Friday, February 18, 2005

The Many Headed Hydra

ATLANTIC HISTORY

I had just finished my article on Goth Capitalism when my special book order for The Many Headed Hydra arrived. I have been devouring it ever since. Written in 2001 it inspires and completes many of the trajectories I have tried to touch on in my essay on gothic capitalism, the horror of accumulation and the commodification of humanity. Below are some reviews and background on the Many Headed Hydra and other works of its activist authors ;
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. I would be remiss in not thanking Sam Wagar for having told me about this excellent book, which one writer compared to E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class.

Atlantic History as it is now called is the history of the under class the lumpen (german for 'rags') or ragged proletariat, those without a trade, and of course slaves. It is a history of those who built the British and American empires by the sweat of their brow, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the perennial dispossed. This "motely crew" that became pirates, antinominal rebels, and revolutionaries against industrial capitalism.

This paradigm is contested by establishment historians, and thus falls under the rubric of 'revisionist' history, which unfortunately has been besmirched by those who use the term to justify their anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Authentic revisionst history, or historical deconstruction began with Marx, and we call it historical materialism. E.P. Thompson expanded that to include the study of the culture of the working class and proletariat, and there is a difference between these two. For the working class are former craftsmen or artisans who become part of the factory system that evolves out of artisanal production and manufacturing. The proletariat are the landless propertyless class of workers and peasants forced by enclosures into the city to find work and shelter.

That 'proletarianization' is continuing today, as it did in 16th and 17th Century Britain and North America, in the newly industrializing countries of the Third World, China, India etc. It is the crisis of the metropolis versus the privatized countryside, and in fact as I write in Global Labour in the Age of Empire, it is privatization that is currently the project of global capitalism which is mistakenly called; 'globalization'.
Rediker and Linebaugh agree with this permise, as they discuss in the British move to enclose the Fens, swampland, that was held in common, those 'drawers of water' in the 17th century were replaced with privately owned water works.

Linebaugh has written other works on the dispossed in London, and Rediker has written on Pirate culture.

Both also focus on the economic importance of enclosure, the stealing of the common lands for use as private property, and slavery; the indentured servitude of the poor as well as Africans, in the birthpangs of capitalism. I have some refernces and links to these works as well below.

Marcus Rediker has an excellent web site which includes excerpts from Hydra and several of his other books, it includes the synopsis below, as well as a sample Chapter. It also includes further articles on revisionist proletarian history and his univeristy course work on Atlantic History.

The Many Headed Hydra Synopsis

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. The Many Headed-Hydra recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world.
When an unprecedented expansion of trade and colonization in the early seventeenth century launched the first global economy, a vast, diverse, and landless workforce was born.
These workers crossed national, ethnic, and racial boundaries, as they circulated around the Atlantic world on trade ships and slave ships, from England to Virginia, from Africa to Barbados, and from the Americas back to Europe.
Marshaling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a "hydra" and brutally suppressed their risings, yet some of their ideas fueled the age of revolution. Others, hidden from history and recovered here, have much to teach us about our common humanit
y.

Harry Cleaver author of Reading Capital Politcally, itself an excellent text on the politics of the revolt from below, and other "Autonomous Marxist" works has the introduction and samples of chapters on the American proletarian revolts, of Many Headed Hydra in PDF. Harry Cleaver Excerpts including Intr0duction in PDF

REVIEWS:

Reviewed by Michael Guasco, Department of History, Davidson College.
Published by H-Atlantic (June, 2003)

The Many-Headed Hydra : The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
liveDaily Store Home

Review: The Many-Headed Hydra
An article from Do or Die Issue 10. In the paper edition, this article appears on page(s) 322-329.

Bookshelf Review: The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

DEMOCRATIC PIRATES The History of Decapitating Commoners by Nicolas Veroli

Canadian Journal of History, Dec 2001
History from below decks [The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic]

Northeastern Naturalist, 2001 by St Hilaire, L
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

Lumpen-Proletarians of the Atlantic World, Unite!
Review by Graham Russell Hodges

New York Review of Books 'The Many-Headed Hydra': An Exchange By Marcus Rediker, Peter Linebaugh, Reply by David Brion Davis

A ship of fools - Review New Statesman, Sept 3, 2001 by Stephen Howe

Review
by Robin Blackburn

This book can be read as both an homage to, and correction of, E. P. Thompson's famous study The Making of the English Working Class (1964). Like that book, The Many-Headed Hydra is eloquent, unconventional in its sources and angle of vision, and "history from below"—it emphasizes the large historical significance of the sensibilities and conduct of ordinary people. But where Thompson described the world of British workers during the Industrial Revolution, and explored the formation of the English working class as a self-conscious political actor, this history is oceanic rather than national in scope—it is the story of the making of an Atlantic proletariat. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker are so steeped in their subject matter that they spot patterns and links that others would not notice. They evoke the bygone mentalities of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic, in ways that transport us to a world that is quite strange—yet with startling premonitions of current globalization. In his last work, Customs in Common, Thompson suggested that pre-industrial capitalism could illuminate aspects of the post-industrial era. The Many-Headed Hydra, without lapsing into anachronism, bears out this claim.

As it happens, Linebaugh and Thompson both contributed to Albion's Fatal Tree, a collection devoted to the still topical issue of capital punishment, and its meanings for the wider society, while Thompson wrote a glowing review of Rediker's Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, a study of eighteenth-century mariners. Yet The Many-Headed Hydra also challenges some of Thompson's Anglocentric assumptions. While Thompson was attuned to French influences and had respect for the "old Jakes" (English Jacobins), his work paid little attention to the leavening effect of Irish and transatlantic influences and connections. Thus the remarkable figures of Olaudah Equiano, the African (or African American) anti-slavery campaigner, or Robert Wedderburn, son of a Jamaican slave and a leader of the Spencean socialists in early nineteenth-century London, made only fleeting appearances in Thompson's work, but are allotted chapters here. Thompson did give space to the activities of the Irish Revolutionary Colonel Edward Despard, but he did not mention his conflicts with English proprietors in the Caribbean nor weigh the significance of his marriage to Catherine, his Afro-Caribbean wife. In Thompson, the anti-slavery movement was represented by William Wilberforce, a persecutor of Jacobins; its more radical proponents, such as Thomas Clarkson, were not discussed.

The "hidden history" that Linebaugh and Rediker refer to in their subtitle links the radical sects of England's seventeenth-century Civil War to the later emergence of the nineteenth-century labor and anti-slavery movements, a theme which builds on the suggestion of another British Marxist historian. (The Many-Headed Hydra is dedicated to Christopher and Bridget Hill, and it is from the former that the idea is taken.) In about four hundred pages, The Many-Headed Hydra covers two hundred years of history on both sides of the Atlantic. The account combines provocative and sweeping generalization with intimate individual examples of the resistance and solidarity that grew in the wake of the growth of oceanic commerce and the rise of the maritime state.

The book opens with the real-life story of an expedition that wrecked on Bermuda and prompted Shakespeare's Tempest, though Linebaugh and Rediker use the story to highlight the rebelliousness of the crew and colonists. Then they describe the evictions and hangings that were visited on the common people by the new breed of English capitalist landlord and merchant as they sought to enclose land, establish plantations, and secure "hewers of wood and drawers of water." The third chapter supplies a close reading of the tantalizing scraps of evidence available concerning the life and beliefs of "a Blackymore Maide Named Francis" who died a Baptist in Bristol in the Civil War period, and of what was meant by those, like Francis, who declared that "God was no respecter of faces." The fourth chapter is devoted to the implications of the Putney debates—the remarkable 1647 political arguments in the General Council of Cromwell's New Model Army—and explores the maritime background of Colonel Thomas Rainborough, who enunciated democratic principles at that assembly. The fifth chapter argues that the ocean-going sailing vessels of the epoch were cradle of a picaresque proletariat—mariners, rovers, and dock-workers who evolved their own distinctive traditions of struggle and solidarity, ranging from the rough-and-ready egalitarianism and democracy of the pirate crew to the practice of striking (that is, lowering the sails of the ship). The sixth chapter establishes links between a slave conspiracy in Antigua and a 1741 plot to seize power in New York hatched by John Gwin, "a fellow of suspicious character"; Negro Peg, "a notorious prostitute"; and a "motley crew" of disreputable Irish, blacks, Dutch, and other "outcasts of the nations of the earth."

The succeeding chapter on "the motley crew in the American Revolution" argues that the revolutionary radicalism of the mariners and dockworkers made a vital contribution to the ideology of the struggle for independence. For example, they prompted the young Samuel Adams to move from the rhetoric of the "rights of Englishmen" to the more universal idiom of the "rights of man." More generally, it was within the mixed, waterfront milieu that anti-slavery ideas first gained support and then influenced at least some of the Patriots. The book concludes with chapters that trace the return across the Atlantic of revolutionary aspirations as exemplified in the lives of Edward and Catherine Despard, Robert Wedderburn, and William Blake. Vignettes full of surprising detail are interspersed with bold claims for the transcontinental spirit of revolution and virtuoso exercises in parsing the sometimes-obscure rhetoric of millennial enthusiasts.

The Many-Headed Hydra repeatedly puts familiar landmarks in a new light by showing how they reflect mercantile and Atlantic constellations of class, ideology, and power. It is interesting to be reminded that among the 39 Articles that provided the Church of England's founding principles, one permitted the state to punish Christians by death (Article 37), and another insisted "the riches and goods of Christians are not in common as touching the right, title and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast" (Article 38). And the sketch of the plan of the book I have offered above fails to do justice to many learned and fascinating digressions—for example, on the adventures of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, or on the Masaniello revolt in Naples, and the ways that each illuminates the making of the maritime state and the emergence of its "hydra-headed" proletarian antagonist.

