December 2011
173 posts
“… he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs.”
—Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.”
—‘Invisible’ Adam ‘Division of Labour’ Smith-Libertarian-Smith Hand - in Wealth of Nations (not men)
“I didn’t do any research at all on Adam Smith. I just read him. There’s no research. Just read it. He’s pre-capitalist, a figure of the Enlightenment. What we would call capitalism he despised. People read snippets of Adam Smith, the few phrases they teach in school. Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be.”
—Noam Chomsky (via cultureofresistance)
To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts →
yesmagazine.org
Wherever I go and ask people what is missing from their lives, the most common answer (if they are not impoverished or seriously ill) is “community.” What happened to community, and why don’t we have it any more? There are many reasons—the layout of suburbia, the disappearance of public space, the automobile and the television, the high mobility of people and jobs—and, if you trace the “whys” a few levels down, they all implicate the money system.
More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don’t depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.
“…No group in the world has had more money spent on it to have its genetics examined, its fecundity stopped, its intelligence measured. (Who are these people who know our sperm count but not our names?) Yet despite years, despite decades of such academic energy, there is very little scholarly recognition that a major part of American history is the history of black people: how they influenced whites and how whites influenced them. There are are very few examinations of U.S. economics as the growth of a country that had generations of free labor to assure that growth. Or of the legal history of this country as primarily the efforts of the courts to contain blacks. Nor is there much notice paid to the fact that anthropology is pretty much limited to the study of the black peoples of the world. Not only are white historians and social scientists un-interested in examining their own poor, they seem never to consider directing their probes to the incidents of incest or bastardy among the rich.”
—
Rediscovering Black History. Review of The Black Book. New York Times Magazine (11 August 1974):14+ Reprinted by the permission of International Creative Management, Inc. Copyright 1974 by Toni Morrison.
from What Moves at the Margin; Selected Non-Fiction Edited and with an Introduction by Carolyn C. Denard. 2008.
(via howtobenoladarling)
