Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/fernando_marti ... nomia.html

Fernando Martí

Fernando Martí
Autonomía es Vida



Autonomía es Vida / Autonomy is Life.

Poster in support of Zapatista Autonomous communities, facing a wave of attacks launched by the Mexican government and their repressive entities. Design originally created for the poster campaign coordinated by the Convergencia Grafica MALLA and the Escuela de Cultura Popular Martires del 68, “La Autonomia es la Vida, la Sumisión es la Muerte.”



The town is the Tzotzil Mayan community of San Pedro Polho, spiraling from its valley like a caracol. A sign outside the town states: "Welcome to the Zapatista Autonomous Rebel Municipality of San Pedro Polho, Chiapas. Here the people command and the government obeys." The sky is a representation of the map of Chiapas, with the Zapatista autonomous municipalities (large red stars) and caracoles.

[American Dream]

I’m an English major. It is a language of conquest.

What does it say that I’m mastering the same language that was used to make my mother feel inferior? Growing up, I had a white friend who used to laugh whenever my mother spoke English, amused by the way she rolled her r’s. My sister and I tease Mami about her accent too, but it’s different when we do it, or is it? The echoes of colonization linger in my voice. The weapons of the death squads that pushed my mother out of El Salvador were U.S.-funded. When Nixon promised, “We’re going to smash him!” it was said in his native tongue, and when the Chilean president he smashed used his last words to promise, “Long live Chile!” it was said in his. And when my family told me the story of my grandfather’s arrest by the dictatorship that followed, my grandfather stayed silent, and meeting his eyes, I cried, understanding that there were no words big enough for loss.

English is a language of conquest. I benefit from its richness, but I’m not exempt from its limitations. I am ‘that girl’ in your English classes, the one who is tired of talking about dead white dudes. But I’m still complicit with the system, reading nineteenth-century British literature to graduate.

Diversity in my high school and college English literature courses is too often reduced to a month, week, or day where the author of the book is seen as the narrator of the novel. The multiplicity of U.S. minority voices is palatably packaged into a singular representation for our consumption. I read Junot Díaz and now I understand not only the Dominican-American experience, but what it means to be Latina/o in America. Jhumpa Lahiri inspired me to study abroad in India. Sherman Alexie calls himself an Indian, so now it’s ok for me to call all Indians that, too. We will read Toni Morrison’s Beloved to understand the horrors of slavery, but we won’t watch her takedowns on white supremacy.

Even the English courses that analyze race and diasporas in meaningful ways are still limited by the time constraints of the semester. Reading Shakespeare is required, but reading Paolo Javier and Mónica de la Torre is extra credit. My Experimental Minority Writing class is cross-listed at the most difficult level, as a 400-level course in the Africana Studies, Latina/o Studies, and American Studies departments, but in my English department, it is listed as a 300-level. I am reminded of Orwellian democracy: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

— Monica Torres, “Majoring In English,” The Feminist Wire 3/29/13

[American Dream]

I have no love for America. I have no patriotism … I desire to see the government overthrown as speedily as possible and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments.

Frederick Douglas, declaimed in a lecture to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1847

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/25/ ... -drug-war/

In Order to Address Racism, We Must Confront the Drug War

by SHARDA SEKARAN

This past week has brought an intense time of reflection and critical self-examination for many Americans. In the wake of the George Zimmerman verdict, there have been emotionally-charged conversations about the way young black men are viewed in the U.S. and how valued their lives are. All the way up to President Obama we are witnessing soul-searching attempts to confront the complicated role of race in our culture. In a public address, President Obama said 35 years ago, he could have been Trayvon Martin and was routinely racially profiled before he became a senator.

Revealed throughout the Zimmerman trial, as Trayvon Martin’s character was scrutinized for signs of how threatened Zimmerman may have felt by him, was the uncomfortable truth that racism results in black men being commonly viewed as menacing simply for being human.

From clothing to intoxicants, what is normal and innocuous in another context becomes sinister when associated with black men and boys. Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie is a sign of millennial individuality and irreverence, whereas Trayvon’s hoodie is a sign of being a “wannabe gangster.” From Martha Stewart to Justin Bieber, marijuana is becoming increasingly socially acceptable. And although no one recommends marijuana use by teenagers, when was the last time someone made a case for justifiable homicide of a suburban white kid by noting trace amounts of THC found in their system, as was done in the case of Trayvon?

Being black means living a life saturated by double standards. When the skin you live in is viewed as inherently suspicious, anything you do can provoke fear and hostility. It takes a special effort to convince people of the humanity and worth of a young black man in a way that is not required for others. The day after the Zimmerman verdict, a friend and I went to see the film “Fruitvale Station,” a poignant and powerful account of the life of Oscar Grant, a young black man from Oakland, and the events leading up to his death at the hands of a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) officer in 2009.

