Economic Aspects of "Love"

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 21, 2013 9:53 am

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/21/ ... ladelphia/

Postcard from the End of America: Philadelphia

by LINH DINH

John is 46 but looks twenty years younger, with not a single white hair or whisker. His grungy style also suspends him in early adulthood. His mom was a registered nurse, then secretary at a garage. His dad sold car parts and drove a mail truck from Philly to Harrisburg in the evening. “I’m not doing as well as my parents, but I’m not trying as hard either,” John confided as he sat in McGlinchey’s, a pint of Rolling Rock in front of him. It was late afternoon, and the place was still quiet, with the jukebox interfering only intermittently. On four televisions, golf balls sailed or skated around cups.

I had come in after recording a segment for Press TV at a nearby studio. Seeing me in suit and tie, Shelley, the bar owner, grinned, “Coming from church?” On Iranian television, I had assumed a serious face to talk about China and the US, how China will try to muscle the US away from the Western Pacific, and how it is moving to supplant the US Dollars, first by trading with various countries (including American allies such as Japan, France and Australia) in their own currencies, then eventually having a gold-backed Yuan, at which point game’s over. I pointed out how China is intertwining itself with Europe through increasing trade and an extensive rail network completed or in progress. Already, freights can be moved by rail from Holland or Belgium to China. The US is still top (bull)dog thanks to its military and control of the world’s banking system, but China is gaining status and leverage through manufacturing, increasing trade ties and infrastructure improvement and linkages. Unlike the USA, it has a long term economic vision, and soon enough, may flash its claws and fangs and show itself no less of a bully, as is already evident by its belligerence in the South China Sea. With the decrease of cheap oil and gas, global economic growth is over, in any case, but certain countries may still chug along fine in the near future, but the US won’t be among them.

We’re so passive, we’re doomed! We watch our rights being systematically stripped away with barely an eye roll, and with each passing day, we are becoming poorer, with our wages steadily decreasing and more of us on food stamps than ever. While fixated on sports, singing contests and network news, we’re being lowered into our degradation. NSA, FBI, Homeland Security and CIA spooks shadow us for evidence of rebellion and espy nada. After inconsequential Occupy and Tea Party twitches, all is quiet. Those sign waving assemblies merely served a carthatic function, and even wore us out, without threatening the status quo at all. Too easily, they funneled our discontent into the Democratic vs. Republican sewage, with too many of us excited to line up, again, to rubber stamp our defeat.

Underemployed and malnourished even, John is ahead of the curve in our collective stumble towards destitution. A maverick screwup, he’s a pioneer of sort, a Neil Armstrong, so let’s examine this man a bit more closely. Three days a week, John scrubs and mops at this lowlife bar, and each day, he also goes to Shelley’s house to twice walk the dog. In between, he can relax on his boss’ couch and stare at the TV.

“Yo, John, how much do you make a week?”

“Ah, I don’t want to tell you, but most of what I make goes towards rent.”

“I can’t see how you make enough to eat!”

“I don’t eat that much. I drink beer, and I get my beer here for free. This is also food, you know.”

“How much do they give you?”

“Two pints.”

“Two pints! That’s not enough! How can you stop at two pints? Once I have had two pints, I must drink more. Why won’t they give you four pints, at least?”

“Maybe you can say something to Shelley about that. You can be my lawyer!”

“Yeah, I’ll say something to Shelley. Cheap motherfucker! But you haven’t explained how you manage to eat on almost no money? How do you eat?!”

“I already told you, man, I don’t eat that much. I haven’t eaten in days! Actually, yesterday, I had three ounces of spaghetti.”

“You count your ounces?!”

“I know because on the package, it said six ounces.”

“Frozen shit?”

“No, man, I don’t even have a fridge. It’s this moist, microwavable shit.”

“OK, OK, but how do you stop eating at three ounces? Why didn’t you eat the whole damn thing if you were that hungry?”

“I don’t need to eat that much. Look at your beer. Can you knock that down in one shot?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“But I can’t do that. My stomach wouldn’t be able to handle it. I don’t need to eat or drink that much. Some weeks, I only spend five bucks on food.”

“That’s ridiculous! What do you buy for five bucks?”

“You can always buy rice. Rice is cheap.”

“You’re right, rice is cheap, especially when you buy a huge bag, but do you ever shoplift, you know, like shove a can of tuna down your pants?”

“No, I have never done that.”

When writing about someone, I must make sure I get everything right, down to the last detail, but with John, I don’t have to fret as much, because he doesn’t know how to use a computer. John won’t be able to read what I’m writing. A man who can barely eat is not someone who will pay for wifi. There, too, John’s ahead of the curve.

“How do you not know how to use a computer? What is there not to know?” And I made some typing motion on the bar.

“Ah, man, I just can’t figure it out, but I don’t miss it. Who cares. I don’t have any tattoos either,” and he showed me his untinted arms. Nodding towards a waitress sitting nearby, bent over her laptop, John continued, “ Once she spent twenty minutes trying to teach me the computer, but I couldn’t figure it out.”

“She can’t get off the computer, and you can’t get on!”

After his two pint allotment, John slunk out of the bar. From Shelley, I then found out that he lives at the Parker Spruce, a residential hellhole that charges $250 a week, plus an extra 10 bucks since John owns a microwave. His bathroom, he shares with another tenant. This is a bum deal, obviously, but John has no choice since he has never been able to cough up enough for the security deposit of a regular apartment. A certain lethargy is also in play here, but it’s hard to have initiative on three ounces of mushy spaghetti coated in some dodgy “meat” sauce.

Just to visit a Parker Spruce resident, you must pay six bucks at the desk, though condoms are free, thanks to the city’s health department. After riding up the musty elevator, you enter a moldy hallway redolent of urine and clorox. If taking the stairs, you might step over a dime bag or two. Whole families take refuge here, not just hurting singles, drug addicts and whores, and though pets are banned, you can hear a caged canary as you walk past this door, and inside this cell is a black cat. At the end of each hallway, bars are placed on windows to prevent jumpers from diving, permanently, into hell, the final one, but if you go straight to the roof of this 12-story building, where the view is indeed spectacular and the air fresh, nothing will stop you from flying for a second or two before splashing onto the adjacent row house’s tar roof, which must be fixed every few years, after yet another corpse is removed.

Before Shelley hired John to walk his dog, he employed Casey, and she also dwelled at the Parker Spruce. In her dresser were bread, peanut butter, jam and pop tarts, and in winter, cans of Bud Ice could be kept cool in a plastic bag hanging out her window.

“So you trust John, huh?” I asked Shelley. “He doesn’t steal like Casey?”

“You know about that too!” Shelley smiled. “Casey only stole small things from me. I went to her place once and saw all these little things that looked very familiar, like salt and pepper shakers that I used to own. Everywhere I looked, there were little things that I used to own.”

“Yeah, and she stole from me! I was talking to Casey at Frank’s one night, and it was her birthday, so I bought her a couple of beers, but when I went to the bathroom, she stole one of my camera lenses. It’s very expensive, you know, more than 500 bucks, but then Casey returned it, because she felt bad, I guess. When I called Frank’s the next day, Sheila said, ‘Hey, we found your camera lens!’ I knew it had to be Casey because I never took the lens out of my bag.”

