Ziggurat - Bob Mazzei

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perfect subject. If you don’t kill the power, the power kills you” Kevin follows up, which sounds very challenging.

      “I see only rhetoric figures. We are just functions of a system where everything is admitted except to knock down the system itself. So, what is responsibility? It is a way to maintain the status quo”, Flynn offers up, and I perfectly understand what he means. He’s saying that if you want to know where all the evil in society comes from, you have to look at the social game. Although we are driven to consider our countries democratic systems, based upon rule of law, like pompously boasted by the jurists, our legal systems impose an atrocious form of slavery based upon capital accumulation.

      “Well, Flynn, exploitation comes before capital formation, then the power makes possible all the rest”, Kevin makes clear, just to highlight like the entire state apparatus makes exploitation and slavery real. Then he adds, “I am so tired to always listen to the same blather, that money is nothing but a conventional means to buy wealth, that human needs can be satisfied by policies that aim to realize common good, and that finance must be ethical not to harm real economy and all the blah… blah… blah…”

      I butt in, “Capital goes where profit is. It disregards human needs. Money is not neutral; it is the unequivocal expression of social relationships, in fact. About those who keep insisting on common good, I would respond that the common good and the good of capital agree. They match as much as hot cookies and cold milk. It is in the real economy that you need to investigate, because it is in the real economy that we see exploitation, there where capital commands over labor”

      “Exactly! It is where new value is created that everything is originated. All those who produce objects that can be traded with capital, not with returns, are productive. All the rest are sucking milk from the prolific cow” Flynn makes it very clear.

      I follow up again, “Remember, surplus of labor – surplus of product – surplus value, this is the sequence from which the process gets developed. If a job is able to increase the initial capital, beyond that the employer pays to the workers, it is productive”, I specified, yet probably not so plainly since Kevin wants to adjoin, “Without the product of the salaried workers employed by the industrial capital, all the rest of the social body would die. While the productive work is exchanged with capital, the unproductive work is exchanged with returns. The productive workers are those who produce wealth for everybody”

      But Flynn sees the need to provocatively ask “Don’t you think you have forgotten agriculture as a source of production?”

      “Huh… Of course. When I mentioned industrial capital, I meant agricultural too,” Kevin admits.

      “Money, and that particular form we call capital, is the software that sets the hardware of our society in motion. Indeed, capital is a social relationship, with no doubts!” Flynn says laying his right hand on the table and extending his fingers.

      “It’s not possible to conceive a capitalist society without exploitation. How could the production of goods create any surplus value otherwise? Those who think that this does not happen anymore, are not capable to understand the real process through which social wealth is created”, Kevin deals.

      “You hear many recipes are being delivered to resolve this crisis, but what they don’t make clear is that capitalism cannot but expand poverty as it increases productivity. Everything is based upon the value of trade; time itself is a value to be traded for money. Imagine instead a society where the distinction productive unproductive does not exist, because the social wealth is given by values of use, no matter material or immaterial. In that society, time acquires a human dimension within human relationships”, I avow, and I must admit to be pleased to have regained such a clear vision. I have conceded too much to the progressive thought for all these years, inasmuch I have risked to get my sight dimmed. Yet, I have concluded that the progressive and the conservative forces have much more in common than their respective fans loiter to differentiate. Their characteristic worry to keep things from breaking, to get the device unaltered, to repair the wrong—no matter if with more wrong—that amplifies the power and makes it even more dominant, that I have come to call Neostance. And Neostance, is this whole of seemingly contrasting views that want to restrain History, trapping it within a dome of crystal, though that it has already broken.

      “You are correct, Duane. Capitalism has never been preoccupied as to satisfy individual needs, nor has it ever done its utmost to please collective needs. Profit is its only goal, full stop!” Kevin says loudly.

      “Go where profit is higher, go where risk is lower. That’s globalization, no need to find more implications. Capital subdues labor, and everybody is subject to capital. The domain of capitalism has grabbed the entire world, Flynn insists, and then maintains, “My people had been dragged in chains to the Americas because they could be sweated without compunction. It was part of the game of dominion. Each age has its trade, and since capital can now travel everywhere, there’s no need to move people. What matters is not private or state property, what matters is to go beyond property”

      Rockefeller used to repeat, “Pay profit to no one”, he knew the game, and he knew how to win. Capital is absolutely something living. It lives among the social relationships of our everyday reality. This living force is inside everybody’s life.

      Who would not want to take flight now and then? The very trouble is that we have then to go back. Sometimes we are left there, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yet, it’s hardly ever that the other shoe is the one that suits.

      But, have you ever thought that we are moved by necessity, indeed, and that our freedom is rather limited? What are we actually free to do? We are driven to think that our discomfort is because there are so many greedy people, tragedies happen because there are so many wicked men, that peace and wellbeing would be absolutely diffused all around the earth if only human beings were more religious, or more ethical, or more respectful of the law. Good intentions!

      Yet, which freedom for individuals can really exert under these circumstances? How, what circumstances? These, these that crush us all to be subjected to produce so that it may be possible to accumulate, that enclose us all in a cruel system where all the battles are bloody, where no place is safe, nobody is innocent. We are more forced than free.

      Nobody is born wicked, yet they can become that, and very much so. If there are too many walls between our being and our humanity, then everything is possible. Our conscience is modeled and shaped in that big forge that is social environment; society has always been a breeding ground for deviancy. If all around me is inhuman, I cannot humanly live as a human, because I am impeded even from seeing the human in me. And if we subside into our social conquests, thinking that our laws expressively define good and bad, then we mistake the lawful for the good and the illicit for the evil, but right and wrong are legal categories that say nothing to our humanity. The axe of justice falls upon anyone who is not disposed to meet the right, not the good. To believe that the law, which defines the right, coincides with the good is tantamount to closing one’s eyes before human’s pain. I too have made that mistake indulging in a sick vision, which sustains to change the world by dint of injections of ethics, without any way for amending the least social relationship though. But no one can dry up the ocean taking a bucketful of water a day.

      There are things that exist, and that nobody can now deny, because they are apparent, and they are frightful; yet, there are others that nobody can see, but they are alive, and these latter determine the first, and are even more dreadful. A tsunami causes destruction, sows death, and it may well demolish the patient work of long, long years, but it never comes out of nothingness, it is, indeed, the consequence of a specific cause. We may be caught off guard by the sudden billow, but nobody can say it happened without anything to provoke it, good, bad, or indifferent!

      It is in the difference between necessities and freed will, that responsibility can be assumed.

      Freed Will, is not a typo, it is instead used deliberately to mean that it is possible to speak of freedom and of responsibility only when the will of all human beings has been liberated]

      As long as human beings are not freed from want and need, free will, is only a mere delusion. There is no free will, in fact, because

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