Why Human Contributive Labor Remains the Creative Principle of Human Society

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• Article: Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society: The salvific and ex-tropic implications of the medieval Christian vision of human work as spiritual activity. Excerpts from the study: “From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body"

URL = http://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/why-human-contributive-labor-remains

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Introduction by Michel Bauwens:

"Even as we are moving to a post-literate society with short attention spans and educational achievements plummeting (in the West), books remain of paramount importance for understanding the world, as they not only represent sometimes a lifetime of study for their authors, but also the ability for long trains of coherent reasoning. In my view good books must be factual, coherent, and yes, at least some of them should give a hopeful narrative that can mobilize human energies in the service of life. A lot of my work is about recommending books, and if you look at this substack Table of Contents, it has a lot of ‘curated bibliographies’, which hopefully set some of my readers off to a more or less organized study, or at least to start reading one of the recommended books.

The following however, is not a book, at least not yet, though it should be. It’s a relatively unknown PhD thesis of an author who seemingly remains very unproductive in terms of producing ‘content’ (as they say nowadays). Perhaps he uses a pseudonym, or otherwise, he has put all of his energy in this one masterpiece, and went on to do other things. As far as I know he is exercising his academic career in a management faculty in Seattle.

So below, I will be introducing a PhD Thesis:

* PhD Thesis: Suriano, Benjamin, "From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body: A Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity & Religious Ideas" (2016). Dissertations (1934 -). 628.

http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/628

"A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 2016."

Now: why should you read this ?

First of all, because it is that rare thing, an integrative book. It integrates the insights of ‘historical materialism’, which seeks to understand human society, history and ideas, in the material conditions that confront humanity. That in itself is nothing new, and just an expression of enduring ‘materialist’ history. This is the brand of world history we know from authors like Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallterstein, and many others. But the author also takes ideas very seriously, and particularly, religious ideas, as formative in the creation of new forms of human consciousness. That in itself is also not rare. But to do both in such a systematic way, that is exceedingly rare, and the historical moments that allow it to happen, are also rare. According to Piritim Sorokin, in ‘Western’ history, which for him includes the Hellenistic and European cultures, only the 5th c. AD in Greece, and 13th century medieval Europe (Aquinas), allowed such mentalities to arise, and such works to happen. This book seamlessly integrates the insights of historical materialism AND what I like to call ‘historical idealism’, i.e. stressing the importance of human agency, through the ideas that are expressed and developed and inspire human action.

Here is how Benjamin Suriano expresses the linkage between the two aspects, material and spiritual, linking labor to human emancipation:

“"One cannot, therefore, simply reject the religious as such — which has been humanity’s enduring cultural expression of consciousness concerning the whole, the perfect, the potential for more and new life—by reducing it entirely to its irrational fundamentalist expressions. Rather we must look more closely at the diminishment of the standpoint of labor in its coinciding with the growth of religious fundamentalisms in the present. This is to suggest that the failure to think through and cultivate labor, as the material capacity for socially creating radical change, leaves the religious, as the cultural expression of real desires and intentions for radical change, to its most repressively alienating and distorting forms. If the disappearance of the standpoint of labor has coincided with the return of the religious in the form of radical fundamentalisms, might the return of the standpoint of labor, in a new more holistic way, coincide, not with the disappearance of the religious, but its return to a more rational form?"

Note that the author himself does not mention ‘historical idealism’, but simply stresses the need to take religious forms of consciousness very seriously, as real agentic forces.

So the second important point is that this book restores the emancipatory role of creative human labor, in its fundamental role of shaping human agency in the world. Labor, and of course we do not merely mean alienated ‘commodity’ labor in which people simply follow orders to increase the profit of some, but labor as creative activity, which transforms nature and the world, which pretty much ‘creates’ the lifeworld we live in. Labor, the author insists, is ‘ex-tropic’, it is what humans do not just to stave off chaos and entropy, but to actually increase order in the world. This labor can be put at the service of human society, the life of the non-human, and if you are so inclined, in service to the very Ground of Being.

Suriano writes that “Labor’s valorization thus emerged from recognition precisely in and through a religious form that implied labor was itself an intrinsic salvific act."

The author does this by focusing on the role of Christian monastic communities. Not just through their practice as craft-agrarian communities which united farmers, craftsmen, intellectuals and mystics in one community, and embodied in a rule-based and organized lifestyle, but also through the development of particular ideas, such as yes, the ‘Resurrection of the Body’. Contrast the two excerpts I have chosen, one on labor in antiquity, when it was considered toil for the slaving classes, unworthy of the citizen elite; and how the Christian theology saw the body as the place where spiritual AND productive life, happened in concert. I learned a lot in the first chapter, about how the early, pre-Benedictine communities, already initiated a return to the abandoned Roman villages, restarting food production, which had been devastated by the slave system.

Before I share the promised excerpts, which I recommend you read on the original pdf as it is accompanied with very valuable footnotes, here is how Suriano expresses his motivation:

“ What is needed, and what I attempt to think through within this dissertation, is then a return to labor as a self-transcending activity. This is nothing short of resurrecting a revolutionary sense of labor as itself an act of resurrection, a fundamentally social and creative activity whose final cause is to raise humanity into a new historical body beyond any reduction to the merely mortal flesh prescribed by the present. Thus, the laboring body qua labor always already harbors all the seeds for its immortality, for producing the perfection of life for itself, which is the qualitative perfection of eternal life. The task, then, is not to eliminate its religious consciousness, but to develop it from the true rationalization of labor according to its own ratio of perfection, i.e. to therein find its corresponding religious forms of thought that illuminate and reinvest in its capacities for the infinite and eternal."

I cannot stress the richness of what the author writes in his study, and at the very least, I hope some of my readers will take up the challenge of the first chapter, and see from there if they want to continue the exploration."

More information

Excerpts via From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body