“Yeah, it was Casey.”

Soon enough, everything that isn’t nailed down will walk. It’s telling that many of our homeless still leave relative valuables such as a newish jacket, belt or pair of shoes unattended as they sleep. This means we’re not quite Third World, hurrah!, for if we were, even a pair of unwatched prescription glasses would take wing within seconds. Of course, stuff here already disappear often enough. In Berkeley, I met a white haired man who had been robbed by another homeless man four times. His coat and shoes he managed to recover in nearby trash cans, “but the photos of my wife and children are gone.” As we talked, a young woman gave him some leftover from a restaurant meal. “But I can’t eat it,” he lamented, “I don’t have any teeth.”

“You can eat it,” she smiled. “It’s only rice.”

Without fork or spoon, he then scooped the brown rice with the carry out container’s plastic top.

The big guys will steal big, including your youth, mature years and old age, your entire lives, in short, sometimes even your sanity or parts of body, while small time crooks will try to relieve you of everything else, including your salt and pepper shakers. The biggest guys will steal the earth from right under you.

I never hinted to Casey that I knew she had stolen from me, but after that incidence, I kept my distance. I have known her for a long time. Adopted, Casey has never been able to find her Puerto Rican birth mother. On each of her sneaker is scrawled “ESPERANZA” [“HOPE”]. Casey has worked as a cook and as a waitress, including here at McGlinchey’s. The last time I saw her, she said she was getting married, so I waved at her bride, a laughing woman standing across Broad Street. They had found an apartment in Point Breeze. Idyllic sounding, it’s a neighborhood best known for flying bullets.

Once, a balding, middle-aged dude saw me talking to Casey, and so advised, “You know, you shouldn’t talk to her. She’s ugly. You make yourself look bad by talking to such an ugly woman.” This guy looked like crap himself, I must add, and so do I, even on my best days. Ugly and uglier, we will slog forward, for sure. The current waitress at McGlinchey’s is only 23, however, and so not ugly. She’s pretty, in fact. Let’s meet her.

“I never went to college, because I don’t like school, and I also can’t afford it.”

“But you said you’re into languages?”

“Yeah, I studied French for five years, and the other day, when I met some French students, I could speak to them, maybe because I was drunk,” she grinned, “and I can pronounce Russian words. I read Camus’ The Stranger five times in English, but when I finally read it in French, it was so much better.”

“You read it in French from beginning to end?”

“Almost.”

She also knows scraps of Sanskrit and Japanese, which have proven useful at SugarHouse, Philly’s very first casino, opened less than three years ago. Playing roulette, she has won up to $100 while chanting “sa ta na ma,” thinking it meant, “all one none sum,” although it really means, “birth, life, death, rebirth,” as I would find out later, after googling. Sometimes she mumbled “nam myoho renge kyo.” On full moons, people win more at casinos, she informed me. Perhaps this Pisces should also use a Magic Marker to scrawl “HOPE” onto her sneakers.

Magic incantations are as good as any, for we have no other plans. Desperate people will plead to the unseen and unprovable. Give us this day our three ounces, at least, and lead us not onto the no-fly list. In 2010, I witnessed a religious procession at San Francisco’s Civic Center, with supplicants carrying this banner, “Praying the Rosary for America… As human efforts fail to solve America’s key problems, we turn to God, through His Holy Mother, asking for His urgent help.”

As we’re making no efforts to solve any of our problems, we’re muttering or shouting words that mean less and less. Amen.


Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 21, 2013 2:21 pm

http://linchpin.ca/?q=content/what-wear ... ility-work

What Wears us Down: Dual Consciousness and Disability at Work
06/13/2013
By Two Toronto Members, One Hamilton Member


Anarchists have in recent years taken up the topic of disability in our political analysis and activism, which is a positive development. The historical resistance of disabled people to segregation, institutionalization, poverty, and oppression has yielded strong political theory from which we can learn, and social movements in which we should participate. To avoid confronting disableism ignores its profound implications for the entire working class.

Historically and presently, anarchist orientations toward disability are extremely varied. While a clear refutation of Social Darwinism and eugenics can be found in Kropotkin’s writings on Mutual Aid, some of his contemporaries and followers promoted these backwards and vicious ideas. Presently, anarchist orientations range from the extreme disableism embedded within anarchoprimitivist thought, to an almost exclusive emphasis on identity politics and intersectionality from the social movement activist milieu, to the vulgar class reductionism often encountered within the anarchist communist tradition. Our goal is an understanding of disability that avoids class reductionism, while remaining firmly based in class struggle politics.

There remains a great deal of ambivalence, discomfort, and contradiction in our actions surrounding disability. Able-bodied working class people often times actively participate in the oppression of disabled people, while at other times standing in solidarity with their struggles. In working toward building strong working class resistance, these divisions and contradictions within the working class must not be stepped around, but examined and addressed head-on. Stating ‘we are all disabled’, or ‘we may all be disabled some day’ are insufficient; what’s needed is an examination of disableism’s broad manifestations in the class.

This article draws from the example of the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO), a Leninist cadre primarily active in the midwestern US from the late 1960’s to mid 1980’s. STO’s early mass work centred on shop floor organizing. As a predominantly white organization, they saw a role for themselves to examine and challenge racism from within the white working class. STO identified the racism of white workers as a barrier to revolutionary organizing. Their theoretical and practical work on this pivoted on their analysis of dual consciousness, which seeks to explain how and why white workers act in contradictory ways when faced with white supremacy and class struggle. Our intention here is to examine how theories around privilege and dual consciousness put forward by the STO might apply to disability or, more particularly, to non-disabled workers. Our goal is not to try and wrench a theory from one context and force it onto another, but to contrast similarities and differences in an attempt to offer strong possibilities for an orientation towards disability. In particular, it is our hope that the conclusions may offer up some ideas for how we can fight against disableism in our mass work as revolutionaries.

The Shifting Terrain of Disability in Capitalism

The social model of disability makes a separation between impairment - the physical condition of an individual - and disability - the social condition. In liberal discourse, this is often understood in relatively limited scope - the impairment is, say, being paralyzed; the disabling condition is the lack of a ramp to enter a building. However, many disability activists and theorists understand this much more broadly. What is considered disability, who is considered disabled, and what that means in relation to broader society changes greatly depending on context. The major shifts in what is considered disability over time and location show that disability is not so much defined in relation or extension to impairment, but by external economic and social conditions. The employing class has shifted definitions and uses of disability to their benefit, to discipline and divide the working class and to hold back revolutionary movements or to minimize their gains.

The industrial revolution marked a significant shift in work and in disability. Work became more regimented, with longer hours and less flexibility on how a job might be done. For those who were not working, it was in the interests of the state and employing class to make divisions between those who could not work and those who could, but did not. The medicalization of disability played a role here in legitimizing the divide between deserving and undeserving poor. For those who were disabled, the result was charity and often institutionalization. Those considered undeserving, or capable of work, were often criminalized. This allowed the state to appear charitable by providing some basic relief, while also adding pressure to maintain class structure. The horribly inadequate supports for disabled people provided impetus for workers to continue working despite horrific and dangerous conditions, and even through workplace injuries or ailments. The remnants of these divisions persist today, and continue to serve the same function in dividing and disciplining the working class.

