Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society

The salvific and ex-tropic implications of the medieval Christian vision of human work as spiritual activity. Excerpts from the study: “From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body"

Even as we are moving to a post-literate society with short attention spans and educational achievements plummeting (in the West), books remain of paramount importance for understanding the world, as they not only represent sometimes a  lifetime of study for their authors, but also the ability for long trains of coherent reasoning. In my view good books must be factual, coherent, and yes, at least some of them should give a hopeful narrative that can mobilize human energies in the service of life. A lot of my work is about recommending books, and if you look at this substack Table of Contents, it has a lot of ‘curated bibliographies’, which hopefully set some of my readers off to a more or less organized study, or at least to start reading one of the recommended books.

The following however, is not a book, at least not yet, though it should be. It’s a relatively unknown PhD thesis of an author who seemingly remains very unproductive in terms of producing ‘content’ (as they say nowadays). Perhaps he uses a pseudonym, or otherwise, he has put all of his energy in this one masterpiece, and went on to do other things. As far as I know he is exercising his academic career in a management faculty in Seattle.

So below, I will be introducing a PhD Thesis:

* PhD Thesis: Suriano, Benjamin, "From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body: A Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity & Religious Ideas" (2016). Dissertations (1934 -). 628.

https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/628

"A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, May 2016."

Now: why should you read this ?

First of all, because it is that rare thing, an integrative book. It integrates the insights of ‘historical materialism’, which seeks to understand human society, history and ideas, in the material conditions that confront humanity. That in itself is nothing new, and just an expression of enduring ‘materialist’ history. This is the brand of world history we know from authors like Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallterstein, and many others. But the author also takes ideas very seriously, and particularly, religious ideas, as formative in the creation of new forms of human consciousness. That in itself is also not rare. But to do both in such a systematic way, that is exceedingly rare, and the historical moments that allow it to happen, are also rare. According to Piritim Sorokin, in ‘Western’ history, which for him includes the Hellenistic and European cultures, only the 5th c. AD in Greece, and 13th century medieval Europe (Aquinas), allowed such mentalities to arise, and such works to happen. This book seamlessly integrates the insights of historical materialism AND what I like to call ‘historical idealism’, i.e. stressing the importance of human agency, through the ideas that are expressed and developed and inspire human action.

Here is how Benjamin Suriano expresses the linkage between the two aspects, material and spiritual, linking labor to human emancipation:

“"One cannot, therefore, simply reject the religious as such — which has been humanity’s enduring cultural expression of consciousness concerning the whole, the perfect, the potential for more and new life—by reducing it entirely to its irrational fundamentalist expressions. Rather we must look more closely at the diminishment of the standpoint of labor in its coinciding with the growth of religious fundamentalisms in the present. This is to suggest that the failure to think through and cultivate labor, as the material capacity for socially creating radical change, leaves the religious, as the cultural expression of real desires and intentions for radical change, to its most repressively alienating and distorting forms. If the disappearance of the standpoint of labor has coincided with the return of the religious in the form of radical fundamentalisms, might the return of the standpoint of labor, in a new more holistic way, coincide, not with the disappearance of the religious, but its return to a more rational form?"

Note that the author himself does not mention ‘historical idealism’, but simply stresses the need to take religious forms of consciousness very seriously, as real agentic forces.

So the second important point is that this book restores the emancipatory role of creative human labor, in its fundamental role of shaping human agency in the world. Labor, and of course we do not merely mean alienated ‘commodity’ labor in which people simply follow orders to increase the profit of some, but labor as creative activity, which transforms nature and the world, which pretty much ‘creates’ the lifeworld we live in. Labor, the author insists,  is ‘ex-tropic’, it is what humans do not just to stave off chaos and entropy, but to actually increase order in the world. This labor can be put at the service of human society, the life of the non-human, and if you are so inclined, in service to the very Ground of Being.

Suriano writes that “Labor’s valorization thus emerged from recognition precisely in and through a religious form that implied labor was itself an intrinsic salvific act."

