gustav on socialism
gustav landauer on social anarchism
(from 1911 article – call to socialism)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Landauer:
Gustav Landauer (7 April 1870 – 2 May 1919) was one of the leading theorists on anarchism in Germany at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. He was an advocate of social anarchism. As an avowed pacifist, Landauer advocated the principle of “non-violent non-cooperation” in the tradition of Étienne de La Boétie and Leo Tolstoy.
In 1919, he briefly served as Commissioner of Enlightenment and Public Instruction in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic during the German Revolution of 1918–1919. He was murdered by right-wing paramilitary (Freikorps) soldiers when this republic was overthrown.
Landauer is also known for his study of metaphysics and religion, and his translations of William Shakespeare’s and Peter Kropotkin’s works into German
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_anarchism:
Social anarchism, also known as left-wing anarchism or socialist anarchism, is the branch of anarchism that sees liberty and social equality as interrelated.
It advocates for a social revolution to remove oppressive forms of hierarchy, such as capitalism and the state. In their place, social anarchists encourage social collaboration through mutual aid and envision non-hierarchical forms of social organization, such as voluntary associations.
still hierarchical/oppressive if any form of m\a\p ie: collab, mutual aid, voluntary compliance et al
Identified with the socialist tradition of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, social anarchism is often contrasted with individualist anarchism, due to the latter’s criticism of socialism.
pierre-joseph proudhon, mikhail bakunin, pëtr kropotkin
anarchism et al
Social anarchism is opposed to all forms of social and political power, hierarchy and oppression, including (but not limited to) the State and capitalism. Social anarchism sees liberty as interconnected with social equality, and considers the maximization of one to be necessary for the maximization of the other. Social anarchism therefore employs a utilitarian ethics, concerning itself with the well-being of all, as it considers each person’s happiness to be equal to those of others. As such, social anarchism seeks to guarantee equal rights to freedom and material security for all persons.
ie: a nother way
Social anarchism envisions the overthrow of capitalism and the state in a social revolution, which would establish a federal society of voluntary associations and local communities, based on a network of mutual aid.
The key principles that form the core of social anarchism include anti-capitalism, anti-statism and prefigurative politics.
via michel bauwens tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/1822895999037374647]:
A Flemish-Dutch philosophical magazine compared my ideas to those of Gustav Landauer, a libertarian socialist who rejected deterministic Marxism.
For him, writing the below in 1911, like for the christians of the Acts of the Apostles and the millions who chose monastic or communal life after their example, social-ism is a always available option, at all times, independent of technology. It is not determined, and as people of faith would say, it is a matter of spiritual choice, the spirit being the realm of freedom, distinct from the deterministic realm of ‘Caesar’.
Just to clarify, my own definition of social-ism is that of Erik Olin Wright, in which a social-ist society is any society that is organized around social, and not other priorities. My family life is social-ist, as is that of most people on this planet, with the exception of feminist or neoliberal couples who keep separate accounts, and my engagement over the last 20 years has been social-ist, in that precise sense, although I no longer yearn for any form of communal living, having enough with the extended family of my wife.
The commons then, is anything that simply is mutualized, as a permanent free choice. So forget about Samuelson and his public goods theory.
It is now time to extend any ‘social’ orientation to the world of life as a whole. The more difficult question is whether that social or ‘life’ orientation needs to be part of a higher orientation to the divine ?
I personally started thinking it does, although I am not clear on which form that should take today.
to me.. the form – listening to what is already on each heart
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
* Gustav Landauer against the Marxists:
“For socialism — let it be said immediately and the Marxists ought to hear it, as long as the wisps of fog of their own obtuse theory of progress are still in the air — *does not depend for its possibility on any form of technology and satisfaction of needs. Socialism is possible at all times, **if enough people want it. But it will always look different, start and progress differently, depending on the level of available technology, i.e., also of the number of people who begin it and the means they contribute or have inherited from the past — nothing begins from nothing. Therefore, as was said above: no depiction of an ideal, no description of a Utopia is given here.
*to me.. exactly what needs to be our focus.. 1\ a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling) as means to facil the seeming chaotic detox of 8b legit free people.. so we can 2\ hear/org around legit needs
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
**has to be all of us for the dance to dance
First, we must examine our conditions and spiritual temperaments more clearly. Only then can we say to what kind of socialism we are called, to what type of men we are speaking. Socialism, you Marxists, is possible at all times and with any kind of technology. It is possible for the right people at all times, even with very primitive technology, while at all times, even with splendidly developed machine technology it is impossible for the wrong group. We know of no development that must bring it. We know of no such necessity as a natural law. Now therefore we will show that these our times and our capitalism that has blossomed as far as Marxism are by no means as you say they are. Capitalism will not necessarily change into socialism. It need not perish. Socialism will not necessarily come, nor must the capital-state-proletariat-socialism of Marxism come and that is not too bad. In fact no socialism at all must come — that will now be shown.
Yet socialism can come and should come — if we want it, if we create it — that too will be shown.
– Gustav Landauer, 1911
https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2021/09/28/for-socialism-landauer-1911/
found same via anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gustav-landauer-call-to-socialism]
notes/quotes from there:
Gustav Landauer – Call to Socialism – 1911
Foreword to the Second Edition
The revolution has come, though I did not expect it this way. War has come, just as I expected; and in that war I soon saw defeat and revolution relentlessly approaching.
With a truly profound bitterness I state: it is now clear that I was essentially correct in this Call for Socialism and in articles in my journal The Socialist. A political revolution in Germany had not yet occurred; now it has been completed, and *only the revolutionaries’ inability to construct the new economy, in particular, as well as the new freedom and self-determination, could be held responsible..t if a reaction should bring about the reestablishment of new privileged powers.
*oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
*In these times when routine has become a malignant scourge, it is spirit that must lead to revolution, spirit that performs miracles;..t thus overnight it changed the constitution of the German Reich, reducing a governmental structure, which German professors had considered inviolably sacred, into a past episode of the German landed and industrial Junkers. The government has collapsed; socialism is the only salvation. It certainly did not result as a blossom of capitalism; it is the heir and repudiated son waiting at the door behind which the corpse of his unnatural father rots. Nor can socialism be added to the beautiful body of society as an apex of national wealth and a sumptuous economy; **it must be created almost out of nothing amid chaos..t In despair I called for socialism; but out of that despair I drew great hope and joyous resolution, and the despair which I and the likes of me bore in our hearts has not become a permanent condition. May those who must now begin the work of construction not lack hope, a desire to work, knowledge, and an enduring creativity.
*aka: itch-in-the-soul.. ie: listen to itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us
**the seeming nothing ness of idiosyncratic jargon.. with nonjudgmental expo labeling facilitating the seeming chaos of 8b legit free people/souls
The social causes necessary for any revolution to take place are present everywhere. However, the need for political liberation, the only reason for a revolution to move toward a goal and become more than a revolt, is of varying strength in those countries which have experienced democratic political revolutions.
