Test

The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane. We need to stop confusing politics with theology. The pre-dominant contemporary form of sovereignty—if we still want to call it that—is completely embedded within and supported by legal systems and institutions of governance, a republican form characterized not only by the rule of law but also equally by the rule of property. Said differently, the political is not an autonomous domain but one completely immersed in economic and legal structures. There is nothing extraordinary or exceptional about this form of power. Its claim to naturalness, in fact its silent and invisible daily functioning, makes it extremely difficult to recognize, analyze, and challenge. Our first task, then, will be to bring to light the intimate relations between sovereignty, law, and capital.

We need for contemporary political thought an operation something like the one Euhemerus conducted for ancient Greek mythology in the fourth century BC. Euhemerus explained that all of the myths of gods are really just stories of historical human actions that through retelling have been expanded, embellished, and cast up to the heavens. Similarly today the believers imagine a sovereign power that stands above us on the mountaintops, when in fact the dominant forms of power are entirely this-worldly. A new political Euhemerism might help people stop looking for sovereignty in the heavens and recognize the structures of power on earth.

Once we strip away the theological pretenses and apocalyptic visions of contemporary theories of sovereignty, once we bring them down to the social terrain, we need to look more closely at how power functions in society today. In philosophical terms we can think of this shift in perspective as a move from transcendent analysis to transcendental critique. Immanuel Kant's 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy puts an end to all the medieval attempts to anchor reason and understanding in transcendent essences and things in themselves. Philosophy must strive instead to reveal the transcendental structures immanent to thought and experience. 'I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori.' Kant’s transcendental plane thus occupies a position not wholly in the immediate, immanent facts of experience but not wholly outside them either. This transcendental realm, he explains, is where the conditions of possibility of knowledge and experience reside.

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth.

The concern working people of all countries show for the question of full-employment is understandable ... but spineless! Yes, spineless, because in the industrialised countries of Europe and America industry has reached a stage in its development where we should no longer be struggling to establish our right to a job but demanding access to the necessities of life as of a right: not the pittance of unemployment benefit or soup kitchens and relief when we are out of a job.

The idea that 'he who does not work neither shall he eat' was an approach to life the rough justice of which could be understood at a time in Man's history when mere survival depended on every member of the community doing his share of work. Life was the struggle for physical survival; work the symbol of life. Such is still the situation in great, and densely populated areas of the world, but not in the established industrial nations. Yet with modifications, emulating Orwellian cynicism, the concept that only those who work are entitled to eat has been carried into present society. Production has become an end in itself, unrelated to needs. Workers operate machines which produce goods simply to keep men in employment and the machines turning. Man's ingenuity is taxed to find new uses to which the machines can be put irrespective of whether what they produce is useful, harmful or useless. There are workers who spend a lifetime in the armaments industry producing weapons for their own destruction or which by the time they come off the production line are obsolete and automatically transferred to the scrap heap.

The workers themselves are the last to question the social value of their work. What counts for them is that they have a job which provides them with the money to buy food, shelter and a few frills to hide the emptiness of their lives. Coal miners in this country and Europe are risking their lives digging coal knowing that a part of it is then dumped in quarries because there is no outlet for it. But what does it matter to them so long as they keep their jobs. 20,000 London dockers for whom there is no work nevertheless continue to report twice a day at the docks because by doing so they are entitled to attendance pay. Even that is a job. Millions of people are engaged in work which they despise because they are servile jobs, useless, time-wasting and from which each evening they flee at the double the moment the bell rings, but which, nevertheless, they would shudder at the thought of losing. After all everyone must have a job just as everyone must have had a mother!

Surely the time has come for a new approach to work. We are still thinking in terms of living to work when science and technology have made it more than possible to think in terms of working to live, not only for those of us in the industrialised half of the globe but for the thousand million human beings in the rest of the world crushed and humiliated by appalling man-maintained poverty.

'Full-employment' is the slogan of wage-slaves in an unfree society. It is an insane society which is embarrassed by too many willing and skilled hands, and food and industrial surpluses. In a free society there can be no unwanted surpluses because production will be geared to needs; no unemployed because the more of us there are in the world the lighter will be our task of providing for the needs of everybody.

But one cannot legislate for the free society. It can only be born by the actions of men and women who have understood what freedom is all about and desire it more than anything else that present society and the political wordspinners have to offer by way of consolation prizes in its stead.

Unsigned, 1958.The concern working people of all countries show for the question of full-employment is understandable ... but spineless! Yes, spineless, because in the industrialised countries of Europe and America industry has reached a stage in its development where we should no longer be struggling to establish our right to a job but demanding access to the necessities of life as of a right: not the pittance of unemployment benefit or soup kitchens and relief when we are out of a job.

The idea that 'he who does not work neither shall he eat' was an approach to life the rough justice of which could be understood at a time in Man's history when mere survival depended on every member of the community doing his share of work. Life was the struggle for physical survival; work the symbol of life. Such is still the situation in great, and densely populated areas of the world, but not in the established industrial nations. Yet with modifications, emulating Orwellian cynicism, the concept that only those who work are entitled to eat has been carried into present society. Production has become an end in itself, unrelated to needs. Workers operate machines which produce goods simply to keep men in employment and the machines turning. Man's ingenuity is taxed to find new uses to which the machines can be put irrespective of whether what they produce is useful, harmful or useless. There are workers who spend a lifetime in the armaments industry producing weapons for their own destruction or which by the time they come off the production line are obsolete and automatically transferred to the scrap heap.

The workers themselves are the last to question the social value of their work. What counts for them is that they have a job which provides them with the money to buy food, shelter and a few frills to hide the emptiness of their lives. Coal miners in this country and Europe are risking their lives digging coal knowing that a part of it is then dumped in quarries because there is no outlet for it. But what does it matter to them so long as they keep their jobs. 20,000 London dockers for whom there is no work nevertheless continue to report twice a day at the docks because by doing so they are entitled to attendance pay. Even that is a job. Millions of people are engaged in work which they despise because they are servile jobs, useless, time-wasting and from which each evening they flee at the double the moment the bell rings, but which, nevertheless, they would shudder at the thought of losing. After all everyone must have a job just as everyone must have had a mother!

Surely the time has come for a new approach to work. We are still thinking in terms of living to work when science and technology have made it more than possible to think in terms of working to live, not only for those of us in the industrialised half of the globe but for the thousand million human beings in the rest of the world crushed and humiliated by appalling man-maintained poverty.

'Full-employment' is the slogan of wage-slaves in an unfree society. It is an insane society which is embarrassed by too many willing and skilled hands, and food and industrial surpluses. In a free society there can be no unwanted surpluses because production will be geared to needs; no unemployed because the more of us there are in the world the lighter will be our task of providing for the needs of everybody.

But one cannot legislate for the free society. It can only be born by the actions of men and women who have understood what freedom is all about and desire it more than anything else that present society and the political wordspinners have to offer by way of consolation prizes in its stead.

Unsigned, 1958.