I find myself torn here. Yes, the point is well taken. But, College kids have always been retarded. I don't give a fuck if they masturbate with string. I was a retarded college kid once. I didn't call for the extermination of minorities, but I did drink myself into plenty of stupors and thought I knew the truth about everything.
What's frustrating is that communism is so obviously fundamentally opposed to human nature, but people who could otherwise be useful members of society hang onto the notion that that's untrue. How dangerous is this march through the institutions, really? Given the lawfare we are ALREADY seeing, it feels very, truly threatening to me as this new batch of radicals takes up real positions in the judiciary, law firms, government, ngos.
But there's nowhere to run. Zeihan (love him or hate him) makes this point pretty convincingly. I think NS Lyons' latest piece is key. We have to build in parallel, and NOW.
Right. I get the point about college kids and the older generation always thinking the younger generation is going to h~ll. However, what's different here is that these college students are being abetted and encouraged by the faculty and leadership of the colleges. There is no longer any balance.
The college administrations and faculties are the “dedicated Marxists.” These assholes get to vote people onto the island! Who are they going to pick?! And where do they pick from? Other islands identical to theirs. Their selection methods ensure singularity of thought, i.e., zero intellectual diversity. Mentally, their environs resemble Miss Havisham’s dilapidated mansion in “Great Expectations,” indistinct at a distance, but all rot and collapse when inspected up close.
Communism may be a disaster for the people, but for the leaders it's great. The leader's desire for wealth and power combined with the stupidity of the useful idiots just keeps it going.
My musings were more along the "hands on" line of thinking. Whoever was growing Marx's food wasn't sharing in the same luxury to expand his/her horizons that Marx enjoyed.
Marx is essentially the prototype Trust Fund Kid telling you how everything sucks and that he has the solution for everything. Of course, someone *else* always has to clean the toilets...
Clean toilets, mop a floor, drive a Fed Ex truck, work in a warehouse...basically be "real" and actually *do* something. I unloaded trucks and stocked shelves in stores all through my time in uni, I *never* look down on anyone doing that kind of work.
“Upon his return to Britain, Engels re-entered the Manchester company in which his father held shares to support Marx financially as he worked on Das Kapital.”
He was just another bloodliner butt boy, like all the other "artificially elevated" psychopaths pushing the Luciferian Freemason Jesuit Templar et al death-cult agenda, then and now.
To be fair to Marx, he wasn't alone in reasoning like he did, re: leisure and personal development. Remember that when he wrote his stuff, the poorest parts of London had an infant mortality rate of 300/1 000 births. Not even Biafra, not even Calcutta during famine attained that - only liberal capitalist industrial nations managed something like that.
What was envisioned, and not only by him and certainly not only by communists was a future (or rather; Future) where machines did all dirty, dangerous labour and where that machine labour made people free to develop themselves. They did not take evolution into account: without some kind of selection pressure, progress isn't made but regress and degeneration quickly become the norm.
There must be both the hope of a carrot, and an actual carrot on offer, and a better one than you've currently get at that, and even worse - it must be a real offer, a real and realistic proposition of a better carrot and it must be fair, or people /will/ start "checking out" in various ways, and it doesn't matter one iota what -ism is the paradigm at hand.
Except if it allows for social darwinism, or actual impartial meritocracy - and those two are only ever nice if you are reasonable sure you'd be on the right side of the line.
"To be fair to Marx. . ." Feels like I need a shower, "Crying Game"-style.
You know the joke about the economist who falls into a deep hole and has to escape? "Let us assume, for the purposes of our theoretical model, that there is a ladder."
Bray quoting Bastani: “With the arrival of communism any distinction between mental and physical labour would vanish, with work becoming more akin to play.”
Implicit in this are the unmentioned “roombas” that operate at 98.6°F – slaves.
It is impossible to take a society that requires X billion manhours (excuse me Trudeau, peoplehours) to function and lop off maybe 50% of that work time without an explosive increase in productivity. Or you just enslave some folks and count their worktime as “zero.”
Separately, people who consume (“play”) without producing are irrelevant to a society and can be disposed of at a Commissar’s whim.
All of this manifested under Stalin. It would be VERY helpful if we could strike a deal with Kim Jong Un to send our college students to the DPRK for 6 months following their sophomore year. Let them see how communism works in its purest and unfettered form.
Oh I “got it” that you agreed, not to worry! I just felt bad bringing a humorous crack to a situation where people survive by stripping bark off of trees…
If 20-somethings want to sit on the dole and smoke pot and play video games....well... that's not great but the disdain I feel for it is mild compared with the white hot rage I feel towards Congress that just doled out another $60 billion in MIC and weapons contractor corporate welfare in the name of fighting an unwinnable proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. I am way madder about that.
The corporate model is the whole problem. If we all owned our own tools and labor and we incorporated creativity into our work, that would be a lot better system. Employees are not happy, but it's easier to be an employee. Often, you don't have to put your whole self into being an employee. You can just show up and go through the motions. It's not like that if you're in business for yourself. We are being reset to a time when technical skill in trade (plumbers, carpenters) is highly valued. The old testament wisdom is to work with your hands so that you may have to give to others. Learning how to do stuff is the real education.
“If we all owned our own tools and labor and we incorporated creativity into our work, that would be a lot better system.”
The world used that system for quite some time: the term “cottage industry” comes from it. Ultimately it fell away because the scale and complexity of the things being manufactured exceeded the capacity of the cottage system. To extend it in absurdum, it would be difficult to build a 787 using independent artisans. Additionally, some processes simply require multiple employees, e.g., a steel mill, no matter how small, cannot operate with just one person.
The ability of employees to go through the motions at work for extended periods is the result of people being promoted to managers despite utter incompetence at effective supervision. Your boss doesn’t need to know what you’re working on at this moment, but s/he should know what your objectives are for the week/month, and if progress isn’t being made, then intervention is needed.
