I know that many of you reading this are not religious, and have a default setting of being put off by citations of religious authority and by religious language. Others of you are religious, and will be unfamiliar with the method in which I am presenting what may be otherwise familiar sayings and events presented in sacred texts.
I am going to ask you all to reserve judgment until you see what I am saying in this essay, because my whole point is that if we adopt the strategy presented here, one I have borrowed from a number of great thinkers and actors, we need never worry that religion, religious works or religious outlooks can ever again risk dominating or oppressing you or anyone else. Nor can any economic, political or cultural system. At the same time, I show that religious forms of expression have an important role to play in democracy, and in how we can control the organizations and institutions that surround our lives. This whole essay is about how to see things in a different way. So please, a little patience, no preconceptions, and an open mind.
In the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 2, verses 27-28, Jesus and his followers are walking through a field of grain, and, being hungry, his disciples harvest some of the grain to make bread. A crowd of Pharisees – one of the main religious groups in the area at the time – shouts to Jesus, asking him why his followers are doing something that is not permitted on the Sabbath. Technically, they had a point: the Sabbath, for reasons we shall see, strongly bans all forms of work, and harvesting grain can certainly be considered as such.
Jesus’ answer should be written on all school buildings, offices, factories, government agencies, courts, police stations, prisons, university administration buildings and classroom buildings, and all religious institutions. It should be engraved on every military barracks everywhere in the world at the very least.
NOT because it is from the Bible. Not because Jesus said it. Least of all because I am a Christian which I am not. Certainly not because it is a religious statement, though it fits the great sociologist Emile Durkheim’s definition of religion as being about the difference between the sacred and the profane (earthly, everyday). I will show that its implications cannot be reduced to religion, narrowly understood.
Jesus’ answer is one of the greatest things anybody ever said.
You should take it to heart every time an employer treats you or someone else as expendable, or treats your work as merely a cog in the machine of the company organization; every time a political party, or religious institution seems to take your willingness or that of others to sacrifice for the cause for granted, and treat you or your efforts as though all that matters is the organization, not the people it fights for or who fight on behalf of it; every time a technicality in the law means you or others are burdened with penalties that compound an injustice, or that are unjust beyond whatever violation you or someone punished may have committed; every time an exam, or a system of learning discourages instead of encourages greater desire to learn on the part of students; every time a piece of culture, be in classical and “high art” or popular and contemporary culture is interpreted in a way that prevents it from being useful to enhancing the lives and happiness of people.; every time a family seems to be concerned about anything other than the well-being, security and happiness of its members; every time a government policy means sacrificing human beings, their well-being, prosperity, liberty, and voices in decision-making to some abstract goal or bureaucratic process; every time a business runs roughshod over workers, communities, the environment, consumers, suppliers, partners, or the public; and absolutely every time a creditor calls about a debt.
Jesus tells the Pharisees, “The Sabbath was made for the human being, not the human being for the Sabbath. Therefore the human being is the lord even of the Sabbath.”
It is one of the most radical things anyone has ever said.
If the Sabbath, which is one of God’s laws, arguably the most sacred of God’s laws (as we shall see and why that is) is made for human beings and if human beings are the lords of the Sabbath (EVEN of the Sabbath, as Jesus states), then it follows that:
1. Human beings are NOT made to serve institutions that don’t serve human beings. We are not to be sacrificed to laws, organizations, economies, businesses, ideologies, churches, politics, or any other human institution.
2. Institutions and law of all kinds, including those made by God for us, and so by extension all institutions made by human beings ourselves, exist to serve human beings, to help us meet our needs, to help ensure our survival, to enhance our lives, to further our well-being, better ensure our safety and security, enable our creativity, make possible our happiness.
3. Laws, organizations, institutions, from the family to religion, from the economy to the state, from businesses to unions and other associations, from ideas, art and science, to schools and universities and health care systems, from systems of justice to armed forces, must be subordinated to the collective will of human beings, “the lord even of the Sabbath”, even as we decide how best, in any given community and generation, to use these institutions as TOOLS to further our collective well-being.
4. Laws, organizations, cultures and institutions, ideas, religions, arts and sciences, technologies and governments, then, have no other purpose than those we collectively need them to have for our own goals.
5. The institutions, organizations, ideas and ideologies, sciences, technologies, governments, businesses, associations and economies, therefore, are NOT GOALS IN THEMSELVES. EVER. They serve us. We are lord of the Sabbath, and of all lesser institutions. They were made for human beings, not human beings for them.
We need to address this question from two sides – through an analysis of the actual Biblical account of the Sabbath, its history, and that of its cousin the Jubilee; and through an analysis of today’s organizations, cultures, ideas, economies and government. Much of my analysis of the historical meaning in Biblical times of the Sabbath and of the Jubilee in what follows relies on the indispensable work by Richard Lowery, Sabbath and Jubilee. And I am relying on, and in agreement with his translation rendering “human being” the term usually translated as “Son of Man”. Lowery I think demonstrates quite convincingly that by “Son of Man”, a phrase Jesus uses very often, and which contrasts with the much more rarely used “Son of God”, he means to both emphasize his own humanity, his ordinariness, and so fellowship with all of us, and also to mean “human being”, that is, every human being. Every daughter and son of woman.
The Sabbath is arguably the most important of all of God’s laws, at least of those regarding the relationships of people to other people, as opposed to their relationship more strictly speaking to God. As the Italian actor Roberto Benigni points out in a wonderful and massively followed series of televised interpretations of the Ten Commandments on Italian public television, THE COMMANDMENT REGARDING KEEPING THE SABBATH HOLY IS A SACRED COMMAND AGAINST SLAVERY, AGAINST OPPRESSION, AGAINST OVERWORK AND EXPLOITATION. As Prof. Lowery points out, and Benigni’s interpretation is consistent with this crucial point, the SABBATH IS PART OF THE ACT OF CREATION, PART OF THE WORK OF CREATION, NOT SOMETHING SEPARATE FROM IT.
