Primitive Accumulation, part 4

                                                                 Primitive accumulation, part 4

In 1066, a French/Norman baron, William the Conqueror, invaded Saxon/Celtic England in response to a quarrel he had with a Capetian French king. He arrived with a band of noble followers and their dependents, as well as with merchants and artisans from his feudal holdings in Gascony. Once established, William began distributing the conquered lands as fiefs among his followers. Subduing the Saxon and Celtic kingdoms of England--as well as his own disgruntled barons--proved to be a lengthy process that continued long after William’s death. 

One of William’s (Plantagenet) descendants, John I, made a temporary peace with his rebellious aristocrats in 1215 by signing the Magna Carta, considered the founding document for the “freedom” of all English speaking people--but, in essence, establishing the liberty of elites to do what they pleased. In the Magna Carta king John pledged to honor the feudal liberties of his barons to rule over their fiefs and their subject populations vis a vis the crown. Neither the kings nor the aristocrats observed the letter of this famous document. In what follows, I’ll try to show how absolute monarchs and venal aristocrats joined with wealthy merchants to jointly exercise their liberty to control and exploit peasants and artisans by “freeing” their labor from the feudal bonds that allowed them direct access to the means of life, the initial step in the accumulation of potential wage laborers.

 The French connection of England’s Plantagenet kings involved them in feudal disputes  with French kings. These disputes culminated in Edward III going to war with the Artois King Phillip 4th over Edward’s weak claim to the French throne. The war turned out to be a long series of wars: the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). The Hundred Years war has been called first modern war, in the sense that battles weren’t between groups of knights, but involved the armies (largely conscripted peasants) of competing dynasties for the control of “France.” Entire countrysides were laid waste. Weapons of war had become more destructive and expensive. Contending kings and their nobles piled up huge debts to merchants who provided the exotic weaponry and the merchant bankers, who provided the credit. Kings and great barons responded by increasing taxes and tithes on peasants, artisans and the lesser nobility. Merchants were granted patents to farm these taxes, and were backed by soldiers.

The bubonic plague broke out in the mid-14th century, and killed perhaps one half of the population of Europe. Labor became scarce. That landlords had already begun enclosing some lands for commercial farming is indicated by the existence of an agricultural proletariat, for whom the “black death” meant higher wages for those who survived. In England, Ordinances and Statutes (1349-51) were issued by the King to bring down the price of labor and to make it a crime to refuse to work. Yet the price of labor continued to rise. Unable to hold on to their fleeing serfs, English lords took to enclosing open, common lands and using them to raise cattle and sheep for market. To raise money, feudal lords tried to sell recalcitrant peasants their personal freedom, or by offering money for converting feudal forms of land tenure to leaseholds. Ironically, higher wages and “freedom” from feudal bonds were important motivational forces in the process of primitive accumulation. Many serfs and free peasants chose working for wages over secure feudal land tenure arrangements that had become burdensome because of the increasing labor demands made on them by the indebted nobility. Eventually, however, wages came down to subsistence level and below. Tithes and taxes increased. 

The 14th century was marked by major peasant and artisan uprisings throughout Europe. Some of the more famous were:  Bruges and Ghent (1323-1328), the Jacquerie in France (1353), the Ciompi uprising in Florence and its suburbs (1378), and the Lollard risings throughout England, led by John Wycliff and John Ball (1381). All of these uprising were in response to immiseration related to war: devastation of land and villages, enclosures and other forms of privatization, and high rents, and taxes. All involved visionary communitarian ideology that rejected both the decaying feudal powers (of the aristocracy and the Church)--and the ascendancy of money relations, as exemplified in the monetary nature of the privatization of feudal lands and the higher taxes and rents for which money (rather than exchange in kind) was increasingly being demanded.

The Hundred Years War was almost immediately followed in England by the dynastic Wars of the Roses (1455-1487). The “red rose” Lancastrian victory over the “white rose” York side signaled the eventual demise of feudalism in England. “Absolute” monarchies in Europe, like Henry VII’s (1485-1509) tried to co-opt the leading aristocrats of the realm by offering  them privileged positions at the “Court” (i.e. the merchant capitalist backed monarchy) and the opportunity of becoming money rich as well as rich in land.  

During the reign of Henry VIII (1509-1547), the interpenetration of the “progressive,”  commercially-minded aristocracy and merchant capitalism began in earnest. Henry’s Protestant “reform” was chiefly the privatization of the vast holdings of the Catholic Church (1530) and their distribution, for a price, among the king’s noble and bourgeois favorites. Aristocrats invested in government granted monopolies trading commodities in Europe and the newly discovered Americas. Leading merchant banker families bought noble titles and the land that came with them. Things were being turned upside down, with money on top. 

 Meanwhile, in the countryside, the dismantling of the feudal order--the enclosure of lands (under newly minted private property laws drawn up in London), the tearing down of villages, the forcible evictions of inhabitants--to make way for profitable farming enterprises like raising sheep for wool--caused the narrator of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia  to exclaim that the sheep were eating men.

The first of the “Old Poor Laws” was passed under Henry VII in 1495. It criminalized the homelessness of the dispossessed, who were put in stocks and sent back to the parish from which they had been uprooted! After 1530, things got much worse. The Catholic church had provided the basic social services until its expropriation. Responsibility for indigent and homeless rural men, women, and children now fell on the almost non-existent resources of parish towns that were overwhelmed. Henry, who habitually cut the heads off of troublesome, principled advisors like Sir Thomas More and inconvenient wives like Ann Boylen, the mother of future queen Elizabeth, reacted to the social disaster he unleashed by issuing the Vagabond Act (1531,) which did not distinguish between vagrants and the unemployed, and replaced the stocks with the whipping post. The tortured, homeless victim was then returned the last “100”  from which he was probably uprooted and banished. (The term, 100, came from feudal times to designate a settlement of at least 100 cottages.)