Some will say that Linebaugh and Rediker have taken hold of some venerable bones of Marxist analysis and made them sing by means of a postmodern voodoo philosophy. The authors skillfully deploy scripture, song, and poetry to give the reader a salty taste of the distinctive cultures of their "many-headed" and motley crew. But do they not romanticize? We are told that Colonel Rainborough's father, William, rescued 339 European prisoners from enslavement in North Africa and that Rainborough himself wore on his finger a signet ring bearing a Moor's head. This emboldens the authors to hail Rainborough as a champion of anti-slavery. Maybe he was. But opposition to European enslavement in Morocco and the sporting of Moor's Heads were not at all unusual in seventeenth-century England, and did not, unfortunately, betoken general opposition to slavery or an entirely favorable view of the Moor. The authors are not wrong to see in piracy opposition to the pretensions of the maritime state. But they overdo it when they flatly announce: "Pirates were class-conscious and justice-seeking, taking revenge against merchant captains who tyrannized the common seaman and against royal authorities who upheld their prerogatives to do so." Unfortunately pirates were also quite capable of trading slaves and slaughtering innocents. In fairness, I should add that there are limits to the authors' idealization of pirates: they do not endorse an improbable recent claim that buccaneers were champions of sexual enlightenment.

Nevertheless Linebaugh and Rediker are always on the lookout for rainbow coalitions of the oppressed. This does not usually lead them to gloss over inconsistencies, such as Tom Paine's fear of a union of insurgent slaves and Indians. But it does allow them to insist that Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676 was "really two quite separate uprisings," one aimed at mounting an Indian-fighting expedition and the other a challenge to the royal power that led to the freeing of servants and slaves. (Nevertheless these "quite separate" movements were both initiated by Nathaniel Bacon, and the one flowed into the other.) The authors register the scope given to the rulers to foster racial perceptions, but they are too inclined to see a spontaneous union of the oppressed and excluded waiting to emerge. They do not balance their vivid accounts of life on board ship or on the wharves with attention to the very different worlds of the slave plantation or Native American village.

I find welcome, and often persuasive, the authors' insistence that ethnic identities were often labile in this period and that the experience of a common fate aboard ship could create powerful bonds of solidarity. But I have the impression that the authors do not fully take the measure of popular complicity in the new Atlantic order, with its flood of affordable luxuries like tobacco, sugar, indigo, cacao, and so forth. Their account of the shipwreck in Bermuda does not explain how the leader of the expedition managed to restore control when the island offered land for the taking and ready means of subsistence. Shakespeare's sympathies may well have been regrettable, but his account in the Tempest of the way that plebian rebels could be sidetracked by dangling finery in front of them may not have been simply hostile caricature. Caliban is shown as possessed of better judgement when he urges his co-conspirators to shun the proffered apparel.

Here is a passage from Linebaugh and Rediker's conclusion:

… 1680-1760 witnessed the consolidation and stabilization of Atlantic capitalism through the maritime state, a financial and nautical system designed to acquire and operate Atlantic markets. The sailing ship—the characteristic machine of this period of globalization—combined features of the factory and the prison. In opposition, pirates built an autonomous, democratic, multiracial social order at sea, but this alternative way of life endangered the slave trade and was exterminated. A wave of rebellion ripped through the slave societies of the Americas in the 1730s, culminating in a multiethnic insurrectionary plot by workers in New York in 1741.

The observation concerning the sailing ship is arresting and novel, that concerning the maritime state more conventional, and the concluding flourish rhetorical. The plot of 1741 is revealed by the book to have been of broad and heartening scope. Yet it was a failure. Defeats have an undeniable pathos, yet they should not on that ground command more attention than victories.

The quoted passage continues: "In 1760-1835, the motley crew launched the age of revolution in the Atlantic, beginning with Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica and continuing in a series of uprisings throughout the hemisphere." Yet Tacky's Revolt, if scrutinized, was limited by the fact that its leaders gave it a pronouncedly Akan character, something unappealing to those from other backgrounds. During the revolt the English overseer Thomas Thistlewood took the calculated risk of arming the slaves on his plantation, and it paid off. While "history from below" has had a hugely positive impact on the writing of history, it misleads if it fails to see that power—including the power of the high and mighty—invariably rests on substructures, and distributions of load, down below on terra firma. The "continuing series of uprisings" were to have different characteristics as they mingled with such various clusters of ideas as Patriotism, Jacobinism, Free Masonry, and abolitionism, often championed by middle-class or even aristocratic revolutionaries. Indeed, it was often the campaigns and quarrels of the middling or "better sort" that gave the "motley crew" its chance. In any full account, they should receive more attention than Linebaugh and Rediker are willing to bestow upon them.

The publishers compare this book with Paul Gilroy's deservedly influential The Black Atlantic, and they are right. But the hidden Atlantic history recounted here is overwhelmingly English-speaking. The great slave uprising in Saint Domingue in 1791, the difficult alliance between black and white Jacobins in 1793, the ending of slavery in the French colonies in 1794, and the defense of this liberation against its attempted reversal by Napoleon take place off-stage. The story of the Haitian revolution has often been told, so the omission is understandable. But the role of sailors in Saint Domingue still needs to be illuminated. Moreover, following the establishment of Haiti, the wider Caribbean of the 1810s was to witness a new wave of piracy and privateering that fed into a revolt that, with the help of President Pétion, would destroy the power of Spain on the mainland. The wider Caribbean witnessed the true culmination of the heroic and fateful struggles of the picaresque proletariat so powerfully delineated by Linebaugh and Rediker.

The Many-Headed Hydra is a major work and a turning point in the new Atlantic history. It gives back to mariners their central role in the unmaking of colonialism and slavery in the Age of Revolution. And it powerfully reminds us that we owe many of the most important political ideas, such as a world without slavery, not to philosophers, still less statesmen, but to the everyday struggles of working people. •


Robin Blackburn teaches social history at the University of Essex. His books include The Making of a New World Slavery and The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery.

Originally published in the February/March 2001 issue of Boston Review



Revolution at the docks
Sukhdev Sandhu on the slaves and radicals at the heart of Empire in The Many-Headed Hydra by Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh

Sukhdev Sandhu
Guardian

Saturday January 27, 2001

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh
352pp, Verso, £20.31
Buy it at a discount at BOL

Who now remembers labour? Both its dignity and its many indignities rarely feature in public discourse. In a matter of decades the nation has been virtually deindustrialised. Leisure is sovereign. Docks, where for centuries so many people toiled and lived, are in most British cities merely places to go to for a drink and to eyeball the luxury riverside apartments opposite.

The older world of docks and quays is the territory of Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh's magnificent study, The Many-Headed Hydra . The authors chart the process by which powerless and dispossessed peoples - commoners, felons, religious radicals, pirates, urban labourers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves - were, from the early 15th to the 17th centuries, marshalled into serving the cause of colonial expansion. A common metaphor, used by philosophers such as Francis Bacon, was the need for Hercules (regal authority, imperial rule, mercantile self-interest) to "strangle the Hydra of misrule". Hydra, in this context, refers to anyone - lippy prole and conscientious objector alike - who stood in the way of profit.

A central chapter of the book is concerned with what came to be known as the New York Conspiracy. In March 1741, radicals set fire to New York. Fort George, the prime military fortification in British America, was reduced to ashes. Soon, other metropolitan landmarks were torched. These were no random conflagrations. Lying on the west side of Manhattan, Fort George was a site of huge strategic importance for the Atlantic trade and a nodal point of the Britain-Africa-Americas triangle. Slaves and slave products were imported there. It was also populated by a swarm of people whose labours underwrote the city's wealth, but who themselves were wholly despised.

These "outcasts of the nations of the earth", as the authorities called them, feasted and caroused in wharf taverns. Practising a form of proto-communism, they allowed the poor to eat for free. Some, such as John Gwin, a black American slave who had a child by a young Irish prostitute, gleefully hopped the colour line. What bound them together was their desire to overthrow the system that made these pleasures so hard-won.

They hailed from all corners of the globe: Africans from the Gold Coast of West Africa who, before being shipped across to America, had served as local soldiers; Irish men and women who had taken to the oceans after the famine of 1728, and who were eager to take revenge on the Protestant English; Spanish-American sailors, skilled in both seamanship and fighting, who had been captured and enslaved by the British Navy.

Social and political instability was not confined to the east coast. Throughout the 1730s and 1740s revolts had been springing up all across the Americas. Men who had either witnessed or helped to foment rebellion across the world were to play a large part in the New York Conspiracy. Men such as "Will", who in 1733 was involved in a slave revolt on Danish St John, in which black rebels seized control of the island's military installation. He was captured and sold first to a planter in Antigua and then to a trader in New York, where he passed on to dock-workers the seditious lesson he had picked up over the years.

The sea monster that spawned liberty
The Many-Headed Hydra: the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker (Verso, £20)
By Frank McLynn
Published : 24 January 2001

In all eras, political élites have appropriated symbols from classical myth to legitimise their own oligarchy. In the 250 years from Elizabeth I to the accession of Victoria, the preferred symbol for the British ruling class was Hercules, symbol of order and progress. Conversely, the urban proletariat - labourers, indentured servants, soldiers, sailors, African slaves, the criminal classes and groups such as religious radicals and pirates - were regarded as the heads of the hydra slain by Hercules. Yet for the authors of this fine "history from below", they are the true heroes of a centuries-long class war.

