The Eye of the Beholder: There is Never Anything New

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Reid Mukai

A review of John Steppling’s new book, Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest

By Paul Haeder

it is through mimesis, (identification with the mirror image) that one gains a sense of unity, self-containment and mastery over the body. If that was all that there was to it, humanity would be condemned to dwell forever entombed in the hell of mirrors. However, the identification with an Other in the mirror opens out the possibility for symbolic thought.

— John Desmond, author, thinker, who is interested in the history of marketing; construction of knowledge in marketing; consuming culture; morality and marketing; advertising and public policy

The beauty of ideas and words and sculpting frames and philosophical groundings is that we in Western culture having nothing more challenging than the numbness of a consumer-wrecked world where crass hucksterism and financial voodoo wizardry – even with its nuclear tipped propaganda, surveillance and missile dragnet technological orgasm science serves up – pales in comparison to any tried and tested narrative grammar of idea wizards.

Yet, dealing with words now, we see, as one noted playwright and thinker attests, involves PR packaged thinking, possibly a flagrant fascism tied to what can be written (thought) and what cannot be (said).

The title to his book says it all, sometimes – Aesthetic Resistance and Dis-Interest – That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said. This is just out in 2016, by playwright, raconteur and philosopher, John Steppling, from the organization, Mimesis International. The book is a compilation of some of his blog postings, and not to denigrate the word “blog” to mean anyone and their uncle expressing anything out there on the world wide web.

Like stepping stones into Steppling’s mind, each essay is a revving reverberating call to mental action, as each essay follows the Introduction with more nitrous oxide pumped into each cylinder of the 12 cylinder motor of his mind: one, Narrative & Empathy; two, Magical Thinking; three, Pedagogy; four, Nothing is Art; five, The Impossible Playwright; six, Someone to Watch Over Me; seven, The Political Uncanny; eight, That Which Will Not Allow Itself to be Said; nine, The Hidden Narrative.

Here, Steppling drills down into the cortex of the American – European, white, patriarchal, Puritan and Elitist – brain, sort of the flash mob mentality we are downloading determinedly. He plugs holes in the tinny junk thinking and pseudo intellectualism hovering around academia, the So Called Liberal Media, the Corporate boardrooms, the waiting rooms at TED Talks 3.0, and the ER’s resuscitating the pop culture that doubles in the minds of the masters of consumption as true art (sic). It’s a violent country, the art is anti-art, and the world of the Imperialist, right-wing or leftie, is predicated on a Heart of Darkness destruction that Steppling decants into the incantation:

The unfinished and fragmentary now emerge as comments all by themselves. When the worst aggressions in society today are often those paraded as benign, or self branded as innocent, even curative, the default response must be one of disconnection. The age of marketing, fueled by Imperialist Capital, has obliterated ideas of belief. Ideas of evidence and trust in our own feelings are all the time under duress and coercion. Aesthetic coercion is the staple of a system of image and narrative control the erases the individual while unrelentingly trumpeting his triumph.

Mimesis conceptually and psychoanalytically is something Theodore Adorno, Robert Hullor-Kentor and Fabo Akcelrud Durao study as they break into the mind of the human condition under the duress of capitalism-hucksterism-market competition-cultural posturing in order to understand how we as thinkers and believers re-narrate when we read a novel or watch a film, as well as engage with poetry and theater. Steppling is looking at this sirocco of thought tied to art, and it’s only that, art, if it changes us somehow. Art can mean buildings, parks, ways entire city blocks and towns are laid out and made to be something more than a mess against nature or utilitarian. Or practical in the Puritanical way. Looking at the Palaeolithic rock paintings around the world, Steppling posits that these sophisticated and voluminous paintings are “exclusively mimetic participation in a magical object .. and that Neolithic artifacts represent a significant change of consciousness, and of the human relationship to the group.”

This short book delves into the heart of what it is to be human, what Pierre Janet (L’Evolution de la Memoire) says how we become the very beingness of “I” – Narration created humanity. This book is just a small sluice into the larger wetlands that spread across the more rarefied postulations of Steppling’s thoughts and comments, here, at this blog: John Steppling – The Practice of Writing – Theatre Film Culture).

Ironically, his most recent post talks about his youth, when he was born in 1951, Laguna Beach, where his mother worked at Woolsworth and father acted in community theater. Steppling looks at Charles Olson and his work in the Yucatan, the same year, 65 years ago, and in that looking back, Steppling unfragments the fragments of memory, youth, childhood, origin, which all boils down to a Western culture seeded with capitalism that is moved by destruction and the boom in the bust:

When Olson dug into the dirt of the Yucatan hills, my parents had moved to Laguna Beach. My mother worked at Woolworths as a counter girl. My father acted in the community theatre there. It was a sleepy beautiful barely touched village, really. It lay off the old Highway — the old PCH. In those years nobody thought about the destruction of entire pine forest in the San Bernadino mountains. Olson didn’t dream of tourist high rises, resorts for white people, all across the Yucatan peninsula.

A half century has been spent in the West destroying things, and destroying people, and destroying beauty. A post apocalyptic treeless suburb, that is the inner circle of hell. Having to live next to affluent white men who bitch about Jews, and then look to play a round of golf at one of the thousands of courses in drought ravaged California. While in far off corners of the globe U.S. made bombs explode and kill and maim. These same guys, over drinks, might discuss topics like ‘reverse racism’. Fifty solid years of this. — John Steppling’s blog

Imagine in this crass, Hollywood-drenched, Chosen Few World of high financial and structural violence and rape and rapine, resource wars, total cultural and physical annihilation of the tribes, and we have Steppling surfing these monster 100-foot waves seeking what it means to be in the present reading the footprints of the past, histories written and rewritten, and into the eye of the poet, which is the vortex of our cultural wars: “The sedimentation of terror into language, specifically into the naming of things, is that magical element in spoken text that differentiates it from reading to oneself silently. Both can be mimetic, but the range of the frightening is greater when it happens on stage.”

Steppling dis-interns the graveyards of humanity and philosophy in a process of eliminating vis-a-vis this modern, scientific and technocratic metallic world the magic, the thoughtful, the greater good of humanity to express, as poets and as the players, actors, in this life theater. He ties this into those who have fought to erase memory, to dominate:

The domination of nature coincided with the neutralizing of Language. Shorn of terror, the cry became the concept, Dionysian energy was expelled, superstition replaced by logic. This was the force of Enlightenment thinking, and the correctives were real, but less observed, the cleansing of that which allowed for the tragic to reveal itself. The tragic as a sensibility; and without that sensibility, the infinite domination, unchecked rational horror grow on the underside of the image and word.

He’s looking at class in most of his work, and Steppling discovers that corporate interests have eliminated the outsider, helped to cull the very idea of class and what the artist’s role is in “the great Spectacle today.” We see threaded like glacial melt Steppling’s look at how we in this punishment society put down the poor, forcing the poor into some crazy reformulaton in our theater or film.

Housebreak them. Make them heel. Make them sentimental. This is the paternalism of ‘encouragement.’ I’ve always felt insulted when anyone wanted to encourage me. Encouragement is the sadism of the ownership class, the good plantation owner, those who enjoy the power that comes from encouragement. I’ve said before, grants and the writing of applications for grants is a form of psychological servitude.

Art, politics, education, and creativity, the word, the intersection of a neoliberalism, a fake Left, all those ideas come into the mental landscape of Steppling, who is a studied playwright, living in a world of intellectual conceptualizations, and he sees the bright line of mimesis as how Adorno formulated it – “as a way out from under the crushing conformity and standardization of mass culture, to trace authentic artworks and to trace the path of their occurrence,” John writes.

I’ve been experiencing first-hand this deadening of culture, ideas, words, poetry, in the education systems I have taught in, and the echo of William Burroughs who called school “the Job” is a place where Steppling and I and so many others see as penal colonies where “the spontaneous fantasies of children are literally beaten out of them . . . the business of extinguishing that fantasy and creativity.”

Mimesis is a form of expression, not a Xerox copier in the head. – John Steppling

This book is a slice on the microscope slide looking at the DNA of modern American psychosis – and the truth is in the antithesis of human and narrative truth, Steppling has discovered in his six decades on the planet:

The only truth now is bureaucratic, administrative, or data based. The fixedness of both ideas and beliefs in those ideas, has disappeared from the contemporary life. One feels that people, in general, deal with quantifications, with administrative rules and regulations. The age of regulations. They do not explore the nature of meaning.

I can digress here, which is one of Steppling’s favorite pastimes writing — entering and exiting the rabbit hole. Punishment, retribution, class war, patriarchal bullshit. Check this out — state of ever-Blue Politics of Washington State:

Division of child support services killing the parent (mostly men) big time if some part of child support has not been paid:

a warning — driver’s license will be suspended; no commercial driver’s license shall be gotten; all Fish and Wildlife licenses issued suspended (can’t fish, hunt, or trap); can’t gather seaweed or shellfish; you won’t be able to maintain insurance coverage; doing business in the state of WA will be affected; your ability to practice your licensed profession, occupation, or trade in WA will be suspended; you shall be held in contempt of court by the state of WA.

In so many ways, Steppling speaks to my own struggle with education and social work and social justice in this state or anywhere. Imagine, you fuck up and don’t pay child support, so, the state goes after you with vengeance. Ahh, then you end up in Haeder’s casebook, homeless, strung out, lost, abandoned. It does happen, these laws and punishments, this retributive society, one that is spittle from Hollywood and the leadership (sic) class that is bent on eviscerating the poor. Steppling says there are no writers, poets, musicians, artists, philosophers really chipping away at the pedantic or the narrow self-important angles to get a real narrative of what sort of fascism that is here now and has been here for decades. Again, time and time again, I talk to these Democrats, these people voting for same sex marriage, same sex adoption, goofy ideas about girls and women in war, all the shitty PC and broken diversity crap, and, alas, we are in a time of collective abandonment, a psyche that is cleaved by trauma, because really very few care to know the cause of so much class hate, class pain.

The bedrock of this lack of thinking and struggle to see meaning as the universal pathway to thought is a society transforming nature and the inclination of the human to work within self outward, working to be original and the same at the time, but now we are a culture denuded of agency, split into identities created by marketing and advertising, and transfixed into a “giant apparatus of policing.” The checks and balances are those so-called culture purveyors, those gesticulating freaks that are unwilling to see a life, live a life, outside of Capital Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Fascism of Privatization.

Steppling doesn’t delve deeply in some of the neo-tribalist thinkers in any of his work; I’ve always been able to make that leap by thinking about the ideas of tribalism cocooned in the philosopher Daniel Quinn’s brain, who calls this a period of remembering, dislodging the great forgetting around what it is to be human outside the narrow constraints of 12,000 or 8,000 years of totalitarian agriculture. John does see tribes of the past living in relatively stable settings. The elimination of so many tribes around the world in the name of capital, manifest destiny, whiteness, is a testament to Western societies slurping up the coin of the realm at a price: “ . . . contemporary societies of the West have perfected a kind of industrial level violence and irrational lust for conquest, and a fetid clenched jaw blindness that has no rival in history. It is the culmination of something that went very wrong.”

Steppling looks at theater, architecture, post-modernism, Freudian and Jungian psychology, the art scene, fine art, photography, Hollywood, propaganda, education, all the lower forms of capitalism, all those devolving collective dendrites of a culture preened by cultural gatekeepers and the models of each generation’s tragically hip pseudo thinkers, all those posing intellectuals.

The crucible of Steppling’s galvanizing thinking is tied to what is authentic artwork, what is the concrete thing that is the spontaneous creative gravity pulling forth this flash-point of the highly creative, which is at the same instance a series of contradictions that make the process magic and concrete.

Edward Said calls this the undefined time and place. Steppling adds, “These are the contours of the imagination. We hear, we invent, we are deaf – but all of it is engaged with, and absorbed.”

In the larger frame of Steppling’s looming and far-ranging essays on/at/in his blog, we are taken into a minefield of the depraved minds of those cultural and propaganda spinners who have not only co-opted liberalism and urbanity . . . but what it means to be a writer, someone telling stories versus someone marketing stories, spinning and PR-lobbing things that are not accurate. This world Steppling covers extensively in his writing, calling to task the posings/posturing and the denaturing of figurative art into something set in a ghost-land of misled identities, narratives and characters.

We get to the data driven shit world of today, all the bureaucracies, this punishment culture, this one driven by a war machine run by USA, Israel, the G-7, the wicked stinger of the scorpion called capitalism. There is a critique of the whiteness of this imperialism, depraved and puritan all in one heave, and there is gentrification of the land and culture and arts, as well as this art-loving haute bourgeoisie class that has denuded meaning and hard work from education, learning, and thinking. This is the class warfare that provides the fodder for ever more Draconian and pervasive punishment and retribution and financial recriminations.

A world people by bearded Duck Dynasty creeps and nerds stuck in Ikea-furnished prisons. It all comes down to lacking curiosity and dependence on technocratic dogma. Titrating back into this deadening tool of marketing and generic history and measured thinking. Steppling calls for open schools which “must offend, must drive some off, must never be bland or generic. Better to be wrong.”

Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, “teaching people to see and hear is the first thing. And then to stimulate the mimetic in relation to all of it. To relearn narrative and story. That is the beginning.”

What Freire posits – He who thinks and does not learn is in great danger.

The vocabulary of our times is not up to snuff in Steppling’s view. It’s torn from our collective memory, reshaped as a kind of amnesia, what Russell Jacoby calls “… the general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychological . . . . Rather it is social amnesia – memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamics of this society.” In the critical mass of the mind in this human condition is what we might like to consider true artwork, a type of “force of negativing the madness of society, the waste and abuse, and this is the negative dialectic; negate the negation, for that is the reality today.”

