Commentary on Political Economy

Saturday 31 August 2019

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Opinion: Hong Kong Police Crack Down on Protest Leaders
Opinion: Hong Kong Police Crack Down on Protest Leaders
Several pro-democracy lawmakers and activists were arrested by Hong Kong police ahead of a banned rally scheduled for August 31, 2019. Image: Kyle Lam/Bloomberg
China appears to be making its long-expected move to crush dissent in Hong Kong, with arrests of pro-democracy lawmakers and activists and a ban on a march planned for this weekend. The crackdown is a gamble that the public will be cowed, but it could ignite even more resentment and protests.
On Friday Hong Kong police under orders from chief executive Carrie Lam arrested Jeremy Tam, Au Nok-hin and Cheng Chung-tai. All three were elected to the city’s Legislative Council and are vocal critics of Beijing’s refusal to allow the genuine autonomy China promised in a treaty with Britain. The lawmakers face a range of protest-related charges.
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Police also detained Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, 22-year-old activists who are part of the pro-democracy group Demosistō. Both were released on bail, but Mr. Wong faces three charges and Ms. Chow faces two related to their role in an unauthorized June assembly. Each charge carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Andy Chan, founder of the pro-independence Hong Kong National Party, was arrested Thursday and charged with rioting, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years. These six join 1,000 or so others who have been detained for protesting since June.
The timing is no coincidence. On Thursday police denied a permit for a protest planned for Saturday by the Civil Human Rights Front, a pro-democracy group that has held three peaceful protests since June 9 that have drawn a million or more participants. The head of Civil Human Rights Front, Jimmy Sham, was attacked Thursday by two armed thugs with baseball bats, and a friend was hurt defending him. Unleashing gangsters to assault opponents is a favorite Beijing tactic.
Hong Kongers are denied the right to elect their chief executive and the majority of their lawmakers, and now authorities want to deny their recourse to peacefully express their discontent. The Civil Human Rights Front says that without a permit it is “unable to call and will not be calling for a demonstration” for Saturday. Outraged by the arrests, many still plan to march.
No permit is required in Hong Kong for a religious assembly, so some will sing hymns and pray. Others say they’ll flock to Hong Kong Island to “enjoy the scenery” or “go shopping.” They’re hoping to avoid legal repercussions, but in a news conference Friday Kwok Pak-chung, the regional police commander for Hong Kong Island, warned a “religious demonstration” won’t be exempt from the ban.

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Hong Kong’s authorities take their orders from Beijing, which may be looking for an excuse to crack down before Oct. 1, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. On Tuesday Ms. Lam dodged whether she’d invoke a state of emergency, saying the government would consider using “all laws in Hong Kong—if they can provide a legal means to stop the violence and chaos.”
Under Hong Kong law, in “an occasion of emergency or public danger” the chief executive has authority to “make any regulations whatsoever which he may consider desirable in the public interest.” These powers may include “censorship, and the control and suppression of publications,” arrests, the seizure of property, and the restriction of transportation.
Meanwhile, China on Friday ordered Wall Street Journal reporter Chun Han Wong to leave the country for reporting on the Australian business activities of a cousin of Chinese President Xi Jinping. The foreign ministry also cited a recent editorial on Hong Kong, though Chinese officials know Mr. Wong had nothing to do with the editorial. The Journal’s news and opinion sections are independent and have separate reporting lines to the publisher.
Beijing can’t tolerate our editorials or protests in Hong Kong because they expose the Communist Party’s lack of democratic legitimacy. Ms. Lam and the police claim they want to preserve order and rule of law in Hong Kong, but they’re the ones eroding both. If there’s more unrest this weekend and beyond, the fault lies with Beijing and its refusal to honor its promise to Hong Kong and Britain of “one country, two systems” through 2047. The world needs to speak up for Hong Kong and its brave freedom fighters.

SAVE HONG KONG! SLAUGHTER XI JIN THE PIG!

Joshua Wong and Alex Chow: The People of Hong Kong Will Not Be Cowed by China
You can arrest us. But more protesters will keep coming out.
By Joshua Wong and Alex Chow
Mr. Wong and Mr. Chow are Hong Kong activists.
·       Aug. 31, 2019
HONG KONG — “If we burn, you burn with us.” A famous line in the movie “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay” has been given a new life in Hong Kong’s summerlong protests: It has come to represent the spirit unleashed by hundreds of thousands of protesters. As many commentators have pointed out, the massive, leaderless resistance movement here is a critical front-line battle against the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party in Beijing. A dictatorial party facing domestic and global pressures — especially from the ongoing trade negotiations with the United States — the C.C.P. is getting impatient, apparently. On Friday, it targeted leading activists and politicians in Hong Kong with a round of arrests, possibly signaling that a broader crackdown may be around the corner.
That morning, while one of us, Joshua, was walking to the metro station, officers from the Hong Kong police snatched him and shoved him into a car. He was arrested on three charges related to a protest outside police headquarters on June 21. As Friday wore on, more activists, including two moderate pro-democracy lawmakers and an advocate of independence for Hong Kong, were arrested as well. The charges they face range from rioting and assaulting police officers, to inciting and participating in an unauthorized assembly, to damaging property and illegally entering the Legislature.
Even as the Chinese authorities try to intimidate protesters, they are using their vast propaganda machine to try to convince the public in China that foreign agents and local conspirators are inciting unrest in Hong Kong, hoping to create chaos.
Friday’s arrests mark another watershed moment in the fast-moving story of Hong Kong’s eroding freedoms. But so, too, does the protest on Saturday: Tens of thousands of people marched again for their rights, despite a police ban on any gatherings that day, braving arrests, tear gas and water cannons. The people of Hong Kong will not be cowed by the C.C.P.

