From Beirut to New York to Houston

July 26, 2010

Mechanical slavery instead of human slavery

"The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

--Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1895)

Even if machines can do factory work, or even clean the house or cook dinner, will they ever be able to take care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled?

"They (corporations) cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed nor excommunicated, for they have no souls."

--Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634), Case of Sutton's Hospital

But they should be. An international body has to regulate international corporations.

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kingcaid

"My teacher was a woman who had been trained by Methodist missionaries; she was of the African people, that I could see, and she found in this a source of humiliation and self-loathing, and she wore despair like an article of clothing, like a mantle, or a staff on which she leaned constantly, a birthright which she would pass on to us" (16).

"This education I was receiving had never offered me the satisfaction I was told it would; it only filled me with question that were not answered, it only filled me with anger. I could not like what it would lead to: a humiliation so permanent that it would replace your own skin. And your own name, whatever it might be, eventually was not the gateway to who you really were, and you could not ever say to yourself, "My name is Xuela Claudette Desvarieux." This was my mother's name, but I cannot say it was her real name, for in a life like hers, as in mine, what is a real name?

My own name is her name, Xuela Claudette, and in the place of the Desvarieux is Richardson, which is my father's name; but who are these people Claudette, Desvarieux, and Richardson? To look into it, to look at it, could only fill you with despair; the humiliation could only make you intoxicated with self-hatred. For the name of any one person is at once her history recapitulated and abbreviated, and on declaring it, that person holds herself high or low, and the person hearing it holds the declarer high or low."