lil! OftenBen!
Yegorushka looked about him, and could not make out where the strange song came from. Then, as he listened, he began to fancy that the grass was; in its song, withered and half dead, it was without words, but plaintively and passionately, urging that it was not to blame, that the sun was burning it for no fault of its own; it urged that it ardently longed to live, that it was young and might have been beautiful but for the heat and the drought; it was guiltless, but yet it prayed forgiveness and protested that it was in anguish, sad and sorry for itself.
More Chekhov! The brilliant Janet Malcolm comments that there are two layers of anthropomorphism here -- Chekhov is giving the young boy thoughts that he wouldn't normally have, and of course the grass is so human and just begging to be empathized with. I've just been rereading Do Androids Dream, which rather wonderfully toys with that idea of empathy and self, so this quote struck me hard.
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beezneez: The human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user... Of course, it was the modern State and capitalism that brought the triumph of the machines, in particular of motorized machines...; but what we are referring to now are technical machines, which are definable extrinsically.
[...]
The wage regime can therefore take the subjection of human beings to an unprecedented point, and exhibit a singular cruelty, yet still be justified in its humanist cry: No, human beings are not machines, we don't treat them like machines, we certainly don't confuse variable capital and constant capital...
The differences between variable capital and constant capital could be exemplified in the variation between minimum wage and rent.