Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

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I Am God

Douglas Rushkoff

This article is excerpted from Life Inc., released by Random House.


While you might expect the marriage of progressive sociopolitical goals and the culture of spirituality to ground activism in ethics, it turns out that just the opposite is true. That’s because what we think of as “spirituality” today is not at all a departure from the narcissistic culture of consumption, but its truest expression. Consumer materialism and spirituality coevolved as ongoing reactions against the seemingly repressive institutions of both state and church.

The Puritans brought the late-Renaissance ideology of boundless frontiers with them to the new continent as Calvinism. While we associate the Puritan ethic with hard work, proper investment, and devotion to charity, all this insurance for one’s soul also promised a totally earthly gratification. Their ascetic renunciation was supposed to yield Puritans a material bounty, and their human prosperity in this world was likewise a sign of their spirit’s salvation in the next one. Not surprisingly, then, the brand of Protestantism that developed in America as corporations took hold in the mid- 1800s was already consonant with capitalism’s requirements for infinite growth and exploitation of material bounty.

John D. Rockefeller saw his monopolies as endowments from the Creator: “I believe the power to make money is a gift from God . . . to be developed to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.” Rockefeller treated his double- entry accounting ledgers as “sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotions.”

The department-store magnate John Wanamaker saw in American Protestantism an emphasis on how people behaved rather than what they believed. He saw no contradiction, but a complete synergy between the sacred and the worldly --between devotion and consumption. Wanamaker expanded the Bethany Mission Sunday School, funding concerts, classes, and decorations -- much the same kinds of innovations he brought to his department stores. He invited an evangelist preacher, Dwight Moody, to hold a revival meeting “tailored more than any that preceded it to the needs of business and professional people who wanted to be freed from the guilt of doing what they were doing.” Religion became a way to support capitalism and purge reflection. The poor should not be helped in any case, lest their immorality be rewarded. Books like Charles Wagner’s The Simple Life criticized the social programs we now associate with churches, because they involve the redistribution of wealth, which was a repudiation of the way God had given it all out. Instead, everyone should just avoid “pessimism” and “analysis,” and be “confident” and “hopeful.”



Developing parallel to all this were the first stirrings of what we could call the American spiritual movement, or “mind cure,” to which Wanamaker’s window dresser, L. Frank Baum, belonged. In the 1893 Parliament of Religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the great mind- cure healers were all brought together for the first time. These were the original practitioners of what we could call the “new age,” bringing together the values of consumerism with that of spiritual healing. Baum’s own guru, the theosophist Helene Blavatsky, was there, right alongside Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science) and Swami Vivekananda (the founder of the Vedanta Society). These spiritualists engaged in pretty esoteric practices. The Russian Blavatsky claimed that she could levitate, project herself out of her body, and produce physical objects out of thin air. Mary Baker Eddy healed ailing farm animals as a child, and later taught people how to heal one another through exposure to Christ Truth. Vivekananda introduced yoga to the West, by pairing it with his particularly American- friendly notion that “Jiva is Shiva” -- the individual is divine. By completely removing the traditional and institutional undertones from spirituality, they allowed their followers to embrace the here, the now, and, most important, the self as never before, democratizing happiness and, not coincidentally, condoning consumption as a form of making oneself whole.

The new cult of personal happiness through bootstrapping found its way into every arena, most famously into children’s literature, where it could take on mythic significance for successive generations. Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna, one of John Wanamaker’s favorite tomes and a testament of the simple- life philosophy, tells the story of a young orphan who sees gladness everywhere. Regardless of any hardship imaginable, the girl experiences happiness and soon infects others with her irrepressible sense of joy. See it, feel it, be it. The universe will follow. In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, we get theosophy through the lens of a window trimmer. He Americanizes the fairy tale, softening violence and misfortune with color and abundance. The Wizard in the Emerald City can provide anything to anyone, and especially to pure- hearted Dorothy as long as she believes. It is mind cure at its best: carpe diem. And it quickly became a foundation myth for the new spirituality of self.

Despite its antiauthoritarian and self-affirming style, the mind-cure movement didn’t offer a genuine alternative to American Protestantism, or a break from its manufactured individualism. Both movements focused on the salvation of the self -- one through grace, the other through positive thinking. Throughout the twentieth century, personal freedom would become the rallying cry of one counterculture or another, only serving to reinforce the very same individualism being promoted by central authorities and their propagandists. We were either individuals in thrall of the masquerade, or individuals in defiance of it. Corporatism was the end result in either case.

The mind-cure movements of Blavatsky and Eddy launched a self-as-source spirituality that dovetailed ever so neatly with the individualism promoted by corporate marketers and their psychology departments. Freud and his daughter Anna had led corporate psychologists to believe they could tame the irrational secret self by giving people symbols of power in the form of private houses, personal territory, and consumer goods. Another school of psychologists, taking their cue from Freud’s former student Wilhelm Reich, took the opposite approach -- or so they thought. Reich believed that the irrational inner self wasn’t dangerous unless it was repressed, and that the Freuds’ techniques did just this. These innermost impulses weren’t violent; they were sexual. They should be liberated, according to Reich, ideally through orgasm.

Anna Freud -- herself a virgin who had been analyzed by her father for practicing excessive masturbation -- was committed to her father’s legacy, and determined to take Reich down. She discredited his work and got him kicked out of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He was later treated as a madman and imprisoned. The court ordered that all his books and records be burned. The battle lines in the psych wars were drawn -- but both sides were ultimately fighting for the same thing.



By the 1960s, the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse had revived much of the spirit of Reich -- this time for an audience already dissatisfied with the spiritual vacuum offered by consumerism. He was the most vocal member of the Frankfurt School, and spoke frequently at student and antiwar protests. Marcuse blamed the Freudians -- as well as the government and corporate authorities who used their stultifying techniques -- for creating a world in which people were reduced to expressing their feelings and identities through mass- produced objects. He said the individual had been turned into a “one- dimensional man” -- conformist and repressed.

Marcuse became a hero to the real counterculture movement, and his words inspired the Weathermen, Vietnam War protests, and the Black Panthers. They saw consumerism as more than a way for corporations to make money; it was also a way to keep the masses docile while the government pursued an illegal war in Southeast Asia. So breaking free of the consumption- defined self was a prerequisite to becoming a conscious protester. As Linda Evans of the Weathermen explained, “We want to live a life that isn’t based on materialistic values, and yet the whole system of government and the economy of America is based on profit, on personal greed, and selfishness.” But as Stew Albert, a cofounder of the anti- Vietnam movement the Yippies, contended, the police state began in an individual person’s mind. People who sought to be engaged in political activism needed first to make themselves new and better people.

The counterculture and its psychologists again revived the spirit of Wilhelm Reich in the hopes of freeing people from the control of their own minds. To this end, in 1962 the Esalen Institute was founded on 127 acres of California coastline. The Institute hosted a wide range of workshops and lectures in an atmosphere of massage, hot tubs, and high- quality sex and drugs, all in the name of freeing people from repression. The Human Potential Movement -- Renaissance individualistic humanism updated for the twentieth century --began in an explosion of new therapies. Fritz Perls taught people how to kick and scream while George Leonard conducted “encounter sessions” between black and white radicals, and another with nuns from the Immaculate Heart Convent in Los Angeles -- a majority of whom discovered their sexuality and quit the order immediately afterward.



Underlying all of this therapy and liberation was a single premise: Esalen hero Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs.” The Brooklyn-born psychologist’s map for the individual’s journey to more liberated states of being held that people needed to fulfill their lower needs for food, shelter, and sex before they could work on higher ones such as self- esteem and confidence. At the very top of Maslow’s pyramidal chart sits the ultimate human state: “self- actualization.” For Maslow and his followers, the goal of the self- actualizer was autonomy, independent of culture, environment, or extrinsic satisfactions. Agency, personal creativity, and self- expression defined the actualized “self.”

Like Dorothy embarking down the yellow- brick road to self-fulfillment, thousands flocked to the hot tubs of Esalen to find themselves and self-actualize. Instead of annihilating the illusion of a self, as Buddha suggested, the self-centered spirituality of Esalen led to a celebration of self as the source of all experience. Change the way you see the world, and the world changes. Kind of. Instead of fueling people to do something about the world, as the Weathermen and Yippies had hoped, spirituality became a way of changing one’s own perspective, one’s own experience, and one’s own self. By pushing through to the other side of personal liberation, the descendants of Reich once again found self- adjustment the surest path to happiness. Anna Freud would have been proud. You are the problem, after all.

The self- improvement craze had begun. Instead of changing the world, people would learn to change themselves. Taking this as their central operating premise, the students of Fritz Perls, Aldous Huxley, and the other Esalen elders developed increasingly codified and process- driven methods of achieving self-actualization. David Bandler introduced the Esalen crowd to what he called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. Part hypnosis, part behavioral therapy, NLP sees the human organism as a set of learned neural patterns and experiences. By reframing one’s core beliefs, a person can relearn reality. The NLP practitioner is a kind of hypnotist who can help reprogram his patients by changing their “anchors,” “associations,” and “body language.”

This work trickled down both directly and indirectly to Werner Erhard and Tony Robbins, who democratized these self- actualization technologies even further through their workshops for EST (now the Landmark Forum) and Unleash the Power Within. Erhard based his seminars on an insight he had gained as a used-car salesman: people weren’t buying cars from him at all -- they were buying something else that they were simply projecting onto the car. When he was doing his sales job properly, he was just selling people back to themselves. So why not do this without the cars at all?



“The purpose of the EST training,” we were told when I took it as a college student in the early ’80s, “is to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself.” Get it? The point is not to work on the outward circumstances, but on the inner obstacles to experiencing life in a fundamentally different way. Even if the insight had some value for certain people, the benefits of the EST experience were soon outweighed by the tremendous obligation to “enlist” others in the program. Instructors insisted that the only way to “get it” was to bring others into the pyramid. And if one did “get it,” why wouldn’t one want to share it with friends and family?

Tony Robbins’s Unleash the Power Within seminars explicitly married self-improvement with wealth and power. By walking across hot coals, his seminar participants were supposedly demonstrating to themselves the power of mind over matter and, presumably, over money and other people. While the initial focus of this commercial form of NLP may be on self-hypnosis, one only needs as much of that as is necessary to justify the hypnosis of others. That’s why the focus of most NLP today is on applying it to sales, advertising, and even influencing jury selection and deliberation.

