So You Want to Become an Excellent Writer

A good writer writes well. This truism maintains that a good writer is has mastered the craft of writing. Unfortunately, this feat does not come without considerable effort, for takes some good old-fashioned study in grammar and spelling. Unfortunately, the linguistic mechanics furnish only the means of entry, though this point seems to be lost on the American English teachers who slighted grammar pedagogically in the opening decades of the twenty-first century. Perhaps the novelists who have felt immune from being grammatical for the sake of style have been the interlarded culprits behind the trend of grammar be viewed as relative or an elective. To be sure, style has right of exception, but the problem is when the exceptions become the norm and even an excuse for bad grammar. This is all just foundational stuff; the quality distinguishing the excellent writer from even a good one is passion-fueled insight. The writer who writes out of a strong urge, or instinct, to express an insight publicly naturally finds his or her own voice, and thus identity, as a writer.  In this sense, a writer is like an entrepreneur whose passion breaks through the confines of an organizational structure like lava pushes through the tough shell of a lava dome.

As an entrepreneur, Richard Branson founded the Virgin Group, which went on to include more than 300 companies in the second quarter of 2011. Ordinarily, the reality of running a cumbersome corporation saps entrepreneurial talent, which enables managerial creatures to swoop in and take the reins of power from the founder. In the case of Branson, however, having a large company did not prevent him from taking on new commercial ventures that reflected his dreams in a way that solidified rather than weakened his control. "I'm just ridiculously lucky," he said, "and [I] just love to live my dreams." True to form, he pioneered Virgin Galactic into space and Virgin Oceanic into the deep sea, utilizing the wealth of a large corporation to do so. 

The key to Branson’s business success was his strong passion for exploration. "The interesting thing about exploration is . . . you never quite know what you're going to discover," he said. A discovery is often a significant find, even one that is of a hitherto unknown paradigm. For example, commercial flights into orbit or even the moon would change the meaning of flights. The uncertainty alone of such a paradigm-changer could easily be choked by organizational managers reflecting the caution that has been innate in most corporate cultures. 
Similarly, editors at publishing houses can act as conservative hedges against a novel idea reaching an audience and hopefully society itself. Like Branson, an excellent writer merges the strong motive of a passion with something new enough to matter. Accordingly, Branson’s advice on choosing a profession has bearing on writers: "don't try to start a business because you think you can make money. Start a business because you really want to."
Similarly, the excellent writer utilizes the mechanics of writing to express an underlying passion rather than merely to write for its own sake or to make money. Such a writer is likely to deliver a unique and interesting perspective that is a real contribution because passion tends to go further in the sense of uncovering. Passion-fueled insight can be revolutionary, and thus be a provocation to the interests vested in the status quo. 
In terms of writing, revolutionary ideas such as those of the European philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century can simply be ignored until long after the writer’s death. No philosopher is a man of his times, Nietzsche wrote. No paradigm-wrestling philosopher that is; plenty of pedestrian philosophers fit perfectly well in the society of their day. Such philosophers tend to study minutia and fit in cubby-holes at universities. To question the assumptions of the operating paradigm of the day and even present alternatives is the mission of a learned philosopher whose learning has enabled him or her to escape the usual orbits. Unitary explorers who have a passion for their respective unique ideas, which are of tremendous value, are not only those philosophers, but great writers more generally who have something very significant to present to the world.

Is Blogging a Marxist Activity?