Queen Elizabeth’s Poor Relief Act  (1601) established a land tax at the parish level throughout the land and attempted, somewhat humanely for the time, to address this new social problem of mass poverty. A new class in society was invented:  the “poor”. Different categories were created. The “deserving poor” were the old, the lame, etc., for whom the parish provided minimal food and shelter. The largest category was the “undeserving poor”: unemployed, able bodied men and women (and children) who were forced to do the sort of work (they were assumed to have disdained) in work houses that were really prisons: unpaid brute labor. Conditions in urban England’s dark, fetid warrens of destitution and crime were aggravated rather than improved by Elizabeth’s 1563 Statute of Artificers. All of the guilds of the major towns were consolidated under state governance, which set hours of work and maximum (not minimum) pay. Certain trades were reserved for the families of prosperous guild members. Guild masters were permitted to hire and fire “freedmen,” which is to say, refugees “freed from feudalism by privatizations in the countryside. Trades that came into existence after the time of the statute were outside its regulations. The effect was to break up the guild system by turning the wealthiest guild masters into capitalists, establishing distinctions and competition between waged workers and apprentices and journeymen, and establishing competition between the lesser guilds and merchant-organized producers. The Statute attracted precarious labor from the countryside to the cities, drove down wages, and increased the numbers of the unemployed, homeless, and desperate.  By the 17th century one could be condemned to death in England for stealing just about anything.  Very cruel public executions were a common form of state terror against this growing reserve army of cheap labor.

The 16th and 17th centuries featured the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, as well as the dynastic wars and social disturbances related to the transformation of feudal, personal relations to money-mediated social relations. These were also the centuries of hysterical state and church organized campaigns throughout Europe and the “New World” directed at “heretics”--most particularly women who were accused of being witches.  

Feminist scholar, Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch presents a well documented, persuasive argument that this terrorist campaign was integral to the process of primitive accumulation because it undermined the egalitarian solidarity among and between the sexes in village life. This solidarity had existed throughout the middle ages in antithesis to the aristocratic and church elite who ruled, but produced nothing themselves. Such solidarity was an impediment to the monetary penetration of the rural economy, which required (as we can consciously articulate only in hindsight) a new kind of human being: the socially alienated individual. 

In her book, Federici describes the status of women in medieval villages as being at least equal to men. Women, especially older women, were central to the village economy and culture. Women worked as herbalists and pharmacists, as doctors, counsellors, and above all, as mid-wives who controlled the reproduction of human beings by other women. The public persecutions, degradation and burning of witches was intended to terrify the populace and destroy the egalitarian bond between men and women. Between 1550 and 1650 over 100,000 women were publicly burned at the stake. But many more died from torture and other abuses. Witches were portrayed not only as agents of the devil but as dangerous, superstitious practitioners who should be punished and replaced by men. In these ways, women were attacked as dangers to society by both the reactionary Inquisitor and the progressive bourgeois philosopher/scientist. Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the empirical, scientific method advocated these persecutions. “Magic,” he stated, “kills industry.” He believed the truths of nature should be “tortured” out of her in order to make her the “slave” of man. Thomas Hobbes considered witchcraft a crime against the state that should be punished.  

Like the demonized women of the Paris Commune, and the courageous women of Kobane in Isis- and NATO-tortured Syria today, medieval peasant women stood in the way of privatization.

In Caliban and the Witch, Federici also compares the demonization of women during the transition in Europe from feudalism to mercantilism to the demonization, during the same time period, of the uprooted native peoples in merchant capitalism’s New World colonies: for both 'Caliban and the Witch' violent degradations were imposed in the service of privatization and super-exploitation. I hope to take up that aspect of colonialism within the discussion of the labor theory of value in my next post. But I’ll end this essay on primitive accumulation with a brief discussion of Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders, a book in which Moll’s career unintentionally exemplifies how colonialism allowed capitalism to develop, expand, and prosper despite of and because of the social chaos and misery the processes of primitive accumulation of the privatized means of production and uprooted cheap were creating.

Defoe wrote Moll Flanders in 1722. By then he was a famous author, having published Robinson Crusoe in 1719. DeFoe’s life as a shady merchant, political conspirator, spy, journalist,  genteel land owner (thanks to a fortuitous marriage), bankrupt, and famous author was as colorful as the eponymic heroine of Moll Flanders, who narrates her wild adventures in a straightforward, earnest tone, without a trace of irony. DeFoe’s purpose, obviously, was not satire, but to market a moral tale for an audience (like ours) that could find no contradiction between commerce and morality, nor between both of those and salacious entertainment. The book is still popular and a “great read”. 

The moral of the tale is stated on the title page: “...the famous Moll Flanders...who was born in Newgate [prison] and during a life of continu’d variety for threescore years...was twelve years a whore, five times a wife (whereof once to her own brother), twelve year a thief, eight year a transported felon in Virginia, and at last rich, liv’d honest, and died a penitent. Written from her own Memorandum.” ...In other words, all is forgiven the penitent if, in the end, she achieves the salvation of a secure, honest income of at least 100 pounds per annum, as did Moll, from her plantation in Virginia. 

 DeFoe implicitly defends Moll’s behavior by establishing both the purity of her heart and the venality of the world, within which she, as a woman, is absolutely dependent on men to make her way. But as the creator of Moll’s simple, positive narration, Defoe, in effect defends Moll’s guarded, venal pursuit of security--not because as a woman in a man’s world she must behave so, but simply because greed is good. This centrality of money as the social medium--so subliminally ingrained and stunting in our post modern, bottom-line consciousness--is presented so baldly and earnestly by Defoe/Moll, because, commerce for DeFoe, a chandler’s son and would-be monied land baron, was liberating. 

Moll’s adventures are bracketed by two visits to the Virginia colony and throw light on how colonialism made Defoe’s dream possible in merchant capitalist England. Moll was born in Newgate prison to a woman condemned to death for either petty theft or prostitution or both. Her mother “pleaded her belly” and rather than being hanged was transported to the Virginia Corporation’s newly established colony, probably as an indentured servant. She eventually purchases her freedom and marries another freed felon. Together they find “servants” (other transported felons, or natives) and become rich and respectable growing tobacco. 

Moll grows into a girl in prison and becomes a servant in a respectable middle class family. She is good looking, well mannered, and, wise in the ways of the world, plans her seduction by her seducer --the family’s older son (she likes but doesn’t trust for a second) who promises marriage, gets her pregnant (the first in about 12 pregnancies), and then sloughs her off on his younger brother, whom Moll also likes. They marry. Moll is securely middle class and respectable!

In quick order, she has two more children, one dies, and then so does her husband. Moll is now insecure! She gets her in-law employers to take the remaining children, and with some severance money, Moll smartly sets out in quest of another husband. She quickly attracts a “gentleman trader” to marry, but they part on amiable terms when he has to run to the Continent to avoid his creditors. Another child is found a home. 

