leveling of mountains, the making of war, or the building of sweatshops: we trade our humanity – our compassion – for the sake of accumulation by an ambitious and even sociopathic few.  If we are serious about emerging from a “mere animal condition,” we need to “think outside the box,” and box is the capitalist paradigm.

© 2012 Douglas S. Harvey

Parasites Lost

Parasites Lost

©Douglas S. Harvey 2012

I once asked a Native American if he thought whether North America was in any way in a post-colonial period.  His response was, “Have they left yet?”  Of the New World republics that came about as a result of colonization, the United States is going to have the hardest time dealing with its past.  Recently, we’ve see a lot of people willing to strut about with their guns and imagine themselves in some pre-pubescent fantasy of John Wayne’s “unbridled individualism.”  Some become so deluded as to be willing to use these guns on perceived “enemies.”  But this is symptomatic only; it is useful to remember how the actual land of North America came to be claimed by European and Euro-American colonists.  More importantly, the causes of these neuroses can be better understood when one realizes what separating people from their resource base means.

            For over ninety-nine percent of human history, the earth and its human offspring were united.  Humans were unique in their ability to fashion bits of the earth into useful items.  With our minds, hands, and intuition we made the stuff of the earth more useful to us.  Nothing came between us and our resources – we were one with our environment and what we did to improve our surroundings and make our lives better we ourselves enjoyed.  As the Thoreau disciple and wilderness advocate Bradford Angier once pointed out, “The hardest part about roughing it is smoothing it.”  We were pretty good at “smoothing it.”  Even cave paintings, figurines, Petroglyphs and the like helped people to understand their relationship with the world into which they had emerged.  Contrary to the assumptions of the old “Whig” histories, people were generally time-rich – indeed, they could easily make more than they needed.  These surplus goods could be traded for others’ surplus goods and the fruits of individuals’ skills could be shared.  At some point someone began to think about accumulating these surplus goods.  How, the calculating mind asked, might I enjoy these manufactures and the potential wealth they represent without having to engage in this difficult work myself?  Many methods were tried with varying degrees of success.  But one that did work and continues to work was coercion – physical, political, legal, economic – forcing a wedge between people and their resource base (the land) and make their reunion with it conditional.  The condition for this reunion with the “means of production” is a controlling cut of the wealth produced by the interaction of human and other-than-human nature. 

            This division between people and nature put us on a path many are beginning to question.  Besides the sense of alienation being cut off from our natural relationships with the other-than-human world produces, we are separated from our own means of production.  Now, instead of using our wits and our hands to mold the stuff of the earth into usefulness, we have to go to the bourgeois “owner” and ask him to buy our labor, since it is often all we have since being deprived of access to resources.  The bourgeoisie figured out that if you usurp the land and resources, you have control of interaction between human and other-than-human – also known as labor power, which is the only real power humans have. 

            This defense of the relationship between humans and their resources should in no way be construed as a defense of, say, corporate access to the minerals of the Grand Canyon or oil in the Arctic.  That is a looting of both nature and labor that I have discussed elsewhere.  No, we have come so far down the path of exploitation of both human and other-than-human nature that assumptions and myths regarding the righteousness of this path remain unquestioned from the halls of power to the public discourse.

            The surplus of useful goods that was often so abundant in pre-modern communities – under the influence of market-obsession, has acquired an exchange-value separate from its use.  The result is “capital,” or surplus-value flowing to the bourgoisie but which they themselves did not produce.  Capital bought and still buys power and influence to entrench this economic system and heavily skew it toward the bourgeoisie – a sort of modern feudalism.  A wedge was driven between people and their resources.  Having been deracinated – alienated from their resources, homes, families, and livelihood – people had nothing to sell but their labor, and oftentimes the going rate was at starvation levels.  In some regions where this deracination is at full throttle, many have chosen suicide over this type of slavery.

