Estranged at the Altar

Widgets are strange, when you're an estranger, people are stranger when you're alone. In this episode we start thinking about death and work a little differently, consider what what work is and why it's a problem under Capitalism, why widgets matter, and what appropriation is... in other words, please welcome Karl Marx and George Bataille to the conversation.

Recommended links:
Ask a Left Nietzschean (Acid Horizon episode)
https://www.youtube.com/live/xZtvocD_ooQ?si=EYs311rESuC0LdkB

Nietzsche symposium at Columbia:
https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/nietzsche1313/
(I misidentified it as 8/13, 8/13 is only one discussion, on Fanon, the Symposium is 13/13).
I highly recommend session 4/13 | Gilles Deleuze, on "The Deleuzian Nietzsche" https://youtu.be/oFFxnf92XqY

Obligatory bibliography, or books you may also want to check out.

Bataille, Georges, and Robert Hurley. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. 1. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007
Heidegger, Martin, John Macquarrie, and Edward Robinson. Being and Time. Malden: Blackwell, 2013.
Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin in association with New Left Review, 1992. 

Transcript

Hello, welcome, and thank you for checking out this episode of Philosophy Versus Work, the podcast that examines the Ethics of the “Work Ethic” and other existential, phenomenological, mythological, ontological, and socio-political questions regarding Work (Life and Death). I am Michael Murray and I’ll be your guide on this philosophical journey. 

Episode 5: Estranged at the Altar 

To fear, or not to fear, the Reaper. Pt. 3

Okay, so, I know last week was a lot of quotes and definitions and obtuse language, and some of you may have missed it – or just gone running for the hills as soon as you realized almost the whole episode was going to be on Heidegger’s Dasein in Being and Time. Also, quick correction over the end of the last episode. This week is actually going to be a good deal of Marx and then some Bataille, rather than the other way around. In outlining this episode I realized there’s a bunch more underlying theory to unpack before diving headlong in General Economy. 

First though, quick recap of Heidegger’s Being-toward-death that I, well, appropriate and pivot from for turning toward death. 

Authentic Being-towards-death is anxiety. It is anxiety in the sense of one’s own understanding of the possibility of the impossibility of one’s own existence, and an anxious anticipation in the face of it. It isn’t death-seeking or sitting around waiting for death, or living in fear of death, avoiding – even mentally, as in belief in an afterlife. It is a self-understanding and certainty of one’s own, individual existence, free from the “they,” no longer concerned with soliciting confirmation of one’s own existence, and anxious of one’s own end. 

To put on spin on Decartes’ cogito, I will die, and I don’t like it, therefore I am. 

One’s death is the singular, ownmost thing and as such it cannot be appropriated.

Alright, I ought to be clear here as to the extent that one’s death cannot be appropriated. To the extent that a worker could be killed at work or suffer exposure to something that curtails the individual’s expected life span, and I believe this is consistent with Heidegger’s position, I do not consider this the appropriation of one’s death so much as the appropriation of one’s life in the most complete sense. Outside of being rendered immortal, my death cannot be taken from me.

Also, death lays a claim on an individual (an individual Dasein), another reason it is not possible to appropriate one’s death – Death, itself, has a greater claim – it’s also my favorite character in the first season of Good Omens. I love how its depicted as being just outside the battle of good and evil, having universe level power, but no malice or intent, it just is inevitable. 

Sidenote on claims – this has an interesting parallel I’d like to circle back to eventually regarding the centrality, and necessity, of debt to capitalism’s functioning – especially as regards maintaining people in capitalist work – and the ransom theory of atonement (or debt theory of salvation), the idea that God has a claim on humanity for having saved humanity from the Devil through his death as Christ, as God-Man. The devil cannot claim man’s soul, appropriate it, except in foreclosure for man’s failure to pay its debt to God (for a debt that God created for man, that man did not enter freely). So, if you thought the Protestant work ethic was the only way religion has impacted work, guess again. Religion has had a very heavy foot on the scale of, let’s call it economic, work, for a long, long time. 

Turning towards death, in thinking about work, following from Heidegger, is a sense of confronting one’s anxiety at their own(most) mortality when making a determination of how to spend one’s labor-time. 

Now, I’m going to lean on both Heidegger and George Bataille to flesh out the role of death in thinking about work. But in short, one’s death is inevitable and it cannot be taken away; as opposed to one’s life, which can be exploited and appropriated by work (especially as under capitalism, through estrangement, which we’re about to unpack how this happens and why it’s still relevant). 

