Homer the Smithers' Grapes of Proletarian Revolution

“The western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The great owners, nervous, sensing a change, knowing nothing of the nature of the change. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. Results, not causes; results, not causes. The causes lie deep and simply—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times. The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments. This you may say of man—when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back. This you may say and know it and know it. This you may know when the bombs plummet out of the black planes on the market place, when prisoners are stuck like pigs, when the crushed bodies drain filthily in the dust. You may know it in this way. If the step were not being taken, if the stumbling-forward ache were not alive, the bombs would not fall, the throats would not be cut. Fear the time when the bombs stop falling while the bombers live—for every bomb is proof that the spirit has not died. And fear the time when the strikes stop while the great owners live—for every little beaten strike is proof that the step is being taken. And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company—that’s the bank when it has land—wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good—not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But this tractor does two things—it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this.

One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlage of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here ‘I lost my land’ is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate—‘We lost our land.’ The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first ‘we’ there grows a still more dangerous thing: ‘I have a little food’ plus ‘I have none.’ If from this problem the sum is ‘We have a little food,’ the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the sidemeat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It’s wool. It was my mother’s blanket—take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning—from ‘I’ to ‘we.’

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’

The Western States are nervous under the beginning change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness.

And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.”

Chapter 14, in its entirety, from The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, 1939. For when you could use a heart-breakingly beautiful reminder of why they ban books.

“My father used to say, how you do anything is how you do everything. Call it the first and last rule of life.”

A line delivered in an appropriately intimidating manner by Bill Skarsgård, son of Stellan Skarsgård, in the movie John Wick: Chapter 4, from 2023, written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch, and directed by Chad Stahelski. To show people they can learn something important even from yet another American movie franchise in which stylish gun violence is the main character and inevitable solution.

“The long-foreseen moment has arrived when capitalism is on the point of seeing its development arrested by impassable barriers. In whatever way we interpret the phenomenon of accumulation, it is clear that capitalism stands essentially for economic expansion and that capitalist expansion has now nearly reached the point where it will be halted by the actual limits of the earth’s surface.

[...] Throughout history men have struggled, suffered and died to free the oppressed. Their efforts, when they did not remain sterile, have never led to anything except the replacing of one oppressive régime by another. [...] Let us spare ourselves the disillusionments of those who, having fought for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, discovered one fine day that what they had got was, as Marx says, Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery. [...] If we are to perish in the battles of the future, let us do our best to prepare ourselves to perish with a clear vision of the world we shall be leaving behind.

[...] But the ideal of a society governed in the economic and political sphere by co-operation between the workers now inspires scarcely a single mass movement, whether spontaneous or organized; and that at the very moment when, on every hand, there is nothing but talk of the bankruptcy of capitalism.

Faced with this state of things, we are obliged, if we wish to look reality in the face, to ask ourselves whether that which is to take the place of capitalism is not to be a new system of oppression, instead of the free association of producers. I should like in this connection to submit an idea, purely as a hypothesis, for examination by the comrades. We can say, to put it briefly, that up to the present mankind has known two principal forms of oppression, the one (slavery or serfdom) exercised in the name of armed force, the other in the name of wealth thus transformed into capital; what we have to determine is whether these are not now being succeeded by a new species of oppression, oppression exercised in the name of management.

[...] To the conflict set up by money between buyers and sellers of labour has been added another conflict, set up by the very means of production, between those who have the machine at their disposal and those who are at the disposal of the machine. The Russian experiment has shown that, contrary to what Marx too readily assumed, the first of these conflicts can be eliminated without entailing the disappearance of the second. In capitalist countries, both conflicts coexist, and this coexistence gives rise to considerable confusion. The same men sell themselves to capital and serve the machine; on the other hand, it is not always the same men who own the capital and run the business.

