The Works of the Bees

When we wake up to begin our day, almost all of us are compelled to focus our minds on the schedule of our work. Whether we concern ourselves with anything else is practically irrelevant. Labor is the main thing in our everyday lives, whether it is personally meaningful to us or not.

I walk past bees pollinating the bushes outside my apartment on my way to work. I glance at them as they go about harvesting the nectar of the flowers. I am struck by a pang of recognition. Both of us repeat a day-to-day routine. Is this meaningless work to them, like my work is to me? Is there a deeper significance in life beyond the incessant cycle of toil?

Their lives seem so fragile to me. But whether a life is a bee’s or a person’s, it is always mortal. Nothing lives forever and always. As everything is born, everything passes away. Bees seem far sparser today than they were when I was young. The air is quieter. A looming death provokes me to wonder what the significance of bees is for our own human lives. Animality and humanity lead into each other in the question of life. Let’s follow the flight of the bees through the lineages of our workaday world, and see if they show us down passages which lead into the free and open air.

Cosmic Power and the Creature

The significance of bees in humanity’s questioning about the meaning of life is ancient. The relationship between humans and bees stems back to the earliest, dimmest memories of human communities, emerging into the historical record in the annals of world empires.¹ Bees appear as symbols of dynastic power from the earliest traces left by the Kemetic dynasties of the Nile River Valley. The god Khnum, who was said to have created himself and the world through a labor of pottery, held among his many titles that of “the laborious bee.”² The Book of Amduat told of subterranean cave networks where the voices of the dead sounded out like “a swarm of bees.”³ The toil of the bees cooperating for the good of all, their apparent obedience to a monarchical organization, and their constant self-renewal appealed to the Egyptians. The bees drew comparisons to the effective management of imperial wealth and the state displays of religious piety alike. They embodied principles which would strengthen the ideal life of a kingdom—unity, harmony, and duty. The Egyptians adopted the motif of the bees in sayings, teachings, and aesthetics as icons of Ma’at [Righteousness]. They considered their practice of beekeeping to be a microcosmic lesson in the right conduct of life.⁴

The shadow of the pious Egyptians stretched long over the ancient Mediterranean world. To the Hellenes, the Egyptians were the greatest models of piety. The priestly wisdom literature tradition had long criticized everyday labor as senseless compared to the work of piety. The Hellenes annexed this criticism into their own political traditions, which spoke of the distinction between leisurely freemen and toiling slaves. Prominent among those philosophers who expounded on Egyptian wisdom was the 5th-4th century BCE Athenian aristocrat Plato. Drawing out the monist implications of Egyptian priestly reflections on Ma’at, Plato perceived the unwavering eternal beyond the blind, passionate flux of mortal life. In one of Plato’s famous dialogues, the philosopher Socrates asks the military general Meno about his comparison of virtues with the incoherence of a swarm of bees: “Do you mean that they are many and varied and different from one another insofar as they are bees? Or are they no different in that regard, but in some other respect, in their beauty, for example, or their size or in some other such way?”⁵ Meno replies that “they do not differ from one another in being bees,” to which Socrates says the “same is true in the case of the virtues. Even if they are many and various, all of them have one and the same form which makes them virtues, and it is right to look to this when one is asked to make clear what virtue is.”⁶

The multitudes of the senses are devalued compared to the singular power of rational thought in this account. Plato’s identification of a thing’s reality with its Form—or Idea—and its Form with Eternity held radical implications. He held a doctrine about being and time which was novel in the Hellenic setting. Plato described a cosmic Demiurge, an original cause which began the world of becoming. The Demiurge had “looked to the eternal” in fashioning the mortal world, acting as a power mediating what has come to be and what is eternal, and “when the maker of anything fixes his gaze upon the ever self-same and takes it for his model in the fashioning of form and quality, the thing thus fashioned is necessarily always beautiful, if his gaze is upon that which has come to be and his model a thing that comes to be, his work is not beautiful.”⁷ Though immortal, the creating Demiurge was only an avatar for the creative power of the eternal, and did not enclose the eternal within itself. Mortal humans participate in the eternal through the Beautiful, the True, the Good—the Idea. Reason is humanity’s share in eternity.

Plato’s Demiurge stood beyond the world of mortality which it had fashioned between it and the eternal. The gods in Hellenic tradition rose and fell, lived and passed away, being personifications brought forth from the concealment of the primordial cosmos. Some gods might play the role of ordering the world out of chaos, from Kronos to Zeus, but their acts of ordering did not constitute an origin point, in which eternity manifests in mortal time. The later Hellenic Roman poet Ovid expressed a view more typical of the culture by describing the original ordering god as “a natural force of a higher kind,” who intervened in primordial formlessness and bound things into limited, distinctive forms, “each in its separate place, forming a harmonious union.”⁸ The god singled out human beings as distinct, but as natural beings. Humanity is that animal which “could be master over all of the rest,” because while “other animals hang their heads and look at the ground, he made man stand erect, bidding him look up to heaven, and lift his head to the stars.”⁹ But neither humanity nor the god could wield the power of eternity. The impulses of the primordial cosmos continue to manifest in formed things. Decay brings new life, for “when bodies decay, either owing to the passage of time, or when heat has reduced them to a pulp, they turn into little animals” such as bees, who “frequent the countryside, are devoted to toil, and are ever working in hope of harvest.”¹⁰ Yet life begins again from decay, and the primordial formlessness becomes new material for life. Ovid observes that “the larvae of the honey-bee, born in the hexagonal cells of the honeycomb, have bodies but no limbs, and only late in life develop feet and wings[...]”¹¹ All things begin from formlessness and ascend to form. The things of the world are not merely the imperfect manifestations of the perfect Form. Ovid appears as a Hellenic pagan critic of the Idea.

The otherworldly eternal Form of Plato had to be altered to survive the criticisms of worldly concerns. As an aristocrat, Plato did not see a reason to relate the creative, forming power wielded by the Demiurge to something as degraded as everyday toil. This interweaving of cosmic power and mortal creatures stemmed from his student, Aristotle. He saw the Idea of his teacher in the pursuit of the good life, even amidst the bustle of the polis [city-state]. Aristotle drew the attention of his students to the presence of the divine within mortal life itself, which revealed itself to the reflections of a rational, philosophical mind. Reason could uncover the Idea in the lives of the simplest organisms. In his study of animals, he described “the tribe of bees” as containing a “divine ingredient,” owing to his belief that they asexually reproduced and needed no pairings for social organization.¹² This was a manifestation of the principle that measure, the apportionment of material appropriately to a thing’s character, is what makes the self-sufficiency of a thing in its natural form possible.¹³

Measure is one matter for bees and another for the polis. Aristotle counts bees as a “political animal” on the basis of their need to cooperate to maintain the life of the colony. Yet this trait is only characteristic of humans. Only humans exercise the power of speech, and so “they alone have perception of what is good or bad, just or unjust, and the rest. And it is community in these that makes a household and a city-state.”¹⁴ This power allows a greater flexibility in human association. In human speech, the determination of what is good for all participants in the community—politics—plays a central role. While the toil of the bees serves their organic self-reproduction, the wealth of humanity’s works can be put at the disposal of a leisure inherently bound up with the question of how one should live. For example, “the task of weaving is not to make wool but to use it, and to know which sorts are useful and suitable or worthless and unsuitable.”¹⁵ As a freeman, Aristotle took the primacy of leisure over labor as a justification of slavery, insofar as the slaves were natural slaves and the freemen were fit to exercise the freedom of leisure made possible by the slaves’ labor. He claimed that “the same thing is beneficial for both part and whole, body and soul; and a slave is a sort of part of his master—a sort of living but separate part of his body.”¹⁶ The vocation of toil could only be justified as a means for the leisurely life of the citizen, the subject of the polis, not as something virtuous for itself. The higher life of the head could not be dragged down by the blind needs of the hands.