". . . it would be difficult to build a 787 using independent artisans. . . .' Even harder than it seems to be for Boeing these days. But I agree that there's nothing wrong with larger, more complex organizations, and nothing wrong with working for them or for someone else. Good employees are creative in their work, usually get rewarded accordingly, and not everyone has the ability to create better products and take the financial risk of starting a business. It was the foolish Marx, with his labor theory of value, who assumed that an hour of work is an hour of work, with the same value, regardless of what's accomplished (or not) in that hour.
I get what you're saying about needing a team to do many tasks. I still believe we need to end the current payroll model. Obamacare is creating a perverse incentive to cause disease and is creating a huge transfer of wealth based on fraud.
The starters and owners of businesses take great risks. Many fail and many get great rewards, they should, it was their necks they risked doing it. Yes, they needed employees, and hopefully paid them well. But the idea and sweat equity, etc., that was needed came from relatively few people, who then went on to employ many.
Mr Bray, you are hitting me like Steve Pressfield often does on his blog. How the fbomb are you gettin inside my head?
I have a thesis I'm fighting with myself to fully articulate--it is that comfort and leisure are actually the antitheses to happiness, connection, and well being. I've written here a few times about my obsession with 'collective suffering' as a means to trust, compassion, connection, meaning, in short--agape.
Comfort & leisure are the seeds of self-centeredness, self-indulgence, SELF SELF SELF-which, anyone who has done any personal reflection at all--knows is the pathway to self-hatred, despondency, depression, and anxiety.
One of the most direct ways to transcendence--meaning transcending one's own needs/desires--it to be of service to others.
Comfort and leisure interrupt this tendency. I'll use one of my dogs as an example.
When I'm awake and around the house and hear my dog whine, like he's hurting or needs to go outside--I'm up out of my chair in an instance, or running downstairs--immediately concerned about his well being--even if on the phone, or engaged in something. I put my dogs well being above my own concerns.
Now--it is 0245, sideways rain pouring, windy--and I"m tucked in warm in my bed--and I hear my dog whine -- all I initially think about is my own warmth, my own comfort, my own sleep--and sadly, "THIS DAMN DOG!"
We are not thinking about love, production, or anything positive/growth oriented--we only think about staying warm.
I would temper that by saying they’re like ice cream – a reward for work or accomplishment, but a little goes a long way. Alas, their effects are much shorter lived than ice cream’s. 😂
Great point, and much more accurate than my description as toxic!
I’m dictating this while driving, so there may be some mistakes.
This is one of the reasons I love Chris’s Substack so much. Good pushback forces me to clarify my thinking.
Huxley’s “brave New World” is the end state of comfort and leisure as the highest values.
Sometime around junior high or high school, I began to have repeated thoughts that all had this type of theme, “when this insert difficult situation is over, then life will be easy. “ midterms, finals, tryouts, getting grounded, whatever.
The underlying belief that I held was, I was put on this earth to live in comfort and leisure.
Another way of saying that is sloth and laziness! Laziness begets laziness. I’m uncertain where I learned this belief home, school, culture, or if I just am intrinsically lazy…
A more accurate and honest statement would be, “comfort and leisure are toxic to Brian.”
Without boundaries surrounding leisure and comfort, I can go off the reservation.
Should be mandatory reading for the entire country--the West these days. No one listens to prophets. Huxley, Orwell, Rand, etc told us all how this could go 90 years ago.
There's a term we sometimes use over here, only half-jokingly:
"Kreativt lat" - "Creatively lazy". It means a person who will work like the Dickens to invent a way for him to work less, simply because he is lazy. Not exactly "hurry up and wait", but a second cousin to it, so to speak.
It sounds like that's what you're describing, in a way.
Personal example (because I'm very much creatively lazy):
While working at a cheese & condiments supplier, I was in charge of sorting through the "order fulfilled"-forms that had to be entered into the computer system before a shipment was sent out. The several dozen old ladies who worked in sorting and packaging simply put all those form in a huge effing pile.
As we ran five deliveries/day, five days a week (the longest one being to a town 600 kilometers away, a back and there again run for the driver) everything in the lorry had to be packed in the correct order, and time was always short.
So being lazy, I scrounged up 25 in-trays and mount them on the wall outside my "office" (two walls in a corner to create the illusion of a cubicle), 5*5, and write up signs saying "Tour 1" and "Monday" and so on - pretty neat, took all of half an hour.
It cut down my workhours by 25%, leaving me time to do my actual job: loading trucks and lorries using a forklift.
Well, it did after the boss yelled like an air-raid siren at the packers to actually use the system I had "invented" for them. . . Scanian dialect, the southern drawl of swedish, is really good for yelling.
There is a saying, heard it first in the Army, but maybe it is said in the civilian world as well, "Good Idea Fairy".
It is a disparaging term for someone who is always wanting to change something here and there.
I'm that guy. The way the Army does stuff is so damn inane most of the time, I couldn't help myself.
BUT, we did create a few really innovative approaches to foreign language training from my 'good idea fairy-ness'. We had an immersion program. Two weeks straight (this is in the National Guard/Army Reserve model, so we worked 15 days straight). 12 hours a day. No English allowed. All meals with instructor. PT with instructor. In short--it SUCKED--but super effective. We started this in 2004, and it is still going on.
The other was LingFit--a mash up on CrossFit principles (short, intense WODs-workouts of day) in the target language. 10 minute WODs. 10 min, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year is 41 2/3 hours--which is half of the required number of language training hours required by big Army.
I honestly thought we were going to change the way DOD did language training--I was essentially running a tech start up out of our Armory (probably should have gone to jail...). It was one of the most delightful periods of my professional life.
Of course we did not change the way the DOD did training, and I eventually did not get the amount of funding needed to continue--but it was a fun three year run.