For the revolution can only be a political one. It would not gain the support of the enslaved masses, if they did not also desire to break free of social oppression and economic hardship. However, the transformation of social institutions, of property relations, of the type of economy cannot come by way of revolution. In these matters, action from below can only shake off, destroy and abandon something; action from above, even by a revolutionary government, can only abolish and command, whereas socialism must be built, erected, organized out of a new spirit. This new spirit prevails mightily and ardently in the revolution. Robots become men. Cold, unimaginative men are fired with enthusiasm. The entire status quo, including opinions, positive and negative, is cast into doubt. Reason, which formerly focused only on selfish interest, becomes rational thinking and thousands of men sit or pace restlessly in their rooms, for the first time in their lives forging plans for the common welfare. Everything becomes accessible to the good. The incredible miracle is brought into the realm of possibility. *The reality which is otherwise hidden in our souls, in the structures and rhythms of art, in the faith-structures of religion, in dream and love, in dancing limbs and gleaming glances, now presses for fulfillment..t However, the tremendous danger remains that the old humdrum way and empty imitation will take hold of the revolutionaries and make them shallow, uncultured radicals, with the ringing rhetoric and violent gestures, who neither know, nor want to know, that the transformation of society can come only in love, work, and silence.
*yeah that.. need to facil what is already hidden in our souls.. the dance
ie: need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
They also ignore another point, despite the experiences of past revolutions. All these revolutions were a great renewal, a bubbling refreshment, a high point of nations; but their permanent results were slight. Ultimately they brought a change only in the forms of political disenfranchisement. Political freedom, maturity, honest pride, self- determination and an organic, corporative coherence of the masses out of one unifying spirit, voluntary associations in public life — this can only be achieved by a great adjustment, by economic and social justice, by socialism. How could there be a commonwealth of true communities in our era, in which Christianity affirms the equality of all the children of men, in origin, rights and destiny; how could there be a free public life, pervaded by the all-fulfilling, dynamic spirit of enthusiastically progressive men and deep, strong women, if slavery, disinheritance and ostracism persist in any form and guise?
rather.. if any form of m\a\p exists/persists
The political revolution which brings the spirit to power and makes it the strong imperative and decisive implementation, can clear the way for socialism, for a change of conditions by a renewed spirit. But decrees can, at most, incorporate men as government slaves into a new military-like economy; the new spirit of justice must create its own forms of economy. The idea must embrace the needs of the moment within its long-range view and shape them energetically. What was previously only an ideal, is realized by the work of renewal born out of the revolution.
oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
to allow for the sitting/pacing in a room ness above
..*the only salvation is work, real work done, performed and organized by an unselfish, fraternal spirit. New forms of work must be developed, freed from a tribute payable to capital, ceaselessly creating new values and new realities, harvesting and transforming the products of nature for human needs. The age of the productivity of labor is beginning; **otherwise we have reached the end of the line.
*rather.. need to let go of work ness and focus on facil ing the dance
for that need the unconditional ness of left to own devices ness.. **’otherwise we have reached the end of the line.’
*Technology has placed both long known and newly discovered natural forces at man’s service. The more people cultivate the earth and transform its products, the richer the harvest. Mankind can live in dignity and without care. **No one need be another’s slave, no one need be excluded and disinherited. Work, the means of life, need not become an arduous torment. ***All can live in openness to spirit, soul, play, and God..t Revolutions and their painfully long, oppressive pre-history teach us that only the most extreme distress, only the feeling of sheer desperation brings the masses of men to reason, to the reason which, for wise men and children, always comes naturally; ****what horrors, ruins, hardships, scourges, plagues, conflagrations and wild cruelties are we to expect, if even at this fateful hour, reason, socialism, spiritual leadership and conformity to the spirit do not enter into men’s minds?..t
*mufleh humanity law: we have seen advances in every aspect of our lives except our humanity– Luma Mufleh
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
**legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
***again.. only if we let go enough to see/be/try the unconditional ness of left to own devices ness..
****today.. there’s a nother way.. again.. tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. can facil a legit global detox leap.. ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us
Capital, which has been the parasitic master, must become the servant — *but a form of capital that represents community, reciprocity, equality of exchange. O suffering men, **are you still standing helplessly before the obvious and childishly easy solution? Even in this hour of need, that also was your hour of political action? Do you still remain animals that have lost their instincts and are stupified by reason, since you wait so long?..t Do you not yet see the error that lies in your boastful arrogance and indolence of heart? ***What has to be done is so clear and simple that every child understands it..t The means are there; whoever looks around, sees it. The imperative of the spirit which leads the revolution can help us through great measures and undertakings. Submit to this spirit; petty interests must not hamper it. But its full implementation is impeded by heaps of rubble that have been piled upon the conditions and even the souls of the masses. One road is open, more open than ever, to help bring about revolution and the collapse of the present system: to begin on a small scale, and voluntarily, immediately, on all sides, you are called, you and your friends!
*if still reciprocity, exchange, any form of m\a\p.. will end up with same song
**that already on each heart ness as ‘guide’.. just need global detox to hear/see/be it
***not yet scrambled ness.. 1 yr to be 5 et al.. the whatever ness.. the unconditional ness of left to own devices ness.. ie: a sabbatical ish transition
Moreover, the negative component of socialism is there and no power can remove it from the earth: the complete, hourly increasing disinclination of the workers, indeed their psychic inability to continue to hire themselves out under capitalist conditions.
gare enslavement law et al.. kilpi work law et al..
need to try a sabbatical ish transition
At this point let me give a brief preliminary summary: what I have repeated again and again in the call which follows and in essays in my Socialist, which complement it, is that socialism is possible and necessary in every form of economy and technology. It has no use for the industrial and mercantile technology of capitalism nor for the mentality that produced this monstrosity. Because socialism must commence and because the realization of spirit and virtue is never mass-like and normal but rather results only from the self-sacrifice of the few and the new venture of pioneers, socialism must free itself from ruin out of poverty and joy in work. For its sake we must return to rural living and to a unification of industry, craftsmanship and agriculture, to save ourselves and learn justice and community. What Peter Kropotkin taught us about the methods of intensive soil cultivation and unification of intellectual and manual labor in his important and now famous book The Field, the Factory, the Workshop as well as the new form of credit and monetary cooperative must all be tested now in our most drastic need and with creative pleasure. Necessity demands, voluntarily but under threat of famine, a new start and construction, without which we are lost.
need deeper than that.. need a legit new start/construction – ie: a sabbatical ish transition
fields factories and workshops
Munich, January 3, 1919
Gustav Landauer
Preface to the First Edition
In my book The Revolution (Frankfurt a.M., 1907) I said:
“Here is where our road leads: that such men as have gained insight and realized that it is impossible to continue living this way, have started uniting in associations and placing their labor in the service of their consumption. They will soon reach the limits set for them by the state; they lack a legal basis. This is the point where the revolution of which we have spoken till now goes further into a revolution of which nothing can be said, because it is still far off. Nor can anything be said here of social regeneration, of which only hints could be given. How one evaluates the beginnings and movements that now exist depends on what one expects in the future. I intend to continue this line of argument in another book and to treat the coming of socialism in context.”
Since I still cannot manage to write the book promised by these lines, let the reader temporarily accept the following lecture without however forgetting that it is a lecture and claims to be nothing else. In such a lecture much must be said briefly and an emotional tone often must replace detailed argumentation; the flow of speech wants to move on. Let the reader take advantage of its being a printed lecture and reflect that many of the sentences in it could require a book for their proof and complete delineation. Let the reader sometimes set aside the lecture in order to reflect for himself on the particular subject, for perhaps then he will discover that what is said quickly need not lack reflection and basis.
