tonality of alienation
we open with this quote by Michael T. Joyce:
print stays itself, hypertext replaces itself. hypertext is as apt to evolve before it forms, as apt to dissolve before it finishes.
in the spirit of hypertext, we can link what we write however we wish to, so all we need to do is just record it with words here, online. so we continue, or begin, however the fuck want: the territory which we map, all roads lead to the undoing of Babylon.
take, for example, the finale of season 5 of Rick and Morty.
at some point, the viewer’s attention is directed to a mutated-Morty trying to escape from a couple police-Morty.
the mutated-Morty finds himself in a difficult position, trapped, shouting back at the police-Morty and onlookers: “there’s no escape, no escape!”
a police-Morty replies in a monotone voice, guns drawn, “you are seriously hurting the Citadel experience.”
the mutated Morty goes on, “listen to me!”
”drop the gun!” the police-Morty shout.
“Death is coming for us all! Citadel is a weapon of mass destruc—” and is shot in the head mid sentence.
Rick C-137 suggests they leave immediately lest the situation becomes political, but as he finishes saying this, a limousine arrives and they are to dinner with the President of the Citadel: president-Morty (who turns out is evil-Morty).
and what does evil-Morty want? C-137’s memory from when he created something called “the central finite curve.”
evil-Morty locks Morty and C-137 to their seat, and as Morty apologizes to C-137 for getting them in this situation (since he insisted they go have dinner with president-Morty), evil-Morty says to him:
you sell-out Morties kill me. i hate you more than the Ricks you worship if there was any point. but you can’t help it, you were bred for it.
like us Blooms and Young-Girls: bred for this nausea, this invisible violence.
evil-Morty goes on:
he’s an infinite smear of one shitty old man, he’s attached to us infinitely through our weakness and our forgiveness. this is why we are with him, this is why we are alive,
as Morty is shown Morties being made in a laboratory, in a spectacle of a laboratory, totally objectified, from imposing (made from scratch) to disposing (ran through an industrial size Morty-composter) his existence.
Rick C-137 frees himself from the seat and tries to escape with Morty. he injects himself with a serum to summon a creature that increases in size as it is hit, absorbing damage and strengthening itself as it does so (”it’s a metaphor for capitalism, Morty, what do you think?” says C-137), overclocking C-137’s nanosuit, giving him extraordinary strength.
in the final moment, evil-Morty lets them go.
C-137 looks back one last time and shoots at evil-Morty, only to hit his force field.
“pfft, did you think my force field would be down the second time?” says evil-Morty.
C-137 shouts before taking off with Morty, “i was expressing disapproval of your dialogue!”
evil-Morty closes the scene by saying,
disapprove all you want.
tonight, the quality of dialogue stops mattering.
tonight, i do that thing i wanna do.
at last, it is finally revealed that the whole show took place within a multiverse that was sectioned off from the rest of The Multiverse.
in this multiverse exists a variant of Morty-existence which was eternally caught up in the self-absorbed activities of Rick C-137, who split himself from a natural cosmic Infinity and with this central finite curve, created an infinity for himself, a multiverse in which there were infinite versions where he was the most intelligent person in each universe. that is, Rick C-137 created a Rick-multiverse of most-intelligent-Ricks in which each Rick hold specific relations and non-relations with each other, other Morties, and the viewer.
Rick is, of course, none other than anthropomorphic Capital.
Rick as Capital, Rick the Capital, the great scientist-engineer with access to all the resources, capable of all sorts of useful or harmful technologies; Capital Rick, the all-powerful creator-investor-entrepreneur-dictator who holds the power to cure all diseases and solve all problems arising from social inequality and asymmetric resource allocation — but doesn’t because why bother? so much work, so much admission of need, so fuck it all.
Morty, on the other hand, is a gig worker for Rick, a proletarian caught up in the tangle of lies and spectacle of Rick, of Capital, trapped within all possible universes created by Capital the Rick.
there, within all these worlds, is the proletarian, Morty-become-sidekick, Morty-become-object, Morty-become-anything-but-himself, who is made to believe he is inferior to Rick, made to believe that these coexisting universes are all the universes that could possibly exist:
it’s not that great, but it’s the best we got,
and
it’s the worst system except for all the others
become aphorisms of the already-dead.
this couldn’t be further from the truth, of course.
it is the best system that works in favor of the historical position a capitalist finds themselves in, that Ricks find themselves in.
thus capitalism is the “worst system” (for the worker/Morty) “except for all the others” (which are the worst for them as exactly who they became under conditions which aim to reproduce precisely them, a capitalist, a Rick).
at the end of the episode, another exchange between Morty and evil-Morty happens. evil-Morty explains to Morty,
the central finite curve is a wall around the infinity that separates all the infinite universes from all the infinite universes where he’s the smartest man in the universe. every version of us has spent every version of all of our lives in one infinite crib built around an infinite fucking baby.
and i’m leaving it. that’s what makes me evil—being sick of him.
if you’ve ever been sick of him, you’ve been evil too.
Morty replies, “well, what are you going to do about it?”
to which evil-Morty says, “jackshit—we are leaving.”
and so he does, creating a black hole that sucks everything in the vicinity of the Citadel and powers his escape to the other side of the central finite curve.
in speaking of the worker/capitalist dyad here, we wish to remark that we understand the situation today is more complex now than the pole of capitalist/worker appears to suggest.
we recognize that this main antagonism has been refracted through various mechanisms of striation such as law and surveillance, resulting in all sorts of conflicts, physical and metaphysical, and hence in all sorts of substructures/subrelations which, when deconstructed, demonstrate the various difficulties with dissolving the main structure from which all others are created, the worker/capitalist dyad: from it arise relationships between user/interface, dividual/socius, agent/network, patient/doctor, consumer/supplier, and so on.
the spectrum created by the capitalist/worker pole is not static, but is itself influenced by an internal dynamism: there are forces acting along this pole which pulls a subject toward one side or the other.
this is an asymmetric force: a random subject of the unpropertied-class is more strongly pulled toward being-worker than becoming-capitalist. even in their pursuit of becoming-capitalist, during their existence they’ll remain in a state of becoming, while remaining being-worker.
these forces are only general labels that represent various mechanisms.
for example, the weak-force of capitalization that pulls a subject toward becoming-capitalist include all the activities, thoughts, and changes in behavior associated with becoming financially literate and using the system for self-actualization.
if one persists, it may be possible that one will begin to regard this type of action on the planet, e.g. skipping out on certain immediate personal pleasures to invest surplus capital instead, as positive.
this change in behavior, in addition to possibly changing the financial stability of a person, is also literally changing the socio-biology of the subject in question — there are very obvious, direct results from such restrictions or measures of self-discipline such as diet and social circles.
yet, paradoxically, this isn’t a self-imposition out of free will, but rather marks complete submission to the capitalist system, obeying Daddy Capital at last.
thus instead of self-discipline (bottom-up) this is actually systemic-discipline (top-down).
this “positive change” is actually, from the perspective of Communism (i.e. the real movement toward abolition of the present state of Things), a negative.
on this parenthetical remark, we recall Marx in The German Ideology:
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
this is because what one learns to recognize under the influence of Capital as positive, is nothing but the subjectification of a systemic order that is in actuality extremely violent.
what is the obscene off-scene supplementing, indeed sustaining, the world of Capital in its metropolises?
the invisible labor of women as well as the overexploited labor of the unpropertied, the immigrant, and the incarcerated; and the invisible labor of the Third World proletarians.
think about your capital-given right to participate in the stock market and invest in a stock in the greatest country in the world (simplifying and skipping steps here, but the intent is to just sketch an image):
you buy Apple stock;
this Apple stock represents a quantum of ownership of the company so as shareholder you, as an investor, want this company to perform well in the stock market;
this company produces specific commodities that require specific raw materials so they need access to land/markets which offer these raw materials or their byproducts;
through direct (military occupation) or indirect (funding paramilitaries and assisting coups, or IMF contracts) confrontations between the U.S government and the sovereignty of the people in these regions, they obtain access to these raw materials or byproducts;
there might be uprisings in these regions, which are violently repressed either by funding provided by U.S. government via c!a or by Apple executives through personal “negotiations” however shady or “legal,” in order to sustain the outflow of the raw material in question;
so you might support politicians that are lobbied by Apple or even consume Apple products to participate in its valorization — hence participating in the violence that sustains this whole operation;
and of course, the stock market is itself maintained through a network of relations directly and indirectly with violence.
one might naively object here “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” which we grant, but to which we add “, but there can be intelligent, mindful consumption.”
we “vote” (or maintain, replicate, participate) with our money with every act of consumption within the capitalist system, with every purchase we make, so yes there is no ethical operation within it.
and so we dream—
what doesn’t have to necessarily happen, though of course it does, is that we don’t have to keep on participating in it with this intensity — but it’s like everyone is just acting on every impulse (a careful study of cybernetics proper offer sober explanations).
however, while participating in this nonethical consumption, we could very well plan with our communities what we absolutely need to survive and divest ourselves from it.
ask each other to become mindful of consumption habits: what do we buy? what do we consume? and from that list, determine what we can do to provide those things for ourselves.
at first, we would plan farms and gardens with those who own land, organizing who or where tomato, corn, beans, carrots, arugula, ashwagandha etc is grown; where would we raise cattle, chicken, and so on (these would be small scale and ethical operations).
we would ask ourselves, what kind of services do we need? we would learn that it’s most of the infrastructure which exists provided by Empire like water and electricity.
but of course, this is state owned so it could be cut off.
so how do we deal with this? many ways, for instance, we could organize with workers in these sectors to secure ownership of the system and plan its defense from state agents/sabotage; or build anew alongside with the help of workers from these sectors; or whatever else we could come up with.
as we are planning this, we would rethink our relationship to the planet and recognize the harm to caving in to every desire and consuming every new gadget or every new product — to immediately stop creating the demand for this excess.
we would, indeed we should, be buying, or gathering by whatever means, resources to build this new world of relations, this new way of living.
as different parts of the system come online, we would start detaching from the capitalist machine as there would be less money flowing away from a community — for those aware, this money would operate like a (community-owned) cryptocurrency, it would literally function like that as it already does in the crypto space, in that it would be used within a specific community or communities.
in fact, blockchain would offer the necessary network protocol to record such exchanges to happen in a way that is decentralized, without a mediating entity such as a bank or person.
in the space of decentralized finance — defi — there already exists lending and borrowing mechanisms that operate entirely without oversight by a human or centralized banking entity, it’s all peer-to-peer, with transactions saved in a public ledger that is distributed and accessible to all the participants in the network so it cannot be manipulated.
do not misinterpret us, we are not saying to use defi as it exists to solve our problems, just that the protocol could be used for a different way than intended or under different conditions.
as other communities are simultaneously organized, we form connections with each other and coordinate trading relations for community-sustenance.
we are not suggesting all this as the solution, just offering a way of thinking about this, and to remind the reader that together we can escape.
we’re walking in the dark here and describing this darkness as we write all this: there are other ways of doing things, there really is, we can imagine it, we can mani-fest it with many participating in this fest, joining in this Carnival of Creation.
listen — the only reason we need to be logging, for instance, and doing it in the scale that it happens, is because there is constant production of excess — there is a constant demand for furniture or for rims of paper by marketing agencies and corporate “offices,” literal hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper used every single day, which essentially contain nothing since it could all be rendered obsolete and meaningless; supplied almost as if only to create and maintain filing jobs, shredding companies, junk mail, and busy work for people, indeed a demand that exists as if just to maintain a series of elements in this machine connected to logs, from source to final product, distribution and use (consumption).
think about it a little longer with us: the junk mail appendage, connected to this tree log machine, a machine which is essentially a series of processes that start with ownership of land with actual trees and includes logging process, distribution of logs, making tools used for logging and distributing it, and facilities transforming logs into this or that commodity — itself influences culture.
for one example, different communities ritualize mail sorting: some quickly go through it, others have important correspondence to they take their time, perhaps there is coffee or breakfast with this activity, or it’s done at the end of the night, but there is always junk mail to be thrown out.
this applies (more or less) to every industrial-scale operation happening RIGHT NOW, to EVERY commodity that exists.
for instance, all those chickens for all that quantity of eggs for all those restaurants or supermarkets — instead of just accepting this excess, why not envision and create a culture of eating at home and within communities, opening spaces for people who love to express themselves through cooking to explore their talents and serve the community, not for money but for recognition, for love of craft, for love of creation?
we invite you to sit down and meditate on the existence of money, the need for it — nevermind that it existed for a long time, think about why it does, how it moves, what it maintains.
if a farmer owns their land and have a surplus of peaches, more than they could possibly do with, why is there a need to sell their peaches? what is the point of using money as a means of exchange? why not offer to someone to bake pies and make jam for themselves and the people who surround them, for all to enjoy?
this is entirely possible outside capitalism, and unfortunately for the eristic, pessimistic, unimaginative, already-dead reader, we are grounded in the truth that your inability to see this doesn’t influence our imagining of this outside.
we can set up technological zones if need be, our “modernity” doesn’t have to be all encompassing (the type of “modernity” as is projected through these technological advances), it doesn’t have to be omnipresent. we can have zones for research, for experimentation, for play — without pulling the whole planet and all its worlds into its machinisms.
we can have beautifully designed zones, intelligently organized, blending the organic with the synthetic, a solarpunk infrastructure — which would require little human input to maintain itself, from cleaning to recycling. whatever the case, it wouldn’t be destructive because we would find ways to not make it so since we would own our time, our existence, our labor power — because our input would matter.
anyway, we return to the matter at hand: the forces that pull a person this or that direction i.e. toward being-worker or becoming-capitalist.
what is equally violent (perhaps more so) to the weak-force that pulls a subject toward becoming-capitalist is the opposing, strong-force of alienation which pulls a subject toward being-worker.
through this force, the subject-made-dividual is further fragmented through four fissures created by the subject’s alienation from a true social existence. there is alienation from:
Self;
Other;
Labor;
Nature.
before we proceed, we find it important to emphasize that alienation is not just a feeling one experiences.
it is felt, yes, but it is felt because of a measurable relation: both the objective and the subjective are two distinct forms of the same conditions i.e. of a material history.
this feeling may be called disenchantment, the encounter with the Lack, the realism of capitalism, nausea. here we use the term alienation:
you are alienated from Nature because under capitalism, it attains no value other than as a dead resource from which to extract capital: this is why it is said, a forest has no value until it has been destroyed. Marx says that human nature (world) is transforming whereas the natural world (planet) is transformed (as the outside planet is shaped, the inside world is shaped: think about how this pandemic changed behavior), and that the commodification function of capitalism alienates us from our interdependent relationship with the planet.
you are alienated from the Labor of what you do or make because you don’t have ownership over what’s produced. whatever it is you make or do, someone else owns your day and your work is sold under someone else’s logo or brand.
you are alienated from the Other, from the socius, because others are seen as competition (for scarce resources, wages, attention) rather than collaborators; or they are your employer who you likely resent or fear to some degree because they have punitive power over your life. regardless, you can’t trust anyone with whom you have a market relationship since they’re not a community with which you can undertake major projects.
finally, you are alienated from Self because instead of seeing yourself as a creative, world-changing member of the human species, you’re merely a profit machine among other machines, a replaceable appendage of a process in which you have no real agency or input.
you may have work friends, fun at work, work on rewarding projects, benefits that make work-life tolerable, whatever—it remains that 85% of workers, according to Gallop, are unhappy at work because the work is meaningless, it has no real value other than to make another person wealthier; and it remains that the greedy 1% have more wealth than 60% of the “middle class” combined, a position which is really a myth in the Empire, for there is no middle class, only an imperialist labor aristocracy.
that there will be a reaction to this last point, only reinforces our understanding of the white settler.
we maintain that any organizing should emphasize the international connection between workers here and workers elsewhere, especially to highlight to the worker here, their parasitic relationship in relation to the Third World.
quite literally, a significant majority of infrastructure (we only write it like this to not be totalizing, but for all intents and purposes, we could write “all infrastructure”) that exists TODAY was built after the genocide of Native American; built with the slave labor of Africans, Native Americans, and every other colonized nation; and maintained by the immigrant, prison, and settler labor force.
do not emote, just recognize this fact.
we are here to change all this by destroying all this — not to change it by bettering conditions here through this parasitic relationship between the imperial labor aristocracy and the Third World proletariat, like securing higher wages or UBI pegged to this existing capital machine.
we aren’t here to demand that because there is no one to demand from, there is no one person, no one entity which could grant that. there’s nothing to demand.
we are not talking to them anymore, we are talking to each other, we are orienting each other to the greater truth that exists beyond, to the Sun.
we can have academic spaces outside capitalism, we can have state-of-the-art art and technology spaces outside capitalism dedicated to research, truly we can.
if we refuse this state of affairs and collectively think about these matters, truly with each other, WE CAN find solutions, solutions which could rebuild the Commons as we mitigate the damage of environmental collapse.
we think, taking from Georges Sorel, that this could be helped by a myth greater than all the myths that exist, indeed one that combines all these myths like religion and esoteric beliefs, and make use of them by combining us all.
it would tell the myth of an extended civil war happening on the physical and metaphysical dimensions, with moments of soft and hard subversions, each of us acting as infiltrators and spies and technicians and propagandists and militants and guerrilla farmers, as well as the witches and wizards and catboys and catgirls and furries and schizos and skinheads and punks and starseeds and goths and skaters and bikers and climbers and sex workers and metal workers and plumbers and DJs and homeless and painters and musicians and surfers and wooks and burners and hackers and juggalos and juggalettes — ALL the physical and metaphysical communities, together building this network of relations parallel to the one that exists as best we can without suspicion, as we plan our escape.
it would be a myth which would capture this capitalist realism tonality of our times, reminding each other of the futures and ways-of-life we have been robbed of by the maintenance of this antiquated system, but that we can still shape a better present — to incentivize, to intensify our acting.
keeping in mind, of course, the seriousness and importance of decisively committing to this as we approach more violent environmental bifurcations.
perhaps, it is too late for any of this.
but perhaps not: we are bored and there is nothing happening.
as early as 1844, Marx predicted that this removal of enjoyment would become a significant social problem under capitalist employment. the number one indicator of enjoying your work is the self-reported quality of meaningfulness — not pay, but the feeling that you are contributing to something valuable to yourself and others.
hence, a lack of dignity in work i.e. being alienated, leads to unhappiness.
so what is it about capitalism that produces this alienating property?
it basically comes down to one exchange: workers are making something (cheeseburgers, movies, shoes, whatever) and are getting paid hourly or they’re salaried, it doesn’t matter. neither does it matter how much you get paid, whether it is the U.S. federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour or whether it is $70/hour.
in each case, the worker receives some money (“a quantum of means of subsistence which is absolutely required to keep the laborer in bare existence as laborer”) in exchange for work, but in each case, they produce more profit than they get paid — and all the surplus goes to those who are not doing any work, since they’re exploiting labor.
to be sure, exploitation doesn’t mean you’re being harmed or someone is being mean to you: it literally and only means that someone who is not working is skimming off the top of your labor, even after paying for maintenance and expenses and so on.
if you’re getting paid $75/hour, you probably don’t care much that you are getting exploited. after all, relative to minimum wage, you’re popping: you can afford a jet ski for the weekend, or rent a boat, or travel to Vegas or to Miami or to anywhere in the world during your 2-week yearly vacation, or a quick vacation getaway, whatever.
but what doesn’t change is the fact that you have no ownership over your labor nor is there any incentive for you to work toward common goals with other people.
it’s worth mentioning that the capitalist isn’t perfectly content either (i mean, look at Rick). they’re also discontent for different reasons, but mostly because they’re disconnected from the majority of humanity.
alienated wage labor leads to predatory and greedy human behavior because we all end up seeing each other as rivals and seeing ourselves as an undignified instrument of labor — and since leisure becomes consumption, we don’t have the time to be concerned about, say, environmental degradation, because we don’t make the time, because we are forced to choose complacency in the face of such a great challenge.
at this point, it is worth clarifying some points.
many readers and nonreaders of Marx misinterpret his criticism of capital as “naively wanting the world to be more fair.”
Marx’s critique very simply reduces to this: the point isn’t to overthrow the capitalist system because it is unfair (though it is).
as many centrists and right-wingers will maintain, the world has never been fair.
this is true.
the point is to overthrow the capitalist system so that we can own our own life, so that you can own your own time and energy; and of course, because it slows down the march of our species toward the unknown, it slows down our advance — to be clear, this advance doesn’t necessarily mean an environmentally destructive technological development.
relative to feudalist mode of production, capitalism was the most revolutionary force. that’s why there was a bourgeois revolution, because at that point in history they were the most revolutionary class.
now that once-most-revolutionary system only destroys the planet to produce excess to make a few wealthy and fewer still, wealthier. it’s no longer revolutionary and neither is the class who owns the production process.
what is revolutionary now, especially in the face of the ecological challenges that have emerged as a result of capitalism, is organizing ourselves in accordance with what factually benefits a species: cooperation, not competition.
the competition might have been good or was historically necessary to get us to this moment, we at most concede that, but now it’s time to do things differently.
again, this advance doesn’t have to include the civilizational destruction we associate with Empire, such as the disgusting way Empire treats the Earth so disdainfully.
as for alienation, in the Grundrisse Marx writes:
from the standpoint of capital and wage labor, the creation of the objective body of activity happens in antithesis to the immediate labor capacity — that this process of objectification in fact appears as a process of dispossession from the standpoint of labor […] to that extent, this twisting and inversion is a real phenomena, not a merely supposed one existing merely in the imagination of the workers and the capitalists.
in other words, this alienation, being a real phenomenon is not just a feeling — it is measurable: you are purposeless in work and purposeless in leisure because your work isn’t yours and because, when you only see yourself in terms of that work, leisure then becomes only consumption: you are expected not to ever change anything either at work or in leisure.
for this to be agreeable, one has to accept the premise that your body is yours; therefore your labor (time/energy) is yours — this labor is the energy of your mindbody’s activity on the planet.
through this materialist perspective, selling your labor, your effect on the planet, doesn’t just mean that it’s no longer your effect: your painting is always yours even if someone else bought it; if someone buys your song, it remains yours (bracketing the whole nonsense of intellectual property right for the moment). and, even if you sell your labor to a fast food chain or an @mazon warehouse, it’s still your labor — that it doesn’t seem that way is precisely that you’ve been alienated from it.
if you make a mark on a tree, it is objectively true that you made that mark — it can’t be transferred (non-fungible token people: shut the fuck up, you know nothing) because even if you sign a paper or contract saying that someone else made that mark, it remains you spend time/energy to do it.
for some reason (“for some reason”), everyone can understand this in terms of intellectual property, but when it comes to a burger or a shoe or sweater, suddenly we forget about this basic relationship between labor and individual when someone slaps a logo on it. in a non-alienating system of exchange, your imprint on the planet would be taken into account.
right now, think about what you are wearing, not the brand but the labor that is in it: probably the labor of a Bangladeshi or Thai or Mexican person working in shitty conditions — even if you “made” aka designed a shirt, you didn’t pick the cotton, you didn’t wash it, you didn’t treat it, transform into the fabric and so on. you painted it and that’s your mark, yes, but the shirt isn’t your doing, it’s a collective doing.
we don’t think about this because we see things in terms of the brand image and forget about the real human labor behind it.
indeed, this is the point of the brand image: to obfuscate the human labor invested in it.
if we saw our stuff as human labor, perhaps we would start understanding the profound relations we have with others, all which simplify to this: we are all interconnected — even, obviously, connected with workers across the ocean.
we must begin seeing produced commodities as records of human activity though brands alienate that human vision — so we must rehumanize the commodity.
perhaps the most frustrating part about this is that alienated labor is worse for everyone but capital. we have,
worse products: if you are alienated and paid minimum wage, there is no incentive for you to improve production (process or product).
”doing a good job” reduces to “not getting fired,” a negative incentive. humans are happier when we are rewarded for doing our best work.
if you are cooking food for a date, you will do your best (even if it doesn’t come out good), you’ll even ask if it’s good (to later improve) because you have ownership of that object as a representation of you.
conversely, if you’re a line cook in the back of a hot kitchen, heating up something you had no input in creating, with someone else’s logo on it, of course you won’t do your best. you won’t make any suggestions to improve it, and your 8-hours at work is completely wasted, your day sucks, and you’re just waiting for it to end.
not only are you robbed of your energy, but the consumer too is robbed of your creativity. the only person or entity that benefits from this, is the capitalist: the brand or the shareholder.
worse relationships: to person buying the burger, buying a shoe, or whatever the case, you are just a cog in a machine: burger-flipping machine, shoe-stitching machine, so there is space for mistreatment and inhuman subjugation.
as a wage earner, there is no incentive to regard the whole humanity as one organism, a species seeking a better life for the species.
the scope of your life as a wager earner is your hourly wage
worse self-image: being-as-a-cog, seeing yourself as an appendage of a machine who’s easily replaceable (no matter how much your boss/manager/corporate says the team is “like family”) doesn’t just affect your view of yourself and your boss and coworkers and the customers (i.e. other people) because for 8-hours a day you are not a human, you are just an output machine from which products are expected and from which no human contact is really expected.
the only time you own your activity is in leisure, though under these conditions leisure is but consumption instead of creation.
in the words of young Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts:
as a result, therefore, the worker only feels themself freely active in their animal functions — eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in their dwelling and in dressing-up, etc; and in their human functions [creative labor], they no longer feel themselves to be anything but an animal.
what is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.
with wage, life is not a means to life — it is just a means to satisfy more means. so as long as that’s the scope of action, there is no benefit to doing any more than that, to putting more effort in.
but imagine if you saw all your time as yours, what would you do? what would your day be like? would you act like an animal all day, consuming, lazying around?
or — would you look for projects to put your hands on, would you seek activity with others? more often or less often? would you be stressed or anxious, more or less? perhaps you’ve be inclined to clean this or that, or improve on communal infrastructure, or perform for a crowd, or paint a mural on a building, whatever.
this is very humanist project yes, but we don’t limit ourselves to it. we are just imagining this here right now, to provide a different image that’s all, to inject a schemata into the unconscious of the reader.
so what is required for this humanist vision to work?
if we are rid of alienation, everyone sees their labor as their own.
but then, who’s going to do the unpleasant labor?
here’s a proposed answer: who in your house clean toilets and does the unpleasant work? why do they do it? there’s no profit incentive, after all!
it’s love and volunteer work: you are a respected member of your family and you want to make them happy.
in societies that are not alienated, the unpleasant jobs might be handled just like they are handled in the household.
when time is not money and where everyone sees themselves as a member of the community, of the species — then doing selfless labor would be a matter of respect and reward.
again invoking young Marx in his 1844 Manuscripts,
man is a species-being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species (his own as well as those of other things) as his object, but also because he treats himself as the actual, living species.
no one would want to clean toilets for 10 hours a day.
however, it’s perfectly reasonable to get 10 people or 20 people to clean toilets for 1 hour or 30 minutes a day — if they were respected for it and could spend the rest of their time doing something more enjoyable with their time that they own.
this might present issues with scalability, for instance, when someone causes a problem — if there is a disciplinary apparatus in place, then you are now reintroducing alienation with the threat of violence.
the question of authority will be explored later, but we mention in passing that there are negative and positive expressions of authority.
we must overcome this gap between alienation from self and from others, and move toward a fully fledged sense of species-being — and that is where this becomes something personal or communal goal, and why a myth could be useful.
every organizing should start off by making international relations clear precisely because consumption is the record of someone else’s labor— you wear it, you sleep in it, it’s in your pocket; and that someone else, that member of the species, their labor was exploited by a capitalist.
indeed, Marx in the Grundrisse sees individualism as a condition to wake up from:
with the positing of the activity of individuals as immediately general or social activity, the objective moments of production are stripped of this form of alienation; they are thereby posited as property, as the organic social body within which the individuals reproduce themselves not as individuals, but as social individuals.
it’s no longer a matter of “who am i really?” but a matter of really understanding our situation here, now and the use of our being-here that we could possibly make — to start from here toward a silent coordination of a truly elegant sabotage.
this is the beautiful myth we can only discover if we join the Carnival.
there, the quality of dialogue stops mattering.
remember this truth: the other is the economy in us.
we thank you for your attention, dear reader.
NOW
BREAKING WITH THE WORLD,
FIRST OF ALL INWARDLY,
WITHOUT ANYONE NOTICING
BREAK RANKS
NOW
“happy are they who in their disgust for empty, satisfied faces decides to cover themselves with a mask: they will be the first to rediscover the raging drunkenness of all that dances to its death over the waterfall of time.”