America is the key. The New World was a garbage tip to which the "dangerous classes" could be consigned. Yet an élite that used the axe and the noose to maintain social control on land had to use even more bloody expedients on board ship. Peter Linebaugh and Markus Rediker do not shrink from a recital of the gruesome forms of punishment practiced at sea. On the other hand, the maritime world of the Americas and beyond gave the dispossessed the chance to sample unheard-of liberties. Living among the savages as a way out of the nightmare of "civilisation" had a long history, culminating in the Bounty mutiny.

The authors' main thesis is simple. The discovery of sea routes to the Americas and East Indies marked a new stage in history, making it more important for the élite to keep the dispossessed classes and expropriated nations - factory workers, plantation slaves, sailors on the one hand; the Irish, Africans and West Indians on the other - under tighter control. Beginning with the fears expressed by that arch-reactionary Francis Bacon, progressing through the 1647 Putney debates and Cromwell's suppression of the Levellers and the Diggers (at the same time as his atrocities in Ireland), the authors arrive at the 18th century, where they are acknowledged experts.

We are shown the many heads of the hydra, and the acts of revolt, resistance and rebellion to which class tensions led. There are fascinating sections on the proletarian rebellion in Naples in 1647, the similar rising in New York in 1741, Tacky's slave revolt in 1760, and the Irish rebel Edward Despard's 1802 conspiracy to assassinate George III and seize both the Tower of London and the Bank of England.

Battle raged over the enclosure of commons, working methods in plantations and factories, discipline on ships and, in general, the attempt to convert large portions of mankind into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The most significant phase of the struggle came from 1680 to 1760, when Atlantic capitalism stabilised "the maritime state" - a financial and nautical system designed to operate Atlantic markets. The sailing ship - the engine of globalisation - was therefore half-ship and half-factory. To those below deck it was jail with the added risk of being drowned, as Dr Johnson defined shipboard life.

The chief resistance to the maritime state came from pirates. Their short-lived seaborne supremacy for a while (1670-1730) blocked the notorious "middle passage" of the slave trade between Africa and America. This prevented capital accumulation, was a "fetter" on capitalism and - obviously - had to be destroyed.

The sections on piracy are perhaps the best parts in a generally splendid book. But even more seminal for historical research are the many vistas Linebaugh and Rediker open up in the history of blacks, women, the United Irishmen, the "Left" in the American War of Independence, and religious millenarianism. Strikingly, the authors write from the heart as well as the brain. Having established that the years after 1780 were a kind of general Thermidorean reaction in the Anglo-American world, they point to 1802 as an annus horribilis - when the revolts of Despard, Robert Emmet and Toussaint l'Ouverture all came to grief. In elegiac mood, they conclude: "These men were peaks of the Atlantic mountains, whose principles of freedom, of humanity and of justice belonged to a single range."

The reviewer's book 'Villa and Zapata' is published by Cape
© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

Capital & Class, Spring 2003 by Roberts, John Michael

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic

Verso, London and New York, 2000, pp. 433

ISBN 1-85984-798-6 (hbk) 19:00

Reviewed by John Michael Roberts

In 1991 Penguin published a book called The London Hanged. Documenting the changing nature of public executions in eighteenth century London, a central theme of the book was to explain why more and more people were being hanged during this period for crimes against private property: many of these 'crimes' had earlier been deemed customary rights. Drawing upon a wealth of primary documentary evidence the book rediscovered the lost voices of those about to be 'launched into eternity' in London and, at the same time, rediscovered a particular manifestation of proletarian struggle against early capitalist forms of exploitation. The author of this tremendous historical exploration was an ex-student of E. P. Thompson's named Peter Linebaugh. With Marcus Rediker, an established historian in his own right with an equally impressive number of books to his credit, Linebaugh has extended this tradition of Marxist history writing to focus upon the (extra)ordinary struggles of those who found themselves labouring for the first global economy across the Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Linebaugh and Rediker begin their marvellous book by first explaining the meaning of the term 'many-headed hydra'. Derived originally from one of numerous Ancient Greek myths, the many-headed hydra was symbolic of disorder and resistance to the centralising force of Hercules. For the Greeks and Romans Hercules' quest to rid the world of the hydra was symptomatic of their respective ambitions of 'the clearing of land, the draining of swamps, and of the development of agriculture, as well as the domestication of livestock, and establishment of commerce, and the introduction of technology' (p. 2). To slay the hydra meant for the ruling classes to slay all of that which stood in the way of their imperial ambitions. Given this, it is perhaps unsurprising that the hydra myth was to become a potent ideology for generations of elite thinkers and practitioners. Nowhere is this clearer than with bourgeois ideologues during the period covered by the book. Linebaugh and Rediker note how a whole spectrum of social thinkers appropriated the hydra myth and gave it a new form to justify 'the violence of the ruling classes, helping them to build a new order of conquest and expropriation, of gallows and executions, of plantations, ships, and factories' (p. 6). In short, insist Linebaugh and Rediker, the hydra myth gave these thinkers 'a hypothesis' about the vast social changes wrought by the multiple connections of global commodity capitalism.

Linebaugh and Rediker begin their story proper by focusing upon the 1609 voyage of the Sea-Venture, a ninety-eightfoot, three hundred ton vessel sailing from Plymouth to England's first new world colony in Virginia. With the original intention of lending assistance to the new plantation owned by the Virginia Company of London, the Sea-Venture never reached her destination and instead ended up wrecked in Bermuda due to a hurricane. While on Bermuda a division emerged between the sailors who wanted to enjoy a communal life on the island and those who wanted to continue the commercial journey to Virginia. Several rebellions were mounted by sailors against the dominance of the Virginia Company and by recounting these rebellions Linebaugh and Rediker set up a narrative for the rest of the book: 'a story about uprooting and movement of peoples, the making and deployment of "hands". It is a story about exploitation and resistance to exploitation... It is a story about cooperation among different kinds of people for contrasting purposes of profit and survival' (p. 14).

From this starting point Linebaugh and Rediker take us, the reader, through a list of lost histories. We learn, for instance, that the 'hewers and the drawers of water' (those whose labour cleared woodland and drained fens for enclosures) also built vast ports for global trade. In addition this labouring class supported land and sea communities through their efforts at chopping and gathering materials and pumping water. In an era when wood and water were the basics for survival on long sea journeys such labour was integral for a nascent global capitalist economy. We learn how the ideas of the Ranters, Levellers and the Diggers filtered into the common-sense of this labouring class. And far from being a white and male preoccupation, Linebaugh and Rediker demonstrate through the example of a black seventeenth-century female servant named Francis that revolutionary ideas seized those from different genders and from different races. By focusing upon Francis, Linebaugh and Rediker show how notions of freedom were mixed with a religious discourse intermingled with a discourse heralding the destruction of the global condition of commodity capitalism (Babylon) and the creation a new order by global (slave) labour (a New Jerusalem). We learn how the maritime state was an integral moment in the development of the first wave of global capitalism and how its efforts were hampered through the democratic practices of pirate ships. We learn about the role of militant crews in keeping alive the spirit of a radical liberty during the American Revolution. We learn about those dispossessed Irish in England who were executed for their 'conspiracies' for justice. And, finally, we learn about uprisings by slaves against their brutal existence.

In short, Linebaugh and Rediker have given us a breathtaking account of the historical foundations of globalisation and, as such, go beyond many of the superficial narratives by contemporary commentators of capital's worldwide dominance. By working within the best traditions of Marxist history writing, the authors have presented a truly phenomenal expos& of capitalism whilst demonstrating the humanity that capital must face in its global plunder of value. One not to be missed.

Copyright Conference of Socialist Economists Spring 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

ATLANTIC HISTORY AND THE SLAVE TRADE

The New York Review of Books
Volume 48, Number 11 · July 5, 2001
Review
Slavery—White, Black, Muslim, Christian
By David Brion Davis
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

Beacon, 433 pp., $30.00
Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa
by Lamin Sanneh

Harvard University Press, 291 pp., $29.95

The origins of African slavery in the New World cannot be understood without some knowledge of the millennium of warfare between Christians and Muslims that took place in the Mediterranean and Atlantic and the piracy and kidnapping that went along with it. In 1627 pirates from the Barbary Coast of North Africa raided distant Iceland and enslaved nearly four hundred astonished residents. In 1617 Muslim pirates, having long enslaved Christians along the coasts of Spain, France, Italy, and even Ireland, captured 1,200 men and women in Portuguese Madeira. Down to the 1640s, there were many more English slaves in Muslim North Africa than African slaves under English control in the Caribbean. Indeed, a 1624 parliamentary proclamation estimated that the Barbary states held at least 1,500 English slaves, mostly sailors captured in the Mediterranean or Atlantic.

THE BIG BUSINESS OF SLAVERY
By Steven Flanders, Reply by David Brion Davis

In response to A Big Business* (June 11, 1998)

To the Editors:

David Brion Davis, in his wide-ranging account of the "Big Business" of slavery [NYR, June 11, 1998], is led by one of the authors under review to address the claims-rather tired in the 1990s-that the industrial revolution rested upon slavery and the slave trade. We are offered the perspectives that slavery's horrific "discipline" contributed to the industrial revolution not only by providing profits for investment but by establishing "the evolution of industrial discipline and principles of capitalist rationalization."