Death, specifically the death of others, makes the scarcity of one’s own time visible, if one pays attention. Heidegger describes this possibility as such; the actual experience of death, of no longer being Dasein, is “denied to any particular Dasein in relation to itself. But this makes the death of others more impressive. In this way, a termination [Heidegger uses “Beendigung”, literally “end” or “ending” as in the end of an evening out or the end of this episode.] In this way, a termination of Dasein becomes ‘Objectively’ accessible. Dasein can thus gain an experience of death, all the more so because Dasein is essentially Being with Others.”  

The key movement we need to accomplish though is to get from anticipation to anxiety in the face of the constant threat of death. To be merely in anticipation of a death that is deferred to the future is to get lost in “the everydayness of the they-self.” 

As noted last week, anticipation of the certainty of death / the possibility of non-existence, in its utter individualization, enables the anxiety of “self-understanding” that one’s ultimate potentiality is not-existing. Anticipation of death, as it relates to work and being lost in the they-self (in an everyday, uncritical, inauthentic, passive being-with-others) stops at planning for one’s socially expected end – retirement savings, health care, housing and possibly geriatric care, i.e., end of life care – but it stops short of addressing the anxiety that the certitude of death makes no guarantee that one will actually survive long enough for any of those plans to come to fruition. Anxiety, as authentic Being-towards-death, in the face of death addresses the possibility of death at this moment. 

Turning toward death, in regards to work, is effectively facing this anxiety in the face of death now, rather than merely anticipating death as planning for the future; thus considering death’s potential immediacy, and all that entails (plans, projects, dreams and goals, impacts on surviving loved ones) rather than deferring death to an unsecured future. 

Now, before we go any further down the rabbit hole, we need to address why working is a problem under Capitalism; specifically, working under conditions wherein there is no choice but to work in order to have access to the basic necessities required for survival (food, water, and shelter), as Marx put it, wage slavery, as well as the estrangement of work under Capitalism. And, to call back a few episodes, lacking radical cultural and/or technological change resulting in the means of production being freely and readily available to all and/or the end of money, there’s no reason to suspect socialism or communism, at least any version of which that have been, to date, attempted, would be immune to compulsory work. Capitalism; however, being the only one of these systems, in all versions, theoretical and practical, that does allow for immunity from work entirely given the possession of enough capital… money.

Capitalism fundamentally requires two forms of work, the work of money (capital) and the work of physical and/or intellectual labor – note, I’m not using “human” labor, as automation and machine-production are also central to capitalist production – the complete replacement of all “human” labor would do nothing to alter what Capitalism is in-itself. Capitalism creates money from money – or at least purports to.

These systems each also hold out their own utopian visions. For communism, the egalitarian eradication of class distinction, the elimination of haves and have nots. For socialism, the transfer of the control of the means of production over to the worker. And for capitalism, the hope of immunity from compulsory work through the accumulation of wealth. 

For now though, since we’re just focusing on trying to get to meaningful work as an ethical issue, you know, baby steps, we’re only going to deal with one negative function of capitalism, as identified by Marx; estrangement. 

Both the object of the worker’s labor and the work itself, according to Marx, are estranged from the worker under the capitalist conditions of production. Okay, so, what does that mean?

Lucio Coletti states in his Introduction to Karl Marx’ Early Writings 

“… that Marx envisages the process of estrangement as occurring in three directions or dimensions at the same time:

(1) as the estrangement of the worker from the material, objective product of his work;

(2) as the estrangement of his work-activity itself (he does not belong to himself at work, but to whoever he has sold his day’s work-activity);

(3) lastly, as estrangement from other men, that is from the owner of the means of production and of the use to which his labor is put.”

To simplify this a little - and, keep in mind, Marx is referring primarily to the factory of industrial production, in contrast to how things were made and sold prior to the industrial revolution, and to earlier forms of wealth accumulation, to identify how and why the current system, Capitalism, both came to be as well as in critique of the system. 

Okay, storytime. 