I have chosen the form of a lecture because one of the tasks of language will always be to call others to oneself and because that was precisely my intention. Of course I speak differently here than I would before an assembly; I speak before the broad, indeterminate circle which the lonely man sees before his eyes in nocturnal work hours.
When I first gave this lecture — on May 26 and June 14 — I summarized the content at the end of the second session in the “Twelve Articles of the Socialist League,” which are printed at the end of the first edition. This marked the founding of the Socialist League, and its first members were enrolled already at that assembly. Soon the first group was founded; the “Work”-group in Berlin. At this moment there exist in Germany and Switzerland nineteen expressly constituted and a larger number of unnamed groups. Early in 1909 appeared the biweekly periodical The Socialist, in which I and others pursue our ideas further and seek to demonstrate their validity in the conditions and events of the nations, in the life of communities, families, individuals.
validation ness.. unjustifiable strategy ness..
In addition we have until now published three pamphlets, which appeared in one volume together with a report on the previous activities of the League.
Hermsdorf, near Berlin, March 1911.
For Socialism
1
Whoever calls for socialism must be of the opinion that socialism is something that is either almost or fully absent, that is either not yet or no longer existent. One could object: “Of course, socialism, the socialist society, does not exist. It is not yet here, but efforts are being made to achieve it — insights, knowledge, teachings as to how it will come.” No, the socialism I am calling for here is not meant so. Rather, *by socialism I mean a tendency of the human will and an insight into conditions and ways that lead to its accomplishment..t Yet this socialism hardly exists, and as miserably as ever. Therefore I speak to each one who wants to hear me, and I hope that my voice will finally reach very many who do not want to hear me; I call for socialism.
*for that need means to hear/see/be itch-in-the-soul of every one
What is socialism? What do men mean by the word? And what is it that goes by the name of socialism today? Under what conditions, at what moment of society — of development, as is generally said — can it become reality?
Socialism is a striving, with the help of an ideal, to create a new reality. This first attempt is necessary even though the word “ideal” has fallen into disrepute due to pitiful hypocrites and base weaklings who like to go by the name of idealists and to uncultured drudges of science who like to call themselves realists. In unspiritual times of decline, un-culture, un-spirit, and misery, men who suffer not only externally but also internally under this general condition which seeks to engulf them fully — in their life, thought, feeling and will — men who resist this engulfment must have an ideal. They have an insight into the oppressive depravity and debasement of their situation. They are unspeakably disgusted with the misery that surrounds them like a swamp. *They have energy that presses forward and longs for something better, and thus arises in them, an image of a pure, salutary, joyous mode of human communality in lofty beauty and perfection. They see in broad, general lines how it could be if a group, no matter how big or small, wanted and acted accordingly; if an entire country or countries ardently grasped this new idea and exerted their influence to bring it about. And now they no longer say: it can be so. Instead, they say: it should, and must come about. Once they grasp the prior history of human generations, they do not say: this ideal must become reality, as plainly and explicitly, as it stands on paper. They know well: the ideal is the ultimate in beauty and joy of life, the best thing their mind and spirit can imagine. It is a portion of spirit, reason and thought. However reality is never identical with the thinking of individual men. It would be boring if it were so, and we, consequently, had a duplicated world: first, in the anticipatory idea, second, in exact facsimile in the external world. It has never been so, and it will never be so. **The ideal does not become reality; but our reality is realized in our time through the ideal, only through the ideal. We envisage something beyond which we see no better possibility. We perceive the ultimate and say: “That is what I want!” — and then we do everything to achieve it. The individual, overcome as if by illumination, seeks companions and finds them. There are others, into whose minds and hearts the idea has come like a flash of lightning and a storm. It is something in the air for the likes of them. Furthermore he finds others who were only sleeping lightly, whose understanding was covered only by a thin membrane and whose energy lay only under a mild anaesthetic. They are now together. They seek ways together. ***They hold discussions in small groups and with the masses, in the big cities, in smaller cities, and in the country. External distress awakens internal distress. Sacred dissatisfaction is aroused and stimulated; something like a spirit — spirit is communal spirit, spirit is union and freedom, spirit is an association of men, soon we will see it even more clearly — a spirit is coming over men; and where the spirit is present stands the people, and where the people are, there is a forward-driving wedge, a will. Where there is a will, there is a way. This word is true; but the way is only there. And the light becomes ever clearer, penetrates ever deeper. The veil, net, dull swampy mist is raised ever higher. A people unites, awakens. Actions are done. Supposed obstacles are recognized as insignificant and easily surmounted. Other obstacles are removed with united strength, for spirit is joy, power, movement, which nothing on earth can impede. This is the point I am trying to make! This voice and this uncontrollable longing burst forth out of the hearts of the individuals in an equal and unified way; and so this new reality is created. It will, of course, be different from the ideal, similar to it, but not identical. It will be better, for it is no longer a dream of intuitive, desirous and pained men, but rather a life, a communality, a social life of living men. It will be a people; it will be culture, joy. Who knows today what joy is? The lover when he contemplates his beloved with the feeling, indistinct or clear, that she is the quintessence of all that is life and creates life; the creative artist in a rare hour alone with a friend of like mind, or when in his mind and in his work he anticipates the beauty and fullness which will one day become alive in the people; the prophetic spirit; who hastens ahead of centuries and is sure of eternity. Who else knows joy today, who knows what complete, great, rapturous joy is? Nobody today; nobody, for a long time. In some eras entire peoples were seized and motivated by a spirit of joy. They were so in the times of revolution, but there was not sufficient clarity in their exhilaration. There was too much dark smoldering in their ardour. They wanted something but they did not know what. And the ambitious politicians, advocates, representatives of special interests ruined everything again, while mindless greed and ambition swept away what sought to prepare the ground for the spirit to grow into a people. We have such advocates today, even if they do not go by that name. We have them and they have a hold on us. We have been warned, warned by history.
*all of us.. let’s listen for that
**perhaps.. until now.. because until now all the ‘that’s what i want’s have been whalespeak.. but now have means to detox us all from that .. get us back to us
***if legit heard that itch.. i don’t think we’d even consider all the talking ness.. we’d be too caught up in the dance
2
Socialism is the tendency of will of united persons to create something new for the sake of an ideal.
So let us see what the old system is, and what previous reality was like, in our era. Not our time in the limited sense of now, a few years or a few decades; rather our own time as at the very least the past four hundred years.
For let us impress it on our minds and let us state it here at the beginning: socialism is a great cause with far-reaching consequences. It wishes to help lead declining families of men back to the height of a blossoming culture, to spirit and thus to unity and freedom.
Such words grate on the ears of professors and pamphleteers and they also displease those whose thinking is impregnated by these corrupters, who promulgate the doctrine that men, and also animals, plants and the whole world, are undergoing constant progress, in an upward movement from the very lowest level to the very highest; on and on, from the deepest filth of hell to the highest heavens. And so absolutism, serfdom, mercenariness, capitalism, hardship and degeneracy, all these things are supposed to be only progressive steps and stages on the road to socialism. We adhere to no such so-called scientific illusions. We see the world and human history completely differently. We say it differently.