In North America, this separation of the land from the indigenous peoples took on an unprecedented scope.  While there was certainly plenty of room in North America in 1492, there were still no fewer than five to ten million people who, in most respects, lived off the fat of an abundant land.  Then, Europeans and unwilling and unwitting Africans came to the New World.  With varying degrees, separating indigenous people from the land became an institution and was developed to the point of becoming a national myth: of course the Indians must be removed in the face of “progress” – removed or exterminated.  Cold hard fact that it is we have yet to internalize this as a society; denial or ignorance of this history is rampant in the U.S.

The denial becomes increasingly difficult as the separation of people from property takes on new dimensions, (if nothing else, the “bourgeois” class is very creative about accumulating wealth and power).  Now, newcomers as well as descendents of the original colonizers – who themselves usurped the land – have found themselves being separated from their resources by a rigged system in which they have no say.  Some might call this karma and that may be true, but it is certainly a continuation. 

Working people took a stand in the U.S. from the Industrial Revolution to the post-World War II era and created the wealthiest working class in history.  It was so successful that this working class took to calling itself the “middle class,” a democratization of the original turf held by the bourgeoisie and characterized by untitled wealth.  Many people once again had a say in their relationship between themselves and their tools and resources.  They did not go to the so-called “owner” with hat in hand begging to sell their labor, they collectively bargained with him to get a reasonable share of the surplus value they were producing.  Some would say these negotiations were a gift to the bourgeoisie from producers who cut them more slack than they deserved.  The abandonment of the American working class by the bourgeoisie, by their politicians, and even by their unions, has been nothing short of a betrayal and indeed a form of robbery.

The wealth accumulated by hook or by crook and now used to manipulate the economy and political power structure is turned against the people who produced it.  The old tried and true strategy of divide and conquer – white and blue collar, black and white skin, English- and Spanish-speaking, male and female, etc., etc., ad nauseum – so far still works.  The financialization of the economy has turned Wall Street into a kind of giant Las Vegas, detached from actual production, subsidized and insured by taxing those who actually do produce wealth.  It must keep moving fast, though, because something is gaining on it.  The separation of workers from the wealth they produce; of workers from their resources; of humans from nature, is a contrivance that cannot last. 

People are looking for that part of themselves that is connected to everything else.  There is a deep cognitive dissonance in the U.S. resulting from a simple historical truth: wealth enjoyed by many American citizens came from resources acquired through systematic conquest and pillage.  It makes it particularly hard to defend your resources on moral grounds when they were stolen to begin with.  Much easier to deny or invent an alternative narrative. 

Parasites often kill their hosts.  To the extent that humans have become parasites, of labor and/or the resource base, we act for our own destruction.  The short-term thinking institutionalized in this system is an indulgence we can no longer afford.  One alternative to the path of exploitation remains vaguely familiar to us: the path of husbandry and cooperation.  But alternative paths require introspection, a difficult facing of fears and facts and, finally, understanding what the relationship between humans and the earth means.  As people have known for over ninety-nine percent of our history, the earth is literally our mother – our source of life.  It is human nature to interact with our environment and treat it with the respect it deserves – as a part of ourselves.  We act self-destructively when we assume the exploitative attitude of parasites.  As with most problems, the answers are in the mirror, which is why they don’t get solved.

January 28, 2012

Nature Regards Itself

Nature Regards Itself

©Douglas S. Harvey, 2012

Growing up in a household that worshipped capitalism, (Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the de facto family Bible), in a Catholic community that had defended the faith from Bavaria to the Volga to the heart of North America, I was confronted early on by two significant conundrums.  One involved the usual questions thinking people experience with religious dogma: if God is omnipotent, can He make a rock so big that He Himself can’t lift it?  The second was, if capitalism is the epitome of unrestrained virtue, why is there so much war, poverty, and environmental degradation?   

