Tuesday, May 31, 2005

All Your Mean of Production Are Belong to Us

Imagine you own a pizza place. For the sake of simplicity, we'll have you be the only person working at this pizza place; it doesn't employ anyone else. The place makes enough money to break even and to provide you with what you need materially, but not much more.
One day, some representative of the government -- doesn't matter which branch, or who it is -- comes to you and says that it is going to shut down your pizza place, your only source of income. "Why?" you ask, naturally quite taken aback.
"Oh, it seems your pizza shop has not generated a lot of revenue," the government person replies.
"Yeah, not a whole lot," you say. "Enough for me, though. So what?"
"You see, without a lot of access revenue, your business has not been paying much in taxes," the gov rep says.
"Well, I pay the percentage of my income -- both business tax and personal income tax -- and it's considerable for me, but yeah, I guess you could say it's not a lot by an absolute measure," you answer, not sure what this person is getting at.
"Exactly," your new buddy says. "And because your shop isn't generating a lot of tax revenue for the government, the government has decided -- measuring the income versus what the government has put into founding this shop -- that the shop is unprofitable and must be shut down."
"What?" you cry. "Where do you folks get off doing that?"
"Simple," s/he says. "We own your shop, of course. Like i said, we've put a lot into this shop, and we expect a bigger return if we want to stay competitive with the other world goverments."
"What do you mean, you own my shop? No, you don't," you insist. "I do. I do all the work here, i put up the money to buy the building and the property and the overhead ..."
"Ah, but what about all the things the government did to found this shop and keep it going?"
"Like what?"
"For example, you have police that keep the shop safe from robbers, you have garbage collectors, et cetera, et cetera," s/he says.
"Well, what about the money?" you ask.
"If you recall, the government did a lot from a financial or monetary standpoint to start the shop," the rep says. "You got loans from the government to buy the building and overhead, the other money you used was insured by the full faith and credit of the government in the bank so you had guaranteed access to it, oh, not to mention, you happened to attend public schools that helped your business skills --"
"I had no college," you protest (let's just say).
"But you went to public elementary and high schools that taught you math and what-have-you." (let's just say)
"But what if I'd gone to private schools? And what if I hadn't borrowed government money?"
"The point still stands. The property belongs to the government, as you know."
"No one told me!"
"Ah, yes. The land happened to have been sold to the government by the native tribes long ago." the rep says. (i won't get into the mess with that for now).

--And so you and the gov rep keep arguing. Now, you could make a bunch of arguments that the property belongs to you, but chances are the gov drone rebuts with some arguments to government ownership that -- although they don't totally seem to make sense -- you somehowcannot seem to poke through entirely. In the end, you can come up with one primary argument as to your claim -- you have done the work at that pizza place.
What i'm doing here is NOT defending government ownership of your pizza place or anything else. We'll assume that the government drone here is an asshole and that the pizza place is rightfully yours. What i'd like you to do, though, is imagine that, instead of a pizza place where you're self-employed as the only worker, you work at a larger company (let's say, not so randomly, a Hoover plant in North Canton, Ohio); and that instead of a government wienie, you have some wienie from higher up in the corporate organization coming to tell you and your coworkers that your plant is going to be shut down because it's just not making a profit for the company. You didn't know it wasn't making a profit; your wages had kep up with inflation 9let's say) and you'd been doing as well as you always had, although not making a lot. They explain to you that when they say profit, they mean a bigger chunk of the overall money generated from selling Hoover products or other widgets or services or whatever that goes not to you, but to the higher ups in the company. You protest that they don't make the products, and the rep replies that they do a bunch of things that are necessary for the running of the company, like, for example, putting up the money for the buidling of the factory and the purchasing of the original overhead. The rep might even say that it puts up the money to buy materials and pay your wages, although of course you know that money comes from the stuff you make.
I could go on, but you might start getting the idea. Remember, the idea of property rights we protect here in the U.S. -- which i won't critique here, for this post's purposes -- comes from philosophical ideas holding that the right to a piece of property comes when one has taken something from God's natural world and mixed it with one's labor to produce something else of value. Think about that, and think about how much the CEO or the stockholder would be seen to have the right to own a company under this idea -- relative to the worker, who does the labor.

See also this comic I found, which makes basically the same argument:

http://www.apolitical.info/images/carefuldollar.jpg

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Don't be a player-hater to the unions

The following is from State of the Union: A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein.

p. 142 - "individual trade unions were now internal oligarchies, administratively top-heavy with technicians and officials, and increasingly prochial in their bargaining strategy and political outlook. This was a product of much history and politics: the birth of the new unions under and New Deal wing, the forced-draft quest for production and social peace during World War II, and the anti-Communist purge that chilled the union movement's more adventuresome spirits.
"But even more important, the stolid quality of postwar U.S. unionism reflected the institutional constraints and legal structures under which the unions were forced to function. Ironically, it was the very decentralization and fragmentation of the poswar bargaining system, the hostility of management, and the relative weakness and vulnerability of the labor movement that generated a huge stratum of full-time officials, put a premium on authoritarian leadership, devalued independent politics, and opened the door to a whole set of corruptions that became an integral part of the postwar union mythos."

--
As my boy Nelson (I'll call him "Nelly") Lichtenstein explains here, all that bad stuff you heard about unions is actually the fault of the hostile environment in which American unions were forced to develop. I try to never believe anything I read right off the bat, but there is a part of me that wants to say, "So there! Hah!" to all the union-haters out there. The moral is, don't hate the union players, hate the postwar industrial bargaining game.