The author does this by focusing on the role of Christian monastic communities. Not just through their practice as craft-agrarian communities which united farmers, craftsmen, intellectuals and mystics in one community, and embodied in a rule-based and organized lifestyle, but also through the development of particular ideas, such as yes, the ‘Resurrection of the Body’. Contrast the two excerpts  I have chosen, one on labor in antiquity, when it was considered toil for the slaving classes, unworthy of the citizen elite; and how the Christian theology saw the body as the place where spiritual AND productive life, happened in concert. I learned a lot in the first chapter, about how the early, pre-Benedictine communities, already initiated a return to the abandoned Roman villages, restarting food production, which had been devastated by the slave system.

Before I share the promised excerpts, which I recommend you read on the original pdf as it is accompanied with very valuable footnotes, here is how Suriano expresses his motivation:

“ What is needed, and what I attempt to think through within this dissertation, is then a return to labor as a self-transcending activity. This is nothing short of resurrecting a revolutionary sense of labor as itself an act of resurrection, a fundamentally social and creative activity whose final cause is to raise humanity into a new historical body beyond any reduction to the merely mortal flesh prescribed by the present. Thus, the laboring body qua labor always already harbors all the seeds for its immortality, for producing the perfection of life for itself, which is the qualitative perfection of eternal life. The task, then, is not to eliminate its religious consciousness, but to develop it from the true rationalization of labor according to its own ratio of perfection, i.e. to therein find its corresponding religious forms of thought that illuminate and reinvest in its capacities for the infinite and eternal."

I cannot stress the richness of what the author writes in his study, and at the very least, I hope some of my readers will take up the challenge of the first chapter, and see from there if they want to continue the exploration.

Here are the two excerpts which will allow you to understand the radical implications of the re-evaluation of the body during the transition from Antiquity to medieval times:

Labor in Antiquity

"That labor came to be valorized as a perfective activity, however, stands in marked contrast with the sociopolitical world of antiquity and its classical philosophical expression. Within the ancient world, whether speaking of the Greek polis or the Roman Empire, sociopolitical reality was determined by those who owned land and expropriated slave labor through private land ownership worked by slave labor. The great masses constituting almost the entirety of the social whole were not slaves, however, but peasants, artisans, shopkeepers and hired laborers who lived mainly at subsistence levels with little or no property and thus scant opportunities for social mobility or political membership. Because the property and wealth of the social whole—especially with the development of the Roman latifundia— was consolidated within the hands of a few through their advantageous exploitation of slave labor, the mass of “free” laborers therefore held no real leverage in determining their sociopolitical reality and were often slavishly subordinated to aristocratic interests, especially through debt bondage.81 The social body was thus marked by a severe and tightly maintained division between a small fraction of a propertied class free from the need to labor and the rest, “free” or unfree, whose lives were consumed by laboring for another.

Because the substantial surplus expropriated by the few allowed them to invest their time into developing a state, military, and cultural apparatus that reproduced their exploitative position of privilege, the collective consciousness ruling this sociopolitical body tended to comprehend its free citizenship abstractly, as if a natural given, with little consciousness of the contribution of the laboring body.83 As the constitutive value of labor to the social totality was concealed and left largely uncomprehended, there was then little incentive to develop and better organize productive forces or relations of production beyond their reproduction of the status quo.84 With this relatively low level of productive development there was a corresponding ideological conception of labor lowly construed as mere toil, bound within the transitory realm of necessity as an involuntary process of reproducing certain nutritive and sensate functions of base animal nature. That is, productive activity was understood in no way to perfect, change, transform or actively contribute to making and knowing the social and natural whole since its socially contingent degradation and diminishment as a lowly biological function was obscured and instead viewed and legitimated as if a natural fact. Labor’s meaning came to be accepted as nothing more than an inevitable and inescapable mortal process within base nature, a symbol of enslavement."