Moll’s adventures really begin at this point. She meets an American planter finishing up business with his London banker. He falls in madly in love with Moll, who gets him to convince her to come back with him to Virginia. There Moll becomes close to her husband’s mother, who, like her own mother, was once a transported felon--and who, in fact, turns out to be her own real mother! This startling fact makes Moll’s husband (whom she truly loves, and with which she now has two living children)--her half brother! Moll’s mother convinces her to stay on, but, after a year, Moll’s conscience drives her to find an excuse to return to London, but with commercial papers representing a stock of goods she can invest with a banker to keep her in style enough to find another husband...

We’ll have to skip the many adventures in Molls quest for at least 100 pound per annum respectability...but she eventually falls in with rather decent thieves, is caught and sentenced to death. In Newgate once more, she is reunited with a long-lost husband/soul mate--also sentenced to death after many adventures of his own following his original encounter with Moll at a country estate where they were both pretending to be personages of great wealth and quickly deceived one another--only to discover each other’s duplicity--which only intensified their passion, which they enjoyed while the money lasted,before parting, broken-hearted, but on amiable terms... The reunited pair of elderly con-artists get their sentences commuted to transportation to Virginia, where the son of Moll’s incestuous relation with her brother--his father--generously gives the property he’s inherited from his grandmother to rightful owner, Moll, his mother. The son takes on the stewardship of the plantation.

Moll, rich and repentant, and her true love eventually return to England and the salvation of something more than 100 pounds per annum (from earnings on certificates on stocks of goods produced by “servants” (slaves).

Moll’s adventures and final salvation are founded on the following: the Elizabethan court’s granting a monopoly to the investors who formed the Virginia Corporation, the policy of transportation rather than the gallows (though public executions were many into the late 18th century), the expropriation, enslavement and decimation of native Americans, and the production and sale of tobacco and other products of forced labor. In microcosm, Moll represents the symbiosis between merchant capitalism and colonization, without which English (and European) capitalism could never have survived the demographic crises created by the primitive accumulation of its uprooted workforce. Eventually, the system of transportation, and the spread of colonies world-wide resulted in the emigration of the tens of millions of Europeans. Between 1600 and 1800, for example, the Dutch East India Company alone sent one million Dutchmen (out of an average population of between 5 and 8 million inhabitants of the Netherlands) to Asia. England, of course, populated North America with her poor. Nor could the development  of the system of industrial capitalism and European world domination have been possible without the accumulation of wealth produced in its expanding colonies by uprooted, forced labor. 

The new world order of monopoly finance capitalism continues the same process. But the brutal methods of primitive accumulation practiced by the colonial system of merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism’s imperial system have been digitally and financially, hocus-pocus-democratized. Laboring populations in the neoliberal Periphery of global capitalism--encouraged by humanitarian World Bank directives and their own democratically engineered, security governments, or responding to NATO’s protective bombings of artificially created terrorists--voluntarily uproot themselves! The fortunate find their way out of capital’s vast, world reserve army of labor to providentially provided factories, and to wage labor. They earn a lot less, and are even less secure in their security states, than the lucky 99% at the militarized Center of it all. 

Change is imperative and will come when human consciousness bridges the gap between the workers of the world. Nature and human nature have nothing to lose but their chains. 

My next post will not explain how all this might come about. It will just be about Marx’s labor theory of value, which might help a bit, but will conclude this seminar on my understanding of marxist theory.

Feudalism in Europe evolved unevenly, according to local conditions. In Western Europe, conditions in the North were more primitive than in the romanized South, but by the 7th century, both regions shared certain fundamental features. The feudal order was a patriarchal hierarchy, ruled by military and ecclesiastical elites, who lived upon the surplus produced by non-alienated peasant and artisan labor. Most artisans were also peasants. In the towns (which were still quite small), artisans grouped themselves into protective organizations, had access to raw materials from the countryside, and controlled the production of crafted items.  

Other than the enforced appropriation of a portion of the product of this labor (through rents, tithes, corvee labor, taxes, and share cropping arrangements), the medieval peasant and artisan controlled the what and how of producing the means of life, enjoying customary feudal rights to land, tools, and habitation. It was in the lord’s feudal interest that the peasant and artisan be able, independently, to produce and reproduce themselves. Medieval society reflected the culture and skills of the peasant and artisan, even when mediated by aristocratic and priestly ideology. Both priests and aristocrats relied on the labor of the common people for their food, clothing, tools, arms, and on other myriad craftsmen involved in the construction and furnishing of churches, manors, and castles. Until the 10th century, there were few merchants anywhere in Western Europe. Even in the romanized South--by the 8th century Abbasid Islam controlled the Mediterranean and the old trade routes--most production was for immediate use, not exchange. Money hardly figured into the lives of the vast majority of people, including the elite.

Islamic control of the Western Mediterranean slackened during the 10th century and Western European towns began to revive from the collapse of the Roman system (and the advent of Islamic power in the Mediterranean), first in Italy, and then in the Netherlands. The professional merchant--Italian, Greek, Jew, Syrian, Dutch--began to re-establish himself in the reviving towns. Merchant capitalists had a traditional role in ancient society. They bought and traded the the surplus product that the elite appropriated from the peasants, or bought and traded the goods produced by independently organized artisans. In ancient society, there were large market towns controlled by wealthy merchants. With the revival of trade, merchants performed the same role under feudal conditions. In Northern Italy, merchants took advantage of the political space created by conflicts between feuding lords, and formed independent city states like Venice and Ravenna. Northern trading and manufacturing towns followed in Ghent and Bruges in Flanders. These enclaves of merchants and organized craft workers fought against and allied themselves with one noble faction or another.   

By the 14th century, powerful, semi-independent city states existed in Italy and Flanders. (England and France lagged somewhat behind.) The great merchant capitalist/bankers of Venice, Florence, Ghent or London loaned money to kings and rebellious barons who bought arms and luxuries from other merchants who circulated this money by buying surplus product from landed aristocrats, trading them on the international market in return for more arms and exotic luxury goods and domestic crafts to sell back to aristocrats, who bought them on credit from merchant bankers. The result was the accumulating riches of the merchant bankers and the piling up of debt of the nobility. This debt could only be paid on the backs of the peasantry and the artisans of lesser guilds. 