On the very same day five years ago, the C.C.P. smashed Hong Kongers’ dream for electoral freedom by announcing that it would add more controls to the way the city’s leader, the chief executive, is nominated and elected. The Umbrella Movement was born out of that decision. This summer’s protest movement was born of the Hong Kong government’s push to hurriedly pass a bill that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects to China, at China’s request — a bill that would have sealed, right now, the death of the “one country, two systems” principle that is supposed to safeguard the city’s semi-autonomy until 2047.
Recent reporting reveals that a few weeks ago Chinese officials — very likely including President Xi Jinping himself — rejected a proposal by Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, to pacify the protesters. At the C.C.P.’s instruction, Reuters reports, Ms. Lam toughened her stance toward the demonstrators, squarely declining all five of their demands — including reforming the electoral system or appointing an independent commission to investigate police violence this summer. Just this week, she went even further, suggesting that the government could pass the Emergency Regulations Ordinance, a version of martial law.
The ongoing mass movement in Hong Kong is civil unrest all right — but civil unrest that is the doing of the C.C.P. The protesters are only defending their beloved city, a beacon of liberty, equality and human dignity. In the past months, young students, middle-aged professionals and the elderly have come together and dared to resist the rising Chinese empire. Risking their future, our fellow citizens have braved batons, tear gas, rubber bullets and even slashing by triad members. They did so again Saturday.
The Hong Kong police has repeatedly abused its powers, by way of excessive violence on the streets but also, it is reported, by maiming first-aid volunteerssexually harassing female protesters under arrest or assaulting other people in their custody. The authorities are also intimidating big businesses.
Hong Kong’s youth are maturing quickly from breathing in the toxic air that is being shot at them. Many teenagers buy safety masks with their pocket money — and their convictions strengthened. While the elderly implore police officers to put down their pistols and batons, professionals are making donations to the movement.
Righting the wrong that is being done in Hong Kong is also the business of the outside world and rests on its will to confront a C.C.P.-controlled China. World leaders cannot keep mistaking their wish for the peaceful rise of China (and one that perhaps will eventually become democratic) with the reality of the Chinese Communist dictatorship today. Any act or policy that sustains the lifeblood of the Communist dictatorship in Beijing is an offense to the peoples whom that dictatorship persecutes and oppresses — in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and mainland China.
When Britain handed control of Hong Kong to China in 1997, some people thought that what was then a colony — a wartime trophy of European imperial empires — was about to come unshackled. But handing Hong Kong to a reviving empire only spelled its re-colonialization. If China had been a democracy in 1997, the handover would have meant no dispute. In reality, it turned the millions of Hong Kong’s residents into refugees in their own city, subservient to the authoritarian Communist regime in Beijing.
Many Hong Kongers are people, or descendants of people, who fled the mainland to escape a regime that starved tens of millions of its citizens decades ago, then murdered students in 1989 and has since persecuted political dissents incessantly. Today, that regime fuels Chinese nationalism on the mainland by delivering fragmented information and fabricated propaganda, or “fake news,” to its people.
We understand that some critics of American interventionism may be inclined to have sympathy for China as a still-developing country bullied by an over-dominant West. But please listen to us here in Hong Kong: Communist China is no alternative to the interventionism you hate or contest — that is an inconvenient truth that the world must reckon with.
The massive resistance movement in Hong Kong is a crisis of legitimacy for the Chinese government. The uprising is also a call for the rest of the world to support our crusade for human dignity, equality and freedom. The protesters at the front lines of these marches, who go out there in the city’s streets, are doing no less than taking on that enormously powerful communist-cum-fascist regime.
In September, the struggle will only take on more life. We know that the Chinese government wants grand celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the birth of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1; it wants to put history on its side by rewriting the memory of the people. But Hong Kongers won’t let it commemorate that day without a fight.
In the meantime, American legislators are supposed to vote on a bill, the Human Rights and Democracy Act, that would give the president of the United States power to penalize Chinese officials who interfere in Hong Kong’s affairs. The law could also allow the United States to revoke the special economic treatment that Hong Kong enjoys, as separate from the mainland.
If the United States Congress passes the bill, it will be delivering a firm message both to other silent allies of Hong Kong and to China’s dictators. The clock is ticking in Hong Kong. Our future is being determined now.
Joshua Wong (@joshuawongcf) is the secretary general of Demosisto. Alex Chow (alexchow18) is a Hong Kong activist.

SLAUGHTER XI JIN PIG!

Friends who have been with us for a while will know that the arguments presented below by Mr. Cohen today at The New York Times are ones we have advanced for the last seven years, since the inception of this Blog and certainly since the arrival of the Rat-in-Chief, Xi, on the scene. An interesting facet of Cohen's analysis here is how (to paraphrase) "the US [and the capitalist West] got cheap goods from exploited Chinese workers to keep our own workers happy and our bourgeoisie rich and stable". Again, these arguments we have expounded along much more politico-economic theoretical lines than Mr. Cohen can or does offer here. What matters is that our conclusions are the same - though we got there a long, long time ago!



Opinion Columnist

For President Xi Jinping of China, Deng Xiaoping’s advice on how China should rise — “keeping a low profile” — was yesterday’s story. Discretion is not his thing.

Since Xi became president in 2013, he has made China’s ambitions abundantly clear, upping the ante on the strategic, military, technological and economic fronts. The United States is now in a direct ideological war with China over the shape of the world in the 21st century.

The trade war between the United States and China, and the brave protesters in Hong Kong fighting for the preservation of the rule of law against the threat of absorption into lawless Chinese authoritarianism, are facets of this overarching confrontation. If you focus on the signal and not the wildly gyrating noise, President Trump has gotten China policy about right. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It was time to draw a line in the sand against Xi and his overreach.

A victim of Mao’s ruthlessness during the Cultural Revolution, Xi absorbed the lesson that ruthlessness is the sine qua non of authoritarian one-party rule. He has abolished the very term limits designed by Deng to prevent the emergence of another Mao-like figure, installing himself as quasi-emperor for life.

He has rounded up protesters and human rights lawyers, deployed technology (stolen or not) to build his Surveillance State, hounded the Uighurs through a system of concentration camps devoted to Orwellian “re-education,” and cultivated a climate of fear — all for his “Chinese dream.” The image of Hong Kong protesters tearing down facial-recognition towers is an iconic one for an age in which Xi wants to make the world safe for dictators.

Xi’s domestic crackdown has been accompanied by an aggressive international agenda. The Belt and Road Initiative to lock Eurasia into dependence on China, the construction of military outposts on islets in the South China Sea, the announcement in 2017 that the Chinese model was now ready for export to nations that “want to speed up their development while preserving their independence,” the “Made in China 2025” technological thrust through acquisition, theft and growing domestic know-how — all of these were gauntlets thrown down to the West.

Trump was right to recognize the threat and respond, however erratically. Xi is not the god of some new rules-based order, as he was anointed at Davos in 2017. He is a threat to liberty, as helmeted Hong Kongers facing down tear gas and growing repression have recognized.

Xi believes in the sacredness of the Chinese Communist Party, not the sacredness of the individual. He also believes, on the evidence, that Chinese money can buy 21st-century international acquiescence to a new order.

American engagement with China over decades has worked up to a point. It involved a useful symbiosis. China developed at a pace; hundreds of millions of people overcame poverty and joined the middle class. Americans got cheap goods made in China. Global stability was enhanced as China joined the world without major disruption. Given the violent history of rising powers, these are

There was a flaw, however. The bet that this engagement, by producing a Chinese middle class, would in turn spur greater liberties as more affluent people sought more freedom has proved wrong — at least for now. Xi’s message is clear: We’ll take your engagement, eat it, double down on repression and one day run the world.

Another flaw, one that helped Trump ride an America-first wave to the White House, was that China gobbled up American heartland manufacturing jobs. Steve Bannon’s comment to me is provocative hyperbole — “Every capitalist would choose slave labor if he could, and in China capitalists got a totalitarian mercantilist manufacturing base based on slave labor” — but not without a kernel of truth. Globalization and the free movement of capital were not fine and dandy for everyone, as the great nationalist and nativist lurch of recent years demonstrates.

Trump flails, but he’s right that China can’t join all the right international clubs and go on playing by its own rules. It can’t make some trade “deal” and then not be held fully accountable, relying on the infinite global capacity to turn a blind eye to its predations.

Ordering American companies out of China one day — a trademark Trump grotesquerie — and praising Xi the next is no way to negotiate, but China has had a pass for too long. The president’s statement linking a trade deal and the Hong Kong demonstrations — “It would be very hard to deal if they do violence. I mean, if it’s another Tiananmen Square, it’s — I think it’s a very hard thing to do if there’s violence” — was perhaps his finest hour. I just hope he meant it, despite the contempt he has otherwise shown for human rights.

A lot is at stake in Hong Kong, the world’s third-largest capital market. It’s a pivotal moment of the American-Chinese ideological war. A second Tiananmen could turn Xi’s overreach into cataclysm. He’s more vulnerable than he looks — as Trump intuits. Right now, of the Democratic presidential candidates, only Elizabeth Warren appears to get the China threat, one reason she’s surging. China will be big in 2020.

Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and the Concept of Freedom

Simone Weil and the Concept of Freedom

Ainsi … apparaît déjà le mal essentiel de l'humanité, la substitution des moyens aux fins. TantÃŽt la guerre. apparaît au premier plan, tantÃŽt la recherche de la richesse, tantÃŽt la production ; mais le mal reste le même. (S.Weil, Reflexions, p.46)

In the Second Book of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer takes aim once more at Kant’s misconception of metaphysics. By relegating the question of Being to the realm of “things-in-themselves”, Kant effectively removes it from all human attempts to know its essence: the thing-in-itself is impenetrable because all we can know is what we can perceive, and that is the world of mere appearances or phenomena. Yet, objects Schopenhauer, if all we can know are mere appearances (blosse Erscheinungen), then not only what we purport to be “knowledge” is a mere morphology – a sterile listing and classification – of phenomena, of empirical observations wholly deprived of any aetiological meaning as to the ultimate causes of these appearances or phenomena; but also we must renounce what is clearly the only certainty that we have in life and the world – our “experience” of the world, our very intuition (Anschauung) of existence! For Schopenhauer, Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena is genial in that it perfects the Platonic chorismos or separation of reality from appearance – and therefore poses correctly the problem of our awareness of Being. But then, in a bizarre and unjustified twist, Kant abandons the true quest of meta-physics as the prima philosophia to locate the essence of reality, of Being, to concentrate instead on the ordo et connexio rerum et idearum, that is, on the human faculties – the intellect or Understanding - that link scientifically what are the epiphenomenal and hence ephemeral representations of that Reality. At best, Kant can provide an epistemology, a science of knowledge – again, a morphology or classification, an anatomy -, but he has abandoned ab initio and indeed a priori any attempt by human beings to go beyond the evanescence of physics – to inquire into meta-physics.

If we were to follow Kant, we would be “locked out” of reality – this would seal our alienation and estrangement from life; and instead we would be “locked in” or imprisoned within the fictitious realm of shadows: in short, we would abandon the quest for finality (the aitia, the aetiology, the ultimate nature and causes of reality) and be relegated to the circuitous, nominalist and ultimately arbitrary netherworld of empeiria. (As Massimo Cacciari observed, in Krisis, Lukacs’s notion of reification – itself an elaboration of Marx’s Entfremdung and Weber’s Entzauberung - is unthinkable without the “screen” of Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant. Similarly, Heidegger’s denunciation of the Western “oblivion of Being” leading to inauthenticity [cf. Sartre] must then be viewed as an oblique riposte to Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness – L. Goldmann, Lukacs et Heidegger.)

Reality would thereby be reduced to a sterile juxtaposition of empirical observations, to a surface of events lacking any ontological and existential depth – and therefore wholly mute about the ultimate ends or goal or telos of human existence. Metaphysics – the human attempt to go beyond “the kingdom of shadows”, the superficial connection of empirical observations, and to seek the ultimate substratum of reality and of Being, its aitia (ultimate cause or causa causans) and physis (its genesis and evolution) – represents the imperishable human attempt to evade “the false prison” (Wittgenstein) of the mundane, of worldly everyday-ness (Heidegger’s Alltaglichkeit, Lefebvre’s quotidiannete’), of human commonplace and conventional signification (Nietzsche’s “semiotics”), in order to penetrate the very core of reality, in order to trans-scend the world and illuminate its essence – an essence understood not as “presence”, Anwesen, as “facticity”, as a “thing” but rather as living experience, as living spirit (cf. Heidegger’s doctoral thesis on Duns Scotus, discussed in Gadamer’s Les Chemins de Heidegger).

Hence, human beings are wedged between these two extreme poles of objective necessity that is, however precariously and tentatively, open to scientific formulation; and subjective freedom, which is ineffable and unfathomable (Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence”). Even in Schopenhauer’s pessimist conception, the introspection that leads to the awareness of the Will-to-Life transcends the necessity of the physical world: the depth of Being is intuitable yet not knowable through the Will-to-Life – but it is not a “thing”. Contrary to Kant, the true noumenon, the reality opposed to the meretricious screen of appearances, the “thing-in-itself” is not the Object, the world external to human intuition, reflection and introspection and unreachable to them: it is rather this intuition itself! The Subject is ultimately unknowable and unquantifiable and unclassifiable, whereas the Object – which is the world of perceived phenomena – is clearly knowable in this nomothetic sense, at least in principle, within the limits of the human intellect (Verstand as opposed to Vernunft, the Understanding as opposed to Reason) and of its scientific enterprise. Only the intuition and awareness of existence constitutes an unfathomable abyss that can alert us to the reality of Being. Kant’s “obscure veil” drawn over existence – the relegation of ontology to mere epistemology by “the cunning theologian” - is only a subterfuge to substitute philosophy with theology in the guise of Pure Reason. (The subsequent critiques of German Classical Idealism moved by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are already foreshadowed by the “Schopenhauer as Educator” of the Untimely Meditations. On all this, vedi K. Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche.)
This trans-scendental reduction (Husserl) is quite evidently a process whereby human beings seek to unburden themselves from the bonds of necessity that tie them bodily, physically to the world to attain the ideal goal of freedom. Even for Schopenhauer the body is “the objectification of the Will”. And Nietzsche turned Descartes inside out with his “Vivo ergo cogito”. The quest of Western metaphysics is to dis-cover freedom as the truth (a-letheia, un-veiling) and final goal (intended even as summum bonum) of existence: - to reach beyond the means of existence to its ultimate meaning, telos and goal – freedom. But, once again, the prime mover of this freedom, its initial spark and repository is precisely the activity of reflection, the faculty of thought, whereby humans project a course of action that may or may not eventuate and succeed.

Et pourtant rien au monde ne peut empêcher l'homme de se sentir né pour la liberté. Jamais, quoi qu'il advienne, il ne peut accepter la servitude ; car il pense. Il n'a jamais cessé de rêver une liberté sans limites, soit comme un bonheur passé dont un châtiment l'aurait privé, soit comme un bonheur à venir qui lui serait dû par une sorte de pacte avec une providence mystérieuse. Le communisme imaginé par Marx est la forme la plus récente de ce rêve. Ce rêve est toujours demeuré vain, comme tous les rêves, ou, s'il a pu consoler, ce n'est que comme un opium ; il est temps de renoncer a rêver la liberté, et de se décider à la concevoir. (S. Weil, Reflexions, p.57)

This is the new Cartesian meditation, then: I live, hence it is possible for me to think. It is first and foremost because I live that I can think. It is not the case that “I think because I live” – because Life is greater than thought. I think, therefore I am free because freedom is the abyss of thought as reflection (cogito cogitatum). If I am part of Life through my awareness of thought, then Life is greater than my thinking and must precede my thinking. Indeed, Life itself is not to be confused with Being, which we may call the Life-world.

