SLAVERY
SLAVERY
HELL INCARNATE
&
UTTERLY EVIL
Need We Enumerate Every Point of Pain?
Abduction
Rape
Torture
Murder
The Desolation of Families
&
The Disease of Generations
That is Destroying Us Today
based on the false concept of property
-culturally transmitted-
these thousands of years
practically hardwired into our brain
the common mind we all share
-ya know-
it's that polar extreme again
remember?
The one can't exist without the other.
ya know what i mean?
I'm talking about
not putting
our responsibility
on
god and the devil
anymore.
NO MASTERS
&
NO SLAVES
SLAVE LABOR
It Built the World
From the Tower of Babel
To the Pyramids
To the Great Wall of China
To the Foundation of World Dominance
By the United States of America
Without slavery europeans could not have created the system of capitalism that operates our world and human relationship. It required vast amounts of wealth, both actual and symbolic, to initiate and establish so successful a system of subjugation. While lots of folks like to point out Newton's science and the philosophies of Machievelli, Malthus, and Descartes as the means and motivatioon of the most recent phase of human evolution, they rarely mention that it was slave labor - the black African in particular, with some help from Chinese and Indian and Native lands stolen - that was the force and raw material that created the planetary wealth that is enjoyed, in particular, by the white, christian, european and american.
and it's those same
white, christian
europeans and americans
that's runnin things now
all based on that odd notion we call
property
(Death puts the concept of property in its proper perspective.)
so absurd a notion
that it requires the point of a sword
to make it believable
but now the idea of property has taken root
in our psychological soil
-fertilized by the fear of death for thousands of years-
it has become nearly fossilized
impossible to cut down
but that's ok
we have merely to leave it alone
undisturbed
it will become a relic
a memento of our primitive past
The most common form of slavery today is debt bondage.
-actual for the poor and virtual for the rich-
The one is physical and the other mental.
each equally catastrophic
The poor are paid less than it takes to live a healthy life.
-ergo-
They are forever in debt.
'cause there's never enough money
The rich pursue a futile illusion of security.
-at the expense of the poor-
Because there is never enough money.
to buy off death
though they may not hold complete legal title
over our body, mind and soul
the result is the same
ok! ok!
let's cut the crap
and stop beatin bout the bush
and call it what it is in today's world
-labor-
that's what it all boils down to
-labor / management-
the rest is just conflict
between the managements of power structures
in competition
for dividing the spoils
or
laborers
acting out their petty dramas
searching for glory
in the midst of property
the poor take the shit
so the rich don't hafta
it's labor
that works the whole world
according to the plan
laid out by management
It is the laborer who makes possible our ablility, or lack thereof, to carry out whatever activity we participate in. It is labor that produces our food, picks up the garbage, builds our homes, and buries our dead and carries out the essential every day tasks of mankind.
There is an innate nobility in those who labor. It is not just putting in a hard days work that makes a laborer, anyone may put in a days work, gain from it, and feel good about it. It is laborers who sacrifice their lives so that a few others may prosper. A laborer lives his or her life, day after day, year in and year out, at the bottom of society. He not only supports his dependents at subsistence level or worse, but sees his work create great wealth for those who stand over him directing his life's energy and determining the material quality of his life.
It is not the owners and managers of property, machinery, and materials who create real, tangible wealth. They play only a small abstract, secondary role that could be replaced with a clerk and a computer. It is the people who get up every day and go to jobs where they perform physicall, repetitious, monotonous, mind numbing work (that nobody would do for its own sake) that creates wealth. Let the workers stay home and see what gets done.
But the saddest part of it all is that the laborer, in order to perform the tasks society demands, in order for her and her family to survivie, the laborer must kill off the most valuable part of herself, her true creativity, her freedom to see the potential for truth and beauty in the world and human relationship. Because if she does not kill off that part of herself, she will take immediate action to dismantle the corrupt, contaminated society in which she lives - and that might risk her ability to survive. It's the factor of fear built into our society. Hidden from humanity, it's the linchpin that holds the absurdities together - the fear of death. Ignoring the fact of our death, the self rules society.