Sounds a lot like an exercise my dad participated in a couple of times. European militaries often train together, but not everyone speak english well enough or at all to use it as a "lingua bella" - the exercise bans english and the team (8-12, everything from baseline infantry soldiers to colonels, all branches mixed together) has to solve real problems using the tools and materials at hand, without a common language.
Making a bridge fit for small trucks f.e. using only hand tools and ropes (dad's a careerist in our combat engineering corps, semi-retired nowadays), or doing maintenance on a vehicle without a manual and so on.
I've used a lot of his manuals on educating/training conscripts; not the military stuff per se but the methodological and pedagogical bits - education is education. I like them a lot better than the ones written for teachers - making a bridge is pass/fail, you can't make a 75% bridge.
We have something similar in the US Army. Leadership Reaction Courses--but not as hard as building a bridge. Small unit problem solving, but with some twist. Usually a water obstacle with a task to which the available tools/supplies do not fit solution.
For example, a pool with 3-5 logs spaced unevenly apart vertically-so they could be used as steps or more likely bases on which to place a board.
Then you have 2-3 boards that do not reach any of the logs, and supplies--bulky stuff like 55 gallon drums, litters with dummies, ammo boxes--and you have 20 minutes to get you, your team, and the equipment across.
Leadership rotates at each obstacle. Short time suspense increases the stress. Great fun, great leadership training (include everyone, most of the good ideas come from the Soldiers--not the leader, enable over demand...) and an even better stress/decision making exercise.
I've always thought if I had a reason to need to hire numerous people at one time, my interview process would be 'collective suffering--something very hard physically', team sports, and an LRC. You learn all you need to know--and people actually develop during the process.
When I was a kid, most of the middle class (and they were not upper middle class) retired people I knew had RVs or trailers, travelled and camped a lot domestically, had hobbies like rock collection plus cutting and polishing them, ham radio, wood shops with a good selection of power tools, restoring classic cars and so on. I can’t think of anyone retired I personally know now that does any of these things. They are on a treadmill trying to keep up with inflation and the devaluation of currency, and even if they have homes that are nominally valuable, they don’t have access to that equity. There are so many anomalies and mysteries with our social and economic environment, and it’s hard to wrap my head around all this stuff.
1) Women went to work outside the home, and the added national income bid up the prices of most things middle class people buy. Food was generally not as badly inflated because of enormous productivity gains in agriculture over the last 50 yrs.
2) America makes FAR less than it consumes. This started most visibly with the steel industry but has spread into almost every industry: e.g., consumer electronics – 100% Asia.
Automotive tells a terrible story: 2023 Exports: $179 billion; 2023 Imports: $458 billion; Feb 2024 those figures are $14B and $38B respectively.
3) Manufacturing plants have automated wherever possible.
The American worker has bid his wages up so high and transportation costs have declined so much that there is a fraction of the demand for our labor as there was post-WWII. This translates into far less consumption than we witnessed in our childhood.
These are the tectonic forces at work. There are smaller ones, like the banks still charging 20-30% interest rates on credit cards when their cost of funds is 0-5% (and price-fixing to preclude competition), but that’s small compared to the national loss of manufacturing jobs.
AGREED! …but I would argue that maybe your needs—training you to keep you alive—is what motivated your drill sergeant. Agape. Love is rarely chocolates and champagne.
Lately Im stuck on the internal fight, the knife fight within ourselves.
I agree with you 100% that work is critical for survival.
I’m also convinced that we’ve hollowed out the meaning of difficulty, struggle, suffering.
I was “fortunate” enough to be in the gifted programs from first grade onward. Sadly, the implicit, and often explicit messaging. I received my entire life, “physical labor is for the dummies. The only work that is worthwhile requires a college education, work with your mind.”
This, too, goes against human nature. There is little intrinsic meaning in completing a PowerPoint presentation or a spreadsheet for the managerial class.
I find much more reward weed in my garden or mowing the lawn then I ever did writing a valuations in the corporate world for the poultry 2.5% raise our company allowed.
Sadly, another consequence of this thinking/indoctrination, was for me to look down on those who do the medial work. This remains a deep source of shame for me.
I too was in advanced classes (ours didn't start until 4th grade), but as a blue-collar kid surrounded by the children of doctors, judges, and businessmen, I never bought the class split. My father, who went into WWII without finishing high school, then worked as a route delivery driver, never had good grammar, but could do most anything (as was more typical of past generations), even help me decipher the crazy "new math"of the time.
I love it. Had a different experience, but yours strikes me as almost ideal. Grounded in reality--the life of creating/fixing/maintaining stuff--or as Chris wrote last week 'put the wet stuff on the hot stuff'--while also learning the value of cognitive effort. Good for you.
I know what a woman is, but I'm not a biologist. Still, according to Wikipedia (no good on health or politics, but maybe OK on this, "Fungi, like animals, are heterotrophs; they acquire their food by absorbing dissolved molecules, typically by secreting digestive enzymes into their environment." So the work may be biochemical and unseen, but I'd argue there's work going on. Even being a parasite takes effort, I think, but for humans, and maybe other species too, there's always the risk that the host will cut you off or die.
I was thinking about the role of fungi in the life-cycle of forests, breaking down dead or dying stuff and helping release nutrients back into the biotope.
Commies do have the breaking down-part down pat, and just as with many types of fungi, they can only attack dead or dying societies.
But biologically speaking, you're correct - some kind of work is happening.
Maybe the male anglerfish is a better example? Imregnates the female, then lets himself be absorbed by her, becoming in effect a sperm-producing attachment feeding off her body.
Or perhaps "male" feminists have claimed that as their spirit animal.
Somewhere I heard of a study that said that the happiest people/communities are those that are continually beset with events or situations that threaten their existence. I have called it the “Little House on the Prairie” effect, because almost every episode of the TV series involved some disaster and how the people dealt with it. They got through them with courage, hard work, and coming together to help one another.
