Dear Unknown Friends:
We are serializing
the great lecture Ownership, Strikes, Unions, which Eli Siegel gave
on July 17, 1970. It is one of his Goodbye Profit System lectures, begun
in May of that year. In them he described what no other historian saw,
and what continues — intensely — in the world’s economy and the lives of
people right now. He said:
What is being shown today is that
without good will, the toughest, most inconsiderate of activities — economics
— cannot do so well.... I wish I could call it something else — good will
and ill will are such pale words; but that is what it’s about.... In May
1970, the conduct of industry on the basis of ill will has been shown to
be inefficient ....This is the greatest victory of good will in history.
[Goodbye Profit System:Update, Definition Press, pp. 2, 7, 9]
There is a
way of seeing and using other human beings and reality which is ugly, and
economics has been based on it these many centuries. To understand it,
we need to understand the fight that goes on within each individual self,
within us. Mr. Siegel explained this fight: it is, he said, between
our deepest desire, to respect the world; and our desire for contempt,
"the addition to self through the lessening of something else." We go after
contempt in thousands of ways. It is tempting and easy. But it is the source
of all the cruelty in the world; and it is the thing in us that weakens
our own minds.
Contempt
is the seeing of outside reality in terms of how comfortable and important
it can make us. It is the feeling that if we can lessen another,
look down on something or someone, we are more. Racism, in all its hideousness,
is a form of contempt. So is profit economics. The profit system is the
seeing of a human being in terms of how much profit one can get from him.
It is the owning of the earth — which should belong to all humanity — by
only a few people. It is a boss or stockholder, who doesn’t do the work,
taking the wealth that other people produced with hours and months of labor.
Giving much,
much evidence, Mr. Siegel explained, with his beautiful depth, clarity,
and passionate kindness: "The profit system has not appealed to man at
his best or wisest," and in these last decades of the century "the purpose
of profit is no longer able to produce well and to keep Americans contented."
This is because "Ethics is a force like electricity, steam, the atom
— and will have its way" (GPS:U,
pp. 160, 82).
The Effort to Sidestep History
I described in previous TROs some of
what has been done these decades to try to make profits keep coming in
— to make the use of human beings for profit continue lucratively. And
I have described some of what this effort to sidestep the force of history
and ethics has done to people. For example, to keep big profits coming
for a few individuals, millions of Americans are being made to work longer
hours, for less, often at two or more jobs, without benefits. While government
and media announce with cruel disingenuousness that the economy is "booming,"
Americans are struggling, are unable to have savings, are in massive debt,
are declaring bankruptcy in record numbers.
In an article
in the New York Times of April 30, we find this representative,
truly ridiculous, contradictory statement: There is, the Times says,
"a persistent fear among workers about losing their jobs despite the strong
economy." American workers — which means the American people — are not
paranoid idiots. If they have this "persistent fear," it’s because the
economy is not "strong": there are not good, decent-paying jobs
for them. The chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers, quoted
in the article, affirms, "Growth is slowing and a lot of companies will
be cutting back." The economy may be "strong" for a few favored persons
and big corporations. But for America, for real families across
this land, the profit economy is a continuing source of daily fearfulness,
fury, suffering — including, in more and more instances, hunger.
There Was the Stock Market
In this section of Ownership, Strikes,
Unions, Mr. Siegel speaks about the stock market. In the spring of
1970, stocks had fallen massively. The Dow Jones, which in late 1968 had
been at 985, by mid-1970 was at 630: it had lost more than a third of its
value. This was the largest drop since 1929, and Mr. Siegel said it was
a culminating sign, along with many other signs, that the profit system
was not the thing it had once been. Here he describes some of what was
being done to prop up the stock market, give it the appearance of health,
despite what was really happening in the economy.
My purpose
is not to talk about today’s market. But there is an increasing feeling
in people that the current soaring stocks are not much connected with the
real economy — the economy of going to work at a job you hate, where someone
tries to force as much labor out of you as possible. How much is the stock
market arranged, decorated, managed, assisted now — including by the government?:
from the putting into place of circuit breakers so stocks can’t
fall below a certain point; to changing which companies comprise the Dow
Jones, so that only prosperous ones are counted; to the effort to have
Americans’ social security be invested in and support the market?
Certainly,
our government has done much to keep businesses going. It has used the
IMF to ensure the profitability of US corporations, by turning the people
and resources of other nations into profit-producing fodder for those corporations.
Unless a "third world" nation, with its wonderful fund of "cheap labor,"
serves US firms and speculators as the IMF decrees, it will not get the
loans it needs and will starve. Our government has bailed out banks with
taxpayers’ money while American children increasingly live in poverty.
And our government is also assisting the making of profit by bombing the
people of Iraq and Yugoslavia. Military expenditure stimulates the economy:
the explosives dropped on Belgrade, like the planes that drop them, are
part of US economic production and keep American companies and workers
busy. In 1970, Mr. Siegel explained:
What has tended to blunt the Depression
of 1929 has been a condition of war. That made people feel the Depression
was over. The Depression of 1929 is not over. Capitalism has been sustained
by war conditions. [GPS:U, p. 97]
It is being sustained by them now.
Owning
Meanwhile, there is ownership itself.
