Dear Unknown Friends:

We have been serializing the powerful 1970 lecture Economics Is Diverse, by Eli Siegel, and we publish the third section of it here. This talk is part of his Goodbye Profit System series: lectures that are momentous, historic, and alive with knowledge that we need now.

He explained that by 1970, economics based on ill will for one’s fellow humans was proceeding with more and more difficulty, and would never be able to function with the success of once. Indeed, economics based on seeing people in terms of how much profit one can make from them would fare worse and be looked at with increasing distaste as the years passed. And so it has been. What is happening, Mr. Siegel explained, is not a matter of any fiscal -ism: it is a matter of ethics, and of ethics as a force in history.

Mr. Siegel was both the most passionate of scholars and the most careful, factual, exact. In this part of Economics Is Diverse, he uses a textbook he respected, Principles and Problems of Economics, by Ault and Eberling. And he comments on some of the basic matters in economic history—including how people (early humans and later ones) obtained various goods, and also produced them.

In this section too he comments with a certain casualness on a huge thing no other writer on economics had seen: the primal aesthetics of the subject. For economics too is in keeping with this Aesthetic Realism principle: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.” One and many are present, for instance, in something Mr. Siegel comments on: how many persons, each an individual, may work together toward one product. Elsewhere he spoke with much feeling about how those opposites took on historic greatness as unions came to be—with their basis in the fact that “An injury to one is an injury to all.” This famous motto, stated by the Industrial Workers of the World, is a saying: the way for me to take care of ME is to go for justice to people who are not me—and they’ll each take care of themselves by taking care of me too! People today are welcoming this idea—welcoming what a union is—freshly and intensely.

And Mr. Siegel speaks here about the opposites of self and world, in the form of selves and earth, selves and land. I’ll quote him now from another lecture, explaining what is most important in production of any kind—be it the manufacturing of steel or the engineering of software. He said in June 1970:

The most important thing in industry is the person who does the industry, which is the worker. That is still true. It never can change. Labor is the only source of wealth. There is no other source, except land, the raw material….Every bit of capital that exists was made by labor, just as everything that is consumed is.

What a Person Deserves—& Needs

As you’ll see, Ault and Eberling mention ways in which goods can be classified as to their meaning for people. And two of those classifications are necessities and luxuries. I comment on this matter now, because Mr. Siegel says it “has so much of history in it.” And a lot of that history has to do with what he showed is the most important question for humanity: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”

A good deal of the fight for justice these centuries has been the showing that what was considered not a necessity for millions of people was, in fact, a necessity—was something a person deserved and needed by being a person. An example is education. For thousands of years it was felt that poor people did not need to be educated, to go to school, did not need even to read or write. And if some woman of wealth taught a youthful servant girl in her home how to read—well, the lass was receiving a luxury (which might, it was even thought, make her uppity—or dangerous).

Rights—what a person deserves by being a person—and necessities have to do with each other. What we deserve is something which we need to have granted us—by our nation or fellow humans.

Under slavery, certain persons’ owning their own lives was not seen as a necessity.

Under the unimpeded profit system in its most profitable days, children could be made to work in factories and mines so that, with their little weary bodies and battered thought, they could supply the owners with revenue. Laws passed against child labor were a saying, NOT to be used for profit is a necessity for every child. (Meanwhile, such laws are still today being evaded.) —Also, laws making education compulsory are a saying that to learn is a necessity for young people, not a luxury.

Then, there is the right to vote. Is it something American citizens deserve?—something that it’s a necessity for each of us to have? As we know, there is still a huge effort to make sure the vote is something some people are stopped from having. There’s an effort to turn the vote into a luxury fit only for certain persons.

The stir about necessities and luxuries continues. It has the fight between good will and ill will in it, respect versus contempt in it. How much is the having of enough food so much a necessity that the nation or states or municipalities will make sure every person gets that food? How much is good housing a necessity, not a luxury, with the states or nation guaranteeing it, as America guarantees the right to free speech? We know there is a tendency in various municipalities to say every school child, by being a school child, deserves a computer.

The matter of luxuries and necessities goes on, and is part of the insistence of that great, decisive question Eli Siegel articulated: “What does a person deserve by being a person?”

A Poem Is Here

We preface this section of Economics Is Diverse with a translation by Mr. Siegel. It appears in his book of poems Hail, American Development under the title “The Song of the Potter: Ceylon Folk Poem.” The translation is of 1965, and the land then called Ceylon is now Sri Lanka. In coming to the deep, kind, musical English form of this anonymous poem, Mr. Siegel—as he says in his note—was working from a French version.

The poem has to do with an aspect of economics Mr. Siegel speaks about in this section of his talk: handicrafts. But we include it here for a much larger reason: the poem is about economics as good will, as ethics. The Ceylon Potter wants people to be better off through his work. He wants them to be, even, healthier. He wants the good that is in earth itself to come to them through grains and herbs and liquids that the pots can carry, let alone through that earth of which the pots themselves are made.

And we can ask: Is this a good enough basis for an economy? Can the basis of an economy be usefulness to one’s fellow humans, with beauty felt in that usefulness, even music felt in that usefulness? What is impractical: economics based on ethics? or economics based on seeing a fellow human and his or her needs as a means of extracting as much profit as possible for oneself? It is the second which is impractical, Mr. Siegel was showing in his talks. And the fact that ill will in economics is not only unjust but impractical is being felt more than ever today.

The thing making this translation poetry is its verbal music: the music in how words are used. Let us take the fourth stanza, beginning “Do not give / To the sick nor to the weary.” The stanza is six lines, and only three of the words in those lines is longer than a single syllable. There is a sound, in these lines, of great firmness, and also of tenderness; the stanza insists and melts, commands and explores, at once.