Let’s look more closely.
After having created the world, the land, all living things and woman and man together – “in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27) – we read that “And on the Seventh Day God finished his work which he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.” (Genesis, 2:2-3).
So resting was finishing his work. That is the work was not finished on the sixth day, but on the seventh day, the day of rest, which completes the work. Without rest, the work is not completed. And it is the rest from work that is holy and makes the Sabbath, the seventh day holy. Rest from work is rendered sacred from the origins of existence. Denying rest to those who work is therefore the opposite of holy, the opposite of sacred. It is an affront to God and oppression to people.
The Sabbath law is made clear in Exodus 23:12: “For six days you may do your work, but on the seventh day you must rest, that your ox and your ass may also have rest, and that the son of your maidservant and the alien may be refreshed.”
Servants, slaves, resident aliens, animals, all are protected by the Sabbath law, all are lords of the Sabbath, which was made for human beings. As Lowery points out, just a few passages earlier in Exodus, we read “You shall not oppress an alien; you well know how it feels to be an alien, since you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23:8). Verses 10 and 11 of the chapter link these protections of human beings to the Jubilee tradition.
Now, it was widely understood in the ancient world that hardship – often the result of taxes and military conscription by Kings – led to common people going into debt, which led to slavery. Kings in the Middle Eastern cultures of “honor and shame” as Lowery describes them SHAMED THEMSELVES BY NOT PROTECTING THE WEAK, THE POOR, THE WIDOW, THE ORPHAN, THE HOMELESS. TODAY OUR LEADERS SHAME THEMSELVES BY THEIR LACK OF PROTECTION OF THESE NEEDY MEMBERS OF SOCIETY. THE LAWS OF VIRTUALLY EVERY ANCIENT MIDDLE EASTERN SOCIETY LIMITED SLAVERY IN TIME, AND LIMITED INDEBTEDNESS.
The Code of Hammurabi made clear that someone could be enslaved only for three years, meaning that REPAYMENT OF DEBT COULD NOT EXCEED THREE YEARS OF WORKING OFF A DEBT. That was the value of human work through the “debt standard”. In the Bible, it is permitted to hold someone to work for you for up to 6 years but in the Seventh Year, the Jubilee, they must be freed. But not only freed – they must be provided with some payment to put them back on their feet – with land, money, resources of some kind as payment for their work. Thus making up for the difference in time worked to end a debt. IN EITHER CASE DEBT COULD ONLY BE IMPOSED FOR AT MOST 6 YEARS. AFTER WHICH IT WAS CANCELLED.
Otherwise it was considered oppression and dishonored first the rulers, for their shameful failure to protect the poor, the debtor, the servant, the enslaved, the vulnerable, and second it dishonored, shamed God in violation of the Sabbath and Jubilee laws, showing him failing to protect those under his care.
As Lowery demonstrates, the evidence is that the Sabbath practice grew out of the older Jubilee practice, the seventh day being a day of freedom and rest, derived from the seventh year being the year of liberation from debts, from slavery, from toil, and being also a year for the soil to lay fallow, to rest, limiting environmental destruction. A woman could not be made a slave for debt unless the creditor married her, demonstrating social obligations to and protection of women, and later laws allowed women to leave at the end of six years and like men to be provided with some payment to get them back on their feet once the limited time to work off a debt was realized.
So “the Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath” means humanity. It means that having a sense of obligation to the vulnerable, limits on work and on exploitation, limits on what creditors can expect to be paid back and for how long, lest debt become lord of human beings instead of human beings being lord of debt, were written into the law. These things were written into God’s law, and any violation of these protections, of these forms of JUSTICE brought SHAME on rulers, on the exploiters, on those who did not act to free slaves, to cancel debts, to protect immigrants and refugees, to protect women from abuse and exploitation and violence, to defend the rights of workers, to provide payment for work done, and these things brought shame on God as well. JUSTICE AND SHAME, honor and dishonor. Sabbath and Jubilee are made for human beings, to honor them and to honor God. To dishonor these protections, these sacred standards, is to bring shame on all involved.
By insisting that Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal pay back their loans to the degree that suffering is imposed on the peoples of these nations, and especially the young, the vulnerable, the poorest and the immigrant, the IMF, the EU Central Bank, and the EU Commission, as well as the governments of Germany, and of northern European countries that support these policies of austerity and debt repayment shame themselves. Their leaders bring dishonor to the German people, the peoples of the Nordic countries, to the Dutch people and the others that do not speak up in defense of the oppressed (France, I am looking at you).
When the IMF, the Central Banks and corporate Banks of the wealthy countries impose privatization, austerity, endless debt payment on the countries and peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, keeping these countries poor, indebted and suffering, it brings shame on the people of the United States, European countries, Canada, Japan and other wealthy nations, and on the organizations and governments involved.
When the government of the United States imposes draconian conditions on those holding student loans, when it allows as it did under the Obama administration, 10 million Americans to lose their homes through mortgage defaults, when it permits credit card companies to write the laws on Bankruptcy, as happened in the early 2000s under George W. Bush, when it allows millions as it continues to do under Donald Trump to go bankrupt from medical bills, it dishonors the United States, the people of the United States, the government of the United States, the Founders of the United States, the Constitution of the United States, and the people running the banks, the universities, the collection agencies, and everyone else involved. When the Secretary of Education Betsy Devoes, makes conditions for repaying student loans even for students who have been swindled by for-profit universities even more draconian, it shames her, her Department, the US Government, the American people and God.