 The merchant, operating within the pores of feudal society, became “richer than a lord.” Legally, however, merchants were of the 3rd estate, along with peasants, laborers, and vagabonds. Even the most powerful merchant risked the chance of debt repudiation and of being expelled (like 2000 Jews were from England by Edward I in 1290). He might also lose his head. Within their walled cities, merchants were still the legal subjects of the ruling landed aristocracy (in the personage of the baron, king, bishop, etc.). Under the feudal regime, land and title ruled, not money: the value of money depended on the needs of the the lord, his peasants, and the guilds, not on the market. The great mass of goods were still produced for need, only the surplus going to the merchant capitalist, who produced nothing himself and had little control over labor or land or the law. The richer the merchant, the greater his risk in the dangerously paradoxical symbiosis between himself and his indebted lord. It took centuries for merchant capitalism to gain control of feudalism. First the richest merchants bought feudal titles, then  some aristocratic landowners entered the market, and, eventually, so did the king and court--against the more conservative nobility. In the process social relations came to be mediated by money rather than feudal ties and customs--and peasants and artisans progressively lost control of the means of production and of their own lives.  

England is the classic example of the dialectical process of attraction and repulsion between the bourgeois and the aristocrat that destroyed the feudal order, which resulted in the primitive accumulation of a critical mass of uprooted peasants and artisans for the earliest “satanic mills” of merchant-controlled factories and nascent industrial enterprises. We’ll take up this dialectical process in more detail in the next post.

Primitive Accumulation, part 2

Marxists like to refer to the contradictions within the capitalist mode of private production for profit in order to show why it succumbs regularly to crises. I’ll do that too, in my last post of this attempt to explain basic marxism when I deal with the labor theory of value. But if one views capitalism as a social system that must produce and reproduce both its mode of production and its socially necessary work force, capitalism’s contradictions are so fundamentally destructive to that very purpose that one wonders how such a system could have evolved and managed to survive for almost 300 years--almost 200 years since the establishment of hegemonic (industrial) capitalism in mid-19th century England. 

Of course, the most fundamental of all of capitalism’s contradictions is that its privately owned and controlled system of production is necessarily structured (juridically and culturally) to oppose any needs (i.e. social needs, ecological needs) that might hamper its exclusive goal of private profit and the accumulation of personal wealth. Yet capitalism--ideology aside--is not just a system for the production of private wealth. Like all historical social systems, capitalism must satisfy the natural necessity of producing and reproducing all its necessary components--especially the one critical component that concerns us here: what Marx called the primitive accumulation of a permanent reserve army of the unemployed (and the precariously employed) which creates a general sense of social insecurity in the working population. As a matter of fact, for many spokespersons of the capitalist system, from Edmund Burke to Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as “society”. Whenever capitalism’s political personifications have been forced (by fear of the working population) to address the myriad social problems capitalism creates, they do so half-heartedly and temporarily, until even that effort seems to them to endanger profits and/or bourgeois political control. Crises, austerity, and wars seem to be capitalism’s “solutions” to its basic social contradictions. 

When we turn to Marx’s labor theory of value we will see how the contradictions  specific to the capitalist mode of production reflect the anti-social conditions historically necessary for its operation. But first we must turn to the historical events which created each of these necessary conditions, without which the emergence of the capitalist system would not have been possible in the first place--and which it must continue to produce and reproduce to maintain its existence: the primitive accumulation of its reserve army of labor: a critical mass of people, uprooted from the basic means of subsistence and forced to work for wages. 

It is important to locate capitalism as a stage (hopefully the last) in the development of Western Civilization’s hierarchic patriarchal orders. We’ll take a brief Google Earth-like look (from a hundred miles up!) at the stages of this development, beginning in the Roman period, then on to medieval Europe, and finally, focusing on England, where a critical mass of potential wage laborers was first employed in the factories of merchant capitalists and in those of nascent industrialists, which led to the industrial revolution and hegemonic capitalism’s wage system in the early 19th century. The initial process of primitive accumulation took centuries. Today the primitive accumulation of capitalism’s global work force is produced and reproduced at breakneck speed by “modernizing” NGO’s, bankers, and bombers.

                                        .........................................

 Western Civilization, originated in the upper Nile Valley, travelled north by conquest and trade to Egypt, then east to Mesopotamia, then along the coastal regions of the Anatolian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, on to Mycenaean Crete and other islands of the Aegean Sea, then along the coasts of the Adriatic and Black Seas. The Old (Upper Nile) Kingdoms of ancient Egypt were transitional from matrilineal social organization to the pharaonic patriarchies of the Second and Third Kingdoms. This Google Earth tour will not focus on the cultural richness and technical achievements of the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, but on the social conditions of its working populations. From this point of view, Rome--which eventually conquered and appropriated the cultures of the entire Mediterranean region--in its glorification of military prowess, its contempt for women and the laboring classes as such--epitomized Western Civilization’s patriarchal hierarchies. 

Having originated from a band of social outcasts who incorporated themselves by abducting (and raping ) women from neighboring tribes, “Rome” quickly expanded into a colonizing military state that spread throughout Italy. Under semi-mythical law-givers like (the patronizing misogynist) Numa, federated tribal councils soon evolved into the Roman senate: an exclusively male club of slave-owning, patrician proprietors of self-sufficient estates. Republican Rome was a complex hierarchy of free citizens: merchants, soldier/slave holding colonists, and the “bread and  circus” plebes of the cities ( freemen who could prove descent from an ancient Roman tribe and who could claim protection and subsidies from an upper class “client”). Roman women were virtually the property of their typically promiscuous husbands, and were praised for their (Roman) purity and submissiveness. 

Slavery was the main form of labor in both republican and imperial Rome. Slaves ranged from highly educated and skilled Greeks to German and Slavic “barbarians.” Slaves were exploited as domestic servants, agrarian workers of the latifundia, brutally driven laborers in state and private mines, oarsmen on merchant ships, skilled artisans in workshops, clerks in stores owned by free businessmen, pedagogues, and scribes. The manufacturing and commercial center of the Empire was in the conquered, Greek, Byzantine, East. Roman senators and other patricians in the Western Empire prided themselves on living self-sufficiently on their estates, where slave-produced surpluses often were sold to traders for money, which was lent out at interest. Slavery in the Roman Empire was not of the ancient, familial type, but very similar to the cold, destructively venal plantation slavery of the Americas--and to the modern wage-slavery exploited in the industrialized fields, factories, and sweat shops of contemporary, global finance capitalism.