This Aesthetic Realism principle is true about ownership, as about everything
else in the world: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the
making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Ownership,
Mr. Siegel shows in this lecture, is always a relation of opposites: oneself
and something standing for the outside world. Ownership can be beautiful
if it is in behalf of justice to the thing owned and to all things and
people. Owning a book can have us fairer to all humanity and earth, if
we are trying to know what is in the book. But to own in a way that stops
other people from being all they could be, is infinitely ugly. And that
is how the world has been owned for hundreds of years. So I quote sentences
that I love, from Eli Siegel’s Self and World: "We can own the world
only by knowing it. We can possess the world only by having it in our minds;
that is, by having knowledge of it" (p. 279).
Those sentences
stand for how he was all the time. His brave, beautiful purpose
was always to know, and to bring out the strength of every person,
and the world itself.
— Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of
Aesthetic Realism-
Stocks and Ethics
By Eli Siegel
Note. The "this"
which Mr. Siegel refers to in the first sentence is the insistence by reality
that economics become ethical.
I shall, in coming weeks, present
evidence that this goes on and is invincible. There’s no chance of its
being otherwise. In order to place what has been happening — there was
an article in the New York Times yesterday about something which
is important and which is coyly, and I think deceptively, underplayed.
You can get this story and watch how it is arranged, what is made important,
what is seen as not so important. "Six More Failures Reported for Big Board
Members," by Eileen Shanahan, begins:
There are six member firms of the
New York Stock Exchange that are currently in liquidation, in addition
to the four whose failure had previously been announced, it was officially
disclosed today.
So there may be even more. This did
not occur in 1930. The houses were hit, but it was mostly the investors
who suffered.
The New York Stock Exchange ...
let it be known that it intended to reimburse all customers of the failed
firms ... .The reimbursements ... would be made without imposition of the
$50,000-per-customer limit that has been recommended for inclusion in pending
legislation creating a Government-backed insurance corporation to deal
with brokerage firm failures.
What we find is a kind of socialism
going on in the stock exchange, where the stock exchange and the government
are in a tie-up to make sure that what happened will be put aside as much
as possible, and won’t happen again. What occurs always is, when capitalism
is in danger, it uses an aspect of socialism to remedy itself and then
says that it always has the power of reviving itself.
There will
be "a Government-backed insurance corporation to deal with brokerage firm
failures." This shows the nerve of what is called free enterprise. It wants
the government to help the situation. That is socialism from the top. On
the one hand they want a free market, and here there’s a calling for something
else than a free market. That has happened before. It has to do a great
deal with the rise in the stock market and the entrance of institutions.
Because if the institutions think the government is that interested that
it will sustain the brokerage houses, they feel they cannot lose as much.
What has happened is, the government has stepped into the stock exchange,
and socialism is helping the profit system now. It’s not the innate capacity
of the profit system to revive itself on its own; it’s the capacity of
the profit system plus something not the profit system.
Ownership and the Profit System
Here we have an idea which has to be
dealt with a little — you cannot make it too clear — the idea of ownership
that is in the profit system. The profit system can be defined as the [private]
ownership of the means by which production goes on, and the setting down
of terms for the rewards of that ownership and production by the owner.
Where that is interfered with, capitalism is that much dented. Ownership
itself can be defined as a relation of something to oneself so that one
has the use of it only for oneself, with the power of denying the use of
the thing owned to another, or the power of getting a reward or a charge
if the use is given. It’s a relation to something — as a person, let us
say, has a machine and can charge so much an hour for its use by another.
And meantime, you have the right to use it yourself and you also have the
right to deny it.
Ownership
is the having of a thing utterly and the using it by oneself and for oneself
utterly. As soon as the utterness is infringed upon, the ownership is that
much diluted. This goes for oneself. If people, as they do these days,
sell their hair, it means they have the ownership of their hair — they
can sell it. There is the O. Henry story about how Delia sold her hair.
"A House
Commerce subcommittee... concluded hearings today on the proposed Securities
Investor Protection Corporation." That is a long title, but it does mean
the entrance of the government more in the investment business. It should
be on the front page and made clear to every reader. Is there some socialism
now helping the profit system? Because as soon as the government steps
in in any financial situation, it can be called the participation of the
state or collective power.
Mr. Haack [the exchange’s president]
said ... the exchange did not plan to make public the names of the six
additional failures "as to do so would seriously jeopardize the prospects
for an orderly liquidation and thereby may adversely affect the customers
of these firms."
The stock exchange is like the manager
of a movie theatre. I remember a person once rose in a cinema and screamed;
people were excited, there was a little scuffle, and the manager came out
and waved his hand. Meantime, the show went on, the lady likely was escorted
out, and you had it all "liquidated." This desire to say nothing has happened,
really — everything is as before — well, the question is, is it? People
would like to think so.
No member of the subcommittee pressed
Mr. Budge or anyone else for information on the size of the failed firms,
the reasons for their failure or any other matter.
Ms. Shanahan saw something. This committee,
the government, the administration, and both parties are all interested,
in these times when Washington values are in jeopardy, in making everything
look good.
So there
are firms who over the months felt profits would go on, and they were wrong
in such a way that they jeopardized themselves and also their customers.
How did that happen? Did it come from something large, and permanent?
Something Failed
Well, this is what I am saying: the
stock market was shown as vincible, and the profit system was shown as
vincible — not just through the stock market; the stock market was the
last sign, in fact. The postal strike came before, and many other things
which I’ll mention and have mentioned.
The entire question of the amount
of risk the Government might be taking in pledging $1-billion, if necessary,
to pay off investors in the case of future failures, dominated the final
day of the subcommittee hearings.
All this has
to do with why stocks have been going up: because the government has discreetly
but definitely shown its interest. It is not the profit system by itself,
but the profit system with a few adjuncts.
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