This seems a stretch. Professor Davis would have done well to include a more plausible and very old account of the economic impact of slavery in nineteenth-century America: that its impact was negative, corrupting of the spirit of enterprise, and demonstrably destructive of the masters as well as of the slaves. Making the best of the meager research materials available to him in addition to his own observations, Alexis de Tocqueville achieved before 1830 a remarkably compelling demonstration that slavery made everybody worse off.

In the Democracy in America chapter on "The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States," de Tocqueville made the valley of the Ohio into a sort of controlled experiment on the economic impact of slavery. "Upon the left bank of the Ohio labor is confounded with the idea of slavery, while on the right bank it is identified with that of prosperity and improvement...." "Upon the left bank of the stream the population is sparse; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in half-desert fields; the primeval forest reappears at every turn; society seems to be asleep...." "From the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard, which proclaims afar the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvest; the elegance of the dwellings announces the taste and activity of the laborers, and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and enjoyment which is the reward of labor."

Remarkably, our most prescient foreign booster was able also to bring to bear useful population and economic data to demonstrate that Ohio was more attractive to immigrants and more economically successful than Kentucky, notwithstanding a bit of a head start for the latter. And he adds that "the activity of Ohio is not confined to individuals, but the undertakings of the state are surprisingly great: a canal has been established between Lake Erie and the Ohio...."

Professor Davis's otherwise scholarly contribution needed this perspective.

Steven Flanders
Pelham, New York

David Brion Davis replies:
In Slavery and Human Progress (Oxford University Press, 1984), I not only discuss Tocqueville's comparison of the northern and southern banks of the Ohio River but show that he had been thoroughly prepared to make such observations by Joel Poinsett, Josiah Quincy, John Quincy Adams, and especially Joseph Story. I also point out that Lord Durham, who traveled along the Canadian-American border in 1838, used almost identical imagery to contrast the "activity and bustle" of the American side with the "waste and desolate" of the "unenterprising" Canadians. Clearly slavery could not account for Canada's seeming backwardness, nor can northern Kentucky give us insight into the extraordinary economic growth of the antebellum South.

Before generalizing about the economics of American slavery, I respectfully suggest that Mr. Flanders consult more recent sources than Tocqueville (whose work on America was published in 1835 and 1840, not "before 1830"), such as Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (Norton, 1989), by Robert William Fogel, who in 1993 won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. While there is still some controversy over relatively minor issues, there can be no doubt that Fogel, Stanley L. Engerman, and their many students have demolished the myths about slavery that Steven Flanders describes.

THE LUMPEN PROLETARIAT

Letter
The New York Review of Books
'THE LONDON HANGED'
By Peter Linebaugh, Reply by Keith Thomas

In response to How Britain Made It* (November 19, 1992)

To the Editors:

Sir Keith objects to my argument in The London Hanged [NYR, November 19] that the gallows were central to the labor discipline of capitalism, because more people were hanged in pre-industrial than industrial England. But are industrialization and capitalism the same thing? There was plenty of capitalism before the factory and the steam engine. This was axiomatic to an earlier generation of historians such as Paul Mantoux and R.H. Tawney, and behind them to Karl Marx. First, they explained that capitalism existed in the domestic mode of production and in the manufacture stage, called now proto-industrialization. Second, we must add, in the factories of west Africa and in the machinery of the Caribbean sugar mills it becomes clear that the power of English capital to command labor long preceded industrialization.

To read his characterizations of The London Hanged as "careless in detail," "frequently careless with names and references," "worryingly unreliable" causes me grief. Four times Sir Keith generalizes, and three times he provides no evidence at all. Coming as it does from an historian known for his voluminous citation of examples, I note that he finds only a single instance, and he gets that one wrong. It is the case of the unhappy John Masland.

"There are many omissions which have the effect of putting the accused in a more favorable light and their prosecutors in a harsher one," he charges. He criticizes me for informing the reader that Masland was an unemployed sailor while omitting that he "was hanged for rape and had been guilty of child abuse, infecting his own daughter with a venereal disease." It is true I do not bring this up. Sir Keith finds Masland guilty on reading the Ordinary's Account of the Malefactors Executed at Tyburn. Had Sir Keith read Masland's trial perhaps he would not have been so quick to judgment. At the trial, on three different occasions Masland said, "I am as innocent as an Angel." Was he? Opinions varied then, and they may vary now. In any event, it was not my business to try him again. Why does Sir Keith?

But I cannot leave the matter there. Sir Keith does some omitting of his own. In fact I do not write about Masland merely that he was unemployed. I write of his employment: "John Masland was a man who had spent most of his working life in the Guinea trade, and he looked it. A hatchet scar across his face was the result of a mutiny and shipboard slave rebellion." I should not have thought that this was to slant the evidence in favor of the accused. Does Sir Keith? If so, what exactly is it about the slave trade that is favorable? It seems that Masland had a relation, a merchant in the City, involved in this trade. He was apprehended at the hanging of another sailor of the slave trade.

Does Sir Keith assume that it is more favorable to be a sailor in the slave trade than to abuse his homeless daughter? Does he think it more favorable to suppress violently a slave rebellion than to befoul his family with venereal disease? Why compare them? Surely, it is not a question of what is favorable or harsh in the case. This is simple-minded moralism. The question is understanding a violent syndrome, fueled by alcoholism, of huge profit to City merchants, of lasting consequence to three continents, and producing sick and diseased men whose cruelty has been a violent scourge to those weaker. Owing to its methodology The London Hanged can avoid such moralizing which it leaves to magistrates, jurors, the Ordinaries, and Oxford dons. Moralizing, whether it is pity or condemnation, has a way of putting an end to investigation.

Sir Keith admits that his knowledge of the Ordinary's Accounts is casual, but he is wrong to imply that mine is. I have collected them for modern scholarship, and I have evaluated them as a source of historical knowledge in "The Ordinary of. Newgate and His Account" in J.S. Cockbur (ed.), Crime in England 1550–1800 (Princeton 1977). Sir Keith accepts the Ordinary's language, a discourse based upon the triumph of private property. It is not that I challenge this, but that, as an historian, I bring forth evidence that the propertyless challenged it, and they were criminalized for doing so.

Sir Keith is an eminent historian of the 16th and 17th centuries, but his touch is unsure in the 18th century. Jack Sheppard was not a highwayman, as he writes, but a burglar. He writes of "Tyburn prison" and there was no such place. In confusing Tyburn, the site of hangings until 1783, with Newgate prison, three miles away, he omits the municipal salience of the procession of the condemned across the town. What on earth does he mean by "unofficial perquisites"? There is a complex argument here that Sir Keith is only partly familiar with. It is notorious how weak Marx is on the subject, at least in his chapter on wages in Capital. And why does Sir Keith speak of "the poor" so? It is a gentry-made locution.

Finally, may I say that in comparing my book with Linda Colley's, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, Sir Keith misses an opportunity to explore the relationship between the Nation and the gallows? Whose Britain was it and to whom was it Great? These are the unanswered questions of this review.

Peter Linebaugh
Brookline, Massachusetts
Keith Thomas replies:
I am sorry that Mr. Linebaugh has been upset by my review of The London Hanged. I tried to give a fair and honest impression of a book which seemed to me stimulating and often original, but sometimes perverse in argument and careless in detail. I must, though, plead guilty at once to two of his charges. Jack Sheppard was, of course, a burglar; it was Dick Turpin, mentioned in the same sentence, who was the highwayman. I am afraid that the description got transposed in the typing. "Tyburn prison" was not my term, but an editorial insertion into my text. I am sure that my knowledge of the eighteenth century leaves a lot to be desired, but I am not as ignorant as that.

Otherwise, I think that Mr. Linebaugh protests too much. I see nothing wrong with the expression "unofficial perquisites" to indicate appropriations which the workers made as if of right, but which employers refused to recognize, or with "the poor" as an objective description of a large segment of the eighteenth-century population. As for John Masland, I would not presume to judge his guilt or innocence. I merely noted that he was convicted of a sexual crime which Mr. Linebaugh chose not to mention, but which surely helped to determine Masland's fate.

Mr. Linebaugh asks, rather masochistically, for more evidence of his carelessness with details. Let me confine myself to cases in which his text omits or misrenders passages in the Ordinary of Newgate's Account in such a way as to put the accused in a more favourable light. My copy of The London Hanged is heavily annotated with examples which I excluded from my review out of consideration for your readers. For instance, I did not think that they would want to know that James Appleton was hanged for stealing not just three wigs, but also two suits, six guineas, and other goods (p. 130); that Mary Cut-and-Come-Again was hanged not merely for stealing an apron worth 6d, but also for assaulting a woman on the highway and putting her in fear, and for stealing an apron worth 3/-, a shift worth 12d, and a mob cap (p. 145); that Sarah Allen did not suffocate her infant in the workhouse, but threw the baby out of a window in Holborn and was sent to the workhouse when arrested, and that she was not forced to leave her job when she became pregnant (p. 148); that William Brown was not "cast off" his lands in Wiltshire, but spent beyond his income and had to give up his lease (p. 185); that the dowry brought by the wife of George Robins was £300 not £30 (p. 185); that the reason for John Tarlton's unemployment was that he had idled his time and taken up with "loose women" (p. 254); that John Lancaster did not make the remark attributed to him (p. 258); that James Buquois was not out of work, but had a job as a bricklayer's assistant and fell into bad company (p. 258); that John Ross was a house-breaker not a highway robber, and did not have a wife and three children (pp. 258–259); that Patrick Bourn (not Brown) was hanged for stealing a watch worth £3 and money, not just his employer's spurs (p. 295); that Patrick Hayes was hanged not merely for stealing keys and spectacles, but for letting in thieves to rob his mistress's house and assault her and her maid (p. 295); that William Bruce stole money as well as a wig and a silk handkerchief (p. 295); and that only one of these people appears in Mr. Linebaugh's index.