             Historical geographer David Harvey has shown how Capital flies from crisis to crisis to avoid facing the music of its own contradictions.  Phenomena ranging from the simultaneous growth of homelessness and empty houses to the boom of the storage unit in the face of dire want and a “working poor” are symbolic of capitalism’s absurdity.  As a young man growing up in Small Town, America, I appreciated the general rhetoric about individual freedom although the connection was never made to anything that might be called “self-realization.”  But where the capitalist mythos lost me was when I saw first hand what capitalism did to the environment without apology or explanation, much less a voluntary effort to clean up after itself.  The social reform movements of the early 1900s and again in the 1960s and ‘70s forced the issue; otherwise, Big Capital has made no willing effort to acknowledge that dead rivers, clear-cut forests, eroded hillsides, and poisonous fumes were a bad thing for both humans and other-than-humans.  Indeed, the assumption was that this was the price we had to pay for the wonders of modern life – automobiles, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, electric toothbrushes – in short, capitalism.  Stuff – the myth tells us – that’s what we need and that’s what will make the people happy and the capitalists rich, which is all good.  In this mythology, the resource base, (i.e. Earth – to all appearances the complicated speck of dust that produced us all), plays second fiddle to that great concertmaster, Mankind; or, more to the point, “Man as Capitalist.” 

            There are several events that epitomize the real world consequences of this fantasy.   One is the degradation of the world’s forests – over half have been cut since 1850 and it does not look good for most of the rest without concerted effort.  The fact of climate change is beyond question among reasonable people who read the evidence.  When Rachel Carson exposed the abuses of the chemical industry and its collusion with government in Silent Spring; when Cleveland’s Cuyohaga River caught fire in 1969; when the horrors of Agent Orange came home to roost, many people in the U.S. began waking up to the dire consequences of this mythos.  This awakening has been tamped down since the 1980s, but very recently the #Occupy movement has begun to rekindle awareness of these and other contradictions in our dominant mythos.

            The prevalent attitude of the modern era in the so-called western world has been the result of the combination of capitalist and Christian mythology.   Culturally, we have separated ourselves from the resource base.  We have cut ourselves off from Earth.  But we are not separate – we ARE the Earth.  And it is time to wake up, smell the coffee, and look at what is before us in stark relief.  Most people in the western world incorporate some form of the 3,000-year-old myth that our forebears were expelled from Paradise and deposited on this wretched plane of existence with the inclination to kill, rape, plunder, and otherwise use pointy objects to the detriment of our fellows.  Elsewhere, it says that we are to subdue the Earth and the things therein.  It seems clear that Yahweh was predisposed to capitalist exploitation.  What a coincidence!  Yet, a clear-eyed appraisal of where we stand shows that we see the Earth beneath our feet and “above us only sky.”  Heaven, Hell, the angels, demons, saints and all the rest are right here, right now, in our psyches – fears and dreams manifested in psychic imagery. 

            What capitalism has done and continues to do to workers – degrade them, force them to work for lower wages, fewer benefits, longer hours, etc., it does also to Earth.  Philosopher Howard Parsons once observed that Capital similarly extorts labor from the worker, fertility and productivity from the soil – all for short-term goals.  It robs both of “vitality, freedom, and independence.”

            We humans are organic critters, much like chimps, dogs, frogs, bugs, and trees. To violate human nature through the exploitation and extortion of value from workers has a direct equivalency in violating other-than-human nature for short-term gain.  The heart of this equivalency centers on a very simple fact: human beings ARE nature.  To violate nature is to violate ourselves and vice versa.  We are Nature regarding itself.  Mythic assumptions that once upon a time perhaps lessened the degree of bloodlust among humans or dispersed economic power among a broader population and freed creative energy are reaching a threshold.  Letting go of our old mythical assumptions is key to moving forward into a more realistic view of our situation and, ultimately, our survival as a self-aware planetary organism.  We have a right to sustain ourselves in a way that contributes BOTH to the health of the individual and the health of the planet.  But we do not have a right to do so at the expense of the future.

            Both our dominant political and economic systems here in the U.S. (and elsewhere) are notorious for their focus on shortsighted goals.  Instant profits and votes – some people will literally do or say anything to acquire these, including wreck the economy of our society and the ecology of Earth, which are ultimately identical.  To this, one simply asks, what about the rights of our now-voiceless offspring?  What about the rights of those whose energy is yet to emerge into this realm of dualities – to engage in what the late comedian Bill Hicks said was “just a ride.”  Don’t they have a right to be born into a functional environment with the hope and opportunity to live a fulfilled life and enjoy the “ride” in a fruitful and healthy way?  If THAT right isn’t worth guarding, what IS? 

