Economic Aspects of "Love"

by **American Dream** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 7:07 pm

“Resistance”

Paula Giddings

from Chapter Two, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. 1996 edition; first published 1984. [PDF]

In its infancy, slavery was particularly harsh. Physical abuse, dismemberment, and torture were common to an institution that was far from peculiar to its victims. Partly as a result, in the eighteenth century, slave masters did not underestimate the will of their slaves to rebel, even their female slaves. Black women proved especially adept at poisoning their masters, a skill undoubtedly imported from Africa. Incendiarism was another favorite method; it required neither brute physical strength nor direct confrontation. But Black women used every means available to resist slavery—as men did—and if caught were punished as harshly.

In 1681 a slave named Maria and two male companions were tried for attempting to burn down the home of their master in Massachusetts. One of the men was banished from the colony; the other was hanged. In the judgment of the Puritan court however, Maria’s crime was more serious than mere arson. The court found that “she did not have the feare of God before her eyes” and that her action was “instigated by the devil.”[15] Whether Maria feared God or not is open to speculation, but it is not difficult to imagine the look in that woman’s eyes. Maria was burned at the stake, and perhaps as an afterthought the lifeless body of her companion was thrown in to burn with her ashes.

In 1708 a woman was among a small band of slaves who killed seven Whites in Newton, Long Island. Four of the slaves were executed; the men were hanged, the woman burned at the stake.

In 1712, New York City (where the first non-Indian women were Black) was gripped in the panic of a slave revolt. Twenty-three slaves, men and women, had armed themselves with guns and knives and gathered to set fire to a slaveholder’s house. They were ultimately subdued, but not before nine Whites had been killed and six injured. Among those arrested was a slave woman, visibly pregnant.

In 1732 the discovery of a slave plot in Louisiana resulted in the hanging of a Black woman and the “breaking on the wheel” of four of her male conspirators. Their heads were stuck onto poles at each end of New Orleans as a warning to others.

In 1741, a slave named Kate and a Black boatswain were convicted of trying to burn down the entire community of Charlestown, Massachusetts. Like Maria, Kate was singled out for having a “malicious and evil intent.” (The devil, it seems, was very busy in Massachusetts.)

In 1766 a slave woman in Maryland was executed for setting fire to her master’s home, tobacco house, and outhouse, burning them all to the ground. The prosecutor in the case noted that there had been two other houses full of tobacco burnt “in the country this winter.”[16]

Few attempted revolts struck more fear into the hearts of slaveholders than the one led by Nancy Prosser and her husband, Gabriel, in Virginia, when one thousand slaves met outside of Richmond in 1800 and marched on the city. Though they were routed by the militia, the specter lingered of thousands of slaves—estimated at two thousand to fifty thousand in number—primed for rebellion.

Black women resisted slavery in other ways as well. During the Revolutionary War period for example, the issue of slavery was raised anew as the contradictions sharpened between enslavement of Blacks on the one hand and the colonists’ struggle for independence on the other. In this era, slaves like Jenny Slew and Elizabeth Freeman (an eighteenth-century relative of W.E.B. Du Bois) of Massachusetts successfully sued for their freedom on the grounds that the Bill of Rights applied to them as “persons.” Freeman’s case, heard in 1781, established the legal fact that “a Bill of Rights, in Massachusetts at least, had indeed abolished slavery.”[17] The success of Slew and Freeman, among others, largely reflected the fact that the late eighteenth century was a fluid period for Blacks. The underlying philosophy of the war was one reason; the need for Black soldiers to fight it was another. In the beginning, the American commanders were loath to arm Blacks or permit them to fight. However, the need for additional manpower, and the fact that the English Loyalist forces not only welcomed Blacks but promised them freedom for their efforts, made the Americans respond in kind.

An intriguing footnote to this history is that at the height of the war, George Washington invited a Black slave to confer with him at his headquarters. The slave was Phillis Wheatley, a poet who had published a volume of verse and thus become the first Black and the second woman in America to do so. What the country’s most famous slaveholder and the country’s most famous slave discussed during the half-hour meeting is open to speculation. However, only days later, George Washington issued an order to conscript Blacks into the Continental Army.

The role of Blacks in the Revolutionary War, the discontent of a White working class forced to compete with slave labor, and the infeasibility of slavery at a time of increasing industrialization hastened its abolition in the North by 1830. At the same time, however, slavery became more viable in the South with the invention of the cotton gin and the demands for cotton to feed England’s nascent industrial revolution. But after 1830 there were new challenges hurled at the South. The increased number of freedmen and women—there were 100,000 in the South alone by 1810—and the rise of the new abolitionists bent on total and uncompensated abolition, demanded a new southern strategy, one that would suppress the potential for slave revolts such as the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831. And the institution did indeed change.

After 1830 slavery became “domesticated,” according to historian Willie Lee Rose. It became “a domestic institution which came to mean slavery idealized, slavery translated into a fundamental and idealized institution, the family.”[18] Especially among the wealthier planters, this meant that slave masters adopted a new ethic, and a new image. No longer the cruel and sadistic abusers who kept slaves in submission by beating them half to death, they became “benign,” if stern, patriarchs who lorded over their Black “brood.” The stick was replaced by the carrot. Masters provided protection, physical necessities, and minimum brutality in return for slave obedience and loyalty. This practice was even reflected in the new Slave Codes, which required that slaves be decently provided for, while prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.

If the social contract was upheld on both sides, then the slave master and his slaves ideally functioned like an extended “family.”

Thus prevailed the resplendent myth of the Big House with the wily mammy, and house slaves—some of whom may have been the master’s own progeny. Thus the tranquil picture of the field couples in their cabin surrounded by grinning pickaninnies; of “aunties” and “uncles” with eyes lidded by years of obedience. And what better authority figure than the paternalistic slave master, aristocratic in bearing, bragging that his slaves were better treated than the working classes of Europe? And of course there was the mistress, patronizingly tolerant, and as loyal to Mammy as Mammy was to her.

However operative all this was in practice, the ideal of a Victorian domestic institution had a tremendous effect on slaves and on women. Although the slaves may have been physically better off than before, the psychological effects of the new slavery were potentially devastating. Along with the “benefit” of obedience came the no-holds-barred response to disobedience. The double-sided coin “caused abolitionists to assert that slavery was becoming harsher with each passing year, and enabled southern apologists to state, with equal confidence, that slavery was becoming milder,” notes Willie Lee Rose. She continues:

In fact both sides were right, and both sides were wrong. As physical conditions improved, the slave’s essential humanity was being recognized. But new laws restricting chattels’ movement and eliminating their education indicate blacks were categorized as a special and different kind of humanity, as lesser humans in a dependency assumed to be perpetual. In earlier, harsher times, they had been seen as luckless, unfortunate barbarians. Now they were to be treated as children never expected to grow up.19

The emphasis on family was another dimension of the new slavery. Unlike the slavocracies of South America and the Caribbean, Southerners encouraged organic family units among their slaves. In other countries there were disproportionate numbers of male slaves, illustrating the tendency of those countries primarily to import males to work the plantations. In contrast, by 1840 the ratio of Black men to women in the United States was almost equal. This factor had a number of consequences: Family relationships among American slaves both discouraged rebellion and runaways, and encouraged a self-sustaining reproduction of the labor force.

The Victorian family ideal also carried a specific consequence for women. White southern women found themselves enmeshed in an interracial web in which wives, children, and slaves were all expected to obey the patriarchal head of the household, as historian Anne Firor Scott observed. The compliance of White women became inextricably linked to that of the slaves. For, it was believed, “any tendency of one member of the system to assert themselves against the master threatened the whole.”[20] As it was often asserted by slavery apologists, any change in the role of women or Blacks would contribute to the downfall not only of slavery, but of the family and society as well. Little wonder that the English-born feminist Margaret Fuller held that “There exists in the mind of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.” [21] Little wonder that the earliest White American feminists, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, had been reared in a wealthy slaveholding family. And little wonder, too, that southern women, as a group, were the most reluctant to assert a feminist sensibility.

The Victorian “extended” family also put the “moral” categories of women into sharp relief. The White wife was hoisted on a pedestal so high that she was beyond the sensual reach of her own husband. Black women were consigned to the other end of the scale, as mistresses, whores, or breeders. Thus, in the nineteenth century, Black women’s resistance to slavery took on an added dimension. With the diminution of overt rebellion, their resistance became more covert or internalized. The focus of the struggle was no longer against the notion that they were less human, as in Elizabeth Freeman’s time, but that they were different kinds of humans. For women this meant spurning their morally inferior roles of mistress, whore, and breeder—though under the “new” slavery they were “rewarded” for acquiescing in them. It was the factor of reward that made this resistance a fundamentally feminist one, for at its base was a rejection of the notion that they were the master’s property. So Black women had a double challenge under the new slavery: They had to resist the property relation (which was different in form, if not in nature, to that of White women) and they had to inculcate the same values into succeeding generations.

The narrative of Linda Brent, a South Carolina slave, revealed her struggle against the exchange of sexual favors for material reward. Brent’s master, Dr. Flint, didn’t try to “rape” Brent by physically overpowering her; he endeavored to make the young slave submit to his will. From the age of fifteen, Flint tried “to people my young mind with unclean images,” Brent wrote. [22] He began telling the young girl that she was his property and “must be subject to his will in all things.”[23] According to Brent, her master seemed to become obsessed with her “voluntary” submission. He “met me at every turn,” she said, “swearing…he could compel me to submit to him.”[24]

Finally he offered her a cabin on the edge of the plantation if she would accede to his demands. Brent resisted, however, and escaped to the North. Even then, Flint continued to pursue her until a friend purchased her freedom. Although Brent could feel safe for the first time in her adult life, she couldn’t help viewing her “purchase” with mixed emotions. “The more my mind had become enlightened,” she wrote, “the more difficult it was for me to consider myself an article of property; and to pay money to those who had so grievously oppressed me seemed like taking from my suffering the glory of triumph.”[25]

For a slave like Linda Brent to have developed such a consciousness, it was necessary for some authority figure to have given her a sense of self that contradicted the dictates of the new slavery. In her case it was a grandmother, for as Brent wrote, her hatred of her master stemmed from his attempt to destroy the values her grandmother had “inculcated” in her. Slave narratives are replete with examples of mothers attempting to impart such values to their children, often at the price of great emotional anguish. The writer of Sojourner Truth’s narrative wrote, for example, that when Truth became a mother, “she would sometimes whip her child when it cried for more bread rather than give it a piece secretly, lest it should learn to take what was not its own.” [26] As Truth explained in the narrative, her action was a means of keeping herself and her child from being compromised by the slave system. “The Lord knows how many times I let my children go hungry, rather than take secretly the bread I liked not to ask for,” she said. [27]

The efforts of slave mothers to instill values in their children had an effect that was not always positive. The need to be exceedingly harsh or enterprising where their children were concerned often created emotional distance between mother and child. A slave by the name of Aunt Sally recalled how stern her mother was, “rarely talking with her children, but training them to the best of her ability in all industry and honesty. Every moment she could gain from labor,” the narrator wrote, “was spent in spinning and knitting and sewing to keep them decently clothed.” [28]

The tension was greater, noted the slave Bethany Veney, when the child was a daughter, whose “almost certain doom is to minister to the unbridled lust of the slaveowner.”[29] When Veney’s daughter was born, she wished that both of them could “die right there and then.”[30] Such a wish is commonly expressed in the slave narratives of women, and a number of the rare but not insignificant instances of infanticide can be seen within this context.

It is not difficult to imagine the anxiety of a mother whose daughter had reached the age of puberty in the slave South. According to the narratives, it was that anxiety that created the greatest friction between mother and daughter. “The mother of a slave is very watchful,” Brent wrote, especially after she reaches puberty. “This leads to many questions, and this wellmeant course has a tendency to drive her from maternal councils.”[31]

In Brent’s case it caused desperate loneliness, which led to an illicit affair with a White man. When Brent’s grandmother discovered Linda’s indiscretion, the recrimination was harsh. “I’d rather see you dead,” her grandmother told her. “You are a disgrace to your dead mother.”[32] The grandmother tore off a wedding ring and silver thimble from Brent’s fingers—keepsakes of her deceased mother—and told Brent never to talk to her again.

In the world of the slave mother, there was little room for compassion, because there was no room for weakness. This was especially true when the mother herself had been compromised. A Northerner who settled in
Mississippi spoke of mothers who were concubines there: “They had too much pride and self-respect to rear their daughters for such a purpose,” he said. “If driven to desperation, she destroyed herself to prevent it, or killed them.”[33]

Slave communities also enforced moral codes. Undiscriminating behavior could get a person run out of church; and in some communities a “loose” woman could be the subject of collective recrimination. One slave, Priscilla McCollough, explained that if a woman wasn’t acting as she should, her neighbors would adopt an African custom and “play the banjo” on her: make her a subject of a public song that warned her that she “betta change.”[34]

Although, as in many African societies, prenuptial intercourse was not necessarily frowned upon, having a baby outside of marriage often was. In spite of the vagaries of the slave system, marriage, fidelity, and an organized family life were important values, combining the ethics of the society, African mores, and resistance to the new slavery.

Perhaps the most dramatic and least known act of resistance was the refusal of slave women to perform their most essential role, producing baby slaves, for which they were rewarded. “Every woman who is pregnant,” observed the plantation mistress Frances Kemble, “is relieved of a certain portion of her work in the field…Certain additions of clothing and an additional weekly ration are bestowed upon the family…. The more frequently she adds to the number of her master’s livestock by bringing new slaves into the world, the more her master’s livestock by bringing new slaves into the world, the more claims she will have upon his consideration and good will.” [35]

Even so, a Texas slave by the name of Rose Williams tried to resist a forcible mating. When her master placed a healthy specimen by the name of Rufus in her cabin for this purpose, she chased him out with a three-foot poker. Subsequent visits by Rufus met with the same response. Rose Williams finally relented when the master threateningly reminded her that he had purchased her entire family to save them from being separated. Rose upheld her end of the desperate bargain and bore Rufus two children.[36]

Some slave women, perhaps a significant number, did not bear offspring for the system at all. They used contraceptives and abortives in an attempt to resist the system, and to gain control over their bodies. In 1860 a Tennessee physician, reading a paper before the Rutherford County Medical Society, talked of the wide use of camphor as a contraceptive: “They take it just before or after menstruation, in quantities sufficient to produce a little nervousness for two or three days; when it has effect they consider themselves safe.”[37]

When contraception failed, slave women took more extreme measures. “All country practitioners are aware of the frequent complaints of planters about the unnatural tendency in the African female population to destroy her offspring,” observed a Georgia physician in 1849. “Whole families of women…fail to have any children.”[38] Another physician, writing in a Nashville, Tennessee, medical journal, told of a planter who kept between four and six slave women “of the proper age to breed,” but in twenty-five years only two children had been born on the plantation. When the slave owner purchased new slaves, every pregnancy miscarried by the fourth month. Finally it was discovered that the women were taking “medicine” supplied by an old slave woman to induce abortions.

At least one slave narrative indicates that the women understood the larger significance of their act. “If all bond women had been of the same mind,” wrote the slave Jane Blake, “how soon the institution could have vanished from the earth.”[39]

Notes

15. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England (New York: Atheneum, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1974), p. 154.
16. Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 145.
17. Sidney Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution: 1770–1800 (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1973), p. 216.
18. Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 21.
19. Ibid., pp. 24–25.
20. Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1970), p. 17.
21. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971), p. 33.
22. Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York and London: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), p. 26.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 27.
25. Ibid., p. 205.
26. Olive Gilbert, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (New York: Arno Press, 1968), p. 24.
27. Ibid., p. 38.
28. Aunt Sally, Or the Cross, The Way of Freedom (Cincinnati: American Reform Tract & Book Society, 1858) p. 59.
29. Bethany Veney, The Narrative of Bethany Veney, A Slave Woman (Worcester, Mass., 1889), p. 26.
30. Ibid.
31. Brent, op. cit., p. 57.
32. Ibid.
33. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), p. 393.
34. Ibid., p. 70.
35. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (New York and Scarborough, Ont.: New American Library, 1961), p. 95.
36. Gutman, op. cit., p. 138.
37. Ibid., p. 81.
38. Ibid.
39. Darlene Hines, “Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex,” The Western Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Summer 1979), p. 127.

http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/1 ... esistance/

by **American Dream** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 8:23 pm

Magnus Malan and crimes against humanity in Africa

Horace Campbell

2011-07-21

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/75087

General Magnus Malan, the chief architect of the total onslaught of the apartheid military, passed away on 18 July 2011. This total onslaught strategy was the idea that South Africa was threatened by a communist conspiracy and that the South African apartheid state must respond with economic, political, ideological, psychological and military tools to defend capitalism and white supremacy. Malan was minister of defence for 11 years (1980–1991), and it was under his tenure that the apartheid war machine spread death and destruction across Africa. Under his tenure as minister of defence this illegal state decided to weaponise biology. The results are still being felt across Africa today with the ramifications of the biological warfare project that was called Project Coast. Malan’s life and death should remind young people that the fight for freedom must be sustained in as much as the economic, military and political vestiges of apartheid still threaten total emancipation. Africans may occupy positions of political power in South Africa but the economic legacies of apartheid are very much flourishing.

Internationally, the crimes of the Nazis are condemned. German society no longer celebrates Hitler and the Nazis as great leaders, but in South Africa the publishing houses and think-tanks that were nourished and financed by Magnus Malan thrive and distort history. Many of these think-tanks have changed their names, but not their basic philosophy. Yet the people of South Africa have tried to transcend the ideation system of revenge and bitterness. The people have attempted to draw on the principles of Ubuntu in practice. Hiding behind the new philosophy of Ubuntu, the war criminals of South Africa have sought to rehabilitate themselves as servants of the South African state and as fighters against communism. The central place of the military in the processes of accumulation and enrichment has been taken over by sections of the African National Congress (ANC). Younger South Africans must work harder to completely understand the real consequences of apartheid and to remember that one cannot dismantle the system with the same ideas that built it.

APARTHEID AS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY

Magnus Malan was born into white privilege in South Africa in 1930 when the ideas of Hitler and white supremacy had not yet taken over the leadership of the organisation that was to later become the National Party. By the end of the Second World War, the National Party had completely absorbed the ideas and principles of Nazism and codified them into a series of laws and forms of organising society that still cripple South Africa to this day. Operating through a secretive organisation called the Afrikaner Broederbond, some of the adherents of the National Party had been interned during Second World War because of their overt support for Adolf Hitler and the ideas of the Nazis. This National Party came to power in 1948 and through the period 1948 to 1990 this party articulated a set of principles that entrenched white minority rule. Apartheid as a doctrine codified and structured life in society with brutal force and super-exploitation. Malan was born in the period when the administrative system had relegated blacks to ‘reserves’, but the demand for labour brought Africans into the urban areas where they were dumped into marginal and police-controlled areas called townships. Malan matured within the secret order of the Afrikaner Broederbond and became one of the principal thinkers for the military plans for the next three decades.

This system of apartheid controlled every aspect of the lives of Africans and other oppressed peoples called ‘Coloured’ and ‘Indians’. Masters and servants ordinances and the pass laws defined the position of Africans and regulated their freedom of movement. The Group Areas Act, the Native Land Act, the Population Registration Act, the Reservation and Separate Amenities Act and the Suppression of Communism Act were all part of the legal basis for the consolidation of the South African form of Nazism that was called apartheid. When Africans opposed these draconian measures they were shot down in the streets, with the Sharpeville Massacre of 1961 standing as one of the most notorious actions of this militarised society.

Malan joined the military after graduating from the University of Pretoria and was sent to the United States to train over the period 1962–1963. It was during this time that Magnus Malan strengthened ties with conservative and racist military forces within the US military establishment. After rising through the ranks of the apartheid military, Malan was promoted to become chief of the army (1973–1976), and chief of the defence forces (1976–1980). He was appointed minister of defence in 1980 and served in this position until 1991.Those US military personnel who want to establish relations with Africa would do well to research and expose the linkages of Malan to the US military establishment so that the present generation would be aware of the collaboration between the US military and apartheid.

MALAN AND TOTAL STRATEGY

Despite the efforts to crush the resistance of the people, the organised and spontaneous opposition to apartheid galvanised an international movement. Malan fancied himself as a military intellectual who had studied the campaigns of France in Algeria and the British in Kenya and Malaysia. After the independence of Angola and Mozambique in 1975 and the massive uprisings of Soweto in 1976, Malan and the thinkers of the apartheid state came up with the military doctrine of 'total strategy'. This strategy was supposed to be the apartheid regime's response to what it perceived as a multi-dimensional 'total onslaught' against the South African state.

To carry forward this strategy the military became central to the reproduction of state power. This was reflected not only in the links between the military and industry, epitomised in the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (ARMSCOR), but also in the militarisation of the state and society. Under Magnus Malan and Prime Minister P.W. Botha, the management techniques of the South African Defence Forces were harnessed to militarise every aspect of life. Total Strategy meant that the apartheid state mobilised economic, military, political, medical, information, cultural and psychological tools to preserve capitalism and white supremacy. Malan was at the top of an aggressive state organised under a National Security Management System (NSMS). An inner war cabinet called the State Security Council linked the military to local administrative structures through joint management committees and a decentralised system of 'security management' at all levels.

This Total Strategy received a boost after the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980. Through a series of meetings with William Casey of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, there was a decision to intensify the wars against the peoples of South Africa and the region as a whole. The long-term plans of the South African State Security Council merged well with the anti-communist policies of the Reagan administration. The United States supported apartheid and acted as a buffer for apartheid when the United Nations wanted to impose stricter sanctions. It was in this period when intellectuals such as Chester Crocker (who was by then the US’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs) became international spokespersons for the defence of apartheid on the grounds that the South African state was in the frontline struggle against communism. The liberation movements of South Africa were labelled as terrorist organisations and Nelson Mandela was kept in jail as the number-one terrorist.

MAGNUS MALAN AS A WAR CRIMINAL UNDER THE UN CONVENTION

The local struggles against apartheid inspired an international movement, and in this struggle the South African apartheid state became isolated in the court of international public opinion. In 1973 the General Assembly of the United Nations had under the Apartheid Convention declared that apartheid was a crime against humanity and that ‘inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination’ were international crimes.

Article 2 of the Apartheid Convention defined the crime of apartheid, stating that it ‘shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa.’ This extended to ‘inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them’. It then listed the acts that fell within the ambit of the crime. These included murder, torture, inhuman treatment and arbitrary arrest of members of a racial group; deliberate imposition on a racial group of living conditions calculated to cause its physical destruction; legislative measures that discriminate in the political, social, economic and cultural fields; measures that divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate residential areas for racial groups; the prohibition of interracial marriages; and the persecution of persons opposed to apartheid.

International criminal responsibility was to apply to individuals, members of organisations and representatives of the state who commit, incited or conspired to commit the crime of apartheid.