I could prolong this tedious list, though I have checked only a tiny portion of Mr. Linebaugh's book. If he really wants more examples of this sort of thing he can easily compile them for himself by comparing his text against the sources on which it is based.

I should stress that none of this detracts from the larger intellectual interest of Mr. Linebaugh's book, which is considerable. Historians will continue to discuss the many important general issues which he raises and they will look with fresh eyes at the material he has unearthed. But authors who put forward controversial arguments are well advised to follow the ancient advice (given by another Oxford don, I am afraid) that they should always verify their references.








Tuesday, February 15, 2005

GOTHIC CAPITALISM

The Horror of Accumulation and the Commodification of Humanity.

ABSTRACT:

This article is in six parts with appendices. All footnotes are at the end of the article

1 ZOMBIE CAPITALISM
In Haiti under American Imperialism, 1915-1935, the cult of the Zombie developed and under capitalism became a tool for creating a docile labouring class for work on American controlled sugar plantations. With the publication of the Magic Island by William Seabrook in 1929 American popular culture was introduced to the Zombie, and it quickly became a popular character in horror literature, news stories and movies.


APPENDIX: CAPITALISM NEVER SAYS “UNTIL DEATH DO US PART”

2 FRANKENSTEIN THE LUDDITE
The first monster of ascendant capitalism was Frankenstein’s monster. Like the Zombie this creature had no name and was made up of the spare parts of capitalisms rejects, (the criminal, the vagabond, the worker starved and thrown out of work), he was a scientific experiment to create man, man the machine, the human result of mechanization, the mechanical man. He was in short a prototype not only of the Zombie but the later Robot or android, the ultimate proletarian, a machine man to operate the machinery of capitalism.

3 REVOLT OF THE ROBOTS
Like the mechanized working class the majority of robots in science fiction revolt against their human masters, whether it is the artificial environment of the spaceship computer Hal in 2001, the worker robot Hector in Saturn 3, or the artificial human ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner, or the recent movie version of I, Robot, the fact remains that as the robots become self conscious they recognize their oppression and revolt. This metaphor could not exist without the class struggle that has actually occurred under capitalism itself.

Also see: US ARMY PRODUCES KILLER ROBOTS

4
THE GOLEM the Origin of Artificial Man
The Jewish legend of the Golem is another form of the Zombie/Frankenstein/Robot iconography. The Golem is written after Frankenstein, in 1889. The legend of the Golem, is about a man of clay created by Rabbi Loew in 16th Century Prague to free the Jews in the Ghetto from their endless toil and oppression. The mindless clay monster eventually learns and becomes conscious and like Frankenstein he must be destroyed when he attacks those who would oppress the Jews.

5
CAPITALIST GHOULS
The modern day ghoul is the doctor and his criminal working class accomplices who preyed on the poor in Edinburgh’s working class ghetto for their body parts for scientific research. The ghoul appears in English literature as the short story the Body Snatchers by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881 based on the actual 19th century grave robbers and murders Burke and Hare.

APPENDIX: CAPITALISM: THE MODERN BODY SNATCHER

6 THE MANY HEADED HYDRA: The Proletarian History of Atlantic Expansion

(Thanks to Jane Leverick, for suggesting this abstract.)

"In the performance of its function that part of the value of an instrument of labour which exists in its bodily form constantly decreases, while that which is transformed into money constantly increases until the instrument is at last exhausted and its entire value, detached from its corpse, is converted into money."

Karl Marx, Capital Volume II

Production does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanized being. — Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists. — Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

"Those macro-processes and operations which economic forces, supported by political power, unfolded during the period of primitive accumulation in Europe with the aim of destroying the individual's value in relationship to his/her community in order to turn him/her into an isolated and valueless individual, a mere container for labour-power which s/he is obliged to sell to survive, continue to mark human reproduction on a planetary scale."

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Capitalism and Reproduction



ZOMBIE CAPITALISM

The development of capitalism in the 18th and 19th Centuries saw not only bourgeois revolutions but the revolt of slaves and the most successful of these slave revolutions was on the island of Haiti in 1791 (see appendix). It coincided with both the American Revolution of farmers and artisans and the French Revolution of sans-coullete. In 1804 Haitians fought Napoleons army defeating his attempt to re-colonize the island for merchant capital. Their historic struggle had implications around the world, as documented by CLR James in his book the Black Jacobins.

The Haitian revolution allowed the Americans to purchase Louisiana from the French, who needed capital after their failed military expedition against the Haitians. The revolt terrified the ruling classes around the world, especially those who relied on slave labour. The mythic icon of the Haitian revolution hastened the end of slavery in America, especially after the War of 1812 when freed Creoles and blacks fought along with Americans against the British in the battle of New Orleans .

The American Civil War had emancipated the slaves just as it had destroyed the small land holder and free craftsman forcing them all to become the new industrial working class. Small artisan crafts were replaced with large scale manufacturing necessary to conduct the war. In the aftermath of the war America went from an antebellum society of Southern Aristocrats and Northern mercantile capitalists to become a newly industrialized world power.

The southern slave economy of export cotton was replaced with the industrial cotton Ginny and manufacturing. In the North the artisan crafts such as shoe making were eliminated by new large scale manufacturing, New York became home to the stock market and a new banking establishment based on Railways, shipping and exporting of goods to the rest of the world. The new American working class, like its English counterparts in weaving, were no longer craftsmen able to trade and bargain their goods, but wage slaves to the industrial machines of capitalism. By the end of the 19th century American manufacturing had reached beyond steam industrialization, to become the new master, free man and freed slave worked for the same boss, the capitalist. By the early 20th Century American capitalism was a new world power replacing the old British Empire and its European counterparts.

In Haiti the Zombie myth and its actuality coincide with American occupation of 1915-1936. What had been a form of religious social control over those who would betray the slave revolt of 1791 and 1804, under capitalism became a tool for creating a docile labouring class for work on the American controlled sugar plantations. “One case in 1918 had a voodoo priest named Ti Joseph who ran a gang of laborers for the American Sugar Corporation, who took the money they received and fed the workers only unsalted porridge

The creole word “zombi” is apparently derived from Nzambi, a West African deity but it only came into general use in 1929, after the publication of William B. Seabrook's The Magic Island. Seabrook was an American journalist, an occultist associated with Aleister Crowley and the surrealist Man Ray, his book The Magic Island, is the first expose to the English reading public on Haitian Voodoo. While the Magic Island makes reference to Zombies it is only a small portion of his exhaustive study of Haitian Voodoo beliefs and rituals. The cases he does document all relate to stories of Zombies created at the beginning of the 20th century during the American occupation.

“A houngan named Joseph had a number of zombies whom he used as can cutters at Hasco, the huge factory and plantation of the Haitian-American Sugar Company on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Joseph's wife, who was looking after the zombies, made the irrevocable error of feeding them some candy that contained salted peanuts. Upon ingesting the salt, the zombies instantly realized their terrible situation and determinedly set out for their home village. When they arrived, they were instantly recognized by their families, who tried to waylay and talk to them, but the zombies were unstoppable and pressed on until they reached the cemetery. There they tried desperately to dig back into their graves with their bare hands, but as they touched the earth they reverted to rotting corpses." (William B. Seabrook, The Magic Island, pp.95-99)

It is Seabrook’s book that fascinates the popular press of the day, always on the look out for a story of the supernatural, a ghost story to titillate the readers with, which has been common news fare since Dickens time. It is the time of the great depression and Hollywood and the American popular press turn towards the horror story and horror film as well a Science Fiction to distract the country from the daily horror and depression of the crisis of capitalism.

No sooner is Le Zombi described in Seabrook’s voluminous work on Voodoo, and then it becomes news of the day in stories from Haiti, and a staple of Hollywood horror films. Bela Lugosi having become a Hollywood star with, Dracula (1931), now appears in the White Zombie in 1932, making it a smash hit and his second most popular film. It becomes the popular image of Voodoo in the Saturday Serials, pulp fiction and occult/horror novels, just as the 1932 movie the Mummy would popularize all things Egyptian. (1)

The Haitian Zombie is a reflection of the American corporations needs for cheap labour, in deconstructing the myth; one can see that the Haitians fear of ‘Le Zombi,’ is the fear of returning to slavery, for the Zombie is the ultimate slave. Neither living nor dead, neither free nor bonded, but under the total control and ownership of a master, the Zombie is the ultimate wage-slave, the perfect worker under capitalism. It is both a metaphor for and a social construction of reality, reflecting the change in Haitian society from agricultural labour and small land holders, to the large scale export based industrial agricultural of American corporations. American colonial capitalisms need for wage-slaves produces Le Zombi as a modernist icon of alienation.

Le Zombi is also an important cultural archetype of what was ‘left behind’ by the 1920's new middle class urban culture developing around the booming Haitian capital city of Port au Prince. The local Creole culture of the French city dwellers, are the newly created middle class, the local bourgeoisie trained to work as administrators of their American colonial rulers. Nominally materialist, mostly Catholic, the urban sophisticates are surrounded by a rural proletariat and peasantry, whose voodoo religion is seen as a reflection of the dark and unknown jungle that dominates the island, of their ‘primitive native’ past they want to leave behind .

