finally the short holidays are over, back to the students and the seminars, the really exciting side of teaching … so no waiting anymore, not even for Godot
Vien dietro a me, e lascia dir le genti:sta come torre ferma, che non crolla
già mai la cima per soffiar di venti …
Well, it is of course not so, but reading The Capital again, I got stuck when I came to the footnote 2 on page 605:[1]
Bentham is a purely English phenomenon. Not even excepting our philosopher, Christian Wolff, in no time and in no country has the most homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a way. The principle of utility was no discovery of Bentham. He simply reproduced in his dull way what Helvétius and other Frenchmen had said with esprit in the 18th century. To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog-nature. This nature itself is not to be deduced from the principle of utility. Applying this to man, he that would criticise all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch. Bentham makes short work of it. With the driest naïveté he takes the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shop- keeper, as the normal man. Whatever is useful to this queer normal man, and to his world, is absolutely useful. This yard-measure, then, he applies to past, present, and future. The Christian religion, e. g., is “useful”, “because it forbids in the name of religion the same faults that the penal code condemns in the name of the law”. Artistic criticism is “harmful”, because it disturbs worthy people in their enjoyment of Martin Tupper, etc. With such rubbish has the brave fellow, with his motto, “nulla dies sine linea”, piled up mountains of books. Had I the courage of my friend, Heinrich Heine, I should call Mr. Jeremy a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.
The difference between Bentham and Thatcher was that she did not pile up mountains of books but made, by applying the same way of thinking, a country relatively rich, its people relatively poor and the thinking absolutely un-societalist = lacking any consideration of solidarity. Indeed,
– after the country had been reduced on individuals and at most family and neighbourhood, the plan is now Europeanised: BREXIT was and is an expression of exactly the same thought.
—
[1] Marx & Engels. Collected Works. Volume 35; Lawrence & Wishart, electronic books; 2010
Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza”.(Dante: Inferno -Canto ventiseiesimo)
Ti hanno uccisa e sepolta nei titoli dei loro giornali, madre. Come posso perdonare, madre? Come può Jenin perdonare? Come si può portare questo fardello? Come si può vivere in un mondo che volta le spalle a questa ingiustizia da così tanto tempo? E’ questo che significa essere palestinesi, madre?(Susan Abulhawa, 2011: Ogni mattina a Jenin; Milano: Feltrinelli: 371 f.)
Chiuse gli occhi, rinata, il metallo freddo ancora contro la fronte. I ricordi la riportarono indietro, e ancora indietro, a una patria che non aveva mai conosciuto.
e
Una terra senza popolo per un popolo senza terra. Lo ripeté finché quasi non se ne convinse. Se non fosse stato per quella donna araba.
A commonly known – und uncontested – pattern is that people who are more or less poor, have to turn every cent, 人民币, копейка, centavo … around and round before spending it … – so different to those who have enough, barely looking at the denomination.
And so it is as well on the “other side”, those who are at the receiving end, or those who are dealing with the “payers” – these are then people who do the same with the money they receive or that have to check, when closing a bank account, transferring petty money from these poorish people into another account or even country etc.: every cent, 人民币, копейка, centavo … has to be turned around and around again and again, forms have to be completed … .
The prayers of the rich and superrich may be better, more substantial, in any case surely: “closer to the higher ecehlons”, to those whom they elected as the political leaders and to heaven?.
Capital is said by a Quarterly Reviewer to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.[1]
And so is it with all the rest of it – cum grano salis and at times inversely: A petty crime will be most likely detected and at court it will be turned around and around like the cents until a reason is found to penalise it I the most stern manner. The major and definitely criminal offense of speculators and other “functionaries” may even get away with some fanfares, re-interpreting the delict as support of economic development, act of fostering investment and growth and good deed.
You remember Brecht’s Macheath, asking in Act 3, scene 3
What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?
Indeed, we have to take up again o the wisdom of the ancestors, already struggling with a world characterised by these patterns
To nonsense, reason’s self they turn; Beneficence becomes a pest; Woe unto thee, that thou’rt a grandson born! As for the law born with us, unexpressed;– That law, alas, none careth to discern.
=====
[1] T.J. Dunning, l. c. [Trades Union and Strikes], pp. 35, 36; in: Marx, Karl, 1867: Capital; Volume I; in: Karl Marx/Frederick Engels. Collected Works; Volume 35; London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996: 748, footnote 2
As we read in
Now to deplore this preference as sordid, and teach children that it is sinful to desire money, is to strain towards the extreme possible limit of impudence in lying, and corruption in hypocrisy. The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization, the one sound spot in our social conscience. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people. It is only when it is cheapened to worthlessness for some, and made impossibly dear to others, that it becomes a curse. In short, it is a curse only in such foolish social conditions that life itself is a curse. For the two things are inseparable: money is the counter that enables life to be distributed socially: it is life as truly as sovereigns and bank notes are money. The first duty of every citizen is to insist on having money on reasonable terms; and this demand is not complied with by giving four men three shillings each for ten or twelve hours’ drudgery and one man a thousand pounds for nothing. The crying need of the nation is not for better morals, cheaper bread, temperance, liberty, culture, redemption of fallen sisters and erring brothers, nor the grace, love and fellowship of the Trinity, but simply for enough money. And the evil to be attacked is not sin, suffering, greed, priestcraft, kingcraft, demagogy, monopoly, ignorance, drink, war, pestilence, nor any other of the scapegoats which reformers sacrifice, but simply poverty.
One can read as complement then from Marx, according to Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Capital (London/New York: Veso, 2010: 257)
He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake. In this way he spurs on the development of society’s productive forces, and the creation of those material conditions of production which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such, he shares with the miser an absolute drive towards self-enrichment. But what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism in which he is merely a cog. Moreover, the development of capitalist production makes it necessary constantly to increase the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws. It compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation.
Indeed, no reason for wanting for the moral entrepreneur, doing good and emerging as pursuer of cooperate social responsibility … mind: the term “entrepreneur” translates nicely into undertaker … – first bringing the workers to the graves, and then preparing himself to be buried on the dust heap of history.
I have often said, and oftener think, that this world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel — a solution of why Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.
Letter by Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann (31 December 1769)
“The Superior Man is aware of Righteousness, the inferior man is aware of advantage.”
(Confucius)
Today to be added?!
The genius of our times of mendacities is well aware of the ways and means to present him/herself as being righteous, doing so in a charismatically “Catholicist” way and does so in favour of own advantage, while presenting it as deed of one who is saviour of the general weal.
It is an old poem, written by Oliver Goldsmith, presenting The Deserted Village – and there may still be something in it that is worth to be thought about today – though …
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade—
A breath can make them, as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
– though the peasant of those times was still the “worker” and the princes were the “capitalists” — in danger to be overthrown by on the one hand the precarious industry 4.0 self-designer and on the other hand the finance oligarch …
COMMEDIA DELLA VITA OR PÁNTA RÊI'S FIRM GROUND 