Within the Life-world, my existence can only be contingency – Dasein. Initium. Auctoritas. Contingency and thought can mean only existential freedom: I am condemned to be free (Sartre, Being and Nothingness). Between these two abysses of the Life-world to which I am subjected and the contingency of thought that makes me free – in this enigma - lies the problem of how I am to conduct my life in the world. I am thrown into the Life-world – in this consists my necessity, my destiny. I cannot know my destiny but thought allows me to decide, whence arises my freedom as contingency or finitude and decision (Heidegger’s “freedom toward death”). Between the unknowable past and the unpredictable future lie the possibilities of thoughtful action, of thoughtful living activity - activity that is author-ship, a beginning. Saint Augustine: Initium ut esset, homo creatus est. It was so that there may be a beginning that man was created. We do not create ourselves; we are within the Life-world, and not with-out it. This action is constrained, bounded by the Lifeworld – nature on one side (as physis) and other human beings on the other: - society and State.
Hannah Arendt contends [in HC at p.313] that “Marx and Nietzsche…equate Life and Being” . Had her targets been Hegel and Schopenhauer, we may have agreed wholeheartedly. There can be little doubt that, in any case, all four philosophers approach Being from this “active” side, from the side of the Subject – much in the tradition of Vico’s verum ipsum factum. This is a perspective to which we are very much sympathetic, as is obvious from our foregoing analysis. For it is difficult to imagine, in the aftermath of the rapid and formidable rise of capitalist industry and of secularism and the even speedier decline of Christianity and absolutism that have so conditioned our present, how radical critics of bourgeois society had much choice except to retreat into introspective reflection so as to rescue human historical agency from the commodification and reification of every aspect of social life under capitalism – what Arendt labels, perhaps too loosely, “secularism”. It is a fact that the near entirety of Western philosophy in the bourgeois or “secular” era retreats to introspection as the ultimate foundation of reality. It is a Schopenhauerian Welt-flucht (flight or retreat from the world), albeit not necessarily an Entsagung (renunciation) of the world. To be sure, even Arendt’s lifelong philosophical trajectory gravitates around this “phenomenological” sphere – so it is hard to see what her remedy for this condition would be, despite her recriminations. Here is how Arendt elaborates this point:

The victory of the animal laborans would never have been complete had not the process of secularization, the modern loss of faith inevitably arising from Cartesian doubt, deprived individual life of its immortality, or at least of the certainty of immortality. Individual life again became mortal, as mortal as it had been in antiquity, and the world was even less stable, less permanent, and hence less to be relied upon than it had been during the Christian era. Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even sure that it was real. And in so far as he was to assume that it was real in the uncritical and apparently unbothered optimism of a steadily progressing science, he had removed himself from the earth to a much more distant point than any Christian otherworldliness had ever removed him. Whatever the word "secular" is meant to signify in current usage, historically it cannot possibly be equated with worldliness; modern man at any rate did not gain this world when he lost the other world, and he did not gain life, strictly speaking, either; he was thrust back upon it, thrown into the closed inwardness of introspection, where the highest he could experience were the empty processes of reckoning of the mind, its play with itself….[320]

The corrective for this consists not so much in reversing course but rather in re-emphasising the subordinate role of humanity in Life and of Life in Being – without thereby incurring the diametrically opposed error of reducing human reality to “natural processes”. As we saw earlier, despite his fundamental, formative Hegelian historicism, Marx himself reduced Being to Process by substituting means to ends in an attempt to present his critique of capitalism as “scientific” as Weil herself argued in connection with his misinterpretation of Darwin’s work and consequent scientization of revolutionary theory. Arendt makes a similar point:

…The only thing that could now be potentially immortal, as immortal as the body politic in antiquity and as individual life during the Middle Ages, was life itself, that is, the possibly everlasting life process of the species man-kind. We saw before that in the rise of society it was ultimately the life of the species which asserted itself. Theoretically, the turning point from the earlier modern age's insistence on the "egoistic" life of the individual to its later emphasis on "social" life and "socialized man" (Marx) came when Marx transformed the cruder notion of classical economy—that all men, in so far as they act at all, act for reasons of self-interest—into forces of interest which inform, move, and direct the classes of society, and through their conflicts direct society as a whole. Socialized mankind is that state of society where only one interest rules, and the subject of this interest is either classes or man-kind, but neither man nor men. The point is that now even the last trace of action in what men were doing, the motive implied in self-interest, disappeared. What was left was a "natural force," the force of the life process itself, to which all men and all human activities were equally submitted ("the thought process itself is a natural process" – Marx wrote in a letter to Kugelmann) and whose only aim, if it had an aim at all, was survival of the animal species man. None of the higher capacities of man was any longer necessary to connect individual life with the life of the species; individual life became part of the life process, and to labor, to assure the continuity of one's own life and the life of his family, was all that was needed. What was not needed, not necessitated by life's metabolism with nature, was either superfluous or could be justified only in terms of a peculiarity of human as distinguished from other animal life—so that Milton was considered to have written his Paradise Lost for the same reasons and out of similar urges that compel the silkworm to produce silk. (HC, pp.320-1.)

To recapitulate, within the Life-world, we initiate action, we are a beginning. We are born free (Rousseau) because we think (Heidegger). But we are con-ditioned by our physis (Nature) and our social institutions (Rousseau, Marx, Weil). These institutions determine our inter-est:  Inter homines esse (being among other humans)– and hence the problem of the Political. Two types of opponents we must fight: Those who wish to freeze freedom into an inalterable state, and so to reify existence and society through scientism; and those who instead seek to hypostatise the Political into political theology and the State into the descendant of God. Both these tendencies relegate freedom either to a nonexistent fantasy or else to an unreachable ever-receding utopian dream. We shall examine these matters more closely next.

The Domain of Freedom – Between Nature and Society (Weil, Arendt and Marxism)

To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin (as the Greek word archein, "to begin," "to lead," and eventually "to rule," indicates), to set something into motion (which is the original meaning of the Latin agere). Because they are initium, newcomers and beginners by virtue of birth, men take initiative, are prompted into action. [Initium] ergo ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit ("that there be a beginning, man was created before whom there was nobody"), said Augustine in his political philosophy.2 This beginning is not the same as the beginning of the world;3 it is not the beginning of something but of somebody, who is a beginner himself. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world itself, which, of course, is only another way of saying that the principle of freedom was created when man was created but not before. (H. Arendt, Human Condition, p.177)

Just as Freedom is the abyss of Thought, so Thought is the abyss of Being – and hence also of Life. Thought is the only human activity whose content we cannot detect – and therefore can neither evade nor control without eliminating it altogether. Thought is the arche’ , the “origin” that was the quest of the earliest philosophers, the pre-Socratics. We can observe all kinds of human actions, but it is impossible for us to observe what someone is thinking. The peculiarity of thought is that it is an activity that initiates spontaneously, that is, in a manner that is not traceable to a material origin other than itself. The origin and source and content of thought are inscrutable and ineffable. It is impossible to trace the origin of thought because thought is accessible only by thought – and that through introspection and reflection. Reflection is not the direct object of thought; but thought is inconceivable without its own ability for introspection and reflection. Thought is reflexive in itself.  It is impossible to conceive of thought except as an inner dialogue of thought with itself – whence arises the delusion of “self”. As it was said of Seneca, “never was he less alone than when he was alone”. Cruel was the god Apollo that enjoined all who consulted it at Delphi “to know thyself” – because the god must have known that thought cannot have a self, an ego, an I. Just as it does not have an origin outside itself, Thought does not individuate because it is inclusive and universal – whence the experience of empathy (or Schopenahuer’s “sym-pathy” [Mit-leid]). Above all else, thought is volition, it is a commencement, a beginning – it is the faculty that decides where the de-cision is literally a “cut”, an in-cision in the flow of time.