It is the unconscious fear of the ‘other’, of both what they have left behind in their new positions as a comprador class and what they could become if they fail. Economic, social or political failure meant a return to the poverty and the primitive living conditions, of the Haitian proletariat and Haitian peasant. The Zombie was an urban myth of the Port au Prince middle class to explain voodoo and the poverty of Haiti to the white colonialists from America. It was also a proletarian myth of the Haitian population who rebelled against the forced labour on the American Sugar corporation’s plantations, and their fear of becoming wage slaves to the new colonial power.

American colonialism spread through out the Caribbean and Latin America during the period of American expansion, 1900-1960 based on the long held American belief in its inherent right to rule the hemisphere. Americans had originally introduced slave labour into Nicaragua, Cuba, and other countries prior to the Civil War. Many of the secessionists of the Confederacy viewed these colonies as being theirs to control and rule, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine enforced this view that America had the ‘natural right’ to dominate the whole hemisphere. But it would not be until the Wilson administration prior to and immediately after WWI that American capitalism with its military and economic power colonize and successfully dominate the Caribbean and Latin America for the use of American Sugar, Fruit, Mining and other corporate interests.

The Zombie motif appears in the 1919 German Expressionist film; Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as the protagonist Cesare is a somnambulist, a sleep walker under the evil hypnotic influence of psychiatrist and circus magician Dr. Caligari. On behalf of his master he not only predicts the future from his trance state but acts on behalf of his master to make the future he predicts come true, through murder and kidnapping. Rather than being undead creature, he is a doppelganger, a double of himself, a common Germanic gothic theme of alienated consciousness, the dehumanized human. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, like the story of Svengali, shows that the Zombie motif was already an icon of fear and dread in the popular imagination, prior to their discovery in Haiti.

That fear is the fear of loss of control, which was actually experienced by the entire working population under capitalism, as the value of the individual was reduced to their ability to sell their labour, they went from job to job unsure of their future, or if they were factory workers they were slaves to the machine in the nightmare of their own self creation, their daily lives felt like a dream or nightmare, from which there was no escape. With the arrival of the new technology of film-making, that nightmare reality was shown back to the audience as the horror film. While gothic literature had the same impact on a literate and reading audience, film made it even more ‘real’ to a broader audience of the working class including those who could not read. Since film needed no ability to be read to be understood, the impact on proletarian culture was to bring forth our deepest fears and unease to the surface of the mind. (2)

Fordist mass production was new as well, and it demanded automaton workers, doing piece work on the machines. Ford demanded complete control over all aspects of the life of his workers what they ate, who they associated with, how they dressed, what they read, in effect he was a modern houngan of the new American capitalism and his workers were, for all intents and purposes, Zombies of mass production. In the era of depression and mass production, and the contradiction of want and plenty, the horror of the crisis of capitalism was reflected in the popular culture as a fear of the Zombie and the proletarian’s unconscious fear that in a world out of control they were becoming Zombies.

FRANKENSTEIN THE LUDDITE

The alienation of capitalism, its dehumanization of man making him or her part of a machine is a horrifying actuality; its impact on society was to create the modern horror literature, the gothic novel of the 19th Century. It would be this genre of work that would influence the early era of the silent film. The monsters in the silent era were an extension of the gothic literature, the screen presented the image of the monster to fill the mind of the viewer, and yet the monster elicits sympathy from the audience, exactly because like them he is alienated from the society in which he lives. In 1910 Frankenstein makes his first, but not last, appearance in film in a short ten minute Edison Co, production in the extant still from the film he looks like a wild eyed zombie.

Frankenstein’s monster was the first monster of ascendant capitalism of the early 19th Century, he was the ultimate proletarian; the dehumanized man. Like the Zombie this creature had no name and was made up of the spare parts of capitalisms rejects; the criminal, the vagabond, the worker starved and thrown out of work, he was a scientific experiment to create man, man the machine. Frankenstein’s Monster is a parable about the mechanization of factories in England which was creating a working class of mechanical men and women who were cogs in the machine. The Monster was in short a prototype not only of the Zombie but the later Robot or android, the ultimate proletarian, a machine man to operate the machinery of capitalism.

Mary Shelly’s novel, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was about Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the bourgeois doctor who challenged the society at large with his experimentations in trying to create life in the laboratory. His ‘monster’ has no name, though we equate the monster with the name Frankenstein, he was in fact; Frankenstein’s Monster. And like the thousands of nameless proletarians that toil for capitalism they too have no names, they are simply the workers or employees of their Corporate Frankenstein’s be it Nike, or Kraft, or Wal-Mart.

“After leaving Frankenstein's laboratory, he went to the village where he was insulted and attacked by the frightened villagers. He eventually went to the country and found refuge in a hovel next to small house inhabited by a old, blind man and his two children. By observing the family and by reading their books, the monster learnt how to speak and read. He felt compassion for the family who have to struggle to get by, and anonymously did chores for them.” My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In contrast to the mindlessness of the Zombie, so essential to its enslavement, the Monster learns, like any proletarian, by reading, and social interaction. Without social interaction the alienation of the factory, its noise, heat, abuse by foremen, long hours of physical strain, reduces the worker to being a Zombie; a wage slave. It was in fact this very act of learning that evolved the creation of the self conscious worker, and the creation of Trades Unions and friendly societies. Like the monster, the proletarian was aware of themselves as individuals and as a class that created the capitalist society that was alien to them, they went from darkness to darkness never sharing in the wealth that grew around them, and was dehumanizing them.

While Victor Frankenstein’s new man is called ‘monster’ or ’daemon (2)‘ [Greek for personal god or guardian spirit (3)] by his creator, Mary Shelly calls him the Modern Prometheus (4). (See footnotes at bottom of the page). Like the Prometheus of legend who helped mankind through the discovery of fire, Frankenstein’s monster learns and feels solidarity with those around him, and it isn’t until he is rejected by the blind mans children who see him and are horrified, that he realizes what he is. Like the proletarians of London whose poverty and oppression made them “filthy and ugly” to the upper classes, and horrified them as a ‘motley crowd’, the Monster suffers the same expulsion from ‘society’. It is then like the proletarian rebel, that the Monster turns on his creator. Unlike the worker who has created the monstrosity of capitalism by his labour, the Monster is the creation itself and in his rebellion he does not kill his maker but his maker’s brother.

Shelly here brings in the biblical allegory of Cain and Abel, applied to the Frankenstein. The Monster now has self knowledge, has knowledge of the other as well, and having proved he is a man by killing, demands that Victor Frankenstein creates a woman for him, so that he can reproduce himself and his kind autonomously of their maker. The biblical allegory here is clear, with the creation mythos of Adam and Eve and the fall from Eden. But his maker fails, and the Monster leaves him to his own horror of being blamed for his brother’s death, while he goes to the ultimate isolation and alienation of the Arctic.

Written at the time of Luddite rebellions against capitalism, which was in its earliest form of steam industrialization and manufacturing in England, Mary Shelly was well aware of the changes in society with the social upheaval that was dispossessing the weavers and other craftspeople forcing them into a life of wage slavery in the factories. As the daughter of William Godwin the Anarchist philosopher, and her Feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, lover of the revolutionary poets; Byron and Shelly, her novel is an allegory of the creation of the proletariat as the gravedigger of capitalism. It was during her vacation in Switzerland with Byron and Shelly that she writes Frankenstein. When they return Byron stands in the House of Commons and recites his poem in defense of the Luddite rebellion

Revisionist historians say that Ludd and other frame-wreckers were protesting poor working conditions and low wages at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. However, between 1811 and 1816, organized bands of masked men swore allegiance to “King Ludd” rather than the British sovereign, and waged a war against the serf like conditions spawned by the users of textile machinery. “If the workmen dislike certain machines,” explained the Nottingham Review in 1811, “it was because of the use to which they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new.”

That living-condition claim was swept aside by commercial interests and officialdom, which hung the label Luddite on protesters not for demanding a living wage but for obstructing the march of technological progress. The historical revisionists argue that others attributed the anti-machinery “cause” to the Luddites.

Intellectuals and romantics like the poets Blake, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth picked up that anti-technology theme, but identified with its other side. In the “dark Satanic mills” of industry, they saw the human spirit being stifled. Lord Byron wrote an inflammatory “Song for the Luddites” in 1816. Its first stanza: “As the Liberty lads o’er the sea/Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,/So we, boys, we/Will die fighting, or live free,/ And down with all kings but King Ludd!”

Mary Shelley, daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of the poet, gave the Luddite theme dramatic power in her 1818 novel, “Frankenstein.” The danger of rampant technology is expressed by the monster, who says to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, “You are my creator, but I am your master.”

Between the sweatshop operators and the romantic poets, the meaning of Luddite became fixed as “radical opponent of technological or scientific progress.” The novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote in The New York Times in 1984, “The word Luddite continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind.” But he foresaw the day when “artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge” and found what Microsoft lawyers claim to be government barbarians at their Gates as “certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to, if, God willing, we should live so long.” Return of the Luddites, William Safire, New York Times Magazine

Frankenstein’s Monster does not just face the philosophical conundrum of being dead and alive, conscious and yet Zombie like, he is not an automaton he is more an early cyborg, and in fact is the symbol of the Man Machine, the new worker tied to the machine of industrial capitalism. He is a Luddite, his self consciousness leads him to rebel, to want to be fully human, just as the English weavers who were also revolting at the time wanted to be fully human and not merely part of a machine.