Daily I toil teaching people around me – younger – to live with resistance and refusal as the underpinning of any life in this hijacked capitalism, the drone warfare of consumerism bombarding us every nano second. Steppling is a friend of Henry Giroux, and in this short book pulls from one of his books, The Violence of Organized Forgetting (2014):

Students are now taught to ignore human suffering and to focus mainly on their own self-interests and by doing so they are being educated to exist in a political and moral vacuum. Education under neoliberalism is a form of radical depoliticization, one that kills the radical imagination and the hope for a world that is more just, equal, and democratic.

This insight Steppling brings to art, unraveling the fabric of mass media, his microscope on those attempts at art in TV, and his dog-earing philosophy-psychology-the dark arts of culture. For him, there is a real sense of lamentation in America, longing for some imagined or pre-invented past where there was “order” or some sense of commonly held beliefs.

We are in a time of conformity, Steppling poses, even in our supposed non-conforming perception, and in that broken covenant this society has a “narcissistic desire . . . self aggrandizement . . . splitting and projection of our bad selves onto the Other.”

He ventures back to how much we have changed in America, how culture is tied to an infantile psyche, “ever afraid of being found out in its incompleteness, in turn cannot afford to gaze too long at certain things.”

I see it everyday, working in Chinatown, Portland, serving as a case manager for homeless, recovering addicts, early release prisoners, veterans, families. This gaze, this head down society looking at those flip after flip pages of self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, well, it is madness to see the broken people living on pavement, actually in the doorways of fancy restaurants and hip shoe stores. Raging lunacy, pickled brains, entire families and their dogs out there, in the oh so hip Portlandia represents what Steppling pinpoints in his work.

I stop and talk to those really down and out, on my way to my office where I serve people who have at least gotten teeth yanked, bellies checked, and are in temporary housing and tied to the recovery model of Narcotics Anonymous, Heroin Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, you name it, all those sponsors and other case managers. These people on the streets have their stories too, amazing ones, torn from the psychological hell that people create for their children, spouses, friends, lovers.

“The purpose of Western capitalist society is to erase ALL stories and replace them with commercials, or, in other words, with anti-stories,” he writes. This is the crux of what Steppling uncovers throughout his musings and philosophical ministerial show. Until the story we have in 21st America is one where the working stiffs, including social workers and teachers like me, imagine we may be moving up some ladder, to be the kings and queens of our castles, to have those two week trips to Machu Pichu, or wherever, any fantasy that has been peddled in the crap we consume — TV, drama, movies, news, magazines, the WWW, education.

I find it more and more difficult to find empathy coming from these people, and even supposedly successful folk with jobs and mortgages and some flimsy undergraduate degrees can spew some of the most hateful fascist craps — “Way too many people on earth. Seven-point-one billion, so someone has to go. I have no problem putting the needle in the arm of some loser druggies shooting or snorting up. They should be the first to go.”

This propaganda consumed by these suburbanites, calling for eugenics and mass slaughter against those we love to stigmatize. You know, people who were once loved or held as babies, now on the streets, struggling, lunatics panhandling, voices in their heads, forever driven to show us how close we are to disaster. Ourselves.

Steppling cites Arno Gruen, how hatred is fueled to destroy empathy. “Sometimes we blame the victims. They make us feel very uncomfortable; we are ashamed of our empathy because we hate the victim ourselves.” (The Betrayal of the Self, 2007)

This is what Steppling unseals in this hermetically coffined society where the stories of struggle — real struggle, the hardscrabble struggle of barely knowing who we are, let alone the struggle of the streets, this school to prison pipeline and cradle to grave social system that has been set up by Capitalism — are never written about with depth and empathy and understanding, and the victims grow, and nothing Hollywood or literary-wood or drama-wood produces even is close to the reality of struggle, near death, Dickensian and Kafka-esque, all of the stories that need to be told, never get told.

Just cut-outs, the reality of people who do not exist in the minds of the controllers, those gate-keepers, those plied with money artists and editors and MFA instructors and super-star Oprah Book of the Month folk.

His look at the death of agency and the death of independent thought, the killing of questioning minds and the suffocation of the soul speak loudly in this book and on/in/at his blog.

Just today . . . . Thinking about Steppling’s look at this failure of the punishment state, the war on drugs, the war on people, I ran into story after story on my caseload — people the triple victim of a penality-corrupt legal-penal system. Older women, now clean and sober, in stable housing my organization provides, with some hands up, and yet, story after story of obscene legal bills being busted for possession, spending 75 days in the clinker and coming out with $3000 bills for the court costs and the fees and such, and, then, two years later, after homelessness, after living on the streets, dumpster diving, scrapping, anything but dealing with letter and summons and warrnats, bam, the $3000 is now $5000, and then the driver’s license is suspended, another $1500 owed there for penalities.

Imagine, trying to get these people minimum wage jobs, and then all these fees and retributions and pounds of flesh held against them, in the tens of thousands per person. Former homeless people, who were not worrying about US Postal deliveries or summons or the long arm of the law creating debtors’ fees, prison, etc. These are not the stories of the elite, the vaunted value-added ones educated at Harvard or UCLA. The stories of my people are on the police blotters or are ripped to shreds by the middle class Speilbergs or anyone with hearts of stone and brains channeled for the One Percent, to tell stories that are both lies and false memories.

Imagine this entire gambit broken down as a way to push more propaganda and the dark arts of vilifying and blaming the victim.

Foreclosure after couch surfing after stolen children after endless payments to the ferryman and the financial philanderers.

This is the way Steppling points his readers to, as the underskin of his work:

And one sees it today in corporate news coverage. The control by the state of “message.” The “message” of the Olympics is Russia is bad, and full of stupid people. You see terms like “cassocks” used a lot. You see the control in what is covered and what is NOT covered. Your see it in the idiotic disinformation on the planned covert destabilizing of Venezuela (as an example). . . . The media distorts Israeli violence and apartheid. It treats all dissent in the US as either terrorism or kooks. And most of all, the control is exercised via ” entertainment.” The constant, CONSTANT, outpouring of stupidity.

So we are here, where disagreements with the law, the financial rules, all those bankers’ games, everything that culls any sense of common sense, that is somehow suspect. There is madness in what Steppling points to, and this is a country that is in possession of a stone (stoic) heart of a killer, as D.H, Lawrence wrote.

The struggle to understand and value art that “knows something that we do not know” is a constant theme in John Steppling’s work-world.

3 Signs Corporate Work Culture Has Become Toxic to the Human Spirit

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: There are of course countless more signs of the toxicity of our culture, but the three mentioned in the article are significant ones.)

By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Waking Times

Feeling trapped on the corporate ladder? You’re not alone… our work culture has become uncaring, toxic and rather dangerous to our well-being.

Everybody seems to be working harder and harder these days, but genuinely happy people are hard to come by, even amongst those who actually have decent jobs. The truth is, very few people are fit and able to succeed under the current status quo of living to work, and more of us than ever are slipping behind in a corporate culture that is becoming increasingly toxic and impossible to endure.

Suspended in ‘survival mode,’ the individual is really not doing well in this environment. But, corporations are doing well, and have grown to have an enormous impact on our lives, even affecting how we educate our children, programming them with the ambition to grow up to become human resources just like everyone else.

Our society hasn’t always been so dominated by the corporate model, as it is today, though. In just the last 150 years or so, the corporation has become more pervasive and influential than the church and most political parties have ever been. Now, human relationships, commerce, and organized human endeavor are monopolized under the corporate model, making financial profit, rather than truer virtues, the primary driver of the vast bulk of daily human activity.

Is dedication to the corporate work model serving us well?

So many people hate their jobs and work only for the weekends… then they go nuts in 48-hour orgies of convenience and excess in order to ferociously attempt to reclaim their lives for themselves. Were human beings meant to live this way?

Who feels it knows it, and in order for the world to change, individuals must first have good reason to love their own lives. The corporate work trap is holding far too many good people in bondage, side-lining them from being change-makers in a needy world.

Here are 3 signs the corporate work culture has become toxic to the human spirit and that it must be abandoned.

1.) The culture of over-work and over-competition is driving us crazy and turning us against each other.

Entry into the corporate worker-bee culture is about being selected, and the education system grooms children and young adults to work for and think in terms of being evaluated, tested, judged and ranked against friends and peers who are subdivided by age, gender and aptitude.

The aim is to be chosen, so early on we are taught to be selectable. We learn to follow the leader, follow the rules, fall in line, and to do our best to be the best at whatever else everyone else is doing.

In order to prosper in the corporate work scene, value must be proven, again and again, and the sense of urgent competition never stops.

To make ourselves always available for this level of participation, we’ve been programmed to sacrifice our most valuable asset, time. The important roles in life, such as caregiving to the young and old (those who don’t work), are snowed under, giving us less and less room to be human and throwing us further and further out of alignment with the natural rhythms of life.

“Bad work culture is everyone’s problem, for men just as much as for women. It’s a problem for working parents, not just working mothers. For working children who need time to take care of their own parents, not just working daughters. For anyone who does not have the luxury of a full-time lead parent or caregiver at home.” [Anne-Marie Slaughter]

2.) The corporate work culture is socially engineering us to conform to a wasteful, meaningless consumer lifestyle.

We are several generations deep into the greatest mass social engineering project ever initiated against human beings. A true and vast global cultural revolution. Enforced on us with mis-education, brainwashing, peer-pressure, propaganda, economics, regulations, ordinances, laws, and the seizure of personal time, our culture has been deliberately transformed into a consumer wasteland by the empires of media, advertising and business.

Colonized by television and mass media, the modern mind has been weened on the illusion that happiness is external and can be purchased. Kept as far as possible from personal development and spiritual growth, we are now expected to be total consumers of media and of stuff, always in pursuit of endless growth and instant gratification.

“We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.” [David Cain]

Which is why we work so hard… because working gives us the freedom to consume… which is what we are supposed to be doing. We fit in when we work to consume to obey. And we’ve been trained to believe that fitting in matters.

“The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by. Is this you?” [David Cain]

3.) The corporate work model has become the contemporary slave management program for a world ruled by fiat money masters.

What we are told to believe is prosperity, is really just an elegant trap, an illusion. And at the very top of this pyramid of lies is the dark secret as to why we all have to work so hard in order to experience life on planet earth.

At its very core, the world economy is based on a rigged fiat monetary system that is explicitly designed to create and perpetuate debt slavery, both personal and public. The dollar is a private enterprise, privately owned by a select few people who create money for the rest of us and get paid like gods to do so.

For every dollar that is put into play in this world, a dollar plus interest is then owed to the people who own the money. The more we do, the deeper in debt we go. It’s guaranteed. At present, more money is owed to the money masters than is actually in circulation. This is bondage, it is servitude, and it is slavery.

It’s also the secret which has allowed the 1% to become the 1%, and why income equality between workers and plantation owners is so outrageous.

We don’t have time to resist any of this in any meaningful way, because we’re struggling to make it work in the corporate world, jockeying against each other for illusory wealth and prestige on a playing field created by criminals. The further we go down this road, the more control these people are given over our lives, and the more intrusive they are permitted to be.

The hamster wheel won’t stop until we have honest money.

Final Thoughts

So, we know that the corporate culture as is doesn’t serve us well, so we must then ask ourselves what we do wish for our lives to be like. Do we really need to buy into all that is being offered here?

The movement for change is growing, and avenues for expressing yourself outside of this system are growing along side of our awareness of just how ridiculous and toxic the corporate work culture has become.

Life is all possibility and our highest potential awaits us, although, before we can fully realize it, we’ll have to break through the crusty fog of wrongfully imposed culture and fully activate our imagination, creativity and courage.

Why Are We Still Working?

Posted on March 10, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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By Mike Dowson

Source: NewMatilda.com

This may be an opportune moment to consider the question. Especially if you’re not actually working.

You may have retired. Perhaps you’ve just left university, considering your options. Perhaps you’re taking a welcome break.

Maybe you have no choice but to take a break. Did you retire early because your job was axed? Has the casual work you depend on dried up? Have you been unable to find a job, despite your qualifications?

Perhaps, as you read this, you’re at work, filling in time, forgoing a holiday. Or at the beach, while the kids play in the surf, watching for emails on your phone.

Of course, it’s obvious why we work. Money. You don’t get something for nothing. And everything is so expensive these days.

If anything, most of us need to work more. Both spouses, extra hours, second jobs. Would anyone, except an idiot, seriously suggest we should all be working less?

Well, actually, yes.

As long ago as 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by now, people in technologically advanced societies wouldn’t need to work much at all. When Keynes said this, advances in technology were yielding extraordinary increases in productivity. The implications seemed obvious. If it took less time to produce what we needed, surely we’d work less.

It turns out that for much of the 20^th Century average working hours in developed countries steadily fell. Then, around the 1970s, the trend plateaued. In some countries, it reversed and working hours began to climb again. This occurred at the same time women were entering the workforce in great numbers so total workforce participation also increased.

In Australia, by the new millennium, many full time employees were working more than their grandparents had.

What happened? Did technology fail to deliver the gains Keynes expected?

On the contrary. Technological advancement outstripped even the giddy imaginations of futurists from a century ago. We can grow food, dig up minerals, make fridges and bridges, move things and ourselves around the planet and share knowledge and information much faster with a fraction of the workforce it once took.

But if staggering productivity gains haven’t manifested as lower working hours, where did they go?

Some prominent economists, including some Nobel laureates, have grappled with this question.

Gary Becker observed that our appetite for material goods has expanded along with our ability to produce them. Instead of working less hours, we opted for bigger houses with more gadgets, which we replace more often.

This process has been fuelled by a deluge of marketing, which persuades us to consume things we previously didn’t recognise a need for.

Does that explain it? Anthropologist David Graeber doesn’t think so. If it continually takes fewer human hours to produce these things, shouldn’t we be able to afford them without working more? What are all these working hours producing?

Graeber argues that, although productive jobs have, in fact, been steadily automated away just as predicted, we have also seen a vast proliferation of new jobs that only seem to exist to keep people working.

Consider this. Productivity growth has stalled in Australia. How can this be? Technology hasn’t stopped advancing. The time we should be winning back through productivity gains must be getting reabsorbed.