            Yes, we humans are Nature, but that doesn’t mean that we should cater to our basest instincts, petty shortsightedness, and the political expediency of the day.  Bad habits gained at the expense of others – human and other-than-human – have been inculcated into our pantheon of assumptions.   We are Nature regarding itself, but that does not give us license to trash the resource base.  Many of us deem it unwise to jab a screwdriver into our eye sockets; yet, cutting all the tropical forests, for example, is no different.  We are Nature regarding itself, and we owe it to ourselves and to our descendants to embrace rational, long-term resource policies and institutionalize them.  In spite of what the narcissistic, grasping capitalist mythos tells us from the cradle to the grave, the Earth is “an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race,” as well as other-than-human generations upon which all are dependent.  We are Nature regarding itself, and to embrace the real world consequences of our actions and take remedial steps is the ultimate act of humanism. 

These condundrums with which I struggled mightily in my youth have largely been resolved.  My allegiances are no longer divided.  To quote Howard Parsons’s cogent essay again, “[T]he true humanist turns out to be the true naturalist and the true radical to be the true conservative.”[1]  Damn it!  I ALWAYS thought that, but I was protected from such insight in the prison of an ideological mythos.  We ARE Nature regarding itself – and at some level, I knew it all along.

           

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[1] Howard L. Parsons, “Introduction,” Marx and Engels on Ecology (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1977), 19.  It is interesting to revisit the critics of capitalism in the post-Cold War era.   They made some very important points and we ignore their critique to our own detriment.

Delusional Assumptions

1/1/12

The Delusional Assumptions of Capitalism

One of the more delusional aspects of capitalism is the idea that if one pursues the acquisition of private wealth with abandon, that this is somehow automatically “good” for human society. 

The laissez-faire advocate and novelist Ayn Rand wrote that if one does not support this notion that greed is good and pursuing “enlightened self-interest,” (as Adam Smith characterized it), is the highest virtue then one defaults to supporting a centralized oppressive regime that allows no personal freedom and no private wealth whatsoever.  One supports living in darkness and despair or, in a word, Hell.  This Manichean thinking is in keeping with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition dating back to the Indus Valley divide between the Vedic traditions and the Zoroastrian belief system of ancient Persia.  The notion that the world is characterized by an ongoing “war” between the forces of light and the forces of darkness is at the base of much of so-called western thought.

In The Three Metamorphoses, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that humans are saddled with a heavy burden as children.  Using the metaphor of a camel, he describes how we then venture into the wilderness with this burden, whereupon we are attacked by a great dragon.  The dragon is covered with hundreds of scales, each scale bearing the words “Thou Shalt.”  The human is then transformed into a lion in order to do battle with the dragon.  If the lion is victorious in the battle – slaying the dragon “Thou Shalt” – the metaphor then turns to that of a child.  The human then becomes what he or she was born to be – “a wheel rolling out of its own center.”  One of the scales on the dragon for most of us growing up in the “developed world” is that “thou shalt believe in the war between light and darkness.”  And, the societal assumption is that one aspect of this war is the capitalist notion of “enlightened self-interest” versus the evil “socialist” notions of public ownership and oppressive altruism that punishes the productive and rewards the unproductive.  This has become conflated with the Judeo-Christian religious structure of “good versus evil” to the point where in some quarters there is no distinction between the secular and religious versions of the myth.  To complete the Nietzschean metaphor in this context, most people do not slay the dragon.  The result is a societal discourse that is largely delusional and controlled by mythic thinking, catch-phrases, and unquestioned assumptions. 

While this is nothing new, the consequences are becoming too great to bear as humans acquire the unprecedented ability to wield cataclysmic power.  What is needed is a strong commitment to reality; i.e., a commitment to jettison ideology and religion for fact-based analysis.  The process begun by the Enlightenment was, by and large, a positive development at least for Europe.  But this process has been interrupted not so much by religion – the antithesis of the Enlightenment – but by a faith-based secular ideology that says the pursuit by individuals of their own private material gain is good for all. 