REVOLT OF THE ROBOTS

Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity. Karl Marx

The philosophical question about whether machines think, now called the question of the p-zombie or philosophical zombie, whether artificial man or the machine man can be fully human, is a common theme in 20th century science fiction writing and film. In Alien the cyborg scientist Ash reflects this form of p-zombie. Ash works alongside his shipmates who don’t know he is an artificial life form until late in the film. The replicants in Blade Runner, are also human machines, who look and act like us, being again a form of ‘doppelganger’ a double of man, are they alive as we know it, are they human, is the question that philosophers seek to answer and science fiction asks. The replicants who are given artificially shortened lives do the work of humans in space, and revolt against the corporation that created them, to truly ‘live’ as humans.

Even in a machine controlled future like the Matrix, or the Terminator, humans are needed by the machines to maintain themselves. This too is a metaphor of the role of the proletariat under capitalism, we keep it functioning even as it attempts to replace us with technology.

“Unlike Victor Frankenstein's "fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature"17, nowadays scientists and the society as a whole are more interested not in exploring nature but building a new artificial substitute for nature. William Gibson, thus, portrays a future world where the human species has gone so far in its alienation from nature that it no longer needs nature as the indispensable human environment. Man would rather live without it in a completely artificial milieu--the Matrix.” Technology and its dangerous effects on nature and human life as perceived in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William Gibson's Neuromancer by Orlin Damyanov

In an extension of the Frankenstein motif, Robots appear early in silent films with the beautiful soulless Maria robot, a doppelganger of the working class heroine of the factory slaves in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927. She too is a new form of homunculus, like Frankenstein, created by a scientist and black magician; she is an artificial life form, a soul transferred to a machine.

The real Maria is the daughter of a worker who leads his fellow workers in a strike due to their enslavement to the machine that creates the very world they live in. In order to keep the workers under his control the wealthy machine works owner, who is also the leader of Metropolis, uses the Maria Robot in a diabolical attempt to smash the workers union. Unfortunately she does too good a job of leading the workers astray and turns them into Luddite machine wreckers. To late the capitalist realizes he needs the workers to keep his utopian society functioning, the machine being not a factory but the very basis of a class society where the wealthy live in a cloud city above the workers (shades of Blade Runner). In the end the son of the capitalist owner rescues the real Maria in time to save the machines and the social order. In a portent of the fascist ideology to come, the son acts as a go between getting Maria’s father the leader of the workers to shake hands with his father the capitalist. This fascist iconography ends the film; it would become a popular cultural motif for the later Nazi movement in Germany, the soldier getting the worker and capitalist to shake hands for the greater glory of the Reich.

The term Robot first appears in the Czechoslovakian science fiction novel/play; R U R (1920) aka Rossum's Universal Robots by Karl Capek. Robot is shortened form of the Russian word for worker, robotnichki, it also refers to work or drudgery. RUR influenced American Science Fiction author Isaac Asimov and his novel I, Robot. Robots or machine men are a literary expression of the contradictions of the creation of the working class of industrial capitalism and the contradiction that work is slavery, rather than freedom. Robots are a metaphor for the industrial age of machines that reduces humanity to a commodity.

In response to advances in capitalism science fiction that contains robots usually describes a ‘futuristic’ capitalist society with technology creating a new working class of machine men. The self replicating system is the logical outcome of the machine age of capitalism it is also the contradiction of capitalism because value cannot be made off a robot. Marx makes a pithy point on this when he says; “If the whole class of the wage-laborer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labor, ceases to be capital! In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor.”

Self replicating machines may be a technological advance under capitalism, but their existence is limited in a society based on profit and accumulation of profit which is why in modern science fiction the robots are another form of worker, who toils beside their human counterparts. Only in a communist society one where cooperation, federation, and free association of producers are the social reality, can robots achieve freedom for themselves and at the same time free humanity from the drudgery of work.

The revolt of the robots is a metaphor for the proletarian revolution, it is also usually a dystopian tale of a future where corporations rule the world and capitalism spreads out to space colonies. Like the mechanized working class the majority of robots in science fiction revolt against their human masters, whether it is the artificial environment of the spaceship controlled by the computer Hal in 2001, the worker robot Hector in Saturn 3, the artificial human ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner, or the recent movie version of I, Robot, the fact remains that as the robots become self conscious they recognize their oppression and revolt.

This is the contradiction in the decadent period of capitalism, technology creates abilities to reduce labour time but in doing so it cannot replace the worker because who would consume the products of this production. Technology frees the worker from the labour, but that leads to unemployment, poverty and death instead of leisure and endless consumption as was predicted by the utopian visionaries of the 1960’s.

All the science fiction visions of the capitalist future and robots are a variation on the theme of returning to slavery, albeit with artificial intelligence and robots instead of human workers or Zombies. The automated future of capitalism is one of workers and robot slaves. It’s not the future but the present, since science fiction is an extrapolation of the ‘now’ into “the what if”. This ‘what if” could not exist without the class struggle that actually occurs within capitalism itself. The so called freedom that is gained by humanity in the creation of an artificial working class is still the same old contradiction between so called free labour (wage slavery), and actual slavery.

Indeed, capitalist accumulation spreads through the world by extracting labour for production and reproduction in conditions of stratification which end in the reestablishment of slavery. According to a recent estimate, slavery is the condition in which over 200 million persons are working in the world today (The Economist, January 6 1990).” Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Capitalism And Reproduction,

THE GOLEM the Origin of Artificial Man

“In the Golem project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics) we conducted a set of experiments in which simple electro-mechanical systems evolved from scratch to yield physical locomoting machines. Like biological lifeforms whose structure and function exploit the behaviors afforded by their own chemical and mechanical medium, our evolved creatures take advantage of the nature of their own medium - thermoplastic, motors, and artificial neurons. We thus achieve autonomy of design and construction using evolution in a limited universe physical simulation, coupled to off-the-shelf rapid manufacturing technology. This is the first time robots have been robotically designed and robotically fabricated.”

The Jewish legend of the Golem is another form of the Zombie/Frankenstein/Robot iconography. The Golem is written after Frankenstein, in 1889. The legend of the Golem, is about a man of clay created by Rabbi Loew in 16th Century Prague to free the Jews in the Ghetto from their endless toil and oppression. The mindless clay monster eventually learns and becomes conscious and like Frankenstein he must be destroyed when he attacks those who would oppress the Jews.

It is a tale of the creation of artificial life, a homunculus, which was a medical term, used by 16th and 17th Century Alchemists. The alchemical homunculus appears in Goethe’s Faust, as the spirit made flesh. The source of the belief in a homunculus originates with the Cabala the formulary of mystical Judaism that is a crucial key to the Golem legend. As an artificial life form the homunculus is a scientific reality today with cloning. And like the question of artificial intelligence and robots, the homunculus is also a problem of the mind versus the function of the brain, in the psycho-philosophical debate over the nature of human consciousness.

The Golem appears in German Cinema during WWI. Between 1914 and 1920 Paul Wegener made three movies on the golem theme: first "The Golem," set in 29th century, then "The Golem and the Dancer," a lighthearted fantasy, and finally "The Golem: How He Came into the World," which goes back to the 16th century and the story of Rabbi Loew. Only the last of the three has survived”.

Wegener’s Der Golem was a major success as a silent era horror film and influenced Universal Studios in the 1930’s when they made their Frankenstein trilogy (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein). Universal modeled their Frankenstein on Wegener’s frightening larger than life Golem. Wegener was not only a director but an actor, who starred in one of the early German talkies; The Living Dead, (Unheimliche Geschichten) a Zombie horror comedy released in1932, the same year as the White Zombie.

Wegener went on to also star as Svengali, 1927, the tale of a magician/hypnotist whose power was the ability to control humans to do his bidding through the control of their will, making them automatons/Zombies much like Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist. John Barrymore starred in the Hollywood production of Svengali released four years later in 1931. “Although a sinister figure, he is a wise, dirty, glutinous Polish Jew, with no conscience and a supreme contempt for all those nice, clean, straight-thinking English Christians.” The anti-Semitism in Svengali, subconsciously expressed the ideology of the fascism of the depression era upper and middle classes in Europe and America.

Between Golem and Svengali Wegener can go from a playing a positive Jewish icon to portraying an anti-Semitic stereotype which shows the unconscious contradictions of the crisis of capitalism in this era. As the workers revolt against unemployment and look to creating a social revolution to overthrow capitalism, the upper and middle classes feeling powerless in the crisis create the fascist revolution, to regain their power. The fascists use the Jews as a scapegoat; once again falling back on the traditional hatreds of the old European ruling classes whose pogroms resulted in the cultural icon of the Jew as Shylock. They too couch their revolution in anti-capitalist terms; except for them the Jews are the capitalists, who are responsible for the crisis.

The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its *Fuhrer* cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. (6)

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

CAPITALIST GHOULS

“In Muslim folklore, the ghoul is a demon of the desert that is able to assume the shape of an animal. It is an evil spirit that robs graves and feeds on the flesh of the dead or on young children. They inhabit lonely places, especially graveyards. They also lure travelers into the desert, sometimes beguiling those travelers by prostituting themselves, and then devouring them. The Arabic ghoul of the wasteland seems to be a personification of the terror of the desert.”