In writing posts on a blog, is a blogger alienated, or estranged, from his or her own labor and the product (i.e., the posts)? If not, would Karl Marx say that both the blogging activity and any resulting content exemplify his ideal? In short, are bloggers de facto Marxists? Or are we entrepreneurs better suited to Capitalism? In this respect, we can distinguish the free-standing blogger from the blogger who works on a blog owned by a company (i.e., others).
In answering these questions, I look first at Marx’s criticism of labor that is alienated from the worker. Marx argues that a worker laboring on another’s product is estranged from both the worker’s own labor and the product. In both respects, clues of the sort of labor that Marx advocates can be found. From these inferences, I turn to Marx’s positive characterization of labor that is natural for the sapiens species, drawing also on Maslow, Locke, and the erasable Nietzsche for additional support.
In terms of the worker being alienated or estranged from the product of his or her own labor, Marx offers the following explanation. “The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the more the worker lacks objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore, the greater this product, the less is he himself.”[1]
That of his life that a worker puts into the product by means of his labor being mixed into the product in process does not give him a property right in the product as Locke would insist; rather, that of the worker’s life that is put into the product is lost to the worker when the product leaves his hands and belongs entirely to another (i.e., the property owner, or capitalist). As the worker works on more products, the worker’s wages per unit decreases because the owner of the means of production and the product receives less revenue per product. In other words, mass production is a volume business depending in part on low labor costs (i.e., the cost leadership strategy). With lower wages per unit, the worker himself can afford to buy fewer commodities, hence he lacks objects. Also, he lacks objects in that he immediately loses contact with the objects of his labor once he has put his labor into them. Of course, the products were never his, even as he worked on them. Accordingly, the "alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.”[2]
That the product belongs to another (i.e., the property owner) accounts for its external existence. Accordingly, that of the worker’s own life that is mixed into the product belongs to someone else rather than himself. The worker is thus cut off from part of his own life. The power of the object that confronts the worker in a hostile manner stems from the adversarial relationship between a worker and the property-owner that is exploitive. In short, the worker is estranged both from his own life that he puts into the product and the product itself. It follows that he is alienated from the production process too. “(T)he estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity, itself. How could the worker come to face the product of his activity as a stranger, were it not that in the very act of production he was estranging himself from himself? The product is after all but the summary of the activity, of production. If then the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation.”[3] In other words, the worker’s labor is not her own, even during the activity of laboring. According to Marx, “the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another.”[4] It is, one might say, a kind of theft protected by the laws of property and the related sanctity of contract.
From this account, we can begin to construct Marx’s view on how labor and its products ought to be related to the worker. Already, we can infer that the life of the worker that the worker herself puts into the products through her labor should belong to her. She should feel that a part of herself—her life—is in the product as well as the production process. Hence, the worker does not view either one as an object, not to mention alien and hostile. Economically, that the worker’s life materialized is not separated from the worker implies that the worker has some ownership interest in both the labor process and the product. Granted that Marx can be labeled an economic materialist, I find psychology to be salient in his positive account of labor.
For example, Marx claims that for labor to be external to the worker means that “it does not belong to his intrinsic nature.”[v] Therefore, work activity should reflect one’s intrinsic nature. Furthermore, through such activity and the products thereof, the worker should be able to affirm or validate herself, hence feel content and free enough to develop her physical and mental energy to strengthen her body and mind. All this is implied in the following: In work external to the worker, “he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.”[6] 
Put in Maslow’s terms, applying one’s labor to a product that reflects one’s life naturally facilitates self-actualization. Marx claims that the productive life of a human being is naturally “life-engendering”[7] It is in the nature of our species that we come to learn more about ourselves through our work—both in the activity and from the results. Put another way, seeing one’s life expressed tangibly tells one something new about one’s life and one’s very self. We are naturally at one with our life activity, which “appears only as a means of life.”[8] Moreover, “Man makes his life activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. . . .  (H)e duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.”[9] How could the worker not learn more about himself from seeing himself in a world materialized in a product that he himself has created?
In writing an essay on a blog, whether involving one’s political, economic, social, moral or religious values and beliefs, a blogger is there, putting his life—and indeed himself—into not only the process of writing (and designing the blog itself), but also the contents of the posts, whether intentionally or not.
The blogger who dutifully writes a daily online-diary of her personal life, for instance, is pours her life and her passion quite intentionally into her writing (both as her writing process and the content of her writing). Her productive activity is essentially an imprint of her memory and her processing of it cognitively. Her very being is engaged and displayed. She might even have a picture of herself on her blog’s home-page. Such a blogger is certainly not alienated from her own blog, the writing process, or the written content. The blog is an extension of her life-experience and her creative spirit whose shadow she has made concrete without being forced to regard the imprint as an object external to, or even cut off from her, as if she were a mother forced to part with her infant whom a property-owner views as a commodity.
Even regarding scholars, such as me, who write and post essays applying theory to unpack current events for the general educated reader, we ourselves are in our respective approaches to writing as well as in the content. Friedrich Nietzsche, a German classicist and moral philosopher writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, argues in his writing that when a philosopher reasons and is in the process of writing, the contending reasons are actually urges, or instincts, vying for dominance over each other. The written page is a snapshot of whichever instincts were on top when the philosopher wrote down the words. It follows that a scholar puts his or her life—indeed, very being—into his or her rational, “objective” academic writing. The instincts that manifest as values and beliefs are not absent from the fight for dominance inside the philosopher’s psyche. Hence, differing appreciably from Flaubert, Nietzsche urges us to write with passion—with ourselves personally engaged—rather than to write from a distance from ourselves by striving to perfect our writing-form. “Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.”[10]
Also in line with Marx’s ideal, a blogger typically does not lose the product once it has been mixed with one’s labor. Even in syndication, a blogger holds the copyright. A blogger can go back to “revise and extend” any of his published posts. Both the way in which a particular blogger revises and the content itself that the blogger deems so important (or unimportant) to add (or remove) says something more about the blogger, as does comparing the revised “edition” to the original. Perhaps different instincts had overcome the hegemony of those imprinted in the original.
In short, a blogger infuses her thought-process, values, beliefs, and ideologies—indeed, even her intrinsic nature—in both the process and product, the latter remaining with rather than estranged from the laborer. Marx would be pleased—more so, I might add, than had he lived to witness the U.S.S.R. Next to writing a book or screenplay, blogging may even be the epitome of Marx’s ideal work-activity on account of the salience of both self-expression and freedom-of-expression in the writing as a process and enduring rather than alienated product. In multiplying the freedom realizable in the species’ productive activity, the internet may just be the world of self-realization through labor that Marx himself could never have imagined.

