/lit/ - Literature

that's enough history. here's where the story starts to join up with land's thesis about capitalist time:

>Traced back to its origins, the curse of labor is the curse of the megamachine: a curse extended beyond the period of conscription to a whole lifetime. That curse gave rise to the compensatory dream of a Golden Age, part memory, part myth: the picture of a life when there was no harsh struggle or competition, when the wild animals meant no harm and even man was kind to his fellows. This dream first appears on an Akkadian tablet; and much later was transferred to the future, as an after-life in Heaven, when all work would cease, and everyone would enjoy an existence of sensuous beauty, material amplitude, and endless leisure: a replica in terms of mass consumption of all that actually took place in the great palaces and temples for whose expansive maintenance and further elevation the megamachine was first invented.

>This dream has haunted civilization throughout history, repeated with magical variations in a hundred fairy stories and popular myths, long before it took form in the modern slogan: 'Let automation abolish all work.' Often this dream was accompanied by another that sought to release mankind from the other curse that the megamachine had imposed upon the under lying population: the curse of poverty. The cornucopia of plenty, the blessed land where an inexhaustible supply of foods and goods came forth at a wave of the hand: in other words, the infantile contemporary heaven of an ever-expanding economy-and its end product, the affluent society. The curse of work was a real affliction for those who came under the rule of authoritarian technics. But the idea of abolishing all work, of transferring the skill of the hand without the imagination of the mind to a machine-that idea was only a slave's dream, and it revealed a desperate but unimaginative slave's hope; for it ignored the fact that work which is not confined to the muscles, but incorporates all the functions of the mind, is not a curse but a blessing. No one who has ever found his life-work and tasted its reward would entertain such a fantasy, for it would mean suicide.

>Thus the Benedictine monastery had within its own confines taken over the discipline and order that the great collective labor machine had originally introduced as an attribute of assertive temporal power. But at the same time the monastery had rationalized and humanized this discipline; for the monastery itself had not merely kept to the human scale- only twelve members were required to form one- but it had abandoned the once tightly organized complex of civilization: the small-scale division of labor; class exploitation; segregation; mass coercion and slavery; fixation for a lifetime in a single occupation or role; centralized control.