A clear example of the economic rather than physical roots of disability can be found in the Pullman railway company in the 1910’s. At the time, the company faced many pressures: dealing with customers’ racist anxieties about the health risks of Black railway porters; new demands around providing life insurance for workers; and controlling workplace organizing - including a wildcat strike of 4000 workers in 1894. In response, Pullman implemented a plan across the company for intensive medical testing of all employees and potential hires. Across different areas of the company, these tests rejected ten to twenty percent of applicants. Workers were tested and rejected for things such as high blood pressure, unknown heart or lung ailments, or poor vision. Pullman official D.A. Crawford stated: “I am very strongly of the opinion that we should take all steps to prevent physical crooks from getting on the employment list. I think there is just as good reason for not employing a man with a bad heart or bad arteries as there is for not taking on a new one-eyed man.” This example makes clear that disability is very much a class relationship, one that in this case excluded workers who would likely never have been considered disabled in any other aspect of their lives, for the economic benefit of the employer.

Disability also plays out in broader society and struggle outside the workplace, interacting with race, gender, sexuality, and social movements. Jonathan M Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis examines how the definition of schizophrenia changed drastically in the 1950’s and 1960’s from a diagnosis associated primarily with white women and not with violence, to a much more violent definition of paranoid schizophrenia that became particularly associated with Black men. Writing in particular about a large Michigan institution for the criminally insane, Metzl looks at how the revised DSM-II diagnosis was applied to Black men, particularly those who participated in civil rights and Black power movements, both in psychiatric institutions and in broader public discourse. The men were described as violent, delusional (believing white people were conspiring against them), hostile to white authority figures, and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia on that basis. This was used both to control individuals, by institutionalizing them, and to delegitimize Black power movements. While disability often presents as static and scientific, closer investigation reveals the significance of social context and, often, a close relationship with oppression and social control.

We Get the Health Problems, They Get the Profits

Injuries and accidents bring the class relation into sharp and infuriating contrast. When old, rusty scaffolding collapses and a worker dies, it’s clear that the company’s push to cut costs cost the worker his life. But it’s no better if that company has the newest scaffolding and the best safety equipment. Management doesn’t fall off roofs. We do. Even the good worker can’t escape. He’s worked hard, turned a screwdriver repetitively for thirty years, made a lot of money for the company and never had a major accident in his life. One morning he reaches for his coffee mug and his elbow just gives out - never to work right again.
- Prole.info, The Housing Monster

At work, the shaky terrain of disablement may not often be at the forefront of our minds. Nonetheless, it plays out in diverse and often challenging ways in the lives of working class people. Disability functions for workers as a threat, or a type of discipline. Working people are aware of the ramifications of being labelled unfit, and are often reticent to complain about workplace conditions and the effects those conditions have on their bodies. In this way standards of production need not only avoid accommodation of the production process to different bodies (which often incur material costs), but can also raise standards of uniformity and production efficiency using the ‘disabled’ bodies as an abject lesson for those who don’t conform. Working people are taught not only that their value is dependant on their ability to produce commodities, but also tied into their willingness to accommodate, without complaint, the rising demands of efficiency.

The division of the fit and unfit or ‘other’ has been a tool of capitalism for centuries in the maintenance of a divided working class, with race, gender, sexuality, nationality etc. used as a means to justify slavery, endemic disenfranchisement, imperialist aggression, chronic poverty, and social control. As with other oppressions, while disability is beneficial to capitalism, its maintenance is often reinforced by the working class itself. Injuries at work often go unreported, and working through pain or intense anxiety is a common feature of our working lives.

This works to the employers’ benefit and also limits the likelihood of the employment of workers who either refuse or are unable to endure environments that cause psychological and/or physical injury. What might be classified as ‘standards of excellence’ or ‘achievement’ may simply be the ability to endure an intense escalation of rote, physically and psychologically draining tasks as means of preserving one’s job against competitors.

In many industries, workers have fought for better health and safety standards, but often choose not to use them, as they find it easier or more comfortable not to; these processes can slow work down, meaning that the boss gets angry. There may also be an element of competition or machismo between workers influencing the decision. The likelihood that such dramatic levels of injury, sometimes to highly trained employees, is helpful for capital is questionable. Yet a contradiction emerges for both the worker and the employer; workers often see safety standards as an imposition in meeting production goals, despite the fact that these very standards have been historically fought for by their own class. Simultaneously, employers and the state attempt to impose some of these standards to avoid losses of skilled labourers, while demanding a level of efficient production that is impossible to meet when all safety standards are applied. What emerge are the necessary conditions of our current working world: workers ignoring safety standards to their own detriment, and employers demanding the impossible. What we must fight for is both an increase in safety standards and a simultaneous reduction in production goals, which would make the application of these new standards realistic. A block exists only when we see ourselves as individual workers fighting each other in the labour market, terrified of not meeting production goals as we may appear unfit. The enduring spectre of poverty and disability keeps us in line, even though it is increasingly likely to produce the very disablement we fear.

Able-Bodied Privilege and White Privilege

While addressing disability, this article finds its real focus in examining ways in which able-bodied workers relate to disability. Although that term is at times controversial in disability politics, we chose to use it for a reason. The reason is that being able-bodied carries its own privileges. It is not simply a case of being non-disabled, but of benefiting from, and at times participating in the oppression of disabled people. So, we felt that it was important to use this term, in order to highlight able-bodied privilege as a construction in its own right. In writing about race, WEB DuBois used the term “the wages of whiteness” to describe the material and social benefits granted to working class white people, a sort of public wage, that granted them access and respect denied to even the most well-off Black people. And it is in this way we use the term privilege - to describe collective material benefits (higher wages, first hired/last fired, adequate housing, better access to healthcare and government institutions) that apply to all members of that social body. This section will first examine how STO, with great influence from DuBois, conceived of and challenged white privilege, before outlining the similarities and differences between white privilege and able-bodied privilege, and what we might conceive of as a “wages of ability”.

Coming out of the civil rights era, STO identified racism and white supremacy as an important division holding back the working class from revolutionary struggle. Like DuBois, STO did not view racism purely as prejudice, but identified that white working class people got real benefits from going along with racism, such as better job security, access to better schools, etc. However, these gains were only short-term. The challenge for STO - as an organization of primarily white workers - was to convince their fellow white workers to organize in solidarity with revolutionary workers of colour, willing to give up short-term benefits for the long-term collective benefit of a successful revolution. The point we draw from this is that it’s not just capitalists who indoctrinate the white section of the working class; the white working class participates in the reproduction of white supremacy through the maintenance of their privileges.

There are some clear similarities between white privilege and able-bodied privilege. Many of the material benefits (wages, housing,etc) accrued through able-bodied privilege are similar to white-skin privilege. In terms of housing and transportation, the worker with able-bodied privilege is afforded not just better quality but a larger variety of options. For example, not all public transportation stops are accessible to people with different impairments. Those with able-bodied privilege have greater mobility and are not limited to specific routes, stops or times of day. Able-bodied privilege gives individuals a false sense of dignity and independence. Although we are all interdependent, and rely constantly on the labour of other workers - in this case bus drivers - the material benefits of being able to get where we want reliably and affordably, and the social benefit of being treated as an independent person are examples of able-bodied privilege.