The worker goes to work make a widget. The widget made is comprised of materials owned by someone else and using tools, machines, facilities, etc. as well owned by someone else. The worker, though skilled at making widgets, or at least skilled in a phase of the production of the widget, has their own skills, but they lack the resources, tools, facilities, etc. (the means of production) and/or the money (the capital) to acquire the means of production. They still need to earn a living, so they sell their labor to someone that does own the means of production, a capitalist, and then they spend their time making widgets. At the end of the work day, they’ve made a number of widgets; however, they don’t own any of them. They cannot take them and sell them in the market. Nor can they sell them to the capitalist that owns them already by virtue of having owned the means of production and having paid the worker for their labor. The worker is paid their wages, they go home, the capitalist takes the widgets and sells them, keeping whatever the difference is between the cost of the production of the widget and the workers’ wages, and the selling price. 

Where does the estrangement come in? 

First, the worker, having made the widget, is denied any claim to the widget, the object of their labor. 

Second, the worker is unfree so far as they are at work. All activity is fully controlled by the purchaser of their labor. They are also physically constrained to the site of their labor - their place of employment - as opposed to the capitalist, who is free to go about their day, taking meals, drinks, leisure, and to otherwise come and go as they please.

This one gets a little bit more wonky, especially now, with hybrid work and work-from-home; but it’s safe to say even in most work-from-home situations, at least as far as the employer is concerned, you’re not really free to come and go as you please. If anything, it’s accelerated an entire industry for work surveillance devices and software designed to make sure you remain chained to your work.

Third, the worker is distinguished, in their being, as different and separate from the owner of the means of production. They are not two equal human beings in different jobs, they are thrust into a categorical relationship as two different kinds, two different classes, of people. 

Also, keep in mind, I’m leaning on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, also called the 1844 Manuscripts, so this is nearly a century before the 5 day, 40 hour work week was signed into law here in the U.S,; and, it had been commonplace for employers of the time, in essentially all of the industrializing world, including the U.S., to require 7 days work per week, unlimited, but typically around 70 hours per week, few, if any, breaks, absolute compliance with instruction in the face of bodily harm by the work (and/or the supervisor), and the ever-present threat of the use of State violence – by the police, state militias (including and which also eventually became the National Guard), federal troops, and mercenary forces like the Pinkertons; free to use all manner of weapons and tactics at their disposal, including espionage, sabotage, lethal force, and even lynchings – against striking employees seeking better wages and working conditions.

The UK adopted a statutory 5-day work week in 1871 compared to the period 1938-45 in the US, which still has no federal protection for meal breaks and states are entitled to all form of industry-specific labor protection carve-outs, but, we’re getting a bit away from the point.

Then again, modern U.S. labor laws have, at least on their face, so far, really only addressed that second form of estrangement, of being “unfree” at work (though you don’t have to look any further than current headlines to see this is still under attack, take for example Elon Musk proposing to ban all Apple devices in and around Tesla facilities by Tesla employees because Apple’s CEO is going to work with OpenAI and Musk just lost his little legal spat with OpenAI’s CEO (so much for being a free speech “absolutist”)). Also, arguably, being “unfree” at work has only been addressed because of trying to deal with a history of slavery. As for the third form, while it’s generally been upheld that de jure (by law) different classes of people is unconstitutional, de facto (in effect) class differences are totally fine, even to the point of limiting potential remedial action for past de jure offenses under the notion that recognizing those offences implies they are still de jure differences when they’re not. Thank you Chief Justice Roberts for that brilliant insight. 

Quick word about appropriation before we swing back to thinking about death. Per Marx, appropriation appears as estrangement. 

Notes Marx, “The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and extent. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he produces… Labour not only produces commodities; it also produces itself and the workers as a commodity and it does so in the same proportion in which it produces commodities in general… the object that labour produces… stands opposed to it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. [Labor is] embodied and made material in an object, it is the objectification of labour. In the sphere of political economy [the] realization [the objectification] of labour appears as a loss of reality for the worker, objectification as loss of and bondage to the object, and appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.”

Okay, that’s a bit to digest.

How does the worker become poorer the more wealth he produces? Well, first of all, it’s relational, and it’s also key to note that Capitalism isn’t a zero sum game. The total size of the economic pie continues to grow as wealth is created. As the worker creates goods for the Capitalist to sell (the Capitalist being the owner of the means of production, not the employer necessarily, but the owner of the employing firm, to be a bit more contemporary), they lose the object of their labor, they gain a fraction of the value of the object in wages, though the Capitalist gains a much larger fraction. So, relationally, as the pie gets bigger, even though the worker is gaining some – and this is of course presuming an imaginary worker with no debt or other financial obligations – the Capitalist gains exponentially more as this continues, proportionally decreasing the worker’s share of the growing pie, despite the workers labor spent in creating the wealth in the first place. 