Productivity returns are highest in capital-intensive industries like mining and manufacturing. As those jobs disappear, either replaced by technology, or lost altogether, the workforce moves into labour-intensive industries like hospitality and professional services. This dilutes the gains in the other industries.

At the same time, unemployment has been trending up since 2008. Young people especially, are out of work. The number of underemployed people, who would work more if they could, is also high. More jobs are casual.

There’s a downward trend in job prospects for new graduates. Some of them settle for part-time work or a free internship. Many find work which is unrelated to primary qualification. That’s now more likely to be in a job without benefits, or multiple such jobs.

There’s another factor. Our lives are now longer relative to our working lives. We tend to start full-time work later, after years of study, and more of life is spent in retirement. Many jobless older people are struggling with the cost of living. Many would work more if they could.

Instead of everyone working less, what seems to be happening is that experienced workers, in professions which are still in demand, are working more, while the young, the old, and those with skills which no longer attract investment have difficulty finding work.

MIT academics Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson refer to this as the great decoupling. For many years, real GDP per capita and median income rose in tandem. Since the 1970s, wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen dramatically, while corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are now at their highest level, despite recurring economic shocks.

To put it simply, labour isn’t as important to growth as it used to be.

There is nothing in the economic outlook or current government policy settings which suggests this trend is going to change.

Automation, artificial intelligence and robotics are encroaching on more human occupations. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) has estimated that as many as 40 per cent of the jobs that are left are vulnerable to replacement by technology over the next decade.

No matter how many politicians chant the jobs mantra for the media, more productive jobs are going to disappear.

The terrible irony in this situation is that there is so much that needs to be done.

Among the underemployed graduates I personally know of, there is a psychologist, a soil chemist and a biodiversity specialist. Have we run out of things to do in the areas of mental health, agriculture and the environment?

Mental illness is widespread. Our food bowl is under threat from climate change. We have a mass extinction on our hands.

What we don’t have, apparently, is sufficient money to invest in making full use of the talent that is available to face these challenges.

Why? What failure of collective enterprise could result in this absurd incongruity?

Capital, like technology, is largely blind to human need. Capital goes where the profit is. If there was profit in healing minds and saving species, some of it would go there. While there is more profit in alcohol, gambling and deforestation, more of it will go there.

People don’t register their desire for a healthy society by shopping for it. Capital doesn’t get that signal through the market. The argument that consumers somehow direct the course of civilisation by choosing dolphin-friendly tuna and “eco” cleaning products is stupid and facile. The factors that most affect our destiny are not options in the supermarket.

If a healthy society is something we want, we have to act collectively. Since few people are active major shareholders, for the time being that task tends to fall to governments.

Whether enacted via direct spending, or by creating incentives for private investment, government initiatives are funded from collective surplus – in other words, tax revenue or borrowing against future earnings increases. Despite political spin to the contrary, our tax is low compared to the OECD as a proportion of GDP.

The great decoupling has coincided with rising inequality. Those with money to invest get rich. Those with only labour to sell miss out. Capital doesn’t like to pay for labour, and it doesn’t like to pay tax either.

But why, if our labour isn’t needed for profit, are we still working?

Faced with a looming crisis in social services, but committed ideologically to low taxation, successive Australian governments used tax concessions to turn superannuation and real estate – where most Australians keep their wealth – into a mini-capitalist alternative to social security.

Of course, this only works while people have jobs that provide super and sufficient income to buy housing. And it doesn’t help the real economy, the place where we apply technological innovation to produce things of real value, especially things we can export.

Nevertheless, one group of people enriched themselves through property investment, pushing up the value of real estate around the country in the process. Another group of people became affluent with nothing more than a job that paid super and a home in a good location.

With commodity revenue pouring in from overseas, it was easy to believe we had discovered some kind of magic prosperity formula. But the surplus generated from commodities mostly wasn’t invested back into productive activity. Instead it was turned into tax cuts and other benefits. These had broad electoral appeal but favoured the wealthy, and encouraged further speculation.

The real estate boom didn’t make the country richer. Nor did it make housing more accessible. It simply transferred wealth from one group of people to another. In the process, it put a basic need out of reach of many, including young people, and diverted investment from the productive economy. It also lured a huge number of Australians into precarious debt.

Contrary to popular opinion, encouraged by unscrupulous politics, we have relatively low government debt, but we now have the largest per capita private debt in the world.

So why are we still working? Because we’re in debt.

Middle-aged people are the ones working long hours. They’re also the ones buying houses. And they’re the ones with the most credit card debt as well.

The generation before them had affordable housing, job security and a real social safety net. They’re not so fortunate, but for the ones after them, a steady job with enough for a deposit has become a kind of Holy Grail, and social security is survival at best.

The current trend points to a time when a young graduate might start adult life with a HECS debt, go into credit card debt on a part-time job and a free internship, and eventually get into massive debt to own a flat her grandparents could have bought with ease.

She might even find a job in financial services, if they haven’t all been automated. It’s the sector that helps wealthy people turn their money into more money. It’s also where ordinary people go to borrow money for a house.

Debt is profitable. Even during the great decoupling, as productive jobs disappear, and real wages fall, it’s proven possible to harness the aspirations of ordinary people for profit, without any of the effort or intelligence required for developing new productive capacity, by simply enticing a greater proportion of personal income into servicing debt.

The mining boom is over. Not that it was ever as important as the miners like to claim. Manufacturing continues its long decline. The banks have been warned they are overexposed.

Whatever combination of policy levers is applied, we need to create the conditions that direct investment into producing things that we and the world need, while caring for our environment and our population. We don’t need to direct it in into unearned private wealth at the expense of our neighbours, our country and future generations.

Our current class of politicians has so far failed to even acknowledge our present circumstances, let alone articulate a credible vision for change. Many of them became rich from property investment. Our Prime Minister is a former banker.

Naturally, the people who’ve done well for themselves are reluctant to sacrifice their advantage. Nevertheless, we have to change the narrative around “wealth creation” from one which is essentially about personal enrichment from gaming the system, to one which is about mutual benefit through innovation and productivity.

Change has come, whether we like it or not. If we respond intelligently, taking advantage of the potential we have developed through our education system, we may very well end up working less, but not in a divided society, with many of us struggling to survive.

Leviathan and Behemoth

Posted on January 20, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Shaw

Source: Center for a Stateless Society

Introduction

The capitalist economy has gone through another shock, and the potential for another, larger one is on the horizon. While it’s seemingly in its death throes, capitalism continues to fuel growth. Under such a system we have seen a vast improvement in general living standards across the globe, despite rigged markets and the omnipresent power of the state. However, who is this growth for? While absolute poverty has been rolled back, and in many Western nations completely eliminated, we still see a large, indebted underclass, a Global South regularly sold out to the interests of capital and a system of vast wealth that only seems accessible to a privileged few. Economists may say that if we look at BRIC countries we see an equalisation of wealth and growth with the West, but these BRIC markets are used as cogs in a hegemonic state-corporate machine. Third World entrepreneurship isn’t encouraged, but rather sidelined for corporate dominance. This is a system that needs to end. The debt economy, big government, the corporate-state partnership and modern globalisation all need to end. In their place we need truly free markets, where cooperation and exchange are paramount and aren’t controlled by corporate or government interests.

Our neoliberal society is composed of corporate hegemony backed by state power. By corporate hegemony I mean the power modern capital has over governance. This isn’t just found within corporations, but within guild-like occupational boards (Lawyers and Doctors and their licencing requirements) and corporate trade unions that support the maintenance of wage labour at the expense of worker independence from the structure of capital. Any markets we see are rigged in favour of corporate interests. The major monopolies of government control make sure that markets are a tool of big business and the ability of workers to break free from this paradigm is limited if not impossible. The entry barriers to markets, the restrictions on self-employment and the continued lobbying of government for patronage and favourable legislation leads to a corrupt, crony system that relies on the indenture of the poor in favour of employers and business.

There are many libertarians who unfortunately see this system as just and fair. They see sweatshop labour as an excellent solution to Third World poverty. The idea of growth is given religious prescience, without realising cultural antecedents and the importance of community within the realm of the individual. They don’t understand the power dynamics at play, and the continued collusion of corporate and state interests. They fail to see the monopolisation of social institutions and the commodification of culture and life. The destruction of livelihoods all in the name of GDP growth. This is not a free market, but rather capitalism at work. To move away from this we need to understand that free, or freed, markets are economic organisations free from coercive control, where the individual and community are the key players and profit is not reliant on its exploitative features, but rather the ability to meet real demand.

We need to look at the current capitalist system from the anarchist perspective that I put forward in this paper. Modern capitalism is a state-based system, reliant on enforced hierarchies and the provision of false choice. Real choice would confer power on individuals and communities, while under today’s system real choice is in the hands of bureaucrats and corporate oligarchies. Chartier’s definitions of capitalism, “capitalism: an economic system that features a symbiotic relationship between big business and government”[1] and “capitalism: rule—of workplaces, society, and (if there is one) the state—by capitalists (that is, by a relatively small number of people who control investable wealth and the means of production)”[2] shines light on this conception. Rather than capitalism being a system of free markets as posited by some libertarians (Block, Mises, Hayek, etc.) it is instead a system reliant on big government and its institutions and the control of said institutions via capital.

The vulgar libertarians who view the capitalist economy as some form of free market do not understand the forms of power present. If a worker wants to start a collectively-owned business, can he? Not without huge capital requirements and regulatory hoops to jump through. How about setting up a mutual credit system with a different currency? Well there are legal tender laws that in the United State are enforced with more brutality than the punishments given for heinous crimes[3]. When talking of free markets, we need to understand that freedom is only relative to where the power lies. If it lies with the state and its subsidiaries, then freedom is conferred on large employers and corporate unions whom receive forms of state funding and favourable regulation. If it lay with individuals and communities, we would most likely see a move away from one-size-fits-all regulation, the processes of commodification through rentierism and arbitrary entry barriers.

The Regulatory Apparatus

The regulatory apparatuses found within the economy also benefit the capitalist structure. While generally seen as a bulwark against corporate power, the regulations found in an economy create entry barriers to markets and a form of implicit subsidy to big business, as these businesses rent-seek government for more regulation, allowing for a monopoly within particular economic sectors. We can see in the banking, energy, manufacturing and retail sectors that this is the case. Childs noted this in relation to the development of monopoly power in American business during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He states “this, then, was the basic context of big business; these were the problems that it faced. How did it react? Almost unanimously, it turned to the power of the state to get what it could not get by voluntary means”[4]. In particular Childs saw this occurring in the rail industry in America during the late 19th century. Massive competition had begun in the rail industry, which massively sunk profits for established companies and encouraged many start ups and smaller competitors. As large rail companies weren’t competitive enough in this environment, they came to rely on government intervention, where regulatory boards were created staffed mostly by executives from the large rail companies.

This is what regulation is really about. It isn’t a way of protecting the hapless consumer from the ravages of a free market, but is rather a tool of corporate power that forms entry barriers and enforces particular dichotomies of ownership and organisation in an economy. Capitalism becomes a system of patronage, where corporations gain favour due to their money and power, which itself comes from the state in the first place. As Paul notes “the rich are more than happy to secure for themselves a share of the loot – for example, in the form of subsidised low-interest loans…bailouts when their risky loans go sour, or regulatory schemes that hurt their smaller competitors”[5]. Rifkin shows a similar process, describing how “the critical industries that made up the infrastructure…banded together in a mega lobby to ensure…financial underwriting, as well as industry-friendly codes, regulations, and standards to ensure market success”[6].

The regulatory apparatuses also have the effect of distorting economies of scale, decoupling supply from demand and favouring largesse in business and ownership models. Thus we see the development of high overhead costs which restrict market entry to best capitalised of entrepreneurs. By limiting competition, we see perverse operations occurring that favour the interests of business over the worker and consumer. Thus things like planned obsolescence, guaranteed markets and a continuation of private gain and socialised loss. As had been noted by Childs, private cartels were difficult to maintain. Even the rail trusts, themselves built in contrived, government-produced markets, were ravaged by competition from smaller rail providers[7] that favoured more local economies of scale. So these corporations looked to the government, who enshrined their demands into acts and legislation which created cartels that were much more easily enforced. We just need to look where wage laws, licensure laws and planning/zoning laws are coming from and who lobbies for them. Invariably its dome by corporations and their lobbying arms. We also forms of legal privilege, as in the case of limited liability and corporate personhood, which are really only accessible with very high capital costs and a developed shareholder clientele. These systems are purely artificial, and whether they would work voluntarily is not the question. Rather it is, if they are efficient, why do they need the government to provide these privileges and apparatuses. The answer is simple, they aren’t efficient.

Even when there are laws supposedly to ameliorate the effects of marketisation, as in the case of welfare and government-provided services, they are usually built on the back of resilient communities who developed their own systems, and usually end up allowing employers to pay subpar wages and benefits and lessen the strength of community relations. It builds layers onto a poor foundation. Or to put it another way, the corporate-state nexus is putting a cinderblock on toothpicks. Bureaucrats don’t fully understand the problem with this but realise it is unstable. So to stabilise it, they put more toothpicks under the cinderblock, thinking it will stabilise. However, the system is inherently unstable and propping it up denies the inevitable.

This assurance of market success shows that under a truly free market they wouldn’t exist, or if they did it would be on a much smaller scale. The regulatory web is just another power dynamic that allows for capture and control. To describe this as a free market is laughable. These processes are completely involuntary, reliant on extortion through taxation and allow for the redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich and privileged.

The Money Monopoly

While regulation, which “far from coming against the wishes of the regulated interests, was openly welcomed by them in nearly every case”[8], is an important part of the corporate state, the original four legal monopolies (as identified by Tucker), money, land, tariffs and patents, allowed for the development of rent-seeking corporations. These four monopolies, or as I see them structural monopolies as they create the structure of the socio-economic paradigm, are fundamentals of capitalism.