 The Roman Empire has been the most admired of the ancient world’s civilizations among the educated bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the vaunted “Roman peace” was really a “peace” of constant wars of conquest--or against rebelling tribes, provinces, or slaves. (In the words of Tacitus, “...they made a wasteland and called it peace.”) The empire became expensive to maintain, corrupting and enervating those enriched by it. Taxes accumulated. Foreign mercenaries replaced citizen soldiers. By the 3rd century a.d., romanized tribal groups were pressuring the imperial borders which they were bribed and organized to defend.These bands of soldiers and their families, led by “kings,” were in turn being pressured by other, larger, less “civilized” tribal groups to the north and east who were moving southward and westward, toward Rome. In the turmoil, slaves and serfs and indebted farmers often fled their masters and creditors, and turned to barbarian “kings” and “governors” for protection. 

The Roman system didn’t fall, it dissolved. By 476 a.d. (the date usually accepted for the collapse of the Empire in the West), most of the Western half of the Roman Empire was governed by either Ostrogoths (Italy), Visigoths (Spain), Vandals (Africa), Lombards (northern Italy) or Franks (Gaul, southern Germany). While the Western Empire was dissolving and re-forming, Constantinople was founded (330 a.d.) on the site of the ancient city of Byzantium by Constantine as de facto capital of “Rome,” and Christianity was made the official religion (380 a.d.) of the Roman world. 

The fall of the Roman empire did not include the Byzantine East, which held on until 1453, when the Ottomans renamed Constantinople Istanbul. In the West, the bishop of Rome (the pope) remained in Rome (when he could), wielding what remained of Roman imperial power: the cross--at once the means by which Rome terrified and executed its slaves and rebels, and symbol of the temporal and spiritual power of the Roman Church in the evolving feudal order. We’ll take up feudalism in the next post.

Bringing my posts up to date

              Primitive Accumulation and the Labor Theory of Value, Part 2

 Fredric Jameson, the great marxist cultural critic, in Representing ‘Capital’, took up Adorno’s suggestion that the best way to read Capital is backward, which is to say, starting from the chapter on “primitive accumulation” that ends Volume 1.  This seemed to me a good idea, because Marx’s approach to economic analysis (really, all social analysis) is historical, and he and Engels were the inventors of “historical materialism” as an epistemological tool. 

So,before discussing primitive accumulation, I thought I should begin my somewhat quixotic attempt to explain marxism in a hundred words or less with a digression, one that turned out to be the mother of all the digressions that followed, and in need of paring. One needed a little basic philosophy (which is all I have) to grasp historical materialism. So I jousted, in my first posting (May 1) with basic phenomenology (subject/object). I think I won that one. Then, in my second post (May 7), I rode into the lists against “Necessity.” This one failed, because it turned into a premature discussion on the commodity and value. I deleted it.  Bloodied, but not beaten, I took on (June 13) “historical materialism (which included natural necessity and historical necessity).  

Somewhat humbled, I was now prepared to take up the task of presenting Capital backward: primitive accumulation first, and then the economics of the first part of Capital, specifically the labor theory of value. Then, after my mission was accomplished, I could return Rosinante to her stable and leave it to more youthful Don Quijotes to joust with the windmills of late capitalism that, it turns out, are corporate, monopolistic, and imperial--real financial monsters!

Unfortunately, it didn't turn out quite that way. I’m still riding Rosinante. In my last posting (way back on August 15), I felt compelled to digress in order to say some things about patriarchal civilization, which has been built on the ruins of the much more ancient, egalitarian/matrilineal social orders that had existed for millennia and produced the basic tools of humanity--first of all language and thinking--that made patriarchal civilization possible. Patriarchal myths were, and are still intended to subvert older, deeper egalitarian values. Hierarchical patriarchal values of property and domination are ideological foundation of every succeeding hierarchy’s legitimacy. My digression’s intention was to clear a bit of space in our minds (without too much narrative clutter) for an unprejudiced examination of marxism. We are in awe and fear of our jailers, and can sooner envision the end of the world, than the end of capitalism. 

Socialism "failed" not because (Dies irae!) it runs counter to the eternal greed and violence of human nature, but because of its premature and abandoned initial birth among wolves. 

Since the digression into ancient society, it’s been a struggle for me in trying to organize, without major digressions and with concision, the huge topic of primitive accumulation. I’m still working on it. There will be 3 more posts: medieval society in Western Europe (focused on England); the process of primitive accumulation in England (1600-1800); and, finally--going “backwards”--a return to the first chapters of Capital, where Marx applies an historical materialist critique to classical political economy’s labor theory of value, based on his inclusion of use value in the commodity equation. This inclusion of use value displaces the point of view of classical political economy’s analysis from capital’s to labor’s, which brings the material world into Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s hermetic calculations, and reveals capitalism’s contradictions. Some of these I’ll sketch out as non-technically as possible, and then try to relate them to the human and ecological crises we face today. My next post, I promise, will be on primitive accumulation...or rather some preliminary stuff on feudalism...

             

                                        

August 16, 2014

Primitive Accumulation, part 1

Primitive accumulation is a tern that refers to events that resulted in the establishment of a social relation between capital and labor which is specific to the capitalist mode of production, and has to be understood, historically, as a stage in the development of social relations between human beings. Humans haven't always lived, under God, in a world of "winners" and "losers." . I’ll start a long way back, but given limitations of space and of my personal knowledge, it will read like a hundred yard dash rather than a marathon.

Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is a good place to begin. Engels’ main influences are the early American Anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan (“Ancient Society”) and the 19th century Swiss archeologist/philologist J.J. Bachofen (Mother Right). In addition, Engels’ ideas about the social/economic structure of ancient societies owes much to classical Greek and Roman philosophy, as well as to the radical criticism of the Bible and the state by 18th century and early 19th century Enlightenment writers like F.C. Bauer, Baron d’Holbach, and C. F. Volney. Socialist, humanist, and feminist writers of our own times like Marja Gimbutas, Martin Bernal, and Sylvia Federici, and many others have extended the investigation into the origins of civilization and of matrilineally organized communist societies.

