Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ ... t-struggle

Common Cause Ottawa

Organized Anarchism in the Anti-Capitalist Struggle

Why we need organisation — and principles to follow

Prelude

This booklet is based on a presentation made by two members of Common Cause Ottawa at the “Capitalism and Confrontation: Grassroots Responses to Empire, Ecology and Political Economy” conference in March 2010 held at Carleton University. We thank the conference organizers, the Critical Social Research Collaborative (CSRC), for allowing us to participate.

Common Cause Ottawa is a branch of the Ontario provincial anarchist organization, Common Cause (http://www.linchpin.ca)

* * *

Capitalism has proven itself to be completely inadequate to meet basic human needs. At the dawn of the twenty first century, the world is deeply divided into have and have-nots. Extreme inequalities have been intensifying since the 1970s. While a minority of the world’s population lives in opulence, the masses struggle in poverty (Schmidt and van der Walt, 2009, pp. 10–11). The latest crisis that has plagued the global economy for the past few years has exacerbated these inequalities even further.

The solution to this crisis must be a revolutionary solution. The problem is not that the current manifestation of capitalism is defective or corrupt, but rather that the entire system is flawed. The trouble is not with the administration of the system, but rather with the system itself (Berkman, 2003, p.73). As such it is necessary to put an end to capitalism altogether. Reformism is destined to fail because reforms fail to address the exploitative basis of capitalism. Reformists

believe in good faith that it is possible to eliminate the existing social evils by recognizing and respecting, in practice if not in theory, the basic political and economic institutions which are the cause of, as well as the prop that supports these evils (Malatesta, 1965).

The point here is not to advocate some type of ideological purity. Reforms can make huge differences in the day to day life of the people. Reformism is a type of harm reduction, and while harm reduction undeniably saves lives, the root problems need to be addressed in a manner that goes beyond mere reforms.

However, while a revolutionary solution is necessary, it is far from inevitable. The current economic crisis is the worst the world has seen since the Great Depression. It is important to bear in mind that in much of the world the Great Depression did not lead to socialism or even social democracy, but rather to fascism in much of Western Europe and the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union (Notheastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists, 2010).

Although there is popular dissatisfaction with the current system, libertarian socialist alternatives do not currently have popular support. The current crisis may open up opportunities to attack capitalism from the left, but it also presents dangers for the rise of the most reactionary elements in capitalist society. If anti-capitalists fail to provide a viable and coherent solution to this current crisis of capitalism, the door will be left wide open for reactionary opportunists to exploit public anger. The growth and influence of the Tea Party movement in the United States is evidence of how anti-capitalists have failed to present convincing solutions to the masses.

While careful critique and analysis of the current system remain essential, the more difficult task that anti-capitalists are faced with is developing an alternative to capitalism. As was pointed out during a recent talk hosted by the Workers Solidarity Movement in Ireland, “It’s not enough to fight capitalism, you need to know what to replace it with, and you have to make that alternative the most popular one around and that would be the most important task for revolutionaries today” (Workers Solidarity Movement, 2010). With that in mind, this paper intends to sketch out the basis for a viable alternative to the current state capitalist system.

In setting out to find alternatives, it is essential to have a clear idea of the principles that any possible alternative would be based on. The three main principles that anarchists wish to base any society on are liberty, equality, and solidarity (Kropotkin, 2007, p. 156). These three principles set the basic groundwork for the basis of any alternative system. There is a lot of room to maneuver within the parameters of these principles, but it is essential that they serve as a guide for any society. It is also important to recognize that these three principles must be taken together as a package, they cannot stand on their own. Each one of these principles is at best hollow and meaningless unless it is accompanied by the other two.

Building on these three guiding principles, it is possible to begin to define anarchism in slightly more concrete terms. At the beginning of Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, Rudolph Rocker (2004) defines anarchism as

a definite intellectual current of social thought, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the capitalist economic order, Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon cooperative labour, which would have for its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society. In place of the present national states with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions, Anarchists desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interests and arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract (p. 1).

The key insight provided by this definition is the recognition that freedom must exist on the economic, political and social level. Just as the principles of liberty, equality, and, solidarity cannot be separated from each other, the application of said principles must take place on each of the political, economic, and social levels. The struggle against capitalism is indispensible but it is not the only struggle that needs to take place. Anarchists insist that emancipatory struggle is class-based but recognize that there is no place for reductionism.