While the Yippies and Vietnam protesters were becoming self-actualized NLP programmers, Madison Avenue was retooling its campaigns to these new, highly independent consumers. Daniel Yankelovich, a leading market researcher, studied the apparently nonconformist people of the 1960s and 1970s, and realized that they weren’t anticonsumerist at all. They simply wanted products that expressed their individuality, their self- direction, their self-actualization. Luckily for American industry, mass production had developed to the point where Detroit could turn out a brand of car for every member of the family, in any number of psychedelics-influenced colors. The Stanford Research Institute hired Abraham Maslow to turn his hierarchy of needs into psychographic categories of American consumers, applicable to marketing.


It’s not that the self-help movement sold out. It was sold out to begin with. First imported from the East by mind-cure fans like L. Frank Baum to help rationalize the marketing of illusion as an ethical pursuit, the “religion of no-religion” was nothing more than a change in perspective. A new set of self- as- source glasses through which to see: Pollyanna’s.

Making money off the new spirituality is not a corruption of this movement’s core truths, but their realization. In that sense, the obligation of Landmark graduates to enlist their friends in multi-thousand-dollar courses really does confirm the teachings of Werner Erhard. In their logic, the refusal to do so indicates a weakness, an inability to master the energy of money, or a difficulty communicating with one’s friends from a place of power. The woman taking Km tonic or wearing magnetic jewelry passes it on to others more as a way of confirming her own belief in its efficacy than to help her friends. But it’s a win-win, because the friends will be helped, too. A win-win-win, in fact, because she’ll get to keep some of the profit as she passes the proceeds up to her supplier.

Every new self-help modality is an opportunity for a new pyramid of wealth-building as it is shared with successive groups of beneficiaries. The patient of a healer first pays to be healed, then pays even more to learn the technique and heal others. Finally, if he’s lucky, he can move to the top of the pyramid and charge still others to be healed themselves. Like residents at a teaching hospital, New Age practitioners “watch one, do one, teach one.” And at each successive place in the hierarchy, the practitioner has invested more time and money. No one who takes enough courses to become a certified reader of auras will be caught dead saying they don’t really exist. Besides, seeing is believing.

Getting past any guilt, shame, or ethics, today’s self-help practitioners no longer consider profit to be a happy side effect of their work, but its raison d’être. The Courage to Be Rich: Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance, by the TV wealth advisor and bestselling author Suze Orman, ties psychology, spirituality, and finances together into a single, one-size-fits-all approach to the universe that hinges on our relationship to cash. Esalen, the Omega Institute, and other spiritual retreat centers fill their catalogs with workshops by Malcolm Gladwell on “Being Fearless,” Jack Canfield on “Success Principles,” and, of course, everyone on The Secret.

Organized religion well understands the new competitive landscape, and offers its congregations just as much personal success as any self-improvement huckster. The televangelist Creflo Dollar (that’s his real name) blings the word to his followers: “Jesus is ready to put some money in your pocket. . . . You are not whole until you get your money. Amen.” Dollar may be the epitome of the “prosperity gospel,” which promotes the “total” enrichment of its followers. Megachurches are megacorporations, whose functioning and rhetoric both foster the culture and politics of the free market. Christian branding turns a religion based in charity and community into a personal relationship with Jesus -- a narcissistic faith mirroring the marketing framework on which it is now based. Megastar and multimillionaire televangelist Joel Osteen, “the smiling preacher,” prays for raises and bonuses for members of his congregation, and promises that people will find material success through faith. And keep finding it as long as they believe they will.

For it’s no longer good enough to make a lot of money. In a society of ever-improving selves, the individual must become a moneymaking entity all its own. As Chicken Soup pusher Canfield says, “The desire for increase is the fundamental. Expansion is the true nature of the universe. More. The soul is attempting to express itself in a higher way.” One can’t simply earn “enough” and then stop. Like the economy and the universe, a person’s wealth must grow. It’s only natural.

[blanc]

Wealth as a mark of holiness and poverty as a mark of lack of moral fibre is an old song, and so much easier for the acquisitive than that stuff about camels and needle eyes.

[American Dream]

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While you might expect the marriage of progressive sociopolitical goals and the culture of spirituality to ground activism in ethics, it turns out that just the opposite is true. That’s because what we think of as “spirituality” today is not at all a departure from the narcissistic culture of consumption, but its truest expression. Consumer materialism and spirituality coevolved as ongoing reactions against the seemingly repressive institutions of both state and church.

On this same general theme, see also:


New Age COINTELPRO and the Optimism Gestapo

by Jaye Beldo

Why has there not been a mass transformation of consciousness, culminating in peace on earth, as so many promised back in the early days of the New Age movement? The answer is that there may be a metaphysical COINTELPRO at work, all under the cover of love and light.

Most people remember COINTELPRO from the days of the Black Panthers, Yippies, and other revolutionary groups who threatened our government during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. Sensing that these groups might incite American citizens into radical action, the FBI sent in agents to agitate members of these various groups, often pitting them against each other through various forms of subterfuge, such as blackmail.

It appears that the CIA, FBI, and NSA are now sending their goons into the metaphysical marketplace, making sure that people who think they are aspiring to higher and positively transformative things are, in reality, only becoming more self-indulgent, disconnected, and confused.

The biggest influx of these agents occurred during the blossoming of the "human potential" movement in the early '70s, through such institutions as Esalen. Legions of people threw away their protest banners and followed their bliss during a time when directly addressing the socio-political problems of the day was imperative.

Since then, the emphasis on personal development—and more recently, the You Create Your Own Reality movement—a significant segment of the population has been brainwashed into disdaining all socio-political issues. For what better way to disempower people than to have them focus on their personal evolution at the expense of their families, communities, and the countries they live in?

Continues at: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15497&start=0

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/burning-man-w ... self-world’s-fair-page-down

Burning Man: A Working-Class, Do-It-Yourself World’s Fair

Chris Carlsson writes on the Burning Man festival for Processed World magazine.

by Chris Carlsson




“After a while, the festival’s emphasis on hedonism and overt displays of sexuality can seem like a hipster straitjacket and the overtones of New Age spirituality a gloss for a new type of vapid and self-congratulatory consumerism…. The essential point of Burning Man is not what it is now but what it suggests for the future, which is not just a new cultural form but the possibility of a new way of being, a kind of radical openness toward experience that maintains responsibility for community. Radical openness means no closure, perpetual process and transformation, and embracing paradox, contradiction, and uncomfortable states. Every instant becomes synchronistic, every contact a contact high.”
—Daniel Pinchbeck(1)

East of Sacramento on Interstate 80, I glance to my left as a pickup truck overtakes me. A blonde woman wearing devil’s horns is flashing me an electrifying smile, gesturing and mouthing: Are you going to Burning Man? I smile back, nod, and give her the thumb’s up. She pumps both arms triumphantly, and as they pull away, I’m left euphoric by the mysteriously powerful connection that passed from one metal box to another.

Hours later, having cleared the mighty Sierra Nevada not far removed from where starving Chinese coolies chiseled out the first transcontinental railroad tracks through howling blizzards, I passed the neon blandness of Reno’s unmajestic skyline, gassed up, and proceeded into the desolation of the Great Basin. Leaving the interstate behind, I entered the world of rural Nevada, Indian tacos and trailers scattered among riparian oases, separated by countless miles of arid but spectacular landscape. The road is crowded with trailers, buses, mid-sized sedans, usually carrying bicycles on the back, clearly all heading north to the playa. One dirt road leaves to the right, and under some rare shade a couple is busy spray painting bicycles light blue against the tawny, dusty ground.

The mountain range that marks the end of the state highway at the towns of Empire and Gerlach looms ahead. Dust clouds appear to the east, kicked up by arrivals preceding me. No sooner do I see them than my throat cracks, the taste of dust on my tongue. Twenty minutes later I’m crawling in bumper to bumper traffic completely immersed in gusting dust-filled winds, awaiting an inspection that rivals airport security as “Rangers” try to ferret out scofflaws and stowaways. License plates hail from New York, Illinois, Oregon, British Columbia, Minnesota, all points between. Newly legalized Black Rock City radio is pumping tunes into the car, interspersed with occasional warnings that impossibly well-hidden stowaways will not elude the Rangers.

Signs line the incoming roadway. “Barter is just another word for commerce.” “Don’t Trade it, Pay it Forward.” And dozens of others. After a brief search for the camp location, I park. The dust thickened on the car as I spent the next five days exclusively bicycling around Black Rock City.

Tuesday night: like a moth drawn to the light in the inky darkness of the desert, I pedal forward. Some kind of mad scientist has a keyboard hanging over his neck, attached to truck horns and bellows. As his fingers tickle the keys, flames shoot from tubes, pops and groans emerging from invisible holes and crevices. Three dozen cyclists surround the scene, smiling and pointing while background drum and bass machine add to the sound.

I take a ride in the 37-foot-high “Olivator,” a vertical chair ascent for a calm view of the lasers and neon lights chasing each other across the nighttime playa. A dozen pyrocycles ride by, each towing a trailer with an oil derrick on it, spouting flame at the top. Later I am nearly run over by a motorized float full of people peering out of a TV screen, labeled “Sony Tripatron”… Two bikes tow a three-piece percussion ensemble, bass and trap drum set… At the camp called Bollywood an unbelievable rock ‘n roll film from 1965 screens, Gumnaam or something like that… a blues band rocks the house at Hair of the Dog bar, a long-time installation at Black Rock City.

Another day, a dusty sun-soaked morning, early risers scurry about while others prepare to crash from the night’s endless party. Cycling about, I encounter on the playa a copy of Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead, spread open to a page on frictionless capitalism, awaiting the arrival of art cars to run over it. Returning to the city streets, I’m accosted by a guy with a bullhorn next to a late model SUV. On it a camping chair says “soccer mom.” He’s yelling, “If you love Burning Man, come and pee on this Soccer Mom’s SUV!”

One midweek evening we ride through gusting waves of dust to the “Man” to catch Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop-Shopping Revue; a big gospel chorus in gold lamé gowns swayed behind his syncopated sermonizing… it was funny and much more overtly political than the usual Burning Man fare. I particularly love their finale as they sing “We Ain’t Sponsored, we ain’t sponsored, we ain’t sponsored…”

One-Hour Scrutinizing

I went to Burning Man in 2003 as a self-designated “Official Scrutinizer,” with a brief questionnaire offering passersby heavy or light scrutiny. “Heavy scrutiny” meant a 45-minute audio interview, “light scrutiny” quickly scribbled answers to a dozen multiple choice questions. My “performance” led to twenty-four quality interviews and countless fantastic conversations. I wanted to explore my assumptions about class consciousness among participants, to find out who they were, what they did the rest of the year, how they contextualized the experience, etc.