All of this angers God.
Let us instead see Jesus’ alternative, based on the laws of the Sabbath and of Jubilee: first , remember that the Pharisees’ first objection is to his disciples gleaning grain from fields. For Jesus, this is a question of need. The needs of the hungry outweigh a procedural enslavement to the law. The real law is to meet the needs of the needy. The Sabbath was made for the human being. To liberate them from slavery, from hunger. Then Jesus heals a man whose hand is withered. With a withered hand the man cannot fully participate in life, in society, he is marginalized. By healing his hand on the Sabbath, Jesus makes clear that healing is more important than the letter of the law. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit those in prison. This is what the law really is, as Jesus elsewhere tells his followers. This is the Sabbath made for the human being, this is the Jubilee.
But he goes further, and we would do well to fully grasp Jesus’ reasoning here:
WHAT NEOLIBERALS TODAY CALL “THE RULE OF LAW” IS A FORM OF TYRANNY.
THE LAW MUST NOT RULE. IT MUST BE FULFILLED !
Jesus over and over again refers to his teachings as fulfilling the law.
He is not overthrowing the law, he is fulfilling it. Yet his approach is in open opposition to those who would follow the law to the letter – debts must be repaid, people cannot get fed or healed when the law says that that work cannot be done, suffering must be the price of law, this is the approach of all those Jesus is refuting.
What does it mean to fulfill the law? TO UNDERSTAND WHAT JESUS MEANS BY FULFILLING THE LAW, WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND, INDEED TO RETURN TO UNDERSTANDING DIALECTICS.
Dialectical thinking has gone out of style with the rise of postmodernist approaches that eschew the idea of dialectic. But we need dialectical approaches today more than ever. To really understand what Jesus is saying, we need now to turn to the second part of our puzzle, to organizations.
Now, let’s look more closely at organizations. Jerome Braun, in an extraordinary, but neglected book called Breaking Our Chains, shows that today’s breakdown of norms of behavior, civility and standards of how to act while in positions of government or authority or leadership have a lot to do with a basic fact: we no longer live primarily in communities in the more industrialized countries of the Global North, but in a society of organizations. A society of organizations needs its own ways of restoring and enforcing norms of behavior, obligations on the part of those in authority or positions of leadership with respect to the rest of us, and obligations and expectations of how the ordinary people must act toward each other. Throughout most of history we have lived in communities, and the ethics, civil obligations, and morality of people, leaders and otherwise, have been shaped by what sociologists call primary groups, face to face interactions and extensions thereof.
Religious language, on the other hand, at least the world religions’ languages, were about society more than about community, about, to use Durkheim’s terms, organic solidarity, based on mutual interdependence, rather than on mechanical solidarity, the sort that comes from us being just like our neighbors in the kind of work, language, culture, religion, family structure, habits, likes and dislikes we participate in. We don’t live mainly in villages or tribes anymore, and we need access to the tools, ancient and modern, that were developed to help us think about how morality, ethics and social obligations work in an organization-based society as opposed to a small community-based one. Some of what we come up with will be new, much will refashion old tools to meet new needs. I believe that much of the ethnic identity emphasis on group identities, and much of the energy around the MeToo and other movements about how to treat each other are in fact indications of the growing recognition of this shift in how we live, which has already been the case for some decades, but which has picked up pace recently. So, we need to understand organizations.
To do so, I need to borrow from someone only slightly less famous than Jesus, namely Karl Marx. Marx tells us that CAPITAL IS DEAD LABOR. Capital, as dead labor, can take the form of money invested to make a profit through some business activity involving labor by workers. It can also take the form of any machines or technologies, resources already mined or processed to be available for the work process. All of this: money, buildings, and tools, is DEAD LABOR. That is, all capital consists of labor PREVIOUSLY EXPENDED BY WORKERS to create them, or to create the value embodied in them as in the case of money capital. The building, the energy sources and tools utilized to make them available for work, the machines and other tools, are all the result of work done previously by other workers. The money capital is what is left over as profit, from the surplus value produced in the work process by workers previously at this same workplace or at others, embodied in money.
ALL of this capital, all of this DEAD LABOR found at the workplace, can only be put into motion to produce new value by LIVING LABOR – by actual living human beings, by their work today, making yesterday’s work useful to the current generation, the current population through the creation of use-values, of useful things and services. So the distinction between LIVING LABOR and DEAD LABOR is fundamental to Marx and to his political project, namely, PUTTING LIVING LABOR IN COMMAND OF – MAKING IT LORD OF (to use Jesus’ term) – ALL THE DEAD LABOR, which in itself is useless, and cannot produce new value, but needs living labor to put it into motion, to make it work to meet today’s needs.
But there are some interesting gray areas as well and I want to explore them here because it will help make my point. There are two of particular interest to our discussion here: first, the organization of work itself, and second, the training, skills and education of the workforce itself.
The structure of the workplace, of the company, its division of labor, its management structure, its work flow design, all of these are ideas put into practice. They had to be worked out ahead of time, and by people doing the work to design them, AND they have to be put into practice today by living labor, by all those at each level of an organization that participate in the work process and the organization. So there is a dual nature to these things: they are both material and symbolic, concrete and ideological, both things and ideas. They are a form of tool, every bit as much as is a hammer or a computer, but they are also intellectual creations, products of the human mind. And every bit as much as a drill press, or a converting machine for rolls of scotch tape (to mention two machines I ran when working in New Jersey factories when young), they are DEAD LABOR needing to be put into motion by LIVING LABOR.