God wired us to be that way. ”The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.“ God renamed Jacob Israel, meaning “struggle with God.” We are meant to work and overcome obstacles. Our modern attempts to eliminate risk and pain are ultimately doomed to failure and in fact only make us more miserable. Someone once said that the only pain that’s avoidable is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
I love it Cactus. We are beasts of burden, happiest under load. Mr Geis made a good point that comfort and leisure are not necessarily toxic, but rewards for effort.
The best times in my life have been post-suffering, post-scary, post-hard--the rucksack flop after the dismounted land nav, 12 mile ruck, or similar exertion when you're with your guys, eating MREs--busting each others' chops (XY love language), and laughing at yourself and others. The only way to feel that is to have done the very challenging work preceding the flop.
Struggles with God is something one can think about for 20 years trying to unpack and continually find more there. One layer I get is that God frowns on passivity, lack of agency, diminished sovereignty. He made us to create, explore, and push back against the world and Him. He wants us to earn it...because he knows we are better for it.
Dancing With String is just beyond parody. Even if I passionately believed in their cause - regardless of how poorly they themselves understand it - I would still think the string thing was pointless.
Has anyone asked them what, exactly, they think that will achieve?
Oh, and Hamas is probably laughing their collective asses off.
And plays were political tools even then, as Shakespeare and Marlowe well knew; a lot of characters and events in the plays would have been obvious political allusions to the contemporary audience - nowadays, you'd need to do a deep dive into the politics at the time to "get it".
I mention this since getting the queen's approval (or later, the king's) could make or break your career (and you). Wasn't any "free speech" or "free expression" provisions back then, so catering to the rich and powerful was just sound marketing and staying alive-policy.
Excellent point. Richard III is such an over-the-top villain in part because the guy who defeats him just so happened to have been Elizabeth I's grandfather.
They have no idea they’ll be ground up in the machine like everyone else, with the exception of the apex predators leading this movement. Did I mention I saw Bernie Sanders flying first class out of Burlington?
I keep hearing this line of thinking concerning AI. that advancing automation and artificial intelligence will create a society free from drudgery where everyone can stay home and make arts and crafts (this is an actual quote from a woman I know who makes six figures at an ad agency).
perhaps this is just cope considering that AI will probably destroy most ad agency work.
does anyone remember, at the onset of Lockdowns, how many Covid albums there would be? the dawning of a new creative renaissance? I do…and the exact opposite happened. it turns out that all art and commerce exist in a feedback loop and once you stop the loop, the well dries up pretty quick.
They said the same thing ("they" being the people with access enough to the media to be heard by all and sundry) in the closing years of the 19th century: in the future, food would be pills made in factories using science so no need for the backbreaking farmwork, and robots would do most other stuff.
That is still the "dream" the present-day "they" strive for.
In my perfect version of their story it ends like this…..the parents who have paid for their self indulgent lifestyle finally die. They inherit money , which they burn thru quickly because they have the brain capacity and with ethic of a sausage and then …. Well the ending sucks too because then we will have to support them. Or maybe they can work at Starbucks ?
Or maybe they're murdered by a foreign criminal Biden and his globalist puppeteers brought in to destroy us? Or just die from a mandatory toxic injection? Or starve to death when the debt economy and food production collapse? Because Marxism/socialism is just a weapon wielded by billionaires to destroy the lower and middle classes and get us to their Garden of Eden with a world population limited for eternity to 500 million.
As you know, intellectual creativity requires effort. It is work. However, labor often requires creativity and ingenuity. If only video games had existed when Marx was alive. Maybe we would have been spared from the torment he has wrought.
I find myself torn here. Yes, the point is well taken. But, College kids have always been retarded. I don't give a fuck if they masturbate with string. I was a retarded college kid once. I didn't call for the extermination of minorities, but I did drink myself into plenty of stupors and thought I knew the truth about everything.
What's frustrating is that communism is so obviously fundamentally opposed to human nature, but people who could otherwise be useful members of society hang onto the notion that that's untrue. How dangerous is this march through the institutions, really? Given the lawfare we are ALREADY seeing, it feels very, truly threatening to me as this new batch of radicals takes up real positions in the judiciary, law firms, government, ngos.
But there's nowhere to run. Zeihan (love him or hate him) makes this point pretty convincingly. I think NS Lyons' latest piece is key. We have to build in parallel, and NOW.
These tantrum-prone children are the symptom (and the victims) of the sinister efforts of 100% dedicated Marxists.
Right. I get the point about college kids and the older generation always thinking the younger generation is going to h~ll. However, what's different here is that these college students are being abetted and encouraged by the faculty and leadership of the colleges. There is no longer any balance.
The college administrations and faculties are the “dedicated Marxists.” These assholes get to vote people onto the island! Who are they going to pick?! And where do they pick from? Other islands identical to theirs. Their selection methods ensure singularity of thought, i.e., zero intellectual diversity. Mentally, their environs resemble Miss Havisham’s dilapidated mansion in “Great Expectations,” indistinct at a distance, but all rot and collapse when inspected up close.
Exactly! I'm retired college faculty and even the science have been captured.
Communism may be a disaster for the people, but for the leaders it's great. The leader's desire for wealth and power combined with the stupidity of the useful idiots just keeps it going.
A few thoughts:
https://drp314.substack.com/p/they-who-would-be-kings
🙌
Ya gotta wonder who provided Marx with the food he ate while he was busy coming up with these brilliant ideas?
Engels, with money from his well-to-do family.
https://theweek.com/articles/480397/love-capital-karl-jenny-marx-birth-revolution-by-mary-gabriel
My musings were more along the "hands on" line of thinking. Whoever was growing Marx's food wasn't sharing in the same luxury to expand his/her horizons that Marx enjoyed.
No, no, he had a LIBERATED organic source, I'm sure of it! "Here are your pork chops. I feel joy." He probably shopped exclusively at farmers markets.
I wonder what sort of favours Marx did for Engels...