This position was again stated explicitly at the Second World Conference against Racism in Geneva in 1983.

Under this UN convention Malan qualified as a war criminal for the systematic oppression that had been meted out against the peoples of South Africa and the region as a whole. While South Africa faced diplomatic isolation with the support of the US military and intelligence, the South African military created proxy armies such as the MNR (Mozambique National Resistance) in Mozambique and supported ‘leaders’ such as Jonas Savimbi in Angola.

It was during the tenure of Magnus Malan that the South African armed forces, like swarms of locusts, left death and destruction in their wake. It was estimated by UN sources that by the end of apartheid over $80 billion dollars’ worth of destruction and economic damage had been wreaked across the region of Southern Africa. Over two million persons were killed, maimed, displaced or made refugees as the SADF (South African Defence Force) fought across the breadth of southern Africa. In Angola, SADF fought both a conventional and irregular war (justified in the West as a fight against a Soviet/Cuban threat to Western strategic resources), and in Namibia apartheid South Africa deployed over 100,000 troops to fight a counter-insurgency war against the South West African Peoples' Organisation (SWAPO of Namibia). In Mozambique the apartheid regime organised a war to destabilise Frelimo, and in the other front-line states the South African regime carried out economic sabotage.

Despite this 'total strategy' the military failed to crush the rebellion of the South African masses at their places of work, in the townships and in schools. The resistance of the people took numerous forms. This resistance inspired a large international movement. Magnus Malan deployed troops in the urban townships and unleashed permanent terror against the poor.

The South African armed forces, in collaboration with some elements in the US government, attempted to impose Jonas Savimbi on Angola. They launched a three-phase operation called ‘Modular, Hooper and Packer’ to destroy Angola. This military invasion was stopped at Cuito Cuanavale and the South Africans were decisively defeated. Despite this defeat the propaganda and psychological warfare of the apartheid state had been so entrenched that it was difficult to sell to the white supremacists the idea that the whites were defeated in battle. After the overthrow of overt apartheid, Malan wrote his own memoirs of this battle, claiming that the South African state won at Cuito Cuanavale. This was published in his memoirs, ‘Magnus Malan: My Life with the South African Defence Forces’.

WEAPONISING BIOLOGY

Before the independence of Zimbabwe, the South Africans and the Rhodesian military developed a weaponised form of anthrax that it deployed against the African people. It was under the leadership of Magnus Malan as minister of defence where the dreaded Project Coast was initiated. We now know some of the criminal actions that were carried out from the testimonies at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Malan and P.W. Botha recruited Dr Wouter Basson to coordinate an offensive chemical and biological warfare (CBW) programme. Basson under Malan ran the CBW program during the 1980s and early 1990s in a desperate effort to save this system of oppression. Testimonies before the TRC highlighted the fact that this Project Coast,

‘… developed lethal chemical and biological weapons that targeted ANC political leaders and their supporters as well as populations living in the black townships. These weapons included an infertility toxin to secretly sterilize the black population; skin-absorbing poisons that could be applied to the clothing of targets; and poison concealed in products such as chocolates and cigarettes.

‘… released cholera strains into water sources of certain South African villages and provided anthrax and cholera to the government troops of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the late 1970s to use against the rebel soldiers in the guerrilla war.’

In the book ‘Medical Apartheid’, Harriet Washington summed up the extent of this grand plan to weaponise biology. She wrote that in response to the massive anti-apartheid struggles:

‘apartheid politicians and scientists funded research and development of exotic biological and chemical weapons for use against the black majority so that the power of weaponized biological might help the white minority to destroy its opponents without firing a shot.’

Project Coast researched the development of deadly bacteria that would only affect blacks.

With many of the books and articles on these bizarre criminal acts focusing on Wouter Basson – who was the lead scientist of Project Coast – not enough attention has been placed on Magnus Malan, who was the minister of defence and responsible for the massive funds that were disbursed for these biological warfare programmes. The manufacture of illicit drugs, money laundering and the establishment of front companies offshore were all perfected under Magnus Malan. At the international level, the relationships between the work of Magnus Malan, Wouter Basson and biological warfare experts in the USA needs to be placed in the public domain. It is known that William Casey enjoyed a very close and cosy relationship with Magnus Malan, and that through their networks Wouter Basson worked closely with US scientists.

MANDELA AND THE PRINCIPLES OF UBUNTU

It was an ironic historical twist that Magnus Malan passed away on the 93rd birthday of Nelson Mandela on 18 July 2011. It was under Malan that the biological warfare experts had contemplated how to infect Mandela and other incarcerated leaders with toxins so that they would die shortly after being released from prison and it would appear that they died from cancer.

Even after the release of Mandela when it was clear that apartheid was on its last legs, Malan was still organising death squads and fomenting violence to make the wars seem as black-on-black violence. As minister of defence, Malan was responsible for paramilitary death squads (called the Civil Cooperation Bureau) that operated against civilians in the East Rand townships. Malan organised the financing of the Inkatha thugs who were the instruments of state terror.

Malan was finally removed from his position as minister of defence in 1991 and moved to the Department of Water Affairs. On 2 November 1995 Malan was charged together with other former senior military officers for murdering 13 people (including seven children) in the KwaMakhutha massacre of 1987. After a trial lasting seven months he was acquitted. His acquittal and that of Wouter Basson were striking examples of how the current political leaders were compromised and failed to do the kind of political and information work that would establish the criminal past of these white supremacists.

Ubuntu and the ideas of forgiveness are important principles, but while embracing the principles of Ubuntu, Africans cannot forget the past because the legacies and consequences of the weaponisation of biology are still being felt across Africa. More important is the reality that the ANC has refused to do the kind of educational work that would teach the younger generation about the realities of apartheid. I was pained when I was in South Africa recently when in discussions with very young students there was the view that neoliberal capitalism is what South Africa needs.

The government of the African National Congress integrated itself into the institutions of the apartheid state. One component of this integration is the continued use of the military and weapons procurement as a field for enrichment by political and military leaders. DENEL, the successor to ARMSCOR, has been at the centre of allegations of massive bribery, kickbacks and corruption.

DISMANTLING THE STRUCTURES THAT MAGNUS MALAN BUILT

Currently, the history of apartheid is being contested at every level and the passing of Malan has afforded one other opportunity for conservative forces to represent Malan as a ‘military strategist’ who was a technocrat. Throughout the Western world in the obituaries about his passing there was no mention of the criminal actions, especially the weaponisation of biology. It was very painful to interact with younger South Africans who do not know the history of the crimes of white supremacy and capitalism in South Africa. These youths are in institutions of higher learning where the ideas of free-market capitalism and white supremacy are taught as gospel.

Some of the leaders of the liberation movement have forgotten the sacrifices of the people and now send their children to the schools where the ideas of Magnus Malan are celebrated. These same leaders live in gated communities and for them apartheid is over because they have inherited the structures that were built by Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, Magnus Malan and P.W. Botha. The social questions of apartheid are evident in every sphere of life in contemporary South Africa. Whether in the context of the health services, the educational system, housing, transportation or access to water and electricity, the poor and oppressed in South Africa are still struggling to dismantle apartheid. These struggles now manifest in massive confrontations over ‘service delivery’. To blunt these struggles some leaders support xenophobia and hostility towards other Africans in order to maintain the black empowerment clique in the business of making money from tenders. The passing of Magnus Malan offers one other occasion for a summing-up of the crimes against humanity that were committed so that the society can heal itself from these crimes. On the day Magnus Malan met his maker the people of South Africa were called upon to exhibit kindness by committing 67 minutes' worth of service in honour of the 67 years that Mandela worked for freedom in South Africa (from 1942 until his retirement from public life in 2009). We join in the celebration of the 93rd birthday of Nelson Mandela while calling on the next generation to grasp the need to transform the society beyond the traditions of Magnus Malan.

by **Allegro** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 8:34 pm

.
I Saw It On The News
by Michael DeLang | Swans dot com

REFER

by **American Dream** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:08 pm

Tortured Fragments of History

Veil of secrecy surrounding methods of interrogation and torture

By Stan Winer

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=2622

2006-06-01

In April 2004, the world was momentarily shocked by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while amused American soldiers stood by. Responsibility for these acts of psychological torture has largely been confined to the lowest ranks and kept close to Abu Ghraib itself. Official statements attributed the practice to a temporarybreakdown in "military discipline", thus diverting any suspicion that the evidence of psychological torture as paraded before our eyes in the Abu Ghraib snapshots is most likely the product of intelligence policies shaped in design and application over a long period of time.

The Abu Ghraib scandal did, however, open a floodgate of news and information leaks about the existence of a mini-gulag of prisons the CIA and US Army Intelligence had set up in Afghanistan, on aircraft carriers, in remote places like the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia, and in the prisons of torture-friendly allies.(1) An official inquiry disclosed that the US Army specifically allowed the CIA to house "ghost detainees" who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib, thus encouraging violations of reporting and monitoring requirements under the Geneva Conventions.(2)

What the official inquiry studiously avoided telling us were the actual reasons why such obsessive secrecy was deemed necessary in the first place. But clearly, such facilities are placed outside the rule of law. They are not subject to review of the manner in which they function, the interrogation methods used, and the general conditions prevailing there. Representatives of the International Red Cross, are denied access to the facilities; nobody knows how many detainees are held there, who the detainees are, where they come from, which authority was responsible for their capture or arrest, who conducted the interrogations, or whether the interrogators were authorised to do so.

It is reasonable to assume that, once a prisoner of war is captured, the captor’s immediate objective would be to obtain from the prisoner quick information for tactical operations such as strikes, counter-strikes or further arrests. The infliction of physical pain is probably the quickest method of obtaining information, the usefulness of which is usually short-lived due to the changing and changeable nature of battlefield conditions. So why then the purpose of protracted psychological torture, which is comparatively slower at producing results and seemingly more benign than physical methods?

The obsessive veil of secrecy surrounding such methods means that military personnel are themselves largely unaware of how their individual actions fit into the overall picture. Others know exactly what they are doing, but keep quiet because they also know that what they are doing is criminal. The Official Secrets Act also ensures that lips remain tightly sealed. Above all, a perceived need to protect "the national interest" combines with censorship to retain a wall of silence around the subject.

A notable exception occurred, however, several years ago during the mammoth trial in South Africa of alleged war criminal Brigadier Wouter Basson, a South African Army chemical and biological warfare specialist.(3) The trial provided rare glimpses into the horrors that can and did evidently occur in circumstances of extreme secrecy and geographical isolation no less pervasive and extreme as those prevailing currently in America’s gulag of secret prisons.

Evidence presented at Basson’s trial lifted the lid on some bizarre events taking place in the 1970s and 1980s at an airfield and forward military base named Fort Rev, situated at Ondangwa in the former South West Africa, (now Namibia). Fort Rev was used by 5 Reconnaissance Regiment and the other special forces regiments as an operational base for launching counter-insurgency operations into Angola and areas of Owamboland. Inside the base, immediately adjacent to the airfield, was a secret torture and interrogation centre where attempts, not always successful, were made to "turn" or "convert" captured guerrillas into so-named "pseudo operators" for deployment in highly sensitive, covert deception operations. Hence the name Fort Rev, meaning "reversal". Neurophysiologists and behavioural scientists have another phrase for it: transmarginal inhibition or TMI — a state of behavioral collapse induced by physical and emotional stress prior to inducing new patterns of actions and beliefs. Successful application of this technique, sometimes referred to pejoratively as "brain washing", requires psychological torturers to have total control of the environment. Existing mental programming can then be replaced with new patterns of thinking and behavior. The same results can be obtained in contemporary psychiatric treatment by electric shock treatments and even by purposely lowering a patient’s blood sugar level with insulin injections. (4)

The Namibian deception operations, under the tutelage of battle hardened former Rhodesian special forces operators, had to be kept secret at any cost. If the operations were successful, pseudo gangs consisting of turned guerrillas posing as genuine freedom fighters would be infiltrated back into the field of operations where they would in turn capture more insurgents. Some of these so-called "high value targets", would then also be turned at Fort Rev, others being useful only as a source of information. But, having served that purpose, or having resisted turning, they then presented a major security risk, because they would have picked up at least some insight into the manner and methods of pseudo operations, and this could immediately compromise the secrecy of the entire pseudo operations programme. So they could not be processed through normal channels and imprisoned in a central holding facility from which word might leak to the outside world.

The torturers and interrogators at Fort Rev got around this small problem by simply killing off survivors of interrogation. "Redundant" prisoners were disposed of without trace after being drugged and their bodies dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from an aircraft. The doomed prisoners, before being loaded onto an aircraft and dumped 100 miles out to sea, were first injected with powerful muscle relaxants which had the effect of paralysing the victim whilst leaving his mind fully conscious. An anaesthetic drug was also used, having the effect of causing hallucinations. (5)

The practise of dropping prisoners’ bodies from aircraft, according to evidence presented at the trial of Brigadier Basson, was developed in the late 1970s during joint operations between Rhodesian and South African special forces. One witness, a former French Foreign Legionnaire and member of the Rhodesian counter-insurgency unit known as the Selous Scouts, also described how Basson allegedly injected captured freedom fighters with poison during a flight over Mozambique territory. He said these captives were then thrown alive from an airplane in 1979. The victims were five guerrillas believed to have been from the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). According to the witness, who could not be named for reasons of personal safety, said that before the poisoned, unconscious men were thrown from the plane, they were dressed in camouflage uniforms and supplied with guns and false papers. They were then sprinkled with an unknown powdery substance, which he believed was poison or some kind of lethal chemical agent. He believed the powdery agent was meant to contaminate other freedom fighters or sympathisers who might happen upon the bodies.

The modus operandi of the Selous Scouts was exemplified in a separate incident in February 1980, when political campaigning was approaching a climax in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia’s first free election. Several churches became the targets of terrorist bombs. A well-orchestrated Press campaign swiftly attributed the bombings to "communist atheists" -- an apparent reference to the national liberation movement. Then, in what turned out to be the last in a series of explosions, somebody blew himself up when the bomb he was planting exploded prematurely. Papers found on his body identified him as a highly decorated member of the Selous Scouts. The Rhodesians are also suspected to have used pseudo operators to murder more than 30 missionaries in remote districts, were many freedom fighters had been educated at mission stations. The murders were attributed falsely to the liberation movement. But Catholic Bishop Donald Lamont, before he was imprisoned for a year, stripped of his Rhodesian citizenship and finally expelled from the country, had no doubts about who was really responsible for the killings. "If it were the objective of the guerrillas to kill missionaries, there would not be one of us left alive."(6)

The Rhodesians had extensive experience in counter-insurgency doctrine dating back to 1956 when British Commonwealth forces in Malaya had included the Rhodesian African Rifles, and the Rhodesians had also modelled their "pseudo gangs" along the lines of the British counter-insurgency strategy during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. The Americans, for their part, later adapted their own version of this doctrine in Vietnam.(7)

Such methods bore a striking resemblance to the ideas of the Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS) which operated in Algeria during the late 1950s. The OAS was made up of embittered right-wing French army officers and fanatical Algerians of European descent trying to retain Algeria under French colonial control. In their ranks were covert action specialists working for the French army's 5th (Psychological Action) Bureau, and officers commanding French Foreign Legion and paratroop units in Algeria. Communist guerrilla warfare, according to them, did not have the objective of capturing strategic territory as in conventional warfare, but created an extended military battlefield that included all aspects of civil society, especially the psychological and ideological spheres. Having "identified" the enemy's techniques, the proponents of "counter-terrorism" then sought to neutralise the enemy by adopting the enemy's "own" methods and turning them against the enemy. Hence the coming into being of a ruthless and sophisticated ensemble of psychological techniques. The objective was to create a climate of tension, anxiety and insecurity, thereby conditioning the masses to accept State authority while alienating the masses from the Algerian liberation movement.(8)

The collapse of the OAS came about after a failed 1958 military revolt in Algiers and a "general's putsch" in April 1961 which brought down the French government and threatened the political survival of its Gaullist successor, the Fifth Republic. Having failed to secure the "moral regeneration" of France many of its members were forced to flee abroad, notably to Argentina and also to Portugal where Lisbon became their strategic centre with official encouragement from the Portuguese secret police. In exchange for asylum and other incentives, they helped train foreign counter-insurgency and parallel police units forming the embryo of future "counter-terrorist" groups deployed around the world under the tutelage of OAS fugitives. (9)

By 1984 one French veteran of Indo-China and many African campaigns, the notorious Bob Denard, virtually controlled the Comoros islands together with a band of French mercenaries. The Comoros rapidly became a secret staging post funnelling arms from South Africa to the rebel Renamo movement in Mozambique. Denard also made it possible for South Africa to build and operate a sophisticated electronic eavesdropping facility at Itsandra on Grande Comore island. From here Pretoria could monitor both maritime movements in the Mozambique Channel and ANC radio communications in neighbouring Tanzania. (10)

From Lisbon former OAS members plotted to destabilise and destroy national liberation movements throughout Africa and their exploits galvanised rightwing extremists everywhere. An internal report written by one former OAS member was captured in the mid-1970s by leftist officers of the Armed Forces Movement in Lisbon. The captured document, shown to journalists, endorsed bluntly a "strategy of tension" that would "work on public opinion and promote chaos in order to later raise up a defender of the citizens against the disintegration provoked by subversion and terrorism". As one seasoned cold warrior put it: "When you've got the masses by the balls, their hearts and minds follow."

In 1994, such ideas found resonance in the run-up to South Africa's first democratic elections. The former apartheid regime -- then part of a transitional government -- made much of wooing black voters on a platform proclaiming "black leaders have failed to halt the continuing violence", which was blamed by white politicians on "warring black factions". The gunmen involved in many of the violent clashes taking place at the time, used Soviet-made AK-47 rifles and Makarov pistols to create the impression that liberation movement "terrorists" were responsible, and police reports always blamed the ANC.

As amnesty applicants would later confess to the South African Truth Commission, the SA Police diverted taxpayers' money to a police-run strategic deception unit called Stratcom. Former Stratcom unit head Vic McPherson disclosed to the Truth Commission that more than 40 undercover police agents, paid informers, unwitting "sources" and "friendly" journalists throughout the South African mainstream media had participated in Stratcom projects during the late 1980s. According to former security police death-squad commander Colonel Eugene de Kock, presently serving a life sentence for multiple murders, his activities in Stratcom during the 1980s included violent attacks on white people by "turned" freedom fighters, which were then falsely attributed by elements of the Press to left-wing activists. The intention was to manipulate South African public opinion to accept that only elements of the former regime, if reinstated, could defend the masses from chaos, anarchy and terrorism.(11)

In the absence of digital imaging technology of the kind evidenced at Abu Gharieb, one can only speculate about the full extent to which brainwashing or the "turning" of prisoners was practised for many years in South Africa, or during France’s battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Britain’s suppression of independence movements in Kenya and Malaya in the 1960s, Argentina’s dirty war, Britain’s Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970 and 1980s, and countless other regional conflicts. Whatever happened then, and whatever the true activities currently taking place in America’s gulag of secret prisons, it is certainly the case that extreme secrecy provides an ideal environment for the application of psychological torture techniques aimed at "converting" prisoners of war into pseudo operators.

There remains wide public ignorance and a studied avoidance of this unsettling subject. Few people have been able to fit together the fragments of history and grasp the larger picture. Others simply don’t want to know. The practice of psychological torture, never fully acknowledged, is thus allowed to persist inside the secret services as the product of intelligence strategies that have probably been standard practice for at least half-a-century or more. Abu Ghraib may be just the tip of an iceberg.

South African-based journalist Stan Winer is author of the book Between the Lies: Rise of the media-military-industrial complex, London: Southern Universities Press, 2004. Free PDF download available athttp://www.coldtype.net/archives.html )

NOTES & REFERENCES:
(1) For a list of US detention sites see http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/2 ... s/0617.htm

(2) For many years the Israeli secret services took this one step further by actually operating a "ghost prison" for political detainees. Code-named Facility 1391, this secret prison intended for "special cases" operated in Israel for many years within the walls of a secret army base, distant from the eyes of the Press and the public, and without being declared a detention facility, as required by statute. See http://www.icj-sweden.org/Facility1391.pdf

(3) The complete trial record of Wouter Basson is available athttp://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/c ... index.html

All charges against Basson were eventually withdrawn by the State after a marathon 30-month trial in the Pretoria High Court three years ago. The court ruled that it had no jurisdiction in respect of crimes committed in South West Africa — or Namibia as it is now named. An appeal court later overturned the decision on the basis that South West Africa was in fact a South African colony during the apartheid era. It was illegally occupied and administered by the former South African regime. The Directorate of Public Prosecutions then decided last year not to reopen the case against of Basson because of the legal principle of double jeopardy, which means in effect that an alleged perpetrator cannot be tried twice on the same charges. For subsequent developments see Stan Winer essay at http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.06/Essay ... eader5.pdf

(4) The technique was discovered by Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov (see bibliography below) who identified TMI in the early 1900’s. His work with animals is said to have opened the door to further investigations with humans. The ways to achieve conversion through TMI are many and varied, but the usual first step in brainwashing is to work on the emotions of an individual or group until they reach an abnormal level of anger, fear, excitement or nervous tension. The progressive result of this mental condition is to impair judgement and increase suggestibility. The more this condition can be maintained or intensified, the more it compounds, leading to total behavioural conversion.

(5) Basson trial record

(6) David Martin & Phyllis Johnson, The Struggle for Zimbabwe, London: Faber 1981, p.283 Martin and Johnson)

(7) On Rhodesian pseudo-gangs see: Martin & Johnson, op cit, pp.110-11; Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: An intelligence chief on record, London: John Murray 1987, pp.114-5. On the Rhodesians in Malaya see Christopher Owen, The Rhodesian African Rifles, London: Leo Cooper, 1970. On the origin of "pseudo gangs" in Kenya see Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-gangs, London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960.On British counter-insurgency doctrine generally see Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, London: Faber, 1971. On Vietnam see Larry Cable, Conflict of Myths: The Development of American Counter-Insurgency Doctrine and the Vietnam War, New York: New York University Press 1986, p.82

(8) Interviews conducted by the author with officers of the Armed Forces Movement (AFM) in Lisbon after the 1975 socialist military coup in Portugal. Many incriminating documents, viewed by the author, were seized by the AFM from OAS fugitives operating in Lisbon.

(9) Ibid.,

(10) See D Kendo, "Comores: L’Ordre Mercenaire", Jeune Afrique, nos 1511/1512, December 1989; Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Madagascar, Comoros, Country Profile, 1989-90, London 1990, pp 32-36; EIU, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Comoros: Country Report No. 1, London 1990.

