By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
In the excellent book The Invention of Capitalism, Michael Perelman gives a detailed description of public condemnation and the struggle against laziness in eighteenth-century England. It is difficult not to recognize in that text the matrix that led to Yugoslav workers, who in the first decades after the Second World War were treated as the best in the world, as a social sludge to be dealt with at the end of the communist experiment. The original accumulation harbors contempt for lazy workers: every effort must be made to show the misery that will befall them as deserved and self-evident.
This is how, according to Perelman, writes Francis Hutcheson, a teacher of Adam Smith:
“If the people have not acquired work habits, the cheapness of all the necessities of life encourages laziness.”
The “democratically elected” rulers here clearly had his words in mind: all the necessities of life are more and more expensive, and this has an effect – our people are cured of laziness; they unsuccessfully, often begging, seek employment. But there is no work, because they have not deserved it yet. Well, they shouldn’t have been lazy.
And Josiah Tucker puts it this way: “In short, the only way to prevent a rival nation from stealing your trade is to prevent your own people from being more idle and with more vices than they are.”
Thomas Mun, on the other hand, was furious at the “general plague of our smoking, drinking, devouring, customs, and wasting time on idleness and pleasure.”
The great minds of the time, harnessed to a money-making machine, considered free time a scandalous vice. Voltaire, for example, demanded that, for the sake of efficiency, the holidays are always celebrated on the first following Sunday, which is already non-working. That way, he calculated, employers could force workers to work an extra 40 days a year instead of drinking and eating.
Capitalism, by the way, does not like free time. If you have it, as far as capitalism is concerned, you need to spend it on shopping. Time control has been vital to capitalism since its inception. Le Goff even accurately locates the moment and place when time in Europe became capitalist.
In 1355, the authorities allowed Aire-sur-la-Lys entrepreneurs to build a bell tower whose bells would not call for prayer, but would mark the time of trade transactions and the working hours of weavers. Workers who would come to work from the surrounding villages should be called. Church bells are losing their monopoly on timekeeping. Time, then, is secularized. It will no longer flow in the rhythm of religious service, but in the rhythm of production and transaction.
The merchant, who by traveling conquers space for his activity and expands the market, lives by Aristotle’s definition: time is the number of movements. He is aware of the cost of time: the duration of a trip can be clearly expressed in money. Just as a banker sells time: the time that his money spends in your hands.
Damn free time, how to deal with it! Some suggested that the servants get up earlier, so that they spend hours before dawn, instead of sleeping, making fishing nets, together with the women and their children. Others, on the other hand, suggested that farm workers, when they finish their daily duties, be forced to knit and tie. Daniel Defoe did not hide his delight at the realization that in Norwich “even children after the age of four or five can earn their living”.
Even then, it became clear that giving too much freedom to people is not good for the free market. The freedom of capital has always depended on the lack of freedom of the population, and not even all the force of human rights rhetoric can conceal this.
Probably no one in describing the denial of human freedoms in the name of free movement and the multiplication of capital has gone further than Jeremy Bentham, one of the most ardent advocates of the free market. He proposed the establishment of a company (which would be financially supported by the state) that would manage the poor. I haven’t dug deep enough into the past, but it’s possible that Bentham is the inventor of the human resources industry.
The company was to gain power over, as he wrote, “the entire burden of the poor,” and to begin with it was to build 500 buildings to house a million poor people. Not only the work, but the entire lives of these people, as well as their living and unborn children, would be under the control of a joint stock company whose manager Bentham proposed – himself. Savings on food, clothing and housing would be maximal, and work discipline brutal.
“What power can another factory worker have over his workers, if it is equal to the one that my factory worker would have over his own ones?” “What other master can reduce his workers, if they are lazy, to a state close to starvation, not allowing them to go elsewhere… And who are the workers, without the possibility of raising wages by uniting, forced to take no matter how miserable compensation… “, writes Bentham.
Capitalism, as Perelman notes, did not literally follow Bentham’s advice. Instead, it found more subtle methods to control the population.
Some of these methods are civil wars and the destruction of society as a precondition for the plunder of social property, the politics of fear and the choice of the so-called “lesser evil”. The Yugoslav example shows how full control of the population can be achieved through unemployment, national and religious divisions that still, in spite of everything, homogenize people far faster and stronger than any iteration of the idea of social justice.
As Perelman recalls, the privatization of common goods was (and remains) the basic technique of the original accumulation. In the past, rich members of the nobility fenced and appropriated land that had previously been divided and used by entire groups of people. What happened to our companies, factories from which whole groups of people lived here? They were fenced off and appropriated by some new privileged people, members of the new nobility.
Perelman’s next insight is extremely important: in a laissez-faire state, neither the state nor its right is there to protect those from whom it is taken, but quite the opposite: to make their expropriation legal. Just as the nobility Perelman writes about “used the state to create a legal structure to repeal” the rights of previous land users, so our newly formed states and their laws were used to make the labor and property used by our citizens legally taken from them and given to new owners.
Did we know that when we were looking for a state and fighting for it? And we didn’t want a state like this? Well, but the states are like that and they are for that. Should we mention that, above all, the rule of law we strive for as a civilizational ideal, the establishment of which is to end our transition, is not there to bring justice to the expropriated and the impoverished, but to make redistribution and, above all, nationalization, illegal; the rule of law is there for them to keep what they acquired in the original accumulation, because the rule of law is determined to defend the sanctity of private property.
And it all started, let’s remember, with a story about how lazy we are and do nothing. It all started with a famous Yugoslav joke that read: “They can’t pay us as little as we can work.”
No system, of course, is eternal, not even this one in which we have spent the last three decades of our lives. When the system is compromised, it resorts to mechanisms that allow it to extend its life. If your children had taught Marxism, instead of teaching them to make fun of it, they would have known that war is one of the models of capitalism in crisis. They would also know that the same goes for populism (which, of course, often leads to war). They would know, moreover, that the marriage of big business and clergy is only a matter of time.
After all, since the church is also a capitalist, marriage is what keeps everything in the house – and there is nothing more beautiful than that, right? They would know all this and would not be surprised: neither by the support of big business and its “free media” for Amfilohije’s clerical counterrevolution, nor by Mickey’s populism which, unfortunately, will surely bring him success, just as it will bring more misfortunes to Montenegro.
One should be honest: Mickey’s populism is bizarre, as any populism is. But it is also very, very modern: post-post-post. Because Mickey knows that today’s capitalism is not about labor and the means of production.
He knows that today capitalism does not need man as a worker, but only as a consumer: machines work perfectly. But do not spend.
Therefore, Mickey offered the people capitalism with a human face – and the older among you will remember the phrase about Yugoslav “socialism with a human face”.
So, Mickey offered the “people” a wet dream: you can’t work as little as I can pay you for not working.
Explaining to people that this is not possible, that it is not sustainable… invoking reason – is the same as explaining to children that Santa Claus does not exist: a reliable way to turn children who are waiting for presents against you.
Unfortunately… the only way to fight what Mickey represents is to promise an even bigger present.