(This section is an excerpt from “The Philosophy of the Flesh”.)
The decision the will arrives at can never be derived from the mechanics of desire or the deliberations of the intellect that may precede it. The will is either an organ of free spontaneity that interrupts all causal chains of motivation that would bind it or it is nothing but an illusion. In respect to desire, on one hand, and to reason, on the other, the will acts like "a kind of coup d'etat," as Bergson once said, and this implies, of course, that "free acts are exceptional": "although we are free whenever we are willing to get back into ourselves, it seldom happens that we are willing." In other words, it is impossible to deal with the willing activity without touching on the problem of freedom. (Arendt, Lectures, p.4)

Arendt is magnificently right. The bourgeoisie is always torn between promulgating the scientific necessity of capitalism with its “economic laws” and, in contradiction, championing the “freedom” that this objectively necessary system bestows on all of society. We have thus an authoritarian economy and a liberal society. How social freedom can be guaranteed objectively, that is, in the absence of participatory democracy, is the great Arcanum of liberal-capitalist society. Thus, the bourgeoisie always totters between the necessity of the allocation of social resources to production and distribution according to capitalist laws – and the “freedom” of consumer choice that supposedly drives production. But as Arendt reminds us, it is the irreducibility of the communicability of human thought – even when thought is supposedly the innermost and most “ineffable” element of human existence – that is the insuperable obstacle of scientism. Thought is intrinsically communicable not because we can relate our experiences to “others” – indeed, Arendt is wrong in presuming that any human experience is “communicable” in her sense, because, as Nietzsche stressed, all human concepts are mere signs. But what is “communicable” about human thought is precisely the fact that all thoughts are inconceivable without a “dia-logue”, a splitting up, of the thinker into a dialogue with its own “self”. The “self” therefore can no longer be seen as “one” but involves an ineluctable duality. This is consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of perception” on which Arendt based her Life of the Mind.



It is surprising and a little disappointing therefore that Arendt failed to go deeper than Kant in her amplification of the great philosopher’s notion of sensus communis as ontogenetic instead of phylogenetic – as is amply revealed in this quotation from her editor:



In the present context, the most important section of Kant's work is § 40 of the Critique of Judgment, entitled "Taste as a kind of sensus communis." Kant writes that



by the name of sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e., a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind.... This is accomplished by weighing the judgment, not so much with actual, as rather

122 PART TWO

with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.

Kant specifies three "maxims of common human understanding," which are: (1) Think for oneself; (2) Think from the standpoint of everyone else; and (3) Always think consistently. It is the second of these, which Kant refers to as the maxim of enlarged thought, that concerns us here, for it is the one that, according to Kant, belongs to judgment (the first and third apply to understanding and reason, respectively). Kant observes that we designate someone as a "man of enlarged mind ... if he detaches himself from the subjective personal conditions of his judgment, which cramp the minds of so many others, and reflects upon his own judgment from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by shifting his ground to the standpoint of others)." Kant concludes that we can rightfully refer to aesthetic judgment and taste as a sensus communis, or "public sense." This particular discussion issues in the definition of taste as "the faculty of estimating what makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept." (pp.121-2)



Again, Arendt seemed to go along with Kant’s definition of sensus communis or “enlarged thought” as what a human does “if he detaches himself from the subjective personal conditions of his judgment”. But this is precisely the point! That “judgement” does not pertain to “the subjective personal conditions” of a single human being but rather judgement is the one condition that is essential to the very conception of a human being – because judgement (thinking) is the very essence of being human! The expression of a judgement may well be subjective and personal – but that is not what is important about the faculty of judgement. What is quintessential about judgement is precisely its being the human faculty kat esochen, par excellence! Thinking is judging: the voice of conscience, the vox interioris, is the most public voice of all. Just how little even the insightful Arendt penetrated this reality is shown in the Lectures – and in the Postscript by her editor:



But what renders this concept of considerably wider application is the idea that thinking in public can be constitutive of thinking as such. This insight runs counter to widespread assumptions about the nature of thinking, according to which thought can operate privately no less well than publicly. (p.122)



No. Not “thinking in public” can be “constitutive of thinking as such”. It is in fact the other way around: thinking as such is in reality constitutive of thinking in public! Arendt and Kant start from the false premise that thinking is “private”, in fact the most private reality of all! But it is not! Thinking is ineluctably “public” in embryo and in nuce. Failure to capture this phylogenetic element of human experience leads to the dead end of Kantian “sociability” (Geselligkeit) – a bourgeois concept if ever there was one – which is why Colletti (From Rousseau to Kant) correctly paused on Kant’s description of bourgeois society as ungesellige Geselligkeit (unsociable sociability) to highlight his inveterate liberalism. Communicability is central to thought. All thought, qua thought, is communicable. Thus, freedom is not to be understood as vapid decisionism, as a “spiritual” entity, but as the most materialistic, immanent aspect of human being, of being human. The emancipation of human society must be based on this fundamental realization:



And this is of some relevance to a whole set of problems by which modern thought is haunted, especially to the problem of theory and practice and to all attempts to arrive at a halfway plausible theory of ethics. Since Hegel and Marx, these questions have been treated in the perspective of History and on the as-

Postscriptum to Thinking 5

sumption that there is such a thing as Progress of the human race. Finally we shall be left with the only alternative there is in these matters. Either we can say with Hegel: Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht, leaving the ultimate judgment to Success, or we can maintain with Kant the autonomy of the minds of men and their possible independence of things as they are or as they have come into being. (Arendt, op.cit., pp.4-5)



As with Schopenhauer and predestination, for the bourgeoisie success or the accumulation of capital is its own justification. Even Marx, in seeking to historicise social antagonism, came close to turning his critique of capitalist society into a teleology or indeed (as Bobbio [Da Hobbes a Marx] says about the Paris Manuscripts) even into an eschatology, just like Hegel’s (again, Arendt’s judgement in the Lectures on Kant is impeccable, as is her reference there to Kojeve’s famous study on the Phenomenology).

Thought is not opposed to matter. Thought is material, but not in the same manner that rocks are material. We conceive of thought immanently. (For a full exposition of this immanentist approach, see our “The Philosophy of the Flesh”.) The opposition of thought and matter – this chorismos (separation) that has plagued Western civilization from its inception, can arise only in a human community where humans view their Life-world, and thence Nature, as an Object, as a hostile environment to be used and abused for human consumption. Capitalism is the civilization of labor and consumption, where consumption serves (a) to perpetuate human living activity as labour-power (by reproducing the working class) and (b) to expand the necessity of labour-power through the overpopulation of the proletariat (which includes the working class and the reserve army of the unemployed), - which expansion is required for the purpose of end-less capitalist accumulation (that is, power over human living activity reduced to labour-power). Hence, the end or goal of work as living activity which was to emancipate human beings from the necessity of labor-as-reproduction has been turned by capitalism into a means – the end-less (aimless) accumulation of capital as power over living labor through the endless expansion of labour-power (the proletariat’s overpopulation) requiring ever-greater consumption of un-necessary “goods”. This endless accumulation is the ne-cessity (no turning back) of capital.

This vital distinction between production for reproduction and production for accumulation of capital, and thence for expanded consumption is one of the key points on which Hannah Arendt improves on the reflections of Simone Weil. It seems evident that – sadly without acknowledgement – Arendt based her exceptional work on The Human Condition on her further reflections and considerations over the earlier work by the French social theoretician. Arendt advances on Weil’s reflections by distinguishing between “labor” and “work”. Whereas “work” is the human activity of objectification whereby human beings exercise the freedom inherent in the act of thinking by putting into action the projects and judgements formed through thought, labor is the reduction of work to the mere objective of consumption. In this case, the original end of work, which was to expand and give material shape to human freedom becomes a mere means without end in view because consumption becomes an end in itself. And once consumption becomes an endless process, it loses all meaning, purpose and worth.
Truly, then, capitalism is “the civilization of labor” and in this regard alone it poses the greatest danger to humanity – the crushing of the domain of freedom that lies between the necessities imposed by nature at one pole and by society at the other. Arendt gives due credit to Marx for piercing through the delusional capitalist promise of a future of “leisure” for humanity under its search for profits:
The danger that the modern age's emancipation of labor will not only fail to usher in an age of freedom for all but will result, on the contrary, in forcing all mankind for the first time under the yoke of necessity, was already clearly perceived by Marx when he insisted that the aim of a revolution could not possibly be the already-accomplished emancipation of the laboring classes, but must consist in the emancipation of man from labor. (P.130)

