Needing conversation…

I apologize that my blog doesn’t have more of my own thoughts. During the summer months, my brain is usually stagnant and I can only get it going in the heat of good conversation, which I thankfully have been finding more and more in the city of Elkhart.

But I’ve been reading Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture recently, and wanted to post a part of it that really stood out to me (in regard to the “Worker”) and was wondering what anyone (whoever actually reads this) thinks about his ideas.

“Once again, then, what is it to be proletarian? … summed up something like this: being proletarian is being bound to the working-process”
…..
“To be bound to the working process is to be bound to the whole process of usefulness, and moreover, to be bound in such a way that the whole life of the working human being is consumed.”
…..
“The proletarian is one who, whether or not he owns property, is constantly on the move ‘because of the practical necessities of the absolutely rational production of goods.’ …the proletarian is one whose life is fully satisfied by the working-process itself because this space has been shrunken from within, and because meaningful action that is not work is no longer possible or even imaginable.”
( All above from pg. 42)

Pieper also makes this distinction: “On the other hand, one can be a proletarian, without being poor: the engineer, the ‘specialist’ in the total-work state is, certainly, proletarian” (41).

Perhaps I just think it is an interesting way of seeing the proletarian, because I did have the conception that the proletarian and “working class” were summed up in the word “poor.” I kind of bring everything back to education–the view that a degree is a means to an end, which has always bothered me. Are we bringing up a generation of proletarians? Is leisure being reduced to “breaks” and “vacations” where we are in fact “rushing to relax” as Wendell Berry writes in Jayber Crow?

Also, I found this online lecture (I’m guessing it is a lecture) from Pheonix College, which I thought was interesting, so I thought I would link it.