Certainly, there is more to say about this poem. But art, Aesthetic Realism shows, is justice to an object, or subject: art is the seeing of a thing as itself and as having to do with nothing less than the whole world. That is how we need to see another person too—in love, in social life, and in that aspect of life which has been called economics.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

The Song of the Potter:
Ceylon Folk Poem

Translated By Eli Siegel

From Mr. Siegel’s Note: In Ceylon someone once saw pots, likely his own, as having an ethical mission. They had an ethical mission, but they were made amidst ethics, too. Kind grains of earth and wished for drink would be brought by the pots. In this way the goodness of earth would be shown….—This is the source of the poem: Les Larmes du Cobra: Légendes de Lanka. Collected by Enid Karunaratné. Translated by Andrée Karpelès. Paris, Bossard, 1925.

Economics Is Selves & Earth

By Eli Siegel

Ault and Eberling have this sentence about a change in the way people work:

In short, the artisan of the handicraft stage, who carried on the production of goods within the household and sold them to his customers, has become the day laborer as we know him today.

In New England, there’s always a movement for the handicraft worker. The going towards handicrafts is a very likable thing. And sometimes it has to do with therapy: you have a person make a basket. There is a feeling a machine isn’t necessary—though nine out of ten baskets, if not more, are made by machine. It used to be felt that an important representative of handicraft was the Navajo Indian, who sold the blanket that he made to tourists. This kind of production has its fetching aspect, but it is a big thing in human history.

The First Kind

The first kind of industry was direct appropriation. In anthropology you caught your dividends. You captured them. That is, something was running around that you felt you could use, even eat—or something was grunting. So we have, in the Bible, Nimrod, the mighty hunter. The authors say:

The early hunter and trapper likewise lived largely by direct appropriation.

That is so. A good deal of American charm in literature is concerned with that: there’s Cooper’s The Deerslayer, and Harry Castlemon’s The Boy Trapper. The trapper was seen as having a life that was free and enviable.

So there was direct appropriation. And something of that can still be. That is, it’s possible to catch a goat, milk it, and drink the milk. —Another statement:

The early settlers gave most of their attention to agriculture, lumbering, and fishing; and the first two occupations named continued to be dominant in America until the close of the nineteenth century.

Agriculture is still dominant. It is becoming more and more like a factory in the open field. It’s becoming more and more big business. Agriculture has had a long history, but still, agriculture is as elemental as it ever was. Whenever we eat, we eat the earth—no matter how subtle it is. You can have a dainty lunch but you’re still eating the earth. You can have dainty biscuits—where did the biscuits come from? When earth is dainty, it is still earth. With all the doo-dads around, it is as elemental as ever. Man has to go to the earth and find what he wants there. How he gets it has become ever so subtle.

The other big thing humanity gets from the ground is what one wears. Not only cotton or linen but synthetic fabrics come from the ground, because chemicals come from the ground. How things are, how they’re made, is something which is poetic, and I think everyone interested in the arts should see how things are made as poetic, or artistic, or aesthetic.

There Came the Factory: One & Many

In chapter 3, a question that is interesting is:

What social and economic changes has the factory system brought about in the relations of the working personnel?

As soon as a workshop had twenty people in it, you could call it a factory. I don’t know what the exact figure is. But a few people could come together and work and it wasn’t called a factory—it might be called a workshop. The French word, usine, gives the idea better than the English, factory: with the French word, you get the sense of space. And in a factory, you may not know the person on the machine fifty yards away from you.

Another statement in this book that I think has importance is present as the writers deal with the meaning of property. That is a large matter: it belongs to me. I think that as you look at the history of property, the idea that the profit system has shown it is ending will be seen as more reasonable. The writers say, in 1936:

Several notable changes are taking place in regard to private property. (1) There is a growing extension of public property and a more drastic regulation of private property—

Which means society is interested in what a person does with what he or she sees as private property. “A more drastic regulation of private property” did go on. There had been Theodore Roosevelt, who was called a trust-buster. There had been the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.

(2) The method of acquiring property is changing and being more carefully controlled by society. (3) Individuals in the ownership of private property are, in many instances, taking more of a social point of view in regard to their possessions than formerly.

Sometimes when asked “Do you own all this?” they would answer, “Only its steward.” They’re all “stewards.”

There Are Categories

There is a discussion in this book about how goods can be classified. Ault and Eberling put that in terms of three categories, but I would add one more. Everything—and this has to do with aesthetics—can be seen as falling into one of four classes. First (and this is my addition), it’s something you’re not interested in, as most people are not interested in, well, old cereal packages, and peelings of various sorts. And most people can pass a golf club without any heightened pulsation.

Then there are the categories Ault and Eberling mention. 2) There are necessities. Some of these are in the field of food. The greatest necessity, of course, is air, which is not yet an object of wealth. 3) The next field is comforts. And we meet those often. People want to have what are called comforts. 4) The fourth category is luxuries. The relation of necessity and luxury is interesting, because a luxury that is very much of a luxury is seen as a necessity, and that is a great part of social life: “I have to see you, Wilma.” “Why?” “Because I love you so much.” A luxury is changed into a necessity.

So Ault and Eberling mention three categories into which goods can be divided—necessities, comforts, and luxuries—to which I have added one more: things that you can just pass by, that you’re not interested in. But the three that the authors list are ever so interesting. What is a necessity? What is a comfort? And what is a luxury? This has so much of history in it.

The idea of a luxury can be seen in the great vodka competition, with one firm saying only its vodka comes from Russia, and the others are imitations. (For once, Russia looks respectable.) And is what’s being talked about a necessity or a luxury?

These things are part of economic history, which is the same as history as such. They can be seen. They can take on increasing relation and increasing intensity. And if they do, what is the meaning of it all in terms of today?