The New Socialism

Socialism with Soul

Contents:

 The New Socialism and Identity Politics

 The New Socialism as Relational Revolution

The New Socialism, Race and Nation

The New Socialism as Radical, Revolutionary and Religious Socialism

The New Socialism and Revolutionary Conservationism

The New Socialism and the Nature of Work

The New Socialism and Social Health Fascism

The New Socialism as Radical Equalitarianism

The New Socialism and ‘The Work’

No American future.
Friedrich Nietzsche
 

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic is destroyed. The Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency, and credits needed to satisfy the spending power of the Government, and the buying power of consumers. By the adoption of these principals, the taxpayers will be saving immense sums of interest. Money will cease to be master, and become the servant of humanity.
- Abraham Lincoln

 America ... has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest. It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has [built a society where] man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate.
- Julius Evola

We must be the change we wish to see.
M.K. Gandhi

  The New Socialism and Identity Politics

 Where does the soul-less culture and science of global capitalism leave the individual? Capitalism has traditionally been identified with ‘individualism’, but this is an individualism of the ego, not spiritual individuality – individuality of soul. In contrast, Marx defined communism not as some form of soul-less collectivism but as fully realised individualism – a stateless society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” The Cold War between Soviet ‘communism’ and U.S. capitalism was a war between a soul-less collectivism and soul-less individualism. The end the of the Cold War and the hegemony of global finance capitalism, spearheaded by the military-imperial hegemony of the United States has resulted in a soul-less culture of ‘McValues’ - one in which all deep spiritual values are converted into brand values attached to consumer commodities (“Real Chocolate. Real Feeling”) and in which brands rather than human beings are seen as having souls. Globalisation has led to a resurgence of identity politics – the attempt by individuals to protect their spiritual identity and rediscover their root values through identification with the group soul of local or regional cultures – whether ethnic or national, racial or religious, local and regional. Particularistic identity politics – whether in the form of Islamism,  Zionism or White Racism, now  pits itself against the universalist identity politics of global capitalism or McWorld. But communalism in all its forms is not communism as Marx understood it, for in the battle between particularistic and universalist identities there is no room for individual identity – for the soul. That is because the essence of class society in all its forms, up to and including global capitalism, is an understanding of identity -  and of soul or psyche - as the exclusive private property of an individual or group, something ‘possessed’ by virtue of class or caste, gender or biological inheritance, racial or religious affiliation.

The crudest expressions of identity politics find expression in the brutality of race persecution and prejudice, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide. Pseudo-scientific justification of racism continues, despite the fact that genetic differences between members of different races are know to be negligible – for every human being shares 99.9 % of their genes with every other. The principle differences in DNA are individual, not racial. Alongside the scientifically ignorant politics of racial identity goes the spiritually ignorant politics of religious identity – the ‘Axis of Ignorance’ constituted by the three great monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Just as racist identity politics ignores the biological uniqueness of the individual, so does religious identity politics ignore the spiritual individuality of each human being. Like Serbian ‘Christianity’, modern religious Zionism is a toxic fusion of racist and religious identity politics. It shares with Islamic fundamentalism the aim of replacing the secular state with a theocratic one based solely on religious Law. Worse still, its chief rabbis go so far as to declare secular Jews as racially non-Jewish in identity - descendents of the tribe of Amalekites  who had infiltrated the Chosen People at the time of the Exodus, and whom God had commanded to be eradicated from the face of the Earth. (http://www.gush-shalom.org/)

 Identity as private property is defined by ‘alterity’ or difference - setting a fixed boundary between Self and Other, Us and Them. That is because similarity and difference, identity and alterity, are themselves believed to be opposites, a belief propped up by old-fashioned Aristotelian logic and its law of identity (A=A) and of non-contradiction – the law that declares that something or someone can be ‘A’ or ‘not-A’ but not both. But if any two identities – whether individual human bengs, tribes, races, religions, ethnic groups, cultures or nations were absolutely identical - they would not constitute two identities at all but one and the same. Conversely, if any two identities were absolutely different from one another, there would and could be absolutely no relation or point of contact between them. They could and would exist in a vacuum. The attempt to describe identities in terms of a combination of difference and similarities results in the same paradox. For if any of these similarities or differences were absolute there would neither be two separate identities at all, or else two absolutely separate identities. Identity is not based on similarity and/or difference, but rather on ‘simference’, on similiarity-in-difference and difference-in-similarity. Only through the principle of simference can we recognise ‘similar but different’ pieces of music as works in the same style, by the same composer. Indeed only through their simference can two or more pieces of music be recognised as music at all, two games as games, two species as species, two races as races. Similarly, only through their simference can human beings, human races and religions, human cultures and nations, be recognised as human at all. Genetics itself bears witness to the principle of simference, which Wittgenstein recognised as a principle of ‘family resemblance’. Inheriting a shared gene does not make John’s nose – or any feature of his physiognomy or physiology – ‘the same’ as that of a parent or grandparent, but different in its very similarity and similar in its very difference. Simference is a principle prior to individual similarity and difference. Identity as such is not a mix or match of similarities and differences but is constituted by simferences.  The non-Aristotelian logic of simference undermines all forms of identity politics – whether based on economic class or social culture, gender or religion, race or ethnicity.