Other Hellenes considered the necessities of labor to be the realm of the virtues of freemen. Pastoralism exercised a powerful draw on the Hellenic freemen who sought to escape the suffocating conformity of the polis.¹⁷ The Homeric-era poet Hesiod even decried the life of the aristocracy as incompatible with virtue, for “Both gods and mortals disapprove of all such workless ones,/And such as in their character resemble stingless drones,/Who, workless, eat and wear away the labor of the bees.”¹⁸ Hesiod imagined an agrarian utopia of labor and virtue. Many pursued this fantasy through warfare, seeking to establish far away colonial settlements and live self-sufficiently. The soldier-colonists sought to become independent men who ruled over their homes as masters. They would enact the principles administering a polis through their microcosmic sovereignty over their own lives. As a participant in colonial expansion, the warrior-philosopher Xenophon wrote one of the first texts in household management: Oeconomicus. In a dialogue with his wife, the narrator invokes the queen bee’s leadership as a model for economizing labor and wealth in a household:

“she stays in the hive[...] and does not suffer the bees to be idle, but those whose duty it is to work outside she sends forth to their work; and whatever each of them brings in, she knows and receives it, and keeps it till it is wanted. And when the time is come to use it, she portions out the just share to each. She likewise presides over the weaving of the combs in the hive, that they may be well and quickly woven, and cares for the brood of little ones, that it be duly reared up. And when the young bees have been duly reared and are fit for work, she sends them forth to found a colony, with a leader to guide the young adventurers."¹⁹

The worldly concerns of the pastoralists overlapped with the philosophers of the Idea in considering how one should live life. They departed from them in associating virtue with the self-sufficiency of a life of labor rather than that of leisure. Warfare between city-states and with the outside threat of the Achaemenid Empire simultaneously drew the Hellenes into tighter social organizations and tossed colonies further afield of their urban centers. Some Hellenes turned away from the world to grasp an inner reality through reflection, while others threw themselves into the wild pursuits of their passions. The question of how one should live was pushed to the side, though it would sustain its hum in the background instead of disappearing into silence.

The Organization of the Beehive

The world needs work to live, but not all live to work. As a vocation of life, the Romans degraded toil no less than the Hellenes. They concurred with Aristotle that the end of labor was leisure, which made the higher activities of politics, philosophy, and the arts possible. Roman Imperial power drew from the capacities of labor as a means for the end of magisterial organization. From the insights of Euclid and others, Roman engineers adopted the techniques of geometry to construct monumental projects. The architecture of state temples, as in the dome of the Pantheon, was reinforced by patterns like the hexagonal honeycombs of beehives. In the temples, the principle of organization confronted the gazing residents of the Roman world. Some adopted the principle as a means to unite the quotidian and the virtuous. One of the most popular writers of the Roman Republic, Marcus Terentius Varro, expressed his highest admiration for the beehive as a model of economizing organization:

“Bees are not solitary creatures like eagles, but gregarious as are men. And though jack-daws also resemble men in this, yet it is not the same thing, for bees combine to work and build, which is not the case with jack-daws; bees have method and science, and from them we learn to work, to build, and to store up food, for those three things are their concern: namely, food, house, and work; nor is the wax the same thing as the food, the honey, or the house. Each cell in the honey-comb has, as you know, six angles, as many angles as the bee has feet, and geometers prove that when regular hexagons are used to fill a circular figure the largest possible amount of its space is thus utilized.”²⁰

As a landowning citizen, Varro identified patriotically with Rome. Yet even the great critics of Roman Imperial power sang their praises of organization. For the Stoics, each person’s pursuit of their self-preservation would lead to a peaceful harmony of society. This harmony meant living according to nature. The Stoic oppositionist to Emperor Nero, Gaius Musonius Rufus, chastised those who characterized human beings as solitary creatures for their indifference to justice while deriving the principles of virtuous life from the beehive:

“If you will agree that man’s nature most closely resembles the bee which cannot live alone (for it dies when left alone), but bends its energies to the one common task of his fellows and toils and works together with his neighbors; if this is so, and in addition you recognize that for man evil consists in injustice and cruelty and indifference to a neighbor’s trouble, while virtue is brotherly love and goodness and justice and beneficence and concern for the welfare of one’s neighbor—with such ideas, I say, it would be each man’s duty to take thought for his own city, and to make of his home a rampart for its protection. But the first step toward making his home such a rampart is marriage. Thus whoever destroys human marriage destroys the home, the city, and the whole human race.”²¹

Varro and Rufus both spoke of politics. They each thought of themselves as citizens of a republic. The emergence of Christianity within the Roman Empire offered a different sense of humanity’s place in the world. Jesus Christ had taught his followers to “give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”²² His followers did not consider themselves to be citizens of Rome, but believers in Christ. Justifying an abandonment of the World, the apostle Paul struck a chord similar to Plato in saying that Christians “fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”²³

If Stoicism counseled knowing one’s earthly limitations, Christianity taught throwing oneself into martyrdom and otherworldliness. While Rufus considered the destruction of the family and the world to be an objection to wrong conduct, Christ made this promise to believers: “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. Everyone will hate you because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.”²⁴ Christianity separated the fallen, untrue World from the higher reality of the Holy Spirit. Christians did not consider the worldly distinctions of classes to be relevant. All would soon be swept away in the return of Christ, the destruction of the World, and the recreation of the earth as one with the Kingdom of Heaven. They knew this would disturb many of their fellow Romans. The author of Revelation described the experience of receiving the Gospel in gastronomic terms: “It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.”²⁵ The Gospel twisted the guts of the sinful world, but blessed the associations formed around the Good News of Christ’s resurrection. Saint Ambrose of Milan was said to have been visited by a swarm of bees in his infancy, who gently passed through his mouth to leave a gift of honey. This was interpreted as a sign of his future eloquence and social ascendancy. The honey of the Word was an organizing force for the believers.

Christianity taught that there was a value in each and all, regardless of who they were in this world. All souls were united in the universal, immortal redemption of Christ’s sacrifice. While Stoicism had taught a similar regard for inner life, Christianity held the greater cosmic ambition of a Second Genesis even in its very rejection of worldliness. Christianity constructed an entire other, ideal world in its visions of Heaven, and many of its followers were willing to suffer and die for this ideal.