As to the abilities of the workers themselves, these are the result of previous labor as well: the work of mothers, fathers, teachers, and of the workers themselves in studying, practicing, trying things out, adapting and gradually incorporating into themselves these abilities. The first is mostly material, physical plant but it is the organization, a product of the human mind, that makes them useful for work; the second is mostly ethereal, mental and psychological, even spiritual, but mind and body need to be in synch, in communication, for the worker to do the work. So dead and living labor are always present, but it is always living labor that must set things in motion. The workers’ skills are of no more use if the worker is not using them than are the tools if they are piled one on top of the other instead of set up in a way that enables a work flow to take place, and that requires someone to do the work, mental and physical, or organizing it in the appropriate manner to be useful.
This insight enables us to see that ALL tools and all activities really have to different degrees this dual nature: the simplest tool imaginable is nevertheless a product of human ingenuity, of thought, creativity, ideas. Karl Marx once wrote, contrasting the activities of animals that are similar in appearance to human labor, such as beavers’ building of dams, spiders spinning webs or bees constructing hives, that what separates the worst architect from the best bee is that the architect must first raise their edifice in their mind before realizing it in the external world. Some tools fall more to the side of being realized ideas in somewhat ethereal form, such as software, academic disciplines, laws, others take a more explicitly three-dimensional and concrete form such as automobiles, screwdrivers, soup ladles, and shoes.
But each must be the product of BOTH thought and physical effort. This is what Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist thinker and activist meant when he said that everyone was an intellectual: everyone thinks as they work, contemplates what we are doing as we do it, whatever our activity. To some extent, perhaps some more than others, but we all do it. The relationship between material bases and cultural or ideational “superstructure” has always been much closer and tighter than orthodox historical materialists have theorized. The same may be said about the traditional terms in Anthropology and Sociology, material and symbolic (or non-material) culture, since while a building (the pyramids of Egypt, a Gothic medieval cathedral, or a McDonalds) may be material culture, its shape, its symbolic meaning and so the reason it was made in the first place and the reason it was designed and built to take the form it did and the purpose it served and serves is symbolic culture. The two are only conceptually distinct, that is, it is a convenience to help us see them as distinct parts of the same thing. But in reality they are not separate.
Since ALL DEAD LABOR, INCLUDING THE IDEA-THOUGHT PART OF A THING, NEEDS TO BE SET IN MOTION BY LIVING LABOR or is useless and of no importance, IT FOLLOWS THAT IDEAS ARE also forms of DEAD LABOR.
This means that WE CAN EXTEND MARX’S GREAT INSIGHT into the nature of capitalism and capitalist work and exploitation and the class struggle over this relationship between dead and living labor TO THE WHOLE OF CIVILIZATION, INDEED TO ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY AND ALL HUMAN ACTIVITY, TO ALL HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS AND INSTITUTIONS.
We can see human history as the long struggle to maintain, restore, and re-establish human control over our advancing and progressing and constantly changing kit of tools, ideas, designs, structures, organizations, machines, technologies, arts, sciences, forms of community and residencies, workplaces and forms of workplace, governments and institutions of all kinds. To keep human beings as the lord even of the Sabbath, to keep living labor in control of all the dead labor, from money and the economy to government and law, from the family to machines, from ideas inherited from the past to new methods of organizing the division of labor, from new technologies including algorithms to the cities we live in.
And we can also see human history as the resistance, struggle, and crying out against the subjugation of human beings by DEAD LABOR, be it in the form of laws, economic systems, forms of work, machines, organizations, governmental forms, businesses or technologies and religions, which IF TREATED AS ENDS IN THEMSELVES, AS GOALS, RATHER THAN TOOLS, AS OUR LORDS, RATHER THAT WHAT WE ARE LORD OF COLLECTIVELY, instead of enhancing our lives, furthering our well-being, insuring our security and safety, meeting our needs, enabling our freedom and creativity, become destructive of these ends.
The Sabbath was made for us, we were not made for the Sabbath. Corporations, governments, laws, economic systems, science, art, education, national defense, criminal justice systems, the great works of philosophy and literature, religions, and families, unions and constitutions, computer programs and transportation systems, were made for us, not we for them.
Now we see what is wrong with insisting on a form of dead labor, of expended labor value from the past in the form of debt, being repaid at all costs, at the cost, indeed of whole generations of young people in the US repaying student debt, of whole peoples in countries of the Global South, or of southern or eastern Europe, being required to pay back loans at the cost of their whole lives and societies being forever scarred by the strain involved. Of the price of austerity, demanded of and by governments from the US to EU, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, and imposed by the global governance organizations like the EU Commission, the IMF and the various Central Banks, as well as by the large corporate banks, sacrificing the well-being of the people, their needs, even their survival and the stability and coherence of their countries and communities, to the idolatrous altar of DEAD LABOR.
But likewise we can see what is wrong inherently about religoius fundamentalisms. Be they religious or otherwise, we must always oppose the use of ancient texts not to give meaning and guidance to our actions today, our living labor that breathes life into these old forms, giving them new meaning and relevance, but instead taking the printed words as our lord, as a master over our lives today, over our needs. Seeing the meaning of doctrines as fixed once and for all on a page leads to treating religion as a GOAL IN ITSELF, instead of as a tool made for human beings. The Sabbath – and the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the sayings of the Buddha, the Upanishads, and Vedic Texts, and Bhagavad Gita, and Tao te Ching – were made for the human being, not the human being for these texts.
The same holds for laws and constitutions. Those who argue that following a constitution to the letter as written, even when doing so is destructive to current needs, freedom, equality, happiness, and democracy, are installing a form of tyranny, of older generations over current ones and their lives, of dead labor over living labor. If the Electoral College or the Second Amendment make life better for people, if they decide today to keep them, and find ways to breathe new life into them to enhance their lives, great. But if they prevent change, and prevent problems from being solved, out with them.
