unions
when did liberals start thinking of supporting unions as an exercise in pity and charity?
middle class liberals make me feel weird sometimes, because whatever notion i have of labor and working class organizing is premised in the belief that collective labor that blends physical and mental life has inherently greater worth and dignity that individualized intellectual work. hands down. i just assumed that was what everyone thought, unless you're a doctor saving babies or something (and honestly medicine does blend physical and intellectual labor, it's as much a skilled craft as an intellectual art).
and it seems like the basic order of American power is still based in elevating individualized labor based in symbolic manipulation rather than physical skill.
so my understanding of working class politics is based very simply on the idea that working class people are basically better than non-working class people, in the sense that they have an organic connection to creating reality whereas boogie people do not. uper class professionals may as well cut their own nuts and/or clits off as far as i can see. they (and i suppose eventually that'll be a "we," maybe) only engage the concrete world as consumers, meaning in a manner already preprogrammed and micromanaged, in a manner "unfree," in a manner unable to leave the control the of the participant and grow into something larger, something that feeds back into the social and lived world. they can have hobbies, they can test themselves, etc, but they can't build a house, they can't make a tool, they can't plow a field or run a serious small business. their material trials are abstracted trials, trials they control at every moment, and so there's no real growth uniting mind and body and spirit, no Events to take hold of your life, just a sort of steady accumulation.
to be fair, this isn't a universal thing. it basically applies to a working class craft or enterpreneurial ethos. i hate capitalism because in its contemporary form it is based on demolishing that ethos, laying it off and deskilling it and outsourcing it to sweatshops and centralizing it in factories.
to me the problem is very simple, labor has not been allowed to "speak" so to speak. and i don't mean working class people, i don't mean organized labor. i mean that we are not allowed, encouraged, taught, etc, to form concepts from free action engaged in the world, or through open encounter with the world that simple labor and simple movement honestly is. our schools aren't designed around that, they're designed to produce middle calss people and then make the ones who "don't make it" accept the indignities of their lives by either seeking distractions or believing in their own shame and culpability (i just didn't work hard enough to be a banker etc etc etc). of course a society built of middle class symbol processors depends upon slaves. the slaves are mehanical or human or ecological, but it can only exist through a relationship of slavery.
slavery is primarily a relationship, a question of expression. slavery is diverting and tapping into a pool of movement, and then feeding off the surpluses of the captured movements without reciprocation, rendering the pool unsustainable, brittle, binding it to death.
it is worst when we do it to other people, in that it is hardest and hence represents an end point in degradation, but the general orientation is the same whatever the foundational pool may be.
skilled labor blends work wih direct experience of the conditions of that work, hence it is opposed, in theory, to slavery, as a method of production and as a spiritual orientation. it blends will with understanding, slavery asserts will and denies understanding.
it's really a gestalt switch, a little lever in the collective unconscious. goes in one direction or the other. masters/slaves or bricoleurs. how much of your lifeworld is alien to you and how much do you understand, concretely? we have an endless stream or words but most of them are just that, words, blips, moments that needn't be enshrined into perpetuity.
we are too concerned with arranging people instead of building work that develops the arranging organically, adaptively, by it's own logic.
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i need to revise the above because i ruin it with my own individualistic words. by that i mean that i focus on people, classes, whatever. working class people and middle class people.
there are no working calss people really, no middle class people, the terms apply as characteristics of actions and habits and not the people that ground them. people are primates, they eat and fuck and drink water and like some sort of shelter and that's about it. class terms apply to actions, classes are collections of actions and affects and not biological beings, subjects.
so it isn't that working class people are better, so to speak, it's that working class actions have a direct relationship to the Being of the world or at least a strong potential for that. those actions bind said primates to the world, and make them something interesting, enlarge their capacity to move in the world.
middle class people etc are fine, that isn't the issue. the issue is a mode of work or discourse that hides itself. middle class symbol manipulation, the code of it, is the issue. it functions in certain ways, individualistic ways, opens certain actions and closes others.
the issue isn't the people doing it, though of course a person is just the composite of their actions and the virtual space of those actions, the degress of freedom, etc. the issue is that as work, as actions that are allowed to blend into the general expression of society (i.e. as actions that are allowed and even predicated upon the possibility of general transmission to all participants in a society, as actions that are turned into a sort of macro-feedback loop unifying all human subjectivities), middle class actions hide themselves from the world and fall back into their own self-definition. they close off connections rather than open them.
there aren't bourgeois people per se, there is a set of bourgeois actions bound to styles of motion and discipline of that motion attached to certain types of privileged work; and those styles of labor are allowed transformative power over large areas of the lifeworld even while they abstract away from it.
it's primarily a question of discursive sets and their openness and closure to the lifeworld; discourse in this sense refers to actions and affects.
by middle class and bourgeois i refer primarily to management and things like management, certain areas of professional life and finance, certain styles of engineering and science, etc.