Worldliness and otherworldliness were once again splitting. Another school would seek to reconcile the schism, drawing from the traditions of the many cultures of the Roman Empire—Egyptian piety, Hellenic paganism, Roman politics, Jewish devotion, and Christian belief. Neoplatonists set out to craft a universal system of consciousness which united faith and reason. They perceived a cosmic unity between the seen and the unseen. The emanation of primordial creative power from the One was ordered into the material world by the Demiurge. The Hellenic Egyptian father of Neoplatonism, Plotinus, described this work of creation in the terms of the labor of craftsmen shaping the brute stones into a form which “was in the one conceptualizing it even before it came to be in the stone.”²⁶ In skilled labor, “it is not simply that which is seen that they imitate, but they go back to the expressed principles from which nature comes.”²⁷ Plotinus’s argument ascribed a cosmic significance to the intentionality of labor, which united all humans in a shared divinity.

Neoplatonism tied the concept of labor to the sacred traditions of the Egyptian priesthood in an ethical vision of creation. But it was Christianity which first bestowed the dignity of redemption to the toil of labor. The Greco-Roman traditions had treated toil with coolness and Jewish tradition had treated it as the curse of Adam and Eve’s Fall. Labor took on an ethical weight far greater than the virtue of the citizen. Paul organized the early Church along the lines of productive labor in order to ensure that it would not be a burden on its multiclass and often impoverished flocks of the preaching shepherds. To his fellow evangelists, he offered the mantra: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”²⁸ This life required a choice of commitment, a powerful act of faith, one which drew on the fundamental humanity of believers.

The reflection on the meaning of life, which Christians found beyond the visible World, became a calling to subordinate the concerns of earthly organization to the calling of the Spirit. Origen of Alexandria, the 2nd-3rd century CE theologian and ascetic, wrote that humanity was distinguished from animality in that it was in “the help of God that men desired for themselves the means protection against wild beasts, and of securing the mastery over them,” and that the monarchical organizations of “ants and bees merit no approval, because they do not act from reflection.”²⁹ The power of rationality allowed human beings to “admire the divine nature, which extended even to irrational animals the capacity, as it were, of imitating rational beings, perhaps with a view of putting rational beings to shame[...]”³⁰ From the power of organization wielded unreflectively by animals like bees, rational Christians could learn how to best organize their own endeavors of evangelism.

The toil of the beehive became a model for monastic organization. In a letter advising the construction of a system of monasteries to be sustained by productive labor, the 4th-5th century Church Father Augustine of Hippo expressed his hope that God would “Himself be present with me also, that I may obey in such sort that from His gift, in the very usefulness of fruitful labor, I may understand that I am indeed obeying Him.”³¹ The Church’s monastic model soon proliferated throughout the Roman and post-Roman world of Christendom. In the medieval European world, it would soon become the central unit for the management of wealth and for the spiritual power of the higher landowning nobility.³² Chief among the endeavors which sustained the economy of the monasteries was beekeeping.³³ The toil of the beehive became an icon of monastic organization at the same time that it became one of many sources for the Church’s wealth.³⁴

The growth of wealth at a large scale cannot be subordinated to the united common good of the community for long. Divisions in the control of wealth soon appear from inequalities in its conditions of creation and distribution. In the post-Roman worlds, this problem was often framed in terms of decadence or moral decay. In the same moment, it was also bound to a call for redemption through the labor of rebirth. The medieval Iranian Muslim polymath Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni counseled his readers that one must cut off what becomes superfluous to life. One must observe that “bees kill those of their kind who only eat, but do not work in their beehive,” and nature “allows the leaves and fruit of the trees to perish, thus preventing them from realising that result which they are intended to produce in the economy of nature. It removes them so as to make room for others.”³⁵ Byzantine notables like the Greek monk Psellus began to advocate for a return to Hellenic culture and early Christian ethics in a rebirth of civilization. The learned monastic discourses of the West reflected on the divinity of labor as humanity’s creative power. An monk known by the pseudonym Theophilus Presbyter wrote a passage on the significance of creation in the arts which, in retrospect, would become the statement of a civilizational mission:

“We read in the account of the creation of the world that man was created in the image and likeness of God and was given life by the breathing-in of the Divine breath; that by the excelling quality of such distinction he was preferred above all other living creatures, so that, capable of reason, he might participate deservedly in the wisdom and skill of God’s design, and that, endowed with freedom of choice, he should respect the will and revere the sovereignty of his Creator alone. But, although he lost the privilege of immortality through the sin of disobedience, being pitifully deceived by the cunning of the devil, nevertheless he transmitted to the generations of posterity his distinction of knowledge and intelligence, so that whoever devotes care and attention to the task can acquire, as by hereditary right, the capacity for the whole range of art and skill.”³⁶

The Design of the Honeycomb

Facing death provokes the question of life. The Black Death threw society across the 14th century Mediterranean world into turmoil and skepticism, creating the conditions for social reorganization. European political reformers began to search for a new way of doing things. They would have to go beyond the loose unity of scattered principalities under the devotion of secular rulers to the Catholic Church. The Crusades had enriched many sections of the Church, but had not succeeded in realizing its vision of a politically unified Christendom. The plague made the situation much worse. Uprisings of peasants in alliance with townspeople in France, Italy, and Flanders gave the problems of sociality a sense of urgency.³⁷

The instability of the plague drew the attention of post-plague thinkers to the value of stability. Human labor and organization were becoming conceptually tied to the role of design in groups. The post-Roman Islamic world had had much greater success in maintaining large-scale political associations than Europe. Islam fostered early expressions of political thought which placed their emphasis on the relationship between divine design and human designs. The ban on images of religious figures encouraged a flourishing of geometrical architecture. The Roman engineering patterns of honeycombs became complex designs in which circles wove together into hexagons, hexagons wove into stars, and stars wove into the square panels of mosques. The prominent Islamic 14th century political philosopher Abu Zayd Abd al-Rahman Ibn Muhammad Ibn Khaldun had recognized this power of design even in the institution of imperial authority. He distinguished royal authority among humans from that among bees and other creatures, as in animals “these things exist as the result of natural disposition and divine guidance, and not as the result of an ability to think or to administrate.”³⁸ Human beings can look upon the principles of nature as the design of their Creator. Humans derive principles from this design which are useful for their own purposes of administration. They interpret the animals ruled by instinct from their own perspective as rational animals created to enact God’s will on earth. But to Ibn Khaldun, the power of rational administration was first and foremost that of the ruler, not of the ruled. The ruled had to choose to obey and focus only on their personal affairs for the greater good of society.

In Europe, where social organization was sparser, this lesson of obedience had to be written in letters of blood and fire. The elites carried out the forcible disciplining of labor through the professional arming of the law, the criminalization of the landless, and the subordination of the peasantry to the urban commercial economy.³⁹ At the same time, the imposed asceticism of manual laborers in the countryside made a store of wealth available, through which intellectual labor in the cities could flourish.⁴⁰ In towns, social organization could be carried out according to the plans of intellectuals, who were sponsored by prominent burghers and nobility like the Florentine House of Medici.⁴¹ These notables gave their patronage to the arts and invested in the slave trade at the same moment. At times, the two endeavors even overlapped. The discoveries of the technical arts could make navigational innovations for the maritime voyages of slave-trading ships. Commercial capitalism served as the backdrop for the works of geniuses like Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, but they were at the mercy of their patrons rather than the forces of the market. The management of wealth was the concern of the notables, not of the artists.