The broad anarchist tradition stresses class, but this should not be mistaken for a crude workerism... The stress on class also does not mean a narrow focus on economic issues. What characterizes the broad anarchist tradition is not economism but a concern with struggling against the many injustices of the present (Schmidt and van der Walt, 2009, p. 7).

Anarchism must be based on class, but it must also be feminist, indigenist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-heteronormative, etc. In order to be consistent with anarchist principles, all forms of hierarchy must be opposed. A victory against one form of oppression is at best an incomplete victory. Hierarchies and oppressions cannot be dealt with implicitly or at a later date, they must be confronted head on the minute that they are recognized, and this organizing must be done prefiguratively, the means of ending all oppressions must themselves be based on the principles of freedom, equality, and solidarity.

The concept of intersectionality is useful here. It is counterproductive to rank the importance of various social struggles. There are no “primary” and “secondary” struggles (Shannon and Rogue, 2010). Social struggles cannot easily be separated, nor should they be, they must be fought as a single struggle for complete liberation.

Anarchism provides a theoretical framework to seek out and oppose all forms of hierarchy and oppression. For example, during the Mexican Revolution the liberal revolutionaries such as Madero had a racist and paternalistic view towards the indigenous population. They viewed native peoples as an inferior and backwards race that ought to have no say in the operations of a “democratic” government. This racist view of the indigenous population was indistinguishable from the views held by those in the Porifirato dictatorship. On the other hand, anarchists, led by Ricardo Flores Magon, fought hard for the rights of indigenous peoples and viewed indigenous civilizations as viable alternative models to the state capitalist system (Maldonado Alvarado, 2004, pp. 59–66).

This difference of attitude does not result from the fact that Flores Magon and the other anarchists were personally more enlightened than their less radical counterpart, but rather a direct result of ideology. If an ideology allows for one form of hierarchy (in society, in politics, or in economics), it is much easier to accept a series of other oppressions. Anarchism however does not allow for any form of hierarchy to exist. This does not mean that anarchists are always successful at identifying and addressing all types of hierarchies (Wright, 1994). There is also the possibility of the existence of oppressions hitherto unidentified (Chomsky, 2005 pp. 221–222). However, it does mean that while any form of racism, sexism, ableism, etc. could possibly be assimilated into a capitalist or statist worldview, they could never be assimilated into an anarchist worldview, provided that one consistently upholds anarchist principles.

One of the major debates within anarchism is over how or even whether anarchists ought to be organized. This debate between anarchists who advocate for formal organization (organizationalists) and those who prefer looser networks of association tends to be characterized by advocates of the latter tendency as a generational divide (anti-organizationalists). David Graeber (2002) speaks of the “new anarchists” who are organized in loosely based “affinity” groups. While Andrej Grubacic (2003) characterizes the divide as one between

two co-existing generations within anarchism: people whose political formation took place in the 60s and 70s (which is actually a reincarnation of the second and third generations), and younger people who are much more informed, among other elements, by indigenous, feminist, ecological and culture-criticism thinking. The former exists as various Anarchist Federations, the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), IWA (International Workers Association), NEFAC (Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists) and the like. The latter’s incarnation is most prominent in the networks of the new social movement

Characterizing this debate as a generational one grossly misrepresents the reality. Following Grubacic’s formula, there are a significant number of activists involved in anarchist organization whose political formation must have taken place decades before they were even born. Also incorrect is the implication that organizationalists are class reductionists that ignore indigenous, feminist, ecological, and cultural struggle.

The debate between organizationalists and anti organizationalists is not at all new. It has been ongoing in the anarchist community for at least a century. On the heels of the failure of anarchists to prevent the consolidation of the Bolshevik dictatorship following the Russian Revolution, a group of exiled Russian and Ukranian anarchists called the Dielo Trouda (Workers’ Cause) wrote of “this disease of disorganization (that has) introduced itself into the organism of the anarchist movement and has shaken it for dozens of years” (Dielo Trouda, 1926).