Those I encountered filled a range of occupations: health educator/social worker, transportation planner, teacher, math professor (retired), testing and counselor of street kids, homeless youth study coordinator, welder/metal fabricator, software tester, human resources manager, environmental biochemist, teacher, freelance high tech research/marketing, handyman/auto mechanic, community development and technology consultant, computer repairman and apartment manager, teacher/ex-dot.com content provider, political organizer, immigration legal aide, veterinary assistant, house painter, builder, president marketing services/open source software company, business/technology consultant.

They covered a full age range, too: 23-30: seven; 32-40: seven; 41-50: five; 51-63: five. Of the thirteen women and eleven men I spoke with, the vast majority believed there is a ruling class (20), while their own class identification was confused at best: 7 middle class; 5 working class; 7 both; 3 neither; 2 didn’t know. Not surprisingly, nearly all of the respondents were white (though a smattering of people of color do attend). And due to my approach, the group was a self-selecting subset of the larger population, people drawn to the notion of “scrutiny,” analysis, thinking, reflection. It is difficult to generalize about 29,000 people, and perhaps not worth trying. Also, many have abandoned Burning Man over the years for a variety of reasons. Thus, this inquiry is not an attempt to confront all the criticisms or objections to Burning Man that are held.

In fact, I am not trying to defend the institution at all—for an institution is what it has become! My own attempt to interact with the organizers of Burning Man led to a puzzling and ultimately absurd exchange with a self-designated media committee representative going by the moniker ‘Brother John’. I thought to communicate my intentions to this committee as a courtesy. Much to my surprise my first email led to a response “rejecting” my “request,” misunderstanding my own past attendance, and admonishing me to come to the festival to just experience it. According to Brother John, after I’d soaked it up for a year I could make a proposal the committee might “approve.” I was shocked and wrote back my rejection of their authority. Brother John then indicated that he realized it was a relationship based on mutual agreement and they could not regulate me if I didn’t accept it, but that the Burning Man Media Committee would expect me to submit to them anything I wrote PRIOR to publication! I stopped myself from responding that this policy violated all journalistic autonomy and was more akin to the Pentagon’s approach to war coverage than the ostensible free community of Burning Man. I held my tongue and chose to ignore them from that time on.

Other complaints about the allocation of money to artists, the occasionally heavy-handed exercise of authority by drunken Black Rock City rangers, the airport security shakedown at the gates to catch stowaways, the ever-rising price of entry, etc., have been noted elsewhere. While I am aware of the many ways to criticize the failures of Burning Man, my own goal in attending, interviewing and writing was different, as you’ll see.

Commerce-free Gift Economy

“If Burning Man is a cult, it is above all a cult of transformation.” —Daniel Pinchbeck(2)
“… The campsite counters the isolation in which most of the people we met live year-round…” —Margaret Cerullo and Phyllis Ewen(3)

The people who come to Burning Man would never say—or even think—so, but clearly the vast majority are part of the sprawling American working class. When they’re not at BM they have to go to work, mostly living from paycheck to paycheck and on credit. Once a year, for fun, they go on an expedition to the desert along with 29,000 others. And what do they do? They “set up” on the blank dusty slate of the white, flat playa. Then they live in a densely populated city and have a totally urban experience. But ita familiar and strangely different city life. The lack of infrastructure beyond porta-potties and the semi-circular layout of Black Rock City leaves room for the harsh nature of the desert to impose itself. Commerce is formally excluded (with the notable exceptions of ice and the Center Camp café).

I asked my scrutinees how they felt about the commitment to a cash-free “gift economy.” Most people were genuinely enthusiastic. Several emphasized that it was a major reason for their coming. “…I am so attracted to Burning Man because for close to a week I can exist without ever having to spend money, without ever having to worry about people asking for money—it’s just eliminated.” For a school teacher it is a “mental vacation, a sense of relief,” while a female metal worker thought it “kind of hypocritical,” mostly because of the espresso sales at Center Camp. One computer geek claimed “I would love to live in the gift economy 365 days a year!” Some of the lower wage participants, a handyman and a veterinary assistant, were adamant: “That’s why I come here,” and “I think life should be like this, it’s the only way to live.” A Berkeley apartment manager, who also fixes computers, described it as “a natural human impulse that is given free reign and encouraged here. It’s just a normal thing that people want to do.”

The commerce-free environment is “imperative. I wouldn’t come here otherwise,” said a street counselor, while a retired human resources staffer emphasized “it’s the thing that inspired me and drew me to Burning Man… Doing something because you love to do it rather than because you have to do it is always refreshing and wonderful…” For one person the commerce-free environment was a means to break down class assumptions based on consumption patterns. “Here nobody cares how much money I make because I have all these other things to offer. Also the people who have a lot of money are able to see people who maybe have almost nothing—they scrimp and they save every single penny they have to come here—[while] it’s just like another vacation for the wealthy.”

Not everyone “buys” the story Burning Man tells itself: “I don’t think it really is a commerce-free environment... it doesn’t mean much to me to have this contrived, one-week gift economy. I see efforts to create alternatives, or to transform the world we live in, [get] co-opted and integrated by the dominant society. There is a gift economy that already exists, the living culture in people’s daily lives, and Burning Man is a co-optation of it, selling it back to people. It’s a product, like ethical consumerism in some ways…”

Thousands of “alternative” people go to the northern Nevada desert and build a miniature Las Vegas. Neon light and techno-music and amenities of urban night life are trucked along. A lot of people bring everything they want: the RV, the pavilion, the sinks, the astroturf, the refrigerators and everything else. They lack for nothing and could almost be in the suburbs. Ironically, people come here to escape, but re-create a version of the world they left behind, down to the carpet on the floor and the wetbar in the corner.

“Family camping embodies many anticapitalist yearnings and a dream of a different life... It is a dream in which there are no great inequalities and in which the market does not determine human relationships. Yet paradoxically, these preindustrial fantasies tie people more tightly into the market. Mass production and mass marketing have made family camping possible for working-class people. Families go further into debt in order to make the investment in camping equipment. The experience of nature is mediated by commodities.”
—Margaret Cerullo and Phyllis Ewen(4)

Burning Man is a countercultural expression of the working class yearnings described in the 1982 article above (read it again, replacing “family camping” with “Burning Man”). The fabled nudity, wild art, rave music, drugs and sex are all manifestations of the specific subcultures that attend, but underneath the spectacular behaviors are regular people. Once away from the stifling conformity of “normal life” (especially work life), people are free to experiment with costume, identity, and group behaviors in ways that are difficult at home. For most attendees, Burning Man is a different world subjectively.

One way to see Burning Man is as a Do-It-Yourself World’s Fair. The much-touted freeing of imagination it embodies leads to entertaining and inspiring art projects from sculpture and installation to fire-breathing dragons and galleons with crowded bars inside. Moreover, the preponderant ethic of do-it-yourself art-making begins to permeate most interactions, deepening human connections in ways that are usually absent in daily lives.

Art is alienated from everyday life by being commodified and separated, but Burning Man places art at the center of human activity. BM slips an exciting notion into the back of its participants’ minds: our greatest collective art project is living together. Every activity can be engaged artistically. One can find in anything a sense of aesthetic pleasure, communicative depth, and resonance with something true and passionate. The art of living becomes something tangible and reinforced by recurrent surprises of gift-giving and cooperation.

Burning Man is an enormous experiment in relearning to speak to each other directly, and reopening and using public spaces. It’s a hands-on, throats-on, tongues-on experience. You learn to meet strangers with an open heart. Participants practice trust in a practical context removed from “normal life.” Skill sharing, experimentation and appropriation of the techno-sphere for pleasure, edification and self-expression point to a deeper practical radicalization than what is usually attributed to Burning Man.

Like anything worth doing, Burning Man is fraught with contradictions. But within them are impulses and behaviors that connect to a wider social movement that exceeds the self-conceptions of its participants. Burning Man is a nascent attempt of the working class, not as a class per se, but as people who refuse to be mere workers, to recompose itself, and in so doing, to transcend class and the capitalist organization of life that stunt our humanity.

Class Dismissed?

“These are people without any well-integrated social place. Their lives are characterized by job instability, geographic mobility, divorce and remarriage, and distance from relatives… If “getting away from it all” represented an escape, it was an imperfect one… If it was an industrial nightmare they sought to escape, it was the products of industrial civilization that offered themselves to aid and abet their escape. If it was an escape from work and the clock they envisioned, they found the very meaning and experience of leisure defined and circumscribed by the images and rhythms and moral valuations of work.”
—Margaret Cerullo and Phyllis Ewen(5)

America is in denial about class. This society insists that there’s no such thing (and of course there’s no history either, only nostalgia, the Civil War and WWII). Ultimately, class is about power. Some people make decisions about the shape of our lives and then there’s the rest of us. We have to work to survive. If you have to work, you’re in the working class. You might be making $65K/yr. but you aren’t in control of what you do, how it’s shaped, what technologies are used, nothing. You may live paycheck to paycheck, but because you are “well paid,” and have been told you are “professional,” you don’t identify as a worker. Big deal, they’ve always had well-paid workers.

U.S. politics tends to gravitate around claims of what’s good or bad for the “middle class,” a group that ostensibly includes everyone but the bag ladies and street homeless on one side and the Leer-jetsetting super-rich on the other. The most confusing piece of this puzzle in the past decades has been the gradual disappearance of the working class, replaced in some politicians’ speeches by references to “working families,” or in the rhetoric of leftist organizers as “working people,” but defrocked of its status as a class. Many people in blue and white-collar jobs think of themselves as middle class, a self-affirming status maintained by shopping properly.

The term “class” has lost a great deal of meaning in the United States. Does this collapse of meaning correspond to a disappearance of referents? Are we living in a classless society? Of course not. But the conceptual tools required to understand and make sense of this society have been radically degraded. The key missing arrow in our empty quiver is the one that pierces class society, that explains the systemic dynamics that produce a small group of extremely wealthy at one pole, and an ever greater number of impoverished at the other. Between the extremes of untold wealth and absolute immiseration(6) most of us live quiet lives, coping as best we can with the cards we’re dealt.

In the U.S., where even the poorest 10% are wealthier than 2/3 of the world’s population,(7) decades of cold war, consumerist propaganda, and a balkanized humanities curriculum have atomized the population into market niches and an endless series of personal crises. The notion that the vast majority of us, who have nothing to sell but our labor and are consequently utterly dependent on wages and salaries for our survival, are part of a broad class of people sharing a fundamental relationship to power and wealth in this society, is an idea that has been overwhelmed and dismissed.