Then the society of societies was there, communality based on voluntary association..t
again.. ends up being voluntary compliance ness (maté trump law et al).. we need to try something legit diff.. something driven by itch-in-8b-souls.. who have been left to their own devices ness
How did man, someone will probably ask, attain this intelligence and insight to abandon his isolation and to join with his compatriots first in smaller, then in larger groups?
The question is stupid and can only be asked by professors of declining times. For society is as old as man; it is the first, given fact. Wherever men have been, they were joined in hordes, clans, tribes and guilds. They migrated, lived and worked together. They were individual men held together by a common spirit, which is a natural and not extrinsically imposed compulsion..t (even what is called instinct in the animals is a common spirit).
need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around these two legit needs .. these two missing pieces(authenticity and attachment)
But this natural compulsion of the unifying quality and common spirit, until now in known human history, has always needed external forms..t: religious symbols and cults, ideas of faith, prayer rituals or things of this sort.
rather.. has always been cancerously distracted by external forms.. need global detox to get back to us
Therefore spirit is in the nations always connected with unspirit, and deep symbolic thinking with superstitious opinion. The warmth and love of the unifying spirit is overshadowed by the stiff coldness of dogma. Truth, arising from such depths that it can be expressed only in imagery, is replaced by the nonsense of literalness..t
intellectness as cancerous distraction we can’t seem to let go of
This is followed by external organization..t The church and the secular organizations of external coercion gain strength and grow continually worse: serfdom, feudalism, the various departments and authorities, the state.
aziz let go law et al.. need to org via the itch-in-8b-souls.. who have been left to their own devices ness.. the dance
This leads to an eventual decline of spirit among and over the people, and of the immediacy that flows from the individuals and leads them to unity. The spirit withdraws into individuals. It was inwardly strong individuals, representatives of the people, who had carried the spirit to the people; now it lives within the individuals, ingenious men who are consumed in all their might, but are without a people: isolated thinkers, poets, and artists without a social contest, without eternal roots, almost as if hovering in the air. Sometimes the spirit seizes them as if out of a dream of ancient, forgotten times. Then, with a royal gesture of disdain, they cast aside the lyre and reach for the trumpet, they speak in the spirit to the people and to coming nations. All their concentration, all their form, which is alive in them with mighty painfulness and often is much stronger and vaster than body and soul can bear, the innumerable, colorful figures, the activity and urgency of rhythm and harmony: all that — hear it, you artists! — is smothered people, is living people that have collected in them, that are buried in them and will be resurrected out of them.
And along with them there arise other individuals, whom a mixture of spirit and unspirit has isolated: tyrants, accumulators of wealth, leasers of men, robbers of land. In such beginnings of the time of decline and transition, as represented most pompously and magnificently in the Renaissance, or early Baroque period, these men still have many features of spirit, centrifugally dispersed but also partly concentrated in them. In all their mighty power they still have a trace of melancholy, rigidity, strangeness, and unearthy visionariness. In many of these phenomena one would almost say that something spiritlike, or rather, spectrelike, lives on, mightier than they, a content for which the container of isolated personality is too narrow. And very, very rarely one of them awakens as if out of a bad dream, flings away his crown and climbs on the top of Mount Horeb, to hold vigil for this people.
And sometimes mixed natures come, at whose cradle a fairy long hovered; it may make of them a great conqueror or a great freedom fighter, a genius of thought and of free fantasy or a great merchant: men like Napoleon and Ferdinand Lassalle.
And these isolated few, into whom richness of spirit and power has fled, face the many isolated, atomized people who are left only with unspirit, desolation and misery: the masses, who are called the people, but who are only a heap of uprooted, betrayed men. Uprooted, in melancholy strangeness, are the individuals, the few in whom the folk-spirit is buried, even if they know nothing of it. Uprooted, divided in hardship and destitution, are the masses into whom the spirit must again flow, if spirit and the people are to be reunited and revitalized.
Death is the atmosphere between us, for where there is no spirit, there is death. Death has crawled over our skin and penetrated into our flesh. But in us, in our hidden self, in our most secret and deepest dream and desire, in the figures of art, our strongest will, deep contemplative insight, purposeful action, love, despair and courage, psychic distress and joy, in revolution and unity, there life, power and glory dwell; spirit is hidden and generated and wishes to erupt and create a people with beauty and communality.
The times of the human race that shine most splendidly in subsequent history are those where this tendency of the seepage of the spirit out of the people into the ravines and hollows of solitary individuals has just begun and not yet progressed very far: where the common spirit, the society of societies, the interlinkage of the many associations springing from the spirit stand in full bloom, but where the persons of genius have already arisen, although still naturally controlled by the great spirit of the people, which therefore is not banally awed by their great works but rather accepts them as a natural fruit of communal life and rejoices in them with holy feelings. Thus it often hardly hands down the names of their originators to posterity.
The Golden Age of the Greek people was such a time; the Christian Middle Ages were such a time.
It was not an ideal; it was reality. And so we see along with the lofty, spontaneous spirituality, relics of former coercion and already the beginings of future coercion by external brutality, imposed force, the state. But the spirit was stronger; indeed often it permeated and embellished even such institutions of power and dependence, which become detestable instruments of cruelty in times of decay. Not everything historians call “slavery” was always completely such.
It was not an ideal, because spirit was there. Spirit gives meaning and sacredness to life; spirit makes, creates and permeates the present with joy, strength and delight. The ideal turns away from the present toward something new. It is a longing for the future, for something better and unknown. It is the road out of times of decline to a new culture.
Here one more point must be made. These times of glorious height which have reached their turning point were preceded by other periods, not only one single time in so-called development, but again and again in the rise and fall of successive and intermingling peoples. Binding spirit was there too, and a common life on a voluntary basis, by the natural compulsion of belonging together. But no cathedral spires, glittering with beauty in all details and coherent in specific harmony, towered heavenward, and no colonnaded halls stood in calm serenity against the transparent blueness of the sky. Those were simpler groups; no personalities of individual genius and subjectivity yet existed as the representatives of the people; it was a primitive, a communist life. There were — and there are — long centuries and often millennia of relative stagnation. Stagnation, hear it, you scholarly and liberal contemporaries, is for those times, for those peoples, which existed almost yesterday, a sign of their culture. Progress, what you call progress, this incessant hustle-bustle, this rapid tiring and neurasthenic, short-breathed chase after novelty, after anything new as long as it is new, this progress and the crazy ideas of the practitioners of development associated with it and the maniacal habit of saying good-bye immediately on arrival, this progress, this unsteady, restless haste, this inability to remain still and this perpetual desire to be on the move, this so-called progress is a symptom of our abnormal conditions, our unculture. We need something quite different from the symptoms of our depravity, in order to escape from it..t — there were and are, I say, times and peoples of prosperous life, times of tradition, epic times, of agriculture and rural craftsmanship, without much outstanding art, without much written science. Times that are less splendid and raise fewer monuments and gravestones to themselves than those great periods that are so glorious because their heirs are already with them and spend their still wonderful youth with them: a time rather of long and broad life, that almost could be called comfortable. The self-conscious spirit with its magic, coercive power did not yet exist. It was not yet in process of separating and spreading like a gospel throughout the world, subjecting the souls of men to its spell. There were such times too; and there are such peoples; and such times will return.