It is very tempting for anarchists to reject most forms of organization. After all, the types of organizations that most people are used to dealing with are hardly non hierarchical groups that adhere to anarchist principles. Mainstream political parties, unions, and NGOs tend to have power placed at the top. It is understandable that anarchists would be skeptical of organization. However, the problem with most organizations is how, not that they are organized.

The enemy is not organization, but hierarchy and as Malatesta (1897) points out, “organization, far from creating authority, is the only cure for it and the only means whereby each one of us will get used to taking an active and conscious part in the collective work and cease being passive instruments in the hands of leaders”. As long as organizations are based on anarchist principles, they are not only effective, but essential tools in combating hierarchy and oppression.

Lack of formal organization actually tends to create structures that are contrary to anarchist principles. Just because these structures are informal, it does not mean that they do not exist. Jo Freeman (1970), writing about the difficulties facing the way the feminist movement was organized, demonstrates this point in her essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. Those activists who are best connected and most privileged tend to become part of an informal elite who wield significant power over others, often without even being conscious of it.

As long as the women’s liberation movement stays dedicated to a form of organisation which stresses small, inactive discussion groups among friends, the worst problems of unstructuredness will not be felt. But this style of organisation has its limits; it is politically inefficacious, exclusive and discriminatory against those women who are not or cannot be tied into the friendship networks. Those who do not fit into what already exists because of class, race, occupation, parental or marital status, or personality will inevitably be discouraged from trying to participate. Those who do not fit in will develop vested interests in maintaining things as they are.

She also points out the political ineffectiveness of small, unstructured groups who are often only able to accomplish small scale tasks.

Purely educational work is no longer such an overwhelming need. The movement must go on to other tasks. It now needs to establish its priorities, articulate its goals and pursue its objectives in a co-ordinated way. To do this it must be organised locally, regionally and nationally.

If these organizations do not exist, people will tend to turn to other organizations because “at least they are doing something”. This was evident during the Russian Revolution when large numbers of anarchists joined the Bolsheviks, not for ideological reasons, but because the Bolsheviks were actually organized and accomplishing something. This process is unfortunately visible today, as masses of people angry with the system are turning towards right wing movements in order to express that anger. Anarchists need to create coherent organizations that can attract mass popular support.

In order for an organization to be coherent and to maintain anarchist principles, the Dielo Trouda (1926) suggested that it contain four basic elements. These are theoretical unity, tactical unity, collective responsibility, and federalism. There is no magic formula for how an organization must operate, but these four elements are some basic general guidelines for the operation of any effective anarchist organization.

Theoretical unity means that there should be general agreement on what the goals and principles of the organization are in order to avoid paralyzing infighting as much as possible. This means that the anarchist principles of liberty, equality, and solidarity need to be agreed upon by all members. Related to theoretical unity is tactical unity. There should be general agreement over what methods the organization will adopt in order to reach its goals. The organization should not be working in several different and contradictory directions, but rather in a common direction. There is a lot of room for disagreement on details, but the guiding principles and tactics must be agreed upon. An organization is generally formed around common principles and it only makes sense to exclude individuals and ideas that do not work towards those goals. There is no contradiction between this and liberty. Individuals are obviously free to form their own groups or work in no groups at all if they so desire, while working with the organization in areas where interests and principles do converge.

There is a disappointing tendency towards individualism among some anarchists. While individual rights are essential, they can not exist outside of a collective. Because of that, collective responsibility is necessary. Any revolution must be collective in nature and the same holds true for any revolutionary organization. This collective responsibility goes in both directions. Individuals are responsible to the collective, but the collective is also responsible to individuals. This might best be summed up by the Three Musketeers’ motto, “all for one and one for all.”

While centralism places the power of the organization in the hands of a few in a top down structure, federalism is organized from the bottom up. This allows for all individuals to share the same amount of power. There can be a lot of flexibility in the specific details of how an organization operates, but only federalism provides the structure for real meaningful democratic decision-making. Any member in a position of added responsibility, such as a delegate, must be answerable to the group as a whole and never the other way around. These positions should also be temporary and recallable in order to prevent the formation of any centralized authoritarian structure.