Labor’s transformation under medieval Christianity

Benjamin Suriano:

"Early Christian culture vacillated between two conflicting images of labor, as portrayed by the ambivalent views within the scriptural tradition. In Genesis labor is depicted as both a primordial good, given to the joyful task of keeping and cultivating creation, and as a cursed affair, the toilsome consequence of the Fall. As Jacques Le Goff notes, within the early Middle Ages Christianity tended toward the latter interpretation as it culturally retained the aristocratic Greco-Roman disdain for labor, compounded also by similar disparagements within the warrior ethos that came with the infusion of the Germanic peoples. Society was thus ruled largely through a bipartite structure of oratores and bellatores, clerics and warriors, with little place for the lot of ordinary workers.

In many ways, however, it is through the ascetic formations of monasticism that an opening was made for reevaluating labor positively rather than negatively. As the early monastics retreated into a life entirely devoted to spiritual exercise they nevertheless took up manual labor to provide a withdrawal not lacking in self-sufficiency. While the monk’s physical labors initially were deemed a matter of penitence and a means of resisting acedia, the fact that the significance of work was already integrated into the very practice of spiritual life evinced a consciousness of the laboring body far removed from the commonplace Neoplatonic asceticisms of late antiquity. Still conditioned by the upper-class ethos of a slave-based society, ancient pagan ascetics, especially with the arrival of Gnosticism, typically protested the present social body out of contempt for the lower body of economic activity itself. Retreat from society was often in order to escape into an elite enclave of pure intellectual contemplation without regard for the material contradictions that continually confronted individual and social bodies. Christian asceticism, however, from the so-called “desert Fathers” to especially the larger scale, coenobitic mobilizations that led to Western medieval monasticism proper, began to express and understand the body as the concentrated site of society’s contradictions.

In protesting and renouncing the dominant social structures, their task was not primarily to escape material contradictions through self-mortification, but more often to build an alternative communal embodiment of unity within the whole body itself, reconciling its lower with its higher elements. As Peter Brown states, the active physical body became not merely an instrument to be tolerated and efficiently used as in the ancient ascetic separation of spirit, but rather a “field to cultivate” holistically for a unified material and spiritual transformation.

Brown’s quotation marks out a key for understanding the monastic valorization as it began to recognize the laboring body’s constitutive value for actively integrating and reconciling the material and spiritual. Referring to the body and its work as a “field to cultivate” comes from Horsiesius (d. 400 CE), an early founder of communally organized monasticism that had begun with Pachomius.93 It at once reflects the communal mode of production that monasticism was taking up and its sociocultural consciousness of a more comprehensive spirituality reflectively emerging from this base. Despite the literature surrounding the legend of Antony and the exaggerated sense of monasticism as initially a retreat to the isolated desert, most of Western monasticism grew out of an urban asceticism whose movement found perfection not in the desert but rather in revivifying deserted villages.

With the decline of the Roman Empire, in the 3rd and 4th centuries, the village life of communal production became increasingly pressed into, not only heavy taxation, but crushing debt bondage. This entailed a process that effectively hollowed out much of Rome’s rural agrarian base, setting the stage for its eventual refilling by manorial conduits toward feudal serfdom.

With many villages abandoned, Pachomian monasticism occupied these depopulated rural villages by way of reclaiming their agricultural production. In reentering village production back into viable economic life this village monasticism had begun providing a kind of alternative socioeconomic organization to the emerging feudal relations of production, a movement that had begun to draw the people back to village life, beginning with Pachomius’s original successes in the deserted villages of Tabannese and Pbow.

As James Goehring states,

- “Its leaders were the new holy men of antiquity, but its institutions were also among the new purveyors of social and economic power in the hinterland. Its success in Egypt was dependent on both elements.”

From the constitutive involvement of coenobitic monasticism with organized communal production the notion of manual labor came to be understood not only as necessary for the maintenance of the body but also for the salvation of the soul.

This form of communal production and its affirmation of labor as constitutive for the life of the spirit spread quickly from Pachomius into the West, with the Pachomian rule for planned living directly influencing the rise of the Benedictine community.