In such times the spirit seems hidden. Even with careful scrutiny one recognizes it almost only by its expression in the forms of social life and the economic institutions of the community.
Men have always returned to the very first, primitive beginnings, the first stages of these times when they had saved themselves from yet earlier times of decline, spiritlessness, tyranny, exploitation, and governmental power, often with the help of nations that, in this state of fertile stillness, moved slowly across the earth to new places and entered them, youthful and healthy, from out of unknown distance and obscurity. *Thus the Romans and the Greeks of the late Imperial period were plunged into this rejuvenating bath and again became primitive children,..t ripe for the new spirit which came over them simultaneously from the East. There is, for the empathetic observer of mankind, in its eternal decline and eternal re-becoming, hardly anything more touching, more tormenting and at the same time arousing almost childishly pious confidence, as the works of early Byzantine art, which could equally be called late Greek. Through what depravity and through what tremendous re-establishment, through what horrors and what psychic distress generations passed in the transition from the stylish, elegant formalism and deadly coldness of virtuosity to this almost dreadfully sincere feeling, to this childish simplicity and inability to perceive corporeal reality correctly! The virtuosity of eye and hand would have been passed on from generation to generation in art and craft, if the soul had not spat it out as filth and bitter gall. What hopes, what deep consolations lie in so painful, yet refreshing a sight, for us and for all who can learn from it **because they know: no progress, no technology, no virtuosity will bring us salvation and blessing. Only out of the spirit, only out of the depth of our inner need and inner richness will the great transformation which we call socialism come about..t
*nothing to date yet ‘rejuvenating’ enough to become ‘primitive children’.. aka: not yet scrambled
**but we can’t get to those inner richnesses .. until we undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
3
So our time stands between two ages. What does it look like?
A cohesive spirit — yes! yes! the word spirit does occur often in this book. Perhaps it happens because the men of our time, especially the so-called socialists, say “spirit” so seldom and act correspondingly. They do not act spiritually and so they do nothing real and practical;..t and how could they do anything real if they think so little! There is no cohesive spirit that impels men to spontaneously collaborate in matters of common interest, in the production and distribution of consumer goods. There is no spirit hovering above all work above every industrious impulse like the song of the lark out of the skies or the far-away song of invisible choruses, the spirit of art transfiguring earthly activity. There is no spirit that would impart necessity and freedom to natural drives, satisfactions, festivities. There is no spirit linking all life with eternity, sanctifying our senses, making all bodily functions heavenly, every activity a joy, a cause for exuberance and exhilaration.
on the need to org via self-talk as data.. (listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday use that data to connect us)
What is there? God, who created the world; whose son redeems this world from sin… enough of that, of these misunderstood remnants of a symbolism that once made sense, remnants that are now taken literally and held up for belief down to the last dot and letter and miraculous tale, so that the so-called soul or even the body too can attain bliss after rotting in the grave. Enough of this. This spirit is an unspirit, has nothing to do with either truth or life. If anything is probably false, then it is these ideas as a whole.
And our scholars know it. If the people, a very large part of the people, are caught in the spirit of wrong and ruinous falsehood, then how many of our scholars are entangled in the spirit of deceit and cowardice.
And how many again, among the people and scholars, no longer are concerned with any spirit and think that there is nothing more superfluous than to bother with such things.
In school, children are educated in false teachings and their parents are forced to let their children’s thinking be distorted. A horrible gap is opened between the children of the poor, who are kept in the old religion by force, and children of the rich, who are provided with all sorts of semi-enlightenment and mild doubt. The children of the poor are supposed to stay stupid, docile, timid, while the children of the rich become semi-educated and frivolous.
supposed to’s of school/work et al
How is work done in our time? Why is work done?
What is — work?
Only a few animal species know what we call work: bees, ants, termites and men. The fox in his lair and on the hunt, the bird in its nest and catching insects or seeking grains — they all must strive, in order to live, but they do not work. Work is technique; technique is a common spirit and forethought. There is no work without spirit, forethought and communality.
What does the spirit governing our work look like?..t What is our forethought like? What is the nature of the communality that regulates our work?
‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows
the dance.. when unconditionality of left to own devices ness not disturbed
It looks and is as follows:
A few men own the earth, and consequently the possibility of habitation, industry, and activity; the earth, and consequently the raw materials; the earth, and consequently the means of labor inherited from the past. These few men seek economic and personal power in the form of land ownership, monetary wealth, and domination over men.
They cause things to be produced, which they believe, according to the respective situation, the market will accept with the help of a great army of agents and sales representatives, or, in plain language, persuasive chatterers, wholesalers, retailers, newspaper advertisements and posters, fireworks and attractive packaging.
But even when they know that the market can absorb their commodities only with difficulty or not at all, or at least not at the desired price, they must continue to bombard it with their products: for their production plants and enterprises are not guided by the needs of a coherent organic class of men of a community or a larger association of consumers or of a people, but by the demands of their production machinery, to which thousands of workers are harnessed like Ixion on the wheel, because they can do nothing except perform small partial labors at these machines..t
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature so we can org around legit needs
Whether they make cannons to exterminate men, or stockings out of spun dust or mustard out of ground peas, is irrelevant. Whether their commodities are used, whether they are useful or senseless, beautiful or ugly, fine or crude, of good quality or poor, is irrelevant. As long as they are bought, and bring in money.
The great mass of men is separated from the earth and its products, from the earth and the means of labor. They live in poverty and insecurity.
Their life has no links to nature, or onlv diminished ones. .They do not experience themselves. They cannot smile or be childlike. They endure themselves and do not know how unbearable they are, for even mentally they live in dirt and polluted air, in a dense smoke of ugly words and repulsive pleasures.
The place where they congregate and foster their type of communality is not the free marketplace under the open sky and not a high cupola symbolizing closed coherence under the freedom and infinity of the sky, and no community hall and no guild hall and no bathhouse: their common meeting place is the tavern.
There they succumb to drink and can often no longer live without being intoxicated. They get drunk because nothing is so essentially alien to them as sobriety.
You have spared yourself too long and you have too long thought only of good clothes, your own flesh, and your notoriously sensitive hearts! Look at the poor, the miserable, the sunken, the criminals and whores, you good citizens, you withdrawn and reserved youths, you chaste girls and honorable women. Look and learn: your innocence is your guilt; your guilt is your life.
And there is a point, a place where the two meet: the poor and the pitifully rich. The two meet in sexual distress. The very poorest are the young women who have nothing to sell but their bodies. The most pitiful are the young men who roam the streets and don’t know where their sexuality comes from and what they are to do with it. No market and no cathedral dome, no temple and community house is now the communal place for all. Only where power and money dwell, where spirit would like to be at home, has pleasure so totally disappeared that there are people who seek to sell it and others who must buy their disgusting surrogate. When pleasure becomes a commodity, there is no longer any difference between the souls of the uppermost and of the lowermost; and the house of prostitution is the house of representatives of our time..
