Monthly Muse: 12/2024
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the December 2024 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
As we are in the midst of the holiday season, I’ll be brief here and give you a preview of what to expect from Handful of Earth at the beginning of the new year.
In lieu of Weekly Groundings on January 3rd and January 10th, I’ll be posting “Excavations” on each of those Fridays. These will be curated guides to the flagship content (essay and articles and reviews and interviews, respectively) published to date on Handful of Earth. These Excavations can be used however you see fit—as a reminder of content to return to, a prompt to read further, or a document to share with friends and family who may be interested in Handful of Earth. Those of you who are recent subscribers will find the Excavations particularly useful. And if you like this kind of curated content, be sure to check out “Best of Weekly Groundings: 2024,” published last week.
Weekly Groundings will resume on Friday, January 17th. I also have some new essays in store for early 2025, so keep an eye out for those!
In other news,
and I hosted a Substack readers and writers Meetup in Mumbai, India this month:Provocation
“Technological development creates a large middle class, and the number of workers increases also. The workers are paid a good deal and get many comforts. But the ruling class is still only interested in itself. They might make certain compromises and give a little—as a matter of fact, the ruling circle has even developed something of a social structure or welfare state to keep the opposition down—but as technology develops, the need for workers decreases. It has been estimated that ten years from now only a small percentage of the present workforce will be necessary to run the industries. Then what will happen to your worker who is now making four dollars an hour? The working class will be narrowed down, the class of unemployables will grow because it will take more and more skills to operate those machines and fewer people. And as these people become unemployables, they will become more and more alienated; even socialist compromises will not be enough. You will then find an integration between the black unemployable and the white racist hard hat who is not regularly employed and mad at the blacks who he thinks threaten his job. We hope that he will join forces with those people who are already unemployable, but whether he does or not, his material existence will have changed.”
—Huey P. Newton, “Intercommunalism” (1974)
I wonder what Huey would think about the impact of technology of the working class now, 50 years after that statement. Huey used to also say in the 1970s, The spirit of the people is greater than the Man's technology. Vincent could you send me the actual citation for that quote of Huey's in the Provocation? It was good to see a photo of you with friends at your Substack Meetup in Mumbai. Stay well.