The growing class of artists began to carry out a spiritual Renaissance of their civilization, articulating the concerns of the times in cosmic terms. The Italian Renaissance began to emerge from 14th-century Tuscany in the Hellenic revival projects of writers like Francis Petrarch and Dante Alighieri before blossoming forth into a general model in the system of patronage and artists’ workshops in the Republic of Florence. The God of Neoplatonic philosophy, the God of Christianity, and the power of labor became bound together into a single concept—disegno [design]. The early Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino articulated this concept in 1469: “As the design of a whole building and of its parts exists in the mind of an architect, so the design of this whole world and of its parts exists in the divine intelligence beyond the world.”⁴² The architect’s design of a building held a significance greater than everyday toil, as it revealed something about design as such. Ficino noted that one can take any thing and “subtract its matter if you can (and you can subtract it mentally), but leave the design. Nothing of body, nothing of matter will remain to you. On the contrary, the design which came from the artist and the design which remains in the artist will be completely identical. You may do the same in any body of a man. You will find that its form, corresponding to the Reason of the Soul, is simple and devoid of matter.”⁴³

The Idea manifested to the artists in their work of design. At least, insofar as they sought to create according to the ideal of beauty and the measures of balance. The Genoan architect Leon Battista Alberti recognized sacred geometry in the construction of temples, noting in 1452 that “Nature delights primarily in a circle,” and “that Nature also delights in the hexagon. For bees, hornets, and insects of every kind have learned to build the cells of their hives entirely out of hexagons.”⁴⁴ Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine artist, art historian, and ideologist of the notion of Renaissance itself, declared in the 16th century that design is “the parent of our three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, having its origin in the intellect, most marvellous in what it compasses, for not only in the bodies of men and of animals but also in plants, in buildings, in sculpture and in painting, design is cognizant of the proportion of the whole to the parts and of the parts to each other and to the whole.”⁴⁵ Through an understanding of the divinely created world, human design freely reconciles the rational human intellect with irrational matter. Humanity shares in divine freedom by comprehending the necessities of God’s plan—the laws of the universe. Vasari and the masters of workshops taught their students to follow the simplicity and lightness of nature’s operations rather than show off the tortures of toil. Artists should make it “their endeavour that the things they are always producing shall not seem painted, but show themselves alive and starting out of the canvas.”⁴⁶

Humanity’s very freedom of choice between departure from God’s design of creation and fidelity to His will makes this capacity of design possible. The 16th century Dutch Catholic humanist Erasmus taught that human beings should conduct themselves in life according to the blind laws of nature, which are one with the designs of God. He praised bees acting on their instincts as a positive example for humans, asking “what is more to be admired than the industry and contrivance of these little animals? What architect could ever form so curious a structure as they give a model of in their inimitable combs? What kingdom can be governed with better discipline than they exactly observe in their respective hives?”⁴⁷ Striking a more pessimistic note than the artists of the Italian Renaissance, Erasmus warned that “those therefore fall shortest of happiness that reach highest at wisdom, meeting with the greater repulse for soaring beyond the boundaries of their nature, and without remembering themselves to be but men, like the fallen angels, daring them to vie with Omnipotence, and giant-like scale heaven with the engines of their own brain; so are those most exalted in the road of bliss that degenerate nearest into brutes, and quietly divest themselves of all use and exercise of reason.”⁴⁸

Erasmus’s call for a return to the folly of nature would not be heard by most. Limitation was not the measure of the times. The very power of choice which he attributed to human beings allowed the people of the Renaissance era to continue to follow their Faustian impulses towards absolute knowledge and absolute power. Freedom drives a distinction between human designs and the divine plan. With their own freedom, men like Faust could turn inwards, reflect on their sense of mortality and limitation, and turn outwards to make a pact with the devil Mephistopheles—selling their souls in exchange for command over the powers of design.

The Busy Bees

1492 brought a new catastrophic change. It would begin a radically new course in world history, even becoming the beginning of world history as such. The religious antagonisms between European Christians and outsiders, and antagonisms among Christians, took on a global significance with the construction of a legal-political regime of racial supremacy.⁴⁹ The Catholic kingdoms of Spain spilled the blood of Jews and Muslims in mass expulsions just as Christopher Columbus began the European colonization of the Americas. The first authentically global economy was built on thousands of scarred and decaying backs.

The beasts of prey who first bound together the Americas and Mediterranean Europe across the Atlantic lacked a social design of their own. They were largely soldiers of fortune seeking adventure and wealth, barbarians invoking the name of God to sanction mass rape and enslavement. It was only the Catholic Church which began to construct the political, legal, and economic institutions of a new global society, which would have Christian Europe at its center. International law began with the normalization of colonization into a new regime. Seeking to stem the tide of blood, the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas defended the humanity of the indigenous peoples of the Americas by painting them with the tones of monastic morality:

“The dry land [Mexico] around two hundred and fifty leagues or more from this island [Hispaniola], where more than ten thousand leagues of coast have been discovered and more are being discovered every day, is like a beehive so full of people, in what up to the year of 1541 has been discovered, that it seems that God put in those lands the mass, or the majority of the entire human lineage.

All these universes and infinite people, God created as the simplest, without malice or duplicity, most obedient and faithful to their natural masters, and to the Christians whom they serve, most humble, most patient, most peaceful and quiet, without arguments or rackets or lust, not quarrelsome, without rancor, without hatred, without wishes for any revenge in the world.”⁵⁰

The friar succeeded in winning the Crown over to the project of reforming the destructive enslavement of the Indigenous by the conquistadores over the Indigenous. But this only served to unite the knightly beasts of prey, the Church, and the Crown in the exploitative institution of the encomienda.⁵¹ The reducciones which the Spanish authorities crowded the Natives into were often nightmarish fusions of utopian schemes and sadistic authority wielded by priests. Monastic organization became a prototype for factory slavery and rural peonage. The Godlike power of design now took on an earthly significance in the project of a New World. But this New World was not only the Americas. It was an era in which the power to command labor would supplant the place of God, even in the name of God himself.

The exploitation of labor and the power of money granted world power to the first great empires of global colonialism. The abject misery of the chattel slave ships, sugar mills, and bullion mines was converted into a world-historic wealth. Blood money funded cultural Golden Ages in Spain and the Dutch Republic. Colonialism gave a bloodthirsty tone to Renaissance humanism. An Italian artist sponsored by the enriched courts of the Catholic monarchies, in 1607 Federico Zuccari reaffirmed the principle that humanity’s works carry the “Spark of Divinity, because man in forming this inner Design resembles God producing in himself the inner concept[...]”⁵² But this celebration of human divinity now carried the weight of the 1550-1551 debates at Valladolid. Colonial law set out the limited conditions in which the peoples of the world could be dignified as humans. Any Natives who resisted the sovereignty of Church and Crown were legitimate targets for destruction and enslavement. The power to design society’s organization was held by the colonial authorities, while the Natives were compelled to obey and toil according to the plans of their masters.