Marx is essentially the prototype Trust Fund Kid telling you how everything sucks and that he has the solution for everything. Of course, someone *else* always has to clean the toilets...
That’s what the “peaceful “ protesters need to do - clean toilets, (for 6 months) for a reality check!
Clean toilets, mop a floor, drive a Fed Ex truck, work in a warehouse...basically be "real" and actually *do* something. I unloaded trucks and stocked shelves in stores all through my time in uni, I *never* look down on anyone doing that kind of work.
His buddy Engels:
“Upon his return to Britain, Engels re-entered the Manchester company in which his father held shares to support Marx financially as he worked on Das Kapital.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels#Back_in_Britain
Marx was a slob that few people liked.
As I recall, he was also diseased, and abused, but never paid, his live-in housekeeper.
Engles gave him the syph.
He was just another bloodliner butt boy, like all the other "artificially elevated" psychopaths pushing the Luciferian Freemason Jesuit Templar et al death-cult agenda, then and now.
To be fair to Marx, he wasn't alone in reasoning like he did, re: leisure and personal development. Remember that when he wrote his stuff, the poorest parts of London had an infant mortality rate of 300/1 000 births. Not even Biafra, not even Calcutta during famine attained that - only liberal capitalist industrial nations managed something like that.
What was envisioned, and not only by him and certainly not only by communists was a future (or rather; Future) where machines did all dirty, dangerous labour and where that machine labour made people free to develop themselves. They did not take evolution into account: without some kind of selection pressure, progress isn't made but regress and degeneration quickly become the norm.
There must be both the hope of a carrot, and an actual carrot on offer, and a better one than you've currently get at that, and even worse - it must be a real offer, a real and realistic proposition of a better carrot and it must be fair, or people /will/ start "checking out" in various ways, and it doesn't matter one iota what -ism is the paradigm at hand.
Except if it allows for social darwinism, or actual impartial meritocracy - and those two are only ever nice if you are reasonable sure you'd be on the right side of the line.
"To be fair to Marx. . ." Feels like I need a shower, "Crying Game"-style.
Now *there's* a movie you don't hear much about these days.
I am having trouble understanding how communism eliminates work that is tedious or drudgery.
You know the joke about the economist who falls into a deep hole and has to escape? "Let us assume, for the purposes of our theoretical model, that there is a ladder."
lol. One of my favorites is when an economist scolded his star pupil “That may very well be true but it will never work in theory!”
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
That's where the, "we pretend to work, you pretend to pay us" maxim enters the stage.
Bray quoting Bastani: “With the arrival of communism any distinction between mental and physical labour would vanish, with work becoming more akin to play.”
Implicit in this are the unmentioned “roombas” that operate at 98.6°F – slaves.
It is impossible to take a society that requires X billion manhours (excuse me Trudeau, peoplehours) to function and lop off maybe 50% of that work time without an explosive increase in productivity. Or you just enslave some folks and count their worktime as “zero.”
Separately, people who consume (“play”) without producing are irrelevant to a society and can be disposed of at a Commissar’s whim.
All of this manifested under Stalin. It would be VERY helpful if we could strike a deal with Kim Jong Un to send our college students to the DPRK for 6 months following their sophomore year. Let them see how communism works in its purest and unfettered form.
The fatter ones would be eaten right away.
I’ve personally never been a fan of blubber, but I realize the North Korean population doesn’t have that luxury.
Indeed. The periodic and targeted starvation there is ugly. Forgive me for joking about it.
Sorry, I didn’t mean my comment as criticism, but rather agreement.
Oh I “got it” that you agreed, not to worry! I just felt bad bringing a humorous crack to a situation where people survive by stripping bark off of trees…
That’s because you’re not supposed to question, think nor understand diana. You’re simply supposed to shut your mouth and do as you’re told.
bsn
I’m reminded of Sean Connery’s line to Tim Curry in “Red October” “Petrov, I will try to forget your comments when I present my report.”
But it does! It eliminates everything! Even food and water. Just ask the Cubans.
If 20-somethings want to sit on the dole and smoke pot and play video games....well... that's not great but the disdain I feel for it is mild compared with the white hot rage I feel towards Congress that just doled out another $60 billion in MIC and weapons contractor corporate welfare in the name of fighting an unwinnable proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. I am way madder about that.
The corporate model is the whole problem. If we all owned our own tools and labor and we incorporated creativity into our work, that would be a lot better system. Employees are not happy, but it's easier to be an employee. Often, you don't have to put your whole self into being an employee. You can just show up and go through the motions. It's not like that if you're in business for yourself. We are being reset to a time when technical skill in trade (plumbers, carpenters) is highly valued. The old testament wisdom is to work with your hands so that you may have to give to others. Learning how to do stuff is the real education.
“If we all owned our own tools and labor and we incorporated creativity into our work, that would be a lot better system.”
The world used that system for quite some time: the term “cottage industry” comes from it. Ultimately it fell away because the scale and complexity of the things being manufactured exceeded the capacity of the cottage system. To extend it in absurdum, it would be difficult to build a 787 using independent artisans. Additionally, some processes simply require multiple employees, e.g., a steel mill, no matter how small, cannot operate with just one person.
The ability of employees to go through the motions at work for extended periods is the result of people being promoted to managers despite utter incompetence at effective supervision. Your boss doesn’t need to know what you’re working on at this moment, but s/he should know what your objectives are for the week/month, and if progress isn’t being made, then intervention is needed.
". . . it would be difficult to build a 787 using independent artisans. . . .' Even harder than it seems to be for Boeing these days. But I agree that there's nothing wrong with larger, more complex organizations, and nothing wrong with working for them or for someone else. Good employees are creative in their work, usually get rewarded accordingly, and not everyone has the ability to create better products and take the financial risk of starting a business. It was the foolish Marx, with his labor theory of value, who assumed that an hour of work is an hour of work, with the same value, regardless of what's accomplished (or not) in that hour.
