If it is true that the political centrality of the mass-worker has been replaced by the political centrality of the mass-bourgeois, then a great anthropological question poses itself on the terrain of human labour. The ideological hegemony of the Right – your boss’s interest is your interest, and you should do things on your own and not with others – does not stop before the factory gates, just like it doesn’t wait in front of the entrance to the home, where the holy family dwells. It enters, penetrates, invades, conquers, seizing hold of the soul – if there is no body of collective forces that pushes it back, countering it with the reasons of an organised solidarity. The material condition of subaltern labour – whether dependent or autonomous, stable or precarious – must now face up to this politically unprecedented situation, that the middle classes no longer need to be a separate social stratum, because they have become a diffuse democratic mentality. This is an illusory veil which the presence of an alternative horizon, both credible and practicable, has the duty to rend asunder.

But who today denounces the evils of society? A few precious experiences among social movements, some isolated scholarly gadflies, the odd papal homily, some praiseworthy grassroots philanthropy. What is lacking is the powerful voice of a subject that counts, and that makes its authoritativeness count, armed with consensus and thought. Work and politics is the point from which to begin once again to weave the interrupted thread of a new fabric of organisation. Around this point everything can be born, in terms of discourse and multiple experiences, but without it nothing will be born. It is first and foremost a political-cultural battle.

We are working in the furrows of a great tradition. But this is only a temporary surrogate, while we await the return of the initiative into the hands of practical politics. Of course, we need to make workers speak, even through new forms of co-research. But we must also start speaking about workers again, with programmes and projects that concern them directly, existentially. And here the forms in which practical politics is currently organised on the Left do not work, they do not respond to the command that the theme of work and politics should trigger in the operational machine. The latest disheartening events tell us as much. The Partito Democratico spoke of something else, the Arcobaleno didn’t speak to anyone, and it will not suffice to cloister oneself in a generous heretical sect of the refounders of communism in order to resolve this problem.

An alternative Left that for the time being closes ranks around the field of work is necessary, and we must therefore make it possible. But this too must be thought and practiced as a passage rather than a point of arrival. Once upon a time we used the formula ‘the world of labour’. Now we sometimes say ‘the world of labours’: not that much has changed when it comes to the fact that whatever world we’re dealing with, we need representatives and forms of representation adequate to it. To put it bluntly, so that everyone will understand, we need a great political force, a popular Left, rooted in the real country, with mass confidence – social before it is electoral – a mass party of working men and women, with the political pride to name the matter at hand in this way. Then, we might even lose some battles, but at least we’ll know that we’re there fighting a just war.

read the rest here.

http://conjunctural.blogspot.com/2008/10/old-guard-on-new-crisis-pt-2-mario.html

PRESS ADVISORY
AYN RAND CENTER FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
555 12th Street NW, Suite 620 N, Washington, DC 20004

October 9, 2008

Capitalism Without Guilt: The Moral Case for Freedom

Who: Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

What: A talk defending the profit motive and presenting the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism. A Q&A will follow.

Where: National Press Club, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C.

When: Wednesday, October 22, 2008, at 6:30 PM

The public and media are invited. Admission is FREE.

Description: Capitalism has an undisputed record of wealth generation, yet it has always functioned under a cloud of moral suspicion. In a culture that venerates Mother Teresa as a paragon of virtue, businessmen sit in stoic silence while their pursuit of profits is denounced as selfish greed.

Society tells businessmen to sacrifice, to serve others, to “give back”–counting on their acceptance of self-interest as a moral crime, with chronic guilt its penance. Is it any wonder that productive giants from John D. Rockefeller to Bill Gates have behaved as if profit-making leaves a moral stain that only tireless philanthropy can launder but never fully remove?

It is time America heard the moral case for laissez-faire capitalism.

Two centuries ago the Founding Fathers established a nation based on the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property–and the selfish pursuit of his own happiness. But neither the Founders nor their successors could properly defend self-interest and the profit motive in the face of moral denunciation. The result has been a slow destruction of freedom in America, leading us to today’s economic mess.

