The lecture by Eli Siegel that we begin to serialize here is Selves Are in Economics, of December 18, 1970 — a historic year. In May of it he explained that a way of economics based on contempt for people and reality was no longer able to succeed. This was and is the profit system, a system in which economics is propelled not by the motive to be useful to one’s fellow human beings, but by the motive to make a profit for oneself from their needs and their labor. It is the system based on the notion that the world, into which every person is born, should not be owned by all people but should belong principally to a few persons.

     In a series of lectures Mr. Siegel gave evidence, from history and current happenings, that not only is it immoral to see a human being in terms of how much you can get from him while giving him as little as possible, but that economics based on such seeing had reached the point at which it was irremediably inefficient. Though persons in power might compel it to go on a while, it would never recover. In a lecture of June 12, 1970, Mr. Siegel explained:

Man should not make money from man! That was justice five thousand years ago, but it didn’t have a chance to show its power until now .... Ethics is a force like electricity, steam, the atom — and will have its way. [Goodbye Profit System: Update, p. 82]

     There is fury across this land at having to worry about the cost of health care, and in so many instances having no health insurance; fury that at any moment one may lose one’s job; that one has enormous credit card debt; that one fears the future because of insufficient retirement savings. There is a continental resentment at how one is seen at one’s job: as existing to provide profit for someone else. It shows itself in grouchiness, ill-nature, rudeness (and worse) at workplaces — and also on highways and in homes. This resentment is not the only cause of anger in America, but it is a large one.

     It is also one of the reasons Americans have gone after a certain unquestioning "patriotism" in recent months. To be sure, the horrible attack on this country has had people want, truly, to protect America and show love for her. But it also happens that Americans, not knowing how to place their pervasive, constant anger about money and jobs — not knowing how to be for their country yet against a way of economics which isn’t America but goes on in America — have wanted just to get to a certain simple wash of feeling: we’re good!; what’s outside us is bad! There is a desire in Americans to transform an intense mix-up and resentment into an intense feeling that seems less confusing and more acceptable to them: a gung-ho nationalism.

     Meanwhile, there is a stupendous effort to keep wringing from the American people, and from the resources and people of the world, big profits for a few persons. The effort has many forms. One is the desire to privatize everything — parts of national parks, schools, the post office, social security. Is the purpose to benefit the American people, or to supply more money — the American people’s money — to private companies?

     From economics based not on such honesty but on the seeing of people in terms of profit, have come child labor, sweatshops, sickness and death from industrial diseases.

     Eli Siegel saw the self of every person, famous or not famous, close or far away, as real, completely real. His grand, passionate, deep, exact justice to people, including me, was the most beautiful thing I know and the most needed. He wrote in his poem "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana," of 1924, "There are millions of men in the world, and each is one man." He was always true to that statement. And the opposites in it are, he showed, what economics has to be just to: an economy has to be fair to millions of people, and to bring out the strength and expression of each individual person. There has not been an economy which did that; but there needs to be. It is the only economy that will now work.

     In the lecture we are serializing Mr. Siegel’s purpose is to show the self as present in economics. It is present in ways that are sometimes intense, but sometimes quite ordinary. The self is of economics intensely when a child, Jerry, in Boston cannot get nutritious food because his mother is out of work. And it is completely shameful that the first priority of the US economy is not to make sure every child, every person, eats well and has a dignified place to live. But the self is also in economics when we look at a garment in a magazine ad and think we should update our wardrobe (something Mr. Siegel refers to in this lecture).

     For example, I wrote in a previous TRO about the importance of Americans’ respect and love for the New York firefighters, so courageous on September 11. The big feeling about them stands for what Americans are looking for — because the firefighters were not impelled by a desire for profit, nor is the fire department owned privately. It belongs to the people of New York City, and the incentive of the firefighters was good will. The ugly notion that the one real incentive in economics is the desire for profit, is fake and insulting to humanity. Good will, seen truly, Mr. Siegel showed, is the greatest incentive: people want to have a good effect on others, and express themselves that way.

     Americans want an economy based on that strong, expressive, critical, efficient thing which Mr. Siegel showed good will to be, and which he himself embodied all the time. 

— Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism

The relation of selves, or a self, to economics is always to be thought about and it is present in today’s consideration. The large point in what I have been saying is that man, man all over the world, is psychologically fed up with the way he has been going through production and distribution, which are the two main things in economics, along with consumption of course. The question, then, is: is man objecting? And has that objection been made rather manifest?

     The big thing at the moment does not depend on what the stock market chooses to do (or chooses to say it has done, which is sometimes nearer to the truth), but whether man is pleased with what he’s been doing, and whether also he’s so displeased at this time that he wants to change to something else. There is such a thing as a fed-up point, a breaking point in people.

     This is to be seen in a full consideration of economics, and that is why I go on with reading from this rather inclusive book, Principles and Problems of Economics, by Otho C. Ault and Ernest J. Eberling (1936).

     There is a chapter called "Value and Price Determinants." It is a mystery, as I said last week, why price is what it is; the factors are still not wholly understood. That which causes price to be what it is, is partly spontaneous and also manipulated or willed. And the factors are of many kinds. The reason why a price is what it is in any one place may have to do with other things in many other places.

Styles are started sometimes purposely to increase sales.

     "Styles are started sometimes purposely to increase sales." To some people this would seem an understatement. The purpose of a fashion designer is to tell you what you want before you know it; and usually you think you’re going to kick but you don’t. How, for instance, cufflinks came to be out of fashion has a history, though if you want to be very distinguished you can still wear them.

A housewife, having one cook stove, would give very little for a second.

     So railroads are lovely things. The motto is: We should never say adieu / To the choo-choo. This is presented as a sentimental poem. And chances are we shan’t. In the meantime, Penn Central is definitely asking Congress to help it. But the methods of transportation are a very big matter, how things were carried — including the caravan, the wagon, the coach. You cannot separate a western from the burro or mule that carries packs.

     Then, because there was a method of transportation, some things happened to the lands. When the Union Pacific was constructed, the railroad made farming land different, and the states through which the railroad went all were different in terms of what they produced, beginning with agriculture. The Erie Canal changed the farmland near it.

     Sometimes the writers of this book, without intending it, get to a poetic way. This occurs with the following:

Sometimes it happens that improved methods of transportation make it possible to open up vast areas of rich agricultural lands heretofore inaccessible.