 Identity politics presupposes a set of qualities that are the exclusive private property of an individual or group, marking them through their absolute difference or differences from other individuals or groups. The Aristotelian logic of absolute identity and alterity, of similarity ‘and’ difference, is itself the very basis not only of class societies but of all forms of identity politics. For it is identity politics that breeds not only class societies based on property relations but tribalism and communalism, racism and nationalism. Even the traditional political opposition of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ is based on a form of identity politics. Those who simply rail against the political Right or the ravages wrought by global capitalism fail to even consider why it is that human beings should fear change. Is it only that the ruling corporate oligarchies fear loss of wealth and power? Or does the very attachment to wealth and power conceal a far more primordial fear that permeates all classes and strata of capitalist society? What this fear fears above all is not essentially loss of wealth or power, but loss of identity. So long as identity itself is treated as the private property of the individual or group, both will fear anything that threatens to alter or transform that identity. Individuals and groups resist change because they cling on in fear to the identifications that constitute their sense of identity – whether identifications with wealth or power, economic class or professional status, gender or sexuality, ideology or religion, ethnicity or race.

 To overthrow global capitalism is only possible by undermining the foundations of capitalist social relations in our own souls. To do so means ceasing to experience our own personal identity as private property separating us from others, and  recognising instead that our true spiritual individuality – our whole self or soul - is itself an inner society of selves. None of these selves is the private property of the ego. Rather each of them is a bridge of identity linking them with others in soul families, groups and communities.  The New Socialism is ‘socialism with soul’. It recognises the already existing reality of ‘communism’ - not in the social world but in those soul groups and communities that make up the soul world. Its aim is the creation of social groups and communities that know themselves as the embodiment of soul groups and communities, and in this way bring the ‘heavenly’ kingdom of soul ‘down to earth’. The soul dimension of socialism has to do with the intrinsically social character of the individual soul as such. Just as society is a group of individual selves, so is the soul an inner society or community of selves. The personal self we know and identify with is but one part and one expression of this inner society of selves.  In the social world, each person is the hub of a wheel of dyadic relationships with others. Part of the meaning of these relationships lies in the way in which each person we relate to in our social world links us through simference to another self of our own – to a specific part of that inner society of selves that makes up our whole self or soul. In the social world, we are taught to feel our personal identity as the private property of our ego.  In the soul world on the other hand, the different elements that make up our identity can mix and merge with simferential aspects of others, and do so without any loss of our essential spiritual identity individuality, which has to do with the group nature of our whole self or soul. If two individuals linked in a dyadic relationship can sense the simferential aspects of their own souls linking them with the other, and feel the ways in which their own identity overlaps with that of the other, then that relationship becomes a link to their whole self or soul. It ceases to be a mere ‘interpersonal relationship’ - one in which each person treats their own identity as private property, and rigidifies the boundary of identity separating them from the other person. Instead they become conscious of their interpersonal relationship as a soul relationship, and become aware of its reality in the soul world. A social group is a group of persons. A soul group is a group of souls. But since each individual, as a soul, is themselves a group or society of selves, a soul group has a ‘holarchical’ character. It is a group of groups in which each member is part of every other, and is linked to each other member through a particular aspect of their own soul.  If each member of a social group is able to feel the specific inner soul-connection uniting them with each other member of the group, then the social group can come to consciousness of itself as a soul group, and become aware of its own living reality in the soul world. It is only through a highly specific sense of our inner soul connection with a specific other that both interpersonal and group relationships can be transformed into soul relationships - awakening a social consciousness of our own whole self or soul, of soul groups and communities, and of the soul world as such. Most accounts of society and social history are based purely on studies of social practices and the social world as such. They entirely ignore the social influence and reality of soul relationships, soul groups and communities and the soul world.  The natural world is a world that surrounds us all the time. It is not ‘another world’ but one we are a part of,  even though, as urban dwellers, we may only be conscious of it through changes in the weather.  The same is true of the soul world. We are part of that world too and have never left it. It surrounds us all the time and in the same way that the natural world does, making its influence felt through constant changes in the psychical atmosphere, mood or climate that permeates social groups and the social world as a whole.
 

The New Socialism as Relational Revolution

‘Soul’ is the realm of relation between self and world and other human beings.
Martin Buber

When we think of ‘revolution’ most people think of mass demonstrations or armed revolts involving large groups or masses of people. For without collective action, how can the world – society - possibly be changed? But if the aim of social revolution is, as Marx understood it, a change in social, political and economic relations then the real question is not how ‘society’ in the abstract can be changed but how those relations can be changed? A true revolution is a revolution in human relations.  What follows from this is the basic thesis of The New Socialism : namely that the true locus of revolutionary practice is therefore neither the realm of the individual alone nor that of society as a whole but a third realm. This is the realm of immediate one-to-one relations between individuals in society that form its basic dyadic “units of relation”. A realm that Martin Buber called ‘the between’ or ‘the interhuman’ (das Zwischenmenschliche).

              The individual is a fact of existence in so far as he steps into a living relation with other individuals. The aggregate is a fact of existence in so far as it is built up of living units of relation.