Here's another take. 

The worker sold their labor to the capitalist, and in addition, the capitalist appropriated the object of their labor. To get how this works, we need to, very briefly, touch on John Locke. So, Locke, in The Two Treatises of Government, lays out a ‘Labor Theory of Property’ in which, essentially, 1. Property is a natural right, as such can neither be granted (positive rights, a person can do x, you have a right to assemble together and speak publicly) nor restricted (negative rights, resulting from a person cannot do y, so, you have a right not to be murdered), and 2. Property is created when a person combines their labor with something. The products of my labor are mine because of my work. 

Selling one’s labor and without selling the product of one’s labor is, for Marx, an appropriation of the product of that labor. Marx is making a similar move to Locke, where Locke argued that taxation was in conflict with the natural right of property. The capitalist is appropriating either the worker’s property, their time and/or the product of the labor. We’ll get deeper into Marx’ Labor Theory of Value sometime later, but for now, we’ll sum it up that the value of a product of work is determined by the “socially necessary labor time” that went into it’s production. The appropriation – fundamental to the creation of wealth in capitalism – comes from theft of that value by the capitalist from the worker.

A really rough example, a capitalist drops $10 on resources, another $5 on facilities, and $3 on labor to get a widget produced. The worker spends their time and effort and is compensated $3 to create a widget. The widget is then sold on the market for $22. For Marx, it’s the worker that created the $22 product, not the capitalist. The capitalist’s profit, the “surplus value,” $4, is stolen, appropriated, from the worker. (In addition to which the worker is estranged from their own life via the time they spent at work and estranged from the basic equality of humanity by being locked in this power relationship with the capitalist). 

Okay, but, Capitalism is just one form of economic organization. And like socialism and communism, it’s a restricted form of economic organization, in that it’s concerned only with the resources and labor of the production and distribution of goods and services. 

George Bataille offers a different conception of economy, a General Economy, in The Accursed Share; and this is going to give us a door to move from thinking about work economically, to thinking about work holistically, making life, and death, intrinsic to work. He’ll also offer us a potential way to view the aim of work such that it invalidates bullshit jobs and may begin to upend the Protestant Work Ethic. But, uh, spoilers. 

You may notice a hard turn in the language and theory being employed now, as far as the authors’ styles. First, as far as Marx and Bataille, Marx was writing from the school of the “Hegelian Dialectic.” Marx had been one the “Young Hegelians,” along with Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Fuerbach, which we’ll get to, um, someday – there’s some stuff here I’d like to get into, but it’s not going to come up for a while probably – Hegel had been the prominent philosopher of Germany in the early 1800s and Marx took up reading Hegel and getting deep into Philosophy while at university studying law. The gist to get here is, Marx’ Historical Materialism is essentially a move from Philosophy as interpreting the world to Philosophy as a way to change it, while following a long tradition from Aristotle to Kant in materialism (as opposed to Plato’s essentialism), from Kant to Hegel in “antinomies” (the Kantian thesis and anti-thesis), and Hegel’s dialectic – the discursive move of conflict-negation-creation : thesis, antithesis, synthesis. More on Marx, Capital, and Historical Materialism soon enough. 

Second, as for Bataille and Heidegger, we’re moving from early German existentialism – Being and Time was published in 1927 – to post-war French existentialism, The Accursed Share being published in 1949 (and though some refer to Bataille as a nihilist, I don’t buy this argument. To be fair, I am by no means a specialist on Bataille. I’m operating on what I’ve read, his novel Blue of Noon, and his texts The Accursed Share (volume 1) and Visions of Excess, as well as lectures in Philosophy and Religious Studies, grad and undergrad  courses. I read Bataille, along with Albert Camus, as existentialists, desperate to try to make sense of a world that no longer makes sense based on what had been generally conceived as largely shared ‘human’ values – the Humanism of the Enlightenment – and that just survived the horrors of World War II and are trying to find some kind of justification for philosophy, and art, and poetry… as it appears all prior justifications of values and ethics, whether religions or virtues or consequentialism and so on, were all just proven false; or, at least, inadequate. 