To simplify Engels’ basic  argument (one that in broad outline is generally accepted by most scholars interested in early human social organization), matrilineal, communistic social orders were universal among human beings at the earliest stages of settled social organization. Enduring mythical evidence, as well as studies of existing matrilineal groups by researchers such as Morgan at the time Engels was writing (1884) indicate a  mutually reinforcing relationship between matrilineal and egalitarian social organization. 

What I have to say here about matrilineal social order is culled mostly from Engels, Morgan, George Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena. 

Matrilineal society was centered on the female, in the first place, because she created human life, and only through her could the structure of the tribal organization be stabilized, given the polyandric sexual practices of the time and the limits of human knowledge. Beyond that, there is strong archeological and mythical evidence that it was the specifically  female qualities of human genius that were critical in creating the fundamental conditions for the establishment of settled communities and, eventually, civilized life. These female powers are dramatized in myths that circulated throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean world, and are best exemplified for us by the goddesses of the Greek Pantheon: to name a few, Persephone/Demeter (agriculture), Arachne (spinning and weaving of cloth), and Athena (the goddess of human thought and knowledge). These goddesses, still paternalistically honored within the pantheon of classical Greek civilization, are later, edited versions of much older goddesses from all over the Mediterranean and the Near East, belonging to a pre-patriarchal, older social order. 

 It’s been argued that the relative peacefulness and productivity of ancient matrilineally ordered, egalitarian society led to rapid population growth, which eventually created conditions of scarcity, which, given the limits of primitive human knowledge and technological development, could not be overcome. The result was conflict, war, warrior bands of males, hierarchical arrangements for control of scarce necessities, and, eventually, early tribal versions of private property in land (for powerful families), and various forms of exploitation of conquered peoples: as serfs or slaves, or “free” tenant labor. 

Private property in the means of production is based on force and results in male-dominated hierarchies that are created specifically to protect the rights of the usurpers of natural and socially produced wealth, which (until quite recently in the advanced capitalist countries) have been passed from one generation to the other in the male line. The biological fact that females control the reproduction of human beings, male and female, must have immediately been seen as problematic to the leaders of what was to become hegemonic patriarchal society. To guard against things getting out of hand, females of the elite, as well as of the subject, exploited population, had to be strictly controlled relative to the needs of the possessing male elite. This control is expressed in the historically documented evolution of morals, property laws, the role of sovereign state, and the ideology of modern religions. Once the ideological hegemony of hierarchic patriarchal institutions was internalized by society at large, sexualized property rights could be relaxed, but over a very long period of time. Women have only very recently gotten the right to vote in “advanced”, bourgeois-democratic societies, and some women--if they have the “balls”--have even achieved positions of power to oppress men (and women) in subject nations. 

At this point, I think it is  important to distinguish between hierarchal matriarchy, which possibly never existed (except in the minds of feminists trapped in patriarchal society) and matrilineal societies that did exist and continued to exist into modern times. Nostalgia for matriarchy seems to assume that the same violent, political/economic phenomena typical of patriarchy--the usurpation of the  common means of production by military gangs, legitimated and enforced by the controlled violence of religion, the law, and the state--would have been more humane if originated and controlled by females. Matriarchy is the inverse of patriarchy: rule not by men, but by women.

No doubt, organized bands of women fought back. There are ancient artifacts depicting battles between Amazons and Greek males. However, there is no evidence of a matriarchal, Amazon state. Men are better at brute force. Matrilineal society reflected the cultural superiority of women, and did succeed, probably for a very long time, because it was egalitarian. Women’s honored place in the community didn’t reflect their dominion over men, but their unique creative and imaginative gifts, which were freely given to society as a whole, men and women, and reciprocated. During the matrilineal period the basic creations of human civilization came into being: language, art, tools of all kinds, and a settled, ordered social life, capable of creating a surplus, but incapable of maintaining that surplus under the pressure of an expanding population. It is almost axiomatic in human history that civilizations become victims of the contradictions inherent in them, which were exacerbated by their own success. Marx called (written) history the history of class rule. We can learn from past, hierarchic civilizations without mourning their passing. However, the destruction of matrilineal society was a tragedy, one that hasn’t been forgotten.

Bachofen notes four stages in this early human development, each represented by a god or goddess: earth centered (Aphrodite), lunar (Demeter), transitional from matriarchy to patriarchy (Dionysian), patriarchy (Apollonian). There is plenty of Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek archeological and mythological evidence supporting such a thesis: myths of a lost golden age, of a war between an older order of gods centered on or beneath the Earth, of a decisive war between such gods and their progeny--for example, in Greek myth, the war between the Titans and the transitional Olympian gods and goddesses, whose progeny of demigods were claimed as  ancestors by the ruling, slave owning families of ancient and classical Greece.  

The Old Testament (which was codified by scribes for the Hebrew elite during the Babylonian Captivity (circa 6th century b.c.) is a testament to the much earlier establishment of full blown patriarchy and the absolute rejection of female right and communal property. The creation story, a re-treatment of early Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths, is noted for its patriarchal propaganda: Jehovah, pointedly male, has made (re-made) mother earth out of nothing and, having no other gods (or goddesses) before him, owns it. “God,” as He is called today in the Judeo-Christian tradition, has all the characteristics of a greedy landlord and demands a ridiculously high monopoly rent from Adam and Eve that must be repaid with endless adoration and infinite ignorance. He rules by fear, because his displeasures are expressed violently. Adam, made in God’s image (except lacking a will of his own), would have been a perfect debtor, but for Eve (a kind of demonized, alienated Aphrodite/Athena), who persuades Adam to think for himself and not pay up. Jehovah jumps up and down like an ape, and throws them out of his gated community, naked into the fallen world where the rent is labor, pain, death, and guilt. (Jehovah’s character translates neatly into Zionist Israel and Imperial USA.)

Read subversively, Eve is the heroine of the story, like Satan is in Paradise Lost. But the lesson for us is: never challenge overwhelming brute power directly. 

Part 2 will move on to an examination of Western Civilization's patriarchal hierarchies that replaced matrilineal society.The focus will be on the main stages in the development of the exploitation of human labor by patriarchy's various elites, which led to the "primitive accumulation" of potential wage laborers and the establishment of the capitalist mode of production.