The money monopoly allows for the restriction of credit and the development of debt-based models that destroy stores of value and make individuals slaves to the desires of governments and banks through modern forms of debt peonage. As Dowd notes, over the 20th century “the US dollar has lost almost 85 per cent of its purchasing power even by official government statistics; for its part, sterling has lost 98 per cent of its value over the last century”[9]. The restriction of credit coupled with the inflationary tendencies of modern fiat currencies mean the poorest are effectively forced into wage labour, as they rely on pitiable increases in nominal wages and are unable to gain any real credit for self-employment or collective worker-owned enterprises. What happens is a redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest. Long shows that “inflationary monetary policies on the part of central banks also tend to benefit those businesses that receive the inflated money first in the form of loans and investments, when they are still facing the old, lower prices”[10]. The pre-inflation money allows investors and banks to capitalise on new production and investment while the poorer elements of a society receive minimal benefits as the inflationary course makes its run, with prices rising and wages following later.

This also leads to massive levels of debt found currently throughout the globe, as credit instruments are used to make up for stagnant wages that can’t afford increasing land prices and subsequently rent prices, as well as an increase in the price of consumer goods that are a significant chunk of working people’s wages. The process of rent extraction via high interest rates follows from this, as “the money monopoly also includes entry barriers against cooperative banks and prohibitions against private issuance of banknotes, by which access to finance capital is restricted and interest rates are kept artificially high”[11]. Carson notes further that the elimination of controlled interest rates would lead to “significant numbers (of workers) retiring in their forties or fifties, cutting back to part-time, or starting businesses; with jobs competing for workers, the effect on bargaining power would be revolutionary”[12]. The current banking system leads to the necessitation of wage labour through restricted credit dissemination and debt-based forms of finance.

The Land Monopoly

The land monopoly is another lynchpin of capitalism. Most modern land is either nationalised or corporatised through state structures, leading to massive land centralisation and the process of land expropriation that is visible in much of the Third World. Alternative land arrangements, such as those organised by tribes and local networks, are swallowed up in this process. Many commons regimes that have existed for centuries are being eliminated in favour of the interests of capital. This process of enclosure of common lands began at “the end of the Medieval Age, when royal and feudal landowners began to enclose common lands, especially in Tudor England and Trastamara Spain. Through legal and political manoeuvres, wealthy landowners marked and hedged off sections of the commons for their own profits, impoverishing many villagers and ultimately destroying their communitarian way of life”[13]. The enclosures have continued into the 20th century, where “common lands have suffered a third, global wave of commodification and enclosure, ‘land grabbing’ spurred by the dominant neoliberal doctrine and competition for non-renewable natural resources and supported now by the evolutionary theory of land rights”[14]. The modern enclosures of land occur most noticeably in Africa and South America. We see the elimination of common land owned by native tribes and the raping of natural resources. The Niger Delta and its oil reserves show this acutely, with oil spills being common and almost no compensation to the farmers and workers who rely on the Delta for their livelihoods.

In effect this is a process of neo-colonialism pushed through via the Washington Consensus that is epitomised in international groups like the IMF and WTO. The plight of Bangladeshi workers is caused by this problem of neocolonial practices. In Bangladesh “wealthy and influential people have encroached on public lands…, often with help of officials in land-administration and management departments”[15] which has led to a result of “Many of the rural poor in Bangladesh are landless, have only small plots of land, are depending on tenancy, or sharecropping”[16]. What follows is a continuation of the development of a landless mass of cheap labour as a result of the nationalisation and corporatisation of land.

Then there are planning and zoning laws and property laws which act as a form of implicit land nationalisation in many Western countries. Among their many effects, they artificially inflate land prices, which has a knock on effect of making housing unaffordable and making the purchase of land extremely difficult for small businesses. This further encourages the process of rentierism and indebtedness as individuals have to get out mortgages or rent accommodation, and individuals looking to start a business are priced out, thus favouring large corporations. If you want to self-build a home or business, it becomes impossible. Instead a series of state-favoured land developers are able to land bank and rent out at extortionate rates. They aren’t subject to competition and making new land isn’t possible, so you create a system of patronage and favouritism, simply adding to the enforced necessitation of wage labour.

These processes of land appropriation lead to the development of land speculation via government-favoured industries, creating artificially high land prices which price out small businesses, community groups and anyone who isn’t able seek rent from the state. This speculation also fuels boom-bust cycles, with much of the credit used by investors and businesses being put into the easy investments of land and housing. This creates economic bubbles through the wide diffusion of mortgages and an increase in house and infrastructure building that isn’t necessarily needed. In London, we see this playing out with high-price apartments and high-rises that don’t address the needs of the wider population and are fueled, at least partially, via QE-induced credit. The development of a rentier society occurs. With land prices held artificially high, rich landowners are able to rent out their properties at high prices, creating economic precarity and stimulating the larger wage labour monopoly that is caused by a combination of this monopoly and the money monopoly.

The Larger Wage Labour Monopoly

As previously mentioned, credit is restricted thus funding options are limited for workers. Add to this high land prices, and the ability to buy a house or develop a business are severely restricted, developing the large pool of wage labour seen today. This obviously favours large-scale employers such as corporations who are able develop to their current size due to this wage labour monopoly. It leads to a means of surplus value, or rent, extraction. As Solow notes “one important reason for the failure of real wages to keep up with productivity is that the division of rent in industry has been shifting against the labor side for several decades”[17].

Alongside the two monopolies, the increase in precarious wage labour is compounded by the restriction of collective action and the development of monopolist unions that complement the centralised economic actors. The legislation governing strikes and the ability to make a union add to this problem, making it difficult for freelance workers to unionise and stopping the development of radical trade unions and company unions. Thatcher’s trade union reforms in the UK created such a problem as the majority of private sector unions are part of the corporate system of economic centralisation. The final nail in the coffin is the minimum wage. This creates a wage ceiling and simply allows corporations to price smaller competitors out of the market while subsequently limiting the hours and benefits workers receive. As most minimum wages aren’t enough to live on, many workers rely on debt-based credit which pushes individuals further into wage labour, creating debt-led wage slavery and maintaining a massive, centralising economic monopoly on the choice of workers.

As Solow explains, in the US “in the past 10 years productivity has increased 12.3 percent in the non-farm business sector of our economy while real compensation of labor has increased by only 5.1 percent”[18]. So what we see is a form of surplus value extraction, whereby the excess product of labour is captured by the interests of capital and removed from the compensation of labour. This can’t simply be explained away by using the marginalist critique. The value of a product is at least partially informed by its labour input. Marshall’s analysis shows that “price was determined, at any given time, by the balance between the demand and supply that actually existed at that moment. As the time factor came into play…price approached closer and closer to cost”[19] thus showing that the equilibrium of supply to demand moves from subjective criteria of value toward the input of labour in that value. Again looking at Solow’s productivity figures, the compensation of labour isn’t in proportion to production.

Hodgskin’s idea of a market artificially privileged with rents, profits and interest becomes a reality in the modern context. The increase in freelancing and labour market individuation means the expropriation of rent and the limitation of choice, particularly as unions are simply a representation of the corporate interest, particularly since the Wagner Act in America and the trade union reforms in Britain. The individualisation of labour serves to increase these artificial privileges, meaning can be paid less and thus become more reliant on debt instruments such as mortgages and credit cards to simply earn a living and have a roof over their head. This system is even more acute in the Global South, with the restriction of choice via the structural monopolies being almost explicitly enforced via the government as land in enclosed and regulations used to restrict microeconomic activity that doesn’t serve the interests of global value chains. Their human capital is monopolised, wages restricted, collective action completely banned and working conditions extremely poor. The main profit garnered from this is simply the mark-up created by internal tariffs and intellectual property (to be discussed later in this paper), which limits domestic market production and serves only the interests of capital and big business, as both the workers and consumers are given low wages and higher prices respectively.

What happens then is the construction of a monopsony situation in wages and labour, where the product of labour isn’t adequately paid, becoming widespread due to companies paying below this level. This is compounded by wage laws favoured by corporate interests, and an inability for the worker to capture this value through collective bargaining or through the means of owning one’s productive capacities due to market entry barriers that restrict self-employment and worker or community ownership. It constrains the real choice of workers and puts the power dynamics upon employers and bureaucrats.

Tariffs

The next two monopolies that Tucker highlighted further the centralisation of economic power toward corporations. Tariffs are simply a form of direct state intervention to favour domestic industry over foreign competitors. There are arguments favourable to this position, such as those by List and Chang. However, there is a significant time limit on the ability of tariffs to produce any sort of growth (usually artificially induced by state policies), and eventually many of the protected industries become bloated and begin to rely on further government subsidy.

The use of tariffs today is much more limited than it was during the mercantile years of the 17th and 18th centuries. However, one area where tariffs are still largely used is modern agriculture in the West, particularly the US and the EU. The Farm Bill in the US creates price distortions within food markets that favours large agribusiness over small, family farms. As Reitzig explains “the farm bill perpetuates the myth of cheap food. It subsidizes Big Ag so that BA can sell its food to the market cheap and you find it at the grocery store for less than you’d pay for it from your local farmer”[20]. However as “it costs the small local farmer about the same to produce the same food as the Big Ag farmer”[21], all the Farm Bill does is redistribute tax money toward large agricultural firms. The economies of scale thus get changed, with farmers forced into retail sector bulk sell offs that are increasingly inefficient and perpetuate the agricultural tariffs and subsidies.

There also forms of internal tariffs that protect large industry through direct subsidisation. For example “between 1973 and 2003, the US government paid out $74 billion in energy subsidies to promote R&D in fossil fuels and nuclear power”[22]. This was despite these companies having huge profit margins, which shows the actual profitability of these industries. They are reliant on institutions of theft to simply develop critical infrastructure as a result of their internal unproductiveness and their falling foul of the economic calculation problem. It creates a system of perverse incentives as these firms aren’t induced to work and develop in smarter, cleaner ways and instead produce the same limited output. This is corporatism at its finest, with government purposefully favouring large firms over small firms, and thus encouraging wasteful practices. Returning to farming, the EU holds similar policies, which in many ways restrict crop diversification and mean that certain farmers are favoured over others. This leads to artificially low prices which allows for retail monopolisation due to farmers being unable to sell their own product due to EU regulations which create this system. It is a continuation of the obstinate incentives that leads to overproduction, false demand and the entrenchment of economic disadvantages and inefficiencies.

Patents

Patents act in a similar way. They privilege large businesses in rigged markets and allow for centralisation and monopolisation. “The patent privilege has been used on a massive scale to promote concentration of capital, erect entry barriers, and maintain a monopoly of advanced technology in the hands of western corporations. It is hard even to imagine how much more decentralized the economy would be without it”[23]. Patents act to lock up innovation in a legal quagmire. It puts new technology into the hands of capital, limiting its distribution and creating a rentier system, where the privilege to use new technology and even knowledge is commodified by large corporations in collusion with the state.

This inability to access new technologies and knowledge creates a form of entry barrier, with smaller competitors being unable to afford this access. Most modern tech companies (Google, Apple, Microsoft) are in effect monopolists of knowledge and technology, limiting its accessibility and collecting the rent they charge on these products. Their market position becomes entrenched with restrictive data laws and copyrights that mean the passage of information is blocked by virtual, artificial toll gates that wouldn’t exist if not for coercive legislation.

Then there is the direct government subsidisation of research and development (R&D) spending that allows for large companies to reap “monopoly profits from technology it didn’t spend a penny to develop”[24]. Modern tech companies then are not only monopolists of patented of knowledge but also rentiers of technology they had no real part in developing. So while small inventors and start ups toil away trying to create a product that can only be sold on a rigged market, large firms benefit purely because of their power and the revolving door of government benefaction. Similar processes occur in military-based R&D spending, where corporations are given large grants and procurement contracts to develop military hardware and weaponry that on a freed market would not even necessarily be required by any customer or business. As Chomsky notes, in the US “the Pentagon system has long been the country’s biggest welfare program, transferring massive public funds to high-tech industry on the pretext of defense and security”[25]. These companies’ profits and growth are not then created in a market mechanism of competition and demand-led supply, but rather in a bubble of government-led protection, where they ride on the coattails of stolen innovation and forms of theft AKA patents and taxation respectively. “If they had to face the market, they’d be out selling rags or something, but they need a nanny state, a powerful nanny state to pour money into their pockets”[26].

Further, this process of patenting becomes a pure form of commodification as they remove products and ideas from their cultural origins. For example, the Human Genome Diversity Project used DNA from certain indigenous tribes in Central and South America. Some of this DNA was patented, and thus removed from the culture it came from without any sort of compensation by the HGDP and the beneficiaries of this knowledge. Biocolonialism and biopiracy are the best terms for this occurrence. By extracting culturally sensitive information and knowledge, a process of commodification occurs, and the whole concept of property, that of the sovereign ownership of the individual or collective, becomes redundant. Further the innovative capacities that supposedly come from intellectual property are limited if not completely negative. In fact the information that was patented was found to be 30% less innovative than the information released for full public use[27].

This analysis is backed by evidence from Scherer, who showed “a survey of 91 companies in which only seven ‘accorded high significance to patent protection as a factor in their R & D investments.’ Most of them described patents as “the least important of considerations.’ Most companies considered their chief motivation in R & D decisions to be ‘the necessity of remaining competitive, the desire for efficient production, and the desire to expand and diversify their sales”[28]. Thus patents and intellectual property “eliminate ‘the competitive spur for further research’ because incremental innovation based on others’ patents is prohibited, and because the holder can ‘rest on his laurels for the entire period of the patent.’ with no fear of a competitor improving his invention”[29].

Transport Subsidies

The fifth monopoly, transport subsidies, is one that has been identified by Carson. As Carson describes, “spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to ‘externalize its costs’ on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses”[30]. These transportation subsidies allow for the development of large business operations, particularly in the retail and manufacturing sectors. By subsidising the movement of goods by heavy duty vehicles, it means they are given a state-based competitive advantage against smaller, local competitors.