middle class liberals make me feel weird sometimes, because whatever notion i have of labor and working class organizing is premised in the belief that collective labor that blends physical and mental life has inherently greater worth and dignity that individualized intellectual work. hands down. i just assumed that was what everyone thought, unless you're a doctor saving babies or something (and honestly medicine does blend physical and intellectual labor, it's as much a skilled craft as an intellectual art).
and it seems like the basic order of American power is still based in elevating individualized labor based in symbolic manipulation rather than physical skill.
so my understanding of working class politics is based very simply on the idea that working class people are basically better than non-working class people, in the sense that they have an organic connection to creating reality whereas boogie people do not. uper class professionals may as well cut their own nuts and/or clits off as far as i can see. they (and i suppose eventually that'll be a "we," maybe) only engage the concrete world as consumers, meaning in a manner already preprogrammed and micromanaged, in a manner "unfree," in a manner unable to leave the control the of the participant and grow into something larger, something that feeds back into the social and lived world. they can have hobbies, they can test themselves, etc, but they can't build a house, they can't make a tool, they can't plow a field or run a serious small business. their material trials are abstracted trials, trials they control at every moment, and so there's no real growth uniting mind and body and spirit, no Events to take hold of your life, just a sort of steady accumulation.
to be fair, this isn't a universal thing. it basically applies to a working class craft or enterpreneurial ethos. i hate capitalism because in its contemporary form it is based on demolishing that ethos, laying it off and deskilling it and outsourcing it to sweatshops and centralizing it in factories.
to me the problem is very simple, labor has not been allowed to "speak" so to speak. and i don't mean working class people, i don't mean organized labor. i mean that we are not allowed, encouraged, taught, etc, to form concepts from free action engaged in the world, or through open encounter with the world that simple labor and simple movement honestly is. our schools aren't designed around that, they're designed to produce middle calss people and then make the ones who "don't make it" accept the indignities of their lives by either seeking distractions or believing in their own shame and culpability (i just didn't work hard enough to be a banker etc etc etc). of course a society built of middle class symbol processors depends upon slaves. the slaves are mehanical or human or ecological, but it can only exist through a relationship of slavery.
slavery is primarily a relationship, a question of expression. slavery is diverting and tapping into a pool of movement, and then feeding off the surpluses of the captured movements without reciprocation, rendering the pool unsustainable, brittle, binding it to death.
it is worst when we do it to other people, in that it is hardest and hence represents an end point in degradation, but the general orientation is the same whatever the foundational pool may be.
skilled labor blends work wih direct experience of the conditions of that work, hence it is opposed, in theory, to slavery, as a method of production and as a spiritual orientation. it blends will with understanding, slavery asserts will and denies understanding.
it's really a gestalt switch, a little lever in the collective unconscious. goes in one direction or the other. masters/slaves or bricoleurs. how much of your lifeworld is alien to you and how much do you understand, concretely? we have an endless stream or words but most of them are just that, words, blips, moments that needn't be enshrined into perpetuity.
we are too concerned with arranging people instead of building work that develops the arranging organically, adaptively, by it's own logic.
**********************************************************
i need to revise the above because i ruin it with my own individualistic words. by that i mean that i focus on people, classes, whatever. working class people and middle class people.
there are no working calss people really, no middle class people, the terms apply as characteristics of actions and habits and not the people that ground them. people are primates, they eat and fuck and drink water and like some sort of shelter and that's about it. class terms apply to actions, classes are collections of actions and affects and not biological beings, subjects.
so it isn't that working class people are better, so to speak, it's that working class actions have a direct relationship to the Being of the world or at least a strong potential for that. those actions bind said primates to the world, and make them something interesting, enlarge their capacity to move in the world.
middle class people etc are fine, that isn't the issue. the issue is a mode of work or discourse that hides itself. middle class symbol manipulation, the code of it, is the issue. it functions in certain ways, individualistic ways, opens certain actions and closes others.
the issue isn't the people doing it, though of course a person is just the composite of their actions and the virtual space of those actions, the degress of freedom, etc. the issue is that as work, as actions that are allowed to blend into the general expression of society (i.e. as actions that are allowed and even predicated upon the possibility of general transmission to all participants in a society, as actions that are turned into a sort of macro-feedback loop unifying all human subjectivities), middle class actions hide themselves from the world and fall back into their own self-definition. they close off connections rather than open them.
there aren't bourgeois people per se, there is a set of bourgeois actions bound to styles of motion and discipline of that motion attached to certain types of privileged work; and those styles of labor are allowed transformative power over large areas of the lifeworld even while they abstract away from it.
it's primarily a question of discursive sets and their openness and closure to the lifeworld; discourse in this sense refers to actions and affects.
by middle class and bourgeois i refer primarily to management and things like management, certain areas of professional life and finance, certain styles of engineering and science, etc.