The point is that the above is the indisputable message of Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Mohammad, Lao Tze, Thomas Jefferson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Karl Marx, Martin Buber and Martin Luther King Jr. to name a few. Such a strong consensus among so many important benefactors of humanity should give us pause.
What do I mean? There is a DIALECTIC IN ALL HUMAN ACTIVITIES BETWEEN DEAD LABOR AND LIVING LABOR. Between the past and the present. Between what Marx called “the tradition of all the dead generations” that “weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the living”. Debts, patriarchal traditions, ages-old prejudices, strict constructionism or originalism in reading constitutions, fundamentalist readings of ancient holy scriptures, identities that no longer serve us, and all of the tools, language, technologies, machines, capital accumulated, and structures of daily life (the layout of cities, the use of fossil fuels, the bureaucratic or hierarchical organization of institutions and groups) that prevent us from putting these human creations to use for what they are intended for – to serve human needs, to enhance life, to further happiness. The Sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the Sabbath.
When we see “three strikes and out” laws filling prisons to the point that American states cannot even afford any longer to hold people in them, when we see standards for hiring or tenuring professors requiring so many academic publications that no one actually reads the published works anymore, when we see an Electoral College that prevents the person with the most votes from being elected, when we see people of color afraid to call the police to protect them in the case of crimes being committed against them because they are afraid they might be shot by the police themselves, when whole generations of Americans cannot buy homes or start families because they cannot get out from under student loans, when we see an entire generation of young people in southern Europe without work or income unable to begin their adult lives because austerity is required to pay back loans from decades ago, when we see millions of children dying every year throughout the global South as the poorest countries continue to have to pay back debts incurred by people no longer even alive today, we see a world gone mad. A world where the dead rule the living, where “rule of law” means destruction of human beings, where rulers believe that the human being was made for the Sabbath, and so shame themselves, their people, and God.
We cannot do without dialectics as postmodernists think because the contradiction between living and dead labor continues. But we can change the game, and that is what Jesus, Karl Marx and all the benefactors of humanity I mentioned above, and many others, understood and have taught us.
Jesus tells us to love our neighbor, to feed the hungry and heal the sick, to fulfill the law, not be slave to it; Buddha told us not to hang on to identities, as they could become our masters; Mohammad told us that we needed to let go of outdated institutions such as the clans and tribes of the Arab past that failed to proviie protection for the widow, the orphan (like himself), the alien, or the poor. He called on followers instead to form a community (Umma) of everyone under one God. One God means that we remember to reject idolatry – to not worship money, power, fame, celebrity, status, privilege, prestige. Thomas Jefferson told us that governments are instituted among people to safeguard life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that when governments become destructive of those ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish such government.
Jefferson wrote,
“Between society and society, or generation and generation, there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independent nation to another…no society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law. THE EARTH ALWAYS BELONGS TO THE LIVING GENERATION (my emphasis – Steven)…Every constitution then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”
Jefferson goes even further than I would perhaps, in bordering on an anarchist view of the world, but the spirit of his comments are clear: the Sabbath is made for the human being and not the human being for the Sabbath. While of course Jefferson is to be condemned as a slaveholder, we should remember that it was he that tried to pass a national law under the original Articles of Confederation to ban slavery in the territories, expecting that slavery would then die out within a generation and that, though again for us it was too late, he freed his slaves in his last will and testament. That instead the enslaved peoples he had held were not freed but sold to pay off his debts (and he railed against debt and its political effects for much of his life), is less a comment on his (undoubted) hypocrisy, and more on the power of dead labor in the form of debt, to enslave, as it has throughout history. (George Washington freed his slaves while he was still alive).
Frederick Douglass, in a famous debate with William Lloyd Garrison argued that the US Constitution – which as Sean Wilentz has shown denied any sanction to the idea of property in person, even as it compromised between the antislavery and proslavery forces at its writing – could be a weapon in the struggle to bring down slavery. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony used a constitutional amendment to gain access to political power for women, a struggle that outlived them both and was won only in 1920. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. saw the need to renew American society by demanding Justice and showing it its own Shame. He demanded that we live up to our own ideals. That we fulfill the law. Meanwhile, through direct civil disobedience, the activists in the movement he led fulfilled the law.
So what does it mean to fulfill the law?
What do I mean when I say that what Jesus is doing is dialectical?
Forget Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis. That is for school children. Yes, if thesis is the attempt to meet our needs, to live full lives, and be happy, to live as human beings on this earth and our societies, and if the use of the laws, the institutions, the organizations, government, the economy, ideas and technologies to hold us back is antithesis, then there must be an outcome.
Synthesis is one way to put it, but it does not really get to the heart of the matter. Fulfillment of the law is a clearer way to understand the process.
The philosopher Hegel saw abstract ideas that claimed to be universal in their mandate and claims as empty of content. He called them “Abstract Universals” – things like” Human Rights”, or “Europe” when actual content, actual protection of the weak and the exploited, or when actual solidarity and friendship among the nations of Europe are lacking. But a “concrete universal” happens when actual forces in the real world, acting and having an effect, give content to the abstract universal and come to embody it, making it a real thing. This is what Dr. King was calling for, getting the civil rights movement to put flesh and blood into the abstract and – until that moment – often false and empty American ideals of equality, justice, and freedom for all. This dialectic is what Marx intended when he said that the proletariat would be the inheritor of philosophy – that civilization which up to now had excluded most people throughout history would be taken up by, and used, breathed life into by the working class which will make civilization a reality, not a scam.
This is what is means to fulfill the law. Feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit those in prison. The great Trinidad-born Marxist CLR James wrote in his essay “Dialectical Materialism and the Fate of Humanity” that the early Christians saw themselves as actually creating a new world through their actions. He argued that the Christian principles as enunciated by Jesus and his followers, and attempted to be brought into realization through their individual and group actions, in our times has as their concrete universal the socialist movement, the effort to make society truly a sisterhood and brotherhood.
