Harry responded to my comments about the capitalistic context causing individuals to be treated as commodities. This seems an appropriate place to try to describe some of the ideas discussed by Dorothy Lee in the little book I keep referring to *Freedom and Culture*
You will see that this discussion is very closely related to a post I sent yesterday with a quote from David Bohm's *Wholeness and the Implicate Order* and you will also see that it is directly related to the recent discussion on this list of who should clean the toilets. Lee has a chapter entitled 'The Joy of Work as Participation'. She writes of having made a discovery while she was working on a Christmas present for one of her children on Christmas Eve when it was very late, she was exhausted and "I was working against time, wishing I were in bed." She also speaks of the conflicts she was experiencing at this time, trying to balance her work as an anthropologist with her responsibilities to her two children, her husband and her home. She felt guilty about neglecting her professional work and needed to justify whatever she did for the family; making a blanket for the doll crib of her 3-year-old daughter seemed justifiable because she couldn't afford to buy it. "As I sewed this Christmas Eve, I was suddenly astonished to discover that I had started to add an entirely unpremeditated and unnecessary edging of embroidery, and, simultaneously, I was aware of a deep enjoyment in what I was doing. It was a feeling that had nothing to do with the pleasure the work would give to my daughter on the morrow; it had nothing to do with a sense of achievement, or of virtue in duty accomplished. And I knew that I had never liked to embroider. There was no justification for my work; yet it was the source of such a deep satisfaction, that the late hour and my fatigue had ceased to exist for me. At this moment of discovery, I knew that I was experiencing what it meant to be a social being, not merely Dorothy Lee, an individual; I knew that I had truly become a mother, a wife, a neighbor, a teacher. I realized that some boundary had disappeared, so that I was working in a social medium; that I was not working for the future pleasure of a distant daughter, but rather within a relationship unaffected by temporality or physical absence. What gave meaning to my work was the medium in which I was working-the medium of love, in a broad sense. So far, my rationalization and justification of my work had obscured this meaning, had cut me off from my own social context. It suddently became clear to me that it did not matter whether I was scrubbing the kitchen floor or darning stockings or zipping up snowsuits; these all had meaning, not in themselves, but in terms of the situation of which they were a part. They contained social value because they implemented the value of the social situation. This was a tremendous discovery for me, illuminating in a flash my experience and my thinking. My mind went immediately to the Tikopia, about whom I had been reading, and I said to myself, 'This is the way the Tikopia work.' I had been puzzled about the motivating forces in the life of the Tikopia. These were people who were without organized leadership in work, yet who carried out large undertakings. And without any authority to impose legislation and mete out punishment, the business of the village was carried out and law and order were maintained. Raymond Firth, the ethnographer, answering the unspoken quesitons of western readers, spoke of obligations, duty, fear of adverse opinion, as motivations. I did not like his choice of words, because he spoke of the obligation to perform unpleasant tasks, for example, and yet the situations he described brimmed with joy. Now I saw that the Tikopia did not need external incentives. This was all very well, but when I came to examine my discovery, I could not explain it in any rational or acceptable way. My society did not structure working situations as occasions which contained their own satisfaction; and it assumed the existence of aggregates or collections of indiividuals, not of a social continuum. I had learned to believe in the existence of a distinct self, relating itself externally to work as a means to an end, with external incentives and external rewards. yet it was obvious that if I got satsisfaction from participating in a situation, there must be some medium, some continuum, within which this participation can take place, If my family and I were aspects of one whole; there must be some positive apprehension of a continuity which made me an aspect of my family, not a separate member; it was not enough to say that my physical being and my sensory experience did not in themselves prescribe the limits of the self." She goes on to explore the meaning of self among the Tikopia; I'll leave that for another time. I would just ask the members of this list if they have ever experienced anything similar to what Lee describes as she was working on that blanket. I know I have and I have felt it as a gift of enormous proportions; mostly, in our society, it occurs in spite of the social and economic environment, not because of it. But I strongly believe that it is possible to stucture a society and to develop cultural values that make this kind of experience possible and common for everyone. > Selma, > > Harry: When was the labor of individuals not bought and sold. > > It seems to me this was always the case in Europe. So to blame capitalism > merely shifts focus from the real problem. It wasn't true when there was > plenty of free land available in North America. But that didn't last long > and soon there was no alternative but to work for what one could get - > which as Ricardo shrewdly noted moved downward toward subsistence. > > This is the case now. It is hidden now by all kinds of welfare > distributions. The social and political sciences spend their energies on > how much welfare will not be too much, but no-one seems to be investigating > why welfare is necessary. > > But, it's not capitalism that is the issue. This is just the latest > manifestation of the same old problem that has kept the peoples of all > countries in penury for centuries. > > Harry > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > Selma wrote: > > >Ray, > > > >I have been convinced, for many decades now, that Marx and some that > >followed him were correct when they argued that, in a capitalistic system, > >where the labor of individuals is bought and sold, those individuals thereby > >become commodities that are bought and sold. In such a society the general > >consciousness becomes one of people being commodities and therefore, the > >kind of connection you are talking about and the spirituality I have been > >talking about are not possible. > > > >I am thinking, in particular, of Erich Fromm's arguments in *To Have or To > >Be*. > > > >Selma > > > ****************************** > Harry Pollard > Henry George School of LA > Box 655 > Tujunga CA 91042 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Tel: (818) 352-4141 > Fax: (818) 353-2242 > ******************************* > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- > > --- > Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. > Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). > Version: 6.0.449 / Virus Database: 251 - Release Date: 1/27/2003 > _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