As a matter of fact, there was still, not so long ago, a class of workmen who, although wage-earners, were not simply living cogs in the service of the machines, but on the contrary carried out their work while using machines with as much freedom, initiative and intelligence as the craftsmen who wields his tool; these were the skilled workmen. This class of workmen, which, in each industrial concern, constituted the essential factor in production, has been more or less swept away by rationalization. [...] Thus a factory is at present divided into two clearly separated camps—those who execute the work without, strictly speaking, taking any active part in it, and those who direct the work without executing anything. Between these two groups composing the personnel of an industrial concern, the machine itself forms an impassable barrier. At the same time, the development of the system of limited companies has created a barrier—less precise, it is true—between those who manage the business and those who own it. A man like Ford, who is both a capitalist and the managing director of a business, nowadays seems to us a survival from the past, as the American economist Pound has remarked. ‘Industrial concerns’, writes Palewski in a book published in 1928, ‘tend more and more to get out of the hands of those captains of industry who were the original owner-managers of the business…. The age of the tycoons tends more and more to become a thing of the past. We are entering a period that has been called the age of the technicians of management, and these technicians are as far removed from the engineers and the capitalists as are the workmen. The head is no longer a capitalist who owns the business; he has been replaced by a board of technicians. We still live on that past which is so close to us, and the mind has a certain difficulty in grasping this development.’

[...] But, whereas in Marx’s time the managing staff of the undertaking was hardly more than a team of employees at the service of the capitalists, nowadays, vis-à-vis the small shareholders reduced to the role of mere parasites and the big capitalists mainly concerned with financial manipulations, the ‘technicians of management’ form a distinct social stratum whose importance tends to increase and which absorbs in various ways a considerable proportion of the profits. Laurat, in his book on the U.S.S.R., remarks that ‘the personal consumption of the bureaucrats’—a consumption disproportionate, generally speaking, to the value of the services rendered by them—‘effected regularly and as a fixed charge’ operates almost independently of capital reserve requirements which figure under the heading “profits” only after ‘running costs’, that is to say the needs of the bureaucracy, have been covered; and he compares this system to the capitalist system under which ‘capital reserve requirements come before the payment of dividends’. But he forgets that, although capital reserves come before dividends, the ‘running costs’ in capitalist countries, exactly as in the U.S.S.R., come before the placing to capital reserve. Never has this phenomenon been as striking as today, when undertakings on the verge of bankruptcy, having sacked a host of workmen and working at a third or a quarter of their productive capacity, preserve almost intact a managerial staff composed of a few directors drawing fat fees and clerks who are ill-paid, but whose numbers are out of all proportion to the rate of production.

This rise of the bureaucratic element in industry is only the most characteristic aspect of an altogether general phenomenon. The essential thing about this phenomenon is a specialization increasing from day to day. The transformation that has taken place in industry, where skilled workmen capable of understanding and handling many types of machine have been replaced by specialized unskilled hands automatically trained to serve one type of machine only, is the image of a development which has occurred in every field. If the workers are becoming more and more lacking in technical knowledge, the technicians are not only often pretty ignorant of working practice, but furthermore their proficiency is in many cases limited to a quite restricted field; in America, they have even set about producing specialized engineers—just like ordinary unskilled men—in a certain category of machines, and, what is significant, the U.S.S.R. has hastened to copy America in this respect. [...] The scientists, in their turn, not only remain out of touch with technical problems, but are furthermore entirely deprived of that general view of things which is the very essence of theoretical culture. One could count on one’s fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only unskilled hands doing scientific work, cogs in a whole their minds are quite incapable of embracing.

Examples could be multiplied. In almost all fields, the individual, shut in within the bounds of a limited proficiency, finds himself caught up in a whole which is beyond him, by which he must regulate all his activity, and whose functioning he is unable to understand. In such a situation, there is one function which takes on a supreme importance, namely, that which consists simply in co-ordinating; we may call it the administrative or bureaucratic function. The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it. The rationalized factory, where a man finds himself shorn, in the interests of a passive mechanism, of everything which makes for initiative, intelligence, knowledge, method, is as it were an image of our present-day society. For the bureaucratic machine, though composed of flesh, and of well-fed flesh at that, is none the less as irresponsible and as soulless as are machines made of iron and steel. The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such. That is why it is our duty to define this new political factor more clearly than Marx was able to do.