We free ourselves by fulfilling the law, making it our own and making it serve our interests. We reject and throw out what is openly damaging, oppressive, or destructive, what is undemocratic that cannot be reinterpreted, we transform what needs to be renewed, and revitalized, and we strengthen what was already right in principle and had its origins in previous struggles for freedom and democracy, expanding its meaning, its reach, its content. We create things that are new as needed, freely and without prejudice. This is what Jesus meant by putting new wine in new wineskins. If you put new wine into old wineskins, they will burst, and the wine will be wasted. This is what Hegel and Marx call “The transformation of quantity into quality”. When things are transformed qualitatively the old container bursts asunder. We need to have new wineskins ready. We need to have fulfilled the law.
It is a dialectical process.
Now we can see the relationship, alluded to above, between organizations, laws, governments, religions, ideas, economies, on the one hand, and tools, machines, inanimate objects, on the other. All things have this dual quality of being a combination of dead labor and living labor embodied in them. Some are more to the material culture and work side of living labor expended to create and maintain them, and to use them anew, to set them in motion, others more to the symbolic culture and symbolic work side. Ideas can dominate us as surely as a machine we must work at in a factory. But each is a human creation. Each, however, bears the traces of its origin. Something created to dominate people, such as shackles, chains, whips, have little use for human fulfillment, though I suspect that a quick search on the internet can find that these too can be re-appropriated for play and enjoyment by those who like them. Weapons of war are harder to turn to our use. But some can be used for sport or for hunting to meet needs for food. Others cannot be used, except in collective self-defense and then only when great need arises, without continuing to be tools of domination, destruction and ruin.
Ideas, laws, constitutions, religions, economic theories, can be used to crush us, procedure and concern for following things to the letter can impose oppressive conditions, or perpetual debts and so slavery. But many can be transformed, used to our benefit as Frederick Douglass, Dr. King and Jesus all taught. The Sabbath transforms work, and so transforms human relationships. The Jubilee transforms debt, money, property, and our relationship to the land.
Organizations of all kinds exist to serve us, laws exist to make our lives better, governments exist to serve the people. Ideas exist to free us. If they are not being used for those goals, but are treated as goals in themselves, then dead labor has again gained the upper hand over living labor, our tools have again become our bosses, or even our destruction, as our movies from the Matrix to Terminator, our stories from Frankenstein to the neon sign in Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” (“and the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made”) metaphorically warn us about.
The attitude we take to all these things matters a great deal.
Listen to two voices on this crucial question:
First, Lao Tze from the ancient text The Tao te Ching:
When we lose the Way, we find power
When we lose power, we find goodness
When we lose goodness, we find righteousness
When we lose righteousness, we find obedience.
Obedience to the law is the dry husk
Of loyalty and good faith. (Translation by Ursula LeGuin)
When ritual and procedure are all that is left to us, dead labor has gained the upper hand, the law is not fulfilled, human beings are serving the Sabbath, not the Sabbath human beings. Dead ritual substitutes for the real fellowship of people, an abstract universal has taken the place of the concrete experience. The people of Europe must suffer to construct “Europe”. Americans and newcomers to America must suffer to “Make America Great Again.”
Now listen to how one author visualizes our earliest ancestors who already perceived as I understand it, the complex relationship between human beings and all of our creations, and the need for the latter not to become our bosses (for as Brad Pitt’s character in “Fight Club” infamously puts it “the things you own, come to own you”).
Here, Stephen Mithen, in his book, After the Ice: A Global Human History imagines an artist painting animals on a cave wall giving life to his creations, keeping them, in my terminology, living creations, immune to being forms of dead labor that can become a power over those who created them to enhance their own lives:
“Artists are at work in the caves of Southwest Europe. A cluster of animal-fat lamps burn on the floor of the cave that will become known as Pech Merle in France. Another lamp is held aloft by a young boy to provide illumination for the quick movements of an artist’s hand. The artist is an old but sprightly man with long grey hair, naked but with painted flesh. He is part of a community who live by reindeer hunting on the tundra of Southern France. Amidst the lamps are his paints. Lumps of red ochre have been crushed to powder and then mixed in a wooden bowl with water from puddles on the cave floor. Another bowl contains a black pigment; sticks of charcoal are scattered between them along with pieces of leather and fur, frayed sticks and hairbrushes. There is a sweet smell in the air; herbs are smouldering upon a fire. Every few moments the artist kneels and inhales deeply to refresh the vision within his mind.
On the wall two horses have been painted in profile, back to back with hindquarters overlapping. The artist is creating large spots within the outlines; he takes mouthfuls of paint and spits it through a leather stencil to make circles on the wall. His breath is the key ingredient to make the horses come alive. Then he returns to his herbs, changes the pigment and now places his hand against the wall to spit and leave its silhouette.
The artist works hour after hour, pausing only to change his pigment or his stencil, to switch a brush or sponge, to replenish the fat within his lamps and intoxicate his mind. He talks and sings to the horses, he drops to all fours and rears like a stallion.”
So, a key to preventing the problem identified by Karl Marx in Capital, of dead labor ruling over living labor, is to breathe life into our creations, be they machines or ideas, be they laws or organizations, universities, or business organizations, political parties, or religious bodies. In this case, the breathing was literal but it was also mythical, anthropomorphizing, and metaphorical. In perhaps the best book ever on organizations, the famous Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan tells us that ALL organizations, including business corporations and government agencies, are created based on metaphors of one kind of another – this or that organization is seen as and conceived of as a family, an army, a church, a village, a tribe, a brotherhood or sisterhood, a machine, a brain, an information processing system, a rock band, an ecological system, a growing plant, a prison, a psychic trap, and so on.