The victories of the Reconquista and the colonization of the Americas made the newly united Spain complacent. It enriched Europe and itself through the free flow of gold and sugar from the hellish workshops of the Americas. With such a tide of wealth, Spain felt little compulsion to undergo a radical project of rational reorganization.⁵³ But Spain could not monopolize commerce through the terrestrial sovereignty of the Crown over its gold, nor could the Catholic Church monopolize spiritual sovereignty over souls.

In 1517, a German theologian began a protest against the worldly corruption of the Catholic Church. Martin Luther considered the redeeming power of Christ to dwell in believers through their faith. He questioned the wealth-seeking of the Church, as well as its claims to temporal authority. Institutional power was not the most important thing. Not even the victories of spiritual authority over temporal authorities were. The key is the distinction between the inner spirit and outer body. While one might be outwardly enslaved, faith in Christ saves one’s inner freedom. And “because this faith alone justifies, it is clear that the inner person cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any external work or activity at all and that no works whatever have anything to do with the inner person.”⁵⁴ Luther drew a hard line between the inner and outer; the inner being the realm of absolute freedom for faith and the outer being subject to the unfreedom of power struggles. Though he did not initially intend it, he had begun a rebellion against the medieval world. Protestantism emerged from a spirituality of inwardness into a multitude of political forces. Kings, princes, scholars, burghers, and peasants joined the project of a Reformation. The Wars of the Reformation threw everything solid into the air, transforming masses into paupers, laity into pastors, Church lands into commercial property, and the present day into the End Times.

The inner freedom of Protestantism opened up the beehive principles of monasticism to society as a whole. While Luther had divided inner and outer in order to stress the primacy of faith, later Protestants began to elaborate on how one may exteriorize the inwardness of the soul into the world. The French theologian John Calvin praised the one who quietly works in their allotted station in life. They follow the inner vocation of Godliness, for “every work performed in obedience to one’s calling, no matter how ordinary and common, is radiant—most valuable in the eyes of our Lord.”⁵⁵ As this worship of work ascended to the highest ethic of conduct, medieval society’s spiritual, political, and economic centers began to fragment. The Wars of the Reformation challenged the monopolistic domination of landed property by the Church and Catholic higher aristocracy. Protestantism gave vent to the antagonisms of the peripheral polities and classes, which felt alienated by the dominance of the Mediterranean world. Systems of property began to transform in ways that would shape the development of world capitalism, the designs of colonialism, and the construction of a global inter-state system.⁵⁶

The Wars left many propertyless, and others newly in control of masses of wealth. This wealth could be invested in the first global commercial system in history. The subject of property became one of the main concerns of society at the same moment that the need to ensure peace and security came to the forefront. The turmoil of the world led many to reflect on what the best design for a society would be. While the medieval world had isolated this project to spiritual authority, Protestantism had made all believers potential participants in this questioning. The rise of the printing press alongside vernacular writing and preaching accelerated the process. People sought to determine how the sanctity of inner freedom and the security of outer possession of property could be united for the sake of the greater good. Property was now inseparably bound with the commercialization of land and the power of bullion in the world economy. Any consideration of the individual could not assume self-sufficiency, but had to turn to society as well. The motif of the beehive returned as a source of inspiration. Bees became global articles of commercial exploitation at the same time that they became a model for organizing wealth and sovereignty of the state in 16th-17th century political theory.⁵⁷ One writer acclaimed for his gardening advice wrote that the lessons of bees should remind his readers that “Nature hath not onlye committed hir lawes to bookes, the which men may lerne by[...]”⁵⁸

The hope of a lawful cosmos backed the speculations of the righteous Christians. They held onto this hope for a sense of security amidst chaos. The turmoil of the world did not only burst forth in wars between Catholics and Protestants. Even mid-17th century Protestant England split in a Civil War between the monarchy, with its official Anglican church, and the Parliamentarians, the ranks of which included many Puritans. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote his famous Leviathan (1651) in response, hoping to set out the principles for designing a peaceful social order. Referring back to Aristotle’s political theory, Hobbes agreed that “certain living creatures, as Bees and Ants, live sociably with one another[...] and yet have no other direction, than their particular judgements and appetites,” but he believed that “the agreement of these creatures is Naturall; that of men, is by Covenant only, which is Artificiall: and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required (besides Covenant) to make their Agreement constant and lasting; which is a Common Power, to keep them in awe, and direct their actions to the Common Benefit.”⁵⁹ Humanity has the power of choice and reflection, which creates the danger of conflict as well as the opportunity to enact an intentional political design through the power of the sovereign legal state over all. The stability of the organization was the uniting consensus of all politics.

Not all Protestants agreed to live under the social consensus that they found themselves within. Many tried to found entire societies on the basis of spiritual principles in colonization projects which set out over the Atlantic. Sects like the Puritans adopted the beehive as a guiding model for successful colonization.⁶⁰ Bees in this discourse economize their labor, compel all to work for the greater good, take care of their households, unconditionally obey the authority of their monarch, accumulate their wealth in honey rather than withering in idleness or swelling in gluttony, and spread themselves out into new colonies when the hive becomes overfilled. Anglo-American settlers imagined they were designing perfect societies, as well-constructed as the honeycombs of the hives. They defended the sanctity of these designs from the Devil’s inner temptations of sin and outer dangers of Indigenous nations.

The desire to ‘tame the wilderness’ inspired the development of systematic modes of organizing knowledge. The designs of nature had to be studied carefully if nature was to be subordinated to human designs. Utopian societies might indeed be constructed, but only with care in work and reason’s discipline of the passions. One of the fathers of the Scientific Revolution, Francis Bacon, wrote in his Novum Organum (1629) that this work could take inspiration from the bees: “Those who have handled the sciences have been either Empiricists or Rationalists. Empiricists, like ants, merely collect things and use them. The Rationalists, like spiders, spin webs out of themselves. The middle way is that of the bee, which gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but then transforms and digests it by a power of its own. And the true business of philosophy is much the same, for it does not rely only or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it store the material supplied by natural history and practical experiments untouched in its memory, but lays it up in the understanding changed and refined. Thus from a closer and purer alliance of the two faculties—the experimental and the rational, such as has never yet been made—we have good reason for hope.”⁶¹ All things could be incorporated into a rational systematization of work and knowledge. As human beings saw greater success in rationalizing the world around them through the knowledge of experience, they would also enact the conversion of the earth into their property.

The concept of property grew into the central concern of society, from Europe to its colonies abroad. While property had appeared as a mainstay of political theory as early as the ancient Hellenes, it was now the basic cell through which many constructed their plans for how society could best be organized. For some, the value of property preceded any particular organization of society, since they believed it served as the irrevocable basis of all political sovereignty. The English philosopher John Locke considered the entire “earth and all inferior creatures” to be the common dominion of all humans, since all descend from Adam, but believed that each person is sovereign over their own body and soul. Whatever someone “removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”⁶² Labor is what externalizes the inner principle, the soul and personality, into the outer world, creating property. The product of labor, as personal property, is humanity’s share in the divine power of creation. Labor individuates the world from the shared creation of God into the exclusive creation of a person’s own designs.