Capitalism must be opposed wholesale. Reforms may be helpful in softening up some of its harsher aspects, but the exploitative nature of the system cannot be done away with through reform. Not all forms of oppression can be placed at the feet of capitalism. A project for true liberation must include the struggle to end all oppressions and hierarchy, a revolution against capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for liberation. Anarchists recognize the need to identify and oppose oppression wherever it may exist. Identifying as an anarchist is not important, but identifying, agreeing with and acting upon anarchist principles is essential. Any free society must be based on the principles of liberty, equality, and solidarity.

In order to arrive at such a society, anarchists and those struggling for anarchist principles need to be organized. The structures of the organization need to reflect anarchist principles; they also need to be formal and clear, or else the door will be open for the creation of informal elites. Currently there are a number of such organizations around the world, including Common Cause in Ontario, Canada, that are picking up in the traditions of mass organized anarchism of past periods of revolutionary struggle. These organizations provide the seeds of hope for the development of a society based on liberty, equality, and solidarity.


References

Berkman, Alexander (2003). What is Anarchism? Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Chomsky, Noam (2005). Chomsky on Anarchism. Oakland: AK Press.

Dielo Truda (1926) The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (draft). Retrieved from

http://www.struggle.ws

Freeman, Jo (1970). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Retrieved from struggle.ws.

Graeber, David (2002). “The New Anarchists”. New Left Review, 13. Retrieved from http://www.newleftreview.org

Grubacic, Andrej (2003). Towards Another Anarchism. WSF: Challenging Empires. Retrieved from http://www.choike.org

Kroptkin, Peter (2007). The Conquest of Bread. Oakland, CA: AK Press

Malatesta, Errico (1965). “Majorities and Minorities and Other Essays”. In Richards, Vern (Ed), Malatesta Life and Ideas. London: Freedom Press

Malatesta, Errico (1897). Anarchy and Organization. Retrieved from http://www.spunk.org

Maldonado Alvarado, Benjamin (2004). La Utopia Magonista. Oaxaca, Mexico: Colegio de Investigadores en Education de Oaxaca S.C.

Notheastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (2010). Nature of the Period: Backgrounds and Perspectives. Retrieved from libcom.org .

Rocker, Rudolph (2004). Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice. Oakland, Ca: AK Press

Schmidt, Micheal and van der Walt, Lucien. (2009). Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. Oakland, CA: AK Press

Shannon, Deric and Rogue, J (2010). Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality. Retrieved from http://www.anarkismo.net

Workers Solidarity Movement (2010). Will we see a Revolution in our Time?. Retrieved from http://www.anarkismo.net

Wright, Colin (1994). “Anarchism, Feminism, and the Individual”. Social Anarchism, 19. Retrieved from http://www.socialanarchism.org

[American Dream]

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ ... m-s-chains

Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from http://www.cat.org.au

Workers’ Solidarity Federation

Breaking Imperialism’s Chains

By imperialism we mean a situation of external domination where the ruling class of one country dominates the people and territory of another country. The key imperialist powers are the Western States (USA, West Europe, Japan) and their ruling classes, and the dominant States of the former Soviet bloc (Russia and China).

Roots of imperialism

Imperialism has been a central part of capitalism and the modern State since these structures of oppression emerged 500 years ago. Two factors account for this. Firstly, the imperialist ruling classes wanted to obtain cheap labour and raw materials and new markets for manufactured goods in the Third World (Africa, South Asia, Latin America, Middle East, East Europe). Secondly, the Western States and their ruling classes competed with one another for territory and strategic advantage (such as keeping rival ruling classes away from cheap minerals).

Imperialism before World War Two

The first phase of modern imperialism was merchant capitalism. This was the period opened up by the conquest of the Americas. The capitalist ruling class of the West got its wealth through plunder, trade, slave plantations and the exploiting of European peasants and artisans. Merchant capitalism overlapped with a second imperialist phase, colonialism, in which Western states established direct rule over Third World areas like Africa.

The consequences of imperialism in all these phases were overwhelmingly negative, involving genocide against indigenous peoples, slavery, racism, war, increased food insecurity, poverty and oppression.

Collapse of the colonial empires

The old colonial empires collapsed after 1945 period due to the weaknesses of the key imperial powers, pressure from the USA for access to these territories, and massive colonial revolts.