Morgan teaches that we must be VERY careful what metaphor we are using to create organizations, to make laws, to design processes for work or education or any other activity. In the book Mechanization Takes Command, by Siegfried Giedion, we see how a metaphor, that of the machine, one critiqued in depth for its impact on human organization in Morgan’s book, became for a long time the basis for how we worked, what art we created, how we thought of science, animals, the natural world around us, tools, homes, schools, each other. As we do things with a machine metaphor view of the world, we turn our work and other activity into mechanical activity and start to treat our own bodies and each other as machines, slowly de-humanizing ourselves. My friend Dan Karan reminded me today that Jean-Paul Sartre made this same point in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, that we use our own bodies as tools when we work, and so the dialectic of dead and living labor begins immediately. Sartre however searched for the means for human beings to be free. Those today who have capitulated entirely to this domination of dead labor call themselves “post-humanists” or “cyborgs”.
If we think of the law as something above us it will be above us. It we think of our businesses as ends in themselves they will eat us to feed their own appetites. If we think of the economy as something that exists to grow endlessly it will act as a cancer, if as a god (an “Invisible Hand”) that must be appeased, we will sacrifice our children to it as we are doing now with debt servitude. If we think of our Constitution as written once and for all, we will be bound to it and it will not serve us, as Jefferson said it should each generation. If we see Scriptures as something we were made for, instead of being made for us, as Jesus taught, we will enslave each other and we will shame God. We will be idolaters, putting a written word in place of God, and so violating instead of fulfilling the law, and ourselves.
For while ideas are mostly symbolic culture, they take material form, as Marx himself wrote, when the masses of people take them up and put them into practice, or when those in power do – and so they can become dead labor ruling over us. Machines are mostly inanimate materials, but they are the result of at the very least the worst architect, and so are the creations of the human mind and so we can think about them differently, put them (with some exceptions that were conceived only for domination or destruction) to use to enhance our lives and serve us instead. Everything we create has this dual nature.
When ideas take material form as written word, however, it is not necessarily its ethereal symbolic element, but the material inanimate one that can become predominant. The written word is fixed in time and place, yet ever present afterward, eternal like a god, no longer limited to the life span and experience of a person or a generation. It can come to weigh like a nightmare on the mind of the living. This is why those who seek to dominate and oppress are so much more likely to rely on the written word as authority: strict constructionism or original intention of the Founders in interpreting the US Constitution, or the sanctity of contracts, especially debt, or the fundamentalist readings of out of date passages in the Bible or the Koran, or the use of traditions and traditional symbols to oppress others (as in the case of the distortion of the sacredness of the cow in India, a symbol par excellence of life and the earth, revitalized by living practices of ecologically sustainable agriculture, as Vandana Shiva has shown, instead to oppress Muslims by the fascist Hindu nationalist Modi government).
It is very striking that most of the great leaders I mentioned above – Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, and we can thrown in Socrates for that matter, despite – as my essay on Protagoras here previously makes clear - his not being one of my favorites – never wrote a word in their life. I do not believe – the traditions about Mohammad notwithstanding – that these men were illiterate. I believe that they preferred the spoken word because the spoken word involves a relationship between speaker and listener that is by definition a living one. It is a moment in time, and lives on only in the memories of the persons involved, and while a memory can become fixed in one’s mind and distort the relationship to the world, to life and to others, it is harder for that to happen than for the written word to be taken out of context. The others on the list above, and so many others, Dr. King, the great suffragists, and abolitionists, made their impact overwhelmingly by the spoken word, as public speakers, preachers, lecturers, and only incidentally or secondarily wrote down their ideas.
I am not calling for abandoning the written word, as I write these words of course, though the great anthropologist Stanley Diamond saw writing as a tool of domination from the very beginning as he recounted in In Search of the Primitive, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for one was suspicious of it, (Voltaire took him to task for his polemics against learning and letters), but I am saying we need to be aware that in written form ideas are fixed THINGS, capable of being sources of domination more easily than the spoken word.
There are exceptions however: Hitler, Mussolini, and (Marx would say “the first time as tragedy the second time as farce”) more recently leaders like Trump and Salvini seem to embody the charismatic leader that Max Weber foresaw as the other side of the coin of an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratized (the letter of the law, the procedure) world: “it is written, but I say unto you” – people who derive authority from their ability to sway a crowd and to seem to convey to followers some personal characteristic that is their own. Yet here we need to recall that the content matters: the Sabbath was made for the human being, not the human being for the Sabbath. The Fatherland, the Nation, the Party, if they are to have any standing must be made for human beings, not human beings made to serve them, nor to be sacrificed to them. The Thousand-Year Reich contrasts quite unfavorably to either the three or the six-year limit on debt in Biblical or Hammarubian codes or with Jefferson’s limit of 19 years on the legitimacy of any law or order or constitution unless ratified anew by the living generation. America First cannot put either AMERICANS – the poor, women, African Americans, Latinos and Latinas, transgenders and gays and lesbians, Muslims and Jews, as well as immigrants, or newcomers, the aliens protected by Sabbath and Jubilee law as well as the living Constitution and the living tradition of the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty – SECOND. To do so is to SHAME Donald Trump himself by his own hand, to shame the government and country he leads, to shame God, to shame the American people, us, and so obligate us to restore our honor by replacing his government and leadership and to establishing JUSTICE.
Indeed what would be a better example of losing the Way and ending up with the empty ritual of obedience that Lao Tze warned us about than these leaders, their movements and governments? Fascism is never fulfillment of the law, it an attempt to make the human being serve, not the Sabbath, but a god who demands human sacrifice.
