The Economist
Constitutional principles
Nov 9th 2011, 19:53 by M.S.
BIBLICAL aphorisms are famous for meaning different things to different people. The one I'm most fond of these days for being cited with extremely different valences by people of differing ideologies is one that I first encountered without knowing it was a biblical aphorism. Apparently Michelle Bachmann referenced it the other day in a speech to the Family Research Council, in which she criticised government social assistance: "Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat." The citation is from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "If any would not work, neither should he eat." (H/t Dave Noon, who notes that it was cited by Captain John Smith, the leader of Jamestown colony, in 1609 to justify banishing lazy or unskilled colonists across the river to starve.)
Not having grown up as a Christian, I encountered this aphorism first while studying Russian history, as a Communist slogan embraced by Vladimir Lenin in his 1917 work "The State and Revolution": "Кто не работает, тот не ест." Mrs Bachmann might correctly note that this is one Christian precept that actually is explicitly incorporated into the constitution—but it's the wrong constitution: it figures in Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution adopted by Josef Stalin. My impression that the saying's main contemporary fame comes from its centrality to the Soviet project seems to be shared by Wikipedia, which provides the Lenin citation:
The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
This is a “defect”, says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law.
I love how Lenin tosses in that little injunction not to "indulge in utopianism" here. In every society, the most ludicrous and ruinous projects are constantly being justified as hard-headed, practical realism by the very serious people who run them. Anyway, as late as 1962 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party published a pamphlet entitled "The struggle of the Communist Party to implement the principle 'He who does not work, does not eat'". Here's the slogan figuring as the centrepiece of a beautifully designed constructivist-era poster from the 1920s that I had sitting around on my hard drive:
Meanwhile, casting around the internet, I found this more propagandistic and rather blunter two-frame comic poster from 1920 in the political poster archives of the Hoover Institution. The text is a rhyme meaning "Before: one plow, seven spoons. Now: he who does not work, does not eat!" In the top frame rich capitalists, generals, merchants and clergymen are all sponging off the poor peasant, and in the bottom they're looking hungry while he enjoys the fruit of his labour. The poster dates from the midst of the Russian civil war. I think the gist is pretty clear, and it makes it really explicit why Mrs Bachmann's line had a strangely Occupy Wall Street-ish ring to my ears.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/inequality-0
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