[syndicate] Come, damned, earth, be purified and suffer

[Alan Sondheim]

Come, damned, earth, be purified and suffer


Diamonds are of very rare occurrence on the earth's surface, and hence
their discovery costs, on an use-values produced by labour. As William
Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.  Gold and
silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith
the direct incarnation of all earth, the earth greets gold as its Holy
Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own
life.

The desire of avarice is to draw Pluto himself out of the bowels of the
earth. The Sophist evens accounts and beautifies the whole; although more
especially the Bible. As the earth is his original larder, so too it is
his original tool house. It supplies him, for instance, with stones for
throwing, grinding, pressing, cutting, and so forth. The earth itself is
an instrument of possible use only to a partial extent; once more we find
it a universal instrument of this sort.

For man and the earth, which latter exists independently of man, we still
employ the process. The earth's spontaneous productions being in small
quantity, and quite independent of man, appear as the final depopulation
of the human race, by the probable fall of the earth into the sun.

In reality, it was much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of
the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is to develop from
the actual. Everywhere we find a state of things which as yet exists only
exceptionally on our earth. According to a recent calculation, there are
yet at least 4,000,000 cannibals in those parts of the earth the most
cultivated. They exist only exceptionally. It is an expression as
imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions, arise
here and there on the face of the earth - even now-a-days they crop up.

The Cannibals.

Compel them to eat beans; beans, however, are relatively much richer in
bone, than earth flaunting in gold and silk.. Therefore is there, on this
earth, no greater enemy of man (after the devil) than the manner in which
they are degraded. Their unfortunate situation will fully appear, by
taking a comparative view of national prejudice - for their gaiety and the
purity of their motives pour forth.

THeir walls are of mud and stones, their floor the bare earth which was
there before the huts were built, They, however fierce, however untaught,
and however reckless of mercy and of shame, cry and whisper, in this
dismal age of earth.