Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches 2: Thoughts on Labor
Thoughts on Labor
This is not — obviously? — an exhaustive catalog of other people’s ideas about labor, work, and commodities. This is just a quick trip through some ideas that, when I encountered them, I thought, “Yes, that — that is how it seems to me too.” Scattered and fragmentary as it is, it’s still too long. I’m sorry about that.
We begin by asking what the two Karls, Marx and Polanyi, thought about the subject, continuing to discuss patron saint William Morris and his crew; then some poetic notions of the Sixties New Left, and the Sixties counterculture; articulate important feminist critiques, and wind up by looking at labor from the perspective of movement, and of Zen Buddhism. Eschewing simple conclusions, we do allow ourselves to wonder what it all means, and to look back over the path taken.
Marx & Polanyi
One reading of Marx’s Capital is that it’s a “Labor Theory of Value”: A theory which understands the value of a commodity as determined by the labor (what Marx called “socially necessary labor time”) which produced it and is thereby embodied in it. This is in sharp distinction to the value theory of bourgeois economics, which sees the value of a commodity as a function of supply and demand, revealed by the free working of the market. To get some perspective on this, though, it’s helpful to ask what a “commodity” is; and how humans might share the products of their labor if not as commodities. Capital is ultimately a critique of the commodity form. In Marx’s well-known, bleak, and terribly succinct formulation, through the commodity form society is reduced to “material relations between persons and social relations between things,” i.e. exactly the reverse of what we might want. So our consideration of labor immediately involves us in questions of economics: Are there ways of exchanging the fruits of our labors other than as commodities to buy and sell?
In what are called the Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844, written 20 years before the composition of Capital, Marx articulated the concept of “alienation” (entfremdung), a word he got from Feuerbach. The concept, though not the word, continue to be important in Capital (unless you believe Louis Althusser, who taught that Marx went through an “epistemological break” shortly after writing the Manuscripts. I know, who cares, right? Well, some people seem to. Personally I care enough to disagree). In the Manuscripts, the term is somewhat metaphysical; it means what it might in conversation today, to feel alien or unwell somehow. Marx also, simultaneously, uses it in the technical economic sense of, basically, theft; when something is alienated from you, it no longer belongs to you but to someone else. The “economic” part of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is an analysis of how, under Capitalism, one’s labor (which, as Polanyi observed, is nothing other than one’s very life, one’s breath and blood and movement) becomes alienated; is no longer one’s own possession. The analysis in Capital is much more complex (and it is 100% worth reading and understanding), but a basic way of understanding what Capitalism is from a Marxist standpoint is that: Under Capitalism, labor becomes a commodity, because everybody accepts or is forced to behave as if it is; when labor is a commodity, which can be sold to the highest bidder, it is no longer one’s own possession; and labor is one’s very physical being, one’s life. This is what people mean when they say they are “looking for work”; they are trying to sell their lives so they can have money to live. So, under Capitalism, the lives of a large majority of the population (those who have nothing else to sell) are for sale to a tiny minority (those who do have something else to sell, and who decide to try to increase their possessions by exploiting others).
The question of how some people ended up with nothing but themselves to sell is a long and sordid one which we can consider some other time; but an important aspect of it concerns the Commons — resources which are socially understood to be available for use by all members of the community, under complex and highly locally specific social rules — and how they are redefined as property, the property of those who become the buyers of the commodity called “labor time” under Capitalism, while all those who formerly made their subsistence through the common use of the Commons are suddenly without property and become sellers of their own labor which is all they have left. This is the second of Karl Polanyi’s three “fictitious commodities”: land, labor and money; Polanyi’s “great transformation” (the title of his best-known book) is the acceptance that any of these things can be commodities. Anyway I’ll write more about that later.
Morris, Kropotkin & Carpenter
William Morris is remembered today, when he is remembered at all, as a wallpaper designer — or even just a wallpaper brand. He deserves this fame; his designs are amazingly beautiful, psychedelically complicated traceries based on closely observed details of the natural world. But his designs emerge from his philosophy of work, which emerge from his politics, totally unknown to those on whose walls his papers hang.
Morris was a lifelong Socialist, founder of several Socialist organizations and funder of several long-running Socialist papers. We should probably insert a digression here on the word Socialist: the word has been used in recent decades to indicate some kind of hybrid of Communism and Capitalism, and these days in American politics to describe a brand of Capitalism with a strong State and enhanced social safety net. This usage seems to begin with Lenin, who used the word to name his claimed first phase of post-revolutionary society, in which the State ruled in the name of the proletariat; in Lenin’s theory, or fantasy, the second phase, called “Communism,” would occur after the State withered away of its own accord. Of course, in the “actually existing Communisms” of the Twentieth Century, the second phase never arrived. Anyway, in Marx’s and Morris’s time the two words were used interchangeably. Morris vigorously denied being an Anarchist; however, he was adamantly opposed to those Socialists who wished to seize State power in order to catalyze utopia; for Morris, Socialism and the State were incompatible. He studied Marx, and was close friends with Peter Kropotkin, and with mystical Anarchist Edward Carpenter, about whom more below.
Morris came to Socialism by an interesting route, however, and one we should examine closely. He began from a hatred of the ugliness of industrial commodities. In this, his mentor was art critic John Ruskin, whose love of beautiful handicraft led him to empathy with the newly proletarianized humans who had until recently been its producers; Ruskin famously wrote (in Modern Painters II), “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a [person] of [them]; you cannot make both.” In this, he foreshadowed Marx, who also observed that machine workers in a factory were reduced to the existence of machines themselves. Ruskin, however, was deeply conservative, deducing naïvely from these correct observations that, since the old ways are the good ways, it follows that the proto-Capitalist paternalism of Medieval England is a just social system, to which we should return.
Morris, on the other hand, was a revolutionary. He believed that a system both so ugly and so unjust as Capitalism could hardly sustain itself for long, though it might require a little bit of violence to dislodge those who benefited from the status quo. Morris believed, and lectured widely to all and sundry, that Capitalism drains the world of beauty, not only for the working class, who are exploited into penury and death and can afford neither objects of beauty nor the time to produce them for themselves, but also for the ruling class, whose homes are filled with ugly simulations of half-remembered craftspersonship, made by people who are miserable, hungry, angry and know they are being underpaid to produce ugly garbage.
This is the sense in which we should understand the Arts and Crafts Movement, of which Morris was a founder — not (or not only) as a return to the artisanal, but as a leap forward into an artisanal future, in which the joy of making and sharing replaces the commodity form, and the world is no longer polluted with cheap mass-produced crap and its byproducts. That, in any case, was the vision: that small scale artisanal production could be a form of revolutionary practice (in Marx’s phrase, more on that below) which could be a stepping stone to a classless and stateless society of free association and mutual aid.
Morris, then, was not a conservative — or maybe we should say his outlook on the past and the future was dialectical. This is summed up in his statement, which has continued to grow more profound to me the longer I have thought about it, “The past is alive in us, and will be alive in the future we are helping to create.” Put that in your pipe and take a long deep puff and see where it gets you.
Morris can be thought of as a hybrid of Ruskin and Marx, but maybe more important influences were his friends Peter Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter, both of whom loom large for me as well and whose thought is fundamental to why I want to start a rural community in the first place. If you haven’t encountered Kropotkin, to me he is absolutely fundamental, a polymath and lifelong revolutionary who did hard time in several prisons and was exiled from country after country purely for his ideas. He called himself a Communist, or an Anarchist Communist; his idea of Communism is based on mutual aid, and his book, Mutual Aid, a Factor in Evolution, which you should read, is a masterpiece which has still not been completely digested by the scientific community. In it he argues against what was already in the 1870s becoming a vulgar simplification of Darwin’s theory of evolution: that organisms are in constant competition with each other for scarce resources, and mutations that give one a competitive edge are retained. Kropotkin points out what Darwin also did, that cooperation is just as often the best way to survive and reproduce, and proceeds to present examples from every plant and animal kingdom, from human prehistory, history and even the Capitalist present. There’s much else to say about Kropotkin’s deep and diverse interventions in a variety of topics, but the notion of mutual aid is the one that’s important for our purposes at the moment.
Edward Carpenter deserves an even bigger shout-out, if that is possible, because he is almost completely forgotten, though in his era he was as well-known as Kropotkin or Morris. He is sometimes dimly remembered as author of From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta, a journal of his travels in India; from India he brought back the first pair of sandals seen on English soil, and proceeded to begin the small-scale artisanal manufacture of them on his communal farm, where he lived openly with first one and then two male lovers, and a variety of bohemian friends. It is because of Edward Carpenter that I usually say my profession is “sandal-maker.”
A gay rights and intersex advocate long, long before those words existed, Carpenter was also author of several books on sexuality, influential essays on Anarchism and utopia, a discussion of the mythic origins of Christianity, and a wonderful little book with one of the best titles ever, Civilization, its Cause and Cure; which, just as it says, argues that civilization is a disease of societies, often fatal, but which it is possible for them to recover from and go on.
Carpenter may be said to have cocreated a philosophy of labor with Morris and Kropotkin. Carpenter’s articulation is the most poetic. For Carpenter, the desire to make things of beauty with the body is as basic as any other desire, and the hobbyist — the gardener, the home cabinetworker, the amateur musician — who goes to work again, in the evenings and on weekends, after having worked for an employer — is the true artist. “And all work,” Carpenter writes (in Towards Industrial Freedom, p. 54), “of course ought to be of a similar nature — that is of the nature of an Art.” He goes on: “Artists, in the wide sense of the word, are the only natural and healthy people, and in line with the rest of creation — with the trees and the animals. They are indeed happy. But to confine the name to those who dabble in paints or letters or music is foolish. For the greatest of arts are the arts of Life; and the washer-woman who takes a real pride and interest in her work, to make it as perfect as she can independently of any so-called profit or gain which she may derive from it, is an artist in her way, and indeed more truly so in the essence of things than many a man who merely paints pot-boilers for the Spring exhibitions.
“Everyone” (Carpenter still) “ought to be an artist and to take pleasure in his or her work, feeling that the work was a true self-expression and self-liberation. There would be joy over the land.” And before we rush to ridicule the romanticism of Carpenter’s proud washer-woman, we should consider the question he poses with the next sentence:
“Is the song of a lark work, or is it play?”
There is a remarkable memoir, published in Gay Sunshine Magazine, which you can currently find here: Gay Sunshine. You should read it, it is by turns delicately poetic and loopily perverted, but it basically alleges that Walt Whitman had sex with a young Carpenter when he came to America to study with the great poet, Carpenter then as an old man took occultist and weirdo Gavin Arthur to bed, and Arthur later had sex with infamous straight dude, hero of Kerouac’s On The Road and Acid Test participant Neal Cassady, who had sex with Alan Ginsberg (an event recounted by Ginsberg in a beautiful poem which I can dig up for you sometime if you like), and so. Good times! There is hope in the world.
Anyway, yeah. Edward Carpenter, people. Don’t let his memory die out.
The New Left: Herbert Marcuse and Norman O Brown
Fast forward 30 or 40 years, to the West coast of Turtle Island in the late 50s, where the big intellectual issue was figuring out how to square Marx with Freud — sort of like how physicists for the last century have been trying to square relativity with quantum mechanics, to have a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. Actually, while Carpenter was still alive famed sexologist and major nut job Wilhelm Reich had been one of the first to try this; his early writings on sexuality and politics actually bridge the gap somewhat more successfully than Brown and Marcuse, and anticipate their theories. However, Reich was already more interested in sex than he was in economics, and his emphases don’t really help us understand labor better — If I get around to writing on matriarchy, monogamy and free love experiments in American utopian communes of the 19th Century we can circle back to Reich.
Norman O Brown, who was called “Nobby” by everyone who knew him, wrote books which are, if you haven’t read them, great crazy sprawling collages of the entire history of world literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis, full of lines like “All work is women’s work. Every commodity is as Marx says, a fetish, that is to say a non-existent penis,” — and so on and so on (from Love’s Body, a section called “Trinity.”) I frankly love it but it is also a little rich for my blood. Herbert Marcuse was the youngest member of the Frankfurt School, living in exile, like his colleagues, in America. His writings are much more linear than Brown’s, which at times makes them more staid, and at times more radical. They both ended up teaching at UC Santa Cruz, publishing a series of books which leapfrogged one another, pushing one another further and further out as the maelstrom of the Sixties accelerated; culminating in two astonishingly bleak utopian retrospectives, Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation (1972) and Brown’s “Dionysus in 1990” (collected in Apocalypse and / or Metamorphosis), which embody Gramsci’s dictum, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
Between them, they elaborated a notion of Capitalism functioning as Freud’s Reality Principle, restraining the Pleasure Principle and perverting the inherent delight of physical action into fatiguing, back-breaking alienated labor. Capitalism, for them, channels and deranges the libido, replacing the erotic drive with the drive to accumulate wealth, play with work, joy with toil. Marcuse uses (but he probably got the idea from Brown) Freud’s term “polymorphous sexuality” to name what he felt was a new Reality Principle, appropriate to a Socialist, not Capitalist society: “to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.” For both Brown and Marcuse, the force of pleasure, the drive to create, is incompatible with Capitalism; pleasure, felt completely, and the unrepressed libido are, themselves, the force of revolution. The idea is not so much that “after the revolution” work will become play, more that Capitalism turns what ought to be play into work; that human flourishing is inherently creative and pleasurable, and Capitalism denies us access to our inborn creativity and pleasure, replacing flourishing with repressive affluence, the false riches of industrial product. And further: That this repression is inherently unstable, as the repressed desire for the simple physical pleasure of existence bursts forth in revolution and ecstatic violence.
1968: Situationists and Diggers
It occurred to me recently that it took the Situationists toxic amounts of alcohol, combined with the early writings of Marx, to get to where the Diggers got with just LSD and no books at all; be that as it may, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, on opposite sides of the globe, two groups of disaffected young people formed “provisional microsocieties,” “creating the conditions they described,” in almost total obscurity before exerting immense influence during “the events” of May 1968 (in France, the general strike; in California, the Summer of Love), and strategically choosing to remain mostly anonymous and collective, disappearing from view again.
Another parallel, which I don’t think anyone but me has ever remarked on, is that both groups are responsible for profound slogans that became so popular they seem corny, until you think about them, and the origins of which are long lost in the mists of time: “Think globally, act locally” (Situationists), and “Today is the first day of the rest of your life” (Diggers).
The Diggers (technically, we should say Diggers mark two or something — the original Diggers were a super-interesting group of 17th Century English radicals, which the 20th Century American Diggers named themselves in homage to — later, if fortune smiles on us, we will get to know them and their comrades the Levellers, Quakers, Ranters and Luddites; “Digger” was also a racist term for California Native people used by early European settlers) didn’t have what you would call a “philosophy” — instead of a philosophy they had “the Free thing.” Like they might say that somebody “got hit with the Free thing,” and dropped out and started helping the Diggers. This had to do with giving out free food in the park, and a sculpture they carried around called “The Free Frame of Reference,” which was like a doorway, and once you walked through it you saw that everything was free — as they liked to say, “It’s free because it’s yours.” So they set up free stores — the free boxes in Bolinas and Peoples’ Park in Berkeley are descendants of those — and a free clinic, from which other free clinics around the country are descended, and free newspapers and a thing called the Free City Collective, and eventually a network of communes with a newspaper called Kaliflower that carried news between them. If you want to know more about the Diggers there’s a rich archive of broadsheets and ephemera at The Digger Archives Home Page, and Jay Babcock of Arthur Magazine has been transcribing his oral history project at https://diggersdocs.home.blog/. The Diggers are important, to me anyway.
For our purposes here, the important thing is their concept of the Life Actor. This was an extension of their origins in the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical political street theater collective that still exists to this day. The Diggers kind of grew out of the Mime Troupe, when some troupe members realized that the implications of “guerrilla theater” went beyond art and agit-prop — that once an actor realizes they are not limited to acting on stage, their art form is not limited at all, and there is no reason to maintain a division between art and life — the division was illusory all along. Thus the Diggers aspired to becoming what they called Life Actors; putting themselves in peculiar situations to see what would happen.
The word, “situation,” brings us around the globe, to where a small group of avant garde poets began by making poetry out of just letters, instead of words (what would come to be known as “Concrete Poetry”), then moved beyond the page, to absurdist / political interventions in society. These women and men, who came to be known as Situationists, always careful to maintain that there was no Situationism, only Situationists and their actions, developed this activity into a political praxis, arguing that, in a post-Capitalist society, work and play would be indistinguishable and would consist in a kind of total art which they called “the construction of situations.” While, in an alienated society, the creation of situations in this sense was not yet possible, they did what they could, in a provisional way. In this they somehow brought together the most radical anti-art strands of the avant garde, Dada and Surrealism, with the most radical elements of Marx, in particular the wonderful “Theses on Feuerbach”; wherein Marx writes that altering society for the better is not and cannot be the work of an elite who educate the masses, but that is is a bootstrap process, in which “it is essential to educate the educator [them]self.” This process of simultaneously changing economic conditions and human understanding, Marx continues, “can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” Elsewhere he calls this “practical-critical” activity, and ends with the famous dictum, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Here would be a place to enter a digression on Aristotle and the distinction between ποιεσισ (poiesis) and πραχισ (praxis), making and doing, but I will spare you. The point is that the Situationists foresaw that in a non-capitalist, pre- or post- or extra-capitalist, environment, work would not be distinguishable from play any more than art would be distinguishable from life, that instead of any of these kind of limited activities humans would engage in the creation of situations, what Guy Debord called “poetry necessarily without poems”; and that, while within a Capitalist system this is still impossible, it is possible provisionally to behave in this way, which is revolutionary praxis, leading toward that “Revolution of Everyday Life” (Raoul Vaneigem) which would bring the possibility of truly Situationist activity into being.
Heady stuff. But inspiring, and it is this basic hypothesis that underlies the slogans widely scrawled on walls across France in May of 1968, slogans such as “Never work,” and “Beneath the paving stones, the beach.”
While the Diggers faded into the woods, becoming active in back-to-the-land utopianism and bioregionalism, and eventually losing a separate political identity, the Situationists followed a much more austere and tragic path; obsessively and almost comically expelling each other from the “Situationist International,” until eventually Guy Debord had expelled everyone but himself — and, having drunk himself into a state of chronic ill health, he ended by expelling himself as well, with a bullet to the brain. That said, my contention would be that the revolutionary practice of both groups is an essential signpost out of the world of alienation. And if you want to know more about the Situationists, for we have only skimmed the surface of their thought and action here, a quick note: I’d advise against reading the books about them in English, which for a variety of historical reasons tend to drastically misrepresent them in various ways. Much better are the writings of the Situationists themselves: Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life are both quite readable. The great bodhisattva Ken Knabb also has translated a huge trove of Situationist writings which he keeps available at Situationist International Anthology.
Feminism: Wages for Housework and Social Reproduction Theory
Somehow it took until 1969, a year after the two groups above rose briefly to prominence and then disappeared from view again, in a kind of weird article by feminist Margaret Benston published in the New Left Monthly Review called “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation,” for anyone to observe an interesting gap in Marx’s theory of labor: that some work, which in 1969 could reasonably be called “women’s work,” while undoubtedly work, in Marxist economic terms is not labor because it neither produces commodities for sale, nor is itself for sale, not being exchanged for money. I believe bourgeois economists still to this day regard it as a “paradox” that “if a man marries his housekeeper the GDP goes down” because her labor will no longer count towards it. Marx gestures towards this in acknowledging that Capitalism requires not only production, in the form of alienated labor, but also reproduction — young proletarians must be born and kept alive until they are old enough to be exploited, or the system will grind to a halt. Marx doesn’t really look into this very deeply however. Benston goes on to take the somewhat surprising step of defining women as those people whose labor is not paid, thus leapfrogging several decades of debate around gender, identity, essentialism, etc, and proceeds to draw some conclusions which need not concern us here (because I disagree with them!).
Her article was mostly unnoticed within Marxism and the American left; its greatest influence was felt in Italy, where several women (including Selma James, wife of the great Trinidadian Marxist anti-colonialist, historian of the slave revolt in Haiti, and author of the best book ever written about the sport of cricket, C L R James) (but I digress) associated with the Autonomist and Workerist (Autonomia / Operaia) movements — which very briefly are in favor of workers’ self-government, and emphasize the role of wages in class struggle — founded Wages For Housework in the early 70s. This movement, mainly active in Italy, France and the United States, argued that a large swath of the activities performed by (often female) human beings were both required for Capitalism to function, and unrecognized by the Capitalist system. Their definition of housework was broad enough to anticipate much of what third wave feminists now call “emotional labor”; witness Silvia Federici’s striking axiom (in “Wages Against Housework”), “More smiles? more money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.”
Wages for Housework was both a serious practical movement, with demands and calls for general strikes (observing that no strike up to that point had been truly general, but in fact had only ever included mostly male wage workers), while simultaneously being a consciousness-raising tool, designed to make the invisible half of labor visible, by the modest proposal that it be compensated. Feminists like Federici did not so much want women to become proletarianized and exploited, as to change the entire system (hence, “Wages Against Housework”).
Of course, the historical irony of demanding “wages for housework” is that neoliberalism was only too happy to comply, and now much housework in the overdeveloped world is in fact waged: performed by immigrants, women of color, and other marginal populations whose wages are kept artificially low by the lack of political representation, the constant threat of expulsion or jail, and other similar stratagems, and who, simultaneously, perform unwaged housework in “their own” houses (which is to say, the houses in which they work for free), or are forced by the demands of their jobs to rely on even more marginalized relatives for, for instance, childcare. Federici, for one, was not blind to this as it was happening, and spent most of the 80s and 90s organizing in the global South, in ways that have born liberatory fruit of late in movements like Ni Una Menos.
This unfortunately did not represent the majority feminist response in the neoliberal years, as mainstream feminism lost touch with its radical roots and began to concentrate its efforts more on “equal wages” (which is to say on drawing the reserve labor army of women into the workforce to meet the demands of Capitalist accumulation) and on cozying up to the State with a variety of judicial initiatives. Thus the groundbreaking work of sociologist Maria Mies and her circle was mostly ignored in its time. Mies, in Patriarchy and Acccumulation on a World Scale and The Subsistence Perspective, articulated fully and clearly the mutual reinforcement of Capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and exploitation of nature, drawing on Marx as extended and corrected by Rosa Luxembourg, who we will hopefully meet again if we get around to discussing the Commons.
Mies describes the economy as an iceberg, the tip of which is Capital’s domination of wage labor. This domination, which is all that is visible to bourgeois economists and orthodox Marxists alike, rests on a vast invisible base comprising the informal sector, homeworkers, the work of subsistence peasants, housework, care work, sex work, external colonies, internal colonies (immigrants), and finally what Marx called the “free gift” of nature. (Marx’s take on nature is actually a good deal more complex than that, but his followers mostly didn’t get the memo — all of which is a topic for another time.) As Mies presciently observed, the aims of both mainstream feminism and development are “raising the iceberg,” in the name of “the end of poverty” and “equality,” the alleged goals being to raise subsistence farmers out of poverty by incorporating them into the market system, and make women’s condition equal to men’s by bringing them into the labor force. And in fact, to this day, “improving the condition of women” and “ending poverty” are the two main smokescreens used for the expansion of neoliberalism and State power, through mechanisms like microloans, aimed mainly at women, and many others. However, as Mies also predicted and has in fact come to pass, what actually happens is that the iceberg sinks: wage earners are increasingly forced into positions of precarity, as a result of class war in which the deck is stacked (by the State). Mies called this process “housewifeization.”
In more recent writings (such as https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/PatriarchyAccumulationOnAworldscale_Revisited2005_MariaMies.pdf) Mies has tried to articulate a possible way forward, calling for a new moral economy based on a subsistence perspective and new definitions of the good life. I agree with pretty much her whole program, but useful here is her succinct formulation: “Today subsistence production subsidizes the market economy. This must be reversed. Wage labor and the market must subsidize subsistence production.”
The writings of both Mies and Federici have been enjoying a great renewal of interest lately, along with other “Social Reproduction Feminists” like Susan Ferguson, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Cindi Katz; an aspect of this analysis we haven’t touched on here is that not only does Capitalism require workers to reproduce themselves, it requires that social relations be reproduced. Capitalism cannot continue, essentially, if people aren’t trained to accept its normalcy. The roles of parents and teachers in this are obvious; but children and students, not to mention coworkers, suitors, housemates and friends all play their parts. It is work to reproduce Capitalist social relations — it also requires effort to stop, to break the chain of social reproduction and widen the cracks in the Capitalist system; a hopeful prospect.
Movement: Another Perspective
Finally — or, well, somewhat finally — movement educator Katy Bowman offers another way of thinking about labor, labor-saving, and the exploitation of the global South. I haven’t read any of her writings actually, she kind of seems to have something for sale, but I heard her on the much missed Liberated Body podcast here: Movement Matters with Katy Bowman (LBP 064) — Liberated Body, and it really made an impression on me. She argues that, along with suffering, the overdeveloped world is exporting our movement, to the detriment of physical and mental health (which are the same thing obvi but that’s a topic for another time). She implies a connection between two seemingly irrational aspects of life under neoliberalism: On the one hand, affluent citizens of overdeveloped Northern countries might, for instance, have a child and then both leave the house to trade their labor for money to pay an immigrant from the underdeveloped South to care for that child, because they are not able to do it themselves (because they are working to make the money to pay a caregiver to do it), while that caregiver must rely on the unpaid labor of a grandparent or someone to care for her own children (because she is leaving the house to trade labor for money to the affluent couple); and on the other hand this same affluent couple might, also, drive their cars to businesses called gyms where they pay to be allowed to ride stationary bicycles (which are bicycles that don’t actually go anywhere). The list of such paradoxical behaviors could be expanded at will. Dogs are walked and hot meals are delivered; pre-washed spinach is sold in plastic clamshells. People sit at desks or slump on sofas pressing buttons; boot camps and power yoga are growth industries.
To really explore this topic very deeply will take us far afield into the critique of technology or what I call “technocapitalism,” but briefly: When we are told a device is “labor-saving” or “convenient” we should consider the examples above; likewise when we are told an activity is “laborious.” When there is apparently irrational behavior, we should follow the money. If someone stands to turn a profit from, for instance, our belief that we do not have time to ride a bicycle to the gym, or that mopping the floor is “backbreaking” and beneath our dignity. we must at least acknowledge that there is an economic component to our beliefs and behavior. Bowman is not a philosopher, and she, probably for the best, does not use words like “biopower” and “necropolitics”; those familiar with those kind of words could spend a little time considering the implications, before dropping the whole line of reasoning and returning to some simple questions: How much movement am I getting today? Who else is moving so that I remain sedentary? Who benefits?
This is also one of the many reasons why the Moonflower Mahasangha will be home to both the Psychosomanautical Research Institute and the William Morris Center for Anticapitalist Arts and Crafts. All the reasons — the parallels between holistic, non-hierarchical anatomy and mindbody practice, nondual spirituality, and horizontal politics — will take decades for Tihkal and me to speak. The process of articulation, embodiment and practice-realization of these parallels is what the Moonflower Mahasangha will be and already is.
What does Zen have to do with it?
Baizhang Huaihai — Huaihai means “embracing the ocean,” Baizhang means “100 zhang” or about 1200 feet, and was this person’s “mountain name” (Zen teachers are known to posterity by the name of the mountain they lived and taught on) — was a semi-legendary Tang Era Chan teacher. (Zen is the Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese word Chan. Actually as I am fond of saying “Zen” is the American mispronunciation of the Japanese mispronunciation of the Chinese mispronunciation of the Sanskrit word ध्यान, dhyāna, “meditation”; it thus contains the entire history of Buddhism in it, a portmanteau of misunderstanding.) He is mythically associated with the establishment of rules for communal life in Chan monasteries. Most of the stories about him are hackneyed Zen nonsense about people inexplicably yanking each other’s noses, but there is this: “Baizhang toiled hard whenever he was engaged in manual labor. The monks, feeling this was unseemly and maybe unsafe, hid his tools and begged him to take rest. Baizhang said, “I am a person without any virtue. How can I cause trouble for others?” He then went to look for his tools everywhere, but was unable to find them. Seeing this, Baizhang refused to eat, saying, “A day without work is a day without food.”
This phrase has passed into the Zen oral tradition as exemplary of the basic flavor of Zen practice. 一日不做，一日不食。One day no work, one day no food.
Two other stories spring to mind. When Shunryu Suzuki, in his 70s and already ill, was helping to build the stone retaining wall for the deck at Tassajara, a student asked him, “Roshi,” (they called him “Roshi”), “why don’t you ever take a break? Aren’t you tired?” Suzuki responded, “I do take breaks. I just take lots of small breaks all the time.” And I remember Mark Lancaster, who is now abbot of a Zen center somewhere, telling me that one day he had a practice discussion with Mel Weitsman, founder of Berkeley Zen Center, which just went on and on, and finally Mark asked Mel, “Don’t you ever get tired?” And Mel said, “No, I don’t really get tired. I just do the next thing.”
Once, many years ago, I was sitting in a seven day silent meditation retreat, and there was a work period of about an hour in between periods of sitting, and the work leader kept giving me the same job: Clean the downstairs bathroom, day after day. The first couple days I did the basics, sprayed vinegar solution on the toilet handle, took out the recycling, mopped, but by the third day it was pretty clean. And something shifted in me, and I started really looking at the bathroom. I inhabited that bathroom. And the bathroom became my universe; I got a chair and climbed up and cleaned the soot off the top of the water pipe that ran close to the ceiling, went outside and cleaned the weird little window that gave onto the courtyard. Every day I looked forward so much to returning to my beloved bathroom; I scrubbed the grout, I daubed at corners of shelves nobody would ever see. I still go to that Zen center sometimes and when I happen to use that bathroom I always feel a slight surge of homecoming.
Poet Gary Snyder famously defined Zen as “sitting meditation plus temple cleaning.” I think that’s pretty good. I personally feel that temple cleaning is given short shrift in most American’s understanding of Zen, maybe other people’s too. We can talk about what else I think about Zen later, including what “Shitstick Shikantaza” means, but: If I leave behind a Zen lineage, it will be a lineage in which temple cleaning is emphasized, the temple is the whole universe, and “cleaning” is a process which does not end in a state called “clean.” Of that you can be sure.
Summary
Through the commodity form society is reduced to “material relations between persons and social relations between things.”
-Marx
Land, labor, and money are fictitious commodities.
-Polanyi
“The past is alive in us, and will be alive in the future we are helping to create.”
-Morris
Mutual Aid
-Kropotkin
“Is the song of a lark work, or is it play?”
-Carpenter
“To make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor.”
-Marcuse
“It’s free because it’s yours”
-Diggers
“Poetry necessarily without poems.”
-Debord
“More smiles? more money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.”
-Federici
“Today subsistence production subsidizes the market economy. This must be reversed. Wage labor and the market must subsidize subsistence production.”
-Mies
How much movement am I getting today? Who else is moving so that I remain sedentary? Who benefits?
-Bowman
“A day without work is a day without food.”
-Baizhang
And as so often we will give the last word to Karl Fucking Marx:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Discussion
I’m not going to try to summarize or shoehorn these ideas into one another. That would be boring and cheap. I will note a few further implications.
Labor is a site of ideological conflict. The Protestant work ethic has been for 200 years and more a justification for Capitalist exploitation, to both exploiters and exploited; just so constant competitive proclamations of one’s busyness help make sense of the long hours demanded of contemporary professional classes, and mantras like “Rise and Grind,” “Ever’ Day I’m Hustlin,” are perfectly suited to the mingled life / work of the Millennial precariat.
The physical activities involved in work can be pleasurable, both in the sense of the pleasure of a job well done and just as the pure sensations of movement, exertion and play. No matter how lazy we may be (and I am among the laziest people I know), it is not sedentariness we crave. What is it that we crave? People who say, “I’m lucky, I do what I love” are not really being very forthright. People who do what they love and keep insane hours, live in constant insecurity, are disrespected by their own clients don’t say that, no matter how much they love what they do. A hypothesis: If one’s shelter and food are secure, one feels respected, is fairly free to manage one’s own time and prioritize one’s own production, labor is ecstasy.
The distinctions between art and craft, art and life, work and play are products of the development of Capitalism and industrialization; they are not innate. We intuit, but cannot quite name, undivided activities beyond those distinctions, which we sense in the pre-Capitalist past or predict in the post-Capitalist future. More important, perhaps, is how we make space for those intuitions in our lives within and against Capitalism.
Division of labor by gender is not a Capitalist invention. It is found worldwide. Exploitation, however, is not. Can we draw any morals from this? One possible moral would be: That the way gender is constructed in Capitalist societies, which is used as a justification for the divisions of labor prevalent in Capitalist societies, is part of the ideological underpinning of those societies, i.e. is socially reproduced. Challenge Capitalist gender and you challenge Capitalism. There are likely other implications I haven’t thought through yet.
Work as spiritual practice: This is called “karma yoga” in contemporary spiritual milieux. This phrase has a dark history which I can run through sometime if you like. But anyway. While it is clear that attentive work, performed with others, without attachment to a goal, is not only deeply satisfying but also enlightening, we must always examine the social relations. Profiting from most “karma yoga” I have encountered, there is a guru of some kind, who does not perform the same labor as his or her students. If not a guru, there is almost always some kind of priestly class, whose “work” is claimed to be their priestly duties. This division — into those whose work is prayer and those whose prayer is work — I find highly suspect. This is, for me, part of the import of the story about Baizhang; his insistence on being treated as a person without virtue, modeling the imperative to starve rather than exploit others on the basis of imaginary virtue, is an exemplary form of counterpower.
It matters how the products of labor are distributed. The pleasure or displeasure experienced by a worker depend on more than the physical activities of work. It is very different to work knowing that everything you produce is the property of your boss, who then sells it, than it is to work knowing that you will own whatever you produce, and can do what you want with it. This is as true for cappucinos as it is for spreadsheets, for blood pressure readings as it is for gardens, for silk scarves as for orgasms. Even harder for us to imagine, from within Capitalist society, is what it would be like to work knowing that what you make is not commodities; is not for sale at all. I think the best way to begin imagining this is to start from simple banal experiences we all have had, like sharing, like borrowing, like owing a favor.
Work deeply conditions our experience of time. The clock was not unthinkable before Capitalism, but it was unnecessary. E P Thompson wrote a wonderful article about this which you can find here: [link]; and as Marx wrote, “moments are the elements of profit.” The laborer’s time is something that can be stolen, wasted, killed; the capitalist is forced, by competition, to think in terms of short-term profit, which inevitably leads to long-term disaster. There is nothing normal about behaving as if an hour — or a month — of a human being’s life can have a price put on it. Hours cannot be bought, sold, priced, traded; they are not commensurable with one another, between people or within one person’s life. To treat labor time as a commodity is obviously completely insane. Once we awaken to this fact, it becomes impossible to participate in the Capitalist charade with a straight face. Participate, at times, we must; but from this moment forth we do so ironically, subversively, with other ends and other means in mind.
Finished May Day 2020, Winters California
Touch Fucking Moonflower