When I asked my interviewees if they identify with the label “middle class,” “working class,” neither or both, I got wonderfully complex responses. A 63-year-old retired math professor explained, “I’m what they used to call déclassé. My parents were working class. I raised myself up to the middle class, and now … University professors—people with an upper middle class income and a sub-lower class mentality!” A 34-year-old social worker from Australia called himself “polyglot: I grew up in a string of mining towns and worked as a miner, but my parents were university educated and so was I in a country where that’s rarer than here.” The female metal worker put it bluntly: “I would say working class, definitely, I don’t make enough money to be middle class.” A mid-20s teacher, on his way from the east to the northwest, explained, “I work. I don’t really think about [class] for me. I think about it for my parents. My mom was a nurse, my dad was a firefighter. We were middle America, right down the middle.” A clown, who survives in San Francisco as a veterinary assistant, reinforced the resistance I encountered to questions about class. “I try not to think about it much. Like what class I belong to... probably working poor... It’s only an issue when someone else makes it an issue.” An NGO staffer in Berkeley in her late-30s characterized her own ambivalence and downward mobility thusly: “Absolutely I’m a middle class person. My parents were both lawyers. I was born into the middle class in Berkeley... But I am definitely the American working class. I live paycheck to paycheck. I don’t own my home. I’m a wage slave…”

A 35-year-old Canadian making his first trip to Burning Man had one of the more unusual responses: “Neither. Because I cycle [between] jobs that pay ridiculously well [and those that don’t]. For the least amount of work I’ve gotten paid the highest wage and for the hardest work I’ve gotten shit wages. I’m not middle class because I’ve been upper class and I’ve been lower class. I was the plant manager, so I had about 150 employees underneath me. Right now I’m working as an industrial cleaner at a ready-to-eat plant that makes sausages. I hose everything down with high pressure, high-temperature water, apply some chemicals that eat away at protein and then rinse it off and sanitize it. Then government inspectors inspect it. When people say ‘what do you do?’ I still say I’m a biochemist… [As a plant manager] I sat down and thought ‘why am I always tired?’ It’s because I’m not doing what I want to do. Which led me to other questions: ‘Well, what is it I DO want to do?’ I don’t know. ‘Well, how do I find out what to do?’ They don’t teach ethics in school. They don’t teach rational thinking processes in school. They don’t teach you how to survive on your own. They teach you how to incorporate into the system, how to be a dependent.”

After finding out how people labeled themselves I asked what the word ‘class’ means to them, and how people fall into one or another class.

“I tend to think that there’s only two classes: there’s the people that have the levers of power and then there’s the rest of us... I come here for the chaos and spontaneity to purposefully forget that manner of thinking.”

“Class means primarily the degree of economic self-determination that you’re able to exercise.”

“I think if you know someone’s class, you won’t know anything about them... I think [class is] what gets us into trouble.”

“Class to me is a relationship, like capital is a relationship… it’s usefulness as an analytic category has been somewhat deflated. At the same time that I think it is still a very real thing.”

“Smash it. It’s ridiculous, it’s horrible, it puts value on very few things and it’s all run by the almighty dollar.”

“Class is a strata, it’s a way of distinguishing groups so you know what boundaries to set for yourself… I think that class distinction is more important as you go further along and get higher up because you stand to lose more.”

“One definition is you are born into or enter as a result of your actions. Another is a sense of upbringing and education. Or your current circumstances. For example, my father is a taxi driver and I live in a neighbourhood surrounded by factories, sweat-shops and prostitution. My last form of semi-regular income was as a labourer on construction sites, and I am regularly un/under-employed. Seemingly working class. However, I also went to a pretty prestigious high school, have a bachelors degree in fine arts and currently work as a community service provider, pretty middle class.”

“It means access to resources... it’s also a way of recognizing excellence... There’s some people that I really admire and look up to and I consider them to be ‘higher class’ in a way.”

“Class means being able to walk out of your wind-blown, sand-blown domicile without a shower in five days, looking fabulous! That is class… My idea of class has nothing to do with money. It has to do with education… blue collar is class. These people know their shit. But those who know, and those who can teach and those who can show and those who just are by example, that’s class, heavy class.”

“All class distinctions are subjective, there are no objective class classifications.”

“I don’t understand class distinctions personally. I don’t need money to do a lot of things, so I feel wealthy.”

“Well birth is a lot of it... I don’t get the class thing, by the way. I think part of it is about self-imposed limitations, and that’s really tragic.”

“Largely birth. Birth, then education.”

The prevailing amnesia and confusion results from a complex set of overlapping dynamics. “Globalization” is the all-purpose buzzword describing the redesign of work, the relocation of production within and without national borders, the rolling back of unions and the welfare state, and the rapid and extreme concentration of wealth and power. Another way of stating it is that since the ebbing of profits in the mid-1970s, capital has carried out a worldwide counterattack. The “just-in-time” pace of work (some call it “Toyota-ism”8), the redesign and redevelopment of cities, the computerization of production, the huge increase of incarceration, the unprecedented wave of human migration within and across borders, all have contributed to a growing isolation for individuals. Where once there were stable communities, neighborhoods, and familiar faces at workplaces, where one might work for decades, now people move from place to place and job to job, whipped by unrelenting insecurity and the threat of being left behind.

The End of Community—Long Live Community!

“Long working hours, the breakup of long-term personal associations, and, most important, the disappearance of women from neighborhoods during the day have accelerated the decline of civil society, the stuff of which the amenities of everyday life are made. In the 1980s and 1990s membership in voluntary organizations such as the Parent-Teachers’ Association, veterans’ groups, and social clubs declined but, perhaps more to the point, many of them lost activists, the people who kept the organizations together. Labor unions, whose membership erosion was as severe as it was disempowering, became more dependent on full-time employees to conduct organizing, political action, and other affairs as rank-and-file leaders disappeared into the recesses of the nonstop workplace. The cumulative effect of this transformation is the hollowing out of participation and democracy where it really counts, at the grass roots.”
—Stanley Aronowitz(9)

What we’ve lived through in the last 30 years is a radical decomposition of the working class. Of course two world wars wrought more destruction and unraveled societies more completely, but the reorganization of life and work since the late 1970s has broken down communities and ways of life that impeded profitability. Consequently, the world is now much more transient. Everywhere people are in motion in the greatest wave of human migration in history. Jobs have been exported, new people have arrived with different cultures, languages, memories and expectations. In the few places that are relatively stable, the influx rapidly alters labor markets, urban density, housing, transportation, pollution, and social tension. Even in the U.S., the chances of living at the same address for more than five years is fairly small. Then there’s the casualization of work, the rise of temporary employment, contract labor, and the breakdown of careers and permanent jobs. Nobody lasts at any given job longer than a few years anymore. And there is no future at a given job. Unless you are a nurse, doctor, or something like that, most people freelance. That fragmentary existence lacks a real sense of shared community, neighborhood, street life, or work life. The old ways of being in community have broken down.

This breakdown of communities and families is a result of the furious pace of life under contemporary capitalism. Conveniently for the needs of capital, it is precisely within those lost social networks that alternative knowledge and counter-narratives were kept alive and passed along. As the traditional communities of workplace and neighborhood have been ripped asunder by plant closings, urban redevelopment, and the new transience, the historical memories of communities that had organized and resisted unfettered exploitation in the past have nearly been lost too. Popular movements with memories of their own political power based on collective action, have diminished as the physical foundations have been kicked out from beneath them.

But this process is as old as capitalism itself. What we are living through is just the latest in a cycle that Italian theorists of the autonomist school have framed with the concept of “class composition.”(10) Since capital’s counterattack began in the mid-1970s, working class composition has been systematically altered, or “decomposed”. By the late 1960s movements across the planet had pushed for shortened working hours and increased pay, but crucially, had begun contesting the very definitions of life and work and the reasons why we live the way we do. The oil shock of 1973-74 was the first loud response of a world capitalist elite afraid of losing its power and determined to rein in an unruly working class by re-imposing austerity and fear of unemployment.(11) Historic wage highs were reached in the early 1970s in the U.S. and elsewhere. Since that time, working hours have been radically intensified and in the 1990s absolutely lengthened, while wages in real dollars have remained constant or diminished. In spite of an economy four times larger than it was in 1980 (as measured by the terribly inaccurate and misleading Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) in the early 21st century we are working more hours per year and working much harder, but life has not improved. Most people are just glad to have work and income in a world where “falling” is perceived as a real possibility, where one doesn’t have to look beyond the next street corner to see how abject life can be if you don’t stay in the good graces of ever-more demanding employers.

Burning Man promises its participants a reclaimed, revitalized, reborn sense of community. Upon arrival everyone is greeted with a hearty “welcome home” even if they’ve never been there before. I asked my scrutinees what the word ‘community’ means:

—“The opposite of feeling isolated and unsupported… a feeling of being able to lean on your neighbor.”

— “An investment looking for a payback.”

— “Where you can lean on and know your neighbors, you help each other out… You’re easy to control when you’re just one person with no strong community backing.”

— “Something that has its real and its ideal sides. The ideal is a lot of sharing and thoughtfulness and planning to make sure everyone’s ok. And the real one is knowing that that’s the best way to take it, but not always having the courage to do that.

— “The common ground constantly has to be renegotiated or re-evaluated… community here is interesting because of its temporariness… You can’t ever step outside how our societal relations are influenced by capitalism but you can certainly try, and I think Burning Man is a possibility.”

— “An environment, doing things and being… It’s a platform for playing with ideas about everyday life.”

— “All the parts dependent on each other, all working together, living and non-living.”

— “Shared purpose, shared values. Another type is based on geography, and is based on default… The most profound meaning is a sense of identity.”

— “Involvement, equality and respect, safety, love.”

— “Oh God. Such an overused word in the Bay Area, such a code word… drop the community in any speech and it shows that you’re a good person and that you value human interaction. It’s become the ‘motherhood and apple pie’ of the left... Community ideally is a group of people together whether by choice or circumstance, who feel a shared interest, a shared destiny, a shared responsibility... it’s so temporary and so tenuous [at Burning Man] and you can just leave if you want, which is not what real community is about. A real community, you can’t just pick up and go, it would matter if you left.”

The normal impulse in life is to cooperate and to do things together. The market and the capitalist economy seeks to break that. You are tacitly pressured to hold back so you can then sell to somebody, instead of sharing your skills and energy. Burning Man is a chance to experience unmediated cooperation. The deeper truth of living is somehow briefly tasted here as an extreme experience, but it’s actually quite normal. People seek community, to connect with each other in authentic ways, regardless of the contradictions inherent in the expensive Burning Man experience. BM provides a context to create trust, which leads people to envision other kinds of living and to share efforts to bring it about.