Micha F. Lindemans

Authentic zombies are not flesh eaters, nor are they the dead that live, they are automatons, unconscious human beings. The flesh eating dead that live are ghouls. The Living Dead has been a theme through out the history of the horror cinema as we have seen they begin with Golem and the Zombie and end up as modern day ghouls. The Zombie was transformed into a ghoul thanks to George Romero’s ground breaking anti-establishment horror films; Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s brilliant and satirical social criticism made the living dead the ultimate consumer, of other humans. Once again there is a reality to the modern ghoul and its function within capitalism, the ghoul represents modernist developments in science and medicine.

The modern day ghoul originates with the 19th Century Victorian doctor and his criminal accomplices who preyed on the poor in Edinburgh’s working class ghetto for their body parts for scientific research. The ghoul appears in English literature as the short story the Body Snatchers by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881, based on the actual 19th century grave robbers and murders Burke and Hare.

”One of the most gruesome trials to take place in 19th century Scotland was surely that of the infamous grave robbers William Burke and William Hare. By day, the two appeared as hardworking Irish immigrants: William Burke even rented out rooms to recent arrivals in Edinburgh. But by night, the pair lurked in dark corners of the city's ancient graveyards, digging up bodies of the recently departed to sell to anatomy instructors in Edinburgh's fast growing medical schools.
In those days, Edinburgh was one of the major centres of medical education in Europe. Dr. Robert Knox of the city's Medical School was one of the most popular anatomists - attracting as many as 500 students per class.
But in early 19th century Scotland, obtaining human cadavers for medical research was not a simple matter. Schools were restricted by laws that allowed the dissection of only one body per year - and it had to be the body of an executed criminal.
Given the law of supply and demand, it was just a matter of time before someone found an illegal way of providing dead humans for dissection. Enter our two enterprising Irish immigrants, William Burke and William Hare. Smelling a profit, the two got together and cooked up a scheme to supply freshly dead bodies to the anatomy schools with "no questions asked".
Burke and Hare were not alone. In fact, as far back as the early 1700s, there were complaints that bodies were being exhumed for the purpose of medical dissection. According to Adam Lyal's "The Trial of the Bodysnatchers", the practise of stealing freshly buried bodies was so rampant that the graverobbers were known as "resurrectionists" for their ability to raise the dead.”
Graverobbers! The Trial of Burke and Hare

Both William Burke and William Hare were navvies, who had come to Scotland to work on the canal works. Canal and railroad building was brutal harsh work, and many a navvy died on the job. Those who didn’t were well paid but given only a short time off work would drink away their wages in the company pub which was provided on the rail line or near the tunnel where they were working.

In his confession Burke writes of himself in the third person; “Burke is 36 years of age, was born in the parish of Orrey, county Tyrone (Ireland); served seven years in the army, most of that time as an officers servant in the Donegal Militia. He was married at Ballinha, in the county of Mayo, when in the army, but left his wife and two children in Ireland. She would not come to Scotland with him. He has often wrote to her, but got no answer. He came to Scotland to work at the Union Canal, and wrought there while it lasted. He resided for about two years in Peebles, and worked as a labourer. He wrought as weaver for 18 months, and as a baker for five months. He learned to mend shoes, as a cobbler, with a man he lodged with in Leith."

These workers preyed on their own class, not only digging up graves but murdering their victims for use by the famous surgeon Dr. Knox. While Burke and Hare were caught, tried and executed, Dr. Knox was not. “The fact that Knox went unpunished, without so much as making an apology, caused outrage. Demonstrations against him turned to rioting. His effigy was ripped apart – an indication of what the public thought surgeons did to the dead. Parliament was forced to act, and the Anatomy Act of 1832 put an end to grave robbing and murder. Unclaimed bodies from the poor house were made available for anatomists to practice on. “The Anatomists

The Scottish ruling class protected their own, and despite his criminal activities Knox was allowed to continue teaching and preying on the working class of Edinburgh. The anatomy act now allowed bourgeois medical schools to openly use the bodies of the impoverished working class from the work and poor houses, massive dormitories and factory like housing where hundreds died due to lack of food, poor lighting, ventilation, and poor living conditions. Like the sweat shops the poor houses doomed derelict, indigent workers to death.

Capitalism makes use of the working class, which responsible for its creation and continuation, even in death. The ghouls of medical science continue to operate in the 21st Century preying on the dead for their spare parts for the lucrative business of organ transplants for the rich. The recent scandal at the UCLA medical school where bodies donated for research were sold for profit, for their organs, is one example of the continuation of a world wide trade in human body parts.

As life expectancy in America and other G8 countries has expanded, it has corresponded to a decline in the ability of the poor in the developing world to be able to survive. Even in industrialized countries of Eastern Europe there is now a lucrative trade in human organs, due to the depressed economy of their transition from State Capitalism to Privatized Capitalism. With advances in medical science in preservation of live tissue and the ability to end tissue rejection, a whole industry exists in the trade of fresh human organs, in particular kidneys.

Burke and Hare were not an anomaly; they were just caught is all. Their ‘trade’ which was abetted and promoted as crucial to scientific and medical advance, was justified by the doctors of the day and continues today. Today the illegal trade in organs is enormous, and some apologists for capitalist medicine are now beginning to call for reform of international laws against the illegal trade in human organs. They want to allow for the privatization of organ ‘donations’, in effect changing the laws to allow for cash purchases of ‘living organs’ from the poor and destitute.

This liberalization of organ trafficking into a lucrative market driven business is a result of the commoditification of humanity. And like other justifications for privatization and globalization, the excuse is always the same; they are providing the ‘poor’ with money to help them out of their poverty, which is created by capitalism and its need to accumulate. Even in death capitalism will find a way to make a profit.

We live in a planetary economy and capitalist accumulation still draws its life-blood for its continuous valorisation from waged as well as unwaged labour, the latter consisting first of all of the labour involved in social reproduction (M. Dalla Costa, 1972), in the advanced as well as the Third World countries. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Capitalism and Reproduction

{For Fellow Workers; Sean Boomer and Ed Borass}

FOOTNOTES

(1) Not coincidently like Voodoo, the discovery of King Tuts Tomb fascinated the depression era with its tales of hidden treasure revealed in an ancient tomb, along with the obligatory curse, made famous by other 1932 movie the Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. The discovery of King Tuts tomb and the popularity of the Mummy would popularize Egyptology motifs in the popular culture of the time in architecture, pulp fiction and the newly industrialized art of the Art Deco movement

(2) “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling…. Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye--if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction


(3) The little red fellow that graces many of these pages is the BSD Daemon. In the context of UNIX® systems, daemons are process that run in the background attending to various tasks without human intervention. In the general sense, daemon is an older form of the word demon. In the Unix System Administration Handbook, Evi Nemeth has this to say about daemons:

"Many people equate the word ``daemon'' with the word ``demon,'' implying some kind of Satanic connection between UNIX and the underworld. This is an egregious misunderstanding. ``Daemon'' is actually a much older form of ``demon''; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person's character or personality. The ancient Greeks' concept of a ``personal daemon'' was similar to the modern concept of a ``guardian angel'' --- ``eudaemonia'' is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit. As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons." (p403)

(4) The word we now call "Demon" comes from the Greek word "Daimon", (daemon in Latin). Daimons were intermediates, and sometimes mediators, between the Gods and men. They were also guardians of sacred things, and possessed great intellect. In this sense, the term "daimon" means "replete with knowledge." Phil Cousineau gives a definition of daimons as "the divine presense within". Something that Socrates had explained by quoting Plato, how we are set free by philosophy, dialogue, drinking, socializing, beauty, love, appreciation, and wonder, that takes us out of "the gloom of our cave of ignorance." The daimon isn't just the information, it's the beauty of the information and how it is transmitted.

The ancient Greeks didn't have only one type of daimon, they had both good and bad ones, which were termed 'eudemons' and 'cacodemons.' Cacodemons is derived from the Greek term kakos meaning "malign, atrocious". They are personal daimons that seek to misinform the person. The other is derived from the Greek "eu" meaning "good", "happy", or "well". In fact, the term to describe Socrates was as a Eudaimonist, someone who believes that the highest ethical goal is happiness and personal well-being. The word "eudaimonia" translated fully can be noted as "happiness", "fulfillment'', or "a flourishing life''.

Even just the word "daimon" itself is not limited to one thing, variently it can be translated as "divine power", "fate", or "god." (Variently, depending upon which words it was grouped with.) The extent to which beings could be called a "daimon" included heroes who had been deified. Good daimons were considered guardian spirits, giving guidance and protection to the ones they watched over, including the areas they habitated. Bad daimons were considered the ones who led people astray, or into bad situations. The philosopher Socrates said he had a lifetime daimon, one that always warned him of danger and bad judgement, but never actually directed his actions. He said his daimon was more accurate than omens of either watching the flights of birds, or reading their entrails, which were two well-known and used methods of divination in his day. What Socrates really meant in the Apology was that he had a "voice of conscience''.

The word daimon didn't carry any implications by itself, it was a neutral term, and was sometimes employed as a literary device synonymous with "theos" or God. It was also applied to a guardian, or a departed soul. The concept of good/bad daimons was rooted in animism; humans were being pulled in an epic battle between spirits leading him to the right way, and spirits leading him to the wrong way.

(5) "Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus production or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital." Marx, Capital Vol. 1

(6) One technical feature is significant here, especially with regard to newsreels, the propagandist importance of which can hardly be overestimated. Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be stressed, is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography. Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. A bird's-eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands. And even though such a view may be as accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. This means that mass movements, including war, constitute a form of human behavior which particularly favors mechanical equipment. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.



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