An important difference between white privilege and able-bodied privilege is trajectory. Social histories of whiteness have examined how groups previously considered nonwhite have been able to become white and gain white privilege - most often through participating in racism and establishing a useful social role for themselves. In disability, the trajectory is most often in opposition - through age, injury or illness, we lose able-bodied privilege much more regularly than we gain it. In STO’s examples, a white worker may be penalized or criticized for acting in solidarity with workers of colour, but he will not stop being white. In examples around workplace safety, the potential to lose able-bodied privilege is intensely clear.

Another important difference is the relative flexibility of disability. A person’s race may change if they travel to a country across the world or access a time machine, but it will not change on their way home from work, or from one industry to another. With disability, this is not the case. A person may be read as able-bodied in one workplace, say, academia, but as disabled when they attempt a construction job beyond the limitations of their particular impairments. The exact reverse also holds: work tends to be particularly disciplining, wearing us down in the specific body parts and abilities most crucial for our jobs.

As such, many of us find ourselves at the edge, and push ourselves to maintain privilege. This social process reinforces the various standards under which ablebodied privilege is produced. What’s peculiar is that these various standards often ensure that we lose our privilege in the long term; someone doing data entry might deny intermittent pain or express its existence while ‘toughing it out’ until their hands become useless due to a serious repetitive stress injury; a construction worker inhaling toxic dust might deny or disavow an ongoing breathing problem until the development of a serious lung disease. We actively engage in the production of our privilege while creating restrictive conditions that only some might be able to endure and which can ultimately relegate us to the same category we sought to avoid. And it can’t be said enough: the long-term benefit goes only to our bosses.

Dual Consciousness and Able-Bodied Privilege

In his work The Souls of Black Folks DuBois uses the term “double consciousness” to describe the two worlds Black people experienced - Black and American. He described it as a somber, almost immaterial veil that divided the South. STO’s work on dual consciousness also pertains to race, but takes a somewhat different character. In part, STO developed ideas of dual consciousness as a rejection of Lenin’s stage theory of consciousness, which described workers going steadily from bourgeois to working class consciousness. Similar to DuBois, STO saw this, not as a progression, but a condition of both consciousnesses existing at once in the mind of workers. In STO’s understanding, race played a central role in the minds of white workers. At times, they would ally with Black workers, demonstrating proletarian consciousness, while at other times they would engage in racist class collaborationism, demonstrating bourgeois consciousness. In his 1972 work, STO member Noel Ignatiev uses an example of white workers displaying proletarian consciousness to stand up to managers on the factory floor in defence of Black workers, then the same evening participating in a demonstration to maintain racial segregation in their neighbourhood schools. Again, it is important to emphasize that STO did not see dual consciousness as illogical or divorced from short-term material benefits, but as something that needed to be contested to secure long-term revolutionary gains.

Dual consciousness plays out in the able-bodied working class, in how we act toward our coworkers, other people, and even how we view ourselves. A group of graduate students all participate in a competitive and nasty work environment, ignoring symptoms of anxiety, depression and physical ill-health in each other and themselves - while also being sure to make department events physically accessible; a construction worker helps out the family of an injured long-time coworker, but doesn’t intervene on younger coworkers or the boss when the same unsafe working conditions crop up; a supermarket worker sticks up for her disabled coworker, until the stress of long hours, an aching back and a nasty boss make it too difficult; a healthcare worker is dedicated to the people she supports, but votes for a party that would decrease disability income because it lowers her taxes. Even when we have the knowledge of what is right, the pressure not to act on it is immense. For this reason, dual consciousness points toward collective organizing: it is not about changing our individual minds, but about organizing together to change social conditions until these contradictions no longer exist.

Forming in the late 1960s, STO believed that Black working class people in the United States were the most revolutionary sector of the class. As an organization composed largely of white workers and activists, they viewed their role in relation to this as one of addressing white supremacy within the white working class. If white workers could overcome this dual consciousness and commit to class consciousness and solidarity across racial lines, STO believed this would help clear the way for revolutionary action. So, dual consciousness was clearly developed not just as a theory to understand race relations within the class, but as a way of directing the actions of revolutionary white workers. In practice, STO prioritized work on the shop floor that challenged white supremacy and promoted class solidarity.

As anarchists, we reject this understanding of a section of the class being the revolutionary vanguard, regardless of who is in this position. Also, we are not proposing that disabled people would be the vanguard in this orthodox equation, even if we did agree with this model of revolution. Dual consciousness is still relevant to our work around able-bodied privilege and disableism, not in spite of this view, but because of it. Anarchists believe in a united class struggle that fights all forms of oppression and divisions within the class. Our hope in connecting disability with dual consciousness is to propose a model for doing so that offers concrete and useful possibilities for action, and a material, rather than ideological basis for thinking about oppression.

Identity and Mass Politics in Disability: Sharpening the Anarchist Approach

For many years, there has been a strong and active disability movement organizing around issues such as accessibility, poverty, employment, and more. Some of these movements have had a left character - for example, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, which helped create the social model of disability, came to these ideas through a socialist analysis. However, the socialist tradition has generally not incorporated disability politics into their analysis and mass work to any great degree. This is not simply an oversight or indicator of disableism, but is related to the ways those who follow a socialist tradition conceptualize class.

Anarchists have been somewhat more aware of disability issues, and have made more significant efforts to address disability, with mixed results. As mentioned above, the severe disableism found in anarchoprimitivism is something other anarchists must actively assert disagreement with and put forward arguments against. Arguably the most successful current of anarchism with regards to disability thus far has been that associated with anti-oppression or identity politics. Those who adhere to those politics have brought awareness and activism around disability, with the result that - at least in Toronto - an access van at a large demonstration, an ASL interpreter at a political event, or a serious discussion around balancing accessibility needs when planning a bookfair are, while certainly not standard, a relatively consistent part of activist practice. We don’t always do a good job with it, but due to the strong efforts of activists, disability and accessibility are on the radar in ways that they weren’t ten years ago.

Without minimizing the importance of this work, we would like to offer up a few critiques. One is that identity politics tends to rely very heavily on individual identity. Because disability is a somewhat flexible identity, this has at times contributed to arguments such as “we are all disabled” or “we all will be disabled someday” as reasons to be involved in these struggles. Our concern in this regard is that opening up a massive spectrum of disability may serve to obscure the realities faced by people most severely affected by disableism, possibly reinforcing the structures that we seek to undermine. Another political argument is the one we put forward in this article: that able bodied working class people also have a stake in this, not because we may be disabled or we may become disabled someday, but because disability is a fundamental part of class structure.

Another critique is that the direction that comes from identity politics is the focus on accessibility at activist events. While this is an important thing to do and the exclusion of disabled people from activist events is a real and serious issue, it is a limited project. While our own events and meetings may be a sensible starting point, a great deal of this type of activism tends to stop here, caught up in perfecting accessibility practice. In order to effect real change, we must not neglect our internal practices - but we also must not let them become a barrier to action in mass struggles.

