Abraham Rotstein, Weekend Notes XIV

Weekend Notes (Overview)

Text in English to type

Comments on "Robert Owen, Draft #1

[2] This draft shows not only much work, but something in the approach of the person which is valid. The strength is in the straightforward account of bare facts (when I couldn’t avoid giving some of the facts). The more facts the better. The other thing is that I have a special surety of touch in quotation and this shows up when I take a whole sentence and quote it. I introduce it with a few words making the sentences. Putting in the clause on Owen’s being insane in brackets, brings it out entirely and is worthy of Edmund Wilson. It is to the point and concrete.

What one has to discount, is that in the beginning there are random notes and lack of precision in regard to facts, e.g. 1819, adjustment to machine. Actually, when Owen started to tell them about the machine in the House of Commons there was a riot. They thought he was crazy. He had discovered that the machine will do work in the ratio of 1 to 100 men, or 1 to 1000. Also there were not weaving machines – Kay’s Shuttle was in 1730. All this was spinning machinery.

But the above is a matter of presentation. But if this is a presentation of Owen’s person, the bulk of the writing is strong, successful, original and interesting.

From the point of view of what happened to him, he was showed up against one thing, and then pushed on to something else. It is a tremendous paradigm of human fallibility and weakness. He was pushed from one step to the next and spanned the gamut of the century.

[3] The editing will bring consistency in the total movement but one needs text. P. believes I need to work and go on and not stop. My careful reading pays off and my sentences are not the oft-quoted ones and they are more illuminating than the oft-quoted ones. I had not read enough originally but now I took up what it’s about.

The more I write the better – don’t avoid descriptions and facts and don’t rush on to gestures, movements and big generalization. Actually the writing is such that it is increases clarity but it never makes up for factual information.

P. has no criticism to offer except a trivial criticism so that the main question is the structure of the chapter. It is a formidable opening and so one excepts a story of what he really did. The value of the chapter depends on treating a large number of points.

If Owen was nothing but “unusual” he would be pretty usual. His life’s work is tom come and P. is very eager to have it and the portrait does introduce the story.

We have to get it hard, real and concrete. If we lift it off the ground it loses interest. It becomes an elevated affair and the book cannot be written, because the book is an exercise in keeping one’s feet on the ground and in keeping the ground under one’s feet. One cannot have the ground rise up for the reality of society.

There is loose writing on capitalism and the machine in the beginning. The rest deals with concrete things. 1816 – the unemployment burst in as it did in 1929. The whole of 1795 was the routine wretchedness, and [4] the war can never be absent from the picture. This comes from writing from fragments and not being precise on the fringes. This is a businessman’s world and 1815 was an apocalyptic shock. What will the chapter look like finished? It can be finished quickly and should be straightforward without reformulations of the figure of the person while the repetitious and the semi-repetitious may have to go. If this Robert Owen chapter is finished, then it would be decided whether this book can be written. It needs the editing to make the book possible and P. has assumed a powerful introduction, in introducing the reader to all the chapters. My writing was to be understood as a contribution to the chapter in mapping out the personality and the figure. It is purposeful and effective writing and has attained its purpose, and not in more then one or two spots does it miss the tone or aesthetic effect which is not wanted.

It is a bad title and it is bad …

The idea of the unemployment of 1820 and of 1930 doesn’t belong here.

The question is do I know … […] [5] …

Concerning our work … […]

Cole took the “education” … […]

The other thing is the tremendous … […]

The autobiography is the leveliest, easiest … […]

What is the drama here? … […]

Owen’s view on individual responsibility … […]

[6] …

In the French proverb, “comprendre” is understanding from inside – Weber’s “verstehende soziologie”. It is to relive the inner process. “Tout comprendre” means this thing in regard to emotions. It is better not to bring in such a thing.

[…]

Jesus said don’t judge for your own sake because you are the son of God, and the Jesus position has a deep and good meaning. It is a finer position. Strike out the first paragraph of the conclusion. We cannot accept it as strictly logical. There is no logic and behind it there was very much more. […]

Also, I shouldn’t use the word “metaphysical” when it looks as if we didn’t know what we meant. The second and their paragraph of the “conclusion” will have to be developed just to be clearer.

(P. has a rule which he invariably applied when he was editing the Austrian Weekly – he would strike the first and last sentence. The first sentence isn’t needed because it is the launching platform).

What should we add to this section? There is factory reform and education. Modern education differs from the traditional memorizing by emphasizing (1) training the mind (2) that the important thing is that the whole personality is involved (cf. Cole, on education and the fourth essay in the New View p. 88). The idea of national education is not important. The basis of Owenism was his theory of education – the power of education to turn the world to a popular course.

In America there was Benjamin Franklin’s educationalism and this was not based on Robert Owen.

Education is an upper class prejudice fed to the lower classes. It’s a thing they haven’t got and is fed and withheld from them. It was largely Owen’s work in the schools which made him a great figure in the world (quote from Cole). When the system of pauper apprentices ceased, he could start educating the children of his employees.

By 1816 New Lanarck became a show place for visitors from all over the world. It was not only Owen’s educational phase but the method he employed […].

In education there are three names, Pestalozzi, Rousseau, and Owen. Rousseau doesn’t have small children. Owen is pre-Frobel. His kindergarten preceded Frobel. […]

[9] Montessori is a development of Frobel. […]

[10] He started the financial question of gold. (He didn’t dream of socialism). He was miles away from …

[…] He didn’t dream of unemployment or the new market economy. It wouldn’t …

[11] We had no sympathy for capitalism because he hated commercialism and he had a stronger aversion to it than Adam Smith. But without the capitalist prelude it was impossible to have any socialist solution. The whole thing may have been impossible without capitalist organization and there is no facile summing up of capitalism in society. The way out is to follow the actual developments of being knocked against the facts.