(11) The strategy was apparently revived three years ago when 22 seditious South African conspirators including three senior army officers who plotted to establish a rebel army of about 4 500 to overthrow the South African government and replace it with a military regime run entirely by white supremacists. The conspirators, currently on trial for murder, treason and terrorism, allegedly planned to unleash chaos in the country to cover the rebel army’s movements while a 50-man death squad would eliminate "traitors" and blame the actions on black people. The rebel army, to "restore order", would then contrive a 10-day electricity blackout under cover of which airports would be closed, aircraft grounded, and arms depots and combat vehicles seized. A final stage would be the inauguration of a right-wing military government.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eysenck HJ The biological basis of personality, Springfield, IL: Thomas, (1967)

Pavlov, IP Lectures on Conditional Reflexes: The higher nervous activity (Behaviour) of animals, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1928

Sargant, W The Battle for the Mind, London: Wm Heinemann, 1957

by **American Dream** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 11:24 pm

http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/obesi ... alism.html

Obesity researchers must understand how capitalism works

Jonathan Wells
23 July 2008

The industry knows how to
make fatty food appealing

To stem the spread of obesity, we must study the web of commercial interests and strategies driving it, says Jonathan Wells.

Pelotas is a South Brazilian city of marked economic contrasts. At the roadside, thin ponies pull battered carts past bicycles. Along the thoroughfare, motorcycles and smart new cars zoom past them. Some people live in shacks made from plastic bags, others in mansions with yachts moored at their garden's edge. Away from the city centre, small stores still offer cheap staples and vegetables. But closer to the centre, a large supermarket has opened, with an escalator leading up from the car park.

The city, where I contribute to epidemiological research on obesity, is also undergoing a marked nutritional transition. In Brazil, between 1973 and 1996, obesity increased from 2.4 to 6.9 per cent in men and from 7.0 to 12.5 per cent in women.

In simple terms, obesity arises when people consume more energy than they expend, either by eating too much or exercising too little. But obesity remains difficult to counter, and hundreds of research papers have been written on tackling it, mostly from high-income countries. Such studies can easily measure dietary intake, physical activity, and obesity status by simple methods (questionnaires, measuring weight and height) or, nowadays, with sophisticated state-of-the-art body movement recorders and stable isotope probes. Yet obesity becomes ever more prevalent.

It's undoubtedly true that economic and cultural transitions affect dietary intake and activity levels. If we measure these changing circumstances, we can see the impact of the growing 'obesogenic niche'—the sum total of environmental factors which collectively predispose to excess weight gain. The problem is that such research risks being simply a witness to the process, telling us what is happening without explaining why. For scientists, the 'why' should be just as important as the 'how'.

Commercial cunning

What is really driving the obesity epidemic is not increased dietary intake, or decreased activity levels, but the web of economic strategies and commercial interests that cause individual people to change or maintain certain behaviours. The way industry understands and manipulates individuals' behaviour is fundamental to the growth of the obesogenic niche.

Heads of industry would probably argue that they are not trying to create an obesity epidemic. Nevertheless, there are enormous profits to be had from obesity. The foods that maximise profit just happen to be those high in sugar or fat. They are cheap to produce, easy to brand and market, and easy to stock in supermarket aisles. And there are numerous ways to encourage people who are pre-obese to buy these foods.

Sedentary behaviour is also profitable, and encouraged by industry. A moped is more glamorous than a bicycle. A new computer game will re-invigorate peoples' interest, but not their bodies.

Clever research

Until now, obesity research has concentrated on measuring the numbers of obese people, and attempting to identify the predisposing risk factors. This tends to identify individual behaviours, but not the push and pull factors that encourage or oblige people to display them. We can count the number of hours spent in a car or playing video games, but if we don't understand comprehensively why the car was used or the game was played, efforts to tackle obesity are doomed to failure.

Every new moped or litre of petrol sold, every new supermarket product purchased, is one more small step along the economic transition — and one more turn of the screw by the profit-led industries. These industries need people to indulge in obesity-causing behaviours in order to achieve their quarterly targets. Until commercial practices become the target, first of research studies and then of interventions, we are likely to retain our role of documenting, rather than truly understanding and preventing, the obesity epidemic.

Understanding the obesogenic niche, rather than what happens to the people in the niche, is an urgent but relatively ignored priority. The kind of research needed to probe this issue is very different from conventional biomedical research. Ideally, researchers should have expertise in the same skills that the companies use to maximise their profits — advertising, economics, and forecasting social trends.

Public health scientists need to take on commercial companies at their own game. Perhaps researchers should begin by measuring the same outcomes that companies use to maximise their profit. If the company knows how to sell more biscuits, health researchers need to know how to achieve the opposite.

Government strategies

As yet, governments have been very reluctant to go on the offensive against commercial interests, because the two parties are interconnected. With substantial tax revenues deriving directly from corporate profits, the financial risks to national economies are obvious.

At the simplest level, only when the cost of treating obesity and its co-morbidities exceeds the tax levied from the obesogenic companies is there an economic logic for taking action. Something similar has already happened with smoking in Europe. A more sophisticated approach suggests it would be prudent to act before this tipping point is reached. Obesity is so difficult to treat that prevention is the crucial target.

Maximising profit and incessantly maintaining economic growth are central to the western industrial economic model. This is our mode of capitalism, and the same model is driving the nutritional transition. As countries are absorbed into this model and pass through the transition, an increasing proportion of the population are drawn into new behavioural patterns, altering their physical activity and their access to food. And the obesogenic niche is not exclusive to adults, it also affects foetuses, infants, toddlers, children and adolescents. Each stage of the life-course is a target for commercial interests.

Capitalism out-competes other economic systems, as evidenced by its worldwide spread. So on purely economic grounds it is successful. But the costs may be expressed in other currencies, such as the prevalence of hypertension, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Capitalism has been studied primarily by economists. It's time health researchers got in on the act.

Jonathan Wells is a reader in childhood nutrition, Childhood Nutrition Research Centre, UCL Institute of Child Health, London.

by **American Dream** » Fri Sep 23, 2011 11:28 pm

Sex Segregation in Schools Detrimental to Equality

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 141910.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 22, 2011) -- Students who attend sex-
segregated schools are not necessarily better educated
than students who attend coeducational schools, but they
are more likely to accept gender stereotypes, according
to a team of psychologists.

"This country starts from the premise that educational
experiences should be open to all and not segregated in
any way," said Lynn S. Liben, Distinguished Professor of
Psychology, Human Development and Family Studies, and
Education, Penn State. "To justify some kind of
segregation there must be scientific evidence that it
produces better outcomes."

In the current issue of Science, Liben and her
colleagues report that there is little concrete evidence
to support claims that single-sex schools are a better
learning environment.

"Our examination of the existing studies leads us to
conclude that there is not scientific evidence for
positive effects of single-sex schooling," said Liben.
"That's not to say that academic outcomes are
definitively worse, but neither are they definitively
better. Advantages have not been demonstrated."

Some supporters of single-sex schools claim that brain
differences between boys and girls require different
teaching styles. But neuroscientists have found few
differences between male and female brains, and none has
been linked to different learning styles.

When students are segregated by sex, they are not given
opportunities to work together to develop the skills
needed to interact with each other. When sex segregation
occurs in public schools, the students are left to infer
reasons for the separation. Are girls not as good as
boys in some subjects? Are boys unable to learn in
cooperative settings?

In 2010, Liben and her graduate student studied
preschool classes to look at effects of gender divisions
among the students. She found that after two weeks of
teachers using gendered language and divisions -- lining
children up by gender and asking boys and girls to post
work on separate bulletin boards -- the students showed
an increase in gender-stereotyped attitudes toward each
other and their choice of toys, and they played less
with children of the other sex.

"The choice to fight sexism by changing coeducational
practices or segregating by gender has parallels to the
fight against racism," the researchers write in the
paper. "The preponderance of social science data
indicated that racially segregated schools promote
racial prejudice and inequality."

Currently most sex-segregated schools are private
schools, and are often cited as evidence of the
advantages of single-sex schools. However, private
schools require admissions testing before students
enter. Entrance exams and private school status make
using existing single-sex schools as examples
problematic when comparing them to public schools.

In 1972 the enactment of Title IX outlawed educational
discrimination on the basis of sex. Students were no
longer allowed to be excluded from a class because they
happened to be male or female -- home economics and wood
shop classes were now open to everyone. But in 2006 the
U.S. Department of Education reinterpreted Title IX --
public schools are now legally allowed to segregate
classes or even entire schools on the basis of sex, but
only if they show that the division is related to
important governmental or educational objectives.

Today there is a significant advocacy effort from those
who encourage single-sex schools, said Liben. But there
is no comparable effort for coeducational schools --
probably because it was the status quo after Title IX.

Liben and her colleagues formed the non-profit
organization, the American Council for CoEducational
Schooling, in part to help disseminate scientific data
relevant to single-sex and coeducational schooling.

"The bottom line is that there is not good scientific
evidence for the academic advantages of single-sex
schooling," said Liben. "But there is strong evidence
for negative consequences of segregating by sex -- the
collateral damage of segregating by sex."

Also working on this research were Diane F. Halpern,
trustee professor, psychology, Claremont McKenna
College, Claremont, California; Lise Eliot, associate
professor, neuroscience, Rosalind Franklin University,
North Chicago, Illinois; Rebecca S. Bigler, professor,
psychology, University of Texas; Richard A. Fabes,
professor and director, social and family dynamics,
Laura D. Hanish, associate professor, and Carol Lynn
Martin, professor, social and family dynamics, Arizona
State University; and Janet Hyde, professor, psychology
and women's studies, University of Wisconsin--

by **American Dream** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 10:19 am

“The Bronx Slave Market”

Marvel Cooke

From The Daily Compass, 1950 [PDF]

PART I

I WAS A PART OF THE BRONX SLAVE MARKET

I was a slave.

I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day.

That is The Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling Sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor.

It has its counterparts in Brighton Beach, Brownsville and other areas of the city.

Born in the last depression, the Slave Markets are products of poverty and desperation. They grow as employment falls. Today they are growing.

They arose after the 1929 crash when thousands of Negro women, who before then had a “corner” on household jobs because they were discriminated against in other employment, found themselves among the army of the unemployed. Either the employer was forced to do her own household chores or she fired the Negro worker to make way for a white worker who had been let out of less menial employment.

The Negro domestic had no place to turn. She took to the streets in search of employment-and the Slave Markets were born.

Their growth was checked slightly in 1941 when Mayor LaGuardia ordered an investigation of charges that Negro women were being exploited by housewives. He opened free hiring halls in strategic spots in The Bronx and other areas where the Slave Markets had mushroomed.

They were not entirely erased, however, until World War II diverted labor, skilled and unskilled, to the factories.

Today, Slave Markets are starting up again in far-flung sections of the city. As yet, they are pallid replicas of the depression model; but as unemployment increases, as more and more Negro women are thrown out of work and there is less and less money earmarked for full-time household workers, the markets threaten to spread as they did in the middle ’30s, when it was estimated there were 20 to 30 in The Bronx alone.

The housewife in search of cheap labor can easily identify the women of the Slave Market. She can identify them by the dejected droop of their shoulders, or by their work-worn hands, or by the look of bitter resentment on their faces, or because they stand quietly leaning against store fronts or lamp posts waiting for anything – or for nothing at all.

These unprotected workers arc most easily identified. however, by the paper bag in which they invariably carry their work clothes. It is a sort of badge of their profession. It proclaims their membership in “the paper bag brigade”-these women who can be bought by the hour or by the day at depressed wages.

The way the Slave Market operates is primitive and direct and simple-as simple as selling a pig or a cow or a horse in a public market.

The housewife goes to the spot where she knows women in search of domestic work congregate and looks over the prospects. She almost undresses them with her eyes as she measures their strength, to judge how much work they can stand.

If one of them pleases her, the housewife asks what her price is by the hour. Then she beats that price down as low as the worker will permit. Although the worker usually starts out demanding $6 a day and carfare, or $1 an hour and carfare, the price finally agreed upon is pretty low-lower than the wage demanded by public and private agencies, lower than the wage the women of the Slave Market have agreed upon among themselves.

FEW CHANGES

I know because I moved among these women and made friends with them during the late 1930s. I moved among them again several days ago, some ten years later. And I worked on jobs myself to obtain firsthand information.

There is no basic change in the miserable character of the Slave Market. The change is merely in the rate of pay. Ten years ago, women worked for as little as 25 cents an hour. In 1941, before they left the streets to work in the factories, it was 35 cents. Now it is 75 cents.

This may seem like an improvement. But considering how the prices of milk and bread and meat and coffee have jumped during the past decade, these higher wages mean almost no gain at all.

And all of the other evils are still there.

The women of the “paper bag brigade” still stand around in all sorts of weather in order to get a chance to work. They are still forced to do an unspecified amount of work undcr unspecified conditions, with no guarantee that, at the end of the day, they will receive even the pittance agreed upon.

They are still humiliated, day after day, by men who frequent the market area and make immoral advances.

Pointing to this shameful fact, civic and social agencIes have warned that Slave Market areas could easily degenerate into centers of prostitution.

So they could, were it not for the fact that the women themselves resent and reject these advances. They are looking for an honest day’s work to keep body and soul together.

THE BRONX SLAVE MARKET
PART II

WHERE MEN PROWL AND WOMEN PREY ON NEEDY JOB-SEEKERS

I was part of the Bronx Slave Market long enough to experience all the viciousness and indignity of a system which forces women to the streets in search of work.

Twice I was hired by the hour at less than the wage asked by the women of the market. Both times I went home mad-mad for all the Negro women down through the ages who have been lashed by the stinging whip of economic oppression.

Once I was approached by a predatory male who made unseemly and unmistakable advances. And I was mad all over again.

My first job netted me absolutely nothing. My employer on this occasion was a slave boss and I quit cold soon after I started.

My second job netted me $3.40 for a full day of the hardest kind of domestic work. My “madam”-that is how the “slaves” describe those who hire them-on this occasion was a gentle Mrs. Simon Legree, who fed me three crackers, a sliver of cream cheese, jelly and a glass of coffee while she ate a savory stew.

The brush with the man was degrading and unspeakable.

These are everyday experiences in the Bronx Slave Market and in the markets elsewhere in the city.

• • •

I took up my stand in front of Woolworth’s in the early chill of a December morning. Other women began to gather shortly afterwards. Backs pressed to the store window, paper bags clutched in their hands, they stared bleakly, blankly, into the street. I lost my identity entirely. I was a member of the “paper bag brigade.”

Local housewives stalked the line we had unconsciously formed, picked out the most likely “slaves,” bargained with them and led them off down the street. Finally I was alone. I was about to give up, when a short, stout, elderly woman approached. She looked me over carefully before asking if I wanted a day’s work. I said I did.

“How much you want?”

”A dollar.” (I knew that $1 an hour is the rate the Domestic Workers Union, the New York State Employment Service and other bona fide agencies ask for work by the hour.)

”A dollar an hour!” she exclaimed. “That’s too much. I pay 70 cents.” The bargaining began. We finally compromised on 80 cents. I wanted the job.

“This way.” My “madam” pointed up Townsend Ave. Silently we trudged up the street. My mind was filled with questions, but I kept my mouth shut. At 171st St., she spoke one of my unasked questions:

“You wash windows?”

‘NOT DANGEROUS’

I wasn’t keen on washing windows. Noting my hesitation, she said: “It isn’t dangerous. I live on the ground floor.”

I didn’t think I’d be likely to die from a fall out a first-floor window, so I continued on with her.

She watched me while I changed into my work clothes in the kitchen or her dark three-room, ground-floor apartment. Then she handed me a pail of water and a bottle of ammonia and ordered me to follow her into the bedroom.

“First you are to wash this window,” she ordered.

Each half of the window had six panes. I sat on the window ledge, pulled the top section down to my lap and began washing. The old woman glanced into the room several times during the 20 minutes it took me to finish the job. The window was shining.

I carried my work paraphernalia into the living room, where I was ordered to wash the two windows and the venetian blinds.

As I set about my work again, I saw my employer go into the bedroom.

She came back into the living room, picked up a rag and disappeared again. When she returned a few moments later, I pulled up the window and asked if everything was all right.

“You didn’t do the corners and you missed two panes.” Her tone was accusing.

I intended to be ingratiating because I wanted to finish this job. I started to answer her meekly and offer to go back over the work. I started to explain that the windows were difficult because the corners were caked with paint. I started to tell her I hadn’t missed a single pane.

Of this I was certain. I had checked them off as I did them, with great precision – one, two, three – .

Then I remembered a discussion I’d heard that very morning among members of the “paper bag brigade.” I learned that it is a common device of Slave Market employers to criticize work as a build-up for not paying the worker the full amount of money agreed upon.

“They’ll gyp you at every turn if you let ‘em,” one of the women had said.

“They’ll even take 25 cents off your pay for the measly meal they give you. You have to stand up for yourself every inch of the way.”

Suddenly I was angry-angry at this slave boss-angry for all workers everywhere who are treated like a commodity. I slipped under the window and faced the old woman. The moment my feet hit the floor and I dropped the rag into the pail of water, I was no longer a slave.

My voice shaking with anger, I exclaimed: “I washed every single pane and you know it.” Her face showed surprise. Such defiance was something new in her experience. Before she could answer, I had left the pail of dirty water on the living room floor, marched into the kitchen and put on my clothes.

My ex-slave boss watched me while I dressed.

”I’ll pay you for the time you put in,” she offered. I had only worked 40 minutes. I could afford to be magnanimous.

“Never mind. Keep it as a Christmas present from me.” With that, I marched out of the house. It was early. With luck, I could pick up another job.

Again I took up my stand in front of Woolworth’s.

THE BRONX SLAVE MARKET
PART III

‘PAPER BAG BRIGADE’ LEARNS HOW TO DEAL WITH GYPPING EMPLOYERS

I had quit my first job in revolt and now, at 10:30 A.M., I was back in The Bronx Slave Market, looking for my second job of the day.

As I took my place in front of Woolworth’s, on 170th St. near Walton Ave., I found five members of the “paper bag brigade” still waiting around to be “bought” by housewives looking for cheap household labor.

One of the waiting “slaves” glanced at me. I hoped she would be friendly enough to talk.

“Tough out here on the street,” I remarked. She nodded.

“I had one job this morning, but I quit,” I went on. She seemed interested.

“I washed windows for a lady, but I fired myself when she told me my work was no good.” It was as though she hadn’t heard a thing I said. She was looking me over appraisingly.

“I ain’t seen you up here before,” she said. “You’re new, ain’t you?”

ON THE OUTSIDE

I was discovering that you just can’t turn up cold on the market. The “paper hag brigade” is like a fraternity. You must be tried and found true before you are accepted. Until then, you are on the outside,
looking in.

Many of the “new” women are fresh from the South, one worker told me, and they don’t know how to bargain.

“They’ll work for next to nothing,” she said, “and that makes it hard for all of us.” My new friend, probably bored with standing around, decided to forgive my newness and asked about the job I had left. I told her how the fat old lady had accused me of neglecting the window I had so painstakingly washed.

“Oh, that’s the way they all act when they don’t want to give you your full pay.” She brushed off the incident as if it were an everyday occurrence.

“Anyway, you shouldn’t-a agreed to work by the hour. That’s the best way to get gypped. Some of them only want you for an hour or so to clean the worst dirt out of their houses. Then they tell you you’re through. It’s too late by that time to get another job.”

“What should I have done?”

“Just don’t work by the hour,” she repeated laconically. “Work by the day. Ask six bucks and carfare for a three-room apartment.”

EXPERT ADVICE

My new friend proved helpful. She told me all manner of things for which to be on the alert.

“Don’t let them turn the clock back on you,” she warned. “That’s the easiest way to beat you out of your dough. Don’t be afraid to speak up for yourself if they put more work on you than you bargained for.”

I asked whether she had tried to get jobs at the New York State Employment Service on Fordham Road. She said she had a “card,” but that “there are just no jobs up there …. And anyway, I don’t want my name on any records.” When I asked what she meant by that, she became silent and turned her attention to another woman standing beside her. I guessed that she was a relief client.

There seemed little likelihood or another job that morning. I decided to call it a day. As I turned to leave, I saw a woman walking down the street with the inevitable bag under her arm. She looked as if she knew her way around.

“Beg your pardon,” I said as I came abreast of her. ”Are you looking for work, too?”

“What’s it to you?” Her voice was brash and her eyes were hard as steel. She obviously knew her way around and how to protect herself. No foolishness abour her.

“Nothing,” I answered. I felt crushed.

”I’m new up here. Thought you might give me some pointers,” I went on.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “Don’t mind me. I ain’t had no work for so long, I just get cross. What you want to know?”

When I told her about my morning’s experience, she said that “they (the employers) are all bitches.” She said it without emotion. It was spoken as a fact, as if she had remarked, “The sun is shining.”

“They all get as much as they can our your hide and try not to pay you if they can get away with it.”

She, too, worked by the job-”six bucks and carfare.” I asked if she had ever tried the State Employment Service.

“I can’t,” she answered candidly. ”I’m on relief and if the relief folks ever find out I’m working another job, they’ll take it off my check. Lord knows, it’s little enough now, and it’s going to be next to nothing when they start cutting in January.”

She went on down the street. I watched her a moment before I turned toward the subway. I was half conscious that I was being followed. At the corner of 170th St. and Walton Ave., I stopped a moment to look at the Christmas finery in Jack Fine’s window. A man passed me, walked around the corner a few yards on Walton Ave., retraced his steps and stopped by my side.

I crossed Walton Ave. The man was so close on my heels that when I stopped suddenly on the far corner, he couldn’t break his stride. I went back to Jack Fine’s corner. When the man passed me again, he made a lewd, suggestive gesture, winked and motioned me to follow him up Walton Ave.

I was sick to my stomach. I had had enough for one day.

http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/1 ... ve-market/

by **American Dream** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 10:54 am

http://www.leftturn.org/Organizing-with-Love

Organizing with Love: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign

By: Ai-jen Poo
Date Published: December 1, 2010

Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible.

The fight to win a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State—led by Domestic Workers United and the New York Domestic Workers Justice Coalition—has been one of those great organizing campaigns. The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights is a piece of statewide legislation that recognizes the domestic workforce and establishes basic labor standards. The first legislation of its kind, the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights provides overtime pay, protection from discrimination, and other basic benefits for the more than 200,000 women—most of whom are immigrants of color—who work as nannies, housekeepers, and companions for the elderly in New York State. The fight to win the Bill of Rights was like a love affair, full of exciting moments, inspiring growth and life-changing struggles. Throughout most years of our efforts, domestic workers and organizers were told we were trying to achieve the impossible, but we believed that we could win.

Before this effort, domestic workers were largely invisible, and the question being asked was whether domestic workers should be included in the labor law. Today, the questions are: How far will benefits and protections be extended, and how far will we go to restore dignity?

