Economic Aspects of "Love"

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sat Sep 07, 2013 1:03 pm

Image

At the age of 15, Mumia Abu-Jamal was already a journalist for the Black Panther newspaper.
This photo was taken in 1970.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Sun Sep 08, 2013 4:34 pm

Image
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:54 am

Image
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 09, 2013 8:29 am

GOOD NEWS FROM ANTS


1. Slave Rebellion is Widespread

2. Male Sex Ornaments are Fishing Lures

3. Promiscuous Queens ensure Genetic Diversity

4. Not All Altruism is the Same

5. Princesses Become Warriors

6. Workers Hold Key to Power





URL: http://tmblr.co/ZIuWlui539DL
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 09, 2013 6:00 pm

Image
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 10, 2013 7:34 am

Socialism is autonomy, people’s conscious direction of their own lives. Capitalism - whether private or bureaucratic - is the ultimate negation of this autonomy, and its crisis stems from the fact that the system necessarily creates this drive toward autonomy, while simultaneously being compelled to suppress it.

— Cornelius Castoriadis
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 10, 2013 7:52 am

Headteacher reports teen blogger who criticised school to police | Camden New Journal

…the school’s headteacher, Jacques Szemalikowski, told the New Journal yesterday (Wednesday) he took action because he was worried Mr Zaloom could be “developing into an anarchist”…

Asked what had worried him about Mr Zaloom’s articles, he said: “The fact that Kinnan has mentioned the ideologies of anarchism and individualism on this blog.”

Mr Szemalikowski added: “I must do something. In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by anti-establishment ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 10, 2013 7:58 am

Image

Sylvia Rivera of STAR (Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries)
at Bellevue Hospital demonstration, Fall 1970
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Tue Sep 10, 2013 10:00 am

http://chaka85.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/slogans/

slogans

Image

‘Queer struggle is class struggle!’

I like this phrase, because it evokes revolutionary politics.

Politics informed by queers and our struggles

placed outside the system through the system

violence coloring the entire process.

What i fear is it becoming just that

a slogan

reminiscent of days gone by and struggles that rallied

‘black white unite and fight’

with no real understanding of what ‘black’ and ‘white’ means

in terms of class and therefore struggle.

Capital is too complex for shallow understandings of our oppression

and i, for one, am tired of being erased.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 11, 2013 3:26 pm

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/1 ... h_a_smile/

Grin and Abhor It: The Truth Behind ‘Service with a Smile’
BY SARAH JAFFE


Image
A waitress juggling plates at Big Juds Burgers in Boise forgets to smile--in some restaurants, that could endanger her job.

No, that waitress isn't flirting with you.

Neither is the barista at your local Starbucks, nor the counter server at the Pret A Manger near your office, and you might be surprised to learn that the stripper at your local club doesn't have a deep fondness for you, either.

Pretending to love one's work, to be overjoyed by the ability to serve you coffee or pizza or dance for your tips, is an integral part of the job for service workers. “Service with a smile” is expected from anyone who deals with customers, and as Josh Eidelson and Timothy Noah pointed out last week at The Nation and The New Republic respectively, sometimes low-wage service employers require much more.

Eidelson reported on the recent move by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to push baristas to write “Come Together” on coffee cups in support of “bipartisan” deficit fear-mongering—to “draft its employees as a delivery system for austerity.” Schultz is a supporter of the “Fix the Debt” campaign started by ultra-rich ideologues that demands spending cuts (especially on social safety net programs) in supposed service of reducing the national debt.

Noah starts his report with a tale of a “slender platinum blonde” at Pret A Manger who he let himself believe was in love with him. “How else to explain her visible glow whenever I strolled into the shop for a sandwich or a latte?” But in reading a London Review of Books piece by British journalist Paul Myerscough, Noah realized that the Pret was actually pushing its employees to go above and beyond, to live up to a list of “Behaviors” that include having “presence” and touching one's coworkers publicly.

Ned Resnikoff at MSNBC also commented on the rise of emotional labor, citing Noah and Eidelson's pieces. He wrote:

It may be slightly uncomfortable to be served coffee by someone who clearly hates working long hours for a minimum wage, but it’s unclear that the best way to deal with that discomfort is through escalating worker coercion—especially when employee rudeness or visible unhappiness helps to make their low wages and poor working conditions visible.

What Noah, Eidelson and Resnikoff mostly overlook is that this is deeply gendered labor, and its requirements are based on behavior that is expected of women beyond the workplace.

Feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild is credited in all three pieces with coining the term “emotional labor.” Hochschild has spent decades writing of the role such labor plays in the lives of workers, especially women workers. She co-edited with Barbara Ehrenreich the book Global Woman, which looked at the role of women, many of them migrant women, in the “new economy,” exploring the ways in which women's supposed skill at emotional labor leads to their exploitation as low-paid care and service workers.

Much of this work has been women's work for decades, in some cases for hundreds of years. Noah comments that the increasing levels of emotional or affective labor involved in the American workplace is harder for men, but let's not forget that even in service workplaces, men make more than women. Women are 60 percent of the fast-food workforce and 73 percent of the tipped workforce—but women in restaurant work make 83 cents to a man's dollar.