Fully agreed, but I’ve always looked at the “hour of work” through the other end of the telescope:
“What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.”
— Adrian Rogers 1931
I get what you're saying about needing a team to do many tasks. I still believe we need to end the current payroll model. Obamacare is creating a perverse incentive to cause disease and is creating a huge transfer of wealth based on fraud.
The starters and owners of businesses take great risks. Many fail and many get great rewards, they should, it was their necks they risked doing it. Yes, they needed employees, and hopefully paid them well. But the idea and sweat equity, etc., that was needed came from relatively few people, who then went on to employ many.
Mr Bray, you are hitting me like Steve Pressfield often does on his blog. How the fbomb are you gettin inside my head?
I have a thesis I'm fighting with myself to fully articulate--it is that comfort and leisure are actually the antitheses to happiness, connection, and well being. I've written here a few times about my obsession with 'collective suffering' as a means to trust, compassion, connection, meaning, in short--agape.
Comfort & leisure are the seeds of self-centeredness, self-indulgence, SELF SELF SELF-which, anyone who has done any personal reflection at all--knows is the pathway to self-hatred, despondency, depression, and anxiety.
One of the most direct ways to transcendence--meaning transcending one's own needs/desires--it to be of service to others.
Comfort and leisure interrupt this tendency. I'll use one of my dogs as an example.
When I'm awake and around the house and hear my dog whine, like he's hurting or needs to go outside--I'm up out of my chair in an instance, or running downstairs--immediately concerned about his well being--even if on the phone, or engaged in something. I put my dogs well being above my own concerns.
Now--it is 0245, sideways rain pouring, windy--and I"m tucked in warm in my bed--and I hear my dog whine -- all I initially think about is my own warmth, my own comfort, my own sleep--and sadly, "THIS DAMN DOG!"
We are not thinking about love, production, or anything positive/growth oriented--we only think about staying warm.
Comfort and leirsure are toxic. They kill us.
bsn
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374535919/theworldbeyondyourhead
This is the third book you’ve recommended which I found for free at Audible. Downloaded and prepped for next listen. Thanks!
bsn
“Comfort and leirsure are toxic.”
I would temper that by saying they’re like ice cream – a reward for work or accomplishment, but a little goes a long way. Alas, their effects are much shorter lived than ice cream’s. 😂
Great point, and much more accurate than my description as toxic!
I’m dictating this while driving, so there may be some mistakes.
This is one of the reasons I love Chris’s Substack so much. Good pushback forces me to clarify my thinking.
Huxley’s “brave New World” is the end state of comfort and leisure as the highest values.
Sometime around junior high or high school, I began to have repeated thoughts that all had this type of theme, “when this insert difficult situation is over, then life will be easy. “ midterms, finals, tryouts, getting grounded, whatever.
The underlying belief that I held was, I was put on this earth to live in comfort and leisure.
Another way of saying that is sloth and laziness! Laziness begets laziness. I’m uncertain where I learned this belief home, school, culture, or if I just am intrinsically lazy…
A more accurate and honest statement would be, “comfort and leisure are toxic to Brian.”
Without boundaries surrounding leisure and comfort, I can go off the reservation.
bsn
"Somaoids" is the end state.
Should be mandatory reading for the entire country--the West these days. No one listens to prophets. Huxley, Orwell, Rand, etc told us all how this could go 90 years ago.
bsn
There's a term we sometimes use over here, only half-jokingly:
"Kreativt lat" - "Creatively lazy". It means a person who will work like the Dickens to invent a way for him to work less, simply because he is lazy. Not exactly "hurry up and wait", but a second cousin to it, so to speak.
It sounds like that's what you're describing, in a way.
Personal example (because I'm very much creatively lazy):
While working at a cheese & condiments supplier, I was in charge of sorting through the "order fulfilled"-forms that had to be entered into the computer system before a shipment was sent out. The several dozen old ladies who worked in sorting and packaging simply put all those form in a huge effing pile.
As we ran five deliveries/day, five days a week (the longest one being to a town 600 kilometers away, a back and there again run for the driver) everything in the lorry had to be packed in the correct order, and time was always short.
So being lazy, I scrounged up 25 in-trays and mount them on the wall outside my "office" (two walls in a corner to create the illusion of a cubicle), 5*5, and write up signs saying "Tour 1" and "Monday" and so on - pretty neat, took all of half an hour.
It cut down my workhours by 25%, leaving me time to do my actual job: loading trucks and lorries using a forklift.
Well, it did after the boss yelled like an air-raid siren at the packers to actually use the system I had "invented" for them. . . Scanian dialect, the southern drawl of swedish, is really good for yelling.
What was the point again?
Kreativt Lat! I love it!
There is a saying, heard it first in the Army, but maybe it is said in the civilian world as well, "Good Idea Fairy".
It is a disparaging term for someone who is always wanting to change something here and there.
I'm that guy. The way the Army does stuff is so damn inane most of the time, I couldn't help myself.
BUT, we did create a few really innovative approaches to foreign language training from my 'good idea fairy-ness'. We had an immersion program. Two weeks straight (this is in the National Guard/Army Reserve model, so we worked 15 days straight). 12 hours a day. No English allowed. All meals with instructor. PT with instructor. In short--it SUCKED--but super effective. We started this in 2004, and it is still going on.
The other was LingFit--a mash up on CrossFit principles (short, intense WODs-workouts of day) in the target language. 10 minute WODs. 10 min, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year is 41 2/3 hours--which is half of the required number of language training hours required by big Army.
I honestly thought we were going to change the way DOD did language training--I was essentially running a tech start up out of our Armory (probably should have gone to jail...). It was one of the most delightful periods of my professional life.