Whereas the existentialists, who take from the idea that life has no intrinsically or extrinsically given meaning, and therefore we are free to, and therefore must, make our meaning and values ourselves; the nihilists, from the idea that life has no meaning, conclude there are no values, and often, there is only power, thus paving the road to fascism and totalitarianism, and, I need to note, a particularly motivated, narrow, and vulgar interpretation of Nietzsche. And we will definitely be unpacking some Nietzsche along the way. For now though, I'll just say Nietzsche is a genealogist, philologist and philosopher of joy, and if you want some info in the meantime on Nietzsche as definitively anti-fascist, check out Ask a Left Nietzschian or any of the series of symposia on Nietzsche hosted by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought titled Nietzsche 8/13. I'll leave a link in the show notes. 

Okay. Georges Bataille. In The Accursed Share, Bataille describes what he refers to as “General Economy.”  General Economy establishes an economics centered on “…the ‘expenditure’ (the ‘consumption’) of wealth, rather [its] production…” He describes the laws of General Economy as Growth, Pressure, and the Accursed Share. These laws are understood biologically as the consumption of energy and what is done with the energy consumed, which must either be used or squandered.

Think the law of conservation of energy and the First Law of Thermodynamics – another little bit of insight, his study on thermodynamics was highly instructive for Marx in developing his theories of work and labor, and, here, is bleeding into Bataille’s thought on General Economy – which is a critique of Restrictive Economy, the bulk of economic thought, including Marx – in that 1. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed, and 2. That the two primary forms of energy transfer are heat and thermodynamic work, how a thermodynamic system, a body of matter, interacts with its environment, exchanging energy. 

The first outlet for the consumption of energy is by the growth of the organism, though this growth is also limited to the natural maximum of the organism. Squander only occurs once the limits of growth have been reached. “Only the impossibility of continuing growth,” Bataille states, “makes way for squander… The immediate limitation, for each individual or each group, is given by the other individuals or other groups.”  These limitations, or local conditions, exert pressure on growth, but only once “life occupies all the available space.”  This filling-up can be mitigated by death or destruction (Bataille uses the examples of a forest fire, volcano, or man’s destructive activities), as that destruction frees up space for life to grow into. However, the principle effect of pressure on growth is extension; by which Bataille means the creation of new spaces to accommodate growth. Here he uses the example of adding seats to a crowded bullring to accommodate a larger than anticipated crowd – the stadium does not grow, it’s construction is fixed, but its capacity can be expanded, up to a point.

In addition, death, as read in Bataille’s analysis on General Economy, comprises the “most remarkable” form of the second effect of Pressure.  And we’re going to start unpacking all of that in a moment. Note though, that Death, in “General Economy,” creates a vacancy that becomes occupied by the growth of the living. All in all, it's a particularly organic conception of economy; and nature, after all, abhors a vacuum.

Now, critical to understanding Bataille’s general economy is understanding his movement from restricted economy, essentially, an economy built on scarcity with the intent of growing wealth, to one built on abundance and with an intent towards consumption. Bataille points out that the alleged scarcity in our current economic models are based based on a lie. The scarcity doesn’t actually exist in either resources or wealth. In regards to both, humanity has an abundance. The scarcity we have to deal with is artificially imposed upon us, it is a function of the existing system. 

As for his laws of Growth, Pressure, and the Accursed Share… 

Growth – Bataille is basing this on basic biology and general ecology. He notes that, in the natural world, there is a superabundance of energy available. That organisms take in this energy and use it for growth and reproduction. Only when the spatial limits of growth are reached, does “living matter… radiate or squander” energy. 

Pressure – “As a rule,” Bataille states, “the surface of the globe is infested by life to the extent possible.” That extent is determined, bounded, by pressure – the edge of the forest, the range of the required climate, presence of the basic necessities of life to function.

The first effect of pressure, is extension. The tree grows higher for it’s leaves to reach the sunlight, the queen bee takes flight seeking new territory for a new colony, likewise for lions forming new prides, wolves forming new packs, humans forming new cities, and so on. To dip out of Bataille and into Deleuze a bit, a rhizome, expanding in all directions at once until it fills in all available space – without falling down the Deleuzian Rhizome rabbit hole, yet, if you’ve seen HBO’s The Last of Us, at least the opening credits, then you’ve seen an animation of rhizomatic expansion. 