Making Technology Ours

One of the constituent elements of the emerging culture visible at Burning Man is a classically working class predisposition for tinkering, playing, innovating and doing things that are useful. And doing it with a real sense of rugged individualist independence: “I can fix that. I don’t need anybody to tell me how to do that, I can do it myself.” In spite of the individualist ethic, it’s always a collective process, handing down knowledge and techniques. Technology, gadgets, electronics—this is how a lot of Americans do art, albeit often unconsciously. At Burning Man people share machinery and electric light and urbanization in a heavily technological event. As one of the teachers I interviewed put it, “Everything here is technology, all these bikes, the flames, the domes, the pyramids, that’s all technology.” But people have very different ideas about technology, often independent of their own engagement with it.

An avid bicyclist, who got involved repairing bikes at her first Burning Man described herself as a technophobe. “When I hear ‘technology’ and ‘tinkerer’, I don’t relate that to fixing bikes for some reason.” Our biochemist, who is as high-tech as a person can be, explained, “Back in the ‘50s they said all this technology was going to save time. Well it didn’t. I’ve got less time than I would have even 20 years ago.”

A former software engineer hilariously characterized herself this way: “I’m pretty low-tech here, although I have a titanium computer, a color printer, a laminating machine and two 80 gig firewire drives and all the equipment. This is my low-tech year… I work, weld, and grind and I’m fabulously happy around tools… I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s great. I am not a trained mechanic. I am not a person who knows any of the crap that I’m doing. I love not having the idea behind me that says ‘no you can’t use this tool for that.’ I don’t know what you use this tool for, fuck it, this is what I’m doin’ with it!”

A social worker who does research on the street observed the same creative involvement: “One of the things I really like at BM is that you see this endless ‘we’re gonna take something and we’re gonna do something different with it, because nothing’s available that let’s us do this thing’. It’s one of the true joys and delights of being here.”

His colleague was repelled by the heavy dependence on fossil fuels at Burning Man: “…the whole idea of art cars that burn gasoline seems ridiculous. And these flamethrowers are all burning petroleum-based products. But on the other hand gasoline is also used in a lot of different, interesting, creative and beautiful ways… Obviously we couldn’t be out here in this godforsaken place without technology.”

The ability to appropriate the technosphere, make it part of you, make it do what you want, is an essential aspect of self-liberation. Gaining confidence by doing little things can lead to challenging and reshaping bigger things. The crucial part is how the material experience shapes one’s imagination. Burning Man reclaims technological know-how, withdraws it from market relations and reapplies it to activities and projects whose purpose is pleasure rather than profit. But more importantly, the same logic and practice of technological reappropriation potentially undergirds another life—a post-capitalist life. Radical change on a global scale depends on our cleverness and our skills—and our ability to use technologies in ways that enhance our humanity, our freedom, and are consistent with interdependence and ecological sanity.

Liberated Work vs. Useless Toil

“The historical emergence of a huge social surplus in industrially advanced capitalist societies, [permitted] a considerable fraction of the population to live outside the wage-labor system, at least for a substantial period of their adult lives. Many are marginals, hippies, freelance artists and writers, and graduate students who never enter the professional or academic workforces except as temporary, part-time workers. Rather than seeking normal, full-time employment in bureaucratic, commercial, or industrial workplaces they prefer to take jobs as office temps or find niches that do not require them to keep their nose to the grindstone, to show up to the job at an appointed hour, or to work for fifty weeks out of the year….”
—Stanley Aronowitz(12)

Burning Man grew out of a subculture of people who recognized that a life worth living takes place outside of wage-labor, in addition to or instead of paid work. Its growth demonstrates a hunger for social experiences outside of the “normal” economic constraints of earning, buying and selling, as a way to deepen and extend human life. For many, it’s also an opportunity to do good work, unmediated by the twisted goals of economic life.

The female metal worker captured a typical approach to survival: “I go through phases, I work for a while, and then it’ll get to the point where I can take some time off… My life just goes on an as-needed basis. When I can afford time then I take time, when I can’t afford time then I make the money so I can afford time later.”

The ex-dotcommer would like to survive as a cartoonist, but expressed a dark realism, typical of many in her generation: “I’m not sure if I can get money doing what really lights me up. So I would rather do something menial with my hands, or work in a café or something, to free up my creative energy to work on my own projects.”

The veterinary assistant/clown straddles the split life: “Money is something I need to survive, and work is something I need to do to have money to survive, and I have a job that I don’t hate. That’s not what I am, that’s part of what I am, but I’m a lot more complex than that.”

An NGO staffer who emailed his questionnaire from Vancouver emphasized his different subjective experience when “working” at Burning Man. “There’s a considerably higher level of fun with these engagements—not only because of the type of work, but also because the knowledge of the end result, the work’s temporality and the personal connections that I have with the work.”

The apartment manager who also fixes computers admitted, “The experience of Burning Man makes my ache greater in my life... I go home, and I’m in planned time and I’m running on clocks, and I don’t know how to stop that cycle... I understand what the people who make the rules are telling me I should do with this green paper, but I just don’t know how to translate it into something that is fun and satisfying. By contrast, when you get ready for the Burn you work your tailbone off. And because you’re creating something different and new and you’re challenging yourself, even though it’s work, it has this bonus attached. You’re doing something that’s going to promote your survival, it’s going to help other people, it’s going to be something really unique.”

The handyman/auto mechanic clearly wants out of normal economic life: “I personally hate working for money. If I could work and not have to take money, it would be great. I love what I do. If I could somehow pull it off and not have to accept money, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

Burning Man has a powerful effect on the imagination. It is not “real” liberation, but a temporary faux “escape” from the economy (that costs you hundreds of dollars). Nonetheless, it’s a real experiment, and a direct manifestation of yearning. People yearn to escape the limits of economic life, to be more than just “workers.” There aren’t many chances to experience a crowd of like-minded people, sharing a collective euphoria produced by artistic and technological self-activity. At Burning Man there is a taste of such a post-economic life, even if the sour aroma of the cash nexus is barely hidden beneath the playa.

Footnotes

1. “Heat of the Moment: The Art and Culture of Burning Man,” Artforum magazine, Nov. 2003
2. ibid.
3. “Having a Good Time”: The American Family Goes Camping, Radical America, Spring 1982, Vol. 16 #1-2
4. ibid.
5. ibid.
6. “The richest 1% of people in the world receive as much as the bottom 57%, or in other words less than 50 million of the richest people receive as much as the 2.7 billion poorest.” from World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, 1999, cited in After the New Economy by Doug Henwood, New Press (New York: 2003), p. 132.
7. Ibid.
8. This term is fleshed out thoroughly in Modern Times, Ancient Hours by Pietro Basso. Verso: London 2003
9. How Class Works: Power and Social Movements, (Yale University Press: 2003). p.220
10. A thorough treatment of this tendency is presented in Storming Heaven: Class composition and struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright, Pluto Press (London: 2002)
11. For a full analysis of the price of oil in combating working class militancy, first in the so-called First World, then turning the attack to the oil-producing workers themselves later, see Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992 by the Midnight Notes collective, Autonomedia (New York: 1992).
12. How Class Works: Power and Social Movements, op.cit. p. 59.

[American Dream]

http://joaquincienfuegos.blogspot.com/2 ... fiers.html

Punx is Gentrifiers

Breaking it down and getting a clue about your role in displacing others.

By Michelle Zenarosa


So you wanna start an infoshop? DIY space? Punk haus? Or maybe you just want to instigate ‘punk night’ at the local dive bar? Well let’s trace the usual steps taken to make this happen…

You probably don’t have much money, so you look towards an area that you can afford. You have found a sweet spot, close to all the local hotspots, and you fill out an application to rent. You look like a much better renter than the people who rented before you and the landlord doesn’t seem to care one way or another, so s/he hands you a lease and you couldn’t be more excited about how promising your new life is looking.

Fast forward a little bit. It’s a warm night in town and you’re out on the rooftop reflecting on what has happened since you set up shop. Suddenly you realize how much has changed in such a short time: a whole new set of affluent faces have moved into the neighborhood. A new yoga studio, an art gallery and an upscale pet boutique have even staked their territory down the street.

What has happened isn’t some new trend—it’s called gentrification. The European Commission’s building design and construction program describes it in more definite terms as the “unit-by-unit acquisition of the housing of low income residents, industrial or commercial property by high-income residents for art, cultural, fashion or other high-status use.”

Contrary to popular belief, gentrification it is not a normal market phenomenon. Displacement means force. It entails harassment and violence, especially of tenants. By initiating and/or contributing to gentrification, you create the potential for landlords to displace tenants.

The main problem with gentrification is displacement, but that’s not the only consequence. When poor residents get displaced it’s nearly impossible for them to find adequate housing because of the reduction in cheaper housing stock and the nonexistent attempt to re-house them in the richer suburbs.

Gentrification, in one form or another, has been displacing indigenous people for hundreds of years. There is a long, complex history of white folks claiming land as theirs whenever they see it fitting to their desires, profit and convenience. And it isn’t unique to just your region, it’s a dangerous wave that is happening everywhere and fast. But the good news is that it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the beginning of the end.


What You Need Is A Little R&R

No folks, I’m not talking about rest and relaxation. I’m talking about Responsibility & Resistance. The first step to countering the gentrification wave is taking responsibility. “But it’s not my fault,” you say? Regardless of the intention, the reality is that when gentrification occurs, even your mere presence contributes to the displacement of the indigenous residents-- not to mention the destruction of the spirit of the existing community. Just because you don’t have a working relationship with corporate scum developers, doesn’t mean you aren’t an active participant in gentrifying a neighborhood. Complacency and taking advantage of a poorer neighborhood at the expense of its residents is just as bad!

But don’t get discouraged—that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to move out ASAP. There are ways you can consciously resist becoming a gentrifier while continuing to live in the neighborhood you live in.


Turning Intention Into Action

Once you become aware of and accept your role in gentrifying a neighborhood and decide you want to do something about it, there is a vast number of ways you can prevent or at least minimize displacement.

Even though it might seem like you are fighting a huge invisible monster, don’t let it make you feel like you are powerless. There are concrete ways to combat gentrification before the wave hits. But it’s going to take some work. Here are some suggestions:

-Determine the needs of the community. Use your diy skills and flier! Hold a town forum and invite everyone to discuss options, concerns and needs.