And the state exists to create order and the possibility to continue living amid all this spiritless nonsense, confusion, hardship and degeneracy. The state, with its schools, churches, courts, prisons, workhouses, the state with its army and its police; the state with its soldiers, officials and prostitutes..
Where there is no spirit and no inner compulsion, there is external force, regimentation, the state.
aka: itch-in-the-soul
need means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls (spirit, inner compulsion) 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us
Where spirit is, there is society. Where unspirit is, there is the state. The state is the surrogate for spirit.
It is this in another sense as well.
Something that looks and acts like spirit must exist. Living men cannot for even a moment live without spirit. Materialists may be quite decent and proper, but they have no idea of what constitutes the world and life. What sort of spirit is it that permits us to stay alive? The spirit regulating our work is, on the one hand, money, and on the other, hardship as we have seen. The spirit that raises us above body and individuality among the lower classes is superstition, whore-mongering and alcohol; among the upper classes it is alcohol, whore-mongering and luxury. And so there are all sorts of spirits — away with them! Away with them! And the spirit that elevates the individuals into a totality, into a people, is called today the nation. Nation as natural coercion of the biological community is a primevally beautiful and ineradicable spirit. Nation in amalgamation with the state and with outrageous violence is an artificial crudity and malignant stupidity — and yet it is an ersatz for spirit, a psychic equivalent to the intoxicating alcoholic spirits that have become the habitual poison of men living today..
The state with its boundaries and the nations with their conflicts are substitutes for a non-existent spirit of the people and of community. The idea of the state is an artificial imitation of spirit, a false illusion, it couples purposes that have nothing to do with one another, that have no roots in the soil such as the beautiful interests of a common language and customs, the interests of economic life (and we have seen what economic life is today!) with a certain territory. The state, with its police and all its borders and institutions governing private property, exists for men’s sakes as a miserable substitute for spirit and purposeful groups. Moreover the next step is to treat men as if they existed for the state which pretends to be a sort of ideal structure and self-purpose, i.e., once again, spirit. *Spirit is something that dwells equally in the hearts and animated bodies of all individuals, which erupts out of them with natural compulsion as a binding quality and leads them to associate together..t The state is never established inside the individual. It has never become an individual quality, never been voluntary. It resides rather in the centralism of command and discipline instead of in the center that rules the world of spirit: that is the heartbeat and free, independent thinking in the living body of the person. **Once long ago there were communities, tribal groups, guilds, brotherhoods, corporations, societies, and they were all stratified into a society. Today there is force, the letter of the law, and the state.
*the dance.. let’s listen for that rhythm
**actually nothing like the dance to date.. always in sea world since forever
4
Socialism is the tendency of will of unified men to create something new for the sake of an ideal.
We have now seen why this new entity should be created. We have seen the old. Once again we have let the existing system pass before our shuddering eyes. Now I will not say, as some may well expect, how the new reality we desire should be constituted as a whole. I offer no depiction of an ideal, no description of a Utopia. I have given some idea of what can now be said and I have called it by name: justice. An image has been delineated of our conditions, and of our people; does anyone believe that reason and decency, or even love, need only be preached in order to happen?
Socialism is a cultural movement, a struggle for beauty, greatness, abundance of the peoples. No one can understand it, no one can lead to it, unless he sees that socialism comes down from the centuries and millennia. Whoever does not grasp socialism as a step ahead in a long, hard history, knows nothing of it; and this already means — we will hear yet more of it — that no everyday politicians can be socialists. The socialist grasps the whole of society and of the past; feels and knows whence we come and then determines where we are headed.
if true.. then sees that all of past is same song.. nothing yet legit free
That mark distinguishes the socialist from the politician. He is interested in the whole, and he grasps our conditions in their totality, in their historical context; he thinks holistically. It then follows that he rejects the entirety of our forms of life, that he has no other intent and goal but the whole, the universal, the principle.
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman
Spirit is a grasping of the whole in a living universal..No wonder that this weird doctrine is a travesty of spirit, since its origin weas already a travesty of real spirit, namely Hegelian philosophy. The man who concocted this drug in his laboratory was called Karl Marx. Professor Karl Marx. He brought us scientific superstition instead of spiritual knowledge, politics and party instead of cultural will. .. Here it will be said that neither Marxism nor the patchwork of the revisionists is socialism. Here it will be shown what socialism is not, and what it is. Let us see.
again.. same song since forever..
Marxism
Karl Marx artificially bridged the two components of Marxism, science and the political party, creating something apparently completely new, which the world had never seen before, namely scientific politics and the party with a scientific basis and a scientific program. That really was something new and, moreover, modern and timely, and furthermore it flattered the workers to hear that precisely they represented science, indeed the very latest science. *If you want to win the masses, then flatter them. **If you want to incapacitate them for serious thought and action and make their representatives archetypes of hollow infatuation, mouthing a rhetoric which they themselves at best only half understand, then convince them that they represent a scientific party. If you want to fill them completely with malicious stupidity, then train them in party schools. The scientific party, thus, was ***the demand of the most advanced men of all times! What amateurs all previous politicians had been, who acted from instinct or geniality as one walks, thinks, writes or paints. Though this does require, along with natural talent, a great deal of skill and technique, it is by no means a science. And what modest people those representatives of politics as a sort of science had been, from Plato through Machiavelli down to the author of the excellent Handbook for the Demagogue. With great skill and a strong eye for simplification and synthesis, they arranged and classified individual experiences and institutions, but the idea never occurred to them to do this scientifically. What aesthetics would be if it purported to provide the programmatic basis for artistic creativity, Marxism is for these scientific socialists.
*if you want to free the masses.. show them a way each of their hearts already craves
**all this.. already done.. aka: sea world
***science scientifically.. intellectness as cancerous distraction..
Every arrogance, every obstinate craze, intolerance and narrow-minded injustice, and the whole sardonic temper constantly displayed by the scientifico-political heart of the Marxists stems from their absurd and peculiar amalgamation of theory and practice of science and party. ..
What does this science of Marxism teach? What does it claim? It claims to know the future. It presumes to have such deep insight into eternal laws of development and the determinant factors of human history that it knows what is to come, how history will continue and what will become of our conditions and forms of production and organization.
At this point it is only a matter of revealing, mocking and rejecting the immeasurably foolish presumption that a science exists that can reveal, calculate and determine the future with certainty from the data and news of the past and the facts and conditions of the present.
..this necessity is not imposed upon us in the form of a natural law, but of what ought to be. For if I say that I know something, is it in the sense that in mathematics an unknown quantity is calculated from known ones? Or that a geometrical problem can be solved? Or that the law of gravity and inertia or the law of the conservation of energy are always valid? Or that I can calculate the trajectory of a falling object or projectile if I know the data required for the formula? Or that I know that H2O is water? Or that we can calculate the movements of many stars and predict eclipses of the moon and sun? No! All these are scientific activities and results. They are natural laws because they are laws of our mind. But there is also a natural law, a law of our mind, a sub-law of the great law of the conservation of energy, that says: what we will make of our life and body, what the continuation of our previous life, the road ahead, the release of compression, the activation of disposition will be — all this is called “the future” — cannot be presented in the form of science, i.e., of accomplished facts subject to classification, but only in the form of a feeling accompanying a disposition, of the inner pressure of effort and desire exactly adequate of the external, shifting state of balance. This implies will, duty, intimation all the way to prophecy, vision and artistic creation. The point of the road where we are standing is not analogous to a mathematical problem or a factual report or even a law of development; that would be a mockery of the law of the conservation of energy. This road corresponds to a dare-devil audacity. Knowledge means: to have lived, to possess what has been. Life means: to live, creating and suffering what is to come.
