Wobbly times number 164

Georges Bataille in a nutshell






"The word, silence, is too noisy. The word, mystical, is too comprehensible." -- From Mike Greene (Bataille's Wound).

Whatever 'noise' there is comes from being mentally immersed within the fetters of capitalist levels ideological hegemony. Bataille uses the catalyst of 'non-knowledge' to break out in order to achieve 'individual sovereignty' and by extension, 'human sovereignty' aka a higher level of freedom through what the Situationists would call, 'radical subjectivity'.  To demystify is to cease reification by becoming the power to move and shape the world without the fetters of domination and submission inherent in class divided civilsation. 

Individual sovereignty could only be fully realised in a classless world where 'the accursed share' had been self-consciously turned into free-time. I think Bataille grasped this much better than Sartre. The shamanic wound (however that is brought about) works as a catalytic agent designed to push us beyond reified notions of the 'sacred'. A sovereign individual uses such catalytic agents on the basis of need in the history one makes, the praxis of which contains no 'last men'.   

Wobbly times number 96

GROWTH SITS ON OUR HEADS LIKE AN ALP


I can remember a time when the sky was clear and you could see the stars at night. I was a child and you were IT. Tag! It was a time before pollution, before the 'growth' which led to smog filled skies, except in Los Angeles. Back then, jokes were made about LA's smog. Smog was something, THEY had. We'd never see it, unless, of course, we went to LA in 1955.

Capitalism cannot survive without 'growth'. In bourgeois terms,'La Growth' means more commodities being produced for sale with a view to increasing profits. Commodities produced by wage-slaves whose time is commodified. Before capitalism, there was no such idea taken as 'commonsense'. To be sure, we were not enlightened. Most of us thought that aristocrats were above the law and that we were subjects to their absolute control--mediated, of course, by religious authority. The ideology of 'growth' fills in a lot of the blanks in our understanding of what's happening to us now--as much or more than Christian, Muslim, etc. religious ideology, IMHO.

'Growth', includes the expansion: of the workforce/population, commodified wealth and living outside the parameters of ecological health. 'Growth' is also connected to increasing debt and speculation in finance markets for commodities like derivatives, real estate and credit default swaps. Just look at our rulers and opinion making public intellectuals go on and on their 'bully pulpits' about the need for 'growth'. Granted, there is also dispute amongst groups and individuals within the issues of 'growth' coming from various perspectives, some to stop it altogether and go back to some pastoral golden age or even as far back as a prehistoric standard of living. Still, the dominant idea our era is 'growth'.

'Growth has been linked time and again with the notion of 'progress'. This is old fashioned and is profoundly wrong headed in this day and age. Progress should always be linked to the notion of gaining more freedom. More freedom and the creation of more junk in a world sick with pollution are incompatible movements of labour. Labour needs freedom and freedom at this stage of labour's ability to create wealth means disposable time, not its incessant employment by a tiny class who want nothing more than even more money under their control after they've found a market for the junk we produce. On the other hand, it should always be kept in the mind that the call for more free-time is not meant as a conservative plea to breed slavish subservience to some new form of Puritan Idealism. We don't need no steenking ascetic priests!

There's no point in being uncomfortable because you're lazy. Inventories build up while workers remain unemployed because they produce too much. Insufficient demand hits the fan. Capitalism breeds the misery of unemployment, while those who are employed are under contract to give away their lives' time.

We all have different needs in terms of time for lounging around. I reckon in a co:operative commonwealth, with distribution of wealth, measured by one's labour time put into what had been determined democratically to be necessary, we'd only collectively need four hours, maybe only 2 hours working time per day, per four day week. We're being employed to produce a lot of crap now, which we shouldn't-oughta. That crap (most of it, just polluting our planet even more) takes a lot our collective time to produce--just in case you were wondering about how we'd live with the 2-hour day. Further, on the two hour day, I think we all should be able to take care of our private desires ourselves, in private if we wish. For instance, we could spend time in a wind surfing collective, which would save anyone not interested from the bothersome effort, for example in spending one's necessary labour time in wind sail production or spending more free-time determining how to vote on yet another issue concerning our society's social plan. Of course, most planning would just amount to an easy "repetez s'il vous plait": notation of what had been taken from the social store of goods and services. The private collective's own labour, eliminates the need for social consideration, except for environmental impact. The need is even now supporting an exploitation of wage-labour, why not labour-time freely given to facilitate its use?

Of course, what we have nowadays is a 'growth' in unemployment or underemployment. Unemployment leads to poverty in a capitalist society. Workers need employers to buy what they're selling--their skills. Wages adequate to support a worker are usually paid for a forty hour work week....at least forty hours. A lot of workers are not 'bought' because the employing class can't profitably employ them for forty hours or even at all which is another way of saying that even though workers are quite capable of producing wealth, it can't be sold therefore, these workers become part of the surplus population in the logic of the social relation of Capital. If wealth can't be sold, there is no point in producing it, even though there may be mass poverty surrounding the means of production. This is the logic of wage-slavery. This is the reality which is presented as being rational. Check this video out. Check out the informed attitudes. Is shorter work time with no cut in pay presented as an solution to unemployment? No. Why not?

1 out of every 7 Americans now rely on food stamps.

While we don't see soup kitchens, it may only be because so many Americans are receiving food stamps.

Indeed, despite the dramatic photographs we've all seen of the 1930s, the 43 million Americans relying on food stamps to get by may actually be much greater than the number who relied on soup kitchens during the Great Depression.