Lastly, identity politics frames the fight against disability in terms of individual transformations, rather than collective change. Identity politics teaches us that with workshops and trainings we can become more self-aware of our privilege and become better allies. This is really a form of liberalism – the notion that we can change the world one individual at a time. It doesn’t take into account that able-bodied privilege and disableism are social processes and must be struggled against as a collective process on all of our actions and ideas. It is not enough to change the individual’s ideology; we need to participate in projects that seek to undermine the material basis (wage-labour, housing, etc.) that produce able-bodied privilege and disableism.

Class struggle anarchists, as a tradition, have done little with disability politics, either internally or in mass work. This is in part due to our conceptions of class and class struggle, which too often focus entirely on workers and the workplace, and don’t take proper account of the community and of reproductive labour. Even within workplace organizing, our focus tends to be similar to that of mainstream unions - wages and benefits, and often throwing our support behind strikes initiated by unions. Tackling issues like dual consciousness and disability requires a different approach, one that gets to the heart of how we conceive of ourselves as working people. We need to develop strategies on the job, using anarchist principles such as direct action and mutual aid, to address issues that could never be written into even the best collective agreement.

It is our hope that this piece expresses a class struggle approach to oppression that is not an either-or choice between class and identity. Class and social oppressions such as disableism are linked, and can - and must, in order to be effective - be holistically addressed. While we critique identity politics for being too inwardly focused, we must also not ignore prefigurative politics in our own organizations. Rather, we should challenge ourselves to apply principles such as mutual aid and collective responsibility to tackle disableism in our organizations and in our mass work.

Conclusions for Action

Able-bodied privilege is deeply embedded in our culture. It is not something, as identity politics might present, that individuals can carve out of themselves with careful self-attention. It is something we must fight collectively, consistently, and with commitment as a critical part of our class struggle. Fighting able-bodied privilege is not high level theoretical politics. It is something all working class people can do, and it is a part of our daily struggles.

A plumber we know was called to a group home for people with developmental disabilities. Left alone in their basement, he noticed a room with padding, restraints and heavy locks. He called in to his employer, stating that he would not be completing this job, and left. Our labour has value and we can commit to using it in ways that do not sell out others in our class. This example is both exemplary and part of the problem: it takes the form of individual action, which is not extended to their coworkers, the staff or the residents of the group home, but it is admirable nonetheless. The issue of extending a struggle against able-bodied privilege into collective working class projects is far more difficult to pin down.

What if construction workers refused to build all forms of segregated institutions, or brought up demands around physical accessibility of the buildings they worked on? If their direct experience and skill with building could meet with disabled peoples’ experience and skill with navigating space in different ways, the spaces constructed would likely be more functional and sturdier (and probably less ugly) than what architects and funders come up with. What if workers in grocery stores and coffee shops implemented a ‘march on the boss’ tactic to demand that the unpaid work placements carried out by people with developmental disabilities be paid? By doing this, they would reject notions of charity and state that everyone’s labour has value. What if direct support workers working with impaired individuals took on a union strategy that placed the demands of the impaired at the forefront? Sufficient staffing ratios would be presented, and won, not only as better working conditions, but as necessary practices for respect and social inclusion.

It might also mean that we not only address the outcome of our work and the ways in which it is used, but also the content. What if we refused to be relegated to a narrow set repetitive tasks that eventually caused chronic debilitating pain, and instead organized our workplaces to demand both ergonomic supports and greater job sharing? By moving what is often considered a personal health issue to the realm of collective struggle, we take to task core issues around how work is structured, and expand notions of workplace issues to organize around. What if we collectively decided to adhere to every possible safety code at the construction site, refusing to compromise regardless of how long it took and how far from quotas we fell because our own safety and well being are more important than the bosses profitability? We would declare the inevitable wearing down of our working bodies, which eventually robs many of our livelihoods and affects our lives outside of work, as unacceptable. We would also challenge the narrow conceptions of what labour struggle is and openly take on the core issue - their profits vs. our lives.

Within and beyond the workplace, addressing disableism also opens up important anarchist discussions around mutual aid and interdependence. Individualism and independence are capitalist notions that have kept us divided and unable to fight against disableism effectively. As stated before, there is a false sense of dignity around independence. We all rely on each other for certain aspects of our life. It is the case that some activities are considered to be ‘’normal’’ to be dependent (such as car repairs, haircuts or childcare) and some are not (such as personal care or working). We are all interdependent, disabled or not. We all need each other. This is why the notions of interdependence and mutual aid must be at the centre of our struggle. Instead of fighting against disableism at a private or individuallevel we need to act collectively, as disableism is part of the class structure that affects all of us. By promoting values of individualism and independence, we stay divided. Why don’t we strive for autonomy - which is being able to make the choices that affect our lives ourselves - as opposed to independence?

It’s clear that the currently narrow focus of disability politics, which is ubiquitous amongst much of the left, is falling short of seriously addressing the pervasive and systemic exclusion of, and brutality toward members within our class. Anarchists should be aware of the framework of mutual aid that we as a class can only truly progress if we support each other in the pursuit of our collective good. We’ve attempted in this article to draw out some of the most useful theories that might uncover our own short-fallings in applying mutual aid within the terrain of disability politics. The content of our lives and countless others must regain the dignity and well-being that has been lost through our own failed perceptions and the ongoing machinations of the exploitative machinery of capitalism. If we truly care about the possibility of a more just and equitable society, it is incumbent on us to better understand how disability is produced - and how we can fight it.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 21, 2013 11:33 pm


'I never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don't let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?'


—veteran New York Times reporter John Hess
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 22, 2013 10:34 am

Scientific Racism: The Eugenics of Social Darwinism

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Jun 22, 2013 11:46 am

"A black child with a transparent rib cage, huge head, bloated stomach, protruding eyes, and twigs as arms and legs was the favourite poster of the large British charitable operation known as Oxfam. Oxfam called upon the people of Europe to save starving African and Asian children… and never bothered their consciences by telling them that capitalism and colonialism created the starvation, suffering and misery in the first place."

How Europe underdeveloped Africa - Walter Rodney
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:51 am

The Paradox of Capitalism and Magnetic Revolutionary Strategy

by Alex Knight, http://www.endofcapitalism.com

1. There is a paradox at the heart of this global power structure we live in, known as capitalism. It is the result of two contradictory truths.
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2A. The first truth is that capitalism is destroying our planet. Through global warming, extinction, impoverishment, racism, sexism, homophobia, propaganda, war, the burgeoning security state, computerized isolation, and more, it is literally killing us.

2B. The second truth is that we are dependent upon capitalism for our immediate survival. Whether through wages, pensions, or social services, our livelihood depends on income provided by the very system which is killing us.


3A. Most of us would like to avoid facing this paradox, and so delude ourselves into apathy, nihilism, and cynicism. We accept the system’s offer of fantasy and mute our inherent knowledge of the deep wrongness that pervades the real world.

3B. Some braver souls among us face the first truth and so do whatever they can to avoid complicity with the machinery of death and destruction. They may adopt an ethical diet, curb their consumption, or even attempt to “live off the grid” (to the extent this is possible within a global power structure whose tentacles reach into every corner of the Earth). Taken to its extreme, this is the route of escapism. Its goal is moral purity, flight from guilt, the individual satisfaction of knowing you’re no longer part of the problem.

The failure of escapism is that avoiding responsibility for the problem also means avoiding responsibility for the solution. You can take comfort in your moral stance, but with or without your participation, capitalism rolls on, destroying billions of lives.

3C. A different set of folks are more concerned with the second half of the paradox – the fact that we are trapped in this system as bad as it is, and therefore the best we can do is to improve it or make it more fair. They may fight for policy changes through lobbying or even run for office. In its pure form, this is the route of reformism. The aim is to work “within the system,” influence the people in charge, and perhaps become one of them in time. The theory goes that once in a position of power, they would be able to steer the ship in a new direction.

The failure of reformism is that it requires the abandonment of our ideals for actually overthrowing the system or creating a world without capitalism. There’s nothing wrong with making life more livable within the system, but when we become ourselves part of the system, we betray ourselves and we have already lost.

4. By themselves, neither of these two poles, escape or reform, offers us any hope of abolishing capitalism and saving our world. Yet, no way forward can exist without both elements. Rather than fleeing this paradox, if we embrace the absurdity of our situation, we can harness the energy of the contradiction to create something new.


Read the rest of this entry »
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Jun 23, 2013 1:14 pm

http://sherevolts.noblogs.org/post/2012 ... se-michel/

Reserchez les Communards: The Anarchist Struggle of Louise Michel

Posted on March 19, 2012

by Bronwyn Lepore

During her trial before the 6th Council of War on December 16th of 1871, Paris communard and professed anarchist, Louise Michel, accused of complicity in the arrest and execution of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas, of fighting in the front lines, of membership in the International, of professing “free thought” in the classroom, etc., etc., though not directly involved in the executions, spoke out before the court: “I do not want to defend myself; I do not want to be defended. I belong entirely to the Social Revolution, and I declare that I accept full responsibility for all my actions…I have been told that I am an accomplice of the Commune, yes; for the Commune wanted, above all else, the Social Revolution, and the Social Revolution is the dearest of my desires.” Michel would have been the first to note that there is something implicitly oxymoronic about the notion of an anarchist hero; though she took an active role in demonstrations and on committees, was known as an outstanding soldier and organizer, ran a school and was responsible for the care of over 200 Communard children, took her turn as a nurse and social worker, was a feminist who recognized that many groups were exploited – the helpless, the poor, the elderly, prisoners, as well as women – was an anarchist motivated by compassion rather than doctrine, Michel saw herself as a revolutionary among revolutionaries. For her role in the Paris Commune – the largest spontaneous urban revolt in modern Western history – she was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment in New Caledonia. On her release, she took up where she had left off, continuing to teach, speak, organize, demonstrate and write, about the necessity of revolution for the liberation of the people from the state, the church, and other authoritarian institutions – despite her time in and out of prison, including 6 years in solitary confinement – until her death in 1905.

So what relevance does Louise Michel have to contemporary anarchism or social change? Why study the Paris Commune of 1871 and those involved? Two brief months of history that began, for the purposes of traditional historians, on March 18th of 1871, with the mostly peaceful takeover over of Paris and its institutions by men, women, and children, forcing the government to retreat to Versailles, the disestablishment of an oppressive church system, the abolishment of the regular army, the police and the bureaucracy and was finally, after a bloody week which witnessed the slaughter of over 20, 000 Communards, stamped out on May 28th. Two months during which an anarchic atmosphere reigned, Vigilance Committees formed, workers’ cooperatives sprang up, equal access to education and the arts was encouraged, night work in bakeries ceased, pawn shop items were returned, and women asserted themselves politically and militarily.

In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx writes: “The tradition of all past generations weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries…” So why conjure up history now? What is our revolutionary crisis? Can such a thing even be defined, let alone acted upon, given the conditions and structures of such a complex local, national, global web? Does the possibility for spontaneous revolution still exist? Or have such possibilities narrowed? What does it mean to be an anarchist/social revolutionary today as opposed to two centuries ago? Perhaps the weight of history will always accrue as a monkey upon the backs of visionaries like Louise Michel – but she was also a dreamer who acted and who refused to be acted upon, who resisted the paralysis of inevitability.

I was drawn to Michel’s story for a number of reasons: I am teaching the history of Western Civilization parts one and two – a history largely told by, for, and of, wealthy white males, or those under their patronage, and so knowing that women, the poor, the disenfranchised were also alive, doing something, I am compelled to find and tell their stories; I am confused about how to act and what to act on given our current post September 11th state of affairs and I realize that this is a privileged position to be in but I am trying to read and talk and understand the past nightmares as well as the past dreams that have influenced the present for both good and bad, so as to articulate, problematize, and discover openings for possibilities in a very frightening time; I am also writing/thinking about Henry Kissinger, Michel’s antithesis and a horrid representative of imperialism, power, and terrorism, a man who, by some estimates, has been responsible for the deaths of millions globally for the simple reason that he wanted more for himself. And so for me right now, Michel represents the dream of banishing power and the myriad abuses of authoritarianism and Kissinger the nightmare of its continued existence and history; and, well, some days lately, when I’m hearing conversations and looking at the front of newspapers and turning on the news and teaching the Greeks and Romans and the weak always, always, always getting beaten down, and those with money getting to decide, there seems such an inevitable and ongoing struggle between power and resistance to it that I wonder if our human fate already has been written. How is it possible that two such people, such visions, could exist in the same world? But then I read Michel’s memoir The Red Virgin and am merely glad that the one has always existed to oppose the other.

While I have had the thought, I don’t think it’s as simple as gender (though certainly gender has played a large role) differences – woman as life-giver, nurturer of mankind, man as plunderer, destroyer. Michel, like many women during the Commune, fought side by side with male communards – communes and worker’s collectives, where egalitarianism between males and females was, for obvious reasons, more likely to exist, have existed in Europe since at least the 12th century and in all likelihood before in resistance to the authority of the church and state. I like her, in part, because she was not a pacifist, but took care of children, she was a feminist, but empathized with female prostitutes and male burglars equally -”It wasn’t bravery when charmed by the sight, I looked at the dismantled fort of Issy, all white against the shadows, and watched my comrades filing out in night sallies, moving away over the little slopes of Clamart or toward the Hautes Bruyeres, with the red teeth of chattering machine guns showing on the horizon against the night sky. It was beautiful, that’s all. Barbarian that I am, I love cannon, the smell of powder, machine-gun bullets in the air.” Kissinger, on the other hand, is clearly a man of comfort, a sybarite still wined and dined at expensive soirees in Manhattan and D.C. – celebrity of death, power and foreign policy. One who waits and watches and plots in fat White House armchairs making phone calls so that others will needlessly die. (See Christopher Hitchens’ recent The War Crimes of Henry Kissinger). Theirs are two very different forms of violence.

Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had argued with Marx over the path social revolution should take – Marx preferring/Bakunin (correct, I think, in his argument that the “people can be saved only by themselves”- though this is perhaps one of the larger problems – theoretically and practically – that Anarchists faced then and today) rejecting Statism – saw in the Commune and its destruction, difficulties – “men are not transformed overnight, and can not change their ways at a whim” – as well as possibilities, the communards “proving to a comforted humanity that, while life, intelligence and moral firmness may have deserted the upper classes, they thrive in the fullness of their powers in the proletariat,” the takeover of Paris “a well articulated and daring rebuttal of the state.” Bakuninists perceived in the Commune a firm rejection of state power; Marx, and later Lenin, saw, in the failure of the Commune the necessity for less decency, more ruthlessness, and more disciplined leadership; in other words, Statism must precede Utopianism or collectively run society. Such arguments over the possibilities/conclusions of the Commune, dramatically influenced, certainly in the Soviet Union for the worse, decision-making processes, the result leading away from a people’s dialogue into totalitarianism, but also encouraged the impetus for transformation as witnessed in the Paris Uprisings of 68, and the perseverance of anarchist movements in France and elsewhere.

One of many possible representatives of Bakunin’s praises, who strongly opposed Marxist/Leninist notions of necessary hierarchy, Michel was an intellectual/spiritual Anarchist (not big on theory); she saw any kind of authority as a destructive/inhumane force that should be abolished, yet believed in the inherent goodness of mankind (another theoretical problem – and one that we are confronted with in a very heightened way during times of increased authority – now, for instance – as authority, and obedience to it, can only reflect another side or component – rather than existing “outside”- of mankind). She worked with her comrades on grassroots initiatives in education and the arts as well as worker’s cooperatives; she struggled with the difficulties of organizing, equipping, feeding, and paying an armed citizenry subsisting on minimal means; she met with the Women’s Vigilance Committee and marched with them in the streets to boost morale and discourage slacking. Barely sleeping during the Seige months, Michel journeyed back and forth between men’s and women’s Vigilance Meetings: “I belonged to both committees, and the leaning of the two groups were the same. Sometime in the future the women’s committee should have its own history told. Or perhaps the two should be mingled, because people didn’t worry about which sex they were before they did their duty. That stupid question was settled…The Montmarte Vigilance Committees left no one without shelter and no one without food. Anyone could eat at the meeting halls…it might only be one herring divided between five or six people.” Despite the brutal quelling of the Commune, her subsequent arrests and imprisonments as a rabble-rouser, until her death, Michel believed that the people would eventually prevail; for her it was just a matter of time.

Was hers an idealist’s dream? A martyr’s selflessness? Was the Commune too violent in seizing power? Or not violent enough? A fleeting mirage of unlikely grassroots democracy? A citizen rebellion against a government only possible in the particular historical circumstances of the urban French? What embers of the Commune’s flames still smolder? Have the possibilities for spontaneous revolution ceased to exist, and if so, what is/are the current goals of Anarchism? What can we learn from history?
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Jun 24, 2013 10:02 pm

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from chakaz:

they stole our ancestors, our land, placed us upon more stolen land and killed us if we practiced our rituals together, they assimilated/integrated us into society as workers, forced us into schools where we are assaulted with european patriarchal bourgeois lies to push us farther from where we come from, then they mock our culture by continuing to steal pieces of it, present it as their own and use it to sell coffee that has been harvested on exploited land..fuck babylon!


http://thegentlemanjigger.tumblr.com/po ... s-our-land
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Jun 25, 2013 8:45 pm

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/25/real-stuff-het.html

Real Stuff: Het!

Dennis Eichhorn

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Read the other Real Stuff stories and listen to Mark's interview with Dennis Eichhorn here.

Dennis P. Eichhorn is an award-winning American writer best known for his adult-oriented autobiographical comic book series Real Stuff.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 26, 2013 12:23 pm

http://libcom.org/blog/you’ve-had-your-anti-hipster-fun-now-get-organised-26062013

You’ve had your anti-hipster fun, now get organised.

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As the Asian Women's Advisory Service in Hackney is turned into a trendy burger bar, should we be complaining about hipsters, or organising in our communities?

You may have seen/read or heard about a trendy burger bar in Dalston opening recently, in the gutted remains of the both publicly and privately funded Asian Women’s Advisory Service which has been shut for years following a lack of funding. There has been a backlash against it since an image went viral on social media protesting the poor taste of using the old signage and name (“The Advisory”) to sell expensive food to gentrified East London.

The article I’ve linked to calls the removal of the sign following a social media campaign a victory. A victory against what? The signage and business name are in poor taste but the removal of the sign won’t change the fact that a much used and needed service for working class people is gone forever. Neither will it change the fact that we (whatever that entails) are in no position and have no resources, energy or organisation to replace such a utility.

How many of the radicals, communists, anarchists, liberals and assorted do-gooders gave a fuck about the service shutting down in the first place? I know that everyone’s favourite punchbags are hipsters and gentrification, but let’s not forget that capital’s power to displace us from the communities where we grow up into units of transient labour is something most of us are utterly powerless against. Government ministers can grandstand, telling the poor and the marginalised to get on a bus/get on your bike to find work, making commutes enforceable by sanction but in reality most of us are already subject to this tyranny of uncertainty. As such many of us find ourselves in London and its environs, far away from where we born out of necessity more than choice. We are as much part of this process as middle class poverty tourists, students and petit bourgeois colonisers.

Landlords being a particularly parasitic class of bastards, are as responsible as the state for displacing working class people, entirely altering the make-up of our communities and as such our everyday lives. With their collective power to determine rents and influence land values, they essentially are able to collude with local councils and the government to socially (and ethnically) cleanse entire swathes of the city.

So I guess my point is that, it’s fine and necessary to have a critique of gentrification and spread a vision of the society we want to live in, but in the meantime we have to survive under the present conditions; it’s time for some serious organisation, to resist cuts to services, gentrification and stop landlords from exploiting tenants. In my mind this requires community and workplace organisation, solidarity and a willingness to take direct action. As far as I can recall, recent examples of successes are few and far between. Barnet Library was closed by the council last year, but local residents occupied it for 5 months until it was re-opened and is now run by volunteers. This itself isn’t without problems and inconsistencies with our aims (e.g. allowing the state to force us into running previously fully funded services voluntarily) but it’s one of the only actual victories I can think of, and for all the press about UK Uncut (and recent “anti-cuts” campaigns and activism in general) did those demonstrations ever actually stop any public services or facilities being cut?

Otherwise encouraging examples of people organising against our relentless degredation:

Victories against companies taking workfare placements after hard campaigning from Solidarity Federation and Boycott Workfare.

Low paid workers winning the living wage in London.

Anarchist groups and tenants solidarity groups forming and fighting against rent increases, welfare cuts and deposit/rent theft.

Workers at Hackney College successfully fighting redundancies with support from the local community.

IWW and SolFed helping groups of workers with specific demands and organising them to win, with a model of collective action, workplace democracy, direct action and escalation.

Groups like the Anti-Raids Network organising interventions against UKBA raids and No Borders/anarchists trying to stop deportations.


I don’t claim to have all the answers on how to make effective community organisation, but it takes a lot of time, energy and often fundraising. Having been involved in several groups and campaigns over the years there seems to be a general trend towards this kind of model:

- Talk to your coworkers/neighbours > call a meeting > publicise it > discuss the issues > form a network > get visible > make demands > take action > escalate > consolidate and defend > stay visible, stay alert, stay active.

I think being angry about the gaudy opulent churning commodification of East London’s corpse as a visible symbol of our exploitation is only to be expected but what motivated me to write this was annoyance at all the sanctimony I’ve been reading about a new fast food restaurant, out of all the things. For real? Let’s get busy then.

Originally posted at http://hayrr.tumblr.com/
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 26, 2013 3:30 pm

from ‘absent present’ mahmoud darwish

on a balcony at the mental hospital, overlooking the remains of deir yasin, sits the new king of israel, raving: ‘here, here my miracle began. here i killed them and i saw them killed. i saw them dead clearly in sight and sound. here i heard the groans of the human beasts which did not spoil my music. from here i broadcast their voices to the north to frighten the rest of the herd which was muddying the waters of the holy land. from here i spread terror among the animals that are still crawling on two feet, so that they will get themselves off to the desert. no, no; desert is not the right word for the fate. the desert is my personal property. the desert leads to guidance; the desert leads to a return. the desert is my monopoly, so is god to me.’

the king takes the tranquilliser pills and remembers, ‘without my heroism, without what we did at deir yasin, my kingdom would not have risen again. without and absence, their absence, i would not be present. their non-being is my being. whence did they suddenly come into my life, when i did not want them as neighbors or slaves, not as hewers of wood or drawers of water?’ the king nervously grips the glass of water, and breaks it; a thin trickle of blood runs from his hand. he raves, ‘do i not see the blood of the ghost that our army chased in lebanon, and do i see my blood? here i killed them and i saw them killed. how did they cheat death and defy my orders? i am he who gives death and life; i am king, the new king of israel. how did the dead man become a ghost; how is it that the ghost insults me? am i dreaming, in a nightmare? is there a balcony in this world overlooking another end? take deir yasin away from me for a second; take away from me the cries of these ghosts; or take me away from them. i cannot apologise to them and do not wish to. hiram! hiram, o king of tyre, come to my aid. my people have grown angry against me and say that my war is a joke, my peace a joke. come to my aid, o hiram, even if only with a false reconciliation with which i may drug my mind and heart and my people, and be cured of my grief. do you not know me? do you not hear me, you son of a dog and a bitch?’ no one is listening to the king crouching in his home overlooking the site of his first crime. and when he emerges, leaning on a stick, to visit the grave of his wife, he speaks to no one. the ghost is his only companion. his enemy it is who does not leave him, his enemy it is who visits him in his illness, and leads him to their first meeting place: ‘here you killed me and buried me in this trench.’ he cannot stop him, and he collapses. the killer falls into the grave of the murdered man!
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:26 pm

Human Resources - Social Engineering In The 20th Century

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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 27, 2013 9:07 am

http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/06 ... -alliance/

Feminism and ecosocialism: a necessary alliance

Ecosocialist and feminist struggles overlap and stand as the great reference for our defence of common goods in our country and our continent.

by Tárzia Medeiros
International Viewpoint

Tárzia Medeiros is active in the World March of Women and member of National Directorate of the Party of Socialist and Liberty (PSOL) in Brazil.


For as long as capitalism and patriarchy have existed as systems linked to each other, they have made an alliance to establish a relationship of domination over nature and of appropriation and exploitation of everything that, on this basis, they stereotyped as beings of an “inferior nature”, which includes women and their bodies.

At the same time, the condition of blacks, mestizos and the indigenous, and their ethnic and cultural subordination, became something natural. Everything that comes from nature and does not match the standard of masculine and bourgeois social evolution and that does not fit the paradigm of white and Western, exists only as something of an “inferior nature”

The naturalization of motherhood as women’s function and destiny, as well as the naturalization of their bodies as territory to be conquered and controlled, should be rejected by all socialists who demand an ecosocialist, feminist world, free from the scars of capitalism.

We cannot permit that a “biological” explanation of the inequality between men and women be used to keep the latter in a an inferior social, political and economic position to that of men.

The effects of the environmental crisis ravaging whole regions of the planet, fall most harshly on the peripheral countries, on the poorest people, and especially on women and children. Desertification, the loss of water resources, environmental disasters caused by climate change (tsunamis, earthquakes, prolonged periods of drought, floods and landslides) have a huge impact on their everyday lives.

When people are forced to leave the places where they live, most refugees and homeless are again women and children. Climate change is exacerbating poverty and accentuating inequalities, making women often resort to prostitution just to get food. The increase in diseases, with the reappearance of some that were already extinct or controlled (such as cholera and tuberculosis, etc.), also puts a burden on women, because the care of the sick still falls to them.

The neo-Malthusian response to the climate crisis points to overpopulation in the world as the central cause of the climate crisis, and seeks therefore to restrict women’s right to control their bodies. This is a racist approach, because population growth is higher in the South. But it also diverts attention from the huge gulf that separates the wasteful consumption of the super-rich from the absolute poverty of the poorest sectors, and the vastly different impacts each have on Nature.

Those of us who have fought for the expansion of women’s rights to control their bodies and their fertility, reject and denounce this pseudo-solution, because it puts in question women’s right to decide and makes the mistake of ignoring the structural causes of the crisis, where capitalism is the central factor.

In the South, women are also responsible for producing 80% of food, including the gathering and preservation of native fruits and seeds. This central role in ensuring food sovereignty and the preservation of biodiversity as the heritage of humanity gives women a key role in agriculture and the supply of food.

The growing impact of large, capitalist development projects in Brazil, which are supported by the state through the CAP and the BNDES, has led to a loss of territory and autonomy for small producers, most of whom are women, indigenous communities or Afro-Brazilian maroon communities.

The main expression of such projects are agribusiness, the re-routing of the São Francisco River and the irrigated areas that adjoin it, large dams to supply new hydroelectric plants (Belo Monte, Jirau, etc.), the IIRSA, mining, the intensive use of pesticides and the production of biofuels. Women play a central role in protecting ecosystems and biomass against governments (Federal, State and Municipal) who want to sell them off to multinationals.

The actions of the women of Via Campesina, who destroyed the eucalyptus plantations of Aracruz Cellulose, like the role of indigenous and maroon communities in defending their ancestral lands, are examples of the victorious defence of the environment, based on their particular realities.

It is vital to strengthen the alliance between women in the countryside and women in the city. A feminism that incorporates the ecosocialist struggle will be closer to those struggles that are today at the forefront of the defence of common goods in our country and our continent. Ecosocialist and feminist struggles overlap and stand as the great reference for our work, because they fall, more than ever, within the framework of the struggle against capitalism and form part of our strategic vision.
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:25 am

Celebrate People's History

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Grace Paley, 1922–2007. Poet laureate, educator, peace activist, feminist, short story writer.

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"It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times, there is no freedom without justice and this means economic justice and love justice."
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Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Jun 28, 2013 10:17 am

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Chicago’s Young Lords Organization, a Puerto Rican radical group
started by former gang members in the 1960s.

(via From gang-bangers to urban revolutionaries: the Young Lords of Chicago | libcom.org)
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