Of course we did not change the way the DOD did training, and I eventually did not get the amount of funding needed to continue--but it was a fun three year run.
bsn
Sounds a lot like an exercise my dad participated in a couple of times. European militaries often train together, but not everyone speak english well enough or at all to use it as a "lingua bella" - the exercise bans english and the team (8-12, everything from baseline infantry soldiers to colonels, all branches mixed together) has to solve real problems using the tools and materials at hand, without a common language.
Making a bridge fit for small trucks f.e. using only hand tools and ropes (dad's a careerist in our combat engineering corps, semi-retired nowadays), or doing maintenance on a vehicle without a manual and so on.
I've used a lot of his manuals on educating/training conscripts; not the military stuff per se but the methodological and pedagogical bits - education is education. I like them a lot better than the ones written for teachers - making a bridge is pass/fail, you can't make a 75% bridge.
We have something similar in the US Army. Leadership Reaction Courses--but not as hard as building a bridge. Small unit problem solving, but with some twist. Usually a water obstacle with a task to which the available tools/supplies do not fit solution.
For example, a pool with 3-5 logs spaced unevenly apart vertically-so they could be used as steps or more likely bases on which to place a board.
Then you have 2-3 boards that do not reach any of the logs, and supplies--bulky stuff like 55 gallon drums, litters with dummies, ammo boxes--and you have 20 minutes to get you, your team, and the equipment across.
Leadership rotates at each obstacle. Short time suspense increases the stress. Great fun, great leadership training (include everyone, most of the good ideas come from the Soldiers--not the leader, enable over demand...) and an even better stress/decision making exercise.
I've always thought if I had a reason to need to hire numerous people at one time, my interview process would be 'collective suffering--something very hard physically', team sports, and an LRC. You learn all you need to know--and people actually develop during the process.
bsn
“Without boundaries surrounding leisure and comfort, I can go off the reservation.“
Also guilty…
When I was a kid, most of the middle class (and they were not upper middle class) retired people I knew had RVs or trailers, travelled and camped a lot domestically, had hobbies like rock collection plus cutting and polishing them, ham radio, wood shops with a good selection of power tools, restoring classic cars and so on. I can’t think of anyone retired I personally know now that does any of these things. They are on a treadmill trying to keep up with inflation and the devaluation of currency, and even if they have homes that are nominally valuable, they don’t have access to that equity. There are so many anomalies and mysteries with our social and economic environment, and it’s hard to wrap my head around all this stuff.
3 basic things happened:
1) Women went to work outside the home, and the added national income bid up the prices of most things middle class people buy. Food was generally not as badly inflated because of enormous productivity gains in agriculture over the last 50 yrs.
2) America makes FAR less than it consumes. This started most visibly with the steel industry but has spread into almost every industry: e.g., consumer electronics – 100% Asia.
Automotive tells a terrible story: 2023 Exports: $179 billion; 2023 Imports: $458 billion; Feb 2024 those figures are $14B and $38B respectively.
3) Manufacturing plants have automated wherever possible.
The American worker has bid his wages up so high and transportation costs have declined so much that there is a fraction of the demand for our labor as there was post-WWII. This translates into far less consumption than we witnessed in our childhood.
These are the tectonic forces at work. There are smaller ones, like the banks still charging 20-30% interest rates on credit cards when their cost of funds is 0-5% (and price-fixing to preclude competition), but that’s small compared to the national loss of manufacturing jobs.
Sorry Brian, but when the drill sergeant rousted me out of my bunk to make 0530 formation, I wasn’t thinking about his needs. 🤣
AGREED! …but I would argue that maybe your needs—training you to keep you alive—is what motivated your drill sergeant. Agape. Love is rarely chocolates and champagne.
bsn
Of his motivation, I have ZERO doubt. I remember both my DS’s with fondness because they were such strong, positive role models.
Can anyone name a species that stays alive by not working?
Lately Im stuck on the internal fight, the knife fight within ourselves.
I agree with you 100% that work is critical for survival.
I’m also convinced that we’ve hollowed out the meaning of difficulty, struggle, suffering.
I was “fortunate” enough to be in the gifted programs from first grade onward. Sadly, the implicit, and often explicit messaging. I received my entire life, “physical labor is for the dummies. The only work that is worthwhile requires a college education, work with your mind.”
This, too, goes against human nature. There is little intrinsic meaning in completing a PowerPoint presentation or a spreadsheet for the managerial class.
I find much more reward weed in my garden or mowing the lawn then I ever did writing a valuations in the corporate world for the poultry 2.5% raise our company allowed.
Sadly, another consequence of this thinking/indoctrination, was for me to look down on those who do the medial work. This remains a deep source of shame for me.
bsn
I too was in advanced classes (ours didn't start until 4th grade), but as a blue-collar kid surrounded by the children of doctors, judges, and businessmen, I never bought the class split. My father, who went into WWII without finishing high school, then worked as a route delivery driver, never had good grammar, but could do most anything (as was more typical of past generations), even help me decipher the crazy "new math"of the time.
I love it. Had a different experience, but yours strikes me as almost ideal. Grounded in reality--the life of creating/fixing/maintaining stuff--or as Chris wrote last week 'put the wet stuff on the hot stuff'--while also learning the value of cognitive effort. Good for you.
That class stuff is toxic for sure.
bsn
3rd & 4th generations of 18th century robber barons. All they lack are some sort of metaphysical placenta to leech off of society.
Good point.
bsn
Fungi?
I know what a woman is, but I'm not a biologist. Still, according to Wikipedia (no good on health or politics, but maybe OK on this, "Fungi, like animals, are heterotrophs; they acquire their food by absorbing dissolved molecules, typically by secreting digestive enzymes into their environment." So the work may be biochemical and unseen, but I'd argue there's work going on. Even being a parasite takes effort, I think, but for humans, and maybe other species too, there's always the risk that the host will cut you off or die.
I was thinking about the role of fungi in the life-cycle of forests, breaking down dead or dying stuff and helping release nutrients back into the biotope.