Wednesday, May 04, 2005

i am in control of my fucking anger, you shithead part I: Going to Dagobah to seek the wisdom of KP

Note: after looking over my past posts (pthew), i saw that i had three in a row dealing with anger management. Therefore, i decided to give these three posts a title and divide them into three parts. The title is a joke and is not meant in any way to imply that either my friend KP Hong or my favorite buddhist author Brad Warner are shitheads or have heads composed of any other excretory substance (i talked to both KP and Warner through email in this "series").

Three posts in a row dealing with anger management may lead one to believe i have some anger issues. Well ... not that i am a man particularly prone to unprovoked acts of lethal violence, but on occasion i am known to lose my cool in embarrassing ways.

The following e-mail exchange took place in October 2004, between me and KP Hong, a campus minister at my college (now alma mater) who had been leading meditation sessions i'd been going to. And now, without further ado:

////////////////////////////////////////

>> Justin Hart 10/28/04 08:11PM >>>
First, I won't be able to be at Sitting on Fridays tomorrow because I'm going to have a take-home test for Monday.

Second, please read the essay at this link this whenever you get the chance:

http://www.dharmalife.com/issue22/killrage.html

What do you think of it? Does it mean all emotions are bad? I can get maybe never expressing our anger, but not expressing any emotions? What does he mean? More importantly, is he right?

I'm afraid if I say he's wrong I'll just be retreating into the "alcoholic" justification tactics in defense of my selfishness, like he talks about. But I don't want to be a robot with no emotions.

I don't think I can be a Buddhist. I don't think it's possible or even necessarily always desirable to totally get rid of our root anger (I don't think it's possible to get rid of greed or ignorance either, but getting rid of those would probably be more desirelable). But I'm afraid that if I'm not a Buddhist, I'll fall deeper into my sensuality (I won't get into details, but suffice to say my life revolves around sensual indulgence and anger at nobody in particular)

I don't want to feel like I'm doing something wrong every time I'm in a bad mood. I don't want to be a robot and I don't want to live in an environment where everybody's all calm and serene all the time. -- Justin Hart

//////////////////////////// Now here's KP's response:

Hey Justin:

Glad to respond. I've read the article and it generally speaks correctly to the Buddhist teachings... but the Buddhist teachings themselves are not so easy to understand. It takes some time and study. So let me see if I can explain and put a twist on what the article was trying to express.

Contrary to what many believe, the enlightened Buddhists are EXTREMELY humorous, FULL of emotions, and nothing at all like a robot. How is this so when Buddhism seems to advocate for "repressing" emotions?

Repression in the Western psychoanalytic sense is not what Buddhism espouses, for that does nothing to the reality of an emotion; it simply turns a blind-eye to it and Buddhist meditation is about seeing everything. In meditation, as we've been practicing on Fridays, we observe anger (or any other emotion), identify what it is (for anger usually contains many more emotions and thoughts), notice its intensity, and observe its duration. When Buddhists do this, they come to realize that emotions are integrally connected with our thoughts and our expectations for what should be versus the terrible wrong that is. And that is perfectly fine.

What is NOT fine is when we distort-exaggerate-intensify-lessen-manipulate that natural emotion into something that it is not. How do we do this? A whole list of things can distort that original, essential emotion into something monstrous:
--our ego ("How dare they. Don't they know who I am! How can this be happening to me! Etc.)
--our memories that connect this pain to past pains
--our attachment to some future ideal and the consequent gap we experience with present reality
--our fears that exaggerate this injustice to something huge

And when we express this anger, we can end up doing several things: harm others, pass along anger to others, create a vicious cycle of anger-violence-revenge, and more. Even if we express this anger to psychologically "vent", the Buddhist tradition would state that this really does not get at the truth of anger but simply deals with symptoms and may even further fuel the original anger.

So what are we to do? We are to neither repress it (in the sense of denial) nor to impulsively act on it... but to bring mindfulness to it. When we do, we come to SEE the root emotion for what it truly is, prior to any distortion we may bring to it:
--we may SEE that our anger is rooted in an overblown ego, and we may ask, "What is the self? Does it exist? What if the self and other are one and the same? Then why the anger?"
--we may SEE that our anger is rooted in some faulty thought, an illusion.
--we may SEE that our anger is rooted in some future anticipation, some ideal, and discover that it's a mental construct perhaps built to reinforce our ego or support our desire to continue into the future. Or we may discover that it's truly an admirable goal that deserves our commitment, not our intense attachment (which disguises the presence of our ego rearing its ugly head again).

And when we truly SEE, we know that no emotion will destroy us, for all emotions flow naturally from WHAT IS. It's the distortions that create further death and suffering. When there is no attachment to anything -- which is not detachment but a non-attachment-- then paradoxically, one truly begins to respond to all things for what they are and not for what I want them to be or need them to be for me.

So the "Buddhist monk" is the one who can truly feel, truly experience emotions at their fullest, for the monk truly SEES without distortion. And its the truly awakened one who then responds and acts with coherence and integrity to the emotions experienced: action and emotion in total congruity with one another. Truth in action. The awakened one can express either kindness or anger without any desire to harm others or protect the self or any other illusion. When there is nothing to protect and nothing to identify one's Self with, the only thing that remains is the larger Truth to feel, to know, to express, and to live in.

Does that help? As always, my doors open to further conversation. Thanks!

K.P. Hong
Associate Campus Minister
Office of Interfaith Campus Ministries
College of Wooster