'Living in harmony with the Earth' involves a conscious effort, even now--especially now. The ancients knew this, as conscious slaves to nature. We should know this because thinking of the Earth other than as, the only known habitable planet in the Universe, in the here and now, in the year 2011, is shot through with genocidal implulse. It always has been.

Wobbly Times number 72

Could you please explain your statement, "Wage-labour is not freedom"?


Well, it's like this. In the marketplace for commodities there are buyers and sellers. Buyers and sellers have opposing interests. Buyers want lower prices and sellers want higher prices.

Wage-labour is a commodity. Workers wish to sell their skills for higher prices and employers would prefer lower prices. Wages are the price of skills and time. Workers sell their skills on the market and when their skills are bought they're employed. They're employed to make goods and services for their employers. The employers own the social product of the wage-labourers they employ. Thus, the product is separated from the producer and the producer becomes a servant and is in fact, dependent on the owners to buy their skills on the market in order to make a living.

Freedom has a lot of aspects; but a major factor is owning and controlling the product of one's labour. This is why so many aspire to become 'their own bosses' in small enterprises. To be bossed is not freedom.

Wobbly Times number 67

IS THE MINIMUM WAGE TOO HIGH?

Wages adjusted for inflation aka 'real wages' are now below what they were in 1964.

see: http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/2009/09/wobbly-times-number-22.html

As for the minimum 'real wage', it's now below what it was in 1958. ... See More
see chart with blue and red diamonds at:
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/anth484/minwage.html

Meanwhile, real productivity, output per hour of labour has increased by an average 2% or more per year over the 20th Century up till now. We're always being told via our media pundits and pollies that when productivity rises, wages rise. This axiom is a commonplace which you'll hear constantly coming from talking heads employed by the capitalist class...all part of the infotainment game. Thus, the vast accumulation of wealth continues apace. The lion's share ends up in the bank accounts, bonds, stocks and real estate holdings of about 10% of the population aka the capitalist and landlord classes.

see:
http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/2009/08/wobbly-times-number-19.html

If you believe capitalist propagandists in the corporate and State media then, you're likely to think that the minimum wage is too high. You're likely to fall into the trap of a 'race to the bottom'. "If workers didn't ask so much, Ford wouldn't be shipping our jobs to Mexico and China."

We're really never educated to become class conscious in capitalist society. We're never told that labour creates all the wealth not already found in Nature. We are told that we're mere indvidudal consumers. Our knowledge of production (what goes on in our minds) is such that we attribute wealth creation to capitalist owners of industry instead of the people who must sell their time and skills to the employing class in order to make a lving e.g. Mercedes Benz makes great cars. This phenonmenon is known as 'reification' in philosophy.

see:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

Wobbly Times number 26

What I'd like to get across is that the revolutionary subjectivity/class consciousness which the Wobblies have exhibited over the years is what is needed to get the movement to progress towards more freedom, including chipping bits of surplus value and time off from the bosses' control--aka reform. The submissive position of many on the left vis a vis their own leaders runs counter to the class struggle for freedom and a classless society. One has only so much TIME in one's life to put energy into the movement. If one spends all one's time subsuming oneself to liberal reform agendas, one never sets the agenda. Thus, the 'class in itself' remains alienated from the 'class for itself' i.e. we remained ruled by Capital.

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"The functions fulfilled by the capitalist are
no more than the functions of capital - viz.
the valorization of value by absorbing living labour
- executed consciously and willingly. The capitalist
functions only as personified capital, capital as a
person, just as the worker is no more than labour
personified. That labour is for him just effort
and torment, whereas it belongs to the capitalist as a
substance that creates and increases wealth, and in
fact it is an element of capital, incorporated into
it in the production process as its living, variable
component. Hence the rule of the capitalist over
the worker is the rule of things over man, of dead labour
over the living, of the product over the producer.
For the commodities that become the instruments of
rule over the workers (merely as the instruments of
the rule of capital itself) are mere consequences of
the process of production; they are its products.
Thus at the level of material production, of the
life-process in the realm of the social
- for that is what the process of production is -
we find the same situation that we find in religion
at the ideological level, namely the inversion of
subject into object and vice versa. Viewed historically
this inversion is the indispensable transition without
which wealth as such, i.e. the relentless productive
forces of social labour, which alone can form the
material base of a free human society, could not
possibly be created by force at the expense of the
majority. This antagonistic stage cannot be avoided,
any more than it is possible for man to avoid the
stage in which his spiritual energies are given a
religious definition as powers independent of himself.
What we are confronted by here is the alienation
[Entfremdung] of man from his own labour. To that
extent the worker stands on a higher plane than the
capitalist from the outset, since the latter has his
roots in the process of alienation and finds absolute
satisfaction in it whereas right from the start the
worker is a victim who confronts it as a rebel and
experiences it as a process of enslavement. At the
same time the process of production is a real labour
process and to the extent to which that is the case
and the capitalist has a definite function to perform
within it as supervisor and director, his activity
acquires a specific, many-sided content. But the labour
process itself is no more than the instrument of the
valorization process, just as the use-value of the product
is nothing but a repository of exchange-value.
The self-valorization of capital - the creation of
surplus-value - is therefore the determining, dominating
and overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the
absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact
it is no more than the rationalized motive and aim
of the hoarder - a highly impoverished and abstract
content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as
enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is
his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite
different manner."

("Results of the Immediate Process of Production" 1863-1866 Marx, Appendix to Capital,vol. I, Penguin ed., pp. 989-90)