The world of work inside the home

Domestic workers are among the most vulnerable workers in the United States today. There are an estimated 2.5 million women who labor as domestic workers. In the New York metropolitan area alone, over 200,000 women of color leave their homes early in the morning, often in the dark, in order to arrive at their work sites before their employers leave for work. Some even live in their employers’ homes, caring for these families day and night, even though many domestic workers have to leave their own children behind in their home nations.

These domestic workers make crucial contributions to the economy in urban areas of the United States as well as crucial contributions to the economies in their home nations. Most domestic workers are immigrant women of color from the Global South who are under enormous pressure to earn enough money to support their families both in the United States and abroad. In a recent survey of domestic workers in New York, conducted by Data Center and Domestic Workers United, researchers found that 98 percent of domestic workers are foreign born and that 59 percent are the primary income earners for their families. Remittances from domestic work are also a central source of revenue for many nations in the global South.

Even though so much of the economy rests on the work of domestic workers, their labor has long been taken for granted. Historically associated with the unpaid work of women in the home and with the poorly paid labor of Black and immigrant women, domestic work today remains undervalued and invisible.

Historically, US labor laws have explicitly excluded domestic workers. This exclusion is rooted in the legacy of slavery. In the early part of the twentieth century, most of the nation’s domestic workers and farm workers were African American. When the New Deal’s labor legislation was being debated in the 1930s, Southern members of Congress—who feared the emergence of an African American labor movement—blocked the inclusion of farm workers and domestic workers in federal labor laws.

The racialized exclusion of domestic workers from labor laws, the gendered devaluation of women’s work in the home, the decentralized structure of the industry, and the economic pressures facing immigrants from the global South make domestic workers extremely vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. In this context, organizing is both difficult and absolutely essential. Over the past ten years, domestic workers in New York City have developed an innovative organizing model to address the challenging dynamics of the industry and to build grassroots workers’ power.

The history of Domestic Workers United

Domestic Workers United (DWU) was born in 1999 out of a joint organizing effort between two community-based organizations: CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and Andolan: Organizing South Asian Workers. The two organizations had been organizing and fighting cases of injustice on behalf of workers in different Asian communities for several years.

DWU initially helped to organize individual support campaigns for workers who had been mistreated by their employers, were owed wages, or had survived trafficking. DWU organized demonstrations at employers’ businesses, and worked with legal partners to file lawsuits against delinquent employers.

As the work evolved, it became clear that grassroots worker education and case-by-case fighting wasn’t going to give workers the protection they needed. We would have to find a way to change labor laws. In 2002, DWU decided to test the waters and see how possible it would be to win legislative protections for domestic workers. That year, DWU led a successful effort to pass a New York City law to compel domestic worker employment placement agencies to educate workers and employers about basic labor rights. On the day of the vote in 2003, domestic workers packed the balcony inside City Council chambers carrying a sign that read, “The First Step to Victory, The Struggle Continues.”

After that initial victory, we wanted to keep domestic worker issues in the limelight and keep our process of building power moving. DWU decided to hold the Having Your Say Convention, which brought together hundreds of domestic workers with the goal of laying the foundation for a much bolder statewide campaign to establish new labor laws protecting domestic workers. The convention brought together domestic workers from over a dozen different countries for a day-long meeting. Even though they spoke six different languages, these workers found a common voice as they shared their experiences of laboring without respect or basic labor standards. The emcee of the convention was Marlene Champion, a nanny from the Caribbean who opened the program by stating, “Ladies, we are making history here today. You have a voice, and together we are going places.”

Out of that convention, we developed a set of key priorities that would become the basis for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, including overtime pay, a minimum of one day of rest per week, health care, a living wage of $14 per hour, notice of termination, severance pay, paid holidays, paid leave, and protection from discrimination. DWU coordinated with the other organizations that organized domestic workers in New York for the next stage of the fight. CAAAV’s Women Workers Project, Andolan: Organizing South Asian Workers, Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, Unity Housecleaners, Damayan Migrant Workers Association, Adhikaar for Human Rights and Domestic Workers United were all organizing domestic workers in their respective communities. Together, we formed the New York Domestic Worker Justice Coalition, and the Bill of Rights Campaign became the place where domestic workers came together across communities to maximize their power as a workforce.

We took our first trip to the state capitol in Albany in January 2004. As we navigated the narrow streets on that cold winter morning, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, what it would take to win protections for domestic workers. In meeting after meeting with legislators and their aides, domestic workers were asked questions like, “What are you talking about? Is this about domestic violence?” and “What if I can’t afford to pay $14 per hour?” We were even told, “Look, honey, the guy that pumps your gas doesn’t get these things by law, why should the babysitter get them?” We spent the next five years learning what it would take to build power and win in Albany.

Building the power to win

Moral arguments were not enough. We had to build power if we wanted to win. We spent the first few legislative sessions in the Bill of Rights campaign learning the ropes in Albany. We needed to understand the dynamics in this new world of power relations: What power did we have? What power did we need to win? Who had that power? Where did the legislature stand on our agenda? This was the moment when it became clear that we would not only need to continue building our base of domestic workers, but that we would also need to significantly expand our base of support among other social sectors.

We started by building a network of support among our current allies, recruiting people to get involved in our work in concrete ways like collecting postcard signatures and attending our trips to Albany. We expanded our support base by speaking at other organizations’ meetings and in classrooms and churches. This growing base of support enabled us to convince more legislators to sign on as cosponsors on our bill. By our third year, we decided to strengthen our support base by creating a campaign organizing committee that our coalition partners and supporters could join to become a part of the campaign planning process. We invited anyone who had the desire and energy to attend: students, union members, attorneys, and individual activists. By opening that kind of space to all the people who were interested in our struggle, we developed a core group of supporters who could lead independent organizing in their own networks.

Building worker-to-worker solidarity was also crucial. SEIU Local 32BJ, for example, is a union that represents the thousands of doormen in luxury apartment buildings around New York City. Local 32BJ has a natural affinity between its members and the members of DWU because the union’s members are often the friends, confidants, or even husbands of the domestic workers who work in the apartment buildings of wealthy. The doormen hear the workers’ stories of abuse, they are the ones who help workers into cabs after late nights of babysitting, and they are also the shoulders to cry on when someone is fired without notice or severance pay. The members of Local 32BJ have been crucial allies in this fight.

Worker-to-worker solidarity also meant building solidarity between excluded workers. One powerful example came when the New York State Labor Religion Coalition and the local Jobs with Justice chapter chose to highlight domestic workers’ and farm workers’ rights during its annual 40-hour fast which was themed “Welcoming the Stranger: Prophetic Voices for Immigrant Rights.” The New York Justice for Farm Workers campaign and the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights campaign mobilized workers to participate in the 40-hour fast activities, which included legislative visits, a morning interfaith service, a press conference, and a march.

Over the course of the day, the workers collaborated in mixed groups of farm workers and domestic workers. They learned from one another’s stories, they built camaraderie, and they laughed together. At the end of the day, Lois Newland, a companion for the elderly and member of DWU, said, “We never ask ourselves at Thanksgiving dinner with all the food on the table, who suffered to make it possible for that food to be there? Now I know.” In turn, the farm workers remarked on the courage and clarity with which domestic workers engaged legislators. One of them said, “We learned a lot from working with you. You have given us more energy to fight.” After the exchange, domestic workers would rarely participate in an event without raising the question of farm worker dignity. In the years following, we invited farm worker leaders to participate in all of our actions.

After three years, we finally had a strong enough support base to pull together major mobilizations to Albany. So we swapped our vans for buses, and we started to take hundreds of supporters to Albany to meet with legislators about domestic workers’ rights. Over the course of the six years of the Bill of Rights campaign, DWU members and supporters traveled to Albany more than 40 times. We mobilized more than 1,000 people on daylong trips to meet with legislators.

In addition to legislative visits, our Albany mobilizations included rallies, press conferences, and exciting cultural performances such as the “Domestic Slide” (a domestic workers’ version of the Electric Slide). We also organized events that mobilized our support network in New York City to bring attention to our issues, including hearings, marches, and days of action. More than 8,000 New Yorkers have taken action for respect and recognition for domestic workers, signing over 7,000 postcards supporting the bill’s passage and participating in creative media events and large-scale direct actions.

By the fifth year of the campaign, our years of public education were finally enough to give us the influence we needed to be able to meet directly with the Speaker of the Assembly. This meeting led to the Assembly’s passage of legislation that eliminated exclusions of domestic workers in the labor law. While the Assembly bill was not the full Bill of Rights, it was a tremendous step forward. The Senate passed the Bill of Rights in the next legislative session. The momentum from local and state initiatives like the New York Bill of Rights can help create the climate for federal legislation to establish standards and reverse the exclusion and discrimination that have defined the lives of domestic workers for generations.

Building on the stories of domestic workers

The work of Domestic Workers United is based on the premise that our power is rooted in our membership, specifically on the capacity of our membership to lead our organization and to provide leadership for broader movements that reach beyond domestic workers. The Bill of Rights campaign strengthened that resolve. We knew that the stories and leadership of domestic workers would be a driving force throughout the campaign. What we didn’t expect was how many other people would feel that their own life stories were so closely connected to the stories of domestic workers.

These connections turned out to be an electric cord that energized the campaign from beginning to end. Rather than framing our work as a narrow workers’ rights campaign focused strictly on the issues of domestic workers, we intentionally built the campaign around broader axes of structural inequality. We based our frames on our analysis of the root causes of the problems facing domestic workers including the devaluing of “women’s work” in the home, the legacy of slavery in the United States, and the lack of a social safety net in the United States and internationally.

We learned that it is possible to frame any campaign broadly enough to allow you to pull in unexpected allies and therefore to bring more power to your agenda. The power of workers’ stories and the strength of our broader frames made the various alliances in this campaign possible.

Lessons in transformative organizing

As effective as our campaign has been in changing state policy, the impact of the process of organizing and alliance building has been equally important. The Bill of Rights campaign offered an opportunity for people to step outside of their own patterns, to make different choices, and to build different relationships with others. Domestic Workers United led a campaign that mobilized many different communities of people based on an expanded sense of self-interest that acknowledged our relationships and our interdependencies.

As a movement, we face enormous challenges ahead. The Bill of Rights Campaign is an example of the types of campaigns—full of hard work, risk and uncertainty—that we will need to embrace in order to make a real difference for the next generation. It provides a hopeful push—despite the unknown—toward campaigns based on love, to bring us into the right relationships with one another for the change we need. In taking these risks, we may become who we were meant to be as a movement.

Ai-jen Poo is executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

by **American Dream** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 11:28 am

Black Girl is a 1966 film by the Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembène, starring Mbissine Thérèse Diop. Its original French title is La Noire de..., which means "The black girl of...", as in "someone's black girl". The film centers on a young Senegalese woman who moves from Senegal to France, to work for a rich French couple.

Diouana, a young Senegalese woman, moves from Dakar, Senegal, to Antibes, France, to work for a rich French couple. In France, Diouana hopes to continue her former job as nanny, and looks forward to a cosmopolitan lifestyle. However, upon arrival in Antibes, the couple begins to treat Diouana more harshly and she is forced to work in the capacity of a servant. Diouana becomes increasingly aware of her constrained and alienated situation.

by **American Dream** » Sat Sep 24, 2011 2:44 pm

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Lay ... World.html

“On Objects, Love, and Objectifications: Children in a Material World”

Layla AbdelRahim [2002]

This work first appeared as a 15-page paper for a doctoral seminar in education at McGill University, Montreal in October 2002. Claudia Mitchell, our professor, challenged us to reflect on the phenomenology of children’s space. My paper for that course focused on my child’s room. I have since incorporated contrastive and reflective elements from my anthropological observations on childhood and edited the form and the content of the first version to present at the CHILDHOODS 2005 conference in July in Oslo.

Before proceeding further, I would like to clarify what may come off as a categorical condemnation of ALL of society or of ALL of ‘civilised‘ ‘Western’ society. When I apply these terms and categories, I refer to the official and the generally valued aspects of social organisation. It is precisely because I understand that all societies are much more variegated than the official or ‘mainstream’ grammar portrays the various ‘nations’ to be that I criticise the attempt to standardise human experience according to the “official party-line” turning this experience into suffering.

Prologue: on Love

How to love a child, asked Janush Korchak, the Polish pediatrician and pedagogue at the beginning of the 20th century, which perhaps meant how to be Human. Yet, most people find it difficult to conceive what it is to be able to listen to a child, to respect a child, and to be there for a child even when not one’s own, even when one feels it is beyond one’s power. The love in your heart will give you the strength, was Korchak’s message. Day or night, he waited by the bedside of a dying child so that when the child’s eyes opened they would meet the doctor’s and the child would know that s/he was not alone in this world and then death would seem less cold, less frightful, less solitary. During World War II, the Germans condemned to death the group of some 200 Orphans in his charge. The doctor had a chance to stay behind. He said that he would not abandon his children at this difficult moment of their lives. He went with them. They all vanished one foggy dawn.

(From the biographical note to the Russian edition of How to Love a Child)

Despite the widespread illusion of human “progress”, the pertinence of this question has not diminished: What does it mean to love? And, more specifically, how can we be sure that we do love our children?

on Things: questions of Cost

I often hear parents use the term “love” to justify their absence from their children’s lives replacing themselves with bought objects: ‘I love you, look what I got you”. Or: “stop being ungrateful, dad and I work so hard because we love you; we’ve got to work in order to earn money for your own good”, the logic being:

1.

work is what brings money. Parents’ care for their children is not paid and therefore is not work. A stranger who cares for a child is paid and therefore is considered to work, even though child-care in general is a minimum wage profession — when lucky.

2.

we work so hard in order to earn money with which we can buy you things and other parent-substitutes, such as formula, pacifiers, toys, baby-sitters, educators, friends, books, toys, clothes, more toys, ad infinitum.

Even if not always blatant, repercussions of this reasoning can often be felt in, both, the adults’ view of children as an unprofitable burden and in children’s view of themselves as disparate, void entities and by extension of human relations as severed, calculating and cold. At the basis of these relations lies the desire to accumulate.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu included in the term “possessions” the non-material or social and symbolic capital, such as education, taste, knowledge, etc. Material and non-material possessions acquire their value through social understanding and negotiation. Value is not an inherent aspect of objects, effort or time. It is the result of a complex process that involves mythology, education, and the mobilisation of the whole cultural apparatus in order to impose the idea, which in the capitalist/globablist world means that some individuals and groups earn disgracefully more for their time and effort while others incomparably less or that some things cost less while others peculiarly more.

For example, one could make a t-shirt from scrap, recycled fabric and it would cost one hour worth of effort. If the maker belongs to an upper class with social and economic weight and labels himself or herself as an “haute couture” and not “low couture” designer, s/he could exchange this scrap t-shirt for thousands of dollars. How does this work?

Bourdieu explains that by belonging to a certain group with social and economic power a person has access to the group’s social and symbolic wealth which allows the person to evaluate his or her effort according to the position that s/he occupies in the group’s scale. In this way, a person sells not only the t-shirt but also the label that marks the buyer as a member of that (powerful in this specific example) group. Taste and the act of buying become tickets to specific cliques and, as such, labels differentiate their owner from owners of other labels. Needless to say, that currency ratings undergo similar “operations” in order to blow-up the rate of some and deflate to the point of total misery, even extinction, the currency of others.

Of course this works because people believe in this system or resign to it because they either view it as natural or as inevitable. If people didn’t participate in it, needless to say, it wouldn’t be there. But since most people strive to acquire material and symbolic wealth, they succumb to spending more on overpriced labels, currencies, objects, services, etc. But, as Bourdieu demonstrates, they forget that the stakes in a pyramidal order are predetermined so that the majority will stay at the bottom of the scale regardless of how much they work, purchase or spend. There simply is no space for everyone up there. But the myths are important to give people the hope and the illusion that if they worked hard, studied more, bought and consumed, each one of them could end up there.

on Things: question of Love, Hatred, and Shame

The culture of childhood, parenthood, or that of child-rearing and education is vital for the endurance of a system, particularly for those who profit from it. What puzzles though is when people who have more to sacrifice than to reap from this system of exchange abandon their children to it and to the professionals trained to safeguard someone else’s interests. Parents justify this act by saying that “we are absent all day from your lives in order to buy you things, care, company, and love”.

Love, in this sense, comprises everything from the hard-core matter to the effervescent idealism that includes taste, types of knowledge, and social networks. They thus transmit matter and love (i.e. desire to possess) for matter.

Love in the other sense, where a person gives something of the self to another, has no place in the culture of baby-sitters, day-care, school, after-school extensions, etc. In fact, the majority of parents secretly (even from themselves) hate themselves and despise their own knowledge or parental skills and feel that they are either incompetent or have nothing to transmit because “only professionals can teach my child” anything of worth; and hence they send their children to the professionals who transmit to those children professional, paid “love” during the 8 am — 6 pm shifts and based on the Ministry of Education curriculum — a programme set not with love and out of love, but from the perspective of how to most efficiently organise labour and consumption patterns. Education offers tools, not love and since the majority has to stay at the bottom to carry the pyramid on their shoulders, the standardised syllabus is the most efficient way to achieve subordination, as long as parents don’t meddle in.

Love, effort, gender issues, have all become useful concerns in contemporary sociology — a normative science, like psychology. Some feminists have even attempted to calculate the value of love in order to create an equation of male and female unaccounted for contribution or effort at home and in society — not a bad idea in itself when seen from this logic of experience but highly problematic because it perpetuates that same logic where parenthood is understood as an investment that begins with the provision of social and material capital before and at the expense of other aspects of children’s and family’s well-being, leading to a crisis of childhood, parenthood and family.

This crisis is the result of the pricing system discussed above, since the time and effort spent by a parent on a child is not valued and childcare is a low pay occupation. For example, how are we going to evaluate the process of conception? Who spent how much time and who gained what? Then, how about the time, sleep, and litres of blood “spent” on a pregnancy and then on breast-feeding (mother’s milk is made from the woman’s blood and needs good nutrition, outdoors light, sleep and time)? Then how are we going to price the time spent on bonding? On caring? Or on the zillion other intricacies of human relationships?

My point is that motherhood is priceless. But it can not be without material or emotional support from others, particularly from the more powerful. For example, every politician in North America could easily support fully AT LEAST 5 families in the third world and MORE than one single mothers in his own country. Since society is set up to have these people (mostly men) rule, society can begin with them its reorganisation towards a more just world.

We can continue restructuring other “social” fields as well: for example, I propose that if a graduate student, particularly with a family, gets funding refused for his or her research, those professors who have been approached for letters of recommendation split the costs of the family among themselves (I bet the ‘letter of recommendation’ system would be immediately abolished). And don’t even let me start on businesses; only when these people begin to divide fairly what they make off the fruit of other people’s labour can we begin to refer to human conglomeration as “society”. The term ’society’, together with the accompanying notion of ’service to society’, appears as a set-up set up in order to trick people and weaken them. In fact, the term is more appropriate to wolves and felines who do more for each other’s children than we do.

And so, childcare can never have a price-tag because there is too much at stake. But what happens is that the majority of people, in general, and in the sphere of childcare, in particular, work hard and dirty yet fare poorly.

The low status of parenthood, just like other “dirty” jobs, in market economy is a curious phenomenon. On the one hand, the capitalist system needs producers to generate clean streets, technological or industrial gadgets, and future generations of workers and soldiers. Yet, these “producers” are despised.

Marilyn Bronstein who ran a women’s co-op for mothers with young children in Montreal found out that she could not mention the word “mother” in applications for grants: “You have to say “women”. Wait a minute, but aren’t women mothers? Apparently not. The second No-no is any mention of childcare. My project focused on creating community viable outlets. Childcare is time and energy consuming. It is a serious issue, if you want the best for the family. Apparently, that is not viewed as a socially viable solution that deserved serious (i.e. publicly funded) consideration”.

Another grant, Marilyn explained, intended to help women get into non-traditional jobs. “I told that to my agent and he said ’so you’re going to stir up all these women and then there won’t be any jobs waiting for me’, so I changed the grant to teaching women self-esteem when they’re not in the workforce. And I got the grant. Grant priorities change from year to year like fashion”.

This attitude towards parenthood in general, but motherhood specifically, is both a reflection of and the force behind the dismissal of childcare as a low priority private and social responsibility. Instead, it shifts the focus on symbolic values and on materialism that other occupations may foster.

However, there seems to be few winners in this system of things. For, if the poor workers bestow little time, social capital, or precious matter upon their progeny, those who fare better financially compensate with acquisitions the time they lose at work and in social networking at clubs, bars, parties, or in other forms of entertainment. In this logic, things become directly proportionate to “love” and raise many questions, such as what type of people and the degree of their health can such a culture nurture. By health I mean functioning in harmony with the social and natural environment.

The topic of poverty is key here, but unfortunately, I have limited space and time to give it its due. In this work, I concentrate on material culture as a context for relationships because access to material goods is an important part of how people view themselves and their relationships with others. Here are two examples to illustrate this self-perception.

“I grew up extremely poor,” I heard on several occasions in Canada and the U.S. Such proclamation startled me. What is it like to characterise oneself as poor? Myself, I grew up in a household with financial strains — at times dire — but I never perceived myself or my family as “poor”. Rather the opposite. Growing up, I felt happy. I asked what it meant to grow up poor in North America. My poor interlocutors replied that they couldn’t buy new clothes.

“It was horrible. I hated going to school, ‘cause others had fancy new clothes while mine always came from the thrift shop. And then for X-mass, everyone had those big X-mass trees with lots of new decorations and boxes and boxes of gifts, but we always had this same old plastic one with the same old stuff and little second-hand-shop gifts. I hated my mother. I hated my home. I was always so ashamed of them. Brrr… I couldn’t wait to grow up and get away from them [parents]…” explained Lynne, a graduate of Smith College who grew up in California.

Suzan, a writer, from Ontario also focused on clothes.

I grew up extremely poor. I never had new clothes. They were always hand-downs. My mother decided to have the three of us knowing she’d be a single mom since my father never intended to marry her. But she couldn’t handle the responsibility. So when we got the welfare cheque, we felt like millionaires. That’s how poor we’ve been…. I always attended private schools, ‘cause I had scholarships. All those other kids had rich parents and nice things and I was always wearing hand-down pants. Sometimes 5th generation. I hated it.

Both of these examples are characteristic of the majority of the comments I heard on growing up poor in the context of “developed” countries. Much of the perception of poverty is related to wanting new things, more things, better things, like-other-people’s things, better-than-other-people’s things. In other words, the pressure to fit into an outside material standard shifts the dimensions of inside relations and togetherness to splintered childhoods, shattered by objects, the lack of them, and the desire to possess.

Suzan’s comment is the more interesting, because it reveals the extent of privation to which her family was subjected apart from having had to wear hand-down clothes. For, if they lived on less than welfare for several years, it means that they had no provision even in terms of basic necessities and in Western countries — where access to nature and public space costs money — it means that they were also deprived of space along with time.