Not all property was the personal property praised by Locke. In the power of money in commerce, property appeared as an exchangeable thing. Money itself is an impersonal form of exchangeable property, which not even a sovereign state has total command over the disposal of. Through the measure of their value in prices, money can be exchanged for all other commodities and all other commodities can be exchanged for money. Reflection on these metamorphoses of property in the early modern world led to the rise of the science of national economy. From the French Physiocrats, who identified agriculture as the source of all national wealth, European political economy soon grew into a science of the urban market economy. The role of globalized money posed a problem for any who sought to remain in categories of analysis only appropriate to the closed world of the countryside. The role of the inner personality in the creation of property was gradually put into question.

In the first phases of commercial political economy, personality seemed to be indispensable. The Anglo-Dutch physician Bernard Mandeville, writing in his The Fable of the Bees (1714), theorized a kind of invisible hand that united the passions of individuals into the harmonious social whole of the market. He sought to appropriate the motif of the beehive from the ascetic morality of monasticism, instead teaching that any society—whether of bees or humans—must recognize that vices motivate people far better than virtues. For “Man never exerts himself but when he is rous’d by his Desires: Whilst they lie dormant, and there is nothing to raise them, his Excellence and Abilities will be for ever undiscover’d, and the lumpish Machine, without the Influence of his Passions, may be justly compar’d to a huge Wind-mill without a breath of Air.”⁶³ Whether their desires are moral or not, the participants of commerce must be able to pursue the vices unique to their personality if society is to accumulate a greater store of national wealth.

Not all analysts of the new system agreed with Mandeville’s separation of passions and virtue. Others sought to establish a greater unity of the inner personality at the same time that they aimed at the wealth and harmony of society. The Scottish economist Adam Smith criticized Mandeville for treating “every passion as wholly vicious, which is so in any degree and in any direction,” while dismissing “every thing as vanity which has any reference, either to what are, or to what ought to be the sentiments of others[...]”⁶⁴ Smith had set his eyes on the possibility for a solidarity of interests. He believed this moral solidarity had been established in the corporate contracts of collaborating capitalists and the cooperating laborers of the mills. Capitalists must set their capitals into motion on the market, wielding their wealth as a social power to command labor, uniting the many in one process, so that all can participate in the enjoyment of wealth. He noted in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that “without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilised country could not be provided, even according to what we very falsely imagine the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated.”⁶⁵

As a consistent humanist, Smith could not look away from the social disruptions emanating from the commercial system. The unification of society into a common mode of production did not benefit all in the same way or to the same degree. At the same time that the cooperation of many augmented human labor’s powers of creation, it compelled the simplification of the tasks of each. This dependency of each laborer on the united labor of all meant that one “naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life.”⁶⁶ Capital represents both the unification of human creative power and the division of people into the cogs of a machine.

As the power of industrial capital and the money economy grew in the 18th century, this problem concerned many humanists. After the Protestant Reformation, most humanist discourse in Europe depended on drawing a distinction between humans and animals. Scientific writers like William Smellie considered the distinction of humans and animals to emerge from the power of choosing designs and constructing them in reality: “The bee makes cells, and the beaver constructs habitations of clay. The order of their architecture, however, is invariably the same. Man likewise builds houses: But he is not forced, by an irresistible instinct, to work always on the same plan. His habitations, on the contrary, vary with the fancy of the individuals who design and construct them.”⁶⁷ In the capitalist economy, not everyone participated in the intellectual work of design, nor were all free to dispose of their powers of labor however they wished. The propertyless had no choice but to sell their capacity for work to the owners of capital for the price of their wages. The division of labor seemed to degrade workers into draft animals of the capitalists, little different to the horses and other beasts who figured as mere factors of production to the capitalists.

Some intellectuals believed that this erosion of the separation between humans and animals was not itself the problem. Humans were distinct, of course, but distinct while remaining animals. The nature of humans, according to the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson, is to metamorphize. Ferguson argued that “art itself is natural to man. He is in some measure the artificer of his own frame, as well as his fortune, and is destined, from the first age of his being, to invent and contrive. He applies the same talents to a variety of purposes, and acts nearly the same part in very different scenes. He would be always improving on his subject, and he carries this intention where-ever he moves, through the streets of the populous city, or the wilds of the forest. While he appears equally fitted to every condition, he is upon this account unable to settle in any.”⁶⁸ But at the same time, “nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the results of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”⁶⁹ The harm of the division of labor was that it created forms of manual labor which “require no abilities, or actually tend to contract and to limit the views of the mind,” while intellectual and skilled labor “lead to general reflections, and to enlargement of thought.”⁷⁰ As the power of capital grew, so did the antithesis of intellectual and manual labor.

The alienation of humanity’s creative power empowered those who owned the conditions of production, insofar as they acted as personifications of capital, and impoverished the inner personality of the dispossessed, putting them at the mercy of the market. Those who owned capital had the power to enact their plans, while those who worked had to obey their commands. But the success of these plans depended on their treatment of labor as only a means for injecting new value into the system. For civil society to thrive in spite of this despotic, impersonal power of capital over the degraded, precarious masses of dependent laborers, theorists like Ferguson believed that the civic virtue of public life had to be revitalized. But this regeneration would not always take forms that the brightest minds of the bourgeoisie expected. The hum of a new movement emerged among the sans-culottes of the world cities and the landless paupers of the countryside.

The Worker and the Swarm

The first mass revolutions of modern history burst forth from the societies of the Atlantic world—the Anglo-American colonies, France, San Domingo, Mexico, and South America. The Atlantic Revolutions set out to remake the world along the designs of the plebeian urban classes.⁷¹ But each did so differently, according to the political terrain of each. The American Revolution repressed the question of the propertyless by making property available to settlers in Indigenous lands, and sealing the labor question in the scars of enslaved Black people. The French Revolution opened up the social question as a factor of national unification through the alliance of the urban poor with the Jacobins. The Jacobins attempted to build France as a social republic, but it became a new Empire instead. The Haitian Revolution posed the problem of labor and race head on, confronting slavery as the fundamental institution of trans-Atlantic commerce and politics. The self-emancipation of the enslaved terrified the enslavers, leading to the gradual decline of the slave trade.⁷² The independent empires and republics of continental Latin America followed paths wavering between the aforementioned. With each revolution, a question was posed: How to organize the growing world of wage labor and capital?

Philosophers and political economists had already recognized that the workaday world posed a problem for civic virtue. Most of its participants suffered in meaningless cycles of miserable toil, with little reason to concern themselves with the governance of a society that treated them as draft animals. The political ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, consummated in the founding of constitutional monarchies and republics, also meant the ascendancy of a conservative attitude in its intellectual production. As people have a greater share in social power, they tend to feel a greater need to defend the legitimacy of its designs. Political economy transformed from a shrewd science to a genre of theological apologetics from the system. The bourgeoisie increasingly sought to maintain, and only to transform where necessary for this task. The critique of the world of labor and capital became the task of socialism.