Wal-Mart is perhaps one of the most famous workplaces to exploit women's “talent” for service work; Bethany Moreton, in her book To Serve God and Wal-Mart, explained how the company hired Southern white housewives, catering to their Christian values and offering them low wages in return for work they were considered naturally good at. The caring professions—such as teaching, nursing, and domestic work—were considered to be women's work as well, and correspondingly paid less than their more prestigious cousins. A domestic worker who cooks for the family might well make less than minimum wage while a famous chef commands much more; elementary school teachers start at $30,000 or $40,000 a year while college professors (if they can get a position) are much better compensated, and I don't really need to tell you how much more doctors make than nurses, right?

Andrew O'Connell at the Harvard Business Review, cited in Resnikoff's piece, looked at the actual pay rates for emotional labor in 2010:

When men move to jobs that require increased cognitive labor, they get an 8.8% wage boost, on average. But when they shift to positions demanding higher emotional labor, they take a 5.7% cut in pay relative to occupations with lower emotional demands, according to Devasheesh P. Bhave of Concordia University and Theresa M. Glomb of the University of Minnesota. (With women, the story is similar, but different: They get no financial reward for greater emotional labor either, but they don't get a penalty—their wages stay flat when they make a transition to higher emotional labor.)

I spent years as a waitress—in high school, then college, then as a struggling freelance writer—in that time I received pats on the ass, scribbled phone numbers in lieu of tips, and many, many personal questions I'd have preferred not to answer. Requiring feigned intimacy on the part of the worker allows the customer to ignore normal boundaries and pretend that a smile is an invitation to cross. Like the Pret workers, one of my bosses hired secret shoppers to make sure that servers went the extra mile; we were downgraded for not thanking our customers by the names we mispronounced off their credit cards. Not only our tips—which were our livelihoods, seeing as we only made $2.13 an hour, the legal minimum for tipped restaurant workers that hasn't changed in 22 years—but our jobs were at stake if we didn't smile hard enough.

Chelsea Welch, an Applebee's server, was recently and somewhat famously fired for posting a photo of a receipt on which a customer had written “I give God 10%, why do you get 18?” in lieu of a tip. (The restaurant placed an automatic 18 percent gratuity on large parties, a common practice so that the server doesn't get stiffed and the restaurant doesn't have to make up the difference in actual wages). She wrote a piece for The Guardian about her experience, commenting, “I’ve been waiting tables to save up some money so I could finally go to college, so I could get an education that would qualify me for a job that doesn’t force me to sell my personality for pocket change.” It seems that what she was fired for was daring to publicly express dissatisfaction with her job; even outside the workplace, emotional labor doesn't stop. (Just ask any woman if she's ever been told to “smile” by a strange man on the street.)

Women's personalities aren't all they're expected to sell in the service workplace. As Grace Bello wrote at Jezebel, there are plenty of jobs that aren't sex work but still rely on the emotional labor and physical appearance of women workers. At one of my serving jobs, I was told that I was hired because I wore seamed stockings to my job interview—I was encouraged to flirt and to “dress sexy.” Nikki Lewis, the lead organizer for the Restaurant Opportunities Center in Washington, D.C., talked about her first restaurant job while speaking to a crowd at the Ford Foundation on Monday for the launch of ROC founder Saru Jayaraman's book Behind the Kitchen Door. At age 17, she found herself on the top of a list kept by male coworkers rating the women's breasts and behinds. “That set the stage for every other restaurant I worked at,” she noted.

So-called “pretty girl jobs” are often seen as exploiting women's bodies, but in fact it's the emotional labor, the stress of feeling obligated to smile through humiliating comments, that marks this work. Would Noah have found this Pret A Manger employee's smile so compelling if she were not slender and blonde—if she were not attractive? Yet would he have thought she was interested in him if “radiance” wasn't required of her?

Sex workers have long known the value of feigned affection; as Noah rather crudely wrote, they've been faking orgasms for millennia. Yet as Melissa Gira Grant wrote recently, the happiness or unhappiness of sex workers is touted as a reason the profession should be abolished, while the happiness of other workers is considered beside the point. As I used to snark when waitressing in New Orleans, a town full of strip clubs and the women who work in them, no one ever wanted to save me from the restaurant industry.

Yet the happiness of all those workers—whether they are escorts or baristas, nannies or waitresses—is, like the happiness of sex workers, something that is regularly faked. In fact, as Selma James, Angela Davis, and other feminists who wrote critically about household labor pointed out, women have been fighting for decades to make the point that they don't do their work for the love of it; they do it because women are expected to do it. And that expectation is precisely what made service work the “economy's bottommost rung,” as Noah wrote. But James and her comrades in the Wages for Housework movement fought for women's right to a decent wage for all their labor—as well as the right to refuse to do that work at all.