For example, public transportation is expensive and is not comprehensive in what it can reach. Without a car, one feels handicapped in North America. Many bicycle paths leading to the countryside in Quebec, for example le petit chemin du nord, cost money. To have a workshop, a studio or a spot for writing is extra $2. Needless to say that each meal counts towards the energy and time needed to perform a task. No meal — no energy. Time ticks between the meals and the longer the gap — the less there is of performance. This applies to everything, to meals and to bills, if the shoes are too tight, too leaky, too uncomfortable, one can’t get far in cold weather; one gets stressed. If there is no coat, if there is no heating (and we know that heating companies cut it off if a family doesn’t pay); one gets stressed. Hungry and crowded people with no exit, whether they are children or adults, scream and burst out with aggression sometimes against the violence of institutionalised injustice but more often amongst themselves and against those weaker than themselves.

Suzan’s case is not an exception, rather the contrary. For example, here is what the Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America (pp 280-283) says about Canada, who boasts more national wealth and higher commitment to social justice than some other countries:

“Younger single people, aboriginal people, persons with disabilities, women, and children are more likely to be poor than other Canadians. …(U)nattached seniors, particularly women, have very high poverty rates…. The poverty rate for young single people increased from 39% in 1981 to 61% in 1997. The poverty rate for persons with disabilities was 31% in 1995…. Single women under age 65 have higher poverty rates than men, 41% compared to 35%. Female single parents had the highest poverty rate of all family types at 56% in 1997. Child poverty remains a particular concern to Canadians because children are unambiguously not to blame for their situation. Also, raising children in poverty hampers their career opportunities”. Children’s poverty rate, regardless of background, rose to 1.4 million or 20% of the total population by year 2000 (data taken from an article by Richard Shillington, ibid).

The formulation of the above paragraph implies that, since children are not to blame for their poverty, adults are to be held accountable for their misfortunes. Yet, the authors concede that growing up poor hampers the opportunities when these children become adults. So, my question is, are we to blame them when they grow up or do we concede that all adults have once been children who either grew up in want or were coerced into it?

Now, if Canadian statistics on poverty are outrageous, the United States boasts the highest poverty poverty rate among industrialised states.

Prison statistics are further revealing of the distribution of power and social relations in North America and their effect on childhood and parenthood. For example, according to Vicky Pelaez[1], there “are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the [U.S.]. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people”.

Since prisoners constitute an important niche for cheap labour, the solution sought in North America, is to make prisons private, where prisoners would work directly for big businesses[2] who now find Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans too hungry and too dying to work yet too costly.

According to Statistics Canada, Canadians don’t fare much better. Whole groups can find themselves ousted from the arena of national wealth. The example of the aboriginal nations shows that aboriginals comprise 3% of total populace. Yet, most of them are either in poverty or in jail.

*

In Saskatchewan, Aboriginal adults are incarcerated at 35 times the rate of non-aboriginals, where they make up 77% of the total prisoner population (10% of outside population)

*

In the Yukon — Aboriginal adults make up 74% of the total prisoner population (20% of outside population)

*

In Manitoba — Aboriginal adults make up 70% of the total prisoner population (11% of outside population)

*

In Alberta — Aboriginal adults make up 38% of the total prisoner population (4% of outside population)

*

In Ontario — Aboriginal adults make up 9% of the total prisoner population (1% of outside population)

*

In British Columbia — Aboriginal adults make up 20% of the total prisoner population (10% of outside population)

Aboriginal Women (2004-2005):

*

Aboriginal women make up 30% of the female prisoner population

*

In Saskatchewan, Aboriginal women account for 87% of all female admissions

*

In Manitoba and the Yukon, Aboriginal women account for 83% of all female admissions

*

In Alberta, Aboriginal women account for 54% of all female admissions

*

In British Columbia, Aboriginal women account for 29% of all female admissions[3]

The main question that begs itself here, is who and what factors are responsible for all these people being in poverty or jail. However, we are concerned with the effect of these social relations on childhood and parenthood. If we consider that, in rich countries alone, over the utterly miserable multitudes hovers a hefty miserable middle class stressing over making ends meet, that leaves a very small group of satisfied childhoods who are out of poverty or out of jail. The most important revelation of the statistics, though, is the brutality and injustice towards motherhood, womanhood, ethnic minorities and childhood and youth.

To return to personal interpretations, what struck me in Suzan’s and other reflections, is that their perception of poverty concentrated on the lack of new clothes. They never expressed to me compassion or love towards their struggling parents and siblings, only hatred and shame — understandable emotions towards the violence inherent to the injustice of social relations fostered by seclusion, alienation deprivation and stress.

Suzan also judged her mother as irresponsible, because it is widely assumed in this globalising culture that parenthood is to be deserved and earned according to the scale of income. The moral and the material thus, once again, intertwine and the alienation of victims from their own interests is appalling.

“I’m against prolonged maternity leave,” said Agnes, a chemist from Montreal. “Each time I had a kid, I went back to the laboratory when they were 3 months old. If you don’t have enough money to pay for your staying at home, then you have to work. If you can’t work, then don’t have kids. It’s as simple as that”. Agnes had 2 children and said that she couldn’t afford any more”.

These examples indicate that in North America, even in Canada where parents can resort to a more extended parental leave and welfare, the notion of having children is tightly connected to income. Income, children and the standard of living are conceptualised as natural categories that are the result of a person’s worth and a reflection of what the person deserves: if one has much money, one deserves it. If one is in financial strain, one merited it too. Love and compassion are read in the context and from a life-stance of capitalism and consumerism.

Moreover, these examples reveal that the pressure to possess — not make — things is a major force underlying the feeling of deprivation and poverty. It is a reflection of impotence and sterility since people can not generate what they need and yet are coerced to provide things ignoring the context of pain and exploitation that is inherent to capitalist production and market economy. It is important to remember though, that when parents choose to replace themselves with toys, books, live-in-care, nannies, genetically modified food, etc. they replace themselves with objects imbued with immense suffering.

“Successful” capitalism is based on the exploitation for profit of, not only time and space, but of living organisms in all their forms: food, services, labour. A nanny living with and caring for a wealthy child in North America or Europe abandons behind 5 children in the Philippines so she could send her hungry in all the senses children the miserable pennies bestowed on her by the wealthy Northerners. The genetically modified grains, fruits and vegetables carry sterile seeds that are incapable of the basic instinct of life: self-reproduction. The sterilisation of pets, the poisonous pesticides and fungicides, the dying from exhaustion and malnutrition third-worlders, the stressed-to-the-point-of-madness first- and second-worlders, the animals tortured in farms and in medical and scientific laboratories, and so much more — all engender objects of hatred, suffering and death. This context is an essential part of the relationship between objects and people.

Children abandoned to these objects inhale this hatred and suffering. Abandoned to the claws of ministerial curriculum they also learn to perceive themselves as poor. Conceiving themselves as poor, they become impotent, lusting to amass and to consume and when they cannot satisfy this urge, instead of questioning the system that betrayed them, most often, they internalise their place in it and learn to hate themselves and their parents.

Hatred seems to be the central lesson of a curriculum that leads to devout consumerism and hence to a crisis of childhood, parenthood and family.

on Things: the question of categorization and interests

The symptoms of this crisis are manifest in the rise of statistical rates on neurological and mental disorders that indicate children’s alienation from themselves and their environment. For example, anorexia, bulimia and plastic surgeries reveal self-hate; autism, dyslexia and other reading or learning disorders, attention span deficit, hyperactivity, depression (manic, chronic or whatever) schizophrenia, outbursts of violence, just to name a few — all point to the disconnectedness from the self and from the outside world. Yet, we cover up the truth with “intelligent” jargon.

The formulation used in Statistics Canada is an excellent example of how language can conceal cause and effect. The subtitle is already an exercise in linguistics: “The transition from home to school: a key factor in identifying certain types of disability in children”; for it remains an open question as to whether, just because there might be some “deviance” in a few children, all children should be subjected to treatment as suspect. Doesn’t the mechanism of questioning often bear the fruit of confession regardless of whether one has committed the crime or not?

Further, the authors say that the proportions of some types of disability, among which they list learning disabilities, increase when children begin to attend school. They propose the following explanation: “The transition from home to school may explain some of this variation. For example, learning disabilities are often not apparent until the child begins to attend school; as well, these difficulties are more easily detected within the school context[4]”.

The authors do not seem to question whether the school “detects” the problem or perhaps causes it. It is even more peculiar that many parents do not think that there may be anything wrong with the fact that their child has been learning well at home yet at school gets diagnosed with a learning disability or that sometimes the child’s behaviour deteriorates and even changes completely the minute s/he is placed in school.

This does not come as a surprise, though, if we consider that society’s logic categorises the expectation itself of a child along with diseases and disorders. A doctor in the United States explained to me the reason behind the signs on university campuses inviting students to the infirmary. The ads group pregnancy together with sexual diseases, the doctor said, because as a “natural”, “biological” category, pregnancy is a parasitic growth with tumor-like behaviour.

The point here is not to argue pro-life or pro-choice in the American political sense. The point is categorisation itself that is not neutral but has the power to impart specific knowledge, logic and values that are part of symbolic capital. In the logic of a culture that emphasises individualism often pushed to the extreme of egotism, indeed, any life that comes to depend on another, be it a child on a parent, a parent on a child, a friend on a friend, an unemployed on “social aid”, etc., is seen as parasitic, as illness. Hence it becomes vital to conceal through language the ultimate dependence of the rich on poverty, desire, and suffering.

In spite of all, children appear. They manage to appear in a world of totalitarian birth control, high-tech medical facilities, and institutinalised schizophrenia. Each is a miracle indeed. Yet, these miracles begin to suffer and to battle for their existence before they are even conceived as an idea. When they are conceived as physical entities, their scream for love and their whole being are reduced to physical explanations.

North American scientists accentuate the “genetic” or “physiological” interpretations of human mystery such as the murderous gene, the gay chromosome, the serotonin levels, and so forth. These explanations allow parents and all involved to ignore, with a somnified conscience, the symptoms of unhappiness, frustration, atrophy and decay. Instead of changing the system that causes this vacuum and pain, they dive deeper, submerging their families in the ocean of material love and beloved purchases. Medication, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, criminologists, police, et al are all necessary attributes in this system of things, paid for by the parents’ sacrifice of their children and love on the scaffold of civilisation. In this regard, archeology, phenomenology and hermeneutics were bound to take root in a culture that valued possessions.

Bourdieu defined Western materialism as a system in the relationship between the possessor and the object of possession in these terms:

“Legitimate manners owe their value to the fact that they manifest the rarest conditions of acquisition, that is, a social power over time which is tacitly recognized as the supreme excellence: to possess things from the past, i.e. accumulated, crystallized history, aristocratic names and titles, chateaux or ’stately homes’, paintings and collections, vintage wines and antique furniture, is to master time, through all those things whose common feature is that they can only be acquired in the course of time, by means of time, against time, that is, by inheritance or through dispositions which, like the taste for old things, are likewise only acquired with time and applied by those who can take their time” (Distinction, p.71).

Not only time becomes a dimension of wealth, it is as if things can secure immortality; as if they can vanquish the poverty of the spirit and the feebleness of the body. Today’s parents are fetishists who consistently weaken their children with the consumerist lifestyle. As Mitchell and Reid-Walsh note in their research on children’s popular culture, a child’s bedroom has become the nest or “haven of ‘hyper consumerism’ and popular culture fantasy” (113). In fact, the room, in itself, can be regarded as punishment, for, the authors further note that “[ b]eing sent to one’s room, as we see represented in the children’s book by Maurice Sendak Where the Wild Things Are (1983) is regarded as punishment; it is not the same as going there freely…” (113).

I would venture further in this connection: Consumerism is punishment!

Yet, consumerism is imposed on children as early as birth, and even prior to it. First, possible future parents strive to “liberate” themselves financially and so they “liberate” themselves from the child — contraceptives is one tactic that is extremely profitable for the medical industry, sterilisation is another, which annihilates the idea of conception and creation itself and brings us back to consumerism as being the vehicle for impotence and sterility.

But when the possible finally become actual parents and get a child, they immediately set off to “liberate” themselves from the child again — this time with baby-sitters, nursery, day-care, school, tutors, extensions, etc. so as to be able to consecrate their time yet again to the “more important”: earning money and serving the “public” good (which public and what good is another question raised by the statistics on poverty and jail above) by earning money and serving the offspring by earning money and spending it on strangers — the “professionals” — thinking that they thus provide care, health, safety, and curriculum. The more they earn, the more they claim to love, to be good parents and good members of society, and the more things they acquire.

But things do not appease the child’s not yet stifled craving for love in the other, the non-material sense. The child screams and demands something which often neither she nor the adults know how to articulate, or perhaps even are not fully aware of — possibly a primeval instinct of being cuddled, snuggled, nursed, looked at, sniffed, pampered, protected, respected, and other such animal stuff. Instead, the civilised Homo Sapiens fights these instincts and imposes “independence” that amounts to: “my child is independent when s/he does not intrude into my space but has her own space which touches mine occasionally, between the baby-sitters, daycare, school, and work and without disrupting me”.

Since money and objects have come to symbolise, and have even replaced, love, the child demands more and more and does not understand why all this love in the form of things does not appease the other, the primordial, the unspoken of and the repressed urge; that is until it mutes. Since how much a child is “loved” is also an indication of the child’s place in society, then by the same logic, the more the child has the better s/he is expected to feel among people. Envy, competition, rivalry are bred by consumerism; and the fetishism of contemporary world demands ever more sacrifices and things.

At this point, a mini synthesis will help connect the above observations to the next part of the essay. Love, as a social construct, has undergone many operations. In a consumerist age, its meaning has become that of provision of things and the accumulation of capital to the point of loss of contact between people. Because things and capital derive their existence in a context of pain, exploitation and lies, any replacement of a living being with things replaces love with pain, exploitation and lies.

Apart from unhappiness, this breeds pathological mistrust between people on many levels: adults distrust each other; they distrust their own children and children grow up to distrust everyone else, including, or perhaps in the first place, their own parents (and seen the wider picture, of course rightly so). Love as the energy of creation, of transmission of a part of oneself to another, whether as personal creativity or cultural or biological reproduction, has been consistently fading away. It is therefore not surprising that consumerist art such as Andy Warhol’s would be chosen to represent contemporary experience: flat, compulsive and sterile.

on Love: the question of Sex

Western doctors, the overseers of social “health”, urge parents to think about sexual relationships and career before pregnancy, during pregnancy and postpartum.

The highly complex phenomenon of sexual energy — the yearning for fulfillment and creative togetherness is thus reduced to sexual intercourse for the sake of pleasure tantamount to the consumption of sterile, genetically modified food. Sterile sexuality is empty pleasure that has no possibility, not even a chance of creativity. This is not to say that sexual intercourse necessarily has to take place with the intention to reproduce. But when the idea of creation — any kind (artistic or biological) — at any point of a union between two people has been a priori eliminated, the physiological act itself breathes emptiness, death.

At the same time, the need to connect with someone for the expression of such creativity, the pleasure of creation sought in a union, can be misinterpreted as a sexual need, because in its basic sense, the act of creation gives the pleasure of satisfaction. The “market” can cash well on this urge particularly when it is not satisfied but almost. Hence, the capitalist “curriculum” promotes sterile sexuality and the medical capitalist plays an important role in this.

In Montreal, I have spoken to 7 doctors, of whom 3 were male and 4 female and 7 nurses (all female). Most of them were from the CLSC, the centralised governmental health association that establishes clinics in every neighbourhood of the province of Quebec. All were shocked to hear that I nursed my child for about 4 years. I pointed out that even UNICEF stipulates nursing for NOT less than a year, preferably two, with no supplements during the first 6 months, while anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler, editor of Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, offers a wider span for nursing human babies ranging from a minimum of 2 ½ years to a maximum of 7.

According to her research, societies, in which children are allowed to nurse as long as they want to, children usually self-wean with no arguments or emotional trauma, between three and four years of age (which was exactly what my daughter did). “Another important consideration for the older child is that they are able to maintain their emotional attachment to a person rather than being forced to switch to an inanimate object such as a teddy bear or blanket. I think this sets the stage for a life of people-orientation, rather than materialism, and I think that is a good thing,” says Dettwyler.

To return to my physicians, doctor Janice’s words express perfectly the opinions of the rest of my respondents. “Yes, the UN recommends that [minimum one year]. So, one year is enough. You should wean after that. Such abnormal nursing is bad for the family. The child will grow dependent, and nursing lowers the mother’s sexual drive, which can cause problems in the family later on and will harm the baby”.

Apart from the minimum standard being “good enough” for the child, this attitude touches on several other issues. First, it raises the question of child dependency versus independence discussed above and where cruelty and abandonment are presented as the meaning of love. Second, it expects the child and the mother to adapt their nature to the male sexual standards, rather than vice versa (democracy, i.e. the totalitarianism of numbers, does not apply in this case). Third, this makes sense politically and economically, for, socialised sexuality consumes sexy attire, make-up, specialised foods, diets, food & drink industry in general, contraceptives, cars, furniture, entertainment, ad infinitum.

But is all this really inevitable?

on Making Things: questions of Respect

This is an excerpt from my journal marked ‘autumn, 2002’.

Having been inspired among others by Korchack and Nikitins, Sasha and I interpreted “love” in the non-commercial sense and chose, first of all, to be “there” for our daughter Liouba, which meant being less “out there” in the social world. This meant less material means, living space, time and energy.

The decision forced us to rely on meagre supplies and sharpened the imagination and artisan skills not only of the parents, but also Liouba’s. One such example is Liouba’s “town-house”. The second floor whose original construction, in a previous existence, used to be a TV box. Liouba hid inside it when she was 1 year and 10 months old and said, “ku-ku”, shutting and opening the lid. I cut out windows, she decided where she wanted to have the door; we dug out colourful old rags and together patched a joyful mosaic on the outside. She painted the inside with pencils and crayons. The ground floor came later. Liouba and her dad made it from the remains of the wood with which dad made our bed and wardrobe. She decorated it in bright acrylics and I “filled in the gaps”.

The house has a meaning and a purpose. First, it served as an outlet for spontaneous creativity, which we took playfully yet seriously. Second, it is a sign of independence and potency: one can create something almost from nothing, and that makes it different from the children’s houses purchased in stores, because contrary to commercial toys that snatch everything from the lives of the underpaid workers who make them and from the working parents who purchase them, this house saved matter that would have gone to waste and brought us together. Creativity can be simultaneously aesthetic and practical.

The house has become Liuoba’s hiding place, her possibility for seclusion. While she uses the whole apartment as hers, she also knows that she shares it with others. In fact, she relies on the knowledge that she can always find someone somewhere, be it in the kitchen, the living room, the office, or the bathroom; even her room — someone might always knock or she, herself, may call one of us in. However, her little, dancing with sunny colours house is outside our reach. She trusts our respect for her privacy. At the basis of this respect live our love and our trust — mutual and her decision for independence.

on Using Things: questions of Trust and Respect

Apart from the example of the house, we decided to also give Liouba the trust and an opportunity to decide in other spheres of her experience, such as to train herself to be wise, confident, strong and independent, sometimes testing our own principles. The Skripalev sports-complex that we installed in her room illustrates this relationship.

Pictures 2 and 3 portray the sports-complex we brought with us from Russia. It has rings, a rope ladder, a wooden ladder, a fixed ladder, a swinging ladder, a rope, an elastic liana, a swinging gymnast’s bar, a fixed bar and the slide which leads to her bunk bed. Liouba had this sports complex since she was 4 months old, and the only rule regarding its use has been the same that the Nikitins used in their home: namely, that no adult interferes with suggestions or help to reach something that she can not do by herself. This way she can only do what she is ready to do. By the age of three, she could climb anywhere and could reach any spot in the room without touching the floor. When Liuoba’s friends come, we do not allow the parents to come in and “help” their children. Even though many children are weak and unable to support their own body weight with their arms and swing, they learn quickly how and where to climb and when it is time to leave, most parents have difficulty retrieving them from under the ceiling.

This example points to the relationship between parents and child. It is not the sports complex by itself that “evolves” Liouba into a more mature and confident child. The complex is only an artificial substitute for the massive possibilities offered by forests, riverbank slopes, climbing country-house roofs, and so forth of which we are denied in city existence, particularly in Western setting, where the underdeveloped public transportation infrastructure[5], hefty fees, private property laws, the destruction of natural resources, etc. render space and nature inaccessible. However, our approach to the object, to the meanings attached to our approach of this object and to the limitations or the liberties that we ascribe to our child point to who we are.

Our trust does not end here, however. We took Nikitins’ advice and extended it to Liouba’s decision making with regard to other aspects of her life, such as toilet training (at 4 months of age), nursing (till 3 ½ years with a break and finally till 4 years and 2 months), and her decision to take off to Russia without her mom.

On Things: Questions of Mistrust

Since the 1950s of Soviet Russia, Lena Alexeevna Nikitina and Boris Pavlovich Nikitin, have been sounding alarm that children’s most vicious enemy is, in fact, adults’ mistrust that begins with holding the child when she walks, helping her up when she falls, forbidding her to climb “dangerous” stairs even on the primitive children’s playgrounds marked “for use between 0-3 years old”, picking up the child and sticking her on the slide, constantly telling her what to do or not, what to wear, eat, feel, know, think, and so on, in other words, exercising total control. Mistrust is also manifested in speaking for the child, putting words in her mouth, branding, evaluating, “helping” and “teaching”. Finally, it takes the form of siding with the institution in the adult endeavor to reconstruct the child from a curious individual to an obedient consumer of things and of instruction[6].

Protective behaviour on the part of adults may, at first glance, seem harmless, even benign. In the long run, it affects the physical, emotional, and mental development, where the child forfeits her right to learn to trust her own abilities and limitations. The absence of those inner mechanisms of self-regulation creates outright danger and is at the basis of much stress and “failure” of the future-adult. Moreover, mistrust sends children the following message: adults treat anyone smaller and weaker than themselves as frail, handicapped, even insipid (have you heard that baby-talk-intonation?). People call such behaviour “protective”, “caring”, “loving”. Since this is love, many children learn to suppress their frustration and to accept others’ control and their own failure. Later, they reproduce this love, care and protection with younger ones, but also with their own parents by then grown old, child-like and frail and thus continue the cycle.

The Nikitins call for trusting the child, providing her with an emotionally safe and enriching environment rather than limitations and control. Such attitude would raise the curiosity, creativity and confidence levels to the extent that parents would not need consumerism to replace family relations, because an independent child will know how to make toys, invent games or find answers to questions about the self and the world. There is an important distinction to make, though, between trust and neglect or between self-chosen independence or self-reliance and imposed neglect concealed by slaving parent substitutes, vocabulary, and things.