This transformation of a means – “labor” – into an end in itself at the expense of “work” is, as it were, a transliteration of Marx’s distinction between living labor and labour-power, between the use value of human work whereby it is possible for the capitalist to extract surplus value and then realise it as profit, and the exchange value that the capitalist pays to the worker in wages for labour-power. Of course, Marx did distinguish between living labor and its capitalist commodification and reification as dead labor or labour-power through the alienation of the worker from the means of production. So much so, that the reflection on alienation and reification has become the biggest focus of Western Marxism from Lukacs to the Frankfurt School. Yet, it is possible to agree with Arendt on the rebuke that Marx did not sufficiently stress the difference between living labour as objectification for the purpose of production-for-consumption and the idea of work as the objectification of human freedom! (In an interesting parallel, Marx’s main criticism of Hegel was that he confused objectification with alienation. And Lukacs himself confessed that his own con-fusion of Marx’s notion of alienation [Ent-fremdung] with Weber’s Ent-zauberung [dis-enchantment] was the gravest error in his elaboration of the concept of reification [Ent-ausserung]. Arendt too, in The Human Condition, adopted the unwise habit of using the word “reification” to refer to objectification!)
Marx’s grave error of omission was to think that all human living activity is ultimately for the purpose of the reproduction of society, and therefore for consumption; and that consequently capitalism’s mortal sin is simply its failure to distribute equitably the products of human living activity reduced to mechanical labour-power (the “theft of labour time”). Arendt is right to assail this biologism implicit in all Western social theory, especially so in economic theory:

It is surprising at first glance, however, that the modern age— with its reversal of all traditions, the traditional rank of action and contemplation no less than the traditional hierarchy within the vita activa itself, with its glorification of labor as the source of all values and its elevation of the animal laborans to the position traditionally held by the animal rationale—should not have brought forth a single theory in which animal laborans and homo faber, "the labour of our body and the work of our hands," are clearly distinguished. Instead, we find first the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, then somewhat later the differentiation between skilled and unskilled work, and, finally, outranking both because seemingly of more elementary significance, the division of all activities into manual and intellectual labor. 14

By insisting on the identification of human freedom with “emancipation from necessary labor intended as toil” – an emancipation that both Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt correctly insist is not possible! –, Marx relegated his “communism” to the utopian status of an “opium of the people”, - indeed, of an eschatology. For if we accept that human beings will never “free” themselves from Nature, as if Nature were a yoke to be discarded and jettisoned, then it becomes immediately evident that the liberation from the yoke of capitalism must not be confused with or reduced to liberation from the ineluctable necessity of Nature.
Once again, this novel yet formidable approach to the critique of capitalism – the transformation of means into ends and the necessity of work as part of “the human condition” – is too close to Simone Weil’s own critique to absolve Arendt from the imputation that she ought to have acknowledged the source of this reflection in Weil’s work:

Productivity and creativity, which were to become the highest ideals and even the idols of the modern age in its initial stages, are inherent standards of homo faber, of man as a builder and fabricator. However, there is another and perhaps even more significant element noticeable in the modern version of these faculties. The shift from the "why" and "what" to the "how" [cf. our emphasis on the change from “knowing” to “doing” in the rise of European science, in our “Descartes’s World”] implies that the actual objects of knowledge can no longer be things or eternal motions but must be processes…. Nature, because it could be known only in processes which human ingenuity, the ingeniousness of homo faber, could repeat and remake in the experiment, became a process,61 and all particular natural things derived their significance and meaning solely from their functions in the overall process. In the place of the concept of Being we now find the concept of Process… Here, from the standpoint of homo faber, it was as though the means, the production process or development, was more important than the end, the finished product…. The full significance of this reversal of means and ends remained latent as long as the mechanistic world view, the world view of homo faber par excellence, was predominant. (Passim, at par.42.)

Indeed, and furthermore, we could be entirely justified in reproaching Arendt also for her failure to look more closely, as Weil certainly did – especially in La Condition Ouvriere – not just at the overall sociological transformation of the nature of work to mere “labour” under capitalism but also and above all else at the effect this has had on workers themselves in terms of the existential meaning of work and their outright alienation from their living activity. (We shall examine this aspect of Weil’s work in the next section.) The actual experience of work by workers is paid very scant attention by Arendt in her overriding preoccupation to dissect the broader philosophical, phenomenological aspects of work in capitalist industry and society. It may seem harsh, but this failure vitiates Arendt’s critical work, turning it once again – as was the case also generally for Weil – into a generic “cri de coeur” against the evils of “modern society”.

Nevertheless, Arendt’s own enucleation of these concepts constitutes a huge step forward not just with respect to Weil’s earlier analysis, but also in the critique of capitalism in that (a) it historicizes the critique by focusing on concrete capitalist social relations of production rather than on a vague trans-historical “human condition” as does Weil; and (b) by improving even on Marx through the valuable distinction between “work” and “labour” and thus, (c), by placing appropriate emphasis on the capitalist reification of human living activity and forced abandonment of the essential goal of turning work as much as possible into an expansion of the sphere of human freedom. It is the very hypnotic mirage and delusion fostered by capitalism of the attainability of the earthly Eden of effortless end-less consumption that serves to entrench and perpetuate on an expanded scale the triumph of work-as-labor in the pursuit of production-for-consumption and, tragically, the depletion of the ecosphere.



As both Arendt and Weil quite correctly impetrate upon us in the works we are reviewing, the incontrovertible and undeniable reality remains that human beings will never emancipate themselves from the necessity of working for their reproduction (“labour”). Nor will they be ever be able to eliminate the constraints on freedom posed by the very existence of society – by the inter homines esse. So that what Marx was proposing as the eventual emancipation of humans from the necessity of work-as-labor leads merely to the end-less accumulation of products for consumption and thereby to the reduction or compression of all human living activity (“work”) to labour-power (“labour”), of “Being into Process” – the reduction of homo faber to the animal laborans. Unless human beings come to recognize the necessity of work for sustainable reproduction, the Marxist and bourgeois-capitalist utopia of the total emancipation from “labor” will lead to the destruction of the ecosphere, of Nature, through the wasteful exasperation of overpopulation and consumption!

It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent. And yet this effort, despite its futility, is born of a great urgency and motivated by a more powerful drive than anything else, because life itself depends upon it. The modern age in general and Karl Marx in particular, overwhelmed, as it were, by the unprecedented actual productivity of Western mankind, had an almost irresistible tendency to look upon all labor as work and to speak of the animal laborans in terms much more fitting for homo faber, hoping all the time that only one more step was needed to eliminate labor and necessity altogether.17

Once again, Arendt is right to state that Marx “looked upon all labor as work” (and not “upon all work as labor”) because labor (the part of work necessary for reproduction) is not “work” (which encompasses all human living activity): it is this Marxian reduction of all “useful” human activity to “productive labor” by confusing the two concepts of work and labor and, much worse, by promoting labor as necessity as “productive” and that part of “work” that is not labor because it is dedicated to free not-necessary activity as “unproductive” that is almost unforgivable in the thinker who most comprehensively and critically penetrated the workings and contradictions of capitalist industry and society. In contrast, this critical insight into a fatal contradiction in Marx’s critique of capitalism, buried in a work of vast intellectual acuity highlights the unjust neglect that Arendt’s socio-theoretical work has received.