Socialism initially emerged among bourgeois intellectuals as they set out to address the social problems of global capitalism. The French Revolution birthed both the modern model of modern mass politics and the modern model of intellectual inquiry into the social question. Henri de Saint-Simon, a capitalist, chastised the ancien régime for repressing the interests of the “productive classes” (those engaged in industry, labor and capital alike) in order to augment the position of the “idle classes” (landed nobility and clergy). Saint-Simon considered this regime to have reduced politics to “giving the largest portion of the honey taken from the bees to that of the two great classes of hornets who serve the views of the government with the most zeal and dedication.”⁷³ If the state intervened on behalf of the honey-producing bees against the idling hornets, then “trade would prosper, the products of culture would be considerably increased, the factories of various kinds would be in activity, the rich would no longer be bored, because they would no longer be idle, and the King would enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the French happy.”⁷⁴ Saint-Simon did not challenge property, but idleness, believing that all productive classes could be reconciled into a harmonious beehive where they were allowed to freely augment the national wealth.

Later reformers were more hostile towards capitalists. They believed that society had to be reconstructed from the ground up, without its ready-made class divisions, in order to enact a perfect plan for organization. The utopian communist Charlies Fourier suggested that the beehive offered a model for such a design, in which the “bees figure all the phalanxes of the globe united under the protection of the federal monarch, whose emblem is the queen-bee, who communicates with each cell. The drones figure unproductive activity, the congresses and intermediary agencies which are subordinate to the federal hierarchy and which the phalanxes can revoke. By analogy, the worker bees kill the drones when they no longer have any use for them.”⁷⁵ Meanwhile, civilization was organized like a wasp’s nest, standing for the few’s violent appropriations from the labor of the many. Fourier and other utopians, like Robert Owen, believed that civilization could only be reformed if utopian communities were built in its midst as a method of moral transformation.

The utopians set out to seek patrons, participants, and fertile grounds for their experiments. Many turned to North America, where Protestants had long worked to realize their own utopian projects of colonization. John Humphrey Noyes, a Protestant and utopian socialist, noted that “Owen and Fourier, like the apiarian inventors (who are proverbially unpractical), undertook to construct, each in his own way, great compound hives for human beings; and they had the example of the Shakers (who may be considered the wild bees in the illustration) to countenance their schemes.”⁷⁶ Beehives served well as a model for the self-enclosed communities of the utopians. As bees efficiently organized their societies into the orderliness of honeycombs, human beings would form phalansteries to be spread across the world.

The fantasy of founding society anew proved to be unsustainable in a world where the power of capital reached over the surface of the earth. Over the course of the 19th century, colonization was increasingly monopolized by the powers of big capital—the plantations, the railroad trusts, the banks… The victory of labor over private property would be the first condition for the realization of socialist designs. The French socialist militant Louis Auguste Blanqui drew a dividing line within Saint-Simon’s “producing class,” calling for labor to liberate itself from the parasitism of capital: “Neither the instruments nor the fruits of labor belong to the workers, but to the idlers. The gluttonous branches absorb the tree’s sap, to the detriment of the fertile boughs. The hornets devour the honey created by the bees.”⁷⁷ If the worker bees would only take command of the state, and destroy the idling hornets with its overwhelming force, they would be free to rationally organize the system of the hive. Then, human bees could become just as efficient as the model beehive described by Fourier.

This fantasy of design depended on the rationality of the planner. The toilng hands had to trust the directions of the scheming head. Some socialists believed that this vision of rational organization failed to appreciate the unique characteristics of human beings. Like the Protestants before them, they believed that freedom and choice placed human beings apart from and above the animals. Writing in his influential book, What is Property? (1840), the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon drew his dividing line between humans and animals: “In the bee, the will is constant and uniform, because the instinct which guides it is inflexible and because this unique instinct creates the whole life, pleasure, and being of the animal. In man talent varies and reason is indecisive, so that his will is multiform and vague. He seeks society but avoids constraint and monotony; he is an imitator but fond of his own ideas and obsessed with his works.”⁷⁸ Humanity can only discover and establish the design of an effective system through experience, reflection, and reasoning. But rationality must be treated as only a means for freedom, not an end in itself. A disciplinary utopia like that of Fourier “would be a mechanical communism [communauté engrenée] but not a society deliberately and freely accepted.”⁷⁹ For Proudhon, inner freedom came before social organization. He believed that the two could only be reconciled if society recognized the freedom of the individual as its basic premise. This freedom was externalized in the right of each to own the products of their labor, and was united with society by the right of equals to freely trade these products according to the measures of fair exchange.

Not all sought to redeem property from capital, or to critique capital from the perspective of justice. A new position between these two tendencies—that of design and that of freedom—grew from the confrontation of socialism with philosophy, political economy, and even socialism itself. Karl Marx represented the most prominent representative of this tendency. Marx believed that capitalist society already acted according to the principle of equal exchange, and that this was the very problem of it. Capitalist society treats all products as measurable along one standard, which is that they are products of labor, yet it only establishes this equivalent blindly on the market. Capital exploits labor as only a means for producing new value, but does so by buying the right of exploitation in the worker’s sale of their capacity for labor.

For Marx, the struggle of classes is central to politics, but this struggle rests on the foundation of labor. In Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), Marx offered his contribution to the subject of human labor: “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.”⁸⁰ The organization of the labor process in society can take various forms, with broader possibilities opened by greater scales of wealth. The transformations between these organizations can make some elements of labor more prominent than others. In capitalist society, the labor of each is measured in its character as abstract, average, socially-necessary labor-time. It is treated first and foremost as a component of the total social value, which is labor-time. In the management of the production process, the ideational plan is enacted through the total subordination of the laborers to the owners and their managerial servants.

Capitalists have faced political challenges from the workers time and time again. Workers rebel against their existence as living tools, seeking a life that is much richer than this. But workers are not the only ones who express their discontent. Many intellectual professionals have become socialists, considering capitalists to be poor executors of social organization. At times, workers and intellectuals have formed political alliances, as in the 1917 Russian Revolution. But even without this alliance with the masses, the planning intellectuals pursue their projects of social reform. Many have taken inspiration from the bees in their fantasies of total social organization. In 1890, the engineer Julius Steigel invented a technique to produce artificial honeycombs from corrugated metal sheets, useful for commercial-scale beekeeping and industrial-scale engineering alike. The structure of the honeycomb cell soon reappeared in the organization of missile silos. The dream of total organization, emanating from the entrails of capitalist society, has no inherent compulsion towards the good of each and all. The aims of capitalist society are flexible. They may be set as anything which augments and strengthens the production and reproduction of capital.

Capital’s indifference to life has allowed for cancerous vocations, from the production of explosives to the burning of fossil fuels, to become lucrative sources of wealth. The disruption to global ecology is made evident in dramatic shifts in the geological record and global climate patterns of the past 200 years. The scientist Paul J. Crutzen proposed that this new era be called the anthropocene, a time in which humanity has become a global force of ecological change.⁸¹ But this is humanity in its form as an abstract and impersonal force of production—capital. All of life is now part of one work process, which simultaneously measures the value of things by labor-time, and yet tries to reduce labor-time as much as possible. A labor system which produces “for value and surplus-value involves a constantly operating tendency[...] to reduce the labour time needed to produce a commodity, i.e. to reduce the commodity's value, below the existing social average at any given time. The pressure to reduce the cost price to its minimum becomes the strongest lever for raising the social productivity of labour, though this appears here simply as a constant increase in the productivity of capital.”⁸² The increase in the productivity of capital comes at the expense of living labor, and even life as a whole. Life becomes increasingly superfluous to the production process. Total automation is the dream of capital and the class of expertise, the technocrats. Entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley fantasize that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will begin a new stage of evolution and supplant humanity. In them, the desire of capital to free its circulation from its dependency on the living, creative power of labor articulates itself.