Companies like Wal-Mart and Tesco are able to price their goods artificially cheaply as a result of not adding the transportation costs. Many of these companies actively lobbied for such infrastructure projects. When the interstate system was being built, it “had both an immediate stimulus effect on the industries that participated…oil companies, general contractors, cement manufacturers, steel companies…were among the dozens of industries involved in the building of the great interstate highway system”[31] showing the degree of corporate-state cooperation. It was because these infrastructure projects benefitted their products and models that they lobbied for them.

Of course Carson’s view of this quite US-centric. In much of Europe, particularly the UK, we see other regulations that create a very different kind of transport subsidy. While these nations do subsidise transport via taxation to pay for roads rather than using user fees or road pricing, they also have high fuel duties and regulation on forms of transport, such as regulations on truck design and usage. The fuel duties act as a subsidy in the sense that they destroy small transport firms and simply monopolise the transport industry as only larger companies can afford the higher prices. The forms of regulation mentioned mean that innovation into new vehicle design and competition between firms is limited and simply continues the dominance of particular transport and production companies that aren’t subject to market competition. Thus what we see are two different types of transport subsidies that both act to continue the current economic paradigm.

These subsidies serve to amplify economies of scale, creating national and international markets largely in the control of corporate interests. These large markets create systems of disequilibrium, with monopoly interests being able to develop oligopoly markets from which rents can be extracted. A modern example of this is the creation of HS2 in the UK. It serves as a vanity project for political and bureaucratic elites, who can gain well-paying jobs as political advisors and construction directors. It also allows for the continuation of the North-South divide, with large London-centric firms sucking out talent from the North and Midlands, at little expense to themselves. As Wellings describes it, it’s an example of externalised costs and internalised benefits, with vested interests serving to gain[32]. Economies of scale are created artificially, with competition in local markets suffering due to a project only favourable to London-based businesses. Local economies of scale, which are more natural and more open to individual considerations and supply and demand, are priced out by government intervention. Local transport projects, like roads linking market towns and local rail infrastructure, are ignored due to a lack of political prestige for politicians and their donors and lobbyists.

Road and rail subsidised by the state leads to the current economies of scale that favour large, centralised business entities. It also prices out and discourages private infrastructure projects that could actually make an economic difference by increasing competition and lowering prices, while maintaining local economies of scale which benefit large swathes of areas that currently don’t benefit from the subsidised corporate model. These three monopolies further the wage labour monopoly, by erecting entry barriers against small business and self-employment and by creating feudalistic patent regimes and transport systems that create favourable economies of scale. National markets serve larger companies and hierarchical organisation, and international markets continue to serve and enlarge this. It pushes real costs onto the consumer/taxpayer, and further creates illegitimate profits taken from oligopoly markets.

The Corporate Infrastructure

This wage labour monopoly, with the five structural monopolies feeding it, is the basis of the modern corporate dominated economy. As a result, modern corporations act as oppressive actors on the world stage, using wage slaves and forms of indebtedness to develop the massive growth seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Carson states “in a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege described above is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else’s labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery”[33].

Then there is the system of incentives created by this corporate-state monopoly. Infrastructures are developed that maintain the inefficiencies. Rifkin’s analysis of a series of Industrial Revolutions shows this to be the case. The Second Industrial Revolution, the current economic system we live in according to Rifkin, is reliant on state-invested infrastructure and subsidisation[34]. The subsidisation of natural capital is one example of this. Roberts shows that “the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP”[35]. The term natural capital is obviously a broad, all-encompassing term. The specifics are those of the production of pollutants that is subsidised by specific tax breaks and forms of limited liability. These follow from elements of the land monopoly which means pollution becomes an externalised cost upon taxpayers, furthering the inefficiencies of a particular economic paradigm, which Rifkin calls the Second Industrial Revolution but what I would call capitalism.

The maintenance of this system means most companies that are reliant on fossil fuels and the energy and transport infrastructures that follow from them have no incentive to divest into new market ventures, but instead have an interest in resource and capital accumulation. It creates ‘revolving door’ government, where lobbyists persist in convincing policy makers for subsidies here and tax breaks there all the while relying on the rent extraction they gain from state intervention.

This process within resource extraction and energy use is more widely seen in the general production processes of capitalism. The levels of overproduction and continued consumption are fed by the structural monopolies, as well as justifying the wage labour monopoly. To fund the levels of consumption needed to continue production means people are put into a paradigm of working longer to buy more things to enjoy. Its paradoxical as you spend more time at work, thus limiting the amount of time you have to actually enjoy consumer goods. Further, as goods become more expensive due to increasing cost mark-ups and inflationary policies, and housing prices and rents go up due to land speculation and monopoly ownership, more people become reliant on debt instruments to fund their everyday lives and their increasing consumer spending. This has created a precipitous debt bubble as Steve Keen’s work has shown. It has also meant that much of the current growth seen since the Great Recession has been on the back of consumer spending, as Blanchflower has documented.

Incentives are created which lead to increasing, unnatural growth and increasing levels of debt. In particular, levels of corporate debt have skyrocketed during the recession of 2008. This is due to systemic overproduction and waste that has developed due to mass production systems used by most multinationals. The structural subsidies create this system where large production facilities with forms of guaranteed profit are needed for massive market areas, usually on a national or international level. Carson has pointed out that modern markets are hardly an example of spontaneous order and aren’t reliant on supply and demand[36]. Rather the system is reliant on a system of planning, with codified relations between suppliers and distributors and systems of guaranteed consumption through external market control in the form of internal sales tariffs and the financialisation of the economy.

Internal sales tariffs limit what stores/areas products can be sold in, and are only viable as a result of intellectual property regimes that allow for increased costs and a further disconnect between production and consumption. Financialisation on the other hand simply maintains the production systems as well as processes of commodification. It makes corporate debt a commodity, and puts value into meaningless products, which allows for more accumulation and overproduction as business isn’t rewarded for genuine wealth production and creation, which comes from artificial processes, but is rewarded rather by debt financialisation, unsustainable growth in bureaucracy and the continued expropriation of surplus value, or human capital. This also represents a commodification process, as the social relation of debt, as identified by Graeber and Martin, is put into an economistic context, with debt serving the purposes of profit and capital. The debt relationship, that’s shaped by community relations and gift-giving and receiving[37], is taken as a value of capital. And this debt is allowed to build up and shape other economic activity. Consumer purchase after consumer purchase represents this. It is encouraged, and when it slows the government takes over and funds through quantitative easing programs, allowing for the construction of bigger, more complex bubbles. It shows that corporation and government are two sides of the same coin.

We have to remember that as much as governments, corporations are just as likely to be effected by the knowledge problem. To get around, every relationship and process is effectively planned. Business to business relations, as seen in distribution and supply chains, are maintained for decades by large manufacturers so as to continue guaranteed buyers of their products. In other cases, the supply and warehousing operations are subsumed by the manufacturer, owning every process from production to sale. Global value chains are an outgrowth of this hierarchalised control and planning, with much of their success being guaranteed by government. It is dictatorial governments in the Global South (who usually have the backing of the US government and its interests) that ban collective action among labourers through extraordinarily harsh measures, it is trade agreements with their backing by Western governments that maintain artificial property rights such as patents and it is government that externalises the cost of global transportation of these goods onto the taxpayer, thus distorting economies of scale to favour the large corporations and forms of state-corporate economic planning. In other the words, the commodification and Sovietisation of the economy.

Culture Under Capitalism

A paradigm that enforces this economic hierarchy is created, where life is work and your main identity is around the soul-crushing job you inhabit. Social relations are commodified and local economic activity is strangled. The whole idea of community in the 21st century is being replaced by a centralised state and economic activity that has no interest in that community, but is inward looking, determining profit margins rather building strong societal relations. The ability to escape this paradigm is extremely limited by the coercive hand of the state. It restricts collective organising, eliminates common and private property and develops extremely insufficient systems of economic organisation.

What we’ve seen is the disembedding of markets from their cultural and social origins[38]. Relations of debt and consumption, which were as much in political institutions and based around social relations, have been expropriated by capital. Thus instead of markets forming one of many different idea of economic organisation of which it could complement, we see the neoliberal discourse of praising markets and even seeing marketisation in what have been social relations up to this day. Thus public services such as health and energy are wrapped in discourses of competition and corporate ownership. However, markets aren’t actually like this. If we look to genuinely free markets, which are few and far between, we don’t see large production and corporate ownership. Instead we see markets crafted around local institutions and genuine demand for certain goods and services. Ownership is much more decentralised. However, due to government-based price and scale distortions, culture and its institutions are brought into the marketised economy, creating the marketised society.

It leads to the development of modern consumerism, creating warped identities based around products. It kills culture and intelligence in favour of an advertised individual. Carson shows that “mass production divorces production from consumption. The rate of production is driven by the imperative of keeping the machines running at full capacity so as to minimize unit costs, rather than by customer orders. So in addition to contractual control of inputs, mass-production industry faces the imperative of guaranteeing consumption of its output by managing the consumer”[39]. The consumer is separated from the producer. Mass production means a consumer culture. Rather than supply meeting demand, demand is made to compensate for oversupply. It also creates forms of consumer inequality that mean Third World workers have almost no access to the products they help produce. The development of domestic markets in consumer goods is massively restricted via patents and tariffs.

Within the Western world there is similar consumer inequality, with a creation of an underclass who desire consumer goods that their limited wages can hardly afford. Bauman’s analysis of the London Riots in 2011 saw an element of this consumer yearning, with products like high-end trainers and flat-screen TVs being taken. Bauman notes that “from cradle to coffin we are trained and drilled to treat shops as pharmacies filled with drugs to cure or at least mitigate all illnesses and afflictions of our lives and lives in common. Shops and shopping acquire thereby a fully and truly eschatological dimension”[40]. The cultural backwater caused by modern consumerism creates a form of stigmatisation and symbol status, with haves and have nots developing into distinct classes in a consumer culture. As Bauman states “for defective consumers, those contemporary have-nots, non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled — and of own nonentity and good-for-nothingness. Not just the absence of pleasure: absence of human dignity. Of life meaning”[41].

The processes of commodification amplify this systemic crisis. The divorcing of production from consumption leads to the most atomistic forms of individualism. It becomes a process of overconsumption and hoarding, without any appreciation of the product development. Cultural and societal obligations and considerations get uprooted by what is wanted and what can be bought. It puts value squarely into the hands of capital, with the determination of worth being decided in social hierarchies that follow from the enforced economic hierarchies of modern capitalism. It is a symptom of the false choice of employment or death, of work creating one’s value in life and of a market shaped not by workers, communities and cultures but by the interests capital and the state that props it up.

Conclusion

This system is massively unsustainable, and becomes more and more reliant on tax revenues to make it profitable. The price system becomes distorted, encouraging the mass production that “leads to ever-increasing demands on state services”[42]. This then shows the inefficiency of large corporations. They are as much subject to the economic calculation problem as the state. Their reliance on the theft of individual income via the taxation system means in anarchist society they are completely unviable. As a system of economic organisation “capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer’s market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market”[43].

In systems of anarchy, there would be an end to corporate dominance due to their inability to seek state rent and thus collapsing in their inefficiencies. As noted by Carson, there were two paths that could have been taken to organise industry and the economy. The one that was followed was “centralized production using expensive, product-specific machinery in large batches on a supply-push basis”[44]. However a better system was possible. One of “decentralized production for local markets, integrating general-purpose machinery into craft production and governed on a demand-pull basis with short production runs and frequent shifts between product lines”[45]. This would have required localised industry, networked communities and what Rifkin calls lateral, distributional, collaborative markets. Workers would be independent of capital, and have an ability to take back their surplus value. It would involve voluntary governance structures and self-organised communities. It would be an end to the corporate-state nexus.

By having this centralised system, we open the floodgates to the continuation of boom-bust cycles through monopoly government control. Since the delinking of production from consumption, there has been a development of mass production and the apparatuses that prop it up. Marx noted this particular phenomenon, with “the birth of large-scale industry this true proportion had to come to an end, and production is inevitably compelled to pass in continuous succession through vicissitudes of prosperity, depression, crisis, stagnation, renewed prosperity, and so on”[46]. This process in the end favours the capitalists. It destroys real value in an economy and allows for more government involvement. Further, it leads to capital accumulation through government subsidisation and the monopoly position many modern corporations hold within their respective markets.

It’s a process of artificial wealth accumulation and creation, backed by the five monopolies previously mentioned. High land prices, restrictive credit access and the use of interest rates to effectively distort the value of currency, the use of market entry barriers through regulations and patents and the use of transport subsidies all favour the main monopoly, that of wage labour. Because of the diminishing returns that many of these companies are finding, they are becoming increasingly reliant on the extraction of surplus value from their workers. As mentioned earlier, wage laws allow them to eliminate smaller competitors and the development of varied, precarious work contracts mean a diversification of their workforce, which allows them to reduce hours paid and thus reduce their labour costs. However, the compensation of a worker’s product isn’t necessarily met. Thus the accruing of capital simply means the extraction of rent from workers, which is enforced by the limitation of worker’s to pool their labour value and capital and develop their own industry in a truly free market.

Government is the glue which holds capitalism together. Without it, the economies of scale, the appropriation and centralisation of land and the distortion of inputs and outputs would be impossible. Without a central bank, the destructive tax of inflation wouldn’t be feasible in a competitive currency market. The redistribution of wealth and malinvestment couldn’t occur on the same scale as markets would act as a corrective against these activities. The use of tariffs and patents to lock up technology and create artificial wealth couldn’t happen without the state’s coercive power. Economic organisation is a fluid concept, that changes from place to place and people to people. What is right for one community or tribe is not what is necessarily right for another. A freed market would reflect this, as it would embed markets in pre-existing cultural/social structures and stop the developments of commodification and neo-colonialism that persist presently. This is a world free of state-action and corporate control. This is anarchism.