As a matter of fact, Marx had perceived the force of oppression constituted by bureaucracy. [...] But Marx did not ask himself whether this was not a case of an order of problems independent of the problems presented by the operation of the capitalist economy properly so called. Although he had witnessed the division between property and management in capitalist enterprise, he did not ask himself whether the administrative function, in so far as it is permanent, might not, independently of all monopoly over property, give rise to a new class of oppressors. And yet, though one can see very well how a revolution can ‘expropriate the expropriators’, one cannot see how a method of production founded on the subordination of those who do the work to those who co-ordinate could do otherwise than produce automatically a social structure of which the distinguishing mark is the dictatorship of a bureaucratic caste. Not but what one can imagine a control and a system of rotation whereby equality in the State as well as in the actual process of industrial production could be restored; but, in point of fact, when a social stratum finds that it has any kind of monopoly in its hands, it preserves that monopoly until the very foundations on which it rests have been undermined by the historical process.

It was in this way that feudalism fell, not through the pressure of the lower orders themselves taking possession of armed force, but by the substitution of trade for war as the principal means of domination. In the same way, the social stratum of which the mark is the exercise of administrative functions will never consent, whatever the legal system of property may be, to allow the working masses access to those functions, to teach ‘every cook how to rule the State’, or every unskilled worker how to run the business. Every system characterized by the domination of one class over another in effect corresponds, historically, to the distinction between one dominant social function and one or several subordinate functions. Thus, in the Middle Ages, production was something subordinate as compared to the defence of the fields by armed force; at the next stage, production, having become essentially industrialized, found itself subordinated to distribution. Socialism will exist when the dominant function is productive labour itself; but this cannot happen as long as a system of production continues in which labour as such finds itself subordinated, by means of the machine, to the function consisting in co-ordination of labour. No expropriation can solve this problem, against which the heroism of the Russian workers was shattered. Abolishing the division of men into capitalists and proletarians does not in the least imply that ‘the separation of the spiritual forces of labour from manual labour’ must disappear, even progressively. [...]

Every human group that exercises power does so, not in such a way as to bring happiness to those who are subject to it, but in such a way as to increase that power; it is a matter of life and death for any form of domination whatsoever. As long as production remained at a primitive stage of development, the question of power was decided by armed force. Economic changes transferred it to the plane of production itself; it was in this way that the capitalist system came into being. The development of the system later restored war as an essential means in the struggle for power, but under a different form; superiority in the armed struggle presupposes, nowadays, superiority in production itself. [...] Besides, as Rousseau had already understood, no system of oppression is interested in the welfare of the oppressed; it is on their miserable condition that oppression can rest the more easily the whole of its weight.

[...] Are we, then, to despair? Certainly, we would not lack reasons for doing so. It is difficult to see wherein one could place one’s hopes. The ability to judge freely is becoming rarer and rarer, more especially in intellectual circles, owing to that specialization which forces each one of us, in the fundamental questions raised by each theoretical piece of research, to believe without understanding. Thus, even in the domain of pure theory, individual judgment finds itself invalidated in face of the results arrived at by collective effort. As for the working class, its position as a passive instrument of production hardly prepares it for taking its own destiny into its hands. The present generations were first of all decimated and demoralized by the war [the First World War]; then peace and prosperity, once restored, brought with them on the one hand a display of wealth and a fever for speculation which have deeply corrupted all classes of the population, and on the other hand technical changes which have deprived the working class of its main strength. For the hope of the revolutionary movement rested on the skilled workmen, the only ones who combined thought and action in industrial work, or who took an active and vital part in the carrying on of the undertaking; the only ones capable of feeling themselves ready to take over one day the responsibility for the whole of economic and political life. Indeed, they formed the most solid nucleus of the revolutionary organizations. And now rationalization has done away with their function and has barely left more than specialized unskilled workmen, completely enslaved to the machine. Then came unemployment [ie, the Great Depression], which descended upon the working class thus crippled without producing any reaction. If it has exterminated fewer men than did the war, it has brought about a far more profound demoralization, by reducing great masses of workers, and in particular the whole of the younger generation, to a parasitic condition which, through being prolonged, has come in the end to seem permanent to those who are its victims. The workers who have remained in the factories have at length come themselves to consider the work they do, no longer as an activity indispensable to production, but as a favour granted them by the undertaking. Thus unemployment, where it is most widespread, ends up by reducing the proletariat as a whole to a parasitic frame of mind. It is true that prosperity may return, but no prosperity can now save those generations that have spent their adolescence and youth in a state of idleness more exhausting than work itself, or preserve the coming generations from another crisis or another war.