In its disciplining of life into a factor of production, technocracy has hardened the separation between the beekeepers and the worker drones. Even socialists have participated in tendencies which reinforce this power, from the bureaucratic reformers of the United States to the party comrades of the Soviet Union. They may have truly believed that they are doing good for the bees, but what serves the body of society now comes at the expense of its isolated members. Feeling our powerlessness, we each feel ourselves as part of someone else’s design. Some interpret this as the benevolence of a rational universe, seeking guidance from the supposed absolute knowledge of AI. Others interpret this as the malevolence of conspirators, who pull the strings of the world’s marionettes for the object of their sinister designs. In truth, no one individual or group has total command. All of us are like bees in an engorged hive, driving madly to produce honey beyond any potential equilibrium. But we drones are only means to this system, not ends in ourselves.

Humanity’s domination of nature reinforces the domination of humans by humans. Populations of bees wither from climate change and the indiscriminate spraying of pesticide, just as populations of humans wither from being thrown out of the workforce and exposed to the waste products of industry. All is in service of the system. The German ex-soldier Ernst Jünger wrote of this instrumentalization of life in his novel The Glass Bees (1957). The narrative is set in the future, centering around a robot-producing firm owned by the capitalist Giacomo Zapparoni. In Zapparoni’s garden, he keeps glass bees, which he warns the narrator to beware of. The narrator observes that Zapparoni keeps the automatons busy with the everyday functions of organic bees, in a display which reveals the nature of technology: “That these glass bees were collecting honey was, of course, a kind of game, an absurd task for such ingeniously contrived mechanisms. But creatures capable of doing this could be used for almost any purpose, and it would probably be easier for automatons of this sort to collect small grains of gold and diamonds than to extract the nectar from blossoms. But even for the most lucrative business they were still too expensive. Economic absurdities are produced only when power is at stake.”⁸³ It is not that power serves economization, but that economization serves power. After all, capital is the exchangeable power of command over social labor. A tendency towards despotism is inherent to its very concept.

Yet even in Zapparoni’s miniature system of automation, in which life takes the form of an instrument, the owner cannot exercise total control. For “by reducing his bees to workers, Zapparoni had not robbed them of their sting—quite the contrary.”⁸⁴ The reduction of life to a tool is also the reduction of it to a weapon. Even in total organization, there is the possibility of rebellion. But without a determined drive to self-organization, the impulse to revolt against instrumentalization must express itself in the terms already set out by the technocratic plan. Resistance to technological discipline more often explodes into catastrophes in service of the work-world. As a former soldier of the Wehrmacht, Jünger would have recognized this principle in Auschwitz. Today we see it in Gaza. Time and time again, the utopian designs of New Jerusalems and the impulse of rebellion against the fallen world have come together into the nihilism of blind slaughter. From an Indigenous person’s perspective as an outsider to Western civilization, the thinker John Mohawk (ha'no:wa:h) described the unity of the two as identitarianism: “People caught up in such movements tend to be intolerant of others who are not part of this projected destiny, who do not believe in the same things, and are not expected to share in the future benefits.”⁸⁵ But the nightmare of monological dystopia is not the only fate of utopia. Utopia is also an impulse to bring forth something new, a struggle of freedom, a hope of emancipation which we draw on as the many come together to try to live rightly in this life.

The power of self-determination cannot be eliminated from any society insofar as it is a society, even if this power may be left to wither. The revolt of populism against technocracy draws on the impulses of technocratic society itself. The hive needs the swarm for its organization. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari described this principle with the motif of the rhizome, a multiplicity in which “each element ceaselessly varies and alters its distance in relation to the others[...] they cannot increase or diminish without their elements changing in nature. A swarm of bees: here they come as a rumble of soccer players in striped jerseys, or a band of Tuareg.”⁸⁶ This concept is no idle fantasy of philosophy, but a movement observable in the societies of bees as well as humanity. The biologist Thomas D. Seeley has noted that bees themselves practice a kind of “democracy,” in which the entire group participates in deciding what is best for the colony to do, and in implementing the most effective organization for the hive.⁸⁷ This participatory metabolism reveals “an astonishing convergence in the adaptive design of two physically distinct forms of ‘thinking machine’—a brain built of neurons and a swarm built of bees.”⁸⁸ There is a parallel between humanity and the bees after all, and it is in the rhizomatic flexibility which the power of organization enacts itself through.

Technocratic society creates the illusion of inflexible organization by subordinating its members into interchangeable parts of the whole. It reduces decision-making into the issuing of commands, and simplifies deliberation into debates between experts about the hard facts. Technocratic language amounts to the communication of signals, like traffic lights. But the flexibility and freedom of human relationality is right there in language itself. To Deleuze and Guattari, the line between bee language and human language lies in the fact that a bee “can communicate what it has seen but not transmit what has been communicated to it. A bee that has seen a food source can communicate the message to bees that did not see it, but a bee that has not seen it cannot transmit the message to others that did not see it. Language is not content to go from a first party to a second party, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen.[...] Language is a map, not a tracing.”⁸⁹ Language is the shared text of human society. The language of politics reveals the contradictions of the social body. Technocracy speaks its ideas of designs and plans, while populism speaks its impulses of needs and demands. Intellectual and manual labor, the design of the idea and the striving matter, each spring from one power. Neither ultimately possesses this power. The power is neither the swarm nor the hive, because it is not a thing. Language opens this power into a particular way of living. It is a metabolism of the creature and creation.

The openness of language is the openness of humanity’s relations, which interweave it with its world. The philosopher Walter Benjamin realized this by reflecting on the place of the name in language: “Naming is that by which nothing beyond it is communicated, and in which language itself communicates itself absolutely. In naming the mental entity that communicates itself is language.”⁹⁰ The name of a thing does not communicate the whole of it, but brings a face forth from it. It allows us to say “that is that,” to individuate the “that” into a singular, unique point. The just-soness, the así, of that, is something that is not a thing. That is the articulation of life in a concept. When we name the bees, we name a companion and relative that has passed through history with us. To thrive, the bees need us to take up the task of our culminating struggle for life. The world of capitalism is a world of work for work’s sake, which squeezes blood and honey from the broken bodies of the living. Self-determination and self-organization demand that we step back and name our place, our home. We must care enough for our world to relate with it intentionally and freely, rather than continuing to reduce it into raw material for the externalization of our working time into proprietary command. Even the hexagon of the honeycomb might mean something beyond the infinite ooze of milk and honey or the emptiness of enclosure. Its six angles can stretch into the brightness of a star, pointing to new horizons. The realm of freedom beyond the necessity of toiling for self-perpetuation has a place for the animals, too.

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