Martin Buber

The starting point for a revolutionary transformation of social and economic relations lies in those “living units of relation” that shape the reality of both individuals and social groups. Human relations on a group, institutional, social or international level can only be changed by changing the way in which individuals relate to one another within those living, one-to-one units of relation. No lasting change in social, economic or political changes can come about except through the expression of a revolution in the Third Realm – that of immediate human relations. No purely individual or collective, spiritual or political practices can bring about that relational revolution. The only practices capable of bringing it about must, by definition, be relational practices of a new and revolutionary character.  The essence of revolutionary change is a revolutionary transformation of human relations that can only come about by changing the way in which we ourselves relate to the real human being before us – whether friend or foe, comrade or conservative, co-worker or corporate manager. For whilst it is the ruthlessly exerted power of the global corporations that are ruining our world, their power rests on the delusion that they themselves are but efficiently organised aggregates of individuals. In fact – and as any corporate manager will freely admit when he or she is not mouthing company speak – the corporation is built from units of relation – dyadic units. The same is true of all social organisations and institutions, economic or party political, religious or ideological, conservative or revolutionary. The real front line of ‘revolutionary struggle’ is not the ideological ‘stand’, ‘position’ or political practices they seek to promote. It is the actual position and practices they adopt in relating to each and all of the individuals with whom they stand in relation. Whether and in what manner each of us is capable of fully sensing and receiving, facing and if need be confronting others in living encounters is what counts – not political programmes, protests, or policies - which are invariably directed at everyone and no-one, and will therefore always fail to touch the majority as individuals. ‘Great Dictators’ at all levels of society from the state to the local party committee or council, have always appealed directly to the group, party or general public because on a one-to-one level they are relational cripples - never having been able, through their own relational practices, to initiate, maintain and sustain even a single reciprocally satisfying and fulfilling relationship. In today’s world, people seek alleviation from contact starvation and lack of relational fulfilment through self-elevation to the status of political ‘leaders’, ‘idols’ or ‘stars’. In today’s world, pop-idolhood and celebrity, whether political or cultural, have become a drunken celebration of a generalised relational immaturity and incapacity - promoted for commercial profit by the corporate media barons and brand-designers of the day.

 
The New Socialism, Race and Nation

Just as globalisation – international finance capitalism - has upset the simple political spectrum which puts left-wing internationalism at one end and right-wing nationalism on the other, so it has also upset the ethnic and cultural spectrum which identifies the Left with pluralism and ‘multi-culturalism’ and the Right with ‘mono-culturalism’, ethnocentrism and racism. For now both the multi-cultural Left and the ‘New Right’ present themselves as valuing and seeking to defend all racial and regional cultures threatened with extinction by ‘McWorld’. The basic difference is that the liberal Left excludes from its international panoply of ‘threatened’ root values those of indigenous European cultures such as those of Germany and Russia, whilst the extreme Right (including Zionism) exclusively defends such values – seen either as Judaeo-Christian, Heathen-Pagan or as ‘Indo-European’ or ‘Eurasian’. Thus defenders of a Christian Europe see a threat to their ‘universal’ values from Islam, just as defenders of a German Europe once saw a threat from Judaism. Conversely, Islamists see a threat to their ‘values’ not only from America but from a Europe that has submitted to McValues. Despite both being multi-regional and multi-racial religions, neither Islam nor Christianity have any claim to ‘universality’. For both have expanded by imposing or superimposing a regional religious culture and its norms (European or Arabic) on other non-Arabic or non-European races and regional cultures. Similarly, Hitlerism and Zionism share in common the identification of biological race with the religion or root values of a ‘people’ or ‘Volk’ – and demand their representation and defence through a nation state. Race, Volk and Nation however, are in essence fundamentally distinct.  As Goethe recognised Germany was an established ‘Volk’ – a geographic grouping of regional peoples – long before it became a unified military nation state of the sort required to ensure its competitiveness as a capitalist economy. 

A race is a biological reality, albeit one in which – even without inter-marriage – individual members of the same race may share less genes in common with each other than with individuals from other races. A ‘Volk’ on the other hand is a psychical reality, the regional culture of a people being the expression of a shared psychical atmosphere and value climate and of shared soul qualities or ‘psychical genes’.  A nation state, on the other hand is a purely political reality. As citizens, individuals form part of the nation. As individuals however, every citizen of a nation unites physical and soul qualities - biological and psychical genes - stemming from different races and regional cultures. The body of the individual is intrinsically multi-racial just as their soul is intrinsically ‘multi-cultural’. Nationalism exploits a natural tendency on the part of individuals alienated from their own bodies and souls to identify their own most valued soul qualities or ‘psychical genes’ with their racial, religious and regional identity  - and to seeks its reflection in the nation’s political state and/or leader. The tendency is ‘natural’ because races, religions and regional peoples and their cultures are indeed an expression of valued soul qualities – root values rich in creative potential. But the root values of a particular race, religion, or regional culture are neither the private property of the individual ego nor that of the national ego – the political state.  Nor do they stand in contradiction to the root values of other races or religions or regional cultures. Their purity is not a purity of blood or soil. Nor does their fulfilment require an outer, imperial expansion of a people’s land or Lebensraum, but rather an inner expansion of each individual’s soul to release the creative potentials latent in their own root values, their own most valued soul qualities. Both right-wing racist or national xenophobia, and left-liberal multi-culturalism are based on the idea of identity as the private property of an individual, ethnic group or nation state. Racism and nationalism are based on fear of otherness or alterity (xeno-phobia). Yet seen in the context of globalisation, they are also an attempt to protect those racial and regional root values which form part of each individual’s soul against the soul-less values of our global McWorld. The ‘post-modern’ liberal-left places all races, religions and regional cultures on the same level and relativistic plane. For by affirming each and all of them in their ‘difference’ it sees them as essentially the same. Neither right nor left recognise that identity cannot be reduced to sameness or difference; that a sense of our own deeper values and deeper identity is not won by opposing sameness to the difference, ‘us’ to ‘them’, ethnic majorities to ethnic minorities – or vice versa. Identity is simference – similarity in difference and difference in similarity. Valuing ‘plurality’ does not mean reducing it to a set of interesting cultural or aesthetic similarities ‘and’ differences, each the liberally respected private property of an ethnic majority or minority.

 The New Socialism as Spiritual Individualism

 The New Socialism does not see the individual as one small part of the collective soul of a biological race or Volk, biologically destined to embody its root values alone. Instead each individual bears within them – biologically as well as spiritually – root values stemming from many different peoples. Those who experience and affirm the reality and power of these root values are easily led into nationalism and racism. Those who most vehemently oppose nationalism and racism on the other hand, may do so partly because they are no longer capable of tapping into the immense creative power of root values they have inherited – root values which we all inherit - both biologically and spiritually, and through our reincarnational as through our cultural inheritance. Global capitalism and ‘McValues’ are the death of all root values, and therefore not the promoters but the destroyers of ‘multi-culturalism’ – the death of all root values. Racism, nationalism and religious fanaticism are their resurgence. ‘Post-modernism’ is their cultural and philosophical denial. Simplistic Marxism sees all cultural values as camouflage for the exercise of power by the ruling classes of the day. Modern psychology and psychotherapy avoids all mention of the word ‘power’ - and all but completely ignores the social-economic, military-political and medical-psychiatric abuse of power over as a source of individual psychic distress. The New Socialism affirms, as Nietzsche did, the ‘feeling of power’ and ‘will to power’ as a central value, and affirms also the reality of root values. For these are immense banks of human potentials - powers into which each individual can tap and from which each can draw. The basic ethical principle of The New Socialism is to take pride in these powers. This does not mean arrogantly exercising power over others. It means taking pride in the power of one’s own being and other beings, in order to feel and fulfil the power of all those root values that feed them. ‘New Age’ philosophies ignore all issues of power, collective and individual, and substitute instead the religious dogma that everything is energy. It offers individuals subtle healing ‘energies’ in place of true empowerment - the capacity to feel and embody the potency of their own unbounded potentialities of being. Aristotle defined reality as actuality, and named it energeia. Every truly spiritual philosophy on the other hand – every philosophy with soul – recognises that all actualities, individual and social, psychical and physical have their source in a greater reality - the realm of unbounded potentiality. Spiritual philosophy recognises the primacy of power or potentiality (dynamis) over ‘energy’ or actuality (energeia). The New Socialism is a truly spiritual socialism precisely because is not about ‘seizing’ power through revolution or reform – replacing one set of collective or institutional structures with another – structures through which power is exerted over others. The New Socialism is truly revolutionary because it transcends the struggle for power over. Instead it affirms each individual’s innate capacity to feel and embody the power of their own innermost potentialities of being – irrespective of the actual circumstances of their lives, however limiting. Only in this way can those circumstances be changed.

The New Socialism as Radical, Revolutionary and Religious Socialism

 Marx’s vision of ‘communism’ cannot be fulfilled through collectivism of any form. It can only be fulfilled if “the free development of each” is recognised by each and all as the fundamental condition for “the free development of all”. This means the emergence of free associations of individuals that are in truth associations of free individuals, individuals who do not see their personal values or identity as private property – as ‘things’ – but are able to value each other’s identity, value each other’s ways of being and relating to the extent of being able to inwardly identify with them. If Nietzsche’s vision of a “transvaluation” of all values is to be achieved, then values themselves must be recognised for what they essentially are – not pretty words such as ‘love’, ‘faith’, ‘hope’ or ‘charity’ but the inner soul qualities that individuals embody in their whole way of being and relating with others. A ‘value’ (noun) is a ‘thing’. To value is a verb. ‘Values’ are those soul qualities we active value (verb) in ourselves and others, whether they are outwardly embodied or only inwardly sensed. They cannot be reduced to ‘things in themselves’ to which we can give some sort of verbal label. Liberally tolerating or respecting the verbally-labelled and self-declared ‘values’ of other individuals, groups, races and cultures - as if they were things in themselves - is a far cry from actively valuing the unique soul qualities embodied and expressed by those individuals, groups, races or cultures. But to truly value the soul qualities of the other requires a relational revolution – means being able to feel, affirm and identify with those qualities ourselves, finding ways to embody them in our own similar-but-different or ‘simferent’ ways. The New Socialism, as revolutionary socialism, revolutionises or turns upside down our whole understanding of the nature of values, recognising them as soul qualities embodied in relationship, not declared as spiritual ideals or moral standards.

The New Socialism, as radical socialism recognises the importance of roots and rootedness – the root meaning of the word ‘radical’ itself.  The New Socialism is therefore also a religious socialism with its own deep roots – not simply in the history of civilisations, continents, and cultures, races and nations alone – but in the soul relationships, soul families, soul groups and soul communities that are their source in the inner universe of soul. The New Socialism is a revolutionary, religious and radical socialism because it has its own roots in the soul world and because it recognises that each individual can only find their own true roots and deeper identity in that world. For the deeper identity of the individual – the soul identity of the individual as opposed to their mental or ego-identity - is itself a group identity. It is an unbounded pool of soul qualities, drawn from countless lives and relationships, historical ages and religions. Such soul qualities can be compared to psychical genes, and like our biological genes can remain latent or be fully embodied – not as fixed bodily or behavioural ‘traits’ but as ways of being and relating with others. Values cannot be the private property of individuals or groups, for they are essentially relational qualities, soul qualities embodied in relation to other beings, and uniting them through simference with one another. Such soul qualities may be valued devalued, misinterpreted or distorted into rigid ideologies and religious doctrines and practices. Capitalism however, is the total devaluation of all deep values - all soul qualities of depth and value. In place of such deep and rooted values it substitutes the one and only ‘value’ it ultimately recognises – quantitative market value in the form of the exchange value of commodities, the economic value of labour, shareholder value or stock value. Capitalism is also the total commodification of all deep values – the fetishistic projection of human soul qualities into material commodities. In this way capitalism uses the global consumer market to give back to matter the ‘soul’ that science denies to it in global production technologies. For the corporate manufacturer of furniture or cocoa products, the trees or beans they use up as raw materials have no soul – that would be seen as primitive ‘animism’ – and yet the furniture or chocolate commodities produced from them are invested with its own brand soul. ‘Real feeling. Real chocolate’.

 The New Socialism and Revolutionary Conservationism

 Marx saw labour as the principal source of economic value and the source also of profit as an expression of ‘surplus value’. Surplus value is the difference between the average social time necessary to sustain and reproduce the value-creating potential or ‘labour power’ of the worker (through the production of those commodities needed by the worker as consumer), and the value of the labour-time actually invested by the worker as a producer. In her seminal contributions to Marxist economic theory, Teresa Brennan has shown how a parallel principle operates to extract surplus value from both human and natural resources. The surplus value extracted from natural resources comes from the difference between the average natural time required to reproduce and thereby conserve the value-creating potential of natural resources (e.g. forest, fish stocks etc.) and the actual transport, production and turnover time required to transform those resources into sold commodities.  In the new consumer culture, an ever-increasing quantity and variety of consumer commodities is required to compensate for alienation of the worker-as-producer from their own human nature - those natural human potentials wasted in low-paid and low-skill jobs.  Ever greater strain is placed on the world’s natural resources, as economic value and quantitative economic ‘growth’ is pursued at the expense of qualitative spiritual growth and value fulfilment of human beings. The ‘Green’ agenda - with its emphasis on the conservation of ecological stability, natural resources and non-human life species - is nothing motivated by mere sentimental, ‘romantic’ or ‘conservative’ attachment to nature. Rather its basis is a belated recognition that even in Marxist terms the capitalist exploitation and degradation of both the earth and of humankind, nature and human nature - go hand in hand. Both humanity and nature are, as Martin Heidegger emphasised, transformed by capitalist technology into nothing more then a vast “standing reserve” of human and natural ‘resources’ that must be capable of being tapped ‘just in time’.  The contradiction between short-term profit obtained by technologically speeding up the turnover of capital and the long-term conservation and regeneration of nature in ‘organic time’ is becoming insuperable. Nature of course, retains its own natural solutions – the destruction of man-made structures through storm and hurricane, flood and landslide brought on by technologically accelerated climatic change.

The New Socialism and the Nature of Work

Let’s face it, work as we know and loathe it today, sucks. Anybody who has worked for a wage or a salary will confirm that. Work, for the vast majority of us, is forced labour. And it feels like it too! Whether you’re working on a casual or temporary basis and suffer all the insecurity that that involves or are ‘lucky’ enough to have a permanent position where job security tightens like a noose around your neck, it’s pretty much the same. Work offers it all: physical and nervous exhaustion, illness and, more often than not, mind-numbing boredom. You can add the feeling of being shafted for the benefit of someone else’s profit to the list. Work eats up our lives. It dominates every aspect of our existence. When we’re not at the job we’re travelling to or from it, preparing or recovering from it, trying to forget about it or attempting to escape from it in what is laughably called our ‘leisure’ time. Work is a truly offensive four-letter word too horrifying to contemplate. We sacrifice the best part of our waking lives to work in order to survive in order to work. It’s a kind of drug, numbing us, clouding our minds with the wage packet and all the ‘benefits’ of consumerism it brings. Apart from the basic fact that if you don’t work and would rather not accept the pittance of state benefits you don’t eat, wage slaves are dragooned into ‘gainful employment’ by ideologies designed to persuade us of the personal and social necessity of ‘having a job’.

The Anarchist Federation

If work were a good thing, the rich would have found a way to keep it to themselves long ago.

Haitian proverb

Today it seems like a truism that we all need to ‘earn a living’ through work. Yet if we listen a bit more attentively to what that phrase implies, its deeper meaning comes through – the belief that ‘living’ is not our birthright but something to be earned by hard work. Despite all fashionable talk of the ‘work-life balance’ the fact remains that in capitalist economies life is dominated by work, and work itself is reduced to  uncreative wage labour – a mere means to an end. Capitalism has instituted a new form of religious sin – the avoidance of work.  The moral commandment that ‘Thou shall be employed’ rests on a fundamental confusion between qualitative and quantitative employment, between creative and fulfilling human labour on the one hand, and uncreative wage slavery – however economically productive - on the other. At the very heart of Marx’s analysis of capitalism lay his understanding of how the sale of labour power to an employer alienates human beings from their capacity for truly creative and fulfilling labour. The artisans and craftsmen of the past owned their own labour as a creative human power. They also owned the products of that labour, which they exchanged for the things they needed or sold for money to buy them.

Historians and politicians ask us to accept that the productive advances unleashed by the factory system were worth the price of our spiritual degradation. When wage-slavery began, and primarily men were drafted into the ranks of wage-slaves, wage-work was portrayed by the merchant and industrial classes as an emancipation from feudal bondage … But wage work in factories or workshops, in clerical positions, in schools & laboratories, in production or in retail stores involves regimentation, repetition, physical burdens and spiritual turmoil that are hardly liberating, creative, or fulfilling. For working class women and men work is neither joyful nor creative. Wage-work is meaningless. Jobs are boring and repetitious, they provide no intellectual or spiritual rewards and provide no satisfaction. The severe regimentation of factory life, which now pervades all spheres of life, destroys vitality and intelligence. It is not paid work but rather free moments away from jobs and housework that give meaning to life. Labour, and how it is organised by the bosses, underpins contemporary relationships among people on every level of experience: whether in terms of the rewards it brings, the privileges it confers, the discipline it demands, the repression it produces or the social conflicts it generates.

It’s almost impossible now to realize that virtually everything produced by society (except those requiring collective effort like mining, brewing or baking) was owned by those who produced it, who were able to control the value of their labour through the price they were prepared to sell it for. The ‘success’ of the factory system meant that capitalism had a means to create vast numbers of jobs but at the price of workers surrendering this power and with it, freedom itself. New laws were passed which restricted the ability of people to work on a temporary or casual basis. Existence without means of visible support became a crime as the industrial masters sought to discipline free peasants and artisans into docile factory armies. To the stick of social stigma, the workhouse and prison for those who refused to work, the bosses added the carrot of permanent employment for the loyal and humble worker, wage differentials for skilled and semi-skilled labour, a mythic social prestige for the ‘kings of labour’ (miners, steelworkers and the like). The ‘job for life’ became our dream and was offered in periods of healthy capitalism then withheld when recession or the need to restructure capitalism arrived.

Work in its present state is, then, an entirely artificial condition. It is not freely chosen, is not a universal and integrated part of family and society, provides neither intellectual nor spiritual fulfilment for most people and is extremely harmful to mind, body and spirit. Everything that was good about work – the sense of vocation, personal choice, creativity, fulfilment, the sense of value of the individual-in-society – has been destroyed for all but a relative handful of artists, craft workers and a few of the ‘professions’. For the rest of us it has become meaningless drudgery from which only death releases us. It is a prison without cages (except for those being worked by the prison-industrial complex) whose governors are the ruling class and whose warders are the bosses, teachers, social workers, employment agencies, police and judicial systems.
Ibid.

Marx recognized that the modern worker or employee owns neither their own labour power nor its products. They do not sell the products of their work to their employer but sell their labour power itself. In doing so they also forfeit ownership both of their own labour and of its products – in doing so they become ‘estranged’ or ‘alienated’ from their own labour – which becomes mere work. The alienation of labour, as Marx wrote “makes man’s life activity, his essential being, a mere means to his existence.”  “Life itself appears only as a means to life”.

What then constitutes the alienation of labour? First, the fact that labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague. External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification.
Karl Marx

One consequence of the alienation of labour is that people feel most human and freely active only in their most animal functions (eating, drinking, sex etc.) Conversely, it is in their most human function, that of productive social activity in work that human beings become ‘animals’ in their mutual relations: driven by what seems to be the most competitive, predatorial and territorial of instincts. Evolutionary theory is largely a human projection onto the animal world of these competitive behaviours, one that allows them to be seen as biologically determined and inevitable. In fact, nature and animal life can be seen as a miracle of cooperative behaviour. Another consequence of the alienation of labour is the alienation of human relations as such: “one man is estranged from another, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.” To make up for the alienation that is built in to their working relations (however friendly and amicable) people seek to recover their humanness in their personal relations. The alienation of people’s working relations however, has effects on their personal relations too (a) by turning other people into means of consumption (b) by using them to satisfy needs unmet in their working lives, and (c) by taking time away from their most intimate human relations with loved ones. To make up for alienation in the process of production, people seek to recover their humanness through consumption. All human values such as care, compassion and cooperation that find no real place in their working relations or personal relations are idealized as ‘corporate values’. Human qualities that find no place in the process of production are sold back to the producers as items of consumption - as material commodities associated by advertisers with images of idealised human qualities. The individuality, creative potentials, quality of life and depth of human relations that workers or employees are forced to sacrifice to the capitalist system as producers are cynically sold back to them as consumers of commodities produced by other wage slaves -  commodities invested by marketers and advertisers with the very life qualities of spirituality, soul, vitality and intimacy that wage labour drains from living human beings and their relations.

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid, monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid, and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home in the end, are habituated to hierarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, they'll likely submit to hierarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

Work used to be a purposeful and meaningful activity. There was spiritual satisfaction in working and co-operating to meet the needs of ourselves, our families, our people. People chose the work they did if they could and invested much of their personality and abilities in the making and production of useful, better or beautiful things. Today, the pre-eminence of consumption as a social good and conferrer of social status on us as individuals has made the product far more important than the producer (witness the social cachet of a Nike trainer over the sweated Indonesian who made it). Work has ceased to have a personal value for those who toil. In many cases it does not have a social value to society (witness the amount we discard or the sheer quantity of junk goods we produce).

Large amounts of work are simply about the reproduction of capitalism on a daily basis – think about the trillions of dollars traded on the stock markets for instance and why it is being done. It matters only because this is the means by which capitalism justifies itself and produces the means – money – for its own continuation. The activity produces nothing, except money, whose social value is zero. Work only matters in terms of what is produced – the commodity - and the social and personal value of what is produced to the person consuming it. If you don’t believe us, why are so many important jobs like nursing rewarded so badly? Our labour, the portion of time we spend being ‘socially useful’ has become a commodity, whose value in the market is dictated solely by the whims of millions of other individual desires to possess, stimulated by the propaganda mills of capitalism, the advertising industry. Of course, many people realise this but are themselves trapped by the artificial need and desire to consume. We become our own gaoler!
The Anarchist Federation

In a communist society in which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” there can be no place for work in its current capitalist form as what is euphemistically termed ‘employment’ – wage slavery. Labour will not be measured by its time-quantity or productivity, status or market value, but a medium for the “free development of each”, valued by its quality, social value and the degree of individual learning, growth and fulfilment it brings.

In the free society, the contribution a person makes to society or the social value of work will not be measured in economic terms as it is under capitalism. It will not be measured at all. What matters is that each individual feels that the work they do is personally fulfilling. If it makes a positive contribution to society as well, this is a bonus for us and you. Work will become, primarily, the expression of a person's pleasure in what they are doing and become like an art - an expression of their creativity and individuality. Work as an art will become expressed in the workplace as well as the work process, with workplaces transformed and integrated into the local community and environment.

It is through consumption that the majority channel their aspirations – to pleasure, to a sense of meaning and personal identity. Our aspirations to freedom have been transferred from the workplace to the rest of our lives but the commodification of personal life and leisure has simply built more cares around our life. The refusal to work must be accompanied by the refusal to consume (and vice versa), to participate in the reproduction of everyday life through the production and consumption of useless commodities via a commodified process: work.
Ibid.

The New Socialism and Social Health Fascism

People who are angered, sickened and impaired by their industrial labour and leisure can escape only into a life under medical supervision and are thereby seduced or disqualified from political struggle for a healthier world.

… people accept health management on the engineering model, when they conspire in an attempt to produce, as if it were a commodity, something called ‘better health’.

In our society .. ill-health that is not labeled by the physician is written off either as malingering or as illusion.

Medicine has the authority to label one man’s complaint a legitimate illness, to declare a second man sick though he does not himself complain, and to refuse a third social recognition of his pain, his disability and even his death. It is medicine which stamps some pain as ‘merely subjective’, some impairment as malingering, and some deaths – though not others – as suicide. The judge determines what is legal and who is guilty. The priest declares what is holy and who has broken a taboo. The physician decides what is a symptom and who is sick.
Ivan Illich

The true foundation of health is individual value fulfilment through creative and cooperative labour. In this sense the health of individuals is a measure of the health of human relations in society. That is why medicine and psychiatry increasingly serve as means to suppress all individual symptoms of a sick society – the generalised sickness of human relations that is tantamount to a global social psychosis. The true ideal of medicine and the corporate medical and health industry is the perfect, pharmaceutically or genetically engineered wage-slave - able to go on functioning like a machine no matter what sense of dis-ease or alienation they may experience in the process. Today ‘health' is increasingly defined not as a potential for value fulfilment but as mere economic functionality – the mental and physical capacity of the individual to contribute to the creation of profit or surplus value. This being the case, individuals who become ‘economically inactive’ or ‘incapacitated’ through sickness are increasingly seen as deserving no sympathy or support from the ‘welfare’ state. That is only logical. For if the essential definition of health in capitalism is the individual’s capacity to stay economically active in the system, then being economically inactive – for whatever reason – is a disease in itself, the very definition of ill-health. Those on sickness, incapacity or disability benefits are therefore increasingly and necessarily seen as ‘malingerers’. Illness, however serious, ceases to be an excuse for not returning to the job market. For since their economic inactivity is their disease the only real cure for it is a return to ‘employment’ i.e. to the very wage-slavery against which their bodies and mind rebelled in the first place, and in the only acceptable way - through becoming sick. The emergence of this  new and insidious form of social health fascism is exemplified by high-paid consultants on ‘disability and employment’ - who now argue that a fixed limit of two years should be set to all forms of disability benefit. The greatest perceived threat that faces capitalist governments comes not from the unemployed or striking workers but from those who reject wage-slavery and belong to the non-employed or ‘economically inactive’. A  Beethoven or Van Gogh without a job would today quite likely be forced into menial employment - quite irrespective of their huge creative potentials and quite irrespective also of the qualitative value of their creativity for society, indeed humanity as a whole. Were they not able to brand or market their symphonies or paintings, and thus become economically inactive, then all their creative activity would be deemed worthless. 
 

The New Socialism as Radical Equalitarianism

The following citation is not from Marx or Bakunin but from the gnostic Epiphanes, son of Carpocrates:

 All beings beget and give birth alike, having received by justice an innate equality. The Creator and father of all with his own justice appointed this, just as he gave equally the eye to all to enable them to see. He did not make a distinction between female and male, rational and irrational, nor between anything else at all; rather he shared out sight equally and universally...The ideas of Mine and Thine crept in through the laws which cause the earth, money, and even marriage no longer to bring forth fruit of common use. God made all things to be common property. He brought the female to be with the male in common and in the same way united all the animals. He thus showed righteousness to be a universal sharing along with equality.

 A purely moralistic critique of capitalist ‘greed’ for profit cannot change the world. Just as right-wing theorists have turned to the original doctrines of free market economics in order to justify the competitive pursuit of profit at any cost, so must socialist theory return to the basic principles of socialist economics. These offer far more radical solutions to current world problems than either free-market economics or the social-democratic illusion of a “social market”.  At the heart of socialist economics is the belief that a social democracy is meaningless without economic democracy. Today, what we call “democracy” is soured by the fact that in practice only those with the money, connections and resources necessary to finance political campaigns have any chance of winning elections. What we call democracy is a state in which all have the right to express their own opinions - but few the wealth to promulgate them. In which The Many have the right to speak freely but The Few do not feel called upon to listen - except in order to translate what they hear into their own terms and twist it to their purposes. The New Socialism is democratic socialism, based on the principles of social democracy and economic socialism. Democracy is based on the principle that each person’s vote carries equal weight, irrespective of their wealth or status - on equality of rights. Socialist economics is based on the principle that each person’s labour has the same basic value as every other person’s, irrespective of its nature. Why should an inefficient, irresponsible and generally poor-quality corporate boss earn ten or a hundred times more per hour than a high-quality teacher, nurse, social worker or carer putting heart and soul into their work? Apologists for capitalism claim that only in this way are incentives provided for people to work harder, advance their careers by gaining more knowledge and skills of the sort that ‘society’ needs. But when was the last time in which a teacher, child therapist or nurse received a ‘bonus’ of millions for the skill and quality of their socially much-needed work? Only an economy in which people are paid equally according to both the quantity and quality of their social labour – irrespective of its current market value - would embody genuine e-quality. A truly socialist economy would be radically equalitarian in this sense - all pay differentials being based not on what job or position people had, but solely on the quantity and quality of their work. As it is, individuals in a capitalist, market economy are frequently forced to choose between value-fulfilling work that is economically under-valued and under-paid, value-negating work that is economically over-valued and overpaid, or, as is most common, value-adding work that gives more than it gets. In a socialist economy, all workers would be paid the same basic hourly rate - not in money but in “smart card” entitlements to whatever products and services they choose to obtain. Systems of earnings differentials would be based solely on distinctions in the quality of the time and work that individuals put in. These quality differentials would be decided democratically.  Individuals who preferred   working at the minimum quality level established by a collective would be under no pressure to raise their productivity - they would simply get the basic rate. The principle of radical equalitarianism - equal pay for equal hours, whatever the nature of one’s work or position, would allow social value and quality of work to become the principal basis of pay differentials, rather than economic value and quantity of work.  But quality of labour depends on the quality of the time people give to their work, and time quality cannot be measured in the same way as time quantity. Innovations require thinking time and incubation time - deep quality time. This deep time is also broad time, for quality and creative innovation are often the expression of many years of experience, or of many weeks and months of thought. That is why, in a socialist economy, quality differentials can only be determined cooperatively and democratically by employees through mutual evaluation of the quality of each other’s labour and of its products. Mutual quality evaluation does not discriminate between the human qualities and skills required by different types of work. It discriminates only the quantitative degree to which each individual actually invests their skills and qualities in their work - the quality of the time they give it. It does not give work different quantitative hourly rates. It merely adds a qualitative dimension to the measurement of labour time. A socialist economy thereby grants full value to the skills and qualities of each worker, not according to the nature of these skills and qualities but according to the extent to which they are applied, embodied and materialised.

The New Socialism and ‘The Work’

 According to Gurdjieff there was only one type of ‘work’ that could reverse the ordinary relation between the individual’s ego-identity and their deeper spiritual individuality or  “ essence”. He called this work ‘The Work’.

The source of The Work could not be found in the world as it was currently perceived, in life as it was currently lived, or in scientific knowledge or religious traditions as these were currently understood. Its only source could be an unrecognised lineage or ‘inner circle’ of human beings who were in the world but not of it – awake to their inner being and able to pass on their inner knowing through direct oral transmission. Religions and philosophies had become mere archaeological remnants of the direct inner knowing still possessed and passed on by this lineage of unacknowledged spiritual teachers.  

Essence must be taught to develop.
Maurice Nicoll

Without direct guidance from a spiritual teacher people remain trapped in ideas and influences stemming from the world as it is, or else seek refuge in the mere remnants of spiritual knowledge retained in philosophy and religion. In the ‘democratic’ cultures of the West however, the idea that human beings are not equal in terms of their level of spiritual awareness, has become unfashionable and quite unpalatable. The illusion is maintained that democracy, redistribution of wealth, or equal rights and opportunities can substitute for the inner education and spiritual development of the human being. The fact remains however, that all talk of ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ notwithstanding, without this inner education – without The Work – individuals remain fundamentally unfree. For only such a will can be called free that comes from the individual’s essence - from their spiritual individuality and not their socially acquired personality and ego-identity, a purely worldly identity.

Peter Wilberg