Social Philosophy: The deficiencies of two economic systems.

In a previous entry (Feb. 28, 2007) I linked to two blog entries by Dr. Peter Leithart who gave an analysis of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s (ERH) observations about time and the whole man. The links are now broken as Leithart’s blogs were moved to his archives. I am beginning to understand some of what Leithart was saying as I am now reading ERH for myself. Currently I am working my way through Out of Revolution: The Autobiography of Western Man, which deals with a good many things about human society and perceptions of time and economic-historical development. We will return to the question of time after we begin with economic realities in human societies.

As one may have noted from my position on socio-politico-economics (see Jim’s Labour Page), I have tried to grapple with these social philosophies and find what actually bears on empirical reality. I think that ERH has realized an important factor in the wholeness of being human versus the dehumanizing economic social contracts that we are compelled to participate in. I am going to begin quoting some excerpts from his section on “the reproduction of man” found in his section on the Russian revolution in his book Out of Revolution. I believe that he means by the term reproduction of man the continuance of a full orbed human life in a developing (for the better) society or the redemption of humanity not just in the spiritual sense.

Here we begin:
“Marx and Engels were the first to study the problem of Revolution and Reproduction seriously. They made it plain to what extent business is behind all history,…
But they did not complete their analysis.
We sum up our statements thus: It is not valid to pretend that the workers are exploited by the capitalists because they get low wages.” {although the wage problem has returned now with tighter integration of global markets.—my comment} “The real outcry of man’s offended nature should be that he is degraded because his boss does not care for his past or future, and because he, the worker, is deprived of the power to weave past or future into his own day of work.
The boss, by virtue of the privileges conferred upon him by liberalism {in the classic sense, JRI}, hires a man’s force and skill and presence and brains as a ready-made product. All the traditions that were needed to concoct this man’s talents, and all the props that are needed to keep up his character, are degraded into his own private affair. Modern society and the fellowship of our modern society use present-day forces, disregarding their past and their future. What you are paid for is not a slow growth or an organic evolution, but something that can be ground out immediately by the mill of social life. Modern society exchanges goods, and man is used as a ready-made product. His own mystic process of reproduction, his long way of birth, education, apprenticeship, disciplineship, hope and faith in the intrinsic powers of his nature—all this is of no interest to the business man who hires him for an hour or a year or ten years. Schools, parents, friends, foundations, can take care of his personality. For his boss he is not a growing child of God, but a standardized labour-force*, number such and such, output such and such, reliability such and such. A modern factory requires above all regular and repetitive work of the same kind; a man is taken as a machine of regularized, standardized capacity, doing his 7,325 "ergs" or "ergons" per X Y Z calories an hour. But that is only another expression for a thing which has no past and no future. Electricity, coal, linen, have no past and no future. A labour-force* has no past and no future. In the world of physical experiment we base our behaviour on the expectance of recurrence. A labour-force* may last a long time, or may be wasted very quickly. But fifty years or five days of repetitive labour in the factory are equally devoid of any meaning for the past or future of its owner.”(ERH, OoR, p.84-85)

*I use the term labor-unit.

And now on the nature of time:

“This world of bodies is a world of mechanical time, repeating its sixty minutes every hour. The other world must be sought through another gate than the "business entrance." We live in a plurality of worlds. In one world, Mr. Smith, the employer, is at home. He sits at the breakfast table, perhaps as an autocrat, but nevertheless as a man, a father, a husband, who has a past when he was unmarried and belonged to his father's family, and a future when all his children will have founded their own homes and ceased to listen to his orders. He is an autocrat, yes, but if he is not a fool he feels happy at being limited in time by his own experience and by his own purpose and intentions. He feels how his present day stretches out between two other ages of equal worth. His present is no better than his past or his future; at its very best it can only rival them. Such a house is a world where death almighty mitigates the arrogance of mere life. Here life is a conscious adventure of man between youth and old age. In this world both past and future exist in a positive sense, because they assist in keeping the family alive and in setting its real standards.

In the business cycle and the circle of business we are in a world of bodies: neither past nor future is represented. They may be preserved in schools and museums, as history, as education; but business itself cannot use them. It has a different concept of time, as a mechanical recurrence. But this kind of time occurs only in the dead world of physical nature.

Thus we are right in saying that we treat ourselves and our neighbors as though we had to obey the laws of two different worlds at once. In one world we deal with a man's individuality, in the other we deal with ourselves and others as bodies. Body and soul are not objective parts of the outside world. They are the two constituent elements of two different worlds which we ourselves are constantly building by our own actions and reactions. The world of bodies embodies our way of working, and the world of souls our way of living. We shall soon see that there is a third world, of another type, which we are building all the time by our way of thinking. Our mind is a creator, too, and constructs a third world. But for the explanation of the Communistic reaction the discovery of the two worlds may suffice.

The important conclusion is that all raw material can be transferred from one world to the other, since our own attitudes create both worlds and since we can tell which occurrences in our lives we ought to treat as elements of real life and which we should treat as business. Lumber, electricity, a man's talents, can be commercialized; or they can acquire a past and a future, enter the real life of the soul, as soon as we become or feel responsible for their reproduction.

Suppose all the kinds of raw material we use in our business begin to grow scarce: rubber, wood-pulp, children, poets; forest-fires begin to destroy our timber, and drought our fields… At that moment the employer becomes deeply interested in the process of "Reproduction"; a new world opens before his eyes: a world of change. The circular process of raising rubber, replanting forests, educating foresters, resettling the country, begins to present itself to the minds of business men who up to that time had thought of nothing but the logs they bought from the farmer who needed cash.

Or again: artists, civil engineers, composers, publicity men, are hired by an employer who assumes he can get them by a simple advertisement in the Times or Herald. But one day he discovers that this recruiting in the labour market does not work. Hundreds and thousands of men wish to be employed; and not one of them is up to the standard of the men he could buy on the market a year before. The irresponsibility of the employer for the reproduction of the forces he hires, uses, and eventually destroys or wastes, is the curse of capitalism.”(ERH, OoR, p.85-87)

This last bit reflects my own attitude toward my present employment. While I am grateful to God in the extreme for His gift of this lucrative job opportunity, I am still only selling a piece of my life energy in the form of my personal time. My intellectual, spiritual, social, and physical development as a human is not a concern of my employer (some would argue that it should not be, but we are exploring the bankruptcy of this attitude among other things). I then, approach this necessary evil of selling off a portion of my life, so that I might provide for my family and acquire the economic means to finance the cost of living and the cost of my development as a human being.

More later…