Class-warfare on the bourgeois (read, Judeo-Christian) virtues by Yale professors:

“As we all know from the great Marx-Bakunin controversy, it was the anarchist constituencies that actually rose up: whether in Spain, Russia, China, Nicaragua, or Mozambique. Yet every time they did so, they ended up under the administration of socialist bureaucrats who embraced that ethos of productivism, that utopia of over-burdened shelves

(Lila: evidently Graeber has never lived in a socialist country and longed for over-burdened shelves, like many hard working Asian bourgeois women, whose lives were immeasurably improved by them)

and consumer plenty, even though this was the last thing they would ever have been able to provide.

The irony became that the social benefits the Soviet Union and similar regimes actually were able to provide—more time, since work discipline becomes a completely different thing when one effectively cannot be fired from one’s job—were precisely the ones they couldn’t acknowledge; it has to be referred to as “the problem of absenteeism”, standing in the way of an impossible future full of shoes and consumer electronics. But if you think about it, even here, it’s not entirely different. Trade unionists feel obliged to adopt bourgeois terms—in which productivity and labor discipline are absolute values—and act as if the freedom to lounge about on a construction sites is not a hard-won right but actually a problem. Granted, it would be much better to simply work four hours a day than do four hours worth of work in eight (and better still to strive to dissolve the distinction between work and play entirely), but surely this is better than nothing. The world needs less work.

All this is not to say that there are not plenty of working class people who are justly proud of what they make and do, just that it is the perversity of capitalism (state capitalism included) that this very desire is used against us, and we know it. As a result, the great paradox of working class life is that while working class people and working class sensibilities are responsible for almost everything of redeeming value in modern life—from shish kebab to rock’n’roll to public libraries (and honestly, do the administrative, “middle” classes ever really create anything?) they are creative precisely when they are not working—that is, in that domain of which cultural theorists so obnoxiously refer to as “consumption.” Which of course makes it possible for the administrative classes (amongst whom I count capitalists) to simultaneously dismiss their creativity, steal it, and sell it back to them.

The question is how to break the assumption that engaging in hard work—and by extension, dutifully obeying orders—is somehow an intrinsically moral enterprise. This is an idea that, admittedly, has even affected large sections of the working class. For anyone truly interested in human liberation, this is the most pernicious question. In public debate, one of the few things everyone seems to have to agree with is that only those willing to work—or even more, only those willing to submit themselves to well-nigh insane degrees of labor discipline—could possibly be morally deserving of anything—that not just work, work of the sort considered valuable by financial markets—is the only legitimate moral justification for rewards of any sort. This is not an economic argument. It’s a moral one. It’s pretty obvious that there are many circumstances where, even from the economists’ perspective, too much work and too much labor discipline is entirely counterproductive. Yet every time there is a crisis, the answer on all sides is always the same: people need to work more! There’s someone out there working less than they could be—handicapped people who are not quite as handicapped as they’re making themselves out to be, French oil workers who get to retire before their souls and bodies are entirely destroyed, art students, lazy porters, benefit cheats—and somehow, this must be what’s ruining things for everyone.”

Comment:

According to Comrade Graeber:

1. Work is unnecessary, because we don’t need to produce anything (er, that’s a PhD in anthropology for you, a mark of complete insanity)

2. There is too much consumption anyway (maybe, but let each man decide for himself)

3. The “working” class (i.e.  manual labor) built everything of value (nice try at buttering up your constituency, but likely when the heads start rolling, you won’t be counted among the brawny and fit-to-live)

There’s much more, but a nauseated stomach makes it impossible for me to read.  Pol Pot would be proud. Next, the Occupiers will be taking out people who wear glasses or own a vegetable plot. Round up the kulaks! The commissars have come.

What a lot of twaddle. No one is claiming that handicapped people are living off productive folk. Unless you’re talking about the morally handicapped financial elites or the morally blind academics (like this one), or the morally vicious (like the media).

I contrast this with the real working man’s credo that such sophisticates dismiss as simple-minded and sentimental:

“Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, Onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, Each evening sees it close;Something attempted, something done, Has earned a night’s repose. Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, For the lesson thou hast taught! Thus at the flaming forge of life. Our fortunes must be wrought;Thus on its sounding anvil shaped Each burning deed and thought!”

More sense in this doggerel by Longfellow, apparently, than a PhD from London.

Notice that, like financiers who support them (Soros), the great enemy of this fellow is not the rich. It’s the middle-class and its religious values.

Thus comes the capitalist-communist convergence,  with its collective boot on the neck of the American kulak.