Patriotism In Henry David Thoreau's Natural Work

with an illuminating promise (Thoreau, “Economy,” 4) . The promise to have property (terra nullius), and in that property, is the tabula rasa of man’s new beginnings. Yet that liberty came at the further expense of aboriginal, black, and enviromental freedom. The flame from liberty’s chalice casts its lawful protection of those considered citizens, and in that, disavows certain men from that sense of having security: “[a] slave and prisoner of his own [private] opinion of himself” (4). The material consciousnesses of men sublates and alienates man from his/her self-development. The alienating practices of patriotism as a form of hegemonic social control estranged man from his neighbours. S/he must balance between the necessity of “commerce
Marx, although, believed the forces of production disenfranchised man from his ability to see nature in its grandeur. That is, nature in its beauty, has already existed in such form outside man's idealism and it is man's productive essence to work with the material around him that in turn recognised that beauty. Man`s natural work is warped by the unnatural forms of capitalist labour: the “superfluously coarse labours of life [make it so] its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them” (Thoreau, “Economy,” 2). Man’s drive is directed towards the desire of capital in “commerce” and “industry” (Marx, “Manifesto,” 210) which repurposes the labouring conscience of man’s “essence” (Ibid., “German Ideology,” 182) to the working “appendage of the machine” (Ibid., “Manifesto,”
Thus man is caught in the paradoxically

drive of the capital-value system, insofar, as his/her desire for capital as a means of freeing

themselves from material bondage. Here, man mistakes the ideal image promised by

capitalism as a false sense of freedom. The unhealthy promise of an idealised image of

his/her body’s ideal reflects in the rotating brass of the capitalist machine. One may desire

that image driven by the perceived unpleasure of their own. S/he is tailored to an all-fitting

suit: man is made to measure. Those in resistance to the garbs of power, must develop an

individual form of liberty that is independent from external authority. S/he may be alienated

from others, but s/he is protected from the capital production of himself or herself.

The individual is coded by the master’s discourse which entangles the collective

conscience and dilutes consciousness of power. The capitalist theory of practice goes

unquestioned in the practice of its theory. Power becomes visible but is divisible between its

capitalist functionaries. There is no single authority. Therein, solidarity gives way