As long as we live under the conditions where the goal of the big wigs runnin things is to obtain the greatest amont of work for the least amount of pay and the goal of the worker is to gain the most pay for the least work, there will be no lasting peace. For a time, in a few instances, there may be truce, while the laborer's needs are sufficiently satisfied. While his mind is occupied with things like cars, televisions, telephones, and refrigerators, his belly full and his mind stupefied by various entertainments, there may be a period of superficial satisfaction for a segment of workers. But it cannot last. A slave well taken care of is still a slave.
Our material standards will never have a chance of matching our master's material standard. Because of the boss's power position, he will continue to move closer to his goals to the same extent we move further from ours. The gulf betweem the rich and the poor widens. There is a growing global consciousness of the gross injustice perpetrated by the powerful over the weak. The more we are aware of this, the more we will refuse to accept it.
The foundation of the global injustice that rules our world is the concept of property. Certain aspects of property arise obviously and naturally in life, while other aspects are imposed by military force, police, judges, and jails. The whole world is divided up - everything is owned by somebody. Some few of recognized property rights are actual, most are abstract. What is real is the food on your table, the clothes on your back and the roof over your head. What is absurdly abstract is ownership of any fragment of the Earth.
Among equally provisioned persons, questions concerning and disputes over ownership rarely occur. It's in the presence of unequal wealth distribution - as it so grossly is in the world today - that the ownership of property is the central issue of human relationship. It is the absolutely absurd, abstract, and arbitrary aspect of our concept of property that makes it necessary to use weapons to prop it up. Property originated with military might and has been passed down to us today through a tradition of inheritance and wars between structures of power.
The concept of ownership, born with the self, the me, creating 'mine' as opposed to you and yours, the first splinter of fragmentation in the mind of man, is an idea born of the fear that the thing one now holds may be lost. We so readily ignore death. Ownership is a social convention to maintain order within a group of people, a convention to be used or tossed aside at the whim of a holder of power. A convention to be used or tossed aside by a group of people dealing with another group, an excuse for war, exploitation, and brutality. The ownership of property is the major source of income for the minority who control the worlds wealth.
How does an owner derive profit from owning a factory, or any stockholder of any corporation for that matter? He doesn't actually hold the factory as a physical activity. He doesn't stick it in his pocket and take it to the store and pull dollar bills out of it. The owner does, however, possess an imaginary, though legal, type of control over the functioning of the business.
What actually produces the profit are people, the people who mass produce, mass market, and mass consume the world of products and services. The little people who survive on a minimal wage, who operate the machines in the factories, who go down in the mines, build the buildings, harvest the crops, who actually put their minds and bodies on the line daily, in back breaking labor. We produce the profit for owners.
And buddy, you better believe that very little of that profit goes to improve the life of the laborer, much less anyone worse off. It is we who live in poverty who provide for the rich. We take the shit so the rich don't hafta. The reason is simply because we are stronger and more intelligent - intelligence being "the ability to deal with ... trying situations". We have to be in order to survive. The rich don't do anything intelligent, they just use information and power to manipulate ideas, events, people, and material to maintain the status quo.
I've been a laborer living in poverty most of my life and i find it no wonder that the working man is so easily held down. He's worn out from working all the time to get a little further behind in the rat race. And of course he done been psychologically euthanatized at an early age. Then he spends the rest of his life struggling with those who control power and their minions.
Though the validity of this imaginary legal concept of ownership usually lies in some desk drawer, safety deposit box or an obscure file cabinet or shelf in some distant government building, it is seemingly more concrete and more significant than the actual "ownership" a man possesses of his own life. The laborer owns his life if nothing else, yet he is forced to turn around and sell himself daily for an hourly wage - essentially nothing in relation to his true worth - and participate in an activity which produces profit for someone who doesn't actually need it.
In far too many cases, the very goods and services provided by laborers for the company are themselves destructive to the planetary well being, for instance - the love canal, three mile island, or that chemical company atrocity in Bhopal. Then, when the affected folks look for assistance from the authorities responsible, come to find out, nobody gives a damn. Responsibility is shifted to that fictitious legal entity, the corporation. The coporation takes the blame while the owner vacations at the beach.
Ownership is the dust in the wind of human affairs. It comes and goes at the whim of fate. There is no lasting reality behind the concept of ownership. I now have to admit that it doesn't make sense to say i own my life or my body or even my perception. Because there is no "I" separate from these that could be said to hold or possess them. Although most of us live our lives as if there were a separate self in possession or control.
who owns your life?
by what authority do you exist?
the state?
the corporation?
your mate?
yourself?
who owns what?