But how could meaning of a child’s freedom to investigate experience and choose her own categories appear in a capitalist setting? For example, Francoise Dolto advises parents to pay children for household chores in order to help them become financially autonomous and concomitantly conscientious workers. Or, at the Childhoods 2005 conference in Oslo, numerous presentations focused on the “positive” aspects of consumerism and called for the participation of children in this sphere — they equated participation in consumerism with “empowerment” and “independence”.

But the problem is that a child who receives a few dollars for washing dishes does not learn independence, rather the contrary: to succumb to the will of others, to do them services in return for a reward set by the more powerful. In this case, the child does not do the dishes because s/he uses them or to participate on an equal footing in family life. The child does them for a materialistic end in order to get something from materialistic parents. It goes without saying that having children do schoolwork for grades and for the promise of material bliss in the “future” is part of the same strategy that markets obedience, consumerism, misery and mistrust, a strategy that shuffles meanings, sells 500ml juice in 750ml bottles, substitutes bright packages of favourite monsters on TV with yogurt derived from miserable cows and chemical laboratories, and so on, ad infinitum. In all of this, parents, instead of siding with their children and protecting them, end up being the prime vehicles of capitalist meaning.

On Issues that objectify: Trust in Institution

The complexity of the notion of trust extends to everything that touches a person’s life. What, who, why, how, when can we trust concerns not only the quality of life that we expect but, on a primordial level, our survival. Trust/mistrust is part of a complex process of the way we react to strangers and others almost on the level of our basic instinct. But what is this instinct in today’s “civilised” context? Let us turn to a concrete example of how parents can “choose” whom to trust and whom to mistrust.

On a Tuesday in July 2004, Liouba (5) and I had an appointment with her friends at a playground at 4pm. To profit from a lovely day outdoors, we arrived an hour earlier. “Liouba, Liuoba,” we heard someone shout from the slides and saw her friend, Celine (5 years old) waving. Celine was out with her kindergarten group. Liouba joined them, but in 10 minutes the teachers rounded up the day-care kids and went back to school.

“Don’t worry, Liouba,” I comforted her. “In less than an hour you’ll see Celine”. We left the playground to wash our hands and eat our lunch returning at least 30 minutes after the kindergarten was gone. I took out my knitting while Liuoba went to play in the sand when suddenly a woman approaches us with a screaming boy.

“Whose child is this?”

His face was so distorted with distress that I failed to recognise him at first. Then I saw that it was Todd, Celine’s 3-year-old brother. “How did you end up here”, I asked. “Bwwwwwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” was the heartbreaking reply. The woman who had found him said he was screaming for at least 20 minutes and she could not make sense of what he said. When Todd realised that Liouba and I were there, he cheered up and just as he began to play, a panic stricken day-care teacher appeared, looking for a forgotten child.

“Did he stay behind with you?” she asked me.

“No, we didn’t even know he was out with this group” I replied and was curious to hear the version that would be presented to Todd’s parents.

Soon after the incident, we see Karen, Arnold and the kids. “So, you kept Todd behind at the playground,” was their greeting. The kindergarten didn’t even bother to make up a story that would not contradict my testimony. I should, also, mention that this neighbourhood and the kindergarten were considered among the prestigious parts of Montreal and of day-care establishments.

I got the impression that the parents were annoyed that I witnessed a serious bluff by the prestigious institution to which they belonged. I explained to them that we didn’t even know that Todd was with the group, that we found him at least half an hour after the kindergarten was gone and that, in fact, he was found by a stranger. However, Karen interrupted me briskly pressing with the Kindergarten’s version.

It is interesting that Karen and Arnold made the decision in favour of the Institution. Not only that, they made it as if they were that Institution. As parents, they did not want to get in conflict with the kindergarten but as part of that institution, they wanted to convince me, a witness to the institution’s blunder, of its competence.

“Well, errors happen,” insisted Karen, “so they forgot him for a few minutes…”

“More than 30,” I interjected.

“No, it wasn’t 30 minutes, it was 2 minutes. I know. They told me they went back immediately when they realised they had left him with you,” persisted Karen.

“Actually, they didn’t know that we were here, so they didn’t leave him with us. Plus, how do you know at what point their realisation came? They could have realised this when they were getting the kids ready to be picked up by the parents. And, do you think that between me and them, I have more reasons to lie about what happened?”

“I don’t know why you insist on slandering them. All I know is that Laurel said that as soon as they had reached the kindergarten, she realised Todd was missing and ran back immediately and it couldn’t have been more than 5 or 10 minutes….”

Todd’s suffering (for whatever number of minutes) and the danger to which he had been exposed did not seem to shake his parents’ faith in their prestigious institution.

One of the difficulties in anthropology is also its strong asset, namely, the degree to which we can take a specific example, even if it may seem anomalous, and generalise it to the extent of claiming to understand society better. In the example above, we can say that, “well, statistically it is not frequent that kindergartens forget kids behind; this is an exception and hopefully it will teach Laurel and her colleagues to be more vigilant in the future”. What the above incident exposes, though, is the general aspect of human/institutional relations, which means that even when the abstract and the general become concrete and personal, the institution has been incorporated in the self to the point that an individual would think and live through it and on behalf of it at the expense of personal instincts. Even if personal reactions to the incident may vary: some people would scream at Laurel, others might sue or pull out their kids only to place them in the same institution elsewhere — the child is still surrendered.

The question of trust is multifaceted. Some of its aspects are revealed in situations of conflict between the child and educator, where parents mostly side with the Institution: they trust doctors, teachers, psychiatrists with questions ranging from toilet training to Prozac, rarely pausing to ask the child’s opinion or to listen to what the “medical” symptoms might be telling about the context of family relations. Instead of listening to the scream of despair, parents side with the “professional” — the Institution — and read the disorder symptoms as medical conditions to be remedied by “professionals” and according to “professional” norms and requirements that aim at manufacturing a docile child manageable for the troupe of overseers of social order and capitalist interests.

Karen and Arnold’s trust choice is stimulated economically: they want/need to earn money and do not want/need to keep their children at home like some home-schoolers do, who are either rich and can “afford it” or are really “poor” because of the sacrifices society imposes on those who choose to raise their own kids. Karen and Arnold also want to accrue the symbolic capital that comes along with a child’s being part of a prestigious institution.

However there is more to their story. Trust in authority comes, not only as a rational choice, but as an irrational reflex undermining the basic parental instinct that normally would push a parent to protect offspring — including from strangers, who the nursery and kindergarten employees really are. And here we touch on a general trend of contemporary “civilised” society, which, paradoxically, through individual greed dumbs down to totalitarian obedience.

Finally, when we give our trust to a children’s institution, we inevitably strip it away from the child, which points to an inherent dichotomy between the interests of a child and those of the Institution in charge of children.

Conclusion: On the Study of Things: Phenomenology, et al

Consumerism and desires are excellent tools of control over some (many) people and of profit for others (fewer) people. In this way, everything — from the setting of a room to what we eat and do — is part of a person’s relationship with the world. Desire for objects exercises a power over the individual who has to conduct specific services and tasks in order to be able to obtain the money to buy the objects of desire (in this logic, people also acquire the status of objects). The invention of money made it possible for some people to control the lives, effort, work and desires of others and to dictate to them what to purchase and where and how to spend time. Hence, on the one hand, things — when used moderately and wisely — can be assets in enhancing independence and freeing time, yet at the same time, they can be a dangerous enemy to creativity and independence. Objects and habitat can thus be slippery “texts” — for, interpretation obeys the common and uncommon senses of the beholder.

It is like two neighbours with two identical Jeeps: Jill has the car in order to camp in what’s left of the forest, while Jack keeps it in order to improve his social status. He gives up many occasions for travel so as not to increase mileage and even sustains himself in order to service and maintain the vehicle. Both Jack and Jill may be seen every Sunday afternoon scrupulously washing and oiling their respective Jeeps in their respective backyards. Behind the exchanged greetings each might even harbour a warm feeling of sharing something together that others, who do not spend their Sunday afternoons in love and gratitude with their Jeeps, may not understand. However, are the relationships, rationale, methods, consequences, or feelings the same, in spite of their similar contribution to car industry and global capitalism? For, Jill beautifies her car after three days of adventure and life in the wilderness (regardless of its effects on the forests she tramps, on the labour markets of the “Developing” (slaving) World that makes the Jeep a possibility for her, or on the oil fields of the middle East), while Jack rubs his in order to keep out the rust, to touch and dust his beloved with tenderness, this Jeep that adorns his self and which by its mere existence provides his life with meaning? What is this meaning?

It is interesting to note that the phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches have taken root in Occidental thought at a time when industrialisation has made things overabundant and people over-dependent (on things as well, and as bad).

Phenomenology could thus be a tricky method unless the investigator uses it most cautiously in order to reveal the dislexic, schizophrenic[7], contradictory and redundant nature, feelings and relationships between people, meaning and objects. An attempt to elucidate how and why would a person acquire or use a particular object can point to the semantics of living with objects, people and the environment all the while the mischievous objects themselves remain slyly deaf, dumb, and numb.

My concern is to take the study of objects beyond its current scope and the status quo of the illusory progress of humanity and of material evolution of things, in order to find other possible ways of living with people and things, possibly with less things and preferably with self-made; because, when we spend time and effort making our own, we make only what is necessary, mostly of recycled matter and do not need to exploit the natural and human resources of the planet in order to buy things we don’t need thus making some few people even wealthier and most others tragically devoid of any possibility for love in any sense. For, when one is constantly hungry and bugged for time, what love can such a person give?

Tragically, though, most social scientists, educators, media, politicians and others continue to use terms that foster negative impressions of people and societies where things are scarce. They call them “poor”, “primitive”, “developing”… and in naming them as such sustain the value and cultivate the desire for the possession of things. In addition to deprivation, poverty has been invented as the stress and pressure to possess. It is this stress and pressure that makes industrialism and capitalism flourish since once you rob people of their time and the possibility for independence, you get workers and consumers.

Therefore, an attempt to answer the question of what makes people want and acquire things inevitably leads to the question of self, relationships, and love; but all these in a different light from the simplistic formula: I want therefore I love or vice versa. The trade-off involved — in the bargain of wanting and ceding and in the schizophrenic use of terminology — reveals our reliance on linguistic and social structures that control us and prescribe particular actions and desires. In simple words, love, objects and objectifications point to fundamental ways of existence that are mouldable and reshapable.

Finale: on love, objects, and objections

No essay can avoid touching on politics, particularly one that discusses desires, objects and love. In a world where even the size of one’s foot becomes an economic, and therefore political, issue — the amount of foot paraphernalia that can be made, advertised and sold is astounding (Nike vs Adidas vs self-made boots) — love is the easiest merchandise and, concurrently, an excellent political and economic tool in a global hierarchy, a pyramid of those who sell, buy, and control with the millions at the bottom who carry the pyramid on their backs and who still buy and consume what the industrialist/capitalist provides, ironically with their own labour and sacrifices.

In this way, the setting of a room with all its objects is part of the relationship that a person forms with her world and the question of trust, respect and love veils the discrepancies in the meaning and application of these notions.

Even the so-called charity or aid programmes perpetuate dependence: in the summer of 2005 in Montreal, a charity organisation was raising money to serve better meals at schools in “disadvantaged neighbourhoods”. While of course “disadvantaged” children need more and better food, such endeavours not only refuse to question the idea of schooling and family separation or even alienation, they present it as positive, as kind, as charity. They also slam shut any possible window to question the fact that the “disadavantaged” (a passive term), both parents and their children, are denied the power to make their own choice as to what, when, and where to consume and to decide what is good for them.

Finally, of course it is never mentioned that instead of paying the salaries of the administrators of such projects or administrators in general, it would have been more sincere to value each person’s effort equally: a parent’s effort to be as valuable as a “professional teacher’s” or a garbage collector’s pay should be no less than a tax collector’s, actually the tax collector already receives his bonus in the fact that his garbage does not stink; or consider the question of why is the effort behind the pesos or the rouble less valuable than the one behind the dollar or the euro. If this is too utopic for some, another option could be to simply donate enough money to the poor so that they, themselves, could provide nourishment for their kids — emotional included. Instead, the system makes the poor, too, depend on consuming what it deems fit for them to consume managing them within the purposefully circumscribed space of tragedy and despair. Finally, the poor and the wealthy, together, abandon their children in the despotic wilderness of the Institution for some to become predators and others obedient prey.

In this light, Karen and Arnold’s reaction to Todd’s abandonment by the school does not come as a surprise. Long before the school abandoned Todd, they, themselves, had abandoned him in the race for material and symbolic wealth.

To return to the beginning, Korchak’s example shows a different approach to love than what is common in consumer society. He does not objectify the “object” of his love nor does he replace it with objects or contradictory meanings. The semantic meaning of his words remains consistent with his actions. He said that he would not abandon these children and he stayed with them even in vanishing — a presence in that which is no longer physically seen or known. He is actively present, even in death and thus fulfills his promise of love.

In this war, is death the only way to love? My next paper on Modernism and Education focuses on how death is the underlying force of children’s institutions. I am presently working on the final part of the trilogy where I examine options to rewrite the script with life.

Bibliography:

*

Bourdieu, Pierre; transl. Richard Nice; Distinction. Routledge, London 1996.

*

Dettwyler, Katherine and Patricia Stuart-Macadam editors. Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives; Aldine De Gruyter, New York, 1995.

*

Dolto, Francoise. La cause des enfants. Editions Robert Laffont; Paris: 1985.

*

Hansen, Gladys. Violence in the Sandbox: A guide to children, parents, pre-schools and teachers. Little Children Productions, P.O.Box 24531, Los Angeles, CA 90024; 1982.

*

Herrick, John Middlemist and Stuart, Paul H. Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America. Sage Publications, Inc.; Thousand Oaks, CA: 2005.

*

Herzfeld, Michael. The Social Production of Indifference.

*

Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London 1992.

*

Korchak, Janush; transl. From Polish into Russian by K. E. Senkevich; How to Love a Child, Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoj Literatury, Moskva 1990.

*

Mitchell, C. and Reid-Walsh, J.; Researching children’s popular culture: The culture spaces of childhood. London: Routledge 2002.

*

Nikitina, Lena A. and Boris P. Nikitin; My, Nashy Deti, i Vnuki. Molodoja Gvardia, Moskva 1989.

*

Nikitina, Lena A.; Roditeljam XXI go Veka. Znanie, Moskva 1998.

Footnotes

[1]^ Pelaez, Vicky. The prison industry in the United States: Big business or a new form of slavery. 13 October 2005. See http://www.doublestandards.org/pelaez1.html

[2]^ Ibid.

[3]^ See http://www.prisonjustice.ca/politics/facts_stats.html

[4]^ See http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/8 ... ildren.htm

[5]^ For example, the petit train du nord used to be a railway service that connected the northof Quebec with Montreal. Car industry destroyed the railway and installed TWO highways. The railway was recently turned into a paid bicycle path.

[6]^ Interesting that in Latin languages the term ‘instruction’ has two components: education and directives.

[7]^ The term “schizophrenia” comes from Greek meaning “split mind” referring to the condition when a person is “split from reality”.

by **American Dream** » Sun Sep 25, 2011 1:30 pm

Honey, de white man is the de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find
out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but
we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and
tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t
tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so
fur as Ah can see.

—Zora Neale Hurston, 1937, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

by **American Dream** » Sun Sep 25, 2011 1:40 pm

“Housework Under Capitalism: The Unpaid Labor of Mothers”

Cindy L’Hirondelle

Off Our Backs, Jan/Feb 2004

I’ve worked laying sod, painting cars, selling donuts, and flipping burgers. I have also lived and felt the invisibility of being “only a mom.” Nothing compares with the stress of looking after small children, cooking for them and cleaning up after them. Housework gets no recognition, no status, and is the most wearing job I have ever done.

But the subject of household labor is seen as dull, and gets ignored even by progressive groups. Paid work gets recognition; it is “real” work. Yet the most common, exhausting, and tedious work is done for free and is invisible to those who fight against capitalism for social justice. As an anti-capitalist activist, I have attended countless meetings and protests, read stacks of alternative magazines-but I was unaware of the role that domestic labor played in the larger economic picture.

I found my first book on the subject at a closing-out sale in a feminist bookstore in Victoria several years ago. It was the cheapest book on the discount table at one dollar. The book, More Than a Labor of Love by Meg Luxton, examined three generations of housewives in Flin Flon, Manitoba. Even though I was intimately familiar and often exhausted by domestic labor (I am a single mother with three kids), I had never understood its significance. Capitalism is built on the backs of unpaid workers all over the world. Most of these unpaid workers are women and most of the unpaid work takes place in the home.

Domestic labor does two things: it reproduces humans-thus labor power-and it prepares workers to go to work daily. Canada estimated in 1994 that the value of housework, if it were paid, would be $318 billion. The variety of jobs you must do when you look after home and children are endless: cook, maid, launderer, health-care provider, mediator, teacher, counselor, secretary, transporter of children and household supplies, etc. all this work goes on quietly, unheroically. Many women who toil away for no pay are ground into an early grave through the physical exertion of bearing and raising children while struggling against squalor, disease and poverty.

But we probably think of ourselves as workers only when we work outside of home. This was evident during an interview conducted by the historian Susan Stasser for her book Never Done. Stasser said an 88 year-old woman told her she could not believe that her unpaid work (as opposed to her “jobs”) could have any importance to a historian.

One of the first women to challenge the view that domestic labor was not productive work was Maria-Rosa Dalla Costa, who wrote from Italy in 1972 that the housewife and her labor was the basis for the process of capital accumulation. Capital commands the unpaid labor of the housewife as well as the paid laborer. Dalla Costa saw the family as a colony dominated by capital and state. She rejected the artificially created division between waged and unwaged labor and said that you could not understand exploitation of waged labor until you understood the exploitation of unpaid labor.

Other feminist writers have criticized this viewpoint because it does not acknowledge that men directly benefit from having women work in the home. Heidi Hartmann writes in Women & Revolution that white union men early in the 19th century wanted women, children, and non-whites out of the work force because their presence lowered wages. They asked for a wage for men high enough so that their wives could afford to stay home and tend to the house and children. Hartmann sees this as a collusion between workers and capitalists. In this way, white men kept women home for their own personal benefit, and bosses-who realized that housewives produced and maintained healthier workers and future workers-got more docile workers. So the family wage cemented the partnership between patriarchy and capitalism.

The tradition of women working for free in the home, and men working for household wages out, has changed. Most men do not get paid enough to support a family. Most women now have paid employment.

But, as Ruth Schwartz Cowen notes in her book, More Work for Mother, while the tasks that women do in the home have changed, the time spent on domestic labor has not. This is partly because domestic workers today are held to higher standards of cleanliness, have more cleaning appliances, spend more time as consumers (approximately 8 hours a week buying and transporting goods that were previously delivered), face greater pressure to provide enriching experiences for their children, have less help from adult relatives, and not nearly enough help from male partners. When both male and female household partners have full-time jobs, the woman still does significantly more housework than the man-15 more hours per week, totaling an extra month of 24-hour days each year.

As a single parent, I find myself trying to comply with two incompatible demands by society: 1) be a good mother and, 2) not be a leech and earn a living. So I do both in a compromised way. It is extremely difficult to be a good mother when you do not have enough money to do the job. It is extremely difficult to earn a living when you are trying to competently raise healthy children.

In Feminist Issues (Fall 1992), Reva Landau warns women that the consequence of leaving paid work for a few years to look after kids are lifelong economic penalties through missed promotions, training opportunities, and pension contributions. Men who have a female partner working in the home have an unfair advantage over women in the workplace, who do not have a free laborer at home tending to their needs. If men refuse to do their share of domestic work, women must go on strike. This is the idea behind the Global Women’s Strike, started March 8, 2000 (http://www.globalwomenstrike.net) It is estimated that women make up 52% of the adults on this planet and do 75% of the work required to maintain 100% of the population.

Organizers of the Global Women’s Strike assert that whoever is doing all this work has real power to effect change. But, as Maria Mies acknowledges in her book Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, there must be solidarity between women in overdeveloped and underdeveloped countries if we want to make this change: “If one set of women tries to better its material condition as wage-workers, or as consumers, not as human beings, capital will try to offset its possible losses by squeezing another set of women.”

Unfortunately, an underlying theme of some feminist literature seems to be that 1) women should have the “right” to exploit other workers, becoming overpaid capitalists, and 2) children should be mass-produced in daycare centers. Allowing both men and women an equal opportunity to be an oppressor is not a solution. Warehousing children so that parents can do jobs that exploit other people is not a solution.

Women who provide all this free labor in a capitalist system in which nothing else is free must stop being so nice. It makes us tired. And the logical consequence of being too tired is no special extras in the home and no volunteering at the school. Perhaps all volunteers should stop working for free, as it is the logical consequence of living under a market dominated value system. The only free work done should be revolutionary work. That includes raising aware children. All other free work only strengthens a system that is killing us and the planet.

Those who are most oppressed by the rules and rulers should “work to rule”-do the least amount of unpaid work as possible, then strike. In British Columbia we are organizing a series of Womyn’s Walkouts, based on some of the goals of the Global Women’s Strike, with the demand to do away with the punitive and starvation-level welfare system and replace it with a universal guaranteed livable income. (See article on this topic http://pacificcoast.net/~swag/guaranteedincome.htm.)

Unpaid labor is a taboo subject because acknowledging it would undermine one of the most important ideological foundations of capitalism. The owning class does not want to admit that they can only prosper by not paying for seventy-five percent of the true work of the planet.

by **American Dream** » Tue Sep 27, 2011 2:43 pm

http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/1 ... cial-uses/

“Feeling Management: From Private to Commercial Uses“

Arlie Hochschild

Chapter Six, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983. [PDF]

If they could have turned every one of us into sweet quiet Southern belles with velvet voices like Rosalyn Carter, this is what they would want to stamp out on an assembly line.
Flight attendant, Delta Airlines

On PSA our smiles are not just painted on.
So smile your way From LA To San Francisco
PSA radio jingle

When you see them receiving passengers with that big smile, I don’t think it means anything. They have to do that. It’s part of their job. But now if you get into a conversation with a flight attendant . . . well . . . no. . . I guess they have to do that too.
Airline passenger

When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labor to be sold, and when private capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses, what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her face? When worked-up warmth becomes an instrument of service work, what can a person learn about herself from her feelings? And when a worker abandons her work smile, what kind of tie remains between her smile and her self?

Display is what is sold, but over the long run display comes to assume a certain relation to feeling. As enlightened management realizes, a separation of display and feeling is hard to keep up over long periods. A principle of emotive dissonance, analogous to the principle of cognitive dissonance, is at work. Maintaining a difference between feeling and feigning over the long run leads to strain. We try to reduce this strain by pulling the two closer together, either by changing what we feel or by changing what we feign. When display is required by the job, it is usually feeling that has to change; and when conditions estrange us from our face, they sometimes estrange us from feeling as well.