Abraham brought Isaac to the altar, thinking that God required blind obedience to the Law, to Authority, that human beings were made for the Law, not to fulfill it. God stops Abraham’s hand, because unlike the false gods, God does NOT demand human sacrifice. There will be no more human sacrifices after this moment. God stands for life. The only sacrifice – and that in the Christian not the Jewish tradition - is Jesus’, God taking human form and sacrificing himself to forgive sins by humanizing God himself, by understanding human suffering, and so being able to forgive. It is God refusing to become a fixed entity, to be dominated by the past, by the written word as dead labor, refusing to BE dead labor. God learns what it means to be human, to suffer, and so is able to forgive human beings our failings, our frailties, our sins, because it is now possible to understand us. A God that can learn is a God that can grow, that is a living God, not one found on the pages of old scriptures that must be used as laws to bind us to ideas from long ago. No human sacrifice, not for God, not for the Bible, Koran or any other book – these books all speak against the sacrificing of people. Not for building Communism under Stalin, nor for building the Reich, nor to Make America Great Again, but neither for the global economy, or for investor confidence, or to lower the “spread” that difference in interest rates on government debt between Germany and the countries of southern Europe, nor for the ratings agencies’ ratings of public debt, not for corporate balance sheets or the quarterly earnings report or the share price, not to pay back debts or for economic growth, not for global military power and hegemony be it that of the US, China or Russia, not for the nationalist projects of Modi or Trump, Duterte or Bolsonaro in Brazil. Not to pay back the IMF or to meet abstract universal EU Commission mandates.
When an official of the Obama administration stated that the administration in 2009 opposed a moratorium on foreclosures of homes because the policy was to get the labor market back up and running, what that meant was that those who would lose homes were being sacrificed so that, now homeless, they would go to another part of the country and lower wage levels through increasing the supply of available labor power and so get the labor market back up and running, getting hired and lowering labor standards in the process. This is a form of human sacrifice. It is forbidden.
As you can see, I am implying that the left needs to relearn sacred and theological language. This does not mean any abandonment of the causes of equality and dignity for women, gays and lesbians or transgender people. When a transgender person is brutally beaten or murdered because they are a trans person, this is a form of human sacrifice to an abstract idea of gender, of what is acceptable, and it goes explicitly against the laws we saw in Exodus and elsewhere that forbid maltreatment of the vulnerable, the excluded, the alien. When women are victim of sexual harassment at work, this is a direct violation of the law of the Sabbath on debt and work and treatment of women. When women are victims of domestic violence this is a violation of someone made in the image of God. When women die of illegal abortions because they do not have access to safe, clean, medical procedures for abortions this is a form of forbidden human sacrifice. The Sabbath was made for woman, not woman for the Sabbath.
Neoliberalism is a completely atheistic worldview in a double sense: first, as Michael Harrington in his magnificent book The Politics at God’s Funeral argued, capitalism is the only structurally atheist system because NOTHING CAN BE SACRED FOR CAPITALISM. ANYTHING THAT IS SACRED EXCEPT FOR MAXIMIZATION OF PROFIT RATES ON INVESTMENT (see my previous post here on What Is, and Isn’t Capitalism) is a LIMITATION ON THE POSSIBILITY OF INVESTING FREELY IN ANY AND ALL POSSIBLE OPPORTUNITIES TO MAXIMIZE RETURN ON INVESTMENT; secondly, Neoliberalism is based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, a hater of Judeo-Christian-Muslim-Buddhist and any other sacred tradition that emphasized social justice, decency to all, sharing, charity, concern for others, being our brothers’ and sister’s keepers. It is a philosophy of selfishness that is vulnerable to attack for being idolatrous, blasphemous, shameful to God and to ourselves, unjust, cruel, inhuman. It is time, as Abraham Lincoln once put it, even if we are not sure if God is on our side, for us to be sure we are on Hers.
Organizations, and Laws, as we can surmise from my dialectical analysis above, are hybrids – almost exactly half made up of material, half of symbolic culture, half inanimate objects made of work by hand, half design by human creativity and ideas of the mind. For this reason, how we think about organizations, what task we set them to, is crucial, but it also means we need to physically reduce them to human control as well. This means making them democratic, cooperative, and setting them to the purposes of human happiness, fulfillment and well-being. Every organization bears the traces of its origin, and some will prove to be unable to be turned to human purposes. But most can be refashioned, transformed, and made into means for meeting human needs. Democratizing all organizational life, seeing our organizations as existing to serve human needs and not as ends in themselves, as reified dead labor to rule over us, is one the most important task facing humanity. Another is returning to ALL our sources of wisdom, and remembering that they were made for us not us for them.
“Know thyself” said Socrates, dead white man. We know ourselves, our transgender brothers and sisters tell us today. “The Sabbath was made for the human being” said Jesus, central figure in a religious tradition run by conservative men for 2,000 years. “My father told me ‘you know, all of this belongs to you’” recounts Latina 29-year old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I sit with Shakespeare, and he does not flinch” wrote the great WEB DuBois of his time at Harvard as the college’s first African American student, when many of his fellow students did flinch, but Shakespeare spoke to him and with him. Years later he wrote that the greatest human drama of the past 2,000 years was the African American struggle for equality and democracy in America: “yet we discern in it no part of our labor movement, no part of our industrial triumph, no part of our religious experience”.
In his Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, Karl Marx wrote, “Just as if the people were not the real state. The state is an abstraction. Only the people is a concrete
reality . . . If in a democracy the political estate exists separately from this content and is distinguished from it, it nevertheless exists for itself only as a particular content, as a particular form of existence of the people.”
The Sabbath was made for the human being, not the human being for the Sabbath. All of this belongs to you.