-Identify potential areas of contention. This means properties like run-down, dilapidated or abandoned buildings that are usually deemed undesirable land. Developers often wait until these properties are dirt cheap so they can buy it and re-develop as expensive luxury condos. Other properties to look out for also include the other side of the spectrum: buildings being bought-out by large chains. If a Borders or Barnes & Noble is looking to buy out the local bookstore, organize to resist that change from occurring. Making sure native businesses can continue to afford rent in the neighborhood is another key part to the puzzle.

-Contact local government. After the community knows what it wants (i.e. community garden, recreation center, low-income housing) and there is available land, let your city councilmembers know what’s going on and steer them in the direction of the community.

-Brainstorm for financing strategies. Build alliances with nonprofit organizations, potential investors, and even landlords or private developers to create proactive financing tactics.

- Work with existing development proposals. If it looks like that huge condo complex is going to happen, try to minimize displacement by making sure that local government sets aside a percentage of the development for affordable housing, living wage jobs, parking and/or open space. You can even negotiate for monetary assistance to local nonprofit community organizations or for implementation of rent control policies.

And if you’re looking for less-intensive ways of resisting, get creative! Don’t forget about the neighborhood you live in when you’re arranging the next event at your house or infoshop. When you are consistently bringing outsiders into the mix and isolating yourselves from the actual community you are in, you are contributing to gentrification. Instead of having that political prisoner-writing event, maybe one night you can hold a puppet-making workshop for the neighborhood kids and have a parade or puppet show for the community. Or perhaps for the next vegan potluck you hold at your house, you can invite your neighbors too. The best way to counter gentrification is to keep the life and bonds of the existing community strong and alive. Instead of conflicting with one another, reinforce each other.

Of course every community has its own specific needs and unique cultural vitality and these are just some ways to approach gentrification and best time to start organizing is at the beginning of it.


The Revolution Is LOCAL

…And it needs to happen now, in our neighborhoods. There’s obviously more than one way to gentrify a neighborhood and punks aren’t always the catalysts. But it’s classic for a structure like an infoshop or a punk-affiliated cafe to be the first sign of imminent gentrification. Nevertheless, punks can and do have the means to break the cycle. After your neighborhood gets gentrified and you are priced out, think again before helping to gentrify yet another neighborhood. Now that you have the knowledge, don’t let it happen again. Make responsible and well thought-out decisions to make sure you can do the most to secure the community you will move into next. There is absolutely no reason why people who have worked so hard to build their lives and improve their neighborhoods should not be able to stay there.

[American Dream]

The portion of this book which is available online is full of good stuff:


New age capitalism: making money east of Eden

By Kimberly J. Lau

[American Dream]

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This one is very heavy with Theory but still may be of interest:


Vision and Viscosity in Goa's Psychedelic Trance Scene

[American Dream]

Anti-capitalist rumba rave in a Spanish bank




Spanish anti-capitalist activists Flo6x8 staged this epic flamenco/rumba flashmob at a branch of Santander.
Their excellent dance was too much for the bystanders, and soon 30 of the bank’s customers were dancing along.

[American Dream]

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Anarchism and the Black Revolution - Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

How the Capitalists Use Racism

The fate of the white working class has always been bound with the condition of Black workers. Going as far back as the American colonial period when Black labour was first imported into America, Black slaves and indentured servants have been oppressed right along with whites of the lower classes. But when European indentured servants joined with Blacks to rebel against their lot in the late 1600s, the propertied class decided to "free" them by giving them a special status as "whites" and thus a stake in the system of oppression.

Material incentives, as well as the newly elevated social status were used to ensure these lower classes' allegiance. This invention of the "white race" and racial slavery of the Africans went hand-in-glove, and is how the upper classes maintained order during the period of slavery. Even poor whites had aspirations of doing better, since their social mobility was ensured by the new system. This social mobility, however, was on the backs of the African slaves, who were super-exploited.

But the die had been cast for the dual-tier form of labour, which exploited the African, but also trapped white labour. When they sought to organise unions or for higher wages in the North or South, white labourers were slapped down by the rich, who used enslaved Black labour as their primary mode of production. The so-called "free" labour of the white worker did not stand a chance.

Although the Capitalists used the system of white skin privilege to great effect to divide the working class, the truth is that the Capitalists only favoured white workers to use them against their own interests, not because there was true "white" class unity. The Capitalists didn't want white labour united with Blacks against their rule and the system of exploitation of labour. The invention of the "white race" was a scam to facilitate this exploitation. White workers were bought off to allow their own wage slavery and the African's super-exploitation; they struck a deal with the devil, which has hampered all efforts at class unity for the last four centuries.

The continual subjugation of the masses depends on competition and internal disunity. As long as discrimination exists, and racial or ethnic minorities are oppressed, the entire working class is oppressed and weakened. This is so because the Capitalist class is able to use racism to drive down the wages of individual segments of the working class by inciting racial antagonism and forcing a fight for jobs and services. This division is a development that ultimately undercuts the living standards of all workers. Moreover, by pitting whites against Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, the Capitalist class is able to prevent workers from uniting against their common class enemy. As long as workers are fighting each other, Capitalist class rule is secure.

If an effective resistance is to be mounted against the current racist offensive of the Capitalist class, the utmost solidarity between workers of all races is essential The way to defeat the Capitalist strategy is for white workers to defend the democratic rights won by Blacks and other oppressed peoples after decades of hard struggle, and to fight to dismantle the system of white skin privilege. White workers should support and adopt the concrete demands of the Black movement, and should work to abolish the white identity entirely. These white workers should strive for multicultural unity, and should work with Black activists to build an anti-racist movement to challenge white supremacy. However, it is also very important to recognise the right of the Black movement to take an independent road in its own interests. That is what self-determination means.

Race and Class: the Combined Character of Black Oppression

Because of the way this nation has developed with the exploitation of African labour and the maintenance of an internal colony, Blacks and other non-white peoples are oppressed both as members of the working class and as a racial nationality. As Africans in America, they are a distinct people, hounded and segregated in U.S. society. By struggling for their human and civil rights they ultimately come into confrontation with the entire Capitalist system, not just individual racists or regions of the country. The truth soon becomes apparent: Blacks cannot get their freedom under this system because, based on historically uneven competition, Capitalist exploitation is inherently racist.

At this juncture the movement can go into the direction of revolutionary social change, or limit itself to winning reforms and democratic rights within the structure of Capitalism. The potential is there for either. In fact, the weakness of the 1960s Civil rights movement was that it allied itself with the liberals in the Democratic Party and settled for civil rights protective legislation, instead of pushing for social revolution. This self-policing by the leaders of the movement is an abject lesson about why the new movement has to be self-activated and not dependent on personalities and politicians.

But if such a movement does become a social revolutionary movement, it must ultimately unite its forces with similar movements like Gays, Women, radical workers and others who are in revolt against the system. For example, in the late 1960s the Black Liberation movement acted as a catalyst to spread revolutionary ideas and images, which brought forth the various opposition movements we see today. This is what we believe will happen again, although it is not enough to call for mindless "unity" as much of the white left does.

Because of the dual forms of oppression of non-white workers and the depth of social desperation it creates, Blacks workers will strike first, whether their potential allies are available to do so or not. This is self-determination and that is why it is necessary for oppressed workers to build independent movements to unite their own peoples first. This is why it is absolutely necessary for white workers to defend the democratic rights and gains of non-white workers. This self- activity of the oppressed masses, (such as the Black Liberation movement) is inherently revolutionary, and is an essential part of the social revolutionary process of the entire working class. These are not marginal issues; it cannot be downgraded or ignored by white workers if a revolutionary victory is to be had. It has to be recognised as a cardinal principle by all, that oppressed peoples have a right to self-determination, including the right to run their own organisations and liberation struggle. The victims of racism know best how to fight back against it.

Continues at: http://libcom.org/library/anarchism-bla ... enzo-ervin

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

What is wrong with capitalism?

Capitalism is theft. Capitalism is murder. Capitalism is poverty. Capitalism is starvation. Capitalism is indignity. These phrases are real. It sounds like rhetoric in the absence of an alternative, but the reality is that they are real. Tens of millions of people around the world die of starvation and preventable diseases every year – that’s murder. In the US there are 30 million people who live below the poverty line. There are seven million empty hotel rooms every night and there are seven million people who are living under bridges and out of boxes because they have no home. The numbers being the same is a coincidence but it is striking. Now think of the people a bit better off who have jobs. Compared to 100 years ago they have material wealth. But they have no dignity or control of their lives. They function by obeying and enduring boredom. Even if you look at the top of society they are just the rats who won the race. At its worst the system is horrific, at its best its grotesque. People so rich they make the kings and queens of old look like paupers.

http://www.zcommunications.org/michael- ... ael-albert

[seemslikeadream]

It just takes a beat
To turn it around

[American Dream]

http://katipunan09.wordpress.com/analys ... evolution/

Love and Revolution

By Nick Southall

[The following speech was presented to the socialist youth group Resistance national conference dinner, held in Thirroul, Australia, on April 24, 2010.]




Tonight I will be looking at love as a form of power, a form of work and a form of wealth, as a need, desire, intention and action, and I will be locating our ability to transform social relations in political acts of love.

Capitalism poisons our lives with a concentration on consumption, materialism and competition, undermining loving relationships. Yet, alongside the system’s violence, exploitation and oppression, there are continuing struggles about who has control over social relations, social cooperation and labour, over whether love is destroyed, suppressed, harnessed to strengthen capital or used to build and extend loving alternatives.

The development of non-capitalist projects requires more discussion about, and a renewed awareness of, love. While love is often absent from political discussions and analyses, it has long been an important component of revolutionary praxis. In 1911 Emma Goldman (1911) pointed out that love was “the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; … the defier of all laws, of all conventions; … the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny”. Still love is too rarely discussed as a political concept and many people feel unable to love because they do not know what love is.

Our use of the word “love” is often so generalised and unspecific as to severely interfere with an understanding of love (Peck: 1978, p. 107). Capitalist culture has purged political conceptions of love from language. Love has been corrupted by religious and romantic fantasies, it has been enclosed within the couple or the family, within narrow notions, as love of the same, love of those closest to you, love of a god, the race or the nation (Hardt and Negri: 2009).

The idea of making love is often restricted to our sexual encounters. Yet conceiving of love politically means that making love is about much more than sex. My current writing is concerned with a reinvention of the concept of love, not limited to the couple, the family or identities. Instead I consider love as an expansive social concept involving struggles for community, cooperation and mutual support. Rather than there being a clear definition of love, love struggles toward definition and the struggle over love as a political concept can make good on the heritage the concept has. Today there is a renewed interest in love amongst anti-capitalists and an upsurge of experiments to unleash our positive desires for connection, for more constructive and profound relationships. Anti-capitalist love does not unify as suggested in romanticism, marriage, or the love of a god. Love is not a fusion, the destruction of difference, or a striving for sameness. Rather love is a desire for collective development and fulfilment, a social process that satisfies the need for love at the same time as satisfying the desire to love.

For Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s “socialism of the twenty-first century” is based in love. According to Chavez (2005) love “is what rebellion is; it’s rebellion out of love for human beings. That is the cause, the cause of love: love for every woman, for every child, for every man”. Denouncing those who mobilise around the politics of hate, Chavez (in Suggett: 2009) has pointed out that “The revolutionary acts with love for human beings and for life, not hate”. The revolution in Venezuela is not about class hatred. And while force is needed to dismantle capitalism, this force should not be hateful, but the force of love. Acting with love recognises capitalists as “personifications of capital” and that it is capitalism, injustice and inequality that we should hate, not people. The hatred of individuals, rather than a hatred of their class power and its effects, stunts our love. Understanding that people can change, assists us all to change, to express our hatred for capitalism, by learning how to love.

We do not have to love. We choose to love.

And political forms of love are not spontaneous, they require organisation and training. Love is a gift produced for shared use through a variety of organisational forms that coordinate, organise and plan this sharing. All over the world people can and do resist isolation and estrangement and build togetherness and communities of struggle by confronting possessiveness, prejudice, violence and the repression of capitalist society. Many movements have understood and articulated their struggles as forms of love and learning to love has countered their isolation and connected them globally to others involved in struggle. Yet when we touch the hearts of others, we also touch their pain and sorrows.

Loving does involve vulnerability and love is often seen as a form of weakness.

However Karl Marx (in Fromm: 1960, p. 25) explained that love is a form of power; a power which produces more love. Many people understand that this productive power is a form of work. The recognition of love as work, points to the importance of class struggles to liberate ourselves from capital in order to organise our own labour, as love. There is a common perception that love tends to be “women’s work” and that women are more loving. “Females are more likely to be concerned with relationships, connection, and community than are males”, but this is not because women are inherently more loving than men, but because “they are encouraged to learn how to love” (hooks: 2003: xvii). Since patriarchy has always seen love as women’s work, it has degraded and devalued labours of love. And when caring labour is labour for capital it can be extremely alienating, as what is sold by the labourer and commanded by their client or boss is the worker’s ability to make and maintain human relationships. Feminist theory has drawn attention to the task of promoting the value of caring labour, kin work, nurturing, and maternal activities and the extension of the power of love to the whole of society. Struggles against gendered divisions of labour aim to share the work of love and break down distinctions between the work of love and other forms of work, so that all work can eventually become labours of love.

Feminism offers understandings of how patriarchal power relations permeate our lives and that patriarchy needs to be confronted; if we want to know love. Without feminist thinking and practice we lack the foundation to create loving bonds. But, according to bell hooks (2003: pages 37 & 57), although feminism has exposed how patriarchal notions of love are ideologies of domination, it has also, at times, encouraged women to “forget about love”. Women have been encouraged to repress their will to love and to give up on “their desire for men to embrace emotional growth and become more loving”. This is partly “because progressive men have often been unwilling to be just in their relationships with women”, communicating to women “a lack of genuine political solidarity” (hooks: 2003: pp. 65-66). A successful revolution requires male conversion to feminist thinking and practice, as genuine love can only emerge in contexts where people come together to challenge and change patriarchal praxis.

The recognition of the value of what is often called reproductive labour must acknowledge that this work is still mainly undertaken by women (Donaldson: 2006: pp. 10-11); although, the loving relationships between all of us are crucial to communal relations and the resilience of class social networks. The work of kinship, the maintenance of family and friendship networks and sociability more generally are sources of material, emotional and psychological support playing pivotal roles in nurturing class connections of mutual aid which constitute a non-capitalist political economy. These social networks of love are the basis of class organisation, both within capitalist workplaces and outside them, organising and sustaining class action, a vital part of our class power (Donaldson: 1991 & 2008).

Our love resists, refuses and exceeds notions that human advancement and human joy can be measured by the production and consumption of commodities, by increases in “gross domestic products”, or similar economic indicators. Only within non-capitalist social relations is love genuinely valued, not as an economic form of value, but as a quality of life, of the wellbeing of living things. Having spent much of my life as an unemployed activist I appreciate that the generation of alternative values “from below” includes the knowledge and understandings of the poor. It is often those who have few material possessions who appreciate the value of love as a form of shared wealth. A form of wealth that can help poor people lead meaningful, valuable and fulfilled lives.

During the last few years the power and value of poor people’s love has been especially evident in the revolutionary experiments of Latin America, where the spread of sharing and barter economies that organise production, distribution and exchange through cooperative and collaborative labour, is weaving networks of economic solidarity involving millions of people working for common benefit, rather than for profit. As a participant in the Venezuelan barter economy explains, this alternative economy “is not just the exchange of merchandise, it’s an exchange of values, of solidarity, of love” (Pineda in Pretel: 2007). Progressive social movements have always relied on alternative relations of production, distribution and exchange in order to build the gift economy of our class. This economy replaces the yearning of individuals for commodities, creating collective support for needs and desires with the shared expectation that fulfilment is a communal necessity.

Loving relationships have been undermined through the development of property as the basis of human relations, and desires for love are often channelled into capitalist production and accumulation. Capital relies on the sociality of labour, on loving relations, while simultaneously using violence and repression to impose commodification and exploitation. Capital erodes the social fabric of love, violently destroying social relationships by incessantly producing poverty, hunger, war and the destruction of people, communities and the environment. This systemic assault atomises and separates people along the lines of gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, religion, nationality and culture. At the same time capital has developed sophisticated strategies for commodifying, managing and exploiting love.

As capitalism seeks to subsume every part of our lives, love has become an important target. A recent Australian Management publication proposes “serious conversations about love” to galvanise management and workers by encouraging them “to love their work, love their co-workers and love themselves” (Barker & Payne: 2006: pages viii & 7). Human resource management techniques utilise peoples’ love for each other to build “team work”, “team solidarity” and work morale, endeavouring to totally integrate peoples’ social relationships into capitalist production. Companies and institutions teach workers to suppress their own feelings and to police those of other workers, turning peoples’ capacity for love into an instrument of accumulation, a resource and a power, for capital. In his book,Lovemarks, Kevin Roberts (2004: p. 36), an advertising CEO, argues that because “the social fabric is spread more thinly than ever. People are looking for new, emotional connections. They are looking for what they can love.” Roberts and the companies that employ him believe that if consumers can be convinced that corporations are interested in love and that they care about them, people will reciprocate and love corporations and their products.

As capitalist culture tries to divide and separate us, it represents love as centred on ownership and control, teaching people to treat each other as possessions, commodities and competitors. The use of love by the mass media and consumer culture to sell commodities makes it appear hollow, as people are encouraged to find emotional satisfaction in private experiences linked to consumption. Capitalism strips love of its best aspects and repackages it as a set of product choices. Advertising “turns lovers into things and things into lovers” not only promising that if you “buy this you will be loved” but “buy this and it will love you” (Kilbourne: 1999: pages 27 & 81).

I was in town before Valentine’s Day and wherever I went there were red hearts and the word “love” plastered all over displays of chocolates, perfume, DVDs and jewellery. Love seemed to be on sale everywhere. But love is not a Hallmark advertising gimmick and you can’t buy love. Nonetheless corporations sell many products by using love. Just as consumers are seduced by products that are made to appear as if they come from nowhere — their production through the exploitation of labour, is hidden away when they are presented in the market — people are also seduced by polished images of desirable people in desirable situations where exploitation and oppression is also hidden. On one hand we are swamped by images of perfect couples and fed the idea that someone will come and save us and make everything all right. On the other, we are constantly reminded that relationships have a use-by date. Capitalism uses built-in obsolescence, a short-term limit on the use of commodities, to boost consumption and profits. In the same way, people’s personalities and relationships are increasingly marketed and perceived as another fashion accessory with a short-term use value based on self-gratification, performance and competition. Shallow relationships based on self-interest are regularly portrayed as the norm and as a natural result of the coming together of self-absorbed and greedy individuals, with the repressive and exploitative nature of the relationships condoned, hidden or denied.

However, the distortions imposed on love by the capitalist system shouldn’t prevent our revolution from being loving in character and proclaiming the importance of love. Che Guevara (1965: p. 211) explained that “the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love”. Yet, according to Che revolutionaries must make an ideal of love for the people. “They cannot descend, with small doses of daily affection, to the level where ordinary people put their love into practice.” Che saw revolutionaries as a breed apart, different from the ordinary population. He laments that revolutionaries have to sacrifice their friendships and relationships with wives and children for the revolution.

Many of us know well, this dilemma, the stresses of putting our families, friendships and other relationships under strain as we dedicate ourselves to the cause. Yet today there is a growing understanding that these relationships are in fact vital to revolutionary struggles. Progressive social movements generate different types of interpersonal relationships through the creation of caring spaces, openness to diversity and the organisation of communal activity.They bring people together in organisations, protests, meetings and conferences such as this, realising a desire that is at the core of anti-capitalist visions; the desire to locate ourselves in community, to make our struggles a shared effort, to experience the tangible power and value of our connections with each other (bell hooks: 2003: xviii).

Militant women’s and queer liberation movements are part of a widespread understanding that the personal is political and that opposition to capitalism entails both an individual and collective rupture from capital; that revolutionising the world involves a production of ourselves and an ability to transform society; that helping others is not in tension with making our own lives better. To make revolution, we don’t need to give up anything of real value, we need to gain more valuable, rewarding and joyful lives (Hardt: 2004d).

Political conceptions of love assist in the clarification of our class power and how it flows from the strength of our social relationships opposing and negating capitalism. The recognition that love exists because of the labour of our class, and that it can be extended, helps us to compose social relations alternative to those of capital. Our class continuously organises ways to avoid, resist and subvert efforts to capture and control us that can be hard to recognise yet exist in the capacities we exercise in our daily lives. Love is crucial for powerful class struggle, generating the solidarity, support, connections and the common activity that builds the class. These loving social relations make our lives worth living despite, against and beyond capitalism, not just after it has ended.

The celebration of our love is today making politics more fun. The construction of alternative loving relationships involves such things as the mock marriages organised recently by the Wollongong Equal Love group. Or carnival festivities like the Love Parade in Germany that attracts over one and a half million people, or the Sydney Mardi Gras whose theme in 2007 was “defending love”. Mardi Gras is flamboyantly optimistic, acting on people’s positive and creative desires, supporting a diversity of loving practices, relationships and connections. By doing so, the queer community has claimed a significant space as its own, for joy and a sense of empowerment, that is secure enough to be opened up to all while affirming a politics that celebrates love, difference and having fun with each other. Even though Mardi Gras now lacks some of its previous radical politics and is becoming more commodified, many of those taking part continue to display and act on an understanding that what is urgently needed today is the development of a more loving world.

Humanity’s survival hinges on the preservation and extension of loving relationships that nurture the biosphere, people, flora, fauna, land, water, air, life. Much of our struggle is now concerned with protecting and embracing biodiversity and the creation of loving environments, focused equally on humans and the non-human world in a dynamic of interdependence, care and mutual transformation. A communal culture of sharing and caring can rebuilddisintegrating communities, habitats and environments, weaving supportive networks and movements. These networks and movements are produced out of recognition that the widespread hunger and search for love, for meaningful connections to ourselves, to each other, to life, cannot be met by capital and its state forms. This understanding promotes our power to overcome the lack of love, to transform and rethink the relations between all forms of life, rather than just by reforming a failed system of lovelessness.

Ignorance of how to love is a serious obstacle to revolutionary change. Yet love is something we learn by doing and we have learnt from previous struggles, creating a firmer basis for revolution, a foundation of loving experiences, lessons and successes. But wherever we organise loving alternatives, they come under attack from capital, and the difficulties of defending love in isolation make more apparent the urgency of deeper and more widespread revolutionary change. Our optimism and hope for the future can affirm the importance of love to a world that is different, where competition isn’t the nature of human relations, where our desires are real. Appreciating the value of love highlights the importance of moving beyond an appeal to individualistic yearnings for economic wealth or power towards collective desires for deeper and richer social connections, desires to share, to act in solidarity, to organise better lives together.

Our loving resistance is at the heart of the crisis of capitalism, because love is a demand that capitalism cannot provide, instead love is created by struggling against capitalism. Love is a gift produced by our labour; it is our wealth beyond the measures of capital, our class’s invincible power. The work of love is shared work, work that is vital to freedom, revolution and the creation of non-capitalist values.

Today there is a global movement to promote love as a power for revolutionary social development and change. And together we are already part of an alternative community, producing non-capitalist society, as a revolution of love.



[Nick Southall is a long-time community activist in Wollongong. He has been involved in a wide variety of political, labour movement, peace and environmental struggles. He is currently completing a Phd. at the University of Wollongong investigating contemporary communist theory and practice.. The socialist youth group Resistance is an affiliate of the Socialist Alliance of Australia.

[American Dream]

End the Drug War: Face the New Jim Crow (Video)

Laura Flanders, GRITtv:

"The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs. The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap's become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old 'War on Drugs' public enemy number one for the nation's oldest civil rights organization? Well here's why: it's not extraneous - it's central: the war on drugs is the engine of 21st century discrimination - an engine that has brought Jim Crow into the age of Barack Obama. Author Michelle Alexander lays out the statistics - and the stories - of 21st Century Jim Crow in her ought-to-blow-your-socks off book: 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness.'"

Watch the Video

[American Dream]

April 30, 2007

Anti-Capitalism in Five Minutes or Less

by Robert Jensen


We know that capitalism is not just the most sensible way to organize an economy but is now the only possible way to organize an economy. We know that dissenters to this conventional wisdom can, and should, be ignored. There's no longer even any need to persecute such heretics; they are obviously irrelevant.

How do we know all this? Because we are told so, relentlessly -- typically by those who have the most to gain from such a claim, most notably those in the business world and their functionaries and apologists in the schools, universities, mass media, and mainstream politics. Capitalism is not a choice, but rather simply is, like a state of nature. Maybe not like a state of nature, but the state of nature. To contest capitalism these days is like arguing against the air that we breathe. Arguing against capitalism, we're told, is simply crazy.

We are told, over and over, that capitalism is not just the system we have, but the only system we can ever have. Yet for many, something nags at us about such a claim. Could this really be the only option? We're told we shouldn't even think about such things. But we can't help thinking -- is this really the "end of history," in the sense that big thinkers have used that phrase to signal the final victory of global capitalism? If this is the end of history in that sense, we wonder, can the actual end of the planet far behind?

We wonder, we fret, and these thoughts nag at us -- for good reason. Capitalism -- or, more accurately, the predatory corporate capitalism that defines and dominates our lives -- will be our death if we don't escape it. Crucial to progressive politics is finding the language to articulate that reality, not in outdated dogma that alienates but in plain language that resonates with people. We should be searching for ways to explain to co-workers in water-cooler conversations -- radical politics in five minutes or less -- why we must abandon predatory corporate capitalism. If we don't, we may well be facing the end times, and such an end will bring rupture not rapture.

Here's my shot at the language for this argument.

Capitalism is admittedly an incredibly productive system that has created a flood of goods unlike anything the world has ever seen. It also is a system that is fundamentally (1) inhuman, (2) anti-democratic, and (3) unsustainable. Capitalism has given those of us in the First World lots of stuff (most of it of marginal or questionable value) in exchange for our souls, our hope for progressive politics, and the possibility of a decent future for children.

In short, either we change or we die -- spiritually, politically, literally.

1. Capitalism is inhuman There is a theory behind contemporary capitalism. We're told that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, an economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behavior if we are to thrive economically.

Are we greedy and self-interested? Of course. At least I am, sometimes. But we also just as obviously are capable of compassion and selflessness. We certainly can act competitively and aggressively, but we also have the capacity for solidarity and cooperation. In short, human nature is wide-ranging. Our actions are certainly rooted in our nature, but all we really know about that nature is that it is widely variable. In situations where compassion and solidarity are the norm, we tend to act that way. In situations where competitiveness and aggression are rewarded, most people tend toward such behavior.

Why is it that we must choose an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the most inhuman? Because, we're told, that's just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we're told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest. So, the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behavior, people often act that way. Doesn't that seem just a bit circular?

2. Capitalism is anti-democratic This one is easy. Capitalism is a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. Is there any historical example to the contrary?

For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary United States, everyone understands that the wealthy dictates the basic outlines of the public policies that are acceptable to the vast majority of elected officials. People can and do resist, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate. Is this any way to run a democracy?

If we understand democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it's clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Let's make this concrete. In our system, we believe that regular elections with the one-person/one-vote rule, along with protections for freedom of speech and association, guarantee political equality. When I go to the polls, I have one vote. When Bill Gates goes the polls, he has one vote. Bill and I both can speak freely and associate with others for political purposes. Therefore, as equal citizens in our fine democracy, Bill and I have equal opportunities for political power. Right?

3. Capitalism is unsustainable This one is even easier. Capitalism is a system based on the idea of unlimited growth. The last time I checked, this is a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this one. Perhaps we will be hopping to a new planet soon. Or perhaps, because we need to figure out ways to cope with these physical limits, we will invent ever-more complex technologies to transcend those limits.

Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don't solve problems. They tend, in fact, to cause more problems. Those problems seem to be piling up.

Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it's the one in which we are stuck. It's the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air.

A tale of two acronyms: TGIF and TINA Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's famous response to a question about challenges to capitalism was TINA -- There Is No Alternative. If there is no alternative, anyone who questions capitalism is crazy.

Here's another, more common, acronym about life under a predatory corporate capitalism: TGIF -- Thank God It's Friday. It's a phrase that communicates a sad reality for many working in this economy -- the jobs we do are not rewarding, not enjoyable, and fundamentally not worth doing. We do them to survive. Then on Friday we go out and get drunk to forget about that reality, hoping we can find something during the weekend that makes it possible on Monday to, in the words of one songwriter, "get up and do it again."

Remember, an economic system doesn't just produce goods. It produces people as well. Our experience of work shapes us. Our experience of consuming those goods shapes us. Increasingly, we are a nation of unhappy people consuming miles of aisles of cheap consumer goods, hoping to dull the pain of unfulfilling work. Is this who we want to be?

We're told TINA in a TGIF world. Doesn't that seem a bit strange? Is there really no alternative to such a world? Of course there is. Anything that is the product of human choices can be chosen differently. We don't need to spell out a new system in all its specifics to realize there always are alternatives. We can encourage the existing institutions that provide a site of resistance (such as labor unions) while we experiment with new forms (such as local cooperatives). But the first step is calling out the system for what it is, without guarantees of what's to come.

Home and abroad In the First World, we struggle with this alienation and fear. We often don't like the values of the world around us; we often don't like the people we've become; we often are afraid of what's to come of us. But in the First World, most of us eat regularly. That's not the case everywhere. Let's focus not only on the conditions we face within a predatory corporate capitalist system, living in the most affluent country in the history of the world, but also put this in a global context.

Half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. That's more than 3 billion people. Just over half of the population of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than $1 a day. That's more than 300 million people.

How about one more statistic: About 500 children in Africa die from poverty-related diseases, and the majority of those deaths could be averted with simple medicines or insecticide-treated nets. That's 500 children -- not every year, or every month or every week. That's not 500 children every day. Poverty-related diseases claim the lives of 500 children an hour in Africa.

When we try to hold onto our humanity, statistics like that can make us crazy. But don't get any crazy ideas about changing this system. Remember TINA: There is no alternative to predatory corporate capitalism.

TGILS: Thank God It's Last Sunday We have been gathering on Last Sunday precisely to be crazy together. We've come together to give voice to things that we know and feel, even when the dominant culture tells us that to believe and feel such things is crazy. Maybe everyone here is a little crazy. So, let's make sure we're being realistic. It's important to be realistic.

One of the common responses I hear when I critique capitalism is, "Well, that may all be true, but we have to be realistic and do what's possible." By that logic, to be realistic is to accept a system that is inhuman, anti-democratic, and unsustainable. To be realistic we are told we must capitulate to a system that steals our souls, enslaves us to concentrated power, and will someday destroy the planet.

But rejecting and resisting a predatory corporate capitalism is not crazy. It is an eminently sane position. Holding onto our humanity is not crazy. Defending democracy is not crazy. And struggling for a sustainable future is not crazy.

What is truly crazy is falling for the con that an inhuman, anti-democratic, and unsustainable system -- one that leaves half the world's people in abject poverty -- is all that there is, all that there ever can be, all that there ever will be.

If that were true, then soon there will be nothing left, for anyone.

I do not believe it is realistic to accept such a fate. If that's being realistic, I'll take crazy any day of the week, every Sunday of the month.



Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center . His latest book is Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Jensen is also the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity; and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang).

Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/04/30/865