As Barbara Young, a national organizer at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, noted recently, service and care workers are ultimately exchanging labor for a wage, not doing it for the love of the work. It's time to stop pretending that enjoyment of the job is its own reward; I couldn't eat smiles or customers' phone numbers, and neither can the barista at your local Starbucks.



ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Sarah Jaffe is a staff writer at In These Times and the co-host of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast. Her writings on labor, social movements, gender, media, and student debt have been published in The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Prospect, AlterNet, and many other publications, and she is a regular commentator for radio and television. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe.
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 11, 2013 4:05 pm

12.29.2012 LOVE POEM | ANNE BOYER

I would exaggerate your virtue / I would make no demands on your person / I would tell you all the things I’d do to you/ I would do these things a lot / I would be on my knees whenever / I would listen to your troubles / I would endure your self-mythologizing / I would enable your self-mythologizing / I would extend your self-mythologizing / I would enjoy your self-mythologizing most days/ I would create for you whatever actions or episodes or interrelations to sustain your carefully constructed personal narrative / I would create for you whatever necessary problems so you could feel a thing or two / I would be of use to the plot of your biopic / I would not testify against you at a grand jury / I would help you with some research / I would pretend to be stupid so that you could be smart / I would be smart enough that when I was stupid you would feel even smarter / I would say it was all for you / I would let you prove me wrong / I would weep for you / I would express my pain vividly so that you could feel powerful/ I would let you feel powerful as much as you want/ I would get how you’d see me as the problem/ I would let you offer constructive criticism / I would take everything you said to heart/ I would make an honest attempt at a new attitude / I would align myself to your interests/ I would be frightened of you and this would be arousing / I would be frightened of you and this would be frightening/ I would be aroused by you and this would be arousing / I would frustrate and arouse you in somewhat equal measure / I would suppress all self-suppression/ I would let you have the sense of satisfaction/ I would let you tell me what to do / I would give you all the glory/ I would resist you till it was pornographic / I would let you weep against my bosom / I would kiss your cheeks and stroke your beautiful head / I would like the unlikeable things of you/ I would say how sorry I am for everything / I would do nothing ever to harm you / I would feel bad for you/ I would keep your secrets I would be a dog for you or elusive/ I would be elusive like a dog who is scared of you / I would explicate your texts / I would close read all your passages/ I would benefit from you socially /I would discuss you at length in seminars / I would curate an exhibition of your angles / I would collect all the memorabilia / I would never abandon the memory of our time together / I would analyze you from all vantage points/ I would defend you to the death/ I would die for you and tell everyone / I would look at you with adoring eyes / I would let you look at me with clinical eyes/ I would find your paternalism attractive / I would let you protect me /I would let you fix my machines / I would be like a cat rubbing against you/ I would be like some sort of pack horse if you needed that / I would let myself have the lower hand / I would be the lower hand that strokes you / I would be the hand for you that doesn’t know what the other is doing / I would overturn the tables at the temple/ I would make no public claims / I would be just another prisoner / I would think we were a conspiracy / I would mistake love for insurrection/ I would read captivity narratives/ I would remember a thousand theories of love/ I would think that to love you was like having to be a poet / I would say I had no choice in the matter / I would let you think you ran things /I would let you run things/ I would write a book called the overseer/ I would know what I was doing

+
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 11, 2013 4:07 pm

Many people believe that great crimes come from terrible ideas: Marxism, racism and Islamic fundamentalism gave us the Gulag, Auschwitz and 9/11. It was the singular achievement of Eichmann in Jerusalem, however, to remind us that the worst atrocities often arise from the simplest of vices. And few vices, in Arendt’s mind, were more vicious than careerism. ‘The East is a career,’ Disraeli wrote. And so was the Holocaust, according to Arendt. ‘What for Eichmann was a job, with its daily routine, its ups and downs, was for the Jews quite literally the end of the world.’ Genocide, she insisted, is work. If it is to be done, people must be hired and paid; if it is to be done well, they must be supervised and promoted.

— Robin, Corey. “Dragon-Slayers.” London Review of Books 4 Jan. 2007
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 11, 2013 4:39 pm

Strange to think that even today, when confronted with the autonomy of the Black movement or the autonomy of the women’s movement, there are those who talk about this “dividing the working class.” Strange indeed when our experience has told us that in order for the working class to unite in spite of the divisions which are inherent in its very structure-factory versus plantation versus home versus schools-those at the lowest levels of the hierarchy must themselves find the key to their weakness, must themselves find the strategy which will attack that point and shatter it, must themselves find their own modes of struggle.

--Selma James, Sex, Race and Class
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 12, 2013 10:04 am

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

— Felix Guattari, 1995
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Economic Aspects of "Love"

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 13, 2013 11:28 am

The idea that socialism is synonymous with the nationalization of the means of production plus planning - and that its essential aim is merely an increase of production and consumption - must be pitilessly denounced. The identity of these views with the fundamental objectives of capitalism itself must constantly be shown.

Socialism means workers’ management of production and of society. It means popular self- administration through workers’ councils.


— Paul Cardan (Cornelius Castoriadis), Modern capitalism and revolution
American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to Data & Research Compilations

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests