Walk the Earth as Humans

Building upon the thinking in my previous post, motivation to profit has started to seem like the crutch on which capitalism leans. In "The Age of Revolution" Hobsbawm talks about how employers during the early stages of the transition to capitalism would complain about the "laziness" of their employees. These people would work enough to make ends meet, and then stop. They were not used to the consistent work of industry, where one needs to be on time and to stay the whole time. Workers were more used to the farm and rural mentality of working whenever, and making your own hours. The combination of lack of motivation to work extra and to stay working annoyed the employers... because it cut their efficiency and profits. And this didn't happen just in urban centers of proto-capitalist economies, it happened in colonies and the outskirts of "civilization" too. It is a stereotype in my mind that British colonial officials would always complain about the laziness of the indigenous people. Anthropology pointed out to me that our civilization stereotypes indigenous societies as lazy and unproductive too.

Once the capitalist motivation of profit took hold in people with authority and power, they sought to use other people as tools to profit, and when these people stubbornly resisted by not conforming to capitalist ideals of a worker. But, as people had become tools to profit in the eyes of business owners and employers, they justified terrible repressions. Material starvation was one tecnique that was used to get more work out of their workers. They cut wages, to force them to work longer, and used the law. When the workers fought back by forming unions, these were attacked by the methods of coercion at the disposal of the powerful. This began the protracted war over labor rights which continues to this day. Another method to motivate people was to place immense obligations on their shoulders, such as military service and debt.

But the most effective method they used was cultural re-education. The early capitalists wanted everyone to think like they did, that profit is what they should seek and self-interest is the primary motivator. After three centuries of capitalistic re-education of society and culture shifting, we can see the success of this approach. Our entire civilization is now based on money as a motivator. It is true, there has been significant resistence to this belief, which is why it is not too surprising how many people still live in poverty. Fear of making ends meet, of feeding your family and keeping a roof over their heads is an immensely powerful motivator, and it ensures that people continue to buy into the capitalism by selling their labor and conforming to the rules.

Martin Luther King said something like "Humanity has learned to swim in the sea like a fish and fly in the sky like a bird, but we still can't walk the earth like a man." I think to put it more correctly, we forgot how to walk like a person. This analogy is very astute and gets to the heart of the problem. Humans were not meant to live this way, it is physcially and mentally destructive. Placing profit over people corrupts people's souls, and is mentally oppressive to those who think that way. Walking the earth, as MLK implies, would require us to treat people as an end in themselves instead of a tool. Something that I think most lefties dont realize is that capitalism is an oppression on the affleuent and power as well as on the down-trodden and working class. Where the majority of people suffer from material poverty, the rich suffer from a spiritual poverty that I find to be much more oppressive. And by spiritual I don't mean faith in God, or religion, I mean how much fulfillment one gets out of life; how people treat each other and the ramifications that has on their minds; lack of a deeper meaning than materialism; and suffering from a severe disconnection with other people.

Spiritual poverty is generated because people are not meant to live this way. Humans are social creatures and we have certain dispositions toward each other that capitalism disrupts. Generosity, connection, reciprocacy, and the social glue that holds a society together are all hard-wired into our brains, and when capitalism disrupts them it lays a yoke upon the mind of a person. This burden is so heavy it causes us to flee to transient pleasures to dull the pain and try to escape.

In Kentucky, people took care of each other. It is true that poverty took its toll with alcoholism, drugs, alienation and mental illness. But poverty also brings people together, it connects them and can build strong social ties. Lack of material comfort does not seem too harsh if one's family and friends are there, protecting each other. The affluent world I gained a view of at Brown was much worse, in my opinion. In the words of the Union song "Bread and Roses" by Bobbie McGee, "Hearts starve as well as bodies." And I see starvation of the heart to be a common affliction among the rich.

The capitalist motivation meme seems to have taken on a life of its own. It spurrs us into spending our collective time and energy on things that are not important, into things and not into people. Last time I was flying I had a window seat, and as I looked down, I noticed that I could always see something made by people. We have built so much, and yet we don't realize that it is more important to put effort into people. This does give me hope though. If we could push ourselves to do all this, build this entire world in a couple centuries, then we could push ourselves to do anything. Human culture is surprisingly flexible and powerful, we have drifted so far from our nature, and its impact is also quite impressive.

Bread and Roses

I have been listening to some classic labor songs lately, and they are so awesome. One of my favorite lines is from the song "Joe Hill." It goes like this: "Takes more than guns to kill a man, says Joe 'I didn't die'... says Joe 'what they can never kill went on to organize'"
This is such a powerful message, that when people stand up for something and die in its defense, that their spirit lives on in others. They inspire people with their sacrifice and their selflessness. Joe Hill was a Swedish-American labor organizer and a Wobbley (term for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World aka the IWW) in the early 1910s. He traveled around the country organizing people to fight for their rights, and penned songs, poems and speeches. He coined the term "pie in the sky" referencing religious figure's claims of rewards after death but apparent apathy toward the living conditions of the average person. His execution was a sham of justice. He had recieved a gun wound (he said it was over a woman) the same night that two people were murdered. During the crime, one of the two murders was wounded, and of the five people with gun shot wounds who went to doctors in the area that night it would be the labor organizer who was tried, convicted, and executed. No motive could be determined for why Hill would have committed the crime, and many of the facts just didn't fit. But he was still convicted. The trial was very controversial and the media made a big deal about it. Hill gained a bit of fame from it, and his loss has been morned in the labor movement since he was murdered by the government.

Another song which tugs at my heart strings is "Aragon Mill" by Peggy Seeger. It describes the economic desolation caused by the closing of the mill in a small rural town. The mill was the main employer, and once it pulled out, it left a void of unemployment. It reminds me alot of my hometown, with its 23% poverty rate, and the darkness that a lack of jobs creates in a community. This lyric always gets me, sometimes I tear up from it: "Oh, I'm too poor to move, and I'm too young to die, and their's no where to go for my family and I, cause the mill has shut down, its the only life I know, tell me where can I go, tell me where can I?" There is such pain in her voice in that lyric. The level of helplessness that she is expressing is really staggering. Maybe if I had not seen this type of economic situation with my own eyes as I was growing up, I wouldn't be as sympathetic. But this song plucks my heart strings like few others.

Then there is "Bread and Roses." People need more than just subsistence. Earning a wage just for survival is not the way people were designed to live. My favorite lyric in this is "hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses." People need beauty, fun, and love in their lives or they will starve as assuridly as if they did not get their daily bread. I have seen many people whose hearts are starved. Interestingly, most of these people are not in economic need, they are quote well off. But they have no time for the things that are truly important in life. And this leaves them starving. They try to fix this hunger with material goods. But that is like eating empty calories to fight malnutrition, it does nothing to heal the body, just fills the stomach for a short time. True and lasting happiness comes from other people and the beauty in human interactions, not from consumption.