Science and Labor

The thing about travelling with smart middle-school kids is that you can actually get them to focus on big questions if you work at it; the problem is that their brains generally relapse afterward and they behave like toddlers an hour later.

We had a nice conversation about whether one could call Captain Cook and his crew "scientists," and, by that standard, would be right in equating his crew's spirit of inquiry with that of the Polynesians who arrived in Hawaii centuries earlier. Spirited discussion; nothing decided.

I've been thinking a lot about Marx on this trip. Karl, not Groucho (though I'm grouchy); Kapital, not Manifesto. That is, I'm thinking about labor and who performs it and why and how it is visible or invisible. People really make an effort here in little ways that they don't in Mississippi. We were noticing this in Santa Monica too -- how store owners and buildings show evidence of care and thought in presentation and appearance. Well it's an expensive area, so why not, right? But even in the (relatively) poor and rural areas of Hawaii you see signs of labor, or care taken: little things like the way a vine is trained around a mailbox or the lava rocks are placed at the end of the driveway. I used to laugh at this sort of thing growing up but I really miss it in Mississippi. I guess it's what Guliani used to talk about re: graffiti and trash.
But I've been thinking about it in a Marxist way rather than a neo-con suburban "betterment" sort of way (as part of that oh-so-compelling discourse of the ownership society and the Friedman "nobody washes a rented car" thing which has its history in only allowing landowners to vote in england until 1867 or thereabouts). What the marxist labor model allows is a way of seeing labor for its own sake, not for accumulation or sale. To see labor is to see laborers, not owners. This thing that Friedman et al do to conflate labor with ownership undercuts the value of labor in favor of the value of price appreciation, thus turning those who plant flowers into members of the investment class rather than the laboring class.
Perhaps I'm noticing this here because there is no growth or change in the rural areas of Hawaii (no bulldozers apparent except on the fancy coasts), very few For Sale signs, some very iffy structures, and yet totally surrounded with incredible labor in working with the natural resources: winding vines, sweeps of ferns, homemade windchimes, tended orchids, hidden shell patterns, well-placed walkways -- all unnecessary except for aesthetic reasons. Just because. Ethical aesthetics. It makes me happier than anything else here because it's so absent in Mississippi. I know this sounds sentimental and goopy but I like seeing this labor and appreciating it as labor, not as lifestyle choice or hobby or the natural outlet of native energies.