As we saw earlier in connection with Weil’s critique of Marx, the great thinker most certainly fell into the delusion that the end-less expansion and extension of human production for consumption was not only possible without depleting and destroying the ecosphere, but would also lead to the abolition of human necessity in the communist utopia (“hoping all the time that only one more step was needed to eliminate labor and necessity altogether”). What Marx neglected was that this utopia was founded on the degradation of human ends (freedom as we are defining it here) to means, to end-less production for consumption and, therefore, of all living activity to thoughtless, unfree labour-power or “productive labour” – which, ironically and tragically, is the identical “goal” of capitalist accumulation!

This all-important distinction is made more explicit in Arendt’s elaboration of the notions of productive and unproductive labour that were and are essential in political economy and indeed in all economic theory:

Moreover, both Smith and Marx were in agreement with modern public opinion when they despised unproductive labor as parasitical, actually a kind of perversion of labor, as though nothing were worthy of this name which did not enrich the world. Marx certainly shared Smith's contempt for the "menial servants" who like "idle guests . . . leave nothing behind them in return for their consumption."16 Yet it was precisely these menial servants, these household inmates, oiketai or familiares, laboring for sheer subsistence and needed for effortless consumption rather than for pro- [   86   ] duction, whom all ages prior to the modern had in mind when they identified the laboring condition with slavery. What they left behind them in return for their consumption was nothing more or less than their masters' freedom or, in modern language, their masters' potential productivity. In other words, the distinction between productive and unproductive labor contains, albeit in a prejudicial manner, the more fundamental distinction between work and labor.16

Let us pause here for an instant to consider the momentous implications of Arendt’s contention – one that we believe is both valid and of paramount importance. What Arendt is saying, in her convoluted way – and perhaps due partly to the fact that she herself who had little or no training in economic theory, did not entirely understand the full import and implications of her critique of Classical Political Economy. Both Smith and Marx, though they differed on the definition and content of the labour theory of value and of capital, believed that the labour that does not end up yielding a profit for the capitalist is “unproductive” whereas the labour that does so is “productive”. The reason for this is that for both Marx and Smith capitalism was, whether one sees it as exploitative (Marx) or market efficient (Smith), the most efficient economic system known to humanity to date for maximizing the accumulation of capital (Marx) or “the wealth of nations” (Smith). It follows that for both thinkers only productive labour was socially “efficient” because, for Smith, it maximized national wealth, and for Marx because it could sustain the greatest “reproduction of society on an expanded scale” through the heightened production of “surplus value”.

So far, so good. But the problem for Marx immediately arises because, given that productive labour maximises the accumulation of capital, and therefore the exploitative power of the capitalist vis-à-vis the worker, then it is not clear how such “productive” labour could be any better than “unproductive” labour, at least from the point of view of the proletariat so dear to Marx! Arendt’s objection does more than show up a mere contradiction in Marx’s labour theory of value and of surplus value: it goes right to the heart of the nature of the “exploitation” that Marx intended to denounce! Indeed, as Arendt remarks with admirable acuity and perspicuity, if only the labour that increases capitalist accumulation and exploitation is “productive”, then it goes without saying that this labour, however “productive” it might be in terms of value, will only lead to even greater worker exploitation! By contrast, it is extremely difficult to see, where it is not impossible, how such “productive” labour could ever lead to the emancipation of workers from the yoke of capitalists! In other words, Marx’s analysis and prescriptions for capitalist society will lead us to the paradoxical situation where we may well prefer “unproductive freedom” to “productive slavery”!

These certainly are minor points if compared with the fundamental contradiction which runs like a red thread through the whole of Marx's thought, and is present no less in the third volume of Capital than in the writings of the young Marx. Marx's attitude toward labor, and that is toward the very center of his thought, has never ceased to be equivocal.48 While it was an "eternal necessity imposed by nature" and the most human and productive of man's activities, the revolution, according to Marx, has not the task of emancipating the laboring classes but of emancipating man from labor; only when labor is abolished can the "realm of freedom" supplant the "realm of necessity." For "the realm of freedom begins only where labor determined through want and external utility ceases, where "the rule of immediate physical needs" ends.49 Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur [   104   ] in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors they lead into the very center of their work. In the case of Marx, whose loyalty and integrity in describing phenomena as they presented themselves to his view cannot be doubted, the important discrepancies in his work, noted by all Marx scholars, can neither be blamed upon the difference "between the scientific point of view of the historian and the moral point of view of the prophet"60 nor on a dialectical movement which needs the negative, or evil, to produce the positive, or good. The fact remains that in all stages of his work he defines man as an animal laborans and then leads him into a society in which this greatest and most human power is no longer necessary. We are left with the rather distressing alternative between productive slavery and unproductive freedom.

Finally for this section, let us recapitulate with what is perhaps the best summary we could find for this complex jumble of ideas in Arendt’s own words:

The endlessness of the laboring process is guaranteed by the ever-recurrent needs of consumption; the end- lessness of production can be assured only if its products lose their use character and become more and more objects of consumption, or if, to put it in another way, the rate of use is so tremendously accelerated that the objective difference between use and consumption, between the relative durability of use objects and the swift coming and going of consumer goods, dwindles to insignificance. In our need for more and more rapid replacement of the worldly [125] things around us, we can no longer afford to use them, to respect and preserve their inherent durability; we must consume, devour, as it were, our houses and furniture and cars as though they were the "good things" of nature which spoil uselessly if they are not drawn swiftly into the never-ending cycle of man's metabolism with nature. It is as though we had forced open the distinguishing boundaries which protected the world, the human artifice, from nature, the biological process which goes on in its very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which surround it, deliver- ing and abandoning to them the always threatened stability of a human world. The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal laborans. We live in a laborers' society because only laboring, with its inherent fertility, is likely to bring about abundance; and we have changed work into laboring, broken it up into its minute particles until it has lent itself to division where the common denominator of the simplest performance is reached in order to eliminate from the path of human labor power —which is part of nature and perhaps even the most powerful of all natural forces—the obstacle of the "unnatural" and purely worldly stability of the human artifice.

This degradation of human existence to an unending struggle and toil in order to consume, and therefore “to earn a living” under the yoke of “labor” – and the consequent loss of the scope for the freedom and creativity of “work” in capitalist society, is duly highlighted by Arendt:
The point is not that for the first time in history laborers were admitted and given equal rights in the public realm, but that we have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. Whatever we do, we are supposed to do for the sake of "making a living"; such is the verdict of society, and the number of people, especially in the professions who might challenge it, has decreased rapidly. The only exception society is willing to grant is the artist, who, strictly speaking, is the only "worker" left in a laboring society. The same trend to level down all serious activities to the status of making a living is manifest in present-day labor theories, which almost unanimously define labor as the opposite of play. As a result, all serious activities, irrespective of their fruits, are called labor, and every activity which is not necessary either for the life of the individual or for the life process of society is subsumed under playfulness.75 In these theories, [   128   ] which by echoing the current estimate of a laboring society on the theoretical level sharpen it and drive it into its inherent extreme, not even the "work" of the artist is left; it is dissolved into play and has lost its worldly meaning. The playfulness of the artist is felt to fulfil the same function in the laboring life process of society as the playing of tennis or the pursuit of a hobby fulfils in the life of the individual. The emancipation of labor has not resulted in an equality of this activity with the other activities of the vita activa, but in its almost undisputed predominance. From the standpoint of "making a living," every activity unconnected with labor becomes a "hobby."76



The materiality of thought is confirmed by its imaginative limitations, including logic, and by its dependence on action for the enactment of its content or projects. It follows that freedom is not the ability to satisfy a desire – because that desire may not have been prompted “freely” or spontaneously; it may have been induced compulsively from without. In the latter case, such consequent actions are “thoughtless” or mechanical precisely because the being that enacts them is not thinking reflectively, is not objectifying its own thoughts into action.