Bibliography

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Notes:

[1] Chartier, G. 2010, 1

[2] Chartier, G. 2010, 2

[3] Dowd, K. 2014

[4] Childs, R. 1971

[5] Paul, R. 2009, 70

[6] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[7] Childs, R. 1971

[8] Childs, R. 1971

[9] Dowd, K. 2014, 85-86

[10] Long, R. 2008

[11] Carson, K. 2002

[12] Carson, K. 2002

[13] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[14] Vivero Pol, L. 2015, 9

[15] Richman, S. 2013

[16] Richman, S. 2013

[17] Solow, R. 2015

[18] Solow, R. 2015

[19] Carson, K. 2007, 50

[20] Reitzig, L. 2014

[21] Reitzig, L. 2014

[22] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[23] Carson, K. 2002

[24] Carson, K. 2002

[25] Shorr, I. 1996

[26] Shorr, I. 1996

[27] de Ugarte, D. 2015

[28] Carson, K. 2002

[29] Carson, K. 2002

[30] Carson, K. 2002

[31] Rifkin, J. 2011, 134

[32] Wellings, R. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r94VP3USOuE

[33] Carson, K. 2002

[34] Rifkin, J. 2011

[35] Roberts, D. 2013

[36] Carson, K. 2010

[37] Martin, F. 2013

[38] Polanyi, K. 2002

[39] Carson, K. 2010, 50

[40] Bauman, Z. 2011

[41] Bauman, Z. 2011

[42] Carson, K. 2010, 111

[43] Carson, K. 2002

[44] Carson, K. 2010

[45] Carson, K. 2010

[46] Carson, K. 2010, 256

Breaking the chains: precarity in the Age of Anxiety

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Reid Mukai

By Joseph Todd

Source: RoarMag.org

In our Age of Anxiety, society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty. How do we fight back under conditions of precarity?

An Age of Anxiety is upon us, one where society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty, fear and alienation. We live with neither liberty nor security but instead precariousness. Our housing, our income and our play are temporary and contingent, forever at the whim of the landlord, policeman, bureaucrat or market. The only constant is that of insecurity itself. We are gifted the guarantee of perpetual flux, the knowledge that we will forever be flailing from one abyss to another, that true relaxation is a bourgeois luxury beyond our means.

Our very beings come to absorb this anxiety. We internalize society’s cruelty and contradiction and transform them into a problem of brain chemistry, one that is diagnosed and medicated away instead of being obliterated at root. All hope is blotted out. Authentic experience, unmediated conversation, distraction-free affection and truly relaxed association feel like relics of a bygone era, a sepia dream that perhaps never existed.

Instead we have the frenetic social arenas of late capitalism: the commodified hedonism of clubs and festivals, express lunches, binge culture and the escapist, dislocating experience of online video games, all underlined by either our desperate need to numb our anxieties or to create effective, time-efficient units of fun so we are available for work and worry.

This is assuming we have work, of course. Many of us are unemployed, or are instead held in constant precarity. Stuck on zero-hour contracts or wading through as jobbing freelancers in industries that used to employ but don’t anymore, we are unable to plan our lives any further than next week’s rota, unable to ever switch off as the search for work is sprawling and continuous.

And if we do have traditional employment, what then? We are imprisoned and surveilled in the office, coffee shop or back room, subject to constant assessment, re-assessment and self-assessment, tracked, monitored and looped in a perpetual performance review, one which even our managers think is worthless, but has to be done anyway because, hey, company policy.

Continuous is the effective probationary period and we are forever teetering on the edge of unemployment. We internalize the implications of our constant assessment, the knowledge that we’re always potentially being surveilled. We censor ourselves. We second-guess ourselves. We quash ourselves.

And thanks to the effective abolition of the traditional working day, work becomes unbearable and endless. The security of having delineated time — at work and then at play — has been eradicated. Often this is because individuals have to supplement their atrocious wages with work on the side. But it is also because traditional 9-to-5 jobs have suffered a continuous extension of working hours into out-of-office time, enabled and mediated by our laptops and smartphones. These gadgets demand immediacy and, when coupled with the knowledge that you are always reachable and thus available, they instill in us a frantic need to forever reply in the now.

And with this expectation comes obligation. Hyper-networked technologies gift our bosses the ability to demand action from us at any moment. Things that had to wait before become doable — and thus are done — in the now. If you are unwilling, then someone is ready to take your place. You must always be at their beck and call. From this, our only refuge is sleep, perhaps the last bastion of delineated time against frenetic capitalism, and one that is being gradually eroded and replaced.

For those that are out of work the situation is no better. They face the cruel bureaucracy of the Job Centre or the Atos assessment, institutions that have no interest in linking up job seekers with fulfilling employment but instead attempt only to lower the benefits bill through punitive, arbitrary sanctions and forcing the sick back to work. Insider accounts of these programs betray the mix of anxiety inducing micro-assessment and surveillance they employ.

Disabled claimants — always claimants, never patients, insists Atos — are assessed from the moment they enter the waiting room, noted as to whether they arrive alone, whether they can stand unassisted and whether they can hear their name when called. Compounding this is the hegemonic demonization of those that society has failed: if you are out of work, you are a scrounger, a benefit cheat and a liar. Utterly guilty of your failure, a situation individualized in its totality and attributable to no system, institution or individual but yourself.

We are surveilled, monitored and assessed from cradle to grave, fashioned by the demand that we must be empirical, computable and trackable, our souls transformed into a series of ones and zeros. This happens in the workplace, on the street and in various government institutions. But its ideological groundwork is laid in the nursery and the school.

These institutions bracket our imaginations while still in formation, normalizing a regime of continuous surveillance and assessment that is to last for the rest of our lives. Staff are increasingly taken away from educating and nurturing and instead are made to roam nurseries taking pictures and recording quotes, all to be computed and amalgamated so authorities can track, assess and predict a child’s trajectory.

It is true that this does not trouble the child in the same way traditional high intensity rote examination does. But what it instead achieves is the internalization of the surveillance/assessment nexus in our minds; laying the groundwork for an acquiescence to panoptical monitoring, a resignation to a private-less life and a buckling to regimes of continuous assessment.

Britain is particularly bad in this respect. Not only does our government have a fetish for closed-circuit television like no other, but also, GCHQ was at the heart of the Snowden revelations. Revelation, however, is slightly misleading — as what was most telling about the leaks wasn’t the brazen overstep by government institutions, but that few people were surprised. Although we didn’t know the details, we suspected such activity was going on. We acted as if we were being watched, tracked and monitored anyhow.

In this we see the paranoid fugitive of countless films, books and television dramas extrapolated to society writ large. We are all, to some extent, that person. Our growing distrust of governments, the knowledge that our technologically-integrated lives leave a heavy trace and the collection of “big” data for both commercial and authoritarian purposes contributes to our destabilized, anxious existence. An existence that impels us towards self-policing and control. One where we do the authority’s job for them.

Many individuals offer the amount of choice we have, or the amount of knowledge we can access at the click of a button, as the glorious consequences of late capitalist society. But our rampant choice society, one where we have to make an overwhelming number of choices — about the cereal we eat, the beer we drink, or the clothes we wear — is entirely one sided. While we have an incredible amount of choice over issues of little importance, we are utterly excluded from any choice about the things that matter; what we do with the majority of our time, how we relate to others or how society functions as a whole. Nearly always these choices are constricted by the market, the necessity of work, cultures of overwork and neoliberal ideology.

Again we find this ideology laid down in primary education. Over the years more and more “continuous” learning has been introduced whereby children, over a two week period or so, have to complete a set of tasks for which they can choose the order. This is an almost perfect example of how choice functions in our society, ubiquitous when insignificant but absent when important. The children can choose when they do an activity, which matters little as they will have to do it at some point anyway, but cannot choose not to do it, or to substitute one kind of activity with another.

Why does this matter? Because meaningful choices about our lives give us a sense of certainty and control. Avalanches of bullshit choices that still have to be made, as study after study has shown, make us incredibly anxious. Each of them takes mental effort. Each contains, implicitly, the multitude of choices that we didn’t make; all those denied experiences for every actual experience. This is fine if there are only one or two. But if there are hundreds, every act is riddled with disappointment, every decision shot with anxiety.

Compounding this orgy of choice, and in itself another root cause of anxiety, is the staggering amount of information that assaults us every day. Social media, 24-hour news, the encroachment of advertising into every crack — both spatially and temporally — and our cultures of efficiency that advocate consuming or working at every possible moment all combine to cause intense sensory overload. This world, for many, is just too much.

Although we’ve talked mostly about work, surveillance, assessment and choice, there are a multitude of factors one could add. The desolation of community due to the geographical dislocation of work, the increased transiency of populations and the growing privatization of previously public acts — drinking, eating and consuming entertainment are increasingly consigned to the home — shrinks our world to just our immediate families.

Camaraderie, extended community and solidarity are eroded in favor of mistrust, suspicion and competition. Outside of work our lives become little more than a series of privatized moments, tending to our property and ourselves rather than each other, flitting between the television shows, video games, home DIY and an incredible fetish for gardening with no hint towards the thought that perhaps these experiences would be better if they were held in common, if they appealed to the social and looked outward rather than in.

In the same way we could mention the ubiquity of debt — be it the mortgage, the credit card or the student loans — and the implicit moral judgment suffered by the debtor coupled with the anxiety-inducing knowledge that they could lose everything at any moment. Or we could consider the near-existential crises humanity faces, be it climate change, ISIS or the death throes of capitalism; all too abstract and total to comprehend, all contributing to a sense that there is no future, only a grainy, distant image of lawless brutality, flickering resolutely in our heads.

But the crux, and the reason anxiety could become a revolutionary battleground, is that neoliberal ideology has individualized our suffering, attributing it to imbalances in our brain chemistry, constructing it as a problem of the self, rather than an understandable human reaction to a myriad of cruel systemic causes. Instead of changing society the problem is medicalized and we change ourselves, popping pills to mold our subjectivities to late-capitalist structures, accepting the primacy of capitalism over humanity.

This is why “We Are All Very Anxious”, a pamphlet released by the Institute of Precarious Consciousness, is so explosively brilliant. Not only does it narrate the systemic causes of anxiety, but it situates the struggle within a revolutionary strategy, constructing a theory that is at once broad and personal, incorporating one’s own subjective experience into an explanatory framework, positing anxiety as a novel, contemporary revolutionary battleground, ripe for occupation.

It is, they claim, one of three eras spanning the last two-hundred years where we have progressed between different dominant societal affects. Until the postwar settlement we suffered from misery. The dominant narrative was that capitalism benefited everybody; while at the same time overcrowding, malnourishment and slum dwelling were rife. In response to this appropriate tactics such as strikes, mutual aid, cooperatives and formal political organization were adopted.

After the postwar settlement, until around the 1980s, a period of Fordist boredom ensued. Compared to the last era, most people had stable jobs, guaranteed welfare and access to mass consumerism and culture. But much of the work was boring, simple and repetitive. Life in the suburbs was beige and predictable. Capitalism, as they put it, “gave everything needed for survival, but no opportunities for life.” Again movements arose in opposition, positioned specifically against the boredom of the age. The Situationists and radical feminism can be mentioned, but also the counter-culture surrounding the anti-war movement in America and the flourishing DIY punk scene in the UK.

This period is now finished. Capitalism has co-opted the demand for excitement and stimulation both by appropriating formerly subversive avenues of entertainment — the festival, club and rave — while dramatically increasing both the amount and intensity of distractions and amusements.

In one sense we live in an age of sprawling consumerism that avoids superficial conformity by allowing you to ornament and construct your identity via hyper-customized, but still mass-produced products. But technological development also mean that entertainment is now more total, immersive and interactive; be it the video game or the full-color film watched on a widescreen, high-definition television.

Key to this linear conception is the idea of the public secret, the notion that anxiety, misery or boredom in these periods are ubiquitous but also hidden, excluded from public discourse, individualized and transformed into something unmentionable, a condition believed to be isolated and few because nobody really talked about it. Thus to even broach the subject in a public, systematic manner becomes not just an individual revelation but also a collective revolutionary act.

I’ve seen this first-hand when running workshops on the topic. Sessions, which were often argumentative and confrontational, became, when the subject was capitalism and anxiety, genuinely inquisitive and exploratory. Groups endeavored to broaden their knowledge of the subject, make theoretical links and root out its kernel rather than manning their usual academic ramparts and launching argument after rebuttal back and forth across the battlefield.

But more than this, there was a distinct edge of excitement, the feeling that we were onto something, a theory ripe with explosive newness, one that managed to combine our subjective experiences and situate them in a coherent theoretical framework.

However, we must be critical. To posit anxiety as a specifically modern affect, unique to our age, is contentious. What about the 1950s housewife, someone mentioned in one of the sessions, with her subjectivity rigidly dictated by the misogyny and overbearing cultural norms of the time? Didn’t this make her feel anxious?

Well, perhaps. But if we take anxiety to mean a general feeling of nervousness or unease about an uncertain outcome — with chronic anxiety being an actively debilitating form — then we can draw distinct differences. Although the housewife was oppressed, her oppression was codified and linear, her life depressingly mapped out with little room for choice or maneuver. Similarly with the slave — surely the universal symbol of oppression — hierarchies aren’t nebulous but explicit, domination is ensured by the whip and the gun, the master individualized and present.

This is in stark contrast to the current moment. While it is obvious that oppressions are distinct and incomparable, we can nevertheless see that the fug of the 21st century youth is of a different nature. Our only certainty is that of uncertainty. Our oppressor is not an individual but a diffuse and multiplicitous network of bureaucrats, institutions and global capital, hidden in its omnipotence and impossible to grasp.

We aren’t depressed by the inevitability of our oppression, but instead are baffled by its apparent (but unreal) absence, forever teetering on the brink, not knowing why, nor knowing who we should blame.