And does not the world seem to us, every morning when we get up, vague, unknown and amorphous, like something new and presented, which we form and assimilate with the instrument of our own natural capacities?
Not resigned, skeptical, or plaintive, but assenting joyously, I state that we know nothing of the manifold and incomprehensible forms of the past and future life of men and nations; .. am I speaking in formulae? Am I a journalist masquerading deceptively as a mathematician? Am I a Pied Piper of Hamlin leading immature children with the flute of science into the mountain of nonsense and fraud? Am I a Marxist?
The spirit that impels us is a quintessence of life and it creates effective reality. This spirit is called by another name: solidarity [Bund]; and what we seek to poeticize in beautiful presentation is: practice, socialism, a league [Bund] of working people.
if working ness.. not legit free.. so.. yeah.. just a ‘presentation’
Here we now see clearly before our eyes and we can touch with our hands why the Marxists have excluded the spirit from their famous conception of history, which they call materialist. We can at this point present the explanation better than other excellent opponents of the Marxists have succeeded in doing. The Marxists have, in their declarations and views, excluded the spirit for a very natural, indeed almost excellent material reason: namely, because they have no spirit.
But if it were only true that their manner of describing history could rightly be called “materialistic.” That would be a laudable, even gigantic enterprise, though one which their representatives could not achieve with a spirit of their own: the attempt to describe the whole of human history merely in the form of physical events, corporeally real processes, of an unending interaction between the material events of the rest of the world and the physiological processes of human bodies. .. For whoever can think materialism through to its ultimate consequences knows that it is only the other side of idealism. Whoever is such a genuine materialist can come only from the school of Spinoza. But enough of that! What do the Marxists understand of that? The Marxists, who, when they hear the name Spinoza, probably think of the stuffed doll their pamphleteers and the Darwinistic monistic writers have made of Spinoza.
..the historical conception they teach ought to be called “economic.” Its true name is, as said above, the spiritless conception of history.
For they claim to have discovered that all political conditions, religions, intellectual movements whatsoever, not excluding of course their own doctrine and their whole agitation and political activity, are only the ideological superstructure, a sort of epiphenomenon of the economic conditions and social institutions and processes. Their superficial minds are only slightly bothered by how much mental and spiritual activity is inextricably interwoven with what they call economic and social reality, by the fact that economic life is only a tiny part of social life and that this social life is totally inseparable from the great and small spiritual structures and movements of human coexistence. Typically in all their pronouncements they are fast talkers and chatterers who have never felt the need to fathom their own words. Had they ever done so they would have become deep silent men, for they would have suffocated in all their contradictions and incoherences..t
gibran talking law.. language as control/enclosure.. rumi words law.. lanier beyond words law.. et al
Marxism is the uncultured plodder who knows nothing more important, nothing more splendid, nothing more sacred than technology and its progress. Put such a plodder face to face with Jesus, who in his richness and the generosity of his inexhaustible personality, as well as in his significance for the spirit and for life, is also a tremendous socialist, put him before the living Jesus on the cross and before a new machine for the transportation of men or freight. If he is honest and not a cultural hypocrite, he will find the crucified Son of Man to be a totally useless and superfluous phenomenon and will go running after the machine.
And yet how much more this quiet, calmly suffering greatness of heart and spirit has truly moved than all the transport machines of these times!
And yet where would all the transport machines of our times be without this quiet, calmly suffering greatness on mankind’s cross.
They see nothing of all this deep decay of our times; they hallucinate progress. Technology progresses, of course. It actually does so in many times of culture, although not always — there are also cultures without technical progress. It progresses especially in times of decay, of the individualization of spirit and the atomization of the masses. That is precisely our point. The real progress of technology together with the real baseness of the time is — to speak, for once, Marxistically for the Marxists — the real, material basis for the ideological superstructure, namely for the Marxists’ Utopia of progressive socialism.
*We will see that true culture is not empty but fulfilled and that the true society is a multiplicity of real, small affinities that grow out of the binding qualities of individuals, out of the spirit, a structure of communities, and a union. ..The choice we face is not: one form of socialism, or the other, but simply: capitalism or socialism; the state of society; unspirit or spirit.
*how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
5
But things did not go on that way. Capitalism has created such a widely ramified multiplicity of needs, satisfied so much expensive, medium-priced, cheap and trashy luxury, while the big industries have given birth to such a need for supporting industries, that consequently no form of technology has become dispensable, entire new jobs, e.g., home and village industries, small and medium-sized factories have arisen, and even the number of door-to-door salesmen and representatives has not diminished, while specialized shops, though small and medium-sized shops are forced out of many fields, find new possibilities elsewhere in others in exchange.
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
Revolutionaries exist in masses only when there is a revolution. One of the Marxists’ worst errors, whether they call themselves Social Democrats or anarchists, is the opinion that a revolution could be achieved by means of revolutionaries, whereas the reverse it true: revolutionaries come into existence only by means of the revolution. To seek to create, multiply and assemble revolutionaries for a few decades in order to be sure to have the right number of them in case of a revolution is a typically German, childishly pedantic and impractical idea. *There is no need to fear a lack of revolutionaries: they actually arise by a sort of spontaneous generation — namely when the revolution comes. But for the revolution, a new formative power, to come, new conditions must be created..t They can best be created by impartial men, who might well be called optimists (although it need not be so), by men who do not consider it certain that the revolution must come, but who are so deeply convinced of the necessity and justice of their new cause that they do not regard the obstacles and dangers as insurmountable and inevitable. ..It is advisable in one’s actions not to think of what could happen, but of what one must do. **The demand of the day must be fulfilled by precisely those who want to construct the work of their heart, their desire, their justice and their imagination very fundamentally and radically..t
*hari rat park law.. via a sabbatical ish transition
**need: tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us
Of course they must build quite differently from the patching up of capitalism..t as we have observed it in these last decades undertaken by the entrepreneurs, the state and the workers themselves, as briefly described above.
diff = sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
The workers’ struggle in their organizations, the trade unions, to improve their situation in life and their working conditions is also a part of this context. We have seen how the workers in their capacity as producers interfere in and regulate what the Marxists call an unavertable destiny though their union fund system. However another important task of the unions is still the struggle for higher wages and the shortening of working hours by negotiations and strikes.
For money is only the expression of the relationships of prices and wages to one another. It all depends on the purchasing power of money.
perhaps let’s try/code money (any form of measuring/accounting/people telling other people what to do) as the planned obsolescence .. where legit needs are met w/o money.. till people forget about measuring..ie: sabbatical ish transition
So an individual worker can sometimes make himself indispensable, improve his situation in life, or enter completely into an area of wealth. But as the workers struggle in their trade unions, they reduce themselves to numbers, each of which is personally insignificant. They thus accept their role as cogs in the machine. They act only as parts of a whole, and the whole reacts against them.