Take the case of the flight attendant. Corporate logic in the airline industry creates a series of links between competition, market expansion, advertising, heightened passenger expectations about rights to display, and company demands for acting. When conditions allow this logic to work, the result is a successful transmutation of the private emotional system we have described. The old elements of emotional exchange – feeling rules, surface acting, and deep acting – are now arranged in a different way. Stanislavski’s if moves from stage to airline cabin (”act as if the cabin were your own living room”) as does the actor’s use of emotion memory. Private use gives way to corporate use.

In the airline industry of the 1950s and 1960s a remarkable transmutation was achieved. But certain trends, discussed later in this chapter, led this transmutation to fail in the early 1970s. An industry speed-up and a stronger union hand in limiting the company’s claims weakened the transmutation. There was a service worker ”slowdown.” Worked-up warmth of feeling was replaced by put-on smiles. Those who sincerely wanted to make the deeper offering found they could not do so, and those who all along had resisted company intrusions on the self came to feel some rights to freedom from it. The job lost its grip. When the transmutation succeeded, the worker was asked to take pride in making an instrument of feeling. When it collapsed, workers came to see that instrument as overused, underappreciated, and susceptible to damage.

Behind the Demand for Acting

”A market for emotional labor” is not a phrase that company employees use. Upper management talks about getting the best market share of the flying public. Advertising personnel talk about reaching that market. In-flight service supervisors talk about getting ”positive attitude” and ”professional service” from flight attendants, who in turn walk about ”handling irates.” Nevertheless, the efforts of these four groups, taken together, set up the sale of emotional labor.

The purpose of Delta Airlines is to make a profit. To make a profit, Delta has to compete for passenger markets. Throughout the postwar years, for example, Delta competed with Eastern Airlines for markets along routes they both serviced. (It now shares 80 percent of its routes with Eastern.)1 The Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), established in 1938 in recognition of the national importance of air transport and the threat of monopoly, was granted authority to control market shares and prices. Until 1978 it established uniform prices for airline tickets and sharpened competition by offering parallel route awards. Companies competed by offering more frequent flights, more seats, faster flights (fewer stops), and – what is most important here – better service. After 1978 the airlines were deregulated and price wars were allowed.2 Yet a brief price war in 1981 and another shake-out of weaker companies has been followed by a general rise in prices. As it was before deregulation, service may again become a main area of competition. When competition in price is out, competition in service is in.3

The more important service becomes as an arena for competition between airlines, the more workers are asked to do public relations work to promote sales. Employees are continually told to represent Delta proudly. All Delta workers once received, along with their paychecks, a letter from the president and chairman of the board asking them to put Delta bumper stickers on their cars. The Delta Jogging Club (which included two vice-presidents) once ran a well-publicized 414-mile marathon from Dallas, Texas, to Jackson, Mississippi, to commemorate Delta’s first commercial flight. Virtually every employee is asked to be ”in sales.”

But of all workers in an airline, the flight attendant has the most contact with passengers, and she sells the company the most. When passengers think of service they are unlikely to think of the baggage check-in agent, the ramp attendant, the cabin clean-up crew, the lost and found personnel, or the man down in commissary pouring gravy on a long line of chicken entre’es. They think of the flight attendant. As one Delta official explained: ”For each hour’s work by a flight attendant, there are 10.5 hours of support time from cabin service, the billing department, maintenance, and so on. Altogether we spend 100 hours per passenger per flight. But the passenger really has prolonged contact only with the flight attendant.”

As competition grew from the 1930s through the early 1970s, the airlines expanded that visible role. Through the 1950s and 1960s the flight attendant became a main subject of airline advertising, the spearhead of market expansion.4 The image they chose, among many possible ones, was that of a beautiful and smartly dressed Southern white woman, the supposed epitome of gracious manners and warm personal service.5

Because airline ads raise expectations, they subtly rewrite job descriptions and redefine roles. They promise on-time service, even though planes are late from 10 to 50 percent of the time, industrywide. Their pictures of half-empty planes promise space and leisurely service, which are seldom available (and certainly not desired by the company). They promise service from happy workers, even though the industry speed-up has reduced job satisfaction. By creating a discrepancy between promise and fact, they force workers in all capacities to cope with the disappointed expectations of customers.

The ads promise service that is ”human” and personal. The omnipresent smile suggests, first of all, that the flight attendant is friendly, helpful, and open to requests. But when words are added, the smile can be sexualized, as in ”We really move our tails for you to make your every wish come true” (Continental), or ”Fly me, you’ll like it” (National). Such innuendos lend strength to the conventional fantasy that in the air, anything can happen. As one flight attendant put it: ”You have married men with three kids getting on the plane and suddenly they feel anything goes. It’s like they leave that reality on the ground, and you fit into their fantasy as some geisha girl. It happens over and over again.”

So the sexualized ad burdens the flight attendant with another task, beyond being unfailingly helpful and open to requests: she must respond to the sexual fantasies of passengers. She must try to feel and act as if flirting and propositioning are ”a sign of my attractiveness and your sexiness,” and she must work to suppress her feelings that such behavior is intrusive or demeaning. Some have come to see this extra psychological task as a company contrivance. A flight attendant once active in Flight Attendants for Women’s Rights commented: ”The company wants to sexualize the cabin atmosphere. They want men to be thinking that way because they think what men really want is to avoid fear of flying. So they figure mild sexual arousal will be helpful in getting people’s minds off of flying. It’s a question of dollars and cents . . . Most of our passengers are male, and all of the big corporate contract business is male.”6

The advertising promises of one airline tend to redefine work on other airlines as well. So although Delta’s advertising has assiduously avoided explicit sexualization of the role, Delta’s flight attendants must cope with the inflated image of the flight attendant put out by other companies. There may well be an economic pattern to sexual innuendo in these ads: the economically marginal companies seem to aim a sexual pitch at the richest segment of the market, male businessmen. United Airlines, which was ranked first in revenues in 1979, has not attached suggestive words to the female smile; but Continental, ranked tenth, and National, ranked eleventh, certainly have. But in any case, when what Doris Lessing has called a fantasy of “easily available and guiltless sex” is encouraged by one airline, it is finally attached to air travel in general.

As the industry speed-up and union pressure have reduced the deep acting promised and delivered in American-based companies, there are signs that the same corporate logic that reached its nadir in the 1950s in the United States is now emerging abroad. Fortune, in an article about Singapore International Airlines entitled ”An Airline Powered by Charm” (June 18, 1979), notes:

[SIA's] advertising campaign glamorizes the cabin hostess as ”the Singapore girl” . . . To convey the idea of in-flight pleasure with a lyrical quality, most SIA ads are essentially large, soft-focus color photographs of various hostesses. In a broadcast commercial a crooner sings: ”Singapore girl, you look so good I want to stay up here with you forever.” [The chairman of SIA has said] ”We’re fortunate in having young people who get a Western education, speak English, and still take an Asian attitude toward service.”

This may be the service-sector version of a ”runaway shop,” including not only runaway-shop labor (”with an Asian attitude toward service”) but ”runaway” imagery to advertise it.

We might add that the first, and nonsexual, significance of the advertised smile – special friendliness and empathy – can also inflate the expectations of passengers, and therefore increase their right to feel disappointed. Ordinary niceness is no longer enough; after all, hasn’t the passenger paid for extra civility? As every flight attendant knows well, she can expect to face surprisingly deep indignation when her expressive machine is idling or, worse yet, backfiring.

Behind the Supply of Acting: Selection

Even before an applicant for a flight attendant’s job is interviewed, she is introduced to the rules of the game. Success will depend in part on whether she has a knack for perceiving the rules and taking them seriously. Applicants are urged to read a pre-interview pamphlet before coming in. In the 1979-80 Airline Guide to Stewardess and Steward Careers, there is a section called ”The Interview.” Under the subheading “Appearance,” the manual suggests that facial expressions should be ”sincere” and ”unaffected.” One should have a ”modest but friendly smile” and be ”generally alert, attentive, not overly aggressive, but not reticent either.” Under ”Mannerisms,” subheading ”Friendliness,” it is suggested that a successful candidate must be ”outgoing but not effusive,” ”enthusiastic with calm and poise,” and ”vivacious but not effervescent.” As the manual continues: ”Maintaining eye contact with the interviewer demonstrates sincerity and confidence, but don’t overdo it. Avoid cold or continuous staring.” Training, it seems, begins even before recruitment.

Like company manuals, recruiters sometimes offer advice on how to appear. Usually they presume that an applicant is planning to put on a front; the question is which one. In offering tips for success, recruiters often talked in a matter-of-fact way about acting, as though assuming that it is permissable if not quite honorable to feign. As one recruiter put, it: ”I had to advise a lot of people who were looking for jobs, and not just at Pan Am. . . And I’d tell them the secret to getting a job is to imagine the kind of person the company wants to hire and then become that person during the interview. The hell with your theories of what you believe in, and what your integrity is, and all that other stuff. You can project all that when you’ve got the job.”

In most companies, after the applicant passes the initial screening (for weight, figure, straight teeth, complexion, facial regularity, age) he or she is invited to a group interview where an ”animation test” takes place.

At one interview session at Pan American, the recruiter (a woman) called in a group of six applicants, three men and three women. She smiled at all of them and then said: ”While I’m looking over your files here, I’d like to ask you to turn to your neighbor and get to know him or her. We’ll take about three or four minutes, and then I’ll get back to you.” Immediately there was bubbly conversation, nodding of heads, expansions of posture, and overlapping ripples of laughter. (”Is that right? My sister-in-law lives in Des Moines, too!” ”Oh wow, how did you get into scuba diving?”) Although the recruiter had simply asked each applicant to turn to a neighbor, in fact each woman turned to her nearest man ”to bring him out.” (Here, what would be an advantage at other times – being the object of conversational attention – became a disadvantage for the men because the task was to show skill in ”bringing out” others.) After three minutes, the recruiter put down her files and called the group to order. There was immediate total silence. All six looked expectantly at the recruiter: how had they done on their animation test?

The recruits are screened for a certain type of outgoing middle-class sociability. Sometimes the recruitment literature explicitly addresses friendliness as an act. Allegheny Airlines, for example, says that applicants are expected to ”project a warm personality during their interview in order to be eligible for employment.” Continental Airlines, in its own words, is ”seeking people who convey a spirit of enthusiasm.” Delta Airlines calls simply for applicants who ”have a friendly personality and high moral character.”

Different companies favor different variations of the ideal type of sociability. Veteran employees talk about differences in company personality as matter-of-factly as they talk about differences in uniform or shoe style. United Airlines, the consensus has it, is ”the girl-next-door,” the neighborhood babysitter grown up. Pan Am is upper class, sophisticated, and slightly reserved in its graciousness. PSA is brassy, funloving, and sexy. Some flight attendants could see a connection between the personality they were supposed to project and the market segment the company wants to attract. One United worker explained: ”United wants to appeal to Ma and Pa Kettle. So it wants Caucasian girls – not so beautiful that Ma feels fat, and not so plain that Pa feels unsatisfied. It’s the Ma and Pa Kettle market that’s growing, so that’s why they use the girl-next-door image to appeal to that market. You know, the Friendly Skies. They offer reduced rates for wives and kids. They weed out busty women because they don’t fit the image, as they see it.”

Recruiters understood that they were looking for ”a certain Delta personality,” or ”a Pan Am type.” The general prerequisites were a capacity to work with a team (”we don’t look for chiefs, we want Indians”), interest in people, sensitivity, and emotional stamina. Trainers spoke somewhat remotely of studies that indicate that successful applicants often come from large families, had a father who enjoyed his work, and had done social volunteer work in school. Basically, however, recruiters look for someone who is smart but can also cope with being considered dumb, someone who is capable of giving emergency safety commands but can also handle people who can’t take orders from a woman, and someone who is naturally empathetic but can also resist the numbing effect of having that empathy engineered and continuously used by a company for its own purposes.The trainees, on the other hand, thought they had been selected because they were adventurous and ambitious. (”We’re not satisfied with just being secretaries,” as one fairly typical trainee said. ”All my girlfriends back in Memphis are married and having babies. They think I’m real liberated to be here.”)

The trainees, it seemed to me, were also chosen for their ability to take stage directions about how to ”project” an image. They were selected for being able to act well – that is, without showing the effort involved. They had to be able to appear at home on stage.

The training at Delta was arduous, to a degree that surprised the trainees and inspired their respect. Most days they sat at desks from 8:30 to 4:30 listening to lectures. They studied for daily exams in the evenings and went on practice flights on weekends. There were also morning speakers to be heard before classes began. One morning at 7:45 I was with 123 trainees in the Delta Stewardess Training Center to hear a talk from the Employee Representative, a flight attendant whose regular job was to communicate rank-and-file grievances to management and report back. Her role in the training process was different, however, and her talk concerned responsibilities to the company:

Delta does not believe in meddling in the flight attendant’s personal life. But it does want the flight attendant to uphold certain Delta standards of conduct. It asks of you first that you keep your finances in order. Don’t let your checks bounce. Don’t spend more than you have. Second, don’t drink while in uniform or enter a bar. No drinking 24 hours before flight time. [If you break this rule] appropriate disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal, will be taken. While on line we don’t want you to engage in personal pastimes such as knitting, reading, or sleeping. Do not accept gifts. Smoking is allowed if it is done while you are seated.

The speaker paused and an expectant hush fell across the room. Then, as if in reply to it, she concluded, looking around, ”That’s all.” There was a general ripple of relieved laughter from the trainees: so that was all the company was going to say about their private lives.

Of course, it was by no means all the company was going to say. The training would soon stake out a series of company claims on private territories of self. First, however, the training prepared the trainees to accept these claims. It established their vulnerability to being fired and their dependence on the company. Recruits were reminded day after day that eager competitors could easily replace them. I heard trainers refer to their ”someone-else-can-fill-your-seat” talk. As one trainee put it, ”They stress that there are 5,000 girls out there wanting your job. If you don’t measure up, you’re out.”

Adding to the sense of dispensability was a sense of fragile placement vis-a-vis the outside world. Recruits were housed at the airport, and during the four-week training period they were not allowed to go home or to sleep anywhere but in the dormitory. At the same time they were asked to adjust to the fact that for them, home was an idea without an immediate referent. Where would the recruit be living during the next months and years? Houston? Dallas? New Orleans? Chicago? New York? As one pilot advised: ”Don’t put down roots. You may be moved and then moved again until your seniority is established. Make sure you get along with your roommates in your apartment.”

Somewhat humbled and displaced, the worker was now prepared to identify with Delta. Delta was described as a brilliant financial success (which it is), an airline known for fine treatment of its personnel (also true, for the most part), a company with a history of the ”personal touch.” Orientation talks described the company’s beginnings as a family enterprise in the 1920s, when the founder, Collett Woolman, personally pinned an orchid on each new flight attendant. It was the flight attendant’s job to represent the company proudly, and actually identifying with the company would make that easier to do.

Training seemed to foster the sense that it was safe to feel dependent on the company. Temporarily rootless, the worker was encouraged to believe that this company of 36,000 employees operated as a ”family.” The head of the training center, a gentle, wise, authoritative figure in her fifties, appeared each morning in the auditorium; she was ”mommy,” the real authority on day-to-day problems. Her company superior, a slightly younger man, seemed to be ”daddy.” Other supervisors were introduced as concerned extensions of these initial training parents. (The vast majority of trainees were between nineteen and twenty-two years old.) As one speaker told the recruits: ”Your supervisor is your friend. You can go to her and talk about anything, and I mean anything.” The trainees were divided up into small groups; one class of 123 students (which included three males and nine blacks) was divided into four subgroups, each yielding the more intimate ties of solidarity that were to be the prototype of later bonds at work.

The imagery of family, with mommies and daddies and sisters and brothers, did not obscure for most trainees the reminders that Delta was a business. It suggested, rather, that despite its size Delta aspired to maintain itself in the spirit of an old-fashioned family business, in which hierarchy was never oppressive and one could always air a gripe. And so the recruit, feeling dispensable and rootless, was taken in by this kindly new family. Gratitude lays the foundation for loyalty.

The purpose of training is to instill acceptance of the company’s claims, and recruits naturally wonder what parts of their feeling and behavior will be subject to company control. The head of in-flight training answered their implicit question in this way:

Well, we have some very firm rules. Excessive use of alcohol, use of drugs of any kind, and you’re asked to leave. We have a dormitory rule, and that is that you’ll spend the night in the dormitory. There’s no curfew, but you will spend the night in the dormitory. If you’re out all night, you’re asked to leave. We have weight standards for our flight attendants. Break those weight standards, and the individual is asked to resign. We have a required test average of 90 percent; if you don’t attain that average, you’re asked to resign. And then we get into the intangibles. That’s where the judgment comes in.

From the recruit’s point of view, this answer simply established what the company conceived of as ”company control.” In fact, this degree of control presupposed many other unmentioned acts of obedience – such as the weigh-in. Near the scales in the training office one could hear laughter at ”oh-my-god-what-I-ate-for-dinner” jokes. But the weight-in itself was conducted as a matter of routine, just something one did.

The need for it was not explained, and there was no mention of the history of heated court battles over the weight requirement (most of them so far lost by the unions). One flight attendant commented, ”Passengers aren’t weighed, pilots aren’t weighed, in-flight service supervisors aren’t weighed. We’re the only ones they weigh. You can’t tell me it’s not because most of us are women.” Obviously, discussions of this issue might weaken the company’s claim to control over a worker’s weight. The trainers offered only matter-of-fact explanations of what happens to the weight gainer. If a flight attendant is one pound over the maximum allowable weight, the fact is ”written up” in her personnel file. Three months later, if the offender is still one pound over, there is a letter of reprimand; if another three months pass without change, there is suspension without pay. People may in fact be fired for being one pound overweight. Outside the classroom, of course, there was a rich underground lore about starving oneself before flights, angrily overeating after flights, deliberately staying a fraction over the weight limit to test the system, or claiming ”big bones” or ”big breasts” as an excuse for overweight. (One wit, legend has it, suggested that breasts be weighed separately.) Officially, however, the weigh-in was only a company routine.

The company’s presumption was supported by several circumstances. It was difficult to find any good job in 1981, let alone a job as a flight attendant. There was also the fact that Delta’s grooming regulations did not seem particularly rigid compared with those of other airlines, past and present. Flight attendants were not required to wear a girdle and submit to the ”girdle check” that Pan American flight attendants recall. There was no mention of a rule, once established at United, that one had to wear white underwear. There was a rule about the length of hair, but no mention of ”wig checks” (to determine whether a worker had regulation hair under her wig), which were used by several companies in the 1960s. There was no regulation, such as Pan Am had, that required wearing eyeshadow the same shade of blue as the uniform. There were no periodic thigh measurements, which PSA flight attendants still undergo, and no bust-waist-hips-thighs measurements that formed part of an earlier PSA routine. In an occupation known for its standardization of personal appearance, Delta’s claims could seem reasonable. The company could say, in effect, ”You’re lucky our appearance code isn’t a lot tighter.” Under a more stringent code, those who could be judged a little too fat or a little too short, a little too tall or a little too plain, could feel pressured to make up for their physical deviations by working harder and being nicer than others. Some veteran workers ventured a thought (not generally shared) that companies deliberately tried to recruit women who were decidedly plainer than the official ideal so as to encourage workers to ”make up for” not being prettier.

The claim to control over a worker’s physical appearance was backed by continuous reference to the need to be ”professional.” In its original sense, a profession is an occupational grouping that has sole authority to recruit, train, and supervise its own members. Historically, only medicine, law, and the academic disciplines have fit this description. Certainly flight attendants do not yet fit it. Like workers in many other occupations, they call themselves ”professional” because they have mastered a body of knowledge and want respect for that. Companies also use ”professional” to refer to this knowledge, but they refer to something else as well. For them, a ”professional” flight attendant is one who has completely accepted the rules of standardization.

The flight attendant who most nearly meets the appearance code ideal is therefore ”the most professional” in this regard. By linking standardization to honor and the suggestion of autonomy, the company can seem to say to the public, we control this much of the appearance and personality of that many people – which is a selling point that most companies strive for. At the other extreme, workers were free of claims over their religious or political beliefs. As one Delta veteran put it: ”They want me to look like Rosalyn Carter at age twenty, but they don’t care if I think like she does. I’m not going to have power over anyone in the company, so they lay off my philosophy of life. I like that.”7

Between physical looks and deeply held belief lies an intermediate zone – the zone of emotion management. It was particularly here, as the head of in-flight training put it, that ”we get into the intangibles.” The company claim to emotion work was mainly insinuated by example. As living illustrations of the right kind of spirit for the job, trainers maintained a steady level of enthusiasm despite the long hours and arduous schedule. On Halloween, some teachers drew laughs by parading through the classroom dressed as pregnant, greedy, and drunk passengers. All the trainers were well liked. Through their continuous cheer they kept up a high morale for those whose job it would soon be to do the same for passengers. It worked all the better for seeming to be genuine.

Trainees must learn literally hundreds of regulations, memorize the location of safety equipment on four different airplanes, and receive instruction on passenger handling.8 In all their courses they were constantly reminded that their own job security and the company’s profit rode on a smiling face. A seat in a plane, they were told, ”is our most perishable product – we have to keep winning our passengers back.” How you do it is as important as what you do. There were many direct appeals to smile: ”Really work on your smiles.” ”Your smile is your biggest asset – use it.” In demonstrating how to deal with insistent smokers, with persons boarding the wrong plane, and with passengers who are sick or flirtatious or otherwise troublesome, a trainer held up a card that said ”Relax and smile.” By standing aside and laughing at the ”relax and smile” training, trainers parried student resistance to it. They said, in effect, ”It’s incredible how much we have to smile, but there it is. We know that, but we’re still doing it, and you should too.”

Beyond this, there were actual appeals to modify feeling states. The deepest appeal in the Delta training program was to the trainee’s capacity to act as if the airplane cabin (where she works) were her home (where she doesn’t work). Trainees were asked to think of a passenger as if he were a ”personal guest in your living room.” The workers’ emotional memories of offering personal hospitality were called up and put to use, as Stanislavski would recommend. As one recent graduate put it:

You think how the new person resembles someone you know. You see your sister’s eyes in someone sitting at that seat. That makes you want to put out for them. I like to think of the cabin as the living room of my own home. When someone drops in [at home], you may not know them, but you get something for them. You put that on a grand scale – thirty-six passengers per flight attendant – but it’s the same feeling.

On the face of it, the analogy between home and airplane cabin unites different kinds of experiences and obscures what is different about them. It can unite the empathy of friend for friend with the empathy of worker for customer, because it assumes that empathy is the same sort of feeling in either case. Trainees wrote in their notebooks, ”Adopt the passenger’s point of view,” and the understanding was that this could be done in the same way one adopts a friend’s point of view. The analogy between home and cabin also joins the worker to her company; just as she naturally protects members of her own family, she will naturally defend the company. Impersonal relations are to be seen as if they were personal. Relations based on getting and giving money are to be seen as if they were relations free of money. The company brilliantly extends and uses its workers’ basic human empathy, all the while maintaining that it is not interfering in their ”personal” lives.