But while the destruction of the empires was an advance, the anti-colonial movements failed in an important way: power did not pass to the working and poor people who made up the majority of the Third World population, but to local capitalist ruling classes. This failure has very concrete roots in the nationalist politics that dominated most of the anti-colonial revolts (see below). At the same time, external domination continued in the Third World despite the attainment of formally independent States.

Imperialism today

Imperialism did not end with the collapse of the empires. The USA became the main imperialist power after 1945. It sought to expand its economic and military influence through alliances like NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) in order to halt the expansion of the rival imperialist blocs of the so-called socialist (in reality, State-capitalist) countries of the Soviet Union and China. All these imperialist powers repeatedly used military force to secure their interests in the Third World: examples are Nicaragua (US intervention)and Afghanistan (Soviet intervention).

Relations between the key imperialist powers are partly regulated by the United Nations, which is an imperialist-dominated congress of self-seeking Western and Third World ruling classes. It is not a peacekeeper!

Huge multi-national corporations (MNCs) like Shell came to dominate world trade, investment, research, and wealth after 1945. MNC’s power allows them to maintain exploitative colonial trade patterns in which Third World countries sell underpriced raw materials to Western companies who in turn charge monopoly prices for manufactured goods. MNCs do invest in Third World countries, but they send most of their profits back to their head offices (instead of reinvesting it locally); undermine efficient local job-creating industries with machinery and imports with few linkages to the local economy; and use cheap, repressed, local labour. In other words, MNCs are part and parcel of the imperialist system in its post-World War Two phase.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are also imperialist structures. These institutions support right-wing Third World governments (for example, South Africa in 1976). Their policies reinforce the unequal exchange trade patterns inherited from colonialism by promoting reliance on the primary sector (raw materials), and also aid MNC activities by promoting free trade and capital movements. Their weapons are the promotion of free market ideas and the insistence that Third World countries wanting loans adopt a set of neo-liberal/free market policies called Economic Structural Adjustment (ESAP). ESAP calls for: promotion of raw material production; trade liberalisation; and a reduced State role in the economy (meaning privatisation, massive cuts in welfare and public sector jobs).

Why nationalism fails

Imperialism casts a shadow over Third World working and poor people,so what strategy can fight it?

One strategy is progressive nationalism, supported by organisations like the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) and IRA (Irish Republican Army). These groups argue that all classes in a given nation must unite to achieve self-determination through an independent State.

Although progressive, anti-imperialist nationalism cannot defeat imperialism. Nationalism delivers power to local ruling classes as it relies on taking State power. The State is a hierarchical, bureaucratic structure of coercion that always defends capitalism and concentrates power in the hands of a small ruling class. As a result, the State cannot deliver freedom to the workers and peasants. Nationalism hides class differences within the nation by arguing that all people must unite around their supposedly common interests, when in fact they have nothing in common. Its function is to build a mass support base for local elites angry with imperialism for blocking their ambitions to rule and exploit.

The enemy is at home

Although Third World elites may use anti-imperialist language, they cannot challenge imperialism once they hijack the anti-imperialist struggle to take power. Nationalists fail to realise that imperialisms international power, in the form of Western militaries, the UN, the IMF and World Bank, and MNCs, means that it is impossible for any one country to pursue an independent path. Those who try are stamped on hard, like Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991.

Third World ruling classes are objectively allies of imperialism as their interests are mostly identical. They rely on the imperialist economic relationships for their wealth, and on Western ruling classes military aid to crush worker-peasant resistance to the exploitation and repression this entails. For their part, imperialist ruling classes support these local elites as they help manage imperialism and capitalism.

Conflicts do sometimes arise between Third World and Western ruling classes. For example, local elites may resent the restrictions of imperialism and try take an independent capitalist development path, for example, by nationalising MNC property. However, although imperialists intervene against these renegades, the real source of conflict between the two groups is over how to manage capitalism andthe State, not about whether or not to keep them. Both sides support these structures and agree on the need to repress the working masses. Nationalisation is not socialism but only a transfer of property from company bureaucrats to State bureaucrats. Where a genuine worker-peasant revolt breaks out, the two elites drop their differences and unite against their common enemy, the workers and peasants.

Path of class struggle

There is another way, Anarcho-Syndicalism. Since imperialism is rooted in capitalism and the State, we argue that the anti-imperialist struggle can only be successful if it is also a struggle against these structures. And these structures can only be destroyed by class struggle as only the workers and peasants are capable of building a free society as only they do not need to exploit, and have no vested interest in the current system.