Similarly it is bold to claim that anxiety is the dominant affect of Western capitalism, tantamount to pitching it as the revolutionary issue of our age. Yet if we analyze the popular struggles of our time — housing, wages, work/life balance and welfare — they are often geared, in one way or another, towards promoting security over anxiety.

Housing for many is not about having a roof over their heads, but about security of tenure, be it via longer fixed-term tenancies or the guarantee that they won’t be priced out by rent rises that their precarious employment can’t possibly cover. In the same way struggles over welfare are often about material conditions, but what particularly strikes a chord is the cruel insecurity of a life on benefits, forever at the whim of sanction-wielding bureaucrats who are mandated to use any possible excuse to remove your only means of support.

Anxiety is also a struggle that unites diverse social strata, emanating from institutions such as the job center, loan shark, university, job market, landlord and mortgage lender, affecting the unemployed, precariously employed, office worker, indebted student and even the comparatively well-off. Again we find this unification in the near-universal adoption of the smartphone and other hyper-networked technologies. All of us, and especially our children, are beholden to a myriad of glowing screens, flitting between one identity and another, alienated and disconnected from our surroundings and each other.

This is not to say a movement against anxiety itself will ever arise. Such a rallying cry would be too abstract and fail to inspire. Instead, anxiety must be conceptualized both as an affect which underlies various different struggles, and a schema within which they can be assembled into a revolutionary strategy.

So, what is our tangible aim here? In part it must be to reduce the level of general anxiety so as to increase quality of life. Yet if we are to take a revolutionary rather than a mere humanitarian approach, this drop in anxiety must in some way translate into a rise in revolutionary disposition. In certain ways it obviously will. If there is a public realization that large swathes of the mentally ill are not as such because of their unfortunate brain chemistry but instead because of a misconfiguration of society, people are already thinking on an inherently challenging, systemic level.

Similarly, conflict with the state or capital — be it on the street, in the workplace or inside one’s own head — tends to be high-impact and anxiety-inducing. A drop in general anxiety will make it more likely that individuals will engage in such moments of conflict and, crucially, experience the intense radicalization and realization of hegemonic power that can only be achieved through such visceral moments. But a second part to this, hinted at already and integral to giving the struggle a revolutionary edge, is to emphasize that there is a public secret to be aired. As well as combating the sources of anxiety, we must say we are doing so; we must situate these struggles within larger frameworks and provide education on its systemic nature.

Thus, any strategy would need to be both abstract and practical. On one hand we must explode the public secret by raising consciousness. This would require a general onslaught of education, including, but not limited to, consciousness-raising sessions, participatory workshops, articles, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, YouTube videos and “subvertised” adverts. The emphasis would be to educate but also to listen, to intermingle theoretical understanding with subjective experience.

The second part would be to strategically support campaigns and make demands of politicians that specifically combat anxiety in its various different guises. When it comes to work, the abolition of zero-hour contracts, the raising of the minimum wage in line with the actual cost of living, and the tightening of laws on overwork as part of a broader campaign to assert the primacy of life over work, of love over pay, would be a good start.

For those out of work, underpaid or precarious, the introduction of a basic citizen’s income would represent a revolutionizing of the job market. In one move it would alleviate the cultural and practical anxieties of worklessness — ending the bureaucratic cruelty of the job center while removing the anxiety-inducing stigma associated with claiming benefits — while simultaneously allowing individuals to pursue culturally important and revolutionary activities such as art, music, writing or (dare I say it?) activism, without the crushing impossibility of trying to make them pay. When we look to housing obvious solutions include mandatory, secured five-year tenancies, capped rent increases and a guarantee of stable, suitable social housing for those who need it.

There are many more reforms I could list. You will notice, however, that these are indeed reforms; bread and butter social democracy. Does that mean such a program is counter-revolutionary? A mere placatory settlement between capital and the working class? No, it does not. Revolution does not emerge from the systematic subjection of individuals to increased misery, anxiety and hardship as accelerationist logic demands. Instead it flourishes when populations become aware of their chains, are given radical visions for the future and the means to achieve them. It is when leftists critique but also offer hope. It is when the population writ large are included in and are masters of their own liberation; not when they are viewed as a lumpen, otherly mass, of only instrumental importance in achieving the glorious revolution.

Look at the practicalities and this becomes obvious. How can we expect individuals to launch themselves into high-tension anxiety-inducing conflicts if the mere thought of such a situation causes them to have a panic attack? How can individuals, in the face of near panoptical surveillance and monitoring, combat the overwhelming desire to conform if they aren’t awarded some freedom from the practical anxieties of life? How are we to think and act in a revolutionary, and often abstract, manner if the very real and immediate anxieties of work, home and play fog our minds so totally?

This is not to say freedom will be given to us. It must always be taken, and we must not rely on electoral politics to hand us the revolution down from above. Nor will true struggle ever be an anxiety-free leisure pursuit. Genuine conflict with the state and capital will always entail danger, stress and the possibility of intensified precariousness.

Nevertheless, the dismissal of electoral politics in its totality represents abysmal revolutionary theory. The pursuit of reforms by progressive governments being bitten at the heels by sharp, vibrant social movements can produce real, tangible change.

It was what should have happened with Syriza, and it is what will hopefully happen with the new Labour leadership in the UK. And if, as individuals and communities, we are to puncture the distress, precariousness and general sense of cruel unknowing so particular to the moment in which we live, if we are to overcome the avalanche of bullshit and reclaim our confidence, if we to construct and disseminate a distinctly communal, hopeful revolutionary fervor, such changes are imminently needed.

Joseph Todd is a writer and an activist. Find more of his writings here or follow him on twitter.

The Santa Claus Syndrome

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Ethan Indigo Smith

Source: ZenGardner.com

The Santa Clause: Lying is OK, so long as everyone else is doing it.

The Santa Claus Syndrome is the effect of societal complicity in, and/or complacency to, lies and the belief that’s ok.

Take a moment to imagine yourself an outsider and visitor to a new culture. Imagine if you will an annual global celebration so fantastic that people excitedly await it all year long. Imagine the celebration correlates the winter solstice. Imagine the celebration is so spectacular and grandiose that it spurs the sales of products worldwide and some businesses exist solely because of it. Imagine that nearly all businesses profit from it and promote it. Imagine that the main part of the celebration, for most people, aside from sparkling decorations and elaborate gift giving, is openly lying to young children!

Most everyone celebrates the holiday, but those who do not celebrate it are expected to go along with the tradition of broadly lying to children and accepting the excessive materialism out of consideration for cultural tradition.

Conjuring, Consumerism and Conditioning

Although some call Christmas today a ‘Pagan’ holiday, in reality it is nothing of the kind. The pagans I know want nothing to do with it.
Christmas is a children’s consumption holiday. They look forward to it the most. Well, children and the profiting corporations, of course. Children receive countless presents, rewarded for accepting as truth impossible fictions about a fat man from the North Pole, an omnipotence external being who “sees you when you’re sleeping”, who judges children, and who withholds or grants material incentives accordingly.

It is better to give than to receive, they are told.

Celebration and happiness is in the receiving, they observe.

Reward is earned by modelling behavior and suspending critical thinking, they learn.

Generally speaking, telling children fiction as fact is counter-productive to their developing minds. But children do of course eventually inquire of their parents and strangers alike about the phenomenon of the holiday and the fat man. For a period of time after that first enquiry, many children are lied to further – to prolong the “magic”. Finally, they get their answer and find that majority of adults are in on the lie. Even institutions like schools lie, and local and national news. And now they will lie, too. And it’s all okay… so long as everyone else is doing it.

And that, kids, is the magic of Christmas!

Other celebration rituals involve cutting down young trees for indoor decorations, wrapping gifts in paper from other trees and putting them under the dying, decorated tree on the last night of the celebration and saying the fat man did it. The children are told the fat man traverses the world on an inadequately sized sled powered by flying reindeer (the lead one featuring an inexplicable glowing nose) and stops by the homes of children, entering through chimneys yet staying crispy clean, having cookies at each house as he drops off plastic weapons and impossibly thin dolls.

And the fat man, old Santa Claus, he isn’t just generous, he’s mysterious. He doesn’t simply give because it’s better than receiving. He and his elf workers in the North Pole watch all the children of Earth all year long. He decides which children receive the promise of abundance based on who’s been naughty and nice.

Sounds a bit like the other Big Guy, who decides who receives the promise of abundance in the ‘afterlife’, based on who’s been naughty and nice.

First Lies

The Santa Claus story is an unnecessary social conjuration of a blatantly un-sacred holiday. Those of us who grew up in in ‘Christmas’ homes were all influenced by it in one way or another; even the ‘not Christmas’ kids were openly encouraged to withhold the truth from the ‘Christmas’ kids – to prolong the magic.
Abstract and nuanced, it is the first load of garbage young humans in Christian-influenced societies have to mentally digest. For many kids, it is the first time they come to doubt their parents on a point of truth, and the first time they are knowingly lied to if their suspicions are deflected. Then, once entrusted with continuing the Santa Claus myth with younger children, it is the first time they learn that the caveat to the long held ‘no lying’ rule is … ‘so long as everyone else is doing it’.

Just play along kids, and you’ll still get the gifts.

Amid all the Christmas hoopla, which starts to build in stores as early as October, children are normally so occupied with shiny lights and the prospect of gifts that there really is no impetus to question it. Eventually, despite the enticements on offer, the lie is realized of course, for some kids much sooner than others, and the specifics and nuances come undone as a natural function of their maturing minds.

Tradition or Parody?

Regardless of any magical intention, the blunt reality is that parents, teachers, strangers, radio hosts, and local weathermen are deceiving children in perfect synchronization, steering them into immense emotional and material attachment to a collective (unnecessary) illusory figure that withholds from the ‘naughty’ and rewards the ‘nice’.

The holiday in its current formation gives us all practice at complicity, passing on cultural fictions because they were passed onto us, and because that’s what adults do. It is effectively a child-friendly celebration of the doctrines — It’s better to receive than to give, and you’re expected to lie so long as everyone else is doing it — proudly brought to you by your favorite sugary drink, Coca-Cola.

The worst part of the celebration of this vile conjuration is not the lie itself, but the results of it. Lying to kids in this way creates a parody of genuine human tradition, substituting meaningful ritual with an illusory commercial mockery. But that’s only stage one of the Santa Claus Syndrome…

Learning the Santa Clause is the the first test of adulthood. Left unresolved, the experience can manifest to varying degrees, in a number of ways.

The Santa Claus Syndrome

The Santa Clause: Lying is OK, so long as everyone else is doing it.

If you don’t question what you’ve been told, accept incomplete information, and don’t proceed with your natural impulse, you quite likely have the Santa Claus Syndrome to some degree. Quite simply, it makes people ignore serious issues.

The Santa Claus Syndrome manifests in a number of stages:

Stage One:
It manifests as insistence on celebrating lies posing as tradition, elaborate intent on the deception of youth including distraction with sparkling decoration and gifts, and instilling ‘the Santa Clause’ in children.

Beyond that, ;the Santa Clause’ teaches us to conform to widely-accepted untruths.

Stage Two:
Stage two is the acceptance of adult lies, servitude to authority and unquestioning belief in whatever the ‘proper authority’ states. The childhood belief in Santa Claus and trust of authority leads to an adulthood belief that the government, corporate and religious institutions they trust do not lie.

Just like a kid sees the local weather reporter tracking Santa’s flight path, an adult with stage two Santa Claus Syndrome will see as real other fictions in the news and media (such as chemically treated food is just as healthy as organic, or nuclear is a safe energy system).

Stage Three:
Telling adult lies. Stage Three Santa Claus Syndrome is also indicated by people who continue adult likes, such as nuclear is safe… or cannabis has no medicinal value… or insert any number of lies here _____ that many people perpetuate on behalf of our corrupted institutions.

Stage Four:
In Stage Four, one has all the symptoms of stages One through Three. Further, those in Stage Four are likely to lash out at those who question the status quo or expose lies (and forcing change) in anyway. Stage Four can involved the conjuration of adult lies, instituting great and broad fictions for trifle and temporary gains, often as a way to psychologically rationalize not just with others but themselves, to believe what they are doing – and who they are – is ok.

Trading why for what

It is no coincidence that around the time when young children begin to ask the eternal why, a series of ‘whys’ in regard to every subject, they are taught ‘the Santa Clause’, which teaches them, teaches us, to replace the endless series of why into an endless series of what. Where the Santa Claus fiction is concerned, knowing is less important than obtaining. It is the first true test of our ‘adulthood’; once you are entrusted with the truth of the lie, adults check that you repeat the lie to those younger than you; those who aren’t to know.

Then in adulthood, we are exposed to big and sometimes seriously dark and disturbing lies. And adult lies – lies told by authorities – are often backed up by the local news reporters and retailers, just like Santa Claus. And just like the children we were, and the children we raise, we adults too stop asking why in exchange for what.

The materialistic enticement of ‘the Santa Clause’ has contributed to a culture where understanding is inhibited, and truth undervalued. We teach our children not to tell the truth so as not to make the babies cry. We reward materialistic impulses, confusing gratification with what is right and wrong. But worst of all, we teach little people to accept that we are lied to, and to contribute to broadly accepted lies — as long as we have bright shiny things.

Evidence of the Santa Clause Syndrome is everywhere in our society. Many personal and societal problems can be theoretically traced to it, but also many institutions can be rationally broken down as disturbingly negative or outright useless when considering it. Most evidently, Santa Claus Syndrome does not promote individuation, but conformity – at a very impressionable stage of childhood development.

Santa Claus is Dead

Christmas today doesn’t celebrate the humanity nor the amazing world around us – in other words, anything real – and that is a direct reflection of our sick society. Although I risk being accused of some ridiculous thinking here, I believe we need to heal and re-create our culture through sacred, nutritious traditions grounded in love, simplicity and gratitude.