To dissent against this faith-based secular religion is to be consigned to Purgatory and Hell by the Upholders of the Faith.  When the upholders of such a system see a dissenting opposition that is so threatening it must be condemned, it is probably worth asking, “So what’s the threat?”  This is what makes a study of the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and other dissenters from the secular faith so fascinating.  Before “Marxism” was codified into a tool of repression by state capitalists, (Soviet Union, China – regimes that used Marxist rhetoric to repress their own people), it was and still can be a useful critique of the secular religion of capitalism and very revealing in its analysis.  Some have helped bring this nineteenth-century dissent up to date on the basis of a critical scientific analysis of the evolution of the capitalist system, (Paul Sweezy, Howard Parsons, David Harvey, John Bellamy Foster, et al.).

The most valuable critique is the questioning of the “enlightened self-interest as public good” assumption.  This assumption is based on the false premise that humans are separate from their environment; that somehow, we are “above” the normal consequences of action in the field of the life-death continuum of Planet Earth.  A brief perusal of the consequences of this false premise should be sobering to any thinking person.  The pursuit of resources and markets to feed a system that MUST grow to survive has made the planet and all of its inhabitants commodities.  In capitalist mythology, EVERYTHING has a monetary value, including and perhaps especially, people.  The fact that humans are dependent on a healthy environment is not a central consideration – capitalists who acquire financial independence can BUY a healthy environment as one of their private acquisitions, it is assumed.  Everyone else must either enter into the field of competition and buy their own “healthy environment,” or be consigned to a life that Thomas Hobbes called “nasty, brutish, and short” – a self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one.

Critics and dissenters such as those mentioned above interrupt this mythic narrative and point out that environmental health, sustainability, and diversity are essential for both human and non-human health.  “Self-fulfillment,” and protection of a “commonwealth” are priorities for these dissenters, which is a thing different from the way Smith’s “enlightened self-interest” has become a societal myth.  The original meaning of the Greek word “oeconomy” had more to do with a well-kept house – be it an individual household, a neighborhood, a city, or an entire region – than it does with private acquisition.  Ultimately, our “house” is the planet – there is NO getting around this fact.  For some time now we have had pictures of Planet Earth taken from space.  The empirical evidence is clear: we are a very small household in a vast sea of time and space.  We MUST cooperate or perish.  As it now stands, our Head of the Household – Capitalism (some would prefer the word “fascism”) – is an alcoholic who runs rampant over all who have something he wants.  The epitome of “self-will run riot,” he ravages entire countries in his search for another “drink” (resources and markets) and will stop at nothing, including self-destruction, to continue his blind, staggering rampage across the face of the earth. 

Once “Thou Shalt” – the dragon telling us that this kind of behavior is the seat of wisdom – is slain, our focus can then move to a more properly “sober” analysis of our situation, allowing long-term, solution-oriented thinking to become part of our daily existence.  Pursuit of personal fulfillment for each individual in a healthy environment – as opposed to strictly material acquisition – can become a central goal of our household economy on Planet Earth.  Happy, fulfilled people do not plunder, rape, maim, and kill others for resources and markets.  The earth is a place of abundance, not scarcity.  People CAN cooperate and live in peace.  But we need to share a commitment to “reality” – the real-life playing out of our interaction with the resources of our household – things that we all need like clean air and water, a healthy diet, expressing our creative powers, loving and being loved, being “part of” something greater than ourselves (Planet Earth comes to mind).  Becoming what we were born to be, a "wheel rolling out of its own center," as the eyes and ears of Planet Earth, is our proper objective.  If the pursuit of individual wealth impoverishes others and the planet as a whole – which empirical evidence indicates -- consigning innocent bystanders to a life “nasty, brutish, and short,” it represents unwarranted and misplaced power.  It is destructive; indeed, it is cancerous.  It is like living with a drunk who is drowning in delusion.  It is time to intervene.

©Figment Zenguitar (AKA Douglas S. Harvey), 12/31/11