Since an isolated anti-imperialist struggle or revolution cannot win, a successful struggle requires maximum international support and solidarity. The worker-peasant revolution must spread into other territories dominated by imperialism and also into the imperialist countries. The true allies of the Third World toiling masses are the Western working classes, not the exploiting local elites who hijack power. These Western working classes do not benefit from imperialism as it strengthens the repressive power of their own rulers, wastes resources and lives on the military, promotes reactionary ideas that divides the workers (like racism), and allows MNCs to cut jobs and wages by the shifting operations to repressive Third World countries.

The revolution aims to establish an international stateless socialist system based on equality and worker-peasant self-management through federations of workplace and community councils. Such a system will allow all people full self-determination and the right to express their various cultures and ways of life.

For international solidarity and revolutionary resistance

In order to work towards this final victory, we must join anti-imperialist struggles as we support their immediate aims, as campaigning gives people confidence in struggle, and out of working class solidarity. It is in struggle that people are won to revolutionary ideas, and so we must link these daily struggles to our vision of a free society. Overall, we oppose all imperialist interventions (including those of the UN), as they are part of the problem, not the solution. Any imperialist-brokered settlement will have as its primary aim the preservation of ruling class power. We are for the unconditional withdrawal of imperialist troops from any occupations.

We are opposed to all imperialist wars, but we do not side with Third World elites when they clash with imperialist powers. Instead, we call for solidarity with, and victory to, the working and poor people of that country, who are, after all, the main victims of any conflict. We make this concrete by offering solidarity including material aid to independent working class and working peasant and anti-authoritarian organisations. We call on First World workers to oppose the interventions. We defend all progressive independence movements and progressive forces (including nationalists) in their battles with oppression. We defend the right of ordinary people to choose to have an independent State and/or secede from an empire. We demand the liberation of all colonies and sites of imperial oppression, and oppose all attacks on secessionist movements.

We welcome local defeats for imperialism as they give confidence to working class struggles in the imperialist countries and as they encourage anti-imperialist struggles in other countries. At the same time, however, we are forced to recognise that any defeat of imperialism that does not have Anarchist/Syndicalist goals will not be ultimately succeed. In countries where nationalist movements do come to power our role is not to support them but rather to organise for a revolution that will place power in the hands of the working class and working peasantry.

We are opposed to ESAP policies, not because they are technically faulty but because they hurt ordinary people. Class struggle is the key to defending and advancing the conditions and rights of working and poor people in this situation. We are for an international minimum wage and international working class unity. If capitalism is global, the workers struggle must become global as well. The way to defeat MNC manipulation of different national wage rates in order to attack workers is not protectionism against cheap imports or surrender to the demands of capital, it is international unity in support of basic worker and consumer living standards across the world. We therefore support all initiatives at international trade union unity but argue that control must stay with the rank-and-file. We are for solidarity strikes between workers in different countries in general, and for solidarity action and trade union unity between workers employed bythe same MNC in different countries in particular.

[American Dream]

The Sky Is Pink - Josh Fox


Josh Fox does a follow-up documentary to his hit Gasland about the propaganda &
misinformation that the hydraulic fracking industry puts out. He refutes the claims
that fracking is clean & safe by the industry.

Here are the hard FACTS behind this documentary
in case you wanted to refute the claims yourself.

http://www1.rollingstone.com/extras/the ... 4final.pdf

[American Dream]

See also:

http://www.corporations.org/system/envirogrouptypes.pdf

[American Dream]

The poor are no longer with us

Marge Piercy


No one’s poor any longer. Listen
to politicians. They mourn the middle
class which is shrinking as we watch
in the mirror. The poor have been

discarded already into the oblivion
pail of not to be spoken words.
They are as lepers were treated once,
to be shipped off to fortified islands

of the mind to rot quietly. If
poverty is a disease, quarantine
its victims. If it’s a social problem
imprison them behind high walls.

Maybe its genetic: how often they
catch easily preventable diseases.
Feed them fast garbage and they’ll
die before their care can cost you,

of heart attacks, stroke. Provide
cheap guns and they’ll kill each
other well out of your sight.
Ghettos are such dangerous places.