Cole couldn’t make up his mind what Owen had read.

He must have appeared as important in Paris.

P. finds Owen’s style excellent, and it is even more so in the autobiography. He seems to have had impeccable address (delivery).

P. thinks we should proceed by putting in the three scenes and then other sub-sections. All the time we should be thinking, what is the point? What happened? How does he go on to the next point?

On education, there is fresh air, nudism, the whole man, play and chance and the children should be drilled but not trained. (This is not militaristic but gymnastic training). All this is New Lanark.

The whole of scientific management comes up here. There is no reason not to take in here, all things for the Villages of Union for education.

There is a reference to democracy that these adults could be le only with their consent – democratic leadership is acknowledge. (cf. his autocracy).

I must be conscious of the facts, how terrible were the difficulties and how he did win through. He had dramatic conquests and victories. The [12] manufacturers committes in the House of Commons used all means against him – intrigues and bitter underhand methods and getting material which was slanderous. He never got out of sorts which we saw by his temperament, also the number of times he was prepared to die.

[…] On page 5 expand the section where he was an advocate of gradual change. He was one of the greatest miracle makers of the world, and his greatest fear was that he shouldn’t change the world too quickly. He was amazing in his feeling of power and that a miracle would come about if he told the world the truth. […]

[13] Nicolas Halasz’ book on Dreyfus, he said that all the politics and the drama were in it, […]

There is a big book which Cole refers to all the time on Samuel Oldnow which was a firm in Wales at the time. From him we know the bookkeeping methods and correspondence of the business manufacturer (see Unwin’s book on Oldnow). Oldnow foreshadowed Owen as a model employer and had diversified interests. Possibly Oldnow’s work influenced Owen and he may have been heavily in debt to Arkwright. Cole points out how it came to affect Owen through Drinkwater.

P. think I should put together the discovery of capitalism under currency and employment. He was amazed at unemployment. Sometimes there were more unemployed, sometimes fewer. While the poor were the standard problem, previously the unemployment hadn’t appeared for fifty years. […]

[14] If you read Harriet Martineau these things appeared in the beginning and in the late 1830’s and she argues that everybody can earn a living if he really wants to. […]

[16] The second part is his success with the church. Then he becomes bitter and says the rich are blocking everything everywhere. There is not a single not to support him and he couldn’t even get a seconder.

P. is urging me to take these things à la lettre.

That doesn’t mean that Owen didn’t have a penetrating insight into the heart of things – but not right away. He partly mistaken idea e.g. only do away with money or with the church etc.

But taking these parts, the question … […]

[17] We want to show a progress – forced one. His secretiveness and reticence never gave it away (Schweitzer said that of Jesus). It is the dynamic of a man who doesn’t want to proceed with any of this. He is afraid of the upset of revolution. He didn’t tell the workers and he had to be pushed. There are perhaps 24 statements about the effects of new radical change. He was in an abyssal contradiction. France was the national enemy [18] and the fear of the French Revolution at that time was as if there were ten Bolshevisms heaped one on the other. They beheaded more of the ruling class than the Russians ever did. Owen had an abiding fear of revolution, violence and class war. … […]

We should deal with capitalism and currency, (the gold standard) anti-Malthus, and Ricardo.

Adam Smith had no direct policy influence at first following the publication of his book. It was only through great statesmen. But later on he had a fantastic influence through the popularizers, McCulloch, and the Harmonists (Bastiat) and later Harriet Martineau. (The radical paid for her book: James Mill, Bentham, Francis Place).

We can use his gradualism obsession as a dynamic. He said to the Prime Minister: I can’t tell you all, it would be too much.

[19] […] He was comparatively, as rich as the richest monopolist: as today I.C.I., Alfred Mond, Alfred or Carnegie. Everything he touched turned into gold.

[…]

The machine arrived creating a new world. The machine was his fate and brought up one horror after another: it crippled the children, caused unemployment and turned the merchants against reform. This got us out of the utopian elements into the new things.

Harriet Martineau said that …

[20] The Bellers plan might conceivably have worked in a boom. The paupers couldn’t be used for anything.

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Frobel

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"Freedom and Technology" - General Comments (4)

[21] Nietzsche and Freud, and with Sartre it gives rise to the human existence. […]

P. would be extremely loathe to drop the book. P. should put these ideas on record. …

P. would say that the Owen chapter depends upon the degree of his inner determination, and the first chapter, the Introduction, doesn’t now make much sense and cannot be written.

P. would give a presentation from the point of view of the reality of society …

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Interdisciplinary Project (3)

P. is having financial difficulties in the […]

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Notes

Sartre and Camus (2)

[24] P. had a talk with terry of “The Fall”. […]

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"Psychology and Ideology"

Terry is working on an article that P. wrote in 1945. It says that institutional change is caused by various types of strain and the most important is the tension between the actual motives and postulated motives. When do institutions change? When actual motives are too distant from the motives they are supposed to be. ↑

Personal (3)

P. had kidney trouble and had to take sulfa for 10 days. The doctor said that this causes the bad lights. There is a general tension of the nervous system. ↑

Text Informations

Date: August 24, 1957 (Interview)
KPA: 45/10