Historical materialism describes history “dialectically” by positing the dynamic interaction between the two necessary conditions--reflecting our human nature--that determine our human, historical project: (1)Natural necessity-- our condition as natural beings that absolutely depend on our natural environment to sustain and reproduce ourselves, and (2) historical necessity: our condition as self-conscious natural beings, who, in our own minds, objectify the world and are able to create societies to mediate our metabolic interaction with nature--and, when necessary, change them. These changes within and between societies--interacting, contradicting, colliding with one another--constitute the complex, non-linear, often paradoxical story of this evolution--our consciousness of the human condition and its "project": history.  Engels put in this way in a letter to Marx in 1853:

“I have the feeling that one fine day, thanks to the helplessness and spinelessness of all the others, our party will find itself forced into power, whereupon it will have to enact things that are not immediately in our own, but rather in the general, revolutionary....interest; in which event, spurred on by the proletarian populous, and bound by our own published statements...--more or less wrongly interpreted...and impulsively pushed through in the midst of party strife--we shall find ourselves forced to make communist experiments which...[will be]...untimely.  One then proceeds to lose one’s head--only physically speaking I hope--,  a reaction sets in and, until such time as the world is capable of passing historical judgement on this kind of thing, one will be regarded, not only as a brute beast...but also as stupid...  I don’t very well think of how it could happen otherwise...”

This could have been Lenin on the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power-- despite the backward conditions in Czarist Russian and their isolation following the collapse of the 2nd International. As human, conscious, responsible human beings, they had not choice. Tragedy has been a necessary part of human history. 

Historical materialism, as a scientific tool and a philosophical stance is strongly influenced by Hegel, Darwin, radical (often idealistic) French and English egalitarianism, and the philological anthropology of the 19th century.  

It adopts Hegel’s dialectic and his view that human history is driven by a kind of collective consciousness (a “zeitgeist”), rippling through the human race, unequally, but resolving itself into various settled (often competing) social orders. It discards Hegel’s idealistic belief that the process is divinely directed, and adopts Darwin’s notion of evolution through adaptation and natural selection, to human social and intellectual development, human history--viewing the motivating drive in human social development as both the desire and the need of human beings to shape the societies (through which they mediate their metabolic relationship with the natural environment) to secure and enhance their lives, individually and collectively.  

Historical materialism’s philosophical stance can be traced to many strands: Greek materialist and epicurian philosophy; radical Christian antinomianism (anti-baptist, egalitarian Christian peasant revolts, Levellers, Diggers, etc.); the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution; romantic poets like Shelley and Heine; French utopian socialist thinkers; pioneering 19th century work on anthropology by researchers like Bachofen (Mother Right) and William Henry Morgan (Ancient Society). 

All these intellectual and spiritual currents, came together in the minds of serious thinkers in Europe faced with the effects of the early industrial revolution: what to make of the power of the new capitalist elite, of the political and social power they wielded through their ownership of incredibly productive (and destructive) machinery, of the social disruption and misery unleashed on the working population. 

Marx wrote Capital as a critique of political economy, but mainly in order to understand how the capitalist system worked--in order to find a way of changing it that would succeed.  He admired the spirit and morality of the anarchists, but not their nihilistic methods. He was Hegelian enough to know that one did not create something new from nothing, but, for better or worse, out of the old, for the old is what we inherit, materially and spiritually. The mind of a child is not a tabula rasa, it is the physical/material potential of the child to absorb the world and come to understand it through the experience of those who have gone before us, and, as circumstances suggest or demand, to imaginatively form something new out of what is still progressive (rather than destructive) in that intellectual and material inheritance. I think it was Istvan Meszaros who first named this dialectical process, out of which history is created,"historical necessity." Certainly there is a dire "historical necessity today.

No one who has read Capital will have missed the footnotes, accounting for what seems to be half of the book. These are full of detailed reports of the actual lives of uprooted people. Capital provides the necessary figures and calculations, but this witnessing of the human costs of industrial capitalism is the heart of Capital, the heart of this heartless, profoundly described and rigorously analyzed, world. Marx condemned mainstream followers of classical political economists like Adam Smith for treating surface market phenomena (and their calculations of “value”) as if they represented eternal forces of nature rather than merely reflecting--and obscuring--historically created, very unequal, social relations. He considered most of the work of their followers to be “vulgar,”  bad-faith apologetics, and not science. They returned, and their modern mainstream followers return the favor, dismissing "marxism" as “history” or “philosophy” or even “religion,” anything but economics. They are wrong. The economics in Capital is profound and rigorous science.  But bourgeois apologists are also right: an unshakable egalitarianism based upon human sympathy is the driving emotional force behind Capital and historical materialism, not cold calculation. 

Primitive accumulation--how industrial capitalism came into being will be taken up next. That will conclude my failed attempt to explicate basic marxism in 100 words or less.

I have to insert one last digression from my attempt to capsulize essential marxism in a few short essays. I hope to complete this task in my next blog, which will cover historical materialism and primitive (primal) accumulation. If you are reading this, thanks for your patience. If not, thanks anyway....          

Tyrone

There had  been two phone messages from Fed Ex that they were holding four dining chairs I had ordered from Overstock.com. We had just driven 300 hot miles northeast from the coast. I was excited to see what the chairs would look like with the oak table we had found at a yard sale and I had sanded and stained. Tired as I was, I decided to go get the chairs before the local Fed Ex store closed.

For the past couple of years my wife and I have met my sister and brother-in-law at one of the beach towns on the coast half-way between Los Angeles (where they lived) and Sacramento. As usual, we talked mostly politics, a grim subject these days for those on the “left,” since the subject has come to revolve about the absence of any effective “left” political movement in the US--or rather, even a proper language with which to analyze the cause of the absence of any politics at all--except the politics of the hegemony of  monopoly financial capital, not only here, but throughout the world. 

My sister and her husband had devoted their lives to labor organizing and political activism. And there I was, sitting in a restaurant chair (though I had done my bit working for civil rights and protesting imperial wars)--repeating the obvious: the industrial working class of the United States lives in China, etc., and we Americans eat courtesy of guest workers mainly from Mexico. Centuries of slavery, racism, and the crumbs of imperial rent have emasculated the average, ethnically divided, American wage earner. Nothing but false consciousness is to be expected from most of them for now, not even the anti-imperialism that basically motivated our generation. We had grown old. My brother-in-law had just retired, and my sister was about to do so. I might as well have told them that they had wasted their lives. Yet I did not think so. I continue to admire them--I suppose, for the same reason that I don’t feel I had wasted more than three decades teaching mainly Afro-American children so that Condoleesa Rice (it would seem) could have an oil tanker named after her. One day that stinking tanker will sink under the sea that floated it. 

The Overstock.com chairs weren’t made in China, they were made in Vietnam. I was stunned, not surprised. It was my particular store of grief evoked by that particular criminal war. Then weakness dressed itself up as irony: should I give up bananas, coffee, underwear? To be honest, the moral miasma I created for myself was a blind that obfuscated good reasons for sending the chairs back, but not my desire to take them home to see what they looked like around the yard sale oak table, which was maybe 100 years old and real oak. These Vietnamese chairs, as I knew, were composed of laminated scraps of oak-finished, tropical wood, processed in high tech factories controlled by the very imperial forces that had murdered millions of the parents of the young people who now had to work for almost nothing in these satanic mills.  

But the price was right: four for $400 rather than about $3000 for real real oak chairs I wouldn’t have to bolt together myself and made in small batches. As far as the business of living and getting by in the United States goes, I’m in the same boat as the patriot across the street running up a flag on Veterans’ Day. Except that his political morality is blindly unproblematic. He looks where he is told to look and sees what he’s told to see. He powerlessly identifies with power. I view my daily existence as a political and moral dilemma.

The woman behind the Fed Ex counter was tiny and wiry, and alone, running around serving customers. She managed to drag my four large, heavy cartons out from somewhere in the back, but I was not going to ask her to load them into my car across the lot. So, respecting the uncertainty of my bulging disks and sciatic feet, I began awkwardly trundling the first carton toward the opened hatch of my “vice Versa”. Then Tyrone called out: Can I help you?

My wife later told me that he had been hanging about Peets for some time with a spray bottle and rags, washing car windows. But I knew Tyrone from a previous encounter a couple of weeks before. It was 6 a.m. and I’d been hobbling along to get us a couple of scones from the local cafe around the corner that had mysteriously started baking good pastries--no more Peets or Starbucks for me! ...Someone called out. --Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I was about to turn my head when Tyrone slowly rolled into view on a decent mountain bike. --Thank the Lord! I am blessed, brother.  And so are you! Isn’t this a beautiful morning! I looked at him carefully. His face was round and brown and smiling and wonderful to behold at at six in the morning. I did feel blessed. I told him so... as he rolled and I strolled toward the intersection. 

Most people live near freeways, Taco Bells, and Rite Aids in Sacramento. There are homeless of every description in our neighborhood, and you cannot expect to go walking about scot-free. So that morning I was wondering if I had some loose dollars in my wallet for Tyrone, as we approached the corner, still sincerely exchanging glad tidings. To me it was clear that Tyrone would have said what he said the way he said it whatever his situation. Nevertheless, his timing was as exquisite as an expert con-artist. The light obediently turned red, and Tyrone said quietly --I’m blessed to wake up and be alive and meet good people like you. ...I could use some money for breakfast. I figured five dollars would be o.k., and he took it graciously.

I don’t think Tyrone remembered me. I insisted on helping him load the cartons, which must have weighed 30 pounds each, but he wouldn’t allow it. He was just happy to help and he didn’t ask for any money, but I handed him two dollars and asked him where his bike was. Stolen he said. (I had three mountain bikes in the garage.) --That’s too bad, I said and mentioned the Bike Kitchen. He said he knew about the place and might try them again. It took a minute to get the cartons on the folded down back seat, and I was impatient to get home. But Tyrone wanted to talk more. Obviously the two dollars were not enough. He asked to wash my windows for a couple of extra dollars. I told him no. I had to go. Actually, I was too tired to stand around while he washed the windows of my car. Tyrone didn’t press the issue, but he wanted to tell me more: about how ill he was, about knees and kidneys. I mentioned a free clinic I knew about. Tyrone knew all about free clinics.  No, he was going to the emergency ward. They’d take care of him. ...Then one last quiet, friendly try: didn’t I have something he could do so he could have some supper?  

I put my hand in my wallet pocket when Tyrone, in way of giving up and saying goodbye, came closer and began to sing--beautifully--a few bars of a spiritual--there, between Fed Ex and Peets, about 3 inches from my face. I was lifted so high out of my nonsense and weariness that I forgot the wallet in my pocket. We shook hands, Tyrone walked back to Peets with, hopefully, more than my two dollars for supper, and I drove home, my spirit lifted, but with a back seat full of grief and stolen labor.

Postscript: Home at last, I ripped one carton apart and blindly convinced myself that the chairs’ color was o.k.  The next morning I tried to bolt the parts together. The directions were quite simple, so I didn’t bother to check the hardware against the illustrated number of parts in the directions. There seemed to be enough of everything, but alignment took some wrestling and the last bolt wouldn’t cinch down, seemingly stripped. I took the chair apart, and checked the hardware against the instruction sheet. There were supposed to be four long bolts and eight short bolts. Somebody had packaged eight long bolts and three short ones. The short bolts were way too short to grab anything but air (and I could find no use for any of them). The long bolts (of which there were many) seemed to work, except in the last hole. 

Could it have been that some eighteen year old worker was sending me a message of human resilience? sort of what Tyrone represented for me? But Tyrone and I had seen each other up close. He could see that (despite my decent pension and nice house that he could certainly have guessed at ) I was far from being the enemy. Quite the contrary. Nor would anything he didn’t know have made any difference to him: we were, in good faith, playing the fool together at this point in time, in this social situation. 

I hope some eighteen year old worker sabotaged my chairs. If she did, it would have been an act of audacity and defiance and proof of the resilience of the Vietnamese people. If so, I hope the defiance (if that’s what the screwed up bolts represented) was not directed at privileged victims (or our common enemy) like me. Rather, I hope and believe, that as a daughter of a revolutionary people now brought to their knees, she--and a host of others like her--intended to create disruptions along the chain of profit growing from the theft and misuse of their labor. They have nothing to lose by such audacity, nor did I. I sent the chairs back.

I hope Overstock.com lives up to its name, when all the factories and land in Vietnam are re-occupied by its workers. That might wake workers in the US to the real price of our illusions, and inspire them to come out on the streets and occupy all our public spaces, especially our bailed-out banks.  That will take the courage and audacity of the Vietnamese. And also, the love and wile of spiritual troubadours like Tyrone.

Amen.