As at home, the guest is protected from ridicule. A flight attendant must suppress laughter, for example, at seeing a passenger try to climb into the overhead storage rack, imagining it to be a bunk bed. Nor will she exhibit any idiosyncratic habits of her own, which might make the guest feel uncomfortable. Also, trainees were asked to express sincere endorsement of the company’s advertising. In one classroom session, an instructor said: ”We have Flying Colonel and Flying Orchid passengers, who over the years have always flown Delta. This is an association they’re invited to join. It has no special privileges, but it does hold meetings from time to time.” The students laughed, and one said, ”That’s absurd.” The trainer answered, ”Don’t say that. You’re supposed to make them think it’s a real big thing.” Thus, the sense of absurdity was expanded: the trainees were let in on the secret and asked to help the company create the illusion it wanted the passengers to accept.

By the same token, the injunction to act ”as if it were my home” obscured crucial differences between home and airplane cabin. Home is safe. Home does not crash. It is the flight attendant’s task to convey a sense of relaxed, homey coziness while at the same time, at take-off and landing, mentally rehearsing the emergency announcement, ”Cigarettes out! Grab ankles! Heads down!” in the appropriate languages.

Before takeoff, safety equipment is checked. At boarding, each attendant secretly picks out a passenger she can call on for help in an emergency evacuation. Yet in order to sustain the if, the flight attendant must shield guests from this unhomelike feature of the party. As one flight attendant mused:

Even though I’m a very honest person, I have learned not to allow my face to mirror my alarm or my fright. I feel very protective of my passengers. Above all, I don’t want them to be frightened. If we were going down, if we were going to make a ditching in water, the chances of our surviving are slim, even though we [the flight attendants] know exactly what to do. But I think I would probably – and I think I can say this for most of my fellow flight attendants – be able to keep them from being too worried about it. I mean my voice might quiver a little during the announcements, but somehow I feel we could get them to believe . . . the best.

Her brave defense of the ”safe homey atmosphere” of the plane might keep order, but at the price of concealing the facts from passengers who might feel it their right to know what was coming. Many flight attendants spoke of enjoying ”work with people” and adopted the living room analogy as an aid in being as friendly as they wanted to be. Many could point to gestures that kept the analogy tension-free:

I had been asked for seconds on liquor by three different people just as I was pushing the liquor cart forward for firsts. The fourth time that happened, I just laughed this spontaneous absurd laugh. [Author: Could you tell me more about that?] Part of being professional is to make people on board feel comfortable. They’re in a strange place. It’s my second home. They aren’t as comfortable as I am. I’m the hostess. My job is really to make them enjoy the flight. The absurd laughter did it, that time.

Others spoke of being frustrated when the analogy broke down, sometimes as the result of passenger impassivity. One flight attendant described a category of unresponsive passengers who kill the analogy unwittingly. She called them ”teenage execs.”

Teenage execs are in their early to middle thirties. Up and coming people in large companies, computer people. They are very dehumanizing to flight attendants. You’ll get to their row. You’ll have a full cart of food. They will look up and then look down and keep on talking, so you have to interrupt them. They are demeaning . . . you could be R2-D2 [the robot in the film Star Wars]. They would like that better.

This attendant said she sometimes switched aisles with her partner in order to avoid passengers who would not receive what the company and she herself wanted to offer. Like many others, she wanted a human response so that she could be sincerely friendly herself. Sincerity is taken seriously, and there was widespread criticism of attendants who did not act ”from the heart.” For example: ”I worked with one flight attendant who put on a fake voice. On the plane she raised her voice about four octaves and put a lot of sugar and spice into it [gives a falsetto imitation of 'More coffee for you, sir?']. I watched the passengers wince. What the passengers want is real people. They’re tired of that empty pretty young face.”

Despite the generous efforts of trainers and workers themselves to protect it, the living room analogy remains vulnerable on several sides. For one thing, trainees were urged to ”think sales,” not simply to act in such a way as to induce sales. Promoting sales was offered to the keepers of the living room analogy as a rationale for dozens of acts, down to apologizing for mistakes caused by passengers: ”Even if it’s their fault, it’s very important that you don’t blame the passengers. That can have a lot of impact. Imagine a businessman who rides Delta many times a year. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars ride on your courtesy. Don’t get into a verbal war. It’s not worth it. They are our lifeblood. As we say, the passenger isn’t always right, but he’s never wrong.”

Outside of training, ”thinking sales” was often the rationale for doing something. One male flight attendant, who was kind enough to show me all around the Pan American San Francisco base, took me into the Clipper Club and explained: ”This club is for our important customers, our million-mile customers. Jan, the receptionist, usually introduces me to some passengers here at the Clipper Club. They go in the SIL [Special Information Log] because we know they mean a lot of money for the company. If I’m the first-class purser for one leg of the journey, I note what drink they order in the Clipper Club and then offer them that when they’re seated in the plane. They like that.” The uses of courtesy are apparently greater in the case of a million-mile customer – who is likely to be white, male, and middleaged – than in the case of women, children, and the elderly. In any case, lower-income passengers are served in segregated ”living rooms.”

”Think sales” had another aspect to it. One trainer, who affected the style of a good-humored drill sergeant, barked out: ”What are we always doing?” When a student finally answered, ”Selling Delta,” she replied: ”No! You’re selling yourself. Aren’t you selling yourself, too? You’re on your own commission. We’re in the business of selling ourselves, right? Isn’t that what it’s all about?”

In this way, Delta sells Southern womanhood, not ”over their heads,” but by encouraging trainees to think of themselves as self-sellers. This required them to imagine themselves as self-employed. But Delta flight attendants are not making an independent profit from their emotional labor, they are working for a fixed wage. They are not selling themselves, they are selling the company. The idea of selling themselves helps them only in selling the company they work for.

The cabin-to-home analogy is vulnerable from another side too. The flight attendant is asked to see the passenger as a potential friend, or as like one, and to be as understanding as one would be with a good friend. The if personalizes an impersonal relation. On the other hand, the student is warned, the reciprocity of real friendship is not part of the if friendship. The passenger has no obligation to return empathy or even courtesy. As one trainer commented: ”If a passenger snaps at you and you didn’t do anything wrong, just remember it’s not you he is snapping at. It’s your uniform, it’s your role as a Delta flight attendant. Don’t take it personally.” The passenger, unlike a real friend or guest in a home, assumes a right to unsuppressed anger at irritations, having purchased that tacit right with the ticket.

Flight attendants are reminded of this one-way personalization whenever passengers confuse one flight attendant with another (”You look so much alike”) or ask questions that reveal that they never thought of the attendants as real people. ”Passengers are surprised when they discover that we eat, too. They think we can go for twenty hours without being allowed to eat. Or they will get off the plane in Hong Kong after a 15-hour flight – which is a 16- or 17-hour duty day for us – and say, ‘Are you going on to Bangkok?’ ‘Are you going on to Delhi?’ Yes, right, sure – we go round the world and get sent back with the airplane for repairs.” Just as the flight attendant’s empathy is stretched thin into a commercial offering, the passenger’s try at empathy is usually pinched into the narrow grooves of public manners.

It is when the going gets rough – when flights are crowded and planes are late, when babies bawl and smokers bicker noisily with nonsmokers, when the meals run out and the air conditioning fails – that maintaining the analogy to home, amid the Muzak and the drinks, becomes truly a monument to our human capacity to suppress feeling.

Under such conditions some passengers exercise the privilege of not suppressing their irritation; they become ”irates.” When that happens, back-up analogies are brought into service. In training, the recruit was told: ”Basically, the passengers are just like children. They need attention. Sometimes first-time riders are real nervous. And some of the troublemakers really just want your attention.” The passengeras child analogy was extended to cover sibling rivalry: ”You can’t play cards with just one passenger because the other passengers will get jealous.” To think of unruly passengers as ”just like children” is to widen tolerance of them. If their needs are like those of a child, those needs are supposed to come first. The worker’s right to anger is correspondingly reduced; as an adult he must work to inhibit and suppress anger at children.

Should the analogy to children fail to induce the necessary deep acting, surfaceacting strategies for handling the ”irate” can be brought into play. Attendants were urged to ”work” the passenger’s name, as in ”Yes, Mr. Jones, it’s true the flight is delayed.” This reminds the passenger that he is not anonymous, that there is at least some pretension to a personal relation and that some emotion management is owed. Again, workers were told to use terms of empathy. As one flight attendant, a veteran of fifteen years with United, recalled from her training: ”Whatever happens, you’re supposed to say, I know just how you feel. Lost your luggage? I know just how you feel. Late for a connection? I know just how you feel. Didn’t get that steak you were counting on? I know just how you feel.” Flight attendants report that such expressions of empathy are useful in convincing passengers that they have misplaced the blame and misaimed their anger.

Perspectives elicit feeling. In deep acting, perspectives are evoked and suppressed in part through a way of speaking. One way of keeping the living room analogy alive is to speak in company language. In a near-Orwellian Newspeak, the company seems to have officially eliminated the very idea of getting angry at the passenger, the source of revenue. Supervisors never speak officially of an obnoxious or outrageous passenger, only of an uncontrolled passenger. The term suggests that a fact has somehow attached itself to this passenger – not that the passenger has lost control or even had any control to lose. Again, the common phrase ”mishandled passenger” suggests a bungle somewhere up the line, by someone destined to remain lost in the web of workers that stretches from curbside to airplane cabin. By linguistically avoiding any attribution of blame, the idea of a right to be angry at the passenger is smuggled out of discourse. Linguistically speaking, the passenger never does anything wrong, so he can’t be blamed or made the object of anger.

In passenger-handling classes one trainer described how she passed a dinner tray to a man in a window seat. To do this, she had to pass it across a woman sitting on the aisle seat. As the tray went by, the woman snitched the man’s desert. The flight attendant politely responded, ”I notice this man’s dessert is on your tray.” The dirty deed was done, but, the implication was, by no one in particular. Such implicit reframing dulls a sense of cause and effect. It separates object from verb and verb from subject. The passenger does not feel accused, and the flight attendant does not feel as if she is accusing. Emotion work has been accomplished, but it has hidden its tracks with words.

Company language is aimed not only at diffusing anger but at minimizing fear. As one Pan Am veteran recalled:

We almost turned upside down leaving Hong Kong. They call it an ”incident.” Not an accident, just an incident. We went nose up and almost flipped over. The pilot caught the plane just before it went over on its back and made a big loop and dropped about 3,000 feet straight down and then corrected what happened. They pulled out at 1,500 feet over the harbor. We knew we were going to die because we were going nose down and you could see that water coming. I was never really afraid of flying before, but turbulence does shake me up now. I’m not as bad as some people, though.

The very term incident calms the nerves. How could we be terrified at an ”incident”? Thus the words that workers use and don’t use help them avoid emotions inappropriate to a living room full of guests.

Finally, the living room analogy is upheld by admitting that it sometimes falls down. In the Recurrent Training classes held each year for experienced flight attendants, most of the talk was about times when it feels like the party is over, or never began. In Initial Training, the focus was on the passenger’s feeling; in Recurrent Training, it was on the flight attendant’s feeling. In Initial Training, the focus was on the smile and the living room analogy; in Recurrent Training, it was on avoiding anger. As a Recurrent Training instructor explained: ”Dealing with difficult passengers is part of the job. It makes us angry sometimes. And anger is part of stress. So that’s why I’d like to talk to you about being angry. I’m not saying you should do this [work on your anger] for Delta Airlines. I’m not saying you should do it for the passengers. I’m saying do it for yourselves.”

From the beginning of training, managing feeling was taken as the problem. The causes of anger were not acknowledged as part of the problem. Nor were the overall conditions of work – the crew size, the virtual exclusion of blacks and men, the required accommodation to sexism, the lack of investigation into the considerable medical problems of flight attendants, and the company’s rigid antiunion position. These were treated as unalterable facts of life. The only question to be seriously discussed was ”How do you rid yourself of anger?”

The first recommended strategy is to focus on what the other person might be thinking and feeling: imagine a reason that excuses his or her behavior. If this fails, fall back on the thought ”I can escape.” One instructor suggested, ”You can say to yourself, it’s half an hour to go, now it’s twenty-nine minutes, now it’s twenty-eight.” And when anger could not be completely dispelled by any means, workers and instructors traded tips on the least offensive ways of expressing it: ”I chew on ice, just crunch my anger away.” ”I flush the toilet repeatedly.” ”I think about doing something mean, like pouring Ex-Lax into his coffee.”9 In this way a semiprivate ”we-girls” right to anger and frustration was shared, in the understanding that the official axe would fall on anyone who expressed her anger in a more consequential way.

Yet for those who must live under a taboo on anger, covert ways of expressing it will be found. One flight attendant recalled with a grin:

There was one time when I finally decided that somebody had it coming. It was a woman who complained about absolutely everything. I told her in my prettiest voice, ”We’re doing our best for you. I’m sorry you aren’t happy with the flight time. I’m sorry you aren’t happy with our service.” She went on and on about how terrible the food was, how bad the flight attendants were, how bad her seat was. Then she began yelling at me and my coworker friend, who happened to be black. ”You nigger bitch!” she said. Well, that did it. I told my friend not to waste her pain. This lady asked for one more Bloody Mary. I fixed the drink, put it on a tray, and when I got to her seat, my toe somehow found a piece of carpet and I tripped – and that Bloody Mary hit that white pants suit!

Despite the company’s valiant efforts to help its public-service workers offer an atmosphere perfumed with cheer, there is the occasional escapee who launders her anger, disguises it in mock courtesy, and serves it up with flair. There remains the possibility of sweet revenge.

Collective Emotional Labor

To thwart cynicism about the living room analogy, to catch it as it collapses in the face of other realizations, the company eye shifts to another field of emotion work – the field in which flight attendants interact with each other. This is a strategic point of entry for the company because if the company can influence how flight attendants deal with each other’s feelings on the job, it can ensure proper support for private emotion management.

As trainers well know, flight attendants typically work in teams of two and must work on fairly intimate terms with all others on the crew. In fact, workers commonly say the work simply cannot be done well unless they work well together. The reason for this is that the job is partly an ”emotional tone” road show, and the proper tone is kept up in large part by friendly conversation, banter, and joking, as ice cubes, trays, and plastic cups are passed from aisle to aisle to the galley, down to the kitchen, and up again. Indeed, starting with the bus ride to the plane, by bantering back and forth the flight attendant does important relational work: she checks on people’s moods, relaxes tension, and warms up ties so that each pair of individuals becomes a team. She also banters to keep herself in the right frame of mind. As one worker put it, ”Oh, we banter a lot. It keeps you going. You last longer.”

It is not that collective talk determines the mood of the workers. Rather, the reverse is true: the needed mood determines the nature of the worker’s talk. To keep the collective mood stripped of any painful feelings, serious talk of death, divorce, politics, and religion is usually avoided. On the other hand, when there is time for it, mutual morale raising is common. As one said: ”When one flight attendant is depressed, thinking, ‘I’m ugly, what am I doing as a flight attendant?’ other flight attendants, even without quite knowing what they are doing, try to cheer her up. They straighten her collar for her, to get her up and smiling again. I’ve done it too, and needed it done.”

Once established, team solidarity can have two effects. It can improve morale and thus improve service. But it can also become the basis for sharing grudges against the passengers or the company. Perhaps it is the second possibility that trainers meant to avoid when in Recurrent Training they offered examples of ”bad” social emotion management. One teacher cautioned her students: ”When you’re angry with a passenger, don’t head for the galley to blow off steam with another flight attendant.” In the galley, the second flight attendant, instead of calming the angry worker down, may further rile her up; she may become an accomplice to the aggrieved worker. Then, as the instructor put it, ”There’ll be two of you hot to trot.”

The message was, when you’re angry, go to a teammate who will calm you down. Support for anger or a sense of grievance – regardless of what inspires it – is bad for service and bad for the company. Thus, the informal ways in which workers check on the legitimacy of a grievance or look for support in blowing off steam become points of entry for company. ”suggestions.”

Behind the Supply: Supervision

The lines of company control determine who fears whom. For flight attendants, the fear hierarchy works indirectly through passengers and back again through their own immediate supervisors.10 As someone put it, ”Whoever invented the system of passenger letter writing must be a vice-president by now.” Any letter from a passenger – whether an ”onion” letter complaining about the temperature of the coffee, the size of a potato, the look of an attendant, or an ”orchid” letter praising an attendant for good service – is put into the personnel files. These letters are translated by base supervisors into rewards and punishments. Delta flight attendants talked about them as much as they talked about the reports of those in the official line of authority – the senior attendant on the crew, the base supervisor, and the plainclothes company supervisors who occasionally ghost-ride a flight.

In addition to the informal channels by which passenger opinion passes to management and then worker, there are more formal ones; company-elicited passenger opinion polls. The passenger is asked to fill out a questionnaire, and the results of that are presented by letter to the workers. As one male flight attendant, seven years with United, describes it:

We get told how we’re doing. Twice a year we get sent passenger evaluations. They show how United, American, Continental, and TWA are competing. Oh, passengers are asked to rank flight attendants: ”genuinely concerned, made me feel welcome. Spoke to me more than required. Wide awake, energetic, eager to help. Seemed sincere when talking to passengers. Helped establish a relaxed cabin atmosphere. Enjoying their jobs. Treated passengers as individuals.” We see how United is doing in the competition. We’re supposed to really get into it.

Supervision is thus more indirect than direct. It relies on the flight attendant’s sense of what passengers will communicate to management who will, in turn, communicate to workers. (For the indirect ”bureaucratic” control more common to the modern workplace, see Edwards 1979: ch. 6.) Supervisors do more than oversee workers. At this juncture in Delta’s history, the fear hierarchy bends, and supervisors must also pose as big sisters in the Delta family – bigger but not by much. These largely female, immobile, and nonunionized workers are not greatly feared by underlings, nor much envied, as the comment of one flight attendant suggests:

It’s not a job people want very much. Some girls go into it and then bounce right back on the line. The pay is an inch better and the hours are a whole lot worse. And you have to talk oat-meal. My supervisor called me into her office the other day. I’ve used seven out of my twenty-one days of available sick leave. She says, ”I don’t want to have to tell you this. It’s what I have to tell you. You’ve used up too much of your sick leave.” She has to take it from her boss and then take it from me – from both ends. What kind of a job is that?

Supervisors monitor the supply of emotional labor. They patch leaks and report breakdowns to the company. They must also cope with the frustrations that workers suppress while on the job. As one Delta base manager explained: ”I tell my supervisors to let the girls ventilate. It’s very important that they get that out. Otherwise they’ll take it out on the passengers.” So the supervisor who grades the flight attendant on maintaining a ”positive” and ”professional” attitude is also exposed to its underside. For example, one flight attendant recalled coming off a long and taxing flight only to discover that her paycheck had been ”mishandled.” She said she told her supervisor, ”I can’t take this all day and then come back here and take it from you! You know I get paid to take it from passengers, but I don’t get paid to take it from you. I want my money. I just got my teeth cleaned three months ago.Where’s my check? You find it!” What is offstage for the flight attendant is on stage for the supervisor. Managing someone else’s formerly managed frustration and anger is itself a job that takes emotional labor.

Achieving the Transmutation

To the extent that emotion management actually works – so that Bloody Marys do not spill ”by accident” on white pants suits, and blowups occur in backstage offices instead of in airplane aisles – something like alchemy occurs. Civility and a general sense of well-being have been enhanced and emotional ”pollution” controlled. Even when people are paid to be nice, it is hard for them to be nice at all times, and when their efforts succeed, it is a remarkable accomplishment.

What makes this accomplishment possible is a transmutation of three basic elements of emotional life: emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange.

First, emotion work is no longer a private act but a public act, bought on the one hand and sold on the other. Those who direct emotion work are no longer the individuals themselves but are instead paid stage managers who select, train, and supervise others.

Second, feeling rules are no longer simply matters of personal discretion, negotiated with another person in private, but are spelled out publicly – in the Airline Guide to Stewardess and Steward Careers, in the World Airways Flight Manual, in training programs, and in the discourse of supervisors at all levels.

Third, social exchange is forced into narrow channels; there may be hiding places along shore, but there is much less room for individual navigation of the emotional waters.

The whole system of emotional exchange in private life has as its ostensible purpose the welfare and pleasure of the people involved. When this emotional system is thrust into a commercial setting, it is transmuted. A profit motive is slipped in under acts of emotion management, under the rules that govern them, under the gift exchange. Who benefits now, and who pays?

The transmutation is a delicate achievement and potentially an important and beneficial one. But even when it works – when ”service ratings” are high and customers are writing ”orchid” letters – there is a cost to be paid: the worker must give up control over how the work is to be done. In Labor and Monopoly Capital (1974) Harry Braverman argues that this has been a general trend in the twentieth century. The ”mind” of the work process moves up the company hierarchy, leaving jobs deskilled and workers devalued.11 Braverman applies this thesis to physical and mental labor, but it applies to emotional labor as well. At Delta Airlines, for example, twenty-four men work as ”method analysts” in the Standard Practices Division of the company. Their job is to update the forty-three manuals that codify work procedure for a series of public-contact jobs. There were no such men in the 1920s when the flight engineer handed out coffee to passengers; or in the 1930s when Delta hired nurses to do the same; or in the 1940s when the first flight attendants swatted flies in the cabin, hauled luggage, and even helped with wing repairs. The flight attendant’s job grew along with marketing, becoming increasingly specialized and standardized.

The lessons in deep acting – acting ”as if the cabin is your home” and ”as if this unruly passenger has a traumatic past” – are themselves a new development in deskilling. The ”mind” of the emotion worker, the source of the ideas about what mental moves are needed to settle down an ”irate,” has moved upstairs in the hierarchy so that the worker is restricted to implementing standard procedures. In the course of offering skills, trainers unwittingly contribute to a system of deskilling. The skills they offer do not subtract from the worker’s autonomous control over when and how to apply them; as the point is made in training, ”It will be up to you to decide how to handle any given problem on line.” But the overall definition of the task is more rigid than it once was, and the worker’s field of choice about what to do is greatly narrowed. Within the boundaries of the job, more and more actual subtasks are specified. Did the flight attendant hand out magazines? How many times? By the same token, the task to be accomplished is more clearly spelled out by superiors. How were the magazines handed out? With a smile? With a sincere smile? The fact that trainers work hard at making a tough job easier and at making travel generally more pleasant only makes this element of deskilling harder to see. The fact that their training manuals are prepared for them and that they are not themselves entirely free to ”tell it like it is” only illustrates again how deskilling is the outcome of specialization and standardization.

Sensing this, most of the flight attendants I observed were concerned to establish that theirs was an honorable profession requiring a mastery of ”real” skