What actually works?

What actually works?

August 12, 2022

"What actually works?" That's the other thing that people often have on their minds in times of transition. They bemoan that nothing that used to work, works anymore. I don't, or at least I try not to. Well, was it supposed to work before? Or, at least, "for whom was it supposed to work?" is a fair question. Who's to say that those old techniques that people default to in times of stress and panic, actually ever worked for them, or even for those whose they supposed they were working for? In fact, the long history of institutional repression, and of working people being screwed out of the fruits of their labor, should indicate the opposite. 

Marx actually wrote about this when he was scribing for the Provincial Assembly in Germany. He called it the "theft of wood". Marx, in essence, well aware that all the commodities in the way that they are worked by human hands, build up into the analogy of wood, stone, metal and clay, wanted to build them up to that from the most basic parts. He maintained despite all opposition that the whole of humanity was building up to the expression of working wood, stone, clay or metal. This also maintained for the Provincial Assembly the purity of its claims to a Mandate of Heaven, based on this material analysis. 

He says regarding a meeting of this Assembly, as follows:

At the very beginning of the debate, one of the urban deputies objected to the title of the law, which extends the category of "theft" to include simple offenses against forest regulations.
A deputy of the knightly estate replied:
"It is precisely because the pilfering of wood is not regarded as theft that it occurs so often."
By analogy with this, the legislator would have to draw the conclusion: it is because a box on the ear is not regarded as murder that it has become so frequent. It should be decreed therefore that a box on the ear is murder.

So maybe the pilfering of wood should be considered the same as a box on the ear. But in any case, what this does illustrate is the confusion about what work is, anyhow. In the first case, they did not distinguish between cut and fallen wood in this debate very well, and neither did their law. For a second thing, their political structure and their law did not make it well worth it to do any work. The ownership of forests made the gathering of fallen wood, necessary work for some, a crime; and their law, not distinguishing between fallen and cut wood, did not strictly allow for the worker cutting wood to claim absolute ownership over the product of his labor. 

You think you're working and you might not have any claim to it, is what I'm saying. Because it might not be serving your own interests, or you're barred from working, except in the way socially prescribed to you, which might in itself be a theft of work. 

Practically this is not so hard to understand. A company, for instance, is set up to serve, or to make things for people. The goal is all that they have in mind, and providing work to people, materially and socially, is a completely secondary concern. This is one reason why we have labor unions, so that people are actually working, and not just slaving away. 

When you add in the technological component, it becomes even more important for people to know what "work" is. The company won't tell you what work it is that you are actually doing, on a human level. Part of the lack of freedom that a new technological paradigm inspires comes from the problem that workers in a new economy don't know on what basis they should be agitating for their worker's rights. The poet Blake even wrote about this on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. This poem is actually saying that the labor problems in the industrial mills were so bad that he thought it would take Jesus Christ to fix them. It's funny but it's not. 

And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Amongst these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green and pleasant Land.

So there is really no evidence that what was "supposed to work" before was ever supposed to work, at least for the laborer or the peasant farmer, even though they were told that that was how work was supposed to work. And the common and ongoing problem here is this: working in the paradigm of the past when the reality of your labor is another paradigm entirely, benefits that paradigm and not your material conditions. This is how the system of exploitation is set up: factories were not farms, and medicine and science is not a factory, but that's how it was set up. And this can get very granular very fast, and before you know it, Marx gets involved. 

With the new technofeudalism, and its absurd taste for power, we have to again reject setting up that system like the past. They are already trying to do that, with the culture of "psychological operations" and "the science of listener attention" already very deep; very polluting. This technological paradigm is not medicine, it is not science, for the workers in it. But then the mischief sets in, with the question "then is law a farm" if you catch my line of reasoning. And, is time circular; cyclical? This type of mischief needs to be stamped out to have a serious thought about it. I think time is helical, with a circular and a linear dimension, and I won't cite my source on it. I think the more cogent point is that to say that "the law" is "a farm" would be the biggest corruption yet seen. I am drawn to this extract from Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws" (I. 16. 7.)

"There are two kinds of corruption, one when the people do not observe the law, the other when they are corrupted by the laws: an incurable evil because it is in the very remedy itself."

(Pilot V5, yellow legal pad, print)