For Benedictine monks manual labor was also understood essentially as a constitutive aspect of spirituality, to be practiced and improved upon daily, along with prayer and contemplation. The rise of this figure of saintly perfection amongst the oratores permitted, in a way unimaginable to the contemplative life of the Greek elite and the heroic life of the Germanic warrior, a more honorable view of work. This not only raised the consciousness of productive activity within the spiritual practitioner, who increasingly came to reflect upon the spiritual meaning and value of labor as more than merely a useful tool, but it also raised popular consciousness to the dignity of labor because of its integral association with the ideal life of the saints.

Yet, more importantly, the ongoing development of monasteries as societies of economic and spiritual flourishing led to increased technological innovations in the forces of production that facilitated their unified embodiment and spiritual growth. 

As René Dubos states, 

“for the first time in the history of human institutions, the Benedictine abbey created a way of life in which practical and theoretical skills could be embodied in the same person. … they destroyed the old artificial barrier between the empirical and the speculative, the manual and the liberal arts.” 

The increased organization of productive activity meant the increased experience of the transformative power of labor as well as a surplus of intellectual labor for reflecting upon the meaning, value, and use of work.

Such surplus labor led to a greater experimentation with the forces of production in themselves, a tendency that led toward vast innovative leaps beyond antiquity in the development of productive technologies, a transformation whose inventive scale has been estimated on par with the nineteenth century industrial revolution.103 With new developments in mills and machinery among other technologies, the Middle Ages saw productive yields, especially in agriculture, grow at unprecedented rates.

Thus, as the practices of manual labor increased and developed in their communal organization, creating a monastic social formation more complex in its forces and relations of production, there was also a greater development of intellectual and spiritual labors, which led to a greater appreciation of physical labor as an internal good to the totality of social and natural relations. This trajectory positively incorporated labor into a spirituality that was increasingly given not to a separation of the inner spirit, but to a higher cultivation of the unifying potentials of nature and humanity.105 The closeness of the community to subsistence production and the reallocation of surplus goods and surplus labor for perfecting and transforming productive activity into higher forms of communal self-organization allowed for a new view of labor as not merely a means of self-preservation but a transformation of subsisting according to new forms of creative development. This new view upon labor as integrating material and salvific economies was being opened, then, precisely because the mode of production did not primarily serve to produce commodities solely for trade and acquisition of wealth, but rather served to perfect the community of primary producers itself in their creative activity. 

As George Ovitt states in opposing Weber’s retrojection of a capitalist ethos on monastic industria: 

“Monasticism, as shaped by the early history of asceticism and by the earliest monastic Rules, saw significance in the process of labor, not its products; it was centripetal and socialistic in its pursuit of communal self-sufficiency.”

**

This ends the chosen excerpts, from Chapter I of thesis.

I introduce the book on a wiki page, here at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/From_Modes_of_Production_to_the_Resurrection_of_the_Body

Please note that I copied the footnotes here at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Medieval_Christianity_and_Labor 

This thesis entry also recommends a related book, that investigates the same territory, with different but related conclusions:

• Book: La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise. Pierre Musso. Fayard, . See: The Industrial Religion.

https://www.fayard.fr/livre/la-religion-industrielle-9782213701806/

Summary:

"Pierre Musso's book "La Religion industrielle: Monastère, manufacture, usine. Une généalogie de l'entreprise" explores the deep historical roots of what he terms the "industrial religion." Musso traces the origins of industrial and capitalist ideology far earlier than Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant work ethic. He argues that the foundation of Western industrialism lies in the medieval monastic organization, which combined religious discipline with economic production. This industrial religion, evolving from monastic systems to modern enterprises, highlights the continuity between religious structures and capitalist production.

The book challenges the idea that industrial capitalism is a modern invention, instead positing that it is deeply rooted in Western religious and philosophical traditions dating back to the 12th century. Musso's work has been well-received in academic circles for its innovative approach to understanding the historical development of capitalism through a religious lens."