On peut entendre par liberté autre chose que la possibilité d'obtenir sans effort ce qui plaît. Il existe une conception bien différente de la liberté, une conception héroïque qui est celle de la sagesse commune. La liberté véritable ne se définit pas par un rapport entre le désir et la satisfaction, mais par un rapport entre la pensée et l'action ; serait tout à fait libre l'homme dont toutes les actions procéderaient d'un jugement préalable concernant la fin qu'il se propose et l'enchaînement des moyens propres à amener cette fin. Peu importe que les actions en elles-mêmes soient aisées ou douloureuses, et peu importe même qu'elles soient couronnées de succÚs ; la douleur et l'échec peuvent rendre l'homme malheureux, mais ne peuvent pas l'humilier aussi longtemps que c'est lui-même qui dispose de sa propre faculté d'agir. (p.60)

Human freedom is therefore bounded, on one side, by natural necessity, and on the other, by political limits involving the wills of other human beings. It follows that freedom is necessarily a political notion in that all human activities, including thought, are materially political actions. The boundaries to human freedom set by our ability to put our thoughts into action are immediately and necessarily political because they affect the lives, thoughts and actions of other humans: our being human is a human inter-est, inter homines esse, a being among humans, and therefore political.
Because thought is material, Freedom – which is the essence of thought - is by no means the absence of necessity. Human existence would have no meaning without freedom and freedom would have no meaning without being bounded by necessity,
as Weil explains:

Si l'on devait entendre par liberté la simple absence de toute nécessité, ce mot serait vide de toute signification concrÚte ; mais il ne représenterait pas alors pour nous ce dont la privation Îte à la vie sa valeur.
Mais le fait même de ne pouvoir rien obtenir sans avoir mis en action, pour le conquérir, toutes les puissances de la pensée et du corps, permettrait à l'homme de s'arracher sans retour à l'emprise aveugle des passions. Une vue claire du possible et de l'impossible, du facile et du difficile, des peines qui séparent le projet de l'accomplissement efface seule les désirs insatiables et les craintes vaines ; de là et non d'ailleurs procÚdent la tempérance
Simone Weil,  Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale (1934) 61
et le courage, vertus sans lesquelles la vie n'est qu'un honteux délire.


The restraint and constraint of human freedom involves judgements as to our ability to carry out our thoughts into action:
Tout jugement porte sur une situation objective, et par suite sur un tissu de nécessités. L'homme vivant ne peut en aucun cas cesser d'être enserré de toutes parts par une nécessité absolument inflexible ; mais comme il pense, il a le choix entre céder aveuglément à l'aiguillon par lequel elle le pousse de l'extérieur, ou bien se conformer à la représentation intérieure qu'il s'en forge ; et c'est en quoi consiste l'opposition entre servitude et liberté. Les deux termes de cette opposition ne sont au reste que des limites idéales entre lesquelles se meut la vie humaine sans pouvoir jamais en atteindre aucune, sous peine de n'être plus la vie.
Un homme serait complÚtement esclave si tous ses gestes procédaient d'une autre source que sa pensée, à savoir ou bien les réactions irrai-
Simone Weil,  Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale (1934) 60
sonnées du corps, ou bien la pensée d'autrui ; l'homme primitif affamé dont tous les bonds sont provoqués par les spasmes qui tordent ses entrailles, l'esclave romain perpétuellement tendu vers les ordres d'un surveillant armé d'un fouet, l'ouvrier moderne qui travaille à la chaîne, approchent de cette condition misérable. (Pp.60-1)


Et disposer de ses propres actions ne signifie nullement agir arbitrairement ; les actions arbitraires ne procÚdent d'aucun jugement, et ne peuvent à proprement parler être appelées libres.

How do we know when a thought and the action it prompts are “free” or “spontaneous” instead of induced or even “irrational”? That is a political problem (not friend and foe).



Quant à la liberté complÚte, on peut en trouver un modÚle abstrait dans un problÚme d'arithmétique ou de géométrie bien résolu ; car dans un problÚme tous les éléments de la solution sont donnés, et l'homme ne peut attendre de secours que de son propre jugement, seul capable d'établir entre ces éléments le rapport qui constitue par lui-même la solution cherchée. Les efforts et les victoires de la mathématique ne dépassent pas le cadre de la feuille de papier, royaume des signes et des dessins ; une vie entiÚrement libre serait celle où toutes les difficultés réelles se présenteraient comme des sortes de problÚmes, où toutes les victoires seraient comme des solutions mises en action. Tous les éléments du succÚs seraient alors donnés, c'est-à-dire connus et maniables comme sont les signes du mathématicien ; pour obtenir le résultat voulu, à suffirait de mettre ces éléments en rapport grâce à la direction méthodique qu'imprimerait la pensée non plus à de simples traits de plume, mais à des mouvements effectifs et qui laisseraient leur marque dans le monde. Pour mieux dire, l'accomplissement de n'importe quel ouvrage consisterait en une combinaison d'efforts aussi consciente et aussi méthodique que peut l'être la combinaison de chiffres par laquelle s'opÚre la solution d'un problÚme lorsqu'elle procÚde de la réflexion. L'homme aurait alors constamment son propre sort en mains ; il forgerait à chaque moment les conditions de sa propre existence par un acte de la pensée. Le simple désir, il est vrai, ne le mÚnerait à rien ; il ne recevrait rien gratuitement ; et même les possibilités d'effort efficace seraient pour lui étroitement limitées. Mais le fait même de ne pouvoir rien obtenir sans avoir mis en action, pour le conquérir, toutes les puissances de la pensée et du corps, permettrait à l'homme de s'arracher sans retour à l'emprise aveugle des passions. Une vue claire du possible et de l'impossible, du facile et du difficile, des peines qui séparent le projet de l'accomplissement efface seule les désirs insatiables et les craintes vaines ; de là et non d'ailleurs procÚdent la tempérance
Simone Weil,  Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l’oppression sociale (1934) 61
et le courage, vertus sans lesquelles la vie n'est qu'un honteux délire. Au reste toute espÚce de vertu a sa source dans la rencontre qui heurte la pensée humaine à une matiÚre sans indulgence et sans perfidie.
On ne peut rien concevoir de plus grand pour l'homme qu'un sort qui le mette directement aux prises avec la nécessité nue, sans qu'il ait rien à attendre que de soi, et tel que sa vie soit une perpétuelle création de lui-même par lui-même. L'homme est un être borné à qui il n'est pas donné d'être, comme le Dieu des théologiens, l'auteur direct de sa propre existence ; mais l'homme posséderait l'équivalent humain de cette puissance divine si les conditions matérielles qui lui permettent d'exister étaient exclusivement l'œuvre de sa pensée dirigeant l'effort de ses muscles. Telle serait la liberté véritable.

Historically, political theorists from the seventeenth century onward were confronted with a hitherto unheard-of process of growing wealth, growing property, growing acquisition. In the at- tempt to account for this steady growth, their attention was natu- rally drawn to the phenomenon of a progressing process itself, so that, for reasons we shall have to discuss later,61 the concept of process became the very key term of the new age as well as the sciences, historical and natural, developed by it. From its begin- ning, this process, because of its apparent endlessness, was under- stood as a natural process and more specifically in the image of the life process itself. The crudest superstition of the modern age— that "money begets money"—as well as its sharpest political in- sight—that power generates power—owes its plausibility to the underlying metaphor of the natural fertility of life. Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending,
50. The formulation is Edmund Wilson's in To the Finland Station (Anchor ed., 1953), but this criticism is familiar in Marxian literature. 51. See ch. vi, § 42, below. [   10*   ]
The Human Condition progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of wilful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.