Trayvon and Oscar were from opposite sides of the country and in many ways lived different lives but in the aftermath of their murders, as arguments were put forth for why they could have been seen as suspicious or potentially threatening, a history of involvement with drugs was cited. Drugs remain an enduring part the collection of social and historical biases commonly summoned to put the character of young black men under a microscope. The underlying assumption seems to be it is not so much a matter what you do but who you are.

From caffeine to nicotine to aspirin to alcohol, when was the last time most of us have experienced a truly “drug free” day in our lives? By and large, we regularly consume some sort of substance that alters how we feel or offers pleasure instead of pain. This is why drug prohibition has been such a pernicious tool for perpetuating bias, corruption and bigotry. When the power is granted to selectively criminalize behavior that everyone engages in, unequal applications of law and social judgment are inevitable. This is why civil rights advocate and academicMichelle Alexander calls the drug war “The New Jim Crow.”

Frank conversations about race at the national level are long overdue. If any good is come from the Trayvon Martin tragedy, hopefully it will include bringing this dialogue to the forefront. But we absolutely cannot talk about race without talking about the war on drugs. This failed social experiment not only leads to the disproportionate targeting, arrest, conviction and incarceration of people of color, despite equal rates of drug consumption across race, it fuels the underlying thread of judgment, stigma and marginalization that permeates how we value human life and enable acts of violence.


Sharda Sekaran is managing director of communications for the Drug Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org)

[American Dream]

Every nation has a creation myth, or origin myth, which is the story people are taught of how the nation came into being. Ours says the United States began with Columbus’s so-called “discovery" of America, continued with settlement by brave Pilgrims, won its independence from England with the American Revolution, and then expanded westward until it became the enormous, rich country you see today.

That is the origin myth. It omits three key facts about the birth and growth of the United States as a nation. Those facts demonstrate that White Supremacy is fundamental to the existence of this country.

A. The United States is a nation state created by military conquest in several stages. The first stage was the European seizure of the lands inhabited by indigenous peoples, which they called Turtle Island. Before the European invasion, there were between nine and eighteen million indigenous people in North America. By the end of the Indian Wars, there were about 250,000 in what is now called the United States, and about 123,000 in what is now Canada (source of these population figures from the book _The State of Native America_ ed. by M. Annette Jaimes, South End Press, 1992). That process must be called genocide, and it created the land base of this country. The elimination of indigenous peoples and seizure of their land was the first condition for its existence.

B. The United States could not have developed economically as a nation without enslaved African labor. When agriculture and industry began to grow in the colonial period, a tremendous labor shortage existed. Not enough white workers came from Europe and the European invaders could not put indigenous peoples to work in sufficient numbers. It was enslaved Africans who provided the labor force that made the growth of the United States possible.

That growth peaked from about 1800 to 1860, the period called the Market Revolution. During this period, the United States changed from being an agricultural/commercial economy to an industrial corporate economy. The development of banks, expansion of the credit system, protective tariffs, and new transportation systems all helped make this possible. But the key to the Market Revolution was the export of cotton, and this was made possible by slave labor.

C. The third major piece in the true story of the formation of the United States as a nation was the take-over of half of Mexico by war — today’s Southwest. This enabled the U.S. to expand to the Pacific, and thus open up huge trade with Asia — markets for export, goods to import and sell in the U.S. It also opened to the U.S. vast mineral wealth in Arizona, agricultural wealth in California, and vast new sources of cheap labor to build railroads and develop the economy.

The United States had already taken over the part of Mexico we call Texas in 1836, then made it a state in 1845. The following year, it invaded Mexico and seized its territory under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. A few years later, in 1853, the U.S. acquired a final chunk of Arizona from Mexico by threatening to renew the war. This completed the territorial boundaries of what is now the United States.

Those were the three foundation stones of the United States as a nation. One more key step was taken in 1898, with the takeover of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba by means of the Spanish-American War. Since then, all but Cuba have remained U.S. colonies or neo-colonies, providing new sources of wealth and military power for the United States. The 1898 take-over completed the phase of direct conquest and colonization, which had begun with the murderous theft of Native American lands five centuries before.

Many people in the United States hate to recognize these truths. They prefer the established origin myth. They could be called the Premise Keepers.

http://soaw.org/index.php?option=com_co ... cle&id=482

[American Dream]

http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2013/07/g ... _apps.html

Google Google Apps Apps



Perusing the ol' Hark! a Vagrant tumblr yesterday I came across this absolutely marvelous video by Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tic for a song called Google Google Apps Apps. I think you should watch it, because you'll enjoy it. It's about what happened when San Francisco filled up with young technologists making six figures, and the previous residents had to pack up their handbags and move somewhere cheaper. I could go into some depth about it but you don't need me to do that- this is a big middle finger painted pink and you can see it a mile away.