[...] Spontaneous struggle has always proved itself to be ineffective, and organized action almost automatically secretes an administrative apparatus which, sooner or later, becomes oppressive. [...] The emancipation of the workers will be carried out by the workers themselves, or it will not take place at all. Now the most tragic fact of the present time is that the industrial crisis affects the proletariat more profoundly than it does the capitalist class, so that it seems to be not merely the crisis of a system, but of our society itself.

[...] The only question that arises is whether we should or should not continue the struggle; if the former, then we shall struggle with as much enthusiasm as if victory were assured. There is no difficulty whatever, once one has decided to act, in maintaining intact, on the level of action, those very hopes which a critical examination has shown to be well nigh unfounded; in that lies the very essence of courage. Now, seeing that a defeat would run the risk of destroying, for an indefinite period, everything which lends value to human life in our eyes, it is obvious that we must struggle by every means which seems to us to have some chance of proving effective. A man who is thrown overboard in the middle of the ocean ought not to let himself drown, even though there is very little chance of his reaching safety, but to go on swimming until exhausted. And we are not really without hope. The mere fact that we exist, that we conceive and want something different from what exists, constitutes for us a reason for hoping. [...] An effort tending towards the grouping together of all that has remained healthy at the very heart of industrial undertakings, avoiding both the stirring up of primitive feelings of revolt and the crystallization of an administrative apparatus, may not be much, but there is nothing else. The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labour which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

But, in addition to this task, the extreme inadequacy of the arms we have at our disposal compels us to undertake another. If, as is only too possible, we are to perish, let us see to it that we do not perish without having existed. The powerful forces that we have to fight are preparing to crush us; and it is true that they can prevent us from existing fully, that is to say from stamping the world with the seal of our will. But there is one sphere in which they are powerless. They cannot stop us from working towards a clear comprehension of the object of our efforts, so that, if we cannot accomplish that which we will, we may at least have willed it, and not just have blindly wished for it; and, on the other hand, our weakness may indeed prevent us from winning, but not from comprehending the force by which we are crushed. Nothing in the world can prevent us from thinking clearly.

There is no contradiction whatever between this task of theoretical elucidation and the tasks set by the actual struggle; on the contrary, there is a correlation, since one cannot act without knowing what one intends and what obstacles have to be overcome. Nevertheless, since the time at our disposal is in any case limited, we are forced to divide it between thought and action, or, to talk more modestly, preparation for action. It is not by any set rule that this division can be determined, but only by the temperament, turn of mind and natural gifts of each one, by the conjectures each one forms about the future, by the chance play of circumstances. At all events, the greatest calamity that could befall us would be to perish incapable both of winning and of understanding.”

From the 1933 essay, Are We Heading for the Proletarian Revolution? by Simone Weil, who was born Jewish but converted to Christianity, taught herself both ancient Greek and Sanskrit as a child, and spent her life variously as a Marxist, teacher, volunteer combatant in the Spanish Civil War on the anarchist side, member of the French Resistance in London in WWII, and a prolific writer and thinker who died at 34 from heart failure brought about by her refusal to eat. Why she refused to eat is unclear. Some say the reason was a Schopenhauer-influenced Christian ascetism, others that she was acting in solidarity with her fellow citizens living in Nazi-occupied France, and still others think her chronic health problems caused her dietary problems. The coroner thought she was mentally disturbed. Richard Rees, who wrote a biography of her in 1966, says, “whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.” For if you want to learn why and how to become radically unmanageable.

“I think Smither’s picked me because of my motivational skills: everyone always says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.”

Homer Simpson, during The Simpson’s season 7 episode, “Homer the Smithers,” written by John Swartzwelder and directed by Steven Dean Moore. For when you want to understand why management exists, and how they justify themselves to ownership.