Give them schools that teach
them how stupid they are. But
always pretend they don’t exist
because they don’t buy enough,

spend enough, give you bribes
or contributions. No ads target
their feeble credit. They are not
real people like corporations.

[American Dream]

Today in labor history, June 30, 1928:

Alabama outlaws the leasing of convicts to mine coal, a practice that had been in place since 1848. In 1898, 73 percent of the state’s total revenue came from this source; 25 percent of all African-American leased convicts died.

Source: todayinlaborhistory

[American Dream]

DREAMer Julio Salgado’s response to American Apparel’s awkward use of a “California Farmer” in its ads.

[American Dream]

"The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine U.S. military aid to the mujahideen amounted to 660 million dollars—”more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua” (Ahmad and Barnet 1988,44). Apart from direct U.S. funding, the CIA financed the war through the drug trade, just as in Nicaragua. The impact on Afghanistan and Pakistan was devastating. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the production of opium (a very different drug than heroin) was directed to small regional markets. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at University of Ottawa, estimates that within only two years of the CIA’s entry into the Afghan jihad, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand,” (2001:4). The lever for expanding the drug trade was simple: As the jihad spread inside Afghanistan, the mujahideen required peasants to pay an opium tax, Instead of waging a war on drugs, the CIA turned the drug trade into a way of financing the Cold War. By the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Central Asian region produced 75 percent of the world’s opium, worth billions of dollars in revenue (McCoy 1997)."

Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism

[American Dream]

PHA LO, “WHEN EATING ORGANIC WAS TOTALLY UNCOOL”

…I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. — the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.

We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.

We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.

With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.

But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.

“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.
My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.

The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.

As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.

My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.

Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.

But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.

I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.

But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.

Salon

[American Dream]

“It would be strange to rely on a party or state apparatus for the liberation of desire. To want better justice is like wanting better judges, better cops, better bosses, a cleaner France, etc. And then we are told: how would you unify isolated struggles without a party? How do you make the machine work without a state apparatus? It is evident that a revolution requires a war machine, but this is not a state apparatus, it is also certain that it requires an instance of analysis, an analysis of the desires of the masses, yet this is not an apparatus external to the synthesis. Liberated desire means that desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective. What counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading: desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prisons, etc. It is not a question of directing, of tatalizing, but of plugging into the same plan of oscillation. As long as one alternates between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and hierarchic coding of a party organization, there is no liberation of desire.

—Felix Guattari, 1995 [via]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

“When Columbus got off the boat, he asked us who we were. We said we’re the Human Beings, we’re the People. Conceptually the Europeans didn’t understand that, it was beyond their conceptual reality. They didn’t see us. They couldn’t see who we were. Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. It’s five hundred years later and they still can’t see us. we are still invisible. They don’t see us as human beings, but we’ve been saying to them all along that’s what we are. We are invisible to them because we are still the Human Beings, we’re still the People, but they will never call us that. They taught us to call ourselves Indians, now they’re teaching us to call ourselves Native Americans. It’s not who we are. We’re the People. They can’t see us as human beings. But they can’t see themselves as human beings. The invisibility is at every level, it’s not just that we’re tucked away out of sight. We’re the evidence of the crime. They can’t deal with the reality of who we are because then they have to deal with the reality of what they have done. If they deal with the reality of who we are, they have to deal with the reality of who they aren’t. So they have to fear us, not recognize us, not like us. The very fact of calling us Indians creates a new identity for us, an identity that began with their arrival. Changing identity, creating a new perceptual reality, is another form of genocide. It’s like severing a spiritual umbilical cord that reaches into the ancestral past. The history of the Indians begins with the arrival of the Europeans. The history of the People begins with the beginning of the history of the People. The history of the People is one of cooperation, collectivity, and living in balance. The history of the Indians is one of being attacked and genocide, rather than a history of peace and balance. The history of the People under attack, the Indians, in an evolutionary context, is not very long, it’s only five hundred years. The objective of civilizing us is to make Indian history become our permanent reality. The necessary objective of Native people is to outlast this attack, however long it takes, to keep our identity alive.”

— John Trudell (Santee Sioux) via stay-human

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
— Adrienne Rich