The second effect of pressure, this is Bataille, is squander or luxury – “the most remarkable form being death.” Bataille pops back to the idea of expanding the seating capacity of an arena by adding more seats. The space has not grown, but the capacity has increased through a kind of expansion. In contrast to adding seats though, “a fight could break out at the entrance.” Now, rather than needing more seats, some of the previously existing seats have become available. Accommodating growth by clearing away some of what was previously filling the space. As regards organisms, Bataille refers to the development of larger and more complicated, more luxurious, organisms that fill the space that lesser organisms had previously filled. 

He identifies three forms of luxury: eating, death, and sexual reproduction. Eating, given what he’s already laid out, seems the most obvious. The food chain. One organism consuming another. Generally speaking, one larger organism (or group of them) consuming smaller organisms – for example, in the first case, a human eating a chicken cobb salad. There’s a lot, and a varied lot, of dead organic matter going into that meal. In the second case, consider a pride of lions killing a water buffalo. There was a lot of energy and organic matter that went into the origin and development of that animal that has now become the food of other animals. In this sense, death is, according to Bataille, “accidental.” Personally, I think it would be more accurate to claim it incidental than accidental, the lions didn’t kill the water buffalo accidentally; however, nor did they “murder” the water buffalo, which, I believe, is what we would mean by intentional death in this scenario. 

Next up is death. This is a bit more complicated, and takes, as a starting point, much earlier, simpler forms of life, that, through reproduction, or reduplication, rather, by “scissiparity” – or schizogenesis… reproduction by splitting apart – are functionally immortal in that the following “generations” are in fact not generations at all, but still identical to the original. The animal body is complex and fragile (which makes it luxurious) and results in death. Death that constantly leaves room for succeeding generations. And, finally, sexual reproduction. Well, really, another simple connection. Sexual reproduction is luxurious in that is consumes an incredible amount of energy and resources, like food, which means, more death. 

Death is universal, unappropriable, revelatory, and, we also need now consider, generative, to the extent that it clears the way, in a closed system, for new growth. 

This raises the problem of a much darker, more cynical alternative to the phenomenon of bullshit jobs that remains available to the ruling/wealth-class. War. As Bataille points out, through war man’s destructive capacity is realized such that we may (1) achieve full employment through military/industrial mobilization of the surplus labor force (the reserve army of labor, to use Marx’ parlance) and (2) to thin the herd, by way of cutting the dead limb of unnecessary surplus labor by employing death to make room for new growth. One response, albeit terrifying, to the problem of there not being enough jobs, is that the real problem is that there are too many people. 

There’s another troubling problem to consider, and one which potentially brings us back to the problem of Bullshit Jobs – those jobs that ultimately create nothing and are functionally, and knowingly (by the worker) meaningless and/or abusive – in the idea of Sacrifice. 

Now, Bataille goes on to refer to the immolation and/or consumption of plants and animals, and of other humans – he renders in detail the cultural and religious significance of human sacrifice in the Aztec culture – but, I wonder if it's possible that in our, and our society’s, reverence for work, are, potentially, destroying ourselves, as sacrificial objects, before the altar of work. “Sacrifice restores to the sacred world,” Bataille states, “that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane. Servile use has made a thing (an object) of that which, in a deep sense, is of the same nature as the subject, is in a relation of intimate participation with the subject.”

Rather than rejecting potentially meaningless work as meaningless and seeking, even demanding, meaningful work, maybe we’re seeking instead to restore work’s meaning – for example, salvation through “impersonal social usefulness” in the service of God’s will – where there actually was none, by sacrificing ourselves to work itself.  The Capitalist now no longer needs to worry about workers resisting their estrangement, or any other potential or real abuses - very much, I should note, in the same way provincial Romans  gave up resistance and  began to ‘morally’ police themselves as Constantine began converting the Empire to Christianity; a far easier and cheaper alternative to real policing by the Roman Legion - as the worker, through their faith in work, deigns their toil noble, sacrificial, rather than meaningless or exploited. 

Alright, I think we’ve said enough about the problems underlying work for now. There’s plenty more to say, but, hey, that’s what we have this whole podcast for. In the meantime, I think it’s about time for a pivot. Enough about death, for a little while any way. I think it might be about time to start talking about art, and food, and I think I had something to say about chairs too. 

Next week, we return to Bataille for a bit, we still need to go over what the Accursed Share itself is, and start trying to figure out if there might be a way out of this mess. 

‘til then. 

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