Commies do have the breaking down-part down pat, and just as with many types of fungi, they can only attack dead or dying societies.
But biologically speaking, you're correct - some kind of work is happening.
Maybe the male anglerfish is a better example? Imregnates the female, then lets himself be absorbed by her, becoming in effect a sperm-producing attachment feeding off her body.
Or perhaps "male" feminists have claimed that as their spirit animal.
Somewhere I heard of a study that said that the happiest people/communities are those that are continually beset with events or situations that threaten their existence. I have called it the “Little House on the Prairie” effect, because almost every episode of the TV series involved some disaster and how the people dealt with it. They got through them with courage, hard work, and coming together to help one another.
God wired us to be that way. ”The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.“ God renamed Jacob Israel, meaning “struggle with God.” We are meant to work and overcome obstacles. Our modern attempts to eliminate risk and pain are ultimately doomed to failure and in fact only make us more miserable. Someone once said that the only pain that’s avoidable is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
I love it Cactus. We are beasts of burden, happiest under load. Mr Geis made a good point that comfort and leisure are not necessarily toxic, but rewards for effort.
The best times in my life have been post-suffering, post-scary, post-hard--the rucksack flop after the dismounted land nav, 12 mile ruck, or similar exertion when you're with your guys, eating MREs--busting each others' chops (XY love language), and laughing at yourself and others. The only way to feel that is to have done the very challenging work preceding the flop.
Struggles with God is something one can think about for 20 years trying to unpack and continually find more there. One layer I get is that God frowns on passivity, lack of agency, diminished sovereignty. He made us to create, explore, and push back against the world and Him. He wants us to earn it...because he knows we are better for it.
bsn
"There is no happiness in comfort. Happiness comes from suffering."
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dancing With String is just beyond parody. Even if I passionately believed in their cause - regardless of how poorly they themselves understand it - I would still think the string thing was pointless.
Has anyone asked them what, exactly, they think that will achieve?
Oh, and Hamas is probably laughing their collective asses off.
My first thought seeing that was "Python-esque".
Indeed. The Pythons were visionaries in so many ways.
https://youtu.be/vZ9myHhpS9s?si=_2x6b3YGvNm-9HGN
👍 Analogously, I can only imagine what Marty Feldman could do with the subject (in my minds eye, I see “Igor” circling around one of the dancers). 🤣
>>>> where all essential wants as well as creative desires are satisfied.
Who says that communists/socialists are unrealistic dreamers?
Oh, and total coincidence, I just started reading a biography of Shakespeare. I'll
report back on all of his government funding!
I thought it was rich patrons, including those not in government, who supported the great Renaissance artists.
They were oppressors, so have been deleted from history.
They were. Shakespeare’s patrons were aristocrats, but their power was much less important to Shakespeare’s success than their money was.
And plays were political tools even then, as Shakespeare and Marlowe well knew; a lot of characters and events in the plays would have been obvious political allusions to the contemporary audience - nowadays, you'd need to do a deep dive into the politics at the time to "get it".
I mention this since getting the queen's approval (or later, the king's) could make or break your career (and you). Wasn't any "free speech" or "free expression" provisions back then, so catering to the rich and powerful was just sound marketing and staying alive-policy.
Excellent point. Richard III is such an over-the-top villain in part because the guy who defeats him just so happened to have been Elizabeth I's grandfather.
They have no idea they’ll be ground up in the machine like everyone else, with the exception of the apex predators leading this movement. Did I mention I saw Bernie Sanders flying first class out of Burlington?
He needs to be closer to the plutocrats so he can give 'em hell, see.
Ah, yes. How did I not see this.
It's not communism what is coming but corporatism. Jeffrey Tucker described it well here: https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-american-capitalism-mutate-into-american-corporatism/
I wish we would be progressing to the idea described above but it's opposite, workers will be slaves in this new system.
I keep hearing this line of thinking concerning AI. that advancing automation and artificial intelligence will create a society free from drudgery where everyone can stay home and make arts and crafts (this is an actual quote from a woman I know who makes six figures at an ad agency).
perhaps this is just cope considering that AI will probably destroy most ad agency work.
does anyone remember, at the onset of Lockdowns, how many Covid albums there would be? the dawning of a new creative renaissance? I do…and the exact opposite happened. it turns out that all art and commerce exist in a feedback loop and once you stop the loop, the well dries up pretty quick.
They said the same thing ("they" being the people with access enough to the media to be heard by all and sundry) in the closing years of the 19th century: in the future, food would be pills made in factories using science so no need for the backbreaking farmwork, and robots would do most other stuff.
That is still the "dream" the present-day "they" strive for.
In my perfect version of their story it ends like this…..the parents who have paid for their self indulgent lifestyle finally die. They inherit money , which they burn thru quickly because they have the brain capacity and with ethic of a sausage and then …. Well the ending sucks too because then we will have to support them. Or maybe they can work at Starbucks ?
Or maybe they're murdered by a foreign criminal Biden and his globalist puppeteers brought in to destroy us? Or just die from a mandatory toxic injection? Or starve to death when the debt economy and food production collapse? Because Marxism/socialism is just a weapon wielded by billionaires to destroy the lower and middle classes and get us to their Garden of Eden with a world population limited for eternity to 500 million.
Lmao. Or that !!!!
“…liberating their minds entirely.”
A small correction:
“…liberating [them from] their minds entirely.”
problem with marx (ok there's a lot of problems with marx) is that he sees leisure as one size fits all.
for some people gardening is leisure. i suspect a farm worker might think otherwise,
i get the sense that from marx's perspective, all work is onerous. maybe that's how you see the world if all you do is write communist manifestos
As you know, intellectual creativity requires effort. It is work. However, labor often requires creativity and ingenuity. If only video games had existed when Marx was alive. Maybe we would have been spared from the torment he has wrought.
There has always been envy & theft. Marx merely institutionalized it.
And codified it.