A point about addicitions - Alwareness

This is my paraphrasing/understanding of part of “The Great Caliban” The struggle against the Rebel Body” from Caliban and The Witch; Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici - in the context of Addictions – Alwareness April subject

We are talking this month about addiction. The last thing I said last week was that it is important to see if there is anything you can love about your addiction. I also said that addictions are a natural and normal part of being human, that every individual has addictions.

Some are not termed addictions because they forward the aims of capitalist society – like our addictions to oranges, tea, sugar, coffee and chocolate – I mention those particularly because they are based on slave labour. Slavery is OK if it is to provide the cherry on the top of an excellent life style for us in Europe and The States but it is not OK when it is your body fighting against your rational mind. - Verslaving – the Dutch term for addiction, literally to be enslaved.

I am a humanist. I believe that the reason we are alive is to learn and grow, to experience, to be. Learning requires access to knowledge and an awareness of what went before to avoid repeatedly inventing the wheel!

In having an 'awareness' of went before, it is important to understand that history is written by the winners. All history is from the point of view of the people who conceived the world the way it is today but also initiated and carried through their plans by the use of ubiquitous violence. It is in truth HIS story there is no placement of HER within it.

Capitalist society can only exist by exploitation, a small group of people are allowed and encouraged to lead lives of exploration, learning, growth and enjoyment at the expense of a much larger group denied all of the above. That larger group have to be applied to creating profit for the smaller group. A capitalist society can never be humanistic. There is room for an adapted form of capitalism within a humanistic society. Because the desire to make profit and be one up or better than ones fellows is also an inherent human trait.

“The human body … was the first machine developed by capitalism.” By creating a hierarchical relations between the mind and body 16^th and 17^th century philosophers developed the theoretical basis for the 'Mechanical body' philosophy essential to the creation of a functioning capitalist society. The body is a machine, the mind must exert will over the machine to focus on serving god and the state. This brilliant idea was formulated by men such as Descartes and Hobbes, these were men who for a start firmly believed that the first woman was created from the rib of a man.

This notion of the body as an engine that needs to subdued, controlled, constrained ordered and subjugated to the will is very new. A battle was fought for over three hundred years in words and concepts, supported by the gratuitous use of violence to embed this idea into our psyche. The war of words began in philosophical texts at end of the 15^th century “but only in the second half of the 19^th century can we glimpse the (ideal) ...worker – temperate prudent, responsible, proud to posses a watch - that personifies the capitalist utopia.

“The body machine idea could not have become a model of social behaviour without the destruction by the state of the pre-capitalist beliefs, practices and individuals whose existence contradicted the behaviour promised by the philosophy. The peak of what is called the Age of Reason which was actually an age of scepticism and methodical doubt was also the peak of a prolonged, vicious and ferocious attack on the proletariat.

The hatred across Europe in the 16^th and 17^th century for wage labour, with the notable exceptions of the NL and Sweden was so intense that most preferred to risk the gallows rather than submit. This we can mark by the intensification in that time of penalties, particularly those punishing crimes again property, also the introduction of bloody laws against vagabonds and huge number of executions. In England alone 72,000 people we hung by Henry VIII in the 38 years of his reign.

Up until the 16^th century the body was seen as a receptacle of magical powers. “Nature was viewed as a universe of signs and signatures, marking invisible affinities that had to be deciphered, every element - herbs, plants, metals and most of all the human body hid virtues and powers..... a variety of practices were designed to appropriate and bend the secrets and powers of nature to the human will. Eradicating these practises was essential.

Francis Bacon lamented that 'Magic kills industry”. Magic is an illicit form of power 'to obtain what is wanted without labouring'. Moreover magic rested upon a conception of space and time that is totally incompatible with the capitalist work/discipline paradigm. Whether magic is real is immaterial. All pre capitalist societies have these beliefs. The revival of 'magical beliefs' is only possible today because to paraphrase Silvia Frederici, even the most devoted believer in astrology will consult the clock to check they are on time for work.

If this war had never taken place we would see our bodies as magical vessels imbued with wonder.

Most of our addictions, especially the ones we see as a problem, take us out of the mundane reality of our daily lives and into another space/mind set. If we hadn't completely taken on board the de-consecration, alienation and mechanisation of our body, how would we view the calling of a magical vessel towards an altered state?