#1
tardy on these heaters
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If one tried to define the Zeitgeist breathing through the New Right today one would be confronted with a seemingly undecipherable puzzle. On the one side these are the spokesmen for a scientific and technological revolution that a few years ago would have smacked of science fiction: gene-splicing, DNA computers, time-compression techniques, space colonies. At the same time the circles of the New Right have witnessed a revival of religious tendencies and moral conservatism that one would have thought was buried once and for all with "our" Puritan Founding Fathers. Falwell's Moral Majority is the most vocal of this return to the values of Calvin and Cotton Mather, but by far not the only one. Wherever you turn, Godfearing, Satan-minded groups, detemmined to reshape the country on the model of the Puritan colonies, are sprawling like mushrooms: Christian Voice, Pro-Family Forum, National Prayer Campaign, Eagle Forum, Right to Life Commission, Fund to Restore an Educated Electorate, Institute for Christian Economics. Seen in its general contours, then, the body of the New Right seems stretching in two opposite directions, attempting at once a bold leap into the past and an equally bold leap into the future.

(...)

A clue to understanding the double soul of the New Right is to realise that its mixture of reactionary social policies and scientific boldness is not a novelty in the history of capitalism. If we look at the beginning of capital - the 16th and 17th century to which the Moral Majority would so happily return - we see a similar situation in the countries of the "take off." At the very time when Galileo was pointing his telescope to the moon, and Francis Bacon was laying the foundations of scientific rationality, women and gays by the thousands were burnt on the stake throughout Europe, with the universal blessing of the modernizing (sic) European intelligentsia.

A sudden craze? An inexplicable fall into barbarism? In reality, the witch hunt was part and parcel of that attempt at "human perfectibility" that is commonly acknowledged as the dream of the fathers of modem rationalism. For the thrust of the emerging capitalist class towards the domination and exploitation of nature would have remained a dead letter without the concomitant creation of a new type of individual whose behavior would be as regular, predictable and controllable as that of the newly discovered natural laws. To achieve this purpose one had to destroy that magical conception of the world that, e.g., make the Indians in the overseas colonies believe that it was a sacrilege to mine the earth, or in the heart of Europe assured the proletariat that people could fly, be in two places at the same time, divine the future and (most important) that on some "unlucky days" all enterprise had to be carefully avoided. The witch hunt, moreover, ensured the control over the main source of labor, the woman's body, by criminalizing abortion and all forms of contraception as a crime against the state. Finally, the witch hunt was functional to the reorganization of family life, i.e., the restructuring of reproduction that accompanied the reorganization of work on a capitalistic basis. On the stake died the adulteress, the woman of "ill repute," the lesbian, the woman who lived alone, or lacked "maternal spirit" or had illegitimate children. On the stake ended many beggars, who had impudently launched their curses against the refusal of some "ale and bread." For in the "transition" to capitalism it was primarily the woman, especially the woman in rebellion, (destined to depend on a man for her survival) who became pauperised. The fathers of modem rationalism approved; some even complained that the state did not go far enough. Notoriously, Bodin insisted that the witches should not be "mercifully" strangled before being given to the flames.


What the launching of high-tech industry needs mostly today is a technological leap in the human machine - a big evolutionary step creating a new type of worker to match capital's investment needs. What are the faculties required by the new being our futurologists advocate? A look at the debate on space colonies is revealing in this respect. All agree, first of all, that the main impediment today to the development of human colonies in space is bio-social rather than technological, i.e., you may be able to glue the space shuttle's tiles together but gluing the right space worker-technician is a project that even the present genetic breathroughs are far from having solved. An individual is needed who can:

* endure social isolation and sensory deprivation for long periods of time without breaking down,

* perform "perfectly" in an extremely hostile/alien and artificial environment and under enormous stress,

* achieve a superb control of his bodily functions (consider: it takes an hour to shit in space!) and psychological reactions (anger, hate, indecisiveness), our all-too-human frailties which can be disastrous in the fragile, vulnerable world of life in space,

* demonstrates total obedience, conformity and receptivity to commands, for there can be little tolerance for social deviations and disagreements when the most minute act of sabotage can have catastrophic consequences to the very costly, complex and powerful equipment entrusted in their hands.

Indeed, not only will the space technician have a quasi-religious relation to his machine but he himself must become more and more machine-like, achieving a perfect symbiosis with his computer which, in the long nights of space, is often his only and always his most reliable guide, his companion, his buddy, his friend.

The space worker, then, must be a highly ascetic type, pure in body and soul, perfect in his performance, obedient like a well-wound clock and extremely fetishistic in his mental modes. Where is this gem most likely bred? In a fundamentalist type religious sect. To put it in the words of biologist Garrett Harding:

What group would be most suitable to this most recent Brave New World (the space colony)? Probably a religious group. There must be unity of thought and the acceptance of discipline. But the colonists couldn't be a bunch of Unitarians or Quakers, for these people regard the individual conscience as the best guide to action. space colonies' existence would require something more like the Hutterites or the Mormons for its inhabitants . . . integration could not be risked on this delicate vessel, for fear of sabotage and terrorism. Only "purification" would do.


Not surprisingly, a few days after landing, the first space shuttle astronauts were greeted by Elder Neal Maxwell at the Mormon Tabernacle. 'We honor tonight men who have seen God in all his majesty and power,' he said and the 6000 member congregation responded, "Amen."



http://deoxy.org/mormons.htm

Isn't it Mormon doctrine that the saved earn their own planets in the afterlife?

Edited by babyfinland ()

#2
tardy on these heaters
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posting this here for posterity, chapter from caliban and the witch i think http://www.commoner.org.uk/03federici.pdf
#3
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#4
tardy on these heaters
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The outcome is a redefinition of bodily attributes that makes the body, ideally, at least, suited for the regularity and automatism demanded by the capitalist work-discipline. Particularly important in this context was the attack on the “imagination” (vis imaginativa) which in 16th and 17th-century Natural Magic was considered a powerful force by which the magician could affect the surrounding world and bring about “health or sickness, not only in its proper body, but also in other bodies.” Hobbes devoted a chapter of the Leviathan to demonstrate that the imagination is only a “decaying sense,” no different from memory, only gradually weakened by the removal of the objects of our perception. The body had to die so that labor power could live.

What died was the concept of the body as a receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality, it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, that branded what the philosophers classified as “irrational” as a true form of crime. The paths of scientific rationalization intersected with the disciplining of the social body, as is evident if we pass to the social sciences. For the development of the latter was premised on the homogenization of social behavior and the construction of a prototype of individual to whom, on an average, all would be expected to conform. In Marx’s words, this is an abstract individual, constructed in a uniform, undifferentiated way, as a social average, and subject to a radical decharacterization, so that all of its faculties can be grasped only in their most standardized aspects.

As Foucault has demonstrated, the mechanization of the body did not simply involve the repression of desires, emotions, or forms of behavior that were to be eradicated. It also involved the developent of new faculties in the individual that would appear as other with respect to the body, and become the agents of its transformation. In other words, the other side of alienation from the body was the development of individual identity conceived precisely as as “otherness” from the body, and in perennial antagonism with it. The emergence of this alter ego, and the determination of a historic conflict between mind and body, represent the act of birth of the individual in capitalist society. For it became a typical characteristic of the individual molded by the capitalist work-discipline to confront one’s body as an alien reality, to be assessed, developed as well as kept at bay, in order to obtain from it the desired results.

#5
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:)