It's all too ephemeral and relative.
Ownership is a social convention manipulated by those who hold power.
It has no independent reality other than conceptual.
- in actuality -
in the light of death
what could ownership possibly mean?
The ownership that human beings are able to pull off is only for a short time anyway and property is central to the division of the planet and human relationship. There is no division without conflict.
PROPERTY
- money -
DETERMINES OUR BOUNDARIES
- conflicts -
AND OUR HUMAN RELATIONS
- violent -
The single most direct and accurate measurement of power through property in the world today is one step further into abstraction to that symbol of wealth we most often refer to as money. This ancient abstract symbol has more substance in our corrupt global culture than all the starving people in India and Africa combined. We live in a world whose greatest determinant of human relationship is a man made symbol of wealth which in itself has no practical human value, as actual food, clothing, and shelter.The only value intrinsic to money is as an intellectual and legal construct stored in a vault downtown or as information in cyberspace. This creation of man's mind, this imagination, backed by law - police, judges, and jails - determines not only the quality of our material life but also our personal and collective interactions. The quality and location of our housing, our educational opportunities and facilities, our food, clothing, and health care, our political power and our legal rights, in fact, how we meet all our needs is determined by whatever particular amount of money we have access to. Keep in mind all this occurs in a system created by selfish, fearful minds and enforced by violence. It's not just happening in particular places at this point in history.
It's the whole world and it originated long ago and that's probalbly why we don't question it. It's not a matter the the truth of one or another belief or opinion or theory of what is happening. It's a matter of what's right and what's wrong. It's not a matter of who has the power to fool people through conditioning by seductive images or who has the power and inclination to force people through threats, fear, and violence into certain modes of thought and behavior. Because the fact of what's right will be all that's left after the inevitable destruction of what is wrong occurs. What's wrong is what is runnin the world now. What concerns us here and now is, will it crumble from within, destroying us all as the natural result of our ignoring 'what is', or will we step back and look at the whole of life and make a conscious collective decision to create a new world.
THE MATTER OF INTELLIGENCE
- a fact demanding recognition -
Who is, actually, the most intelligent?
-intlelligence-
the ability to learn or understand
or to deal with new or trying situations
a mind divided within itself is schizoid at best
and our common mind is divided countless ways
-racially, nationally, politically, religiouslly, economically, socially, ideologically-
(the whole of culture in all its aspects and influences)
but the most potent division is sexual
in order for any system of rank to be maintained
it is vital that the feminine half of humanity be suppressed
the half whose genetic and biological imperative
is loving and caring
and practical, devoted, daily activity
the subjugation of the female
is and always has been
attained by physical and material force
-same as all evil is accomplished-
the next most potent division is racial
when i look into a black face
i see the strength and grace
that has endured
the desolation of generations
when i look into a white face
i see the fear of a lost soul
seeking ruthlessly
his own personal security
It is certainly not my intent to encourage any type of racism, bigotry, or prejudice - but until we look the facts in the face and deal directly with them, they'll keep poppin up, interfering with whatever we may want to create.
I was lucky enough the other day to have a pleasant conversation with one good ol boy with whom i had been acquainted a number of years. How our converstion made its way round to a particular social phenomena, i can't recall. We were talkin bout the urban poor of the united states of america - of which i am one. He asked me a question that went somethin like this, in reference to the unfortunate, "Are they stupid, lazy, ignorant, or what?" At that point i had an almost overwhelming desire to take that question in my fist and deposit it through his esophagus into his small intestines. Fortunately, for both our sake, i was able to ward off the temptation. Instead, i calmly posed him a hypothetical scenario: your forefathers, rather than being the abductors they were, instead were abducted themselves from a faraway paradise, transported on slave ships and had endured lifetimes of torture, abuse, and inhumane treatment generation after gereration for hundreds of years until now, one generation after major federal legislation had granted a few basic human rights that still aren't fully recognized in the day to day affairs of your society, making for a deprived, humorless existence and a bleak future - might not you behave in ways that would appear destructive to the corrupt society in which you found yourself?
And I Say
If You Did Not
Then You Would Be
Either
A Saint
Or
A Spineless Worm