In this inaugural lecture celebrating the launch of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights (ARC), in Washington, D.C., executive director Yaron Brook will demonstrate how Ayn Rand’s revolutionary ethics of rational self-interest supplies the moral foundation that previous proponents of capitalism lacked. Dr. Brook will explain why individual rights are crucial for capitalism’s survival–why productivity and profit, the “selfish greed” that conservatives abhor, are not vices but cardinal virtues, and he will explain why Americans must reject McCain/Obama-style “national service” and instead proudly embrace the radical individualism their lives and happiness require.

Bio: Dr. Yaron Brook is president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a regular contributor to Forbes.com and a contributing editor of The Objective Standard. A former finance professor, he has been published in academic as well as popular publications, and his opinion-editorials appear in major newspapers. He is frequently interviewed on national TV and radio. Dr. Brook lectures on Objectivism, business ethics and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

For more information on this talk, please e-mail media@aynrandcenter.org

### ### ###

Dr. Yaron Brook is available for interviews now and after his talk.

what the fuck is this? it’s goddamn madness.

“Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”

David Hume

“I will be immoral, and why should I not? Because the Bible wills it? But the Bible is only a collection of Babylonian and Hebrew traditions, traditions collected and put together like the Homeric poems, or as is being done still with Basque poems and Mongolian legends. Must I then go back to the state of mind of the half-civilised peoples of the East?

“Must I be moral because Kant tells me of a categoric imperative, of a mysterious command which comes to me from the depths of my own being and bids me be moral? But why should this `categoric imperative’ exercise a greater authority over my actions than that other imperative, which at times may command me to get drunk. A word, nothing but a word, like the words `Providence,’ or `Destiny,’ invented to conceal our ignorance.

“Or perhaps I am to be moral to oblige Bentham, who wants me to believe that I shall be happier if I drown to save a passerby who has fallen into the river than if I watched him drown?

“Or perhaps because such has been my education? Because my mother taught me morality? Shall I then go and kneel down in a church, honour the Queen, bow before the judge I know for a scoundrel, simply because our mothers, our good ignorant mothers, have taught us such a pack of nonsense?

“I am prejudiced,–like everyone else. I will try to rid myself of prejudice! Even though immorality be distasteful, I will yet force myself to be immoral, as when I was a boy I forced myself to give up fearing the dark, the churchyard, ghosts and dead people–all of which I had been taught to fear.

Such was the way in which the youth of Russia reasoned when they broke with old-world prejudices, and unfurled this banner of nihilist or rather of anarchist philosophy: to bend the knee to no authority whatsoever, however respected; to accept no principle so long as it is unestablished by reason.

Need we add, that after pitching into the waste-paper basket the teachings of their fathers, and burning all systems of morality, the nihilist youth developed in their midst a nucleus of moral customs, infinitely superior to anything that their fathers had practised under the control of the “Gospel,” of the “Conscience,” of the “Categoric Imperative,” or of the “Recognised Advantage” of the utilitarian. But before answering the question, “Why am I to be moral?” let us see if the question is well put; let us analyse the motives of human action.

A child’s spirit is weak. It is so easy to coerce it by fear. This they do.They make the child timid, and then they talk to him of the torments of hell. They conjure up before him the sufferings of the condemned, the vengeance of an implacable god. The next minute they will be chattering of the horrors of revolution, and using some excess of the revolutionists to make the child “a friend of order.” The priest accustoms the child to the idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the “divine law,” and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the civil law may be the better obeyed.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0287160

• on the way to work you got stuck in traffic because of an unexpected detour, then run out of gas because of it.
• you calculate the price of taking the bus to school each day and decide on getting a u-pass, when you find out your school doesn’t have one, despite being a public university.
• your standing in your hallway about to unlock your door when the light burns out, leaving the hallway pitch black. you try to get down the stairs back to the door without seeing anything when you hear something fall, scared, you pull a muscle looking for the doorknob to escape.
• finally inside your home, hungry as shit because you haven’t had time to eat all day long, you see your leftovers from earlier have been thrown away.
• you spend the last of your money getting on the bus heading south, you fall asleep exhausted, the bus then does a 180 and heads north. you wake up 35 minutes further away from your destination and have to walk 8 miles home.
• in the midst of all this, you forget to follow up on plans with your special someone.

and we continue through the “go fuck yourself” of it all.

and im thinking so soon? we just met.

wait…