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/sex-work-sex- ... rxian-take

Sex as work and sex work: a marxian take



In this essay, Laura Agustín discusses among other things, sex in relationships as work and sex work as reproductive labour and a job.


An army colonel is about to start the morning briefing to his staff. While waiting for the coffee to be prepared, the colonel says he didn’t sleep much the night before because his wife had been a bit frisky. He asks everyone: How much of sex is ‘work’ and how much is ‘pleasure’? A Major votes 75-25% in favor of work. A Captain says 50-50%. A lieutenant responds with 25-75% in favor of pleasure, depending on how much he’s had to drink. There being no consensus, the colonel turns to the enlisted man in charge of making the coffee. What does he think? With no hesitation, the young soldier replies, ‘Sir, it has to be 100% pleasure.’ The surprised colonel asks why. ‘Well, sir, if there was any work involved, the officers would have me doing it for them.’

Perhaps because he is the youngest, the soldier considers only the pleasure that sex represents, while the older men know a lot more is going on. They may have a better grasp of the fact that sex is the work that puts in motion the machine of human reproduction. Biology and medical texts present the mechanical facts without any mention of possible ineffable experiences or feelings (pleasure, in other words), as sex is reduced to wiggly sperm fighting their way towards waiting eggs. The divide between the feelings and sensations involved and the cold facts is vast.

The officers probably also have in mind the work involved in keeping a marriage going, apart from questions of lust and satisfaction. They might say that sex between people who are in love is special (maybe even sacred), but they also know sex is part of the partnership of getting through life together and has to be considered pragmatically as well. Even people in love do not have identical physical and emotional needs, with the result that sex takes different forms and means more or less on different occasions.

This little story shows a few of the ways that sex can be considered work. When we say sex work nowadays the focus is immediately on commercial exchanges, but in this article I mean more than that and question our ability to distinguish clearly when sex involves work (as well as other things) and sex work (which involves all sorts of things). Most of the moral uproar surrounding prostitution and other forms of commercial sex asserts that the difference between good or virtuous sex and bad or harmful sex is obvious. Efforts to repress, condemn, punish and rescue women who sell sex rest on the claim that they occupy a place outside the norm and the community, can be clearly identified and therefore acted on by people who Know Better how they should live. To show this claim to be false discredits this neocolonialist project.

Loving, with and without sex

We live in a time when relationships based on romantic, sexual love occupy the pinnacle of a hierarchy of emotional values, in which it is supposed that romantic love is the best possible experience and that the sex people in love have is the best sex, in more ways than one. Romantic passion is considered meaningful, a way for two people to ‘become one’, an experience some believe heightened if they conceive a child. Other sexual traditions also strive to transcend ordinariness in sex (the mechanical, the frictional), for example Tantra, which distinguishes three separate purposes for sex: procreation, pleasure and liberation, the last culminating in losing the sense of self in cosmic consciousness. In the western romantic tradition, passion is conceived as involving a strong positive emotion toward a particular person that goes beyond the physical and is contrasted to lust, which is only physical.

It is, however, impossible to say exactly how we know which is which, and the young enlisted man in the opening story might well not understand the difference. Sex driven by surging or excess testosterone and sex as adolescent rebellion against repressive family values cannot be reduced to a mechanical activity bereft of emotion or meaning; rather, those kinds of sex often feel like ways of finding out and expressing who we are. And even when sex is used to show off in front of others, or to affirm one’s attractiveness and power to pull, ‘meaningless’ would seem to be the last thing it should be called. Here it is true that one person may not only lack passion but totally neglect another’s feelings and desires, but just as often this other person is engaged in the same pursuit. The point is that reductions like lust and love don’t go very far towards telling us what is going on when people have sex together. Moreover, while real passion is meant to be based on knowing someone long and intimately, a parallel story glorifies love at first sight, in which passion is instantly awakened – and this can occur as easily at a rave or pub as at the Taj Mahal.

Part of the mythology of love promises that loving couples will always want and enjoy sex together, unproblematically, freely and loyally. But most people know that couples are multi-faceted partnerships, sex together being only one facet, and that those involved very often tire of sex with each other. Although skeptics say today’s high divorce rate shows the love-myth is a lie, others say the problem is that lovers aren’t able or willing to do the work necessary to stay together and survive personal, economic and professional changes. Some of this work may well be sexual. In some partnerships where the spark has gone, partners grant each other the freedom to have sex with others, or pay others to spice up their own sex lives (as a couple or separately). This can take the form of a polyamorous project, with open contracts; as swinging, where couples play with others together; as polygamy or temporary marriage; as cheating or betrayal; or as paying for sex.

The sex contract

Even when love is involved, people may use sex in the hope of getting something in return. They may or may not be fully conscious of such motives as:

• I will have sex with you because I love you even if I am not in the mood myself

• I will have sex with you hoping you will feel well disposed toward me afterwards and give me something I want

• I will have sex with you because if I don’t you are liable to be unpleasant to me, our children, or my friends, or withhold something we want

In these situations, sex is felt to be and accepted as part of the relationship, backed up in classic marriage law by the concept of conjugal relations, spouses’ rights to them and the consequences of not providing them: abandonment, adultery, annulment, divorce. This can work the opposite way as well, as when a partner doesn’t want sex:

• I will not have sex with you, so you will have to do without or get it somewhere else

The partner wanting sex and not getting it at home now has to choose: do without and feel frustrated? call an old friend? ring for an escort? go to a pick-up bar? drive to a hooker stroll? visit a public toilet? buy an inflatable doll? fly to a third-world beach?

People of any gender identity can find themselves in this situation, where money may help resolve the situation, at least temporarily, and where more than one option may have to be tried. Tiring of partners is a universal experience, and research on women who pay local guides and beach boys on holidays suggests there is nothing inherently male about exchanging money for sex. That said, our societies are still patriarchal, women still take more responsibility for maintaining homes and children than men and men still have more disposable cash than women, making the overtly commercial options more viable for men than for others.

We don’t know how many people do what, but we know that many clients of sex workers say they are married (some happily, some not, the research is all about male clients). In testimonies about their motivations for paying for sex, men often cite a desire for variety or a way to cope with not getting enough sex or the kind of sex they want at home.

• I want to have sex with you but I also want it with someone else

This is the point in the sex contract many have trouble with, the question being Why? Why should someone with sex available at home (even good sex) also want it somewhere else? The assumption is, of course, that we all ought to want only one partner, because we all ought to want the kind of love that is loyal, passionate and monogamous. To say I love my wife and also I would like to have sex with others is to seem perverse, or greedy, and a lot of energy is spent railing against such people. However, there is nothing intrinsically better about monogamy than any other attitude to sex.

If saving marriages is a value, then more than one sex worker believes her role helps prevent break-ups, or at least allows spouses to blow off steam from difficult relationships. Workers mean not only the overtly sexual side of paid activities but also the emotional labour performed in listening to clients’ stories, bolstering their egos, teaching them sexual techniques, providing emotional advice. Rarely do sex workers position clients’ spouses as enemies or say they want to steal clients away from them; on the contrary, many see the triangular relationship – wife, husband, sex worker – as mutually sustaining. In this way sex workers believe they help reproduce the marital home and even improve it.

Sex as reproductive labour

In support of the idea that sex reproduces social life, one can say that people fortunate enough to experience satisfying sex feel fundamentally affirmed and renewed by it. In that sense, a worker providing sexual services does reproductive work. Paid sex work is a caring service when workers provide friend-like or therapist-like company and when they give a back rub – whether the caring is a performance or not. The person providing the caring services uses brain, emotions and body to make another person feel good:

• Leaning over to comfort a baby

• Leaning over to massage aching shoulders

• Leaning over to kiss a neck or forehead or chest

• Leaning over to suck a penis or breast

If the recipient perceives the contact as positive, a sense of well-being is produced that the brain registers, and the individual’s separateness is momentarily erased. These effects are not different simply because the so-called erogenous zones are involved rather than other parts of the body. In this sense, sex work, whether paid or not, reproduces fundamental social life.

The argument against sex work as reproductive labour is that sexual experiences, while sometimes temporarily rejuvenating, are neither always felt as positive nor essential to the individual’s continued functioning. Humans have to eat and keep our bodies and environments clean but we don’t have to have sex to survive: the well-being produced by sex is a luxury or extra. Sex feels as essential as food to a lot of people, and they may be very unhappy without it, but they can go on living.

Sex as a job

The variability of sexual experience makes it difficult to pin down which sex should properly be thought of as sex work. My own policy is to accept what individuals say. If someone tells me they experience selling sex as a job, I take their word for it. If, on the contrary, they say that it doesn’t feel like a job but something else, then I accept that. What does it mean to say it feels like a job? There are several possibilities:

• I organise myself to offer particular services for money that I define

• I take a job in someone else’s business where I control some aspects of what I do but not others

• I place myself in situations where others tell me what they are looking for and I adapt, negotiate, manipulate and perform – but it’s a job because I get money

There are other permutations, too, of course. All service jobs involve customer relations, which are eternally unpredictable. Some clients are able to specify exactly what services they want and make sure they are satisfied, but some cannot and may end up getting what the worker wants to provide. To imagine that the worker is always powerless because the client pays for time makes no sense, since all workers jockey for control in their jobs – of what happens when and how long it takes. This is a simple definition of human agency. And it’s important to remember that a very large proportion of sex work is spent on selling: the seduction and flirtation necessary to turn atmosphere, potentiality and possibility into an exchange of money for sex.

Furthermore, although we like to think about the two roles, salesperson and customer, as separate, in the sexual relation roles can be blurred. Theorists want to think about the worker doing something for the client or the client commanding the worker to act. But carrying out a command does not exclude doing it one’s own way, nor, for that matter, enjoyment, feelings of connectivity and the reproduction of self.

Non-partner sex in the home

Many would like to believe that non-commercial (or ‘real’) sex takes place in homes, while commercial sex lurks in seedy other places. However, sex outside the partnership easily takes place while one of the partners is not there. This can be sex that is ordered in and paid for or adulterous, promiscuous, play or non-monogamous sex. Sometimes the non-partner is considered ‘almost one of the family’ – a live-in maid or nanny. Other times the non-partner is someone who’s come to perform some other paid job – the proverbial milkman or plumber. There’s also sex in the home online, via webcam, or over the telephone, as well as images or objects that enhance a sexual experience in which no partner is necessary at all. The sex industry penetrates family residences in many ways and cannot be, by definition, the family’s Other.

Most commentary on how the sex industry is changing focuses on the Internet, where apart from more conventional business sites, sexual communities form and reform continuously. Social networking sites like Facebook provide spaces where the commercial, the aesthetic and the activist intersect and overlap, also complicating the traditional divide between selling and buying. Chat and instant messaging provide opportunities for people to experiment with sexual identities including commercial ones. Much of all this is unmeasurable, taking place on sites where all participants are mixed together, not sorted into categories of buyers and sellers. Statistics on the value of pornography sold on the Internet focus on sites with catalogues of products for sale, but the sphere of webcams, like peep shows of old, blurs the wobbly line between porn and prostitution.

Although, some (like my colleague Elizabeth Bernstein 2007) claim that sex workers offering girlfriend-like experiences are a manifestation of post-industrial life, I am not convinced. Sex worker testimonies from many periods reveal the complexity always waiting to happen when brief encounters are repeated, when clients seek again someone with whom they felt a bond as well as a sexual attraction. Nor am I convinced that the experiences of upper-class clients patronising courtesans, geishas or mistresses are inherently different from the socialising of working-class men and women in ‘treating’ cultures. Instead, it is clear that the lines between commercial and non-commercial sex have always been blurry, and that middle-class marriage is itself an example.

Scholars of sexual cultures won’t get far if they follow dogma that considers marriage to be separate and outside the realm of investigations of commercial sex. In societies where matchmaking and different sorts of arranged marriages and dowries are conventional, the link between payment and sex has been overt and normalised, while campaigners against both sex tourism and foreign-bride agencies are offended precisely because they see a money-exchange entering into what they believe should be ‘pure’ relationships. We have too much information now about non-family forms of love and commitment, non-committed forms of sex and non-sexual forms of love to hold on to these arbitrary, mythic divisions, which further oppressive ideas about sexually good and bad women. We know now that monogamy is not necessarily better, that paid sex can be affectionate, that loving couples can do without sex, that married love involves money and that sex involves work.

I see no postmodern crisis here. Some believe that the developed West was moving in a good direction after the Second World War, towards happier families and juster societies, and that neoliberalism is destroying that. But historical research shows that before the bourgeoisie’s advancement to the centre of European societies, with the concomitant focus on nuclear families and a particular version of moral respectability, loose, flexible arrangements vis-à-vis sex, family and sexuality were common in both upper- and working-class cultures (Agustín 2004) . In the long run it may turn out that 200 years of bourgeois ‘family values’ were a blip on the screen in human history.

Sex, equality and money

Understanding professional sex work has not been made easier by making ‘equality’ the standard for gender relations. We can only really know whether sexual experiences are equal if everyone looks and acts the same, which is not only impossible but repressive of diversity. In sexual relations, equality projects run into the problem of dissimilar bodies, different ways of exhibiting arousal and experiencing satisfaction, not to mention differences in cultural background and social status. Those who complain about other people’s perversity and deviance are accused in return of being boring adherents of repressive sex.

In terms of the work of sex, we run into a further difficulty vis-à-vis equality, the cliché that sees participants taking either an active or a passive role and identity. But many people, not just professional sex workers, know that the work of sex can mean allowing the other to take an active role and assuming a passive one as well as taking the active role or switching back and forth. Sometimes people do what they already know they like, and sometimes they experiment. Sometimes people don’t know what they want, or want to be surprised, or to lose control.

For some critics, the possession of money by clients gives them absolute power over workers and therefore means that equality is impossible. This attitude toward money is odd, given that we live in times when it is acceptable to pay for child and elderly care, for rape, alcohol and suicide counselling and for many other forms of consolation and caring. Those services are considered compatible with money but when it is exchanged for sex money is treated as a totally negative, contaminating force - this commodification uniquely terrible. Money is a fetish here despite the obvious fact that no body part is actually sold off in the commercial sex exchange.

Sex work and migrancy

In many places, migrant women and young men do most of the paid sex work, because: there are enormous structural inequalities in the world, because there are people everywhere willing to take the risk of travelling to work in other countries and because social networks, high technology and transportation make it widely feasible (Agustín 2002). Migrants take jobs that are available, accept lower pay and tolerate having fewer rights than first-class citizens because those are less important than simply getting ahead. Even those with qualifications for other jobs, whether as hairdressers or university professors, are glad to get jobs considered unprestigious by non-migrants. While many view migrants in low-prestige jobs as absolute victims too constrained by forces around them to have real agency, social gain or enjoyment, there are other ways to understand them (Agustín 2003).

Critics hold that migrants who work in private homes reproduce the social life of their all-powerful employers but accomplish little on their own behalf. This is strange, because low-prestige workers who are not migrants are acknowledged to gain a connection to society, knowledge of being a useful economic actor and more options because of having money.

“We look at migration as neither a degradation nor improvement . . . in women’s position, but as a restructuring of gender relations. This restructuring need not necessarily be expressed through a satisfactory professional life. It may take place through the assertion of autonomy in social life, through relations with family of origin, or through participating in networks and formal associations. The differential between earnings in the country of origin and the country of immigration may in itself create such an autonomy, even if the job in the receiving country is one of a live-in maid or prostitute” (Hefti 1997).

One of the great contradictions of capitalism is that even unfair, unwritten, ambiguous contracts can produce active subjects.

Ways forward

I have proposed the cultural study of commercial sex (Agustín 2005), in which scholars are free of the constraints of the traditional study of prostitution, where ideology and moralising about power, gender and money have long held primacy. Cultural study does not assume that we already know what any given sex-money exchange means but that meaning changes according to specific cultural context. This means we cannot assume there is a fundamental difference between commercial and non-commercial sex. Anthropologists studying non-western societies consistently reveal that money and sex exchanges exist on a continuum where feelings are also present, and historians reveal the same about the past (for example, Tabet 1987 and Peiss 1986).

Sex and work cannot be completely disentangled, as the officers knew and the enlisted man would some day find out.



Laura Agustín is the author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (Zed Books 2007) and recently participated in a BBC World Debate on Human Trafficking held in Luxor, Egypt. She has been studying sex work since the early 1990s and blogs several times a week at The Naked Anthropologist.

Originally published at The Commoner in their [ url= http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=144 ]Winter 2012 edition.

Works cited:

Agustín, Laura. 2005. The Cultural Study of Commercial Sex. Sexualities, Vol 8, No 5, pp 618-631.

_________2004. ‘At Home in the Street: Questioning the Desire to Help and Save.’ In Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity. E. Bernstein and L. Shaffner, eds., 67-82. New York: Routledge Perspectives on Gender.

_________2003. Sex, Gender and Migrations: Facing Up to Ambiguous Realities. Soundings, 23, 84-98.

_________2002. ‘Challenging Place: Leaving Home for Sex.’

Development, Society for International Development, Rome, Vol. 45.1, March, 110-16.

Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hefti, Anny Misa. 1997. ‘Globalisation and Migration.’ Paper presented at European Solidarity Conference on the Philippines, Zurich, 19-21 September.

Peiss, Kathy. 1986. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Tabet, Paola. 1987. ‘Du don au tarif. Les relations sexuelles impliquant compensation’. Les Temps Modernes, n° 490, 1-53.




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[American Dream]

Bruce Cockburn: Grim Travellers

[American Dream]

"The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."

-Preamble to the constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World

[American Dream]

http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/claude-cahun

Claude Cahun – Eloisa Aquino




Eloisa Aquino was born gay in São Paulo, Brazil. There, she was already making zines and working as a journalist on the side. She then moved to Canada to pursue a master’s in media studies at Concordia University, writing and thinking about the food of immigrants. Currently living in her adopted city of Montreal, she works as a translator and runs the micropress B&D Press.

The series of zines The Life and Times of Butch Dykes tells the stories of fantastic women who helped make the world a better place. Their strength resided not only in their extraordinary talent but also in their willingness to challenge and subvert oppressive societal norms. The word “butch” itself has a rich history. Once used to vilify, it has now been embraced as descriptor of masculinity for all genders – and as such it is used also as a compliment. But “butch” is still a controversial term that could potentially lead to awkward conversation.

[American Dream]

http://feldbrandon.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... o-failure/

3 Ways Organizing With Friends Can Lead to Failure
Posted: July 26, 2013

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Sitting among a group of college aged friends that all dress and talk in the same way is a recurring scene in activism and organizing groups around the world. In large part, organizing takes the form of a few people trying to rally their friends around a cause. These practices are counterproductive to creating welcoming organizing spaces.

I’ve been in all types: organizations that were started from friendships, groups of people that later became friends after working together (which is better), and most recently a group that I have a few friends in but most of the people I work with I just consider comrades. Meaning once in awhile we go out for beers after a meeting or action but socializing doesn’t go much beyond that. The latter of the three works best to promote a healthy organizational culture. This article will examine the reasons as to how leaning on our friends to take a role in our organizations can become problematic.

1. Organizations that have a membership based around a group of friends are unwelcoming. In friend groups a culture develops: inside jokes happen and friends start to reflect each other’s styles. Groups of friends tend to be homogeneous, belonging to a specific subculture. This is natural, because we want to be around people that validate our interests and beliefs. This means we often share the same tastes in music, sports, fashion, and so on. But our goal in creating broader social movements means that we not only have to look towards engaging people outside of our social sphere, but we also need to create welcoming spaces for people that we may have nothing in common with except the project that we’re all interested in. It’s incredibly difficult to create these spaces when organizations start as groups of friends. A newcomer interested in the project will quickly notice who is friends with who and who has influence over who. That new person will feel left out in realizing that influence in these friendships spills over and dominates the decision making process and power dynamics in the organization.

These types of organizations are identified with the social scene which its members make up. For example, there might be a group made up of solely of hipsters around the same age from a specific university, or solely of crust punks, or solely of diehard Seahawks fans. These groups are going to be unwelcoming to people who could never see themselves as being like those people.

2. Another problem is that friend drama spillover gets in the way of effective organizing. The health and culture of these friend/activist groups are very much linked to health of the friendships of the people involved. For example, friends date each other, they break up, and friends take sides. Organizing spaces that aren’t dominated by friend groups are less susceptible to friend drama spillover because others in the group are likely not to stand for the distraction. There is also less of a possibility that this will cause the friends who are involved in the conflict to leave the organization because the organization is perceived to exist outside of the friend sphere of the people involved.

3. Many of our friends who consider themselves politically minded are just not as serious about organizing as we are. Oftentimes, attendance at meetings is more motivated by the social aspect than an actual desire to make revolution. The motivating force behind recruiting our friends is the idea that by adding bodies to our group will somehow make us more successful, and that by leaning on these people to attend our meetings it will increase our groups capacity and power. This line of reasoning doesn’t work. A group filled with friends can often lead to unreliable members which puts pressure on the reliable organizers in the group to babysit. Babysitting leads to burnout, and burnout of the solid organizers within the group leads to group failure. It’s better to put zero effort into retaining these unreliable people. A group of three reliable people will function better and accomplish more than a group of five with two or three “reliables” and the rest being flakes.

This isn’t to say that people who have a lot going on in their life shouldn’t be able to participate and be involved. Levels of involvement will always vary and we should make space for people with families, illness, or other reasons that leave them with minimal time to contribute. Unreliable people are something different altogether; they are the people who say they will do something and repeatedly don’t follow through or require a phone call meeting reminder to even show up. It just so happens that often times these people happen to be the ones with the most time on their hands.

Why do friendship groups so often dominate our organizing? It’s because they are the people that we have the most access to. Going out and doing real outreach and engaging people that we don’t know and are different than us is scary at first. It takes work, so doing this in teams is a good way to alleviate some of this fear. The simplest thing we can do to change the friend activist group culture is to not lean on our friends to join our groups and actively seek out self-starting organizers who are interested in the projects we want to work on. Start with two or three people instead of five unreliables. You will have better results.

[American Dream]

http://juliosalgado83.tumblr.com/post/5 ... ulled-over

Getting Pulled Over

*This is an excerpt of a cover feature I wrote for the now defunct District Weekly magazine in Long Beach. It was published a couple of years ago while I was still in college and in the shadows. It was my first ever cover story but because I wasn’t out, it was credited to an anonymous writer.

This incident came to my mind after watching “Fruitvale Station." I couldn’t find the link to the original story, but found this draft in my old Yahoo e-mail. Anyways, I thought I’d share it with ya’lls….

My hands froze at the steering wheel.

“Just do what they say and don’t panic,” my dad had advised me in the past in preparation for this moment.

It was too late. I was panicking and freaking out.

“License and registration please,” the cop said.

I didn’t move. I just looked straight ahead and didn’t say a word.

“I said license and registration, young man,” he said again.

I finally opened my mouth and managed to say that I didn’t carry either.

When I bought that 1983 Chrystler Plymouth for a mere $500, I knew that scenario was bound to happen.

I always told myself that if a cop ever pulled me over I wouldn’t get scared and I would tell the truth- no matter what.

Now that it was happening my whole body went numb as I waited for the cop’s next move after my sudden revelation.

“Where are you going at 3 a.m.?” the cop asked.

“I’m on my way to work.”

“Do you have any form of identification?”

I pulled out my Mexican Consular ID and the cop walked to the patrol car. He came back and asked me to pull into a nearby McDonald’s parking lot.

“You know you can’t drive without a driver’s license, right?”

“I’m aware officer.”

“Then why don’t you have a driver’s license? You’re old enough.”

I hesitated to answer. I’d heard stories about police departments in other counties contacting immigration officers as soon as they caught undocumented immigrants driving without a license.

I looked at the cop. The young Caucasian man with the green eyes couldn’t be older than 25.

“I don’t have papers, sir,” I said, almost in a whisper. “If I don’t have papers, I can’t get a social security number. Without a social security number I can’t get a driver’s license.”

There was silence. Then he said something into his radio and in a few minutes, there were about four more patrol cars.

“You don’t mind if we search your car, do you?” the cop asked.

“Be my guest,” I replied.

Five Long Beach Police Department officers began to search my old bucket. I wasn’t sure what they were looking for.

They found something and the young cop with the green eyes changed in an instant, pulled his gun out and screamed, “Stay where you are and don’t move!”

I thought of my mother and how she would react at the sight of a cop pointing a gun at her son’s head.

“Is there a problem officer?” I asked, nearly crying. “Why are you pointing a gun at me?”

“Nevermind,” another officer screamed, “False alarm.”

The young cop lowered his gun and apologized. I held back my tears, I’d be damned if those men were to see me cry.

“You can’t drive your car,” the cop said. “Is there anyone you can call right now so they can give you a lift?”

It was almost 3:35 a.m. and I was late for work. I couldn’t call my dad. What if they asked him for a license?

I pretended to make a call in a public telephone outside McDonald’s.

The young cop asked if I needed a lift to my job. As much as the idea of being dropped off in a patrol car at my place of work sounded super cool, I couldn’t imagine sitting in the same vehicle as the man who’d just pointed a gun to my head and almost made me pee my pants.

As the cops got back into their cars and disappeared into the cold morning, I walked back to my car and looked at the mess of books and papers these men left behind.

I noticed that a bunch of T-pins, which I’d used for an art project, were all over the floor and in the driver’s seat.

Then I figured that one of the cops must have poked himself with one of the Tpins when they were searching my car and that’s why they freaked out.

I waited another twenty minutes before calling my dad. Luckily I didn’t lose my job for being almost an hour late.

After work, I went back to the parking lot to see if my car was still there.

It was there.

I pulled my keys out of my pocket and opened the car. The books, papers and Tpins were still there, as well as the memory of a gun pointed in my head.

That was the first time I’d ever seen a gun.

[American Dream]

http://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2013/07 ... ound-here/

Not News ‘Round Here



It’s “funny” how what’s news isn’t news at all. Instead, it’s more like the news catching up to the old story that people have long been experiencing for themselves on the ground. Take the media report this past weekend that “4 out of 5 Americans will experience poverty in their lifetimes.”

On the ground in mid-Michigan, the words “grapes of wrath” are like a remixed theme song underscoring the narratives of present-day pathos and nonhip(ster) irony. Here’s one paired vignette:

A couple pulls up at a yard sale — mostly consisting of free things — in a rusted vehicle; everything about them looks tattered, and one of them is pregnant with their third child. They had jobs in the Bay Area, and had rented the same place in San Francisco for five years, but had both lost their jobs and then lost their home. “We weren’t behind on the rent. But we put metal yard furniture on the porch, and the landlord said that wasn’t in lease, so we got evicted. I couldn’t find it in the lease, but it was probably our fault.” So they drove to Michigan because here they have family they can live with, and thus little or no rent — in a place with few or no jobs, at least ones that pay anything worth talking about. They try to load up their vehicle with rusted, tattered stuff from a huge free pile, and the back door gets stuck, despite the screw driver that they say usually opens it. While shoving things into a side door instead, something else breaks off inside their auto; they just shove harder, then drive off, their muffler rumbling in the distance.

Meanwhile, a local hustler of a realtor in a real estate market that’s “rebounding” from the low of home prices that largely cost less than most rusted cars (and still do!) explains how he has a bunch of “investors” from San Diego who have this idea of getting richer quick. He shakes his head, as if it’s a super bad idea, but also mentions proudly how he’s been featured recently in a major national newspaper as a top realtor in the United States — “and in mid-Michigan, no less!” These California investors have been buying up tons of good deals (read: foreclosures and other sad stories of loss) at dirt-cheap prices with the notion that they can somehow sell the houses and apartments almost instantly to some Michigander for double or triple or more, sans any improvements. “I don’t think they understand the difference between the San Diego and mid-Michigan real estate market.” The bought-and-not-yet-sold spaces sit silently empty, smelling musty and forgotten.

* * *

[American Dream]

Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism & Syndicalism
(Lucien Van Der Walt, Michael Schmitt)

[American Dream]

It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographing “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc. … ie. the black and Hispanic and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” –

I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on.

So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards … it’s just being poor– but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something.

—comment left on the Racialious blog post “Sustainable Food & Privilege: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class)