Here I say: no! All these things are necessary under capitalism, as long as the workers do not understand how to get out of capitalism. But all this only leads around and around within the vicious circle of capitalism. Whatever happens within capitalist production can only lead deeper and deeper into it, but never out of it.
hari rat park law via a sabbatical ish transition
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
Thus, we do not warn against the peculiar attempt to bring society to a halt by a combination of revolution and socialism, struggle and construction. We must only say that we are today far from that point and that the consumer cooperatives, as they exist today — though without knowing if they are only a pitiful beginning of socialism — are not the least suited to seriously ruining capitalism’s prices or taking away their customers. Thus, this is the main duty of those who call for socialism. Socialism, if it is to come, must and can begin only with consumption.
if start there – consumption.. will end up with same song.. need to start with missing pieces.. as infra
This will be explained below. Here the task was to show that all one-sided struggle and all activity in the area of capitalist production, and so all action by the producers is a part of the history of capitalism and nothing more.
But since we have described and criticized the union activity of the producers, the workers’ economic self-help, and the pressure they exert on the state for legislative regulations, two further important tasks of these organizations and their struggles must be dealt with briefly. *The main tasks of the unions still include the shortening of working hours and a change in the wage structure that is closely connected therewith, namely the replacement of piece work and contracted work by daily pay. ..Under the system of daily wages there is no outspoken relationship of work to the quantity and quality of its products, there is no quid pro quo exchange. There is only need that desires subsistence. Thus we again find that in the capitalist world the worker must defend a capitalist, anticultural institution to preserve his existence. **Need and his role as a producer make him a servant and vassal of capitalism. The struggle of organized labor for its own daily wage system has its counterpart in the life of the state, i.e., in the struggle of the politically militant worker for the secret ballot.
*oi.. cancerous distraction.. need to try sabbatical ish transition
**perhaps until now.. now have a means to org around legit needs
Technology will, in a cultured people, have to be *directed according to the psychology of free people who want to use it. **When the workers themselves determine under what conditions they want to work, they will make a compromise between the amount of time they want to spend outside of production and the intensity of work they are willing to accept within production.
*rather.. what we need now is tech to augment our interconnectedness.. as we leap into conditions we’ve not yet tried.. ie: legit free\dom.. a space where everyone is left to own devices ness
**if work ness still an issue.. not yet free..
Today all this does not come into consideration. Technology stands completely under the spell of capitalism.
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
The earth was explored and repopulated over its entire surface; travel and communication go with a speed even we are not yet accustomed to, and which still seems fabulous to us, all round the globe; and in connection with all this the number of people living at the same time has increased enormously. Needs, but also the means of satisfying them have risen tremendously.
rather.. whales‘ needs for coping in sea world.. we need a means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
The new society we want to prepare, whose cornerstone we are about to lay, will not be a return to any old structures. It will be the old in a new form, a culture with the means discovered by civilization in these recent centuries.
has to be sans any form of m\a\p.. otherwise same song
How will we start? How will socialism come? What should be done? Done first? Done right away? To answer this will be our final task.
ie: a sabbatical ish transition
6
It was a memorable moment in the history of our era, when Pierre Joseph Proudhon, after the French February revolution of the year 1848, told his people what it had to do to establish a society of justice and freedom. He was still living, like all his revolutionary compatroits of the time, completely in the tradition of the revolution which had erupted externally in 1789 and had, as was then felt, been nipped in the bud by the counterrevolution and subsequent governments. He said: The revolution put an end to feudalism. Something new must replace it. Feudalism was an order in the area of the economy of the State, it was an articulated, military system of dependencies. For centuries it had been undermined by freedoms; civil liberties had gained more and more ground. However, they also destroyed the old order and security, the old associations and leagues. A few men became rich under the new freedom and mobility, while the masses were exposed to hardship and insecurity. How can we both preserve, extend and create freedom for all, as well as bring about security, the great equalization of property and conditions of life, the new order?
The revolutionaries, he says, do not yet know that the revolution will put an end to militarism, i.e., to the government; that its task is to replace politics by social life, political centralism by a direct unity of economic interests, an economic center which does not rule over persons, but takes care of business.
You Frenchmen, he says, are small and medium-sized farmers, small and medium-sized craftsmen; you are active in agriculture, industry, transportation and communications. Until now you needed kings and their officials in order to come together and protect yourselves one from the other. In 1793 you abolished the king of the state, but you retained the king of the economy, gold. Because you thus left misfortune, disorder and insecurity in the country, you had to let the kings and officials and armies return. Do away with the authoritarian intermediaries. Abolish the parasites. See to the direct unity of your interests. Then you will have society as the heir to feudalism and the state.
need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness as nonjudgmental expo labeling)
What is gold? What is capital? It is not a thing like a shoe or a table or a house. It is not a thing, it is nothing real. Gold is the sign for a relationship. Capital is something that goes back and forth as a relationship between men. It is something between men. Capital is credit, credit is mutuality of interests. You are now in the revolution. The revolution — enthusiasm, a spirit of trust, the exuberance of equalization, the desire to go for the whole — has come over you, has arisen among you: create for yourselves direct mutuality. Set up an institution whereby you come to one another with the production of your work without any parasitic, vampire-like intermediaries. Then you will need no tutelary authority, nor the transfer of the absolute power of the political government to economic life, of which the newest bunglers, the Communists, speak. The task is: to assert and create freedom in the economy and public life and to see to an equalization to abolish hardship, insecurity, and property, which is not the ownership of things but the domination of men and slave-ownership, and interest, which is usury. *Create an exchange bank!
*still oi.. marsh exchange law et al
Mutuality restores the order of nature. Mutuality abolishes the rule of money. Mutuality is primary: the spirit between men that allows all men who want to work to do so and to satisfy their needs.
7
The three cardinal points of economic slavery are the following:
First, private ownership of the land.
Secondly, the circulation of goods in an exchange economy by means of a vehicle of exchange that serves every need non-expirably and unchangeably.
The third key feature of economic slavery is, accordingly, surplus value.
Our human prosperity, our existence now depends on the fact that the unity of the individual and the unity of the family, which are the only natural groups that have survived, is again intensified to the unity of communities, the basic form of every society.
If we want a society, then we must construct it, we must practice it.
We need that again: a new rule and transformation by the spirit, which will not establish things and institutions in a final form, but will declare itself as permanently at work in them. Revolution must be a part of our social order, must become the basic rule of our constitution. The spirit will create forms for itself, forms of movement, not of rigidity; ownership that does not become private property, that provides only the possibility to work with security but not the possibility of exploitation and arrogance; a means of exchange that has no value of itself but only in relation to trade, but also contains the conditions for its use; a means of exchange that can expire and precisely therefore can vivify, whereas today it is immortal and murderous.
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us.. ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: imagine if we listened to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & used that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
Socialists therefore must form new communities that produce what their members need..t
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. so we can org around legit needs.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
can’t find this quote now.. maybe deleted in on here?:
Occasionally, crisis responses can come into conflict w/one another, making it difficult to take effective action
rather..always until we let go enough to try the unconditional ness of left to own devices ness
..otherwise just keep up with whac-a-mole-ing ness of sea world
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be you. 