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 [1] Marx, Karl, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. (Marxists.org). Accessed August 18, 2013.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ch. 7.

Ethics in Blogging: A Normative Constraint on Excessive Economizing and Power-Aggrandizement

Blogs are interesting creatures. Like humans, they seek not merely self-preservation, but also the expansion of their domain on the internet. The empire-building does not have power-aggrandizement as its goal; rather, bloggers use what power they have to maximize the reach of their words. To be heard by as many people as possible—as if quantity were more important than quality—is a still more intermediate means, with the end being to bring one's words to the world-at-large. At the extreme, a blogger wants to see a world that has become a projection of his or her own words. Less extreme, a blogger wants to be a significant player in societal discussions even beyond the internet. Toward such ends, bloggers economize in the sense of seeking to minimize what they incorporate of other blogs beyond what they view as being useful to themselves, while attempting to maximize that of themselves that is incorporated on other blogs by power or moral suasion. For example, a blogger might say to another blogger, “I’ll blogroll you if you blogroll me.” This is a variant of “I’ll follow you if you follow me” on Twitter. As Susan Gunelius, an expert on blog marketing, observes in Blogging for Dummies, such reciprocity is no longer a normative practice in blogging. Indeed, the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” mentality is questionable at best. It implies that one person follows another not because of any value perceived on the followed’s account, but, rather, solely so he or she can be followed by yet another person. In other words, the apparent reciprocity is actually egoist.
Fortunately, “semi-permeable” normative constraints can be applied to the two forces that seek to maximize self-interest. One might call such constraints ecologizing, for like an ecosystem they can be breached by a maximizing species or variable within. Susan Gunelius points to a few of the ethical “rules” that can act as constraints via pressure from other bloggers.

Spam can be interpreted as economizing or power-aggrandizing forces that fail to respect the normative "rules" of the internet society. Comment spam, for example, utilizes a useless or irrelevant comment-posting simply to self-promote (i.e., to economize) through links. Post-spam reduces a blogger’s own post to an otherwise content-empty medium advertising the blog itself or someone else’s product in exchange for samples or money. Both of these kinds of spam are unethical because they operate under a subterfuge (i.e., promising to be something other than what they are). The underlying selfishness fuses with theft (i.e., stealing other bloggers’ time and effort in reading), and thus manifests passive aggression. In other words, it is a “taking” beyond that which the spammer is entitled to take.

As another example of the mentality that has a difficult time with limitation, some bloggers steal the bandwidth of other bloggers. According to Gunelius (2010, p. 69), bloggers and website owners can be charged more if the amount of time that their content is accessed increases dramatically, “such as when other bloggers use images without saving them to their own hosting accounts first.” Gunelius claims that a blogger should copy and save the picture (assuming fair use) before inserting the image in the post. Otherwise, the excess power-aggrandizing steals more than time and effort.

In describing excessive economizing and power-aggrandizing in blogging beyond ethical, or “ecologizing,” constraints, I have sought to bring out the element of passive aggression. The anger that bloggers feel toward the “cheaters” is not only due to the unfairness in the manipulation; the response is also to the passive aggression. If the responses go beyond what is proportionate, however, excessive power-aggrandizement is involved in the victims as well. Such anger “over the top” is also evinced in comments that are hateful or otherwise attacking. It is the sheer excess in the anger that strikes me as being in need of further explanation.  

Generally speaking, the bloggers who subscribe to normative constraints in the blogosphere recognize the existence of excessive power-aggrandizement and economizing forces in blogging. The theft and anger elements in the excess are particularly onerous. While the law cannot effectively sanction such elements, “societal” pressure can. However, lest the latter become self-righteous, it is important not to label as spam anything that is inconvenient.

For example, commenting (or tweeting) to someone on topic and including a link to one’s own post can be a legitimate part of an effort to start a conversation on a mutual topic—as long as there is content on that topic in addition to the link. You might tweet on Obama and Libya. I might send the following reply: “yeah, but Obama waited too long. So his motive is suspect. See link.” My reply was on the other’s topic and added content as well as a link to my posting on that content. To treat my tweet as cold-calling would be to overreact simply out of the mistaken belief sending out a tweet should not occasion tweets. In such overreaction is an element of presumptuousness in addition to the excessive power-aggrandizement. In other words, excess can manifest where it is least expected.  

Source: Susan Gunelius, Blogging for Dummies (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2010).

On ecologizing, economizing and power-aggrandizing forces applied to business and society, see: William C. Frederick, Values, Nature and Culture in the American Corporation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).