In contrast, the fiction of Santa doesn’t encourage a sense of gratitude in children. Children “earn” gifts from Santa Claus by adhering to social norms – naughty or nice – and any innate sense of gratitude a child may feel for this annual abundance is intentionally misdirected at a magical, fictional patriarch, until a comprehensive deception is finally realized. Sadly, that realization is where, for most kids, their broader sense of magic is hindered a learned distrust of their developing senses.

Arguably the most underestimated and psychologically disturbing rites of passage for children in Christian-based cultures today, ‘the Santa Clause’ is another failing institutionalization, much like the religions that spawned it. And so, many of us are now facing the decision to keep perpetuating ‘the Santa Clause’ within our family circles, or begin the process of transforming this ritualized nonsense into a genuinely sacred, annual celebration of peace, renewal and gratitude.

This year Santa is dead to me. There will be no false idol. This year, children will learn the truth if they come around here. And with that, healing from the Santa Clause Syndrome can begin.

This holiday season, be sure to not tell your kids a pack of lies and cater only to their material desires – no matter the tradition.

Let’s create a new holiday.

Peace on Earth… only for real.

Merry Christmas!

The Reason You Work So Hard to Participate in the Rat Race

Posted on November 15, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By M.J. Higby

Source: Waking Times

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A man in debt is so far a slave.” Money has no intrinsic value yet we spend our days damaging our health and spirit in order to obtain it. Why do we sacrifice our well-being for it? Is it the cliché that “we just want to provide a better life for our kids than we had?” Is it just way of the civilized world? The most important question to ask, however, is what power do we have to change this way of thinking and living? The reality is simple: money is a vehicle for social control. Debt makes us good, obedient workers and citizens.

The traditional workweek started in 1908 at The New England Cotton Mill in order to allow followers of the Jewish religion to adhere to Sabbath. With the passage of The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, the 40-hour workweek became the norm. Data from the 2013 American Community Survey showed that the average commute time in America is about 26 minutes each way. According to a Gallup poll, the average workweek in America is 34.4 hours, however, when only taking into account full time workers, that average shoots up to 47, or 9.4 hours per day during a 5-day workweek. Keeping averages in mind then, between commuting, working and figuring in an hour for lunch (usually less), that puts us at approximately 11 hours and 40 minutes for the average full time worker. If you have a family with young kids, just add in another few hours for homework, baths, etc.

When the day is done, how much time do you have for yourself? To exercise, meditate or otherwise unwind the way that all the healthy living gurus preach? And how much of yourself, your presence of mind, is left to devote to family? We give the company the heat of our most intense mental fire while our families get the smoke. Yet Jeb Bush, the 2016 GOP presidential hopeful, says we need to work more.

The answer to why we put ourselves through this daily grind is multifaceted. The most pervasive reason is workplace and societal pressures. We are raised in a matrix of sorts. The cycle starts around the age of five when we are expected to adhere to a regimented 8-hour day of school. At this age, we don’t have the intellect to question why, so we mechanistically follow the path that’s laid out. This daily path becomes engraved in our minds and becomes as automatic as the sun’s daily journey. Our school system is adept at churning out working class individuals en masse. We are taught along the way not to question authority, again adhering to the working class mentality.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are those in power. They are the ones that like to color outside the lines. Many books abound with titles such as The Wisdom of Psychopaths that illustrate how people with psychopathic traits, ones who don’t tend to follow rules, are often found in managerial roles such as CEOs all the way up to presidents of countries. With these rare manipulative, coldhearted personalities in place and the rest of us following like good sheeple without questioning, the stage is set for compliance.

If you have been in the working world long enough, then the following statement should ring true: if you work extra hours, you are a great worker; if you decline, you’re useless and apathetic. In the work world, there’s typically no in between. The pressure to succeed for the pride and benefit of the company unfortunately supersedes that of the pressure to be a good parent, sibling, son or daughter. According to a study done by the economic policy institute, between 1948 and 2013, productivity has grown 240% while income for non-managerial workers has grown by 108%. To make up for this discordance, pride of doing what’s best for the company has been employed as a motivational tactic. This tactic has been used as a sharp IV needle that’s been inserted into our veins and we have willingly ingested the contents that are injected through it. Pressure to conform toward achieving the company’s goals has overcome our will to be compensated accordingly.

The other side of this pressure comes from society as a whole outside the education/workplace. A close friend of mine works for a state court and makes about $40K/year. He is also a self-employed business owner on the off hours. I estimate that he works about 70-80 hours a week. He owns a home in a well-to do neighborhood and he drives a seventy thousand dollar luxury car. This crystallizes the saying ‘big hat, no cattle.’ But when a lie is told over and over, the lie becomes the truth.

When we look at someone who drives a luxury car and lives in an upscale part of town, we see this as success because of how often that visual of it has been pounded tirelessly into our minds. We fail to see that these are nothing but symbols of success and false ones at that. They appear real because as a society, we have been conditioned to see them this way by the advertising industry. In the book, The Millionaire Next Door, the authors annihilate this illusion. Numbers don’t lie and the statistics show that most true millionaires, those with a net worth of over one million dollars, do not own those luxuries that we typically associate with success and wealth. They view them as the reality of what they are: a depreciating liability. According to the book, the typical millionaire owns a home in the two to three hundred thousand dollar-range and a non-luxury automobile. If something goes wrong with either, they have the cash reserves to fix it. On the other hand, the commonplace owner of the luxury home and car can’t afford the roof and the tires respectively without going deeper into debt if they should need replacing.

Ownership of these symbols of wealth becomes a self-perpetuating illusion to satisfy the psychological need for acceptance. Unfortunately, human behavior dictates that emotional needs often override logical thinking. It’s been said that the borrower is slave to the debt-owner and with luxury items, debt is the rule, not the exception. Debt is healthy for those in power and contributes to a needy and thus obligated worker.

The current wisdom of slave, spend and save for retirement has only one destiny. That destiny can be summed up in three sentences. Spend your healthiest and most productive years working to support a life of materials and thus illusions of success while elevated stress damage your health. During this time, be sure to save enough money for retirement so you can enjoy those years of the subsequent poor health. And lastly, do it in the name of pride for your company and country.

I take pride in being American, as I’m sure most Americans do, however, if you’re reading this you’re likely smart enough to see the holes in the daily grind. It saps our creative potential and our physical, as well as our spiritual energy. We don’t need any studies to tell us how stressed we are and subsequently, how unhealthy we are. The physical manifestations of stress such as obesity, hypertension, heart disease, increased risk of cancer, depression, anxiety and many others tell us all we need to know. They tell us that we need a better work/life balance. They tell us that the pendulum has swung too much in the direction of work and away from life. Fortunately, there’s a way that we can take it back.

The most important way to restore this balance is to realize the power that we, as consumers, hold. Tyler Durden, the protagonist in the film, Fight Club said it best…

“…advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”

The marketing and advertising industry know, more than anyone else, what motivates the human mind and how to tap into those instinctual drives. To defend against this industries seductiveness, we need to journey within ourselves and bring to light what’s really important to us. What most of us will find is that experiences and time well spent, not materials, are what makes us happy. In the book, aptly titled Well Being, the authors Tom Rath and Jim Harter discuss how experiences have been proven to make us happier than material posessions.

We revel in the anticipation of the experience, we enjoy the experience itself and we look back on it fondly for as long as we live. We do this while the expensive car or house that we borrowed money long ago to obtain falls apart causing us to borrow more money. If we live according to the rule that everything we purchase, with the exception of a home, is acquired by cash, then we fail to become slaves to debt and by extension, work. We no longer relinquish our power to creditors.

Oscar Wilde was famously quoted as saying that anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. Materialistically speaking, living by this notion will bind us with shackles to a life of debt servitude. When we rip those shackles of debt from our wrists, our minds become clear and we see what truly makes us happy. We spend more time with friends and family. We focus on our passions and hobbies. In essence, we get back to the foundation of what it means to be human. After all, none of us will ever arrive upon the mountain of our last moments of existence wishing we spent more time at the office. We will instead arrive wishing we completed that book, that painting or that experience with those we love most. For those can be purchased not with debt, but with time. And there is no more cunning, covert and deceitful thief of time as that villain we call debt.

About the Author

M.J. Higby practices medicine in Phoenix, AZ. He is passionate about martial arts, most notably Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He enjoys writing about mental, spiritual and physical well being and questioning the methods by which we attain it. You can reach him on Facebook and Twitter @MJHigby

Terence McKenna’s Disillusioned Perspective on Mass-Consumerist Culture

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Editor’s note: Since Terence McKenna’s passing on April 3 2000, his ideas have only grown in relevance and popularity largely because of their prescience and resonance to growing segments of internet culture. In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his birthday we’re sharing this article which reflects an important yet often neglected aspect of McKenna’s worldview.

By Jordan Bates

Source: Refine the Mind

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.”

Terence McKenna is one of those cult-famous, societal-fringe figures of whom the majority of people have never heard. He’s also someone whose views probably have a polarizing effect on anyone who encounters them. At the very least, though, Terence was an exceptionally original thinker, and those who explore a fraction of his work will note his erudition and incredible ability to articulate his thoughts.

McKenna was an American philosopher and ethnobotanist who passed away in the year 2000. He was known for possessing expertise on a broad range of subjects including history, biology, geology, botany, and ecology. He toured and lectured extensively on everything from language and science to shamanism and extraterrestrials, developing a sizable and enthusiastic following.

His controversial status is in large part due to his vocal advocacy of mind-altering substances. McKenna was a well-known psychonaut–one who explores consciousness through the ingestion of psychedelic hallucinogens–and a staunch proponent of the use of naturally occurring psychoactive compounds.

Obviously this latter aspect of McKenna’s legacy is an immediate turn-off to many. For a major sector of the population, the colossal stigma surrounding psychedelic substances is sufficient reason to lambaste the views of a well-known user. I, however, am not so quick to dismiss such a person, especially one as lucid, compelling, internally consistent, and dedicated to free inquiry as Terence McKenna.

McKenna’s Views on Mass-Consumerist Culture

I’ve delved into hours of McKenna’s lectures, and I am particularly interested in his ideas on culture. When McKenna speaks of culture, he seems to refer primarily to modern, mass-consumerist culture, so keep that in mind.

McKenna held a rather unfriendly position toward culture that can be summed up succinctly by one of his most famous quotations: “Culture is not your friend.” McKenna saw modern culture as a sort of engine detached from the interests of the individual and serving the manipulative, power-focused agendas of various institutions and wealthy individuals.

The following short video contains a portion of one of his lectures in which he addresses culture. I encourage you to watch it now (I will transcribe and elaborate on its central ideas below):

What Civilization is and What it Could be

McKenna certainly had a way of poetically articulating his ideas, and the video opens with what I feel is one of Terence’s most memorable metaphors:

“What civilization is is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.”

With this statement McKenna addresses the hyper-competitive environment that is symptomatic of the modern capitalistic socioeconomic paradigm. Our culture has a tendency to glorify competition, and many would argue that competition drives innovation and “progress” (a slippery word). I doubt McKenna would argue that competition has not been essential to the invention of our modern world, but he seems to step back and ask, “Yes, but when will it be enough?”

McKenna suggests that we’ve reached a stage of technological advancement and knowledge that would allow us to “produce a kind of human paradise.” This declaration sounds vague and idealistic, but based upon what I know of McKenna, I assume that by “human paradise” he envisioned something like a drastic change in the work paradigm, an elimination of poverty and starvation, a great reduction in disease and illness-related death, the end of war, and a much more palpable sense of a world community.

“Culture is Not Your Friend”

These items might sound far-fetched, but McKenna is not the first to suggest that such a situation is possible with our modern technology. R. Buckminster Fuller comes to mind as another prominent thinker who held similar views. After making this statement, McKenna elaborates on what he believes prevents us from attaining this state of affairs–namely, a lack of significant resistance to the poor leadership, dehumanizing values, and damaging cultural “control icons” that he perceives in the world. He states:

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.”

[…]

But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects. It creates consumer mania. It preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.”

Modern World as Dystopia?

McKenna holds that modern culture is centered around the agendas of those who are almost certainly not you. He believes that culture diminishes and dehumanizes the vast majority of the population by inviting them to unreflectively reinforce its models.

McKenna seems to suggest that instead of focusing on creating the type of world that is possible, we are caught up in a game of culture–a robotic pursuit of fetishized objects and false visions of a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

To some, this view may seem rather grim and dystopian. I don’t see it that way. I see it as a warning that remains pertinent in 2013 [and 2015]. The culture McKenna refers to does exist, and its effects are far-reaching and potentially insidious. However, I know that there are many, many people who are aware of this cultural game and do not conform to its status quo, who resolve to try to choose their own way of life and who see through the glitzy media-images.

Simply by being among this latter group of people, I think we’re doing the work that McKenna believed needed to be done–the work of resisting the damaging and dehumanizing aspects of modern consumerist culture. The mere realization that we are culturally conditioned to behave in certain ways is a sufficient catalyst to begin assuming a more active and reflective role in deciding how to live and act.

I see nothing wrong with being a cultural participant, but it should be our goal to develop a deeper awareness of the ideals our culture would have us pursue. When we understand the culture’s vision for our lives, we can continue to exist within our given society while challenging its flaws in subtle ways. We can deliberately express ourselves in forms that disrupt its norms, and we can consciously choose which aspects of it are worth partaking in. In this way, we become active constituents of culture, shifting and re-imagining its values, contributing to the gradual creation of a culture that we can call our “friend”.

McKenna Suggests We Must Create Culture

McKenna was certainly a vocal critic of mass culture, but to his credit, he was also quite vocal about offering alternatives. He believed strongly in the importance and utility of art, the primacy of felt experience, and the need to create our own values and alternative spaces for expression.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from another of Terence’s lectures that is especially poignant here. He was a frank and opinionated speaker, to be sure, but don’t let his style put you off. Terence was also always quick to check his own views and make light of his position. He didn’t want to insult people–he just wanted us to ask questions. This message from beyond the grave is valuable to each of us; ponder it with an open mind:

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Tag Archives: Consumerism

Why Are We Still Working?