Monday, June 21, 2004
(11:59 AM) | Anonymous:
The Proletariat and the Axiomatic of the Socius.
There is a place in the machine for everyone, the one, true machine that all have a place within. There is only one class and you are part of it. There are only slaves and you are one of them. So am I. We have lost our masters, we need only look so far as the Bush administration to know that he is also a slave, that there is no person driving forth history along a preconceived path. Only slaves tinkering with the machine and the machine knows what it is doing. Time has given itself only to contingencies, some which are predictable and others which are not. There is one machine and there is no outside of that machine.Some suggest that the poor are outside of the machine but the machine has found a place for them as well. The Capitalist machine always avoids limits, it has learned the Greek wisdom of homopathia quite well, and one such limit is that everyone would be equal, perhaps this an aporatic limit. The machine would be unbalanced if this limit were to be reached and as such the Capitalist market has worked, quite nicely, a 10% unemployment rate for which it bleeds when too much excess wealth is accumulated and this allows the machine to run smoothly.
I've found a riddle quite by chance in an old book purchased in a Salvation Army called English Riddles. It reads, "There stands a tree at our house-end. / It's a' clad owre wi' leather bend; / It'll fecht a bull it'll fecht a bear, / It'll fecht a thousand men t'weir." The answer to the riddle is simply 'war', the editor comments that "the description of war as a tree is perhaps a confused fragment of a riddle which is not preserved in any intelligible version." The tree is a machine; an oxygen machine, a paper machine, and war is a machine; a wealth-creating machine, a death machine, a value creating machine. The war machine stands at our house-end and no house law can save us from it, we breath it and read it and we buy it and we sell it. Everything good is paid for by the war machine, the State used its excess wealth to buy a few rights for a few souls and their life is better, oh so much better without the despot or the tyrant, but they still breath war and death for the sake of doing anything at all.
There is only one machine with little machines attached. This machine works to no end other than to work and it is moving towards a telos of destruction. Yet the Socius' axiomatic is that the machine works for the good of all (Of who? All? Which all?) and that is shared by nearly all, those that dissent are still within the machine. They even desire it, the machine is all they know. Dissent merely helps water the tree of liberty and thus the tree of war and thus the full machine. So where is the Proletariat to come from? The poor? I've seen them, they don't desire anything differently than what the other slaves desire, after all they have a purpose too. The intellectuals? They must create thoughts that have a market and breaking the machine doesn't sell. The social worker? I'm not sure the worker can think anymore with all the work to be done and the rest necessary for the next day of work to be done. We all know the religions don't work contrary to the machine anymore except, maybe, the ones we don't want to be a part of.
I know we are supposed to focus more on policy, focus on working with the machine to take down the machine but let's admit that none of us really believes the machine is going to stop without someone throwing themselves onto a cog. I know, I know, 'a little rationality please!' John Kerry can save us from Bush but who can save us from John Kerry? The reality of the situation is that we are heading towards disaster and the only option that seems viable among such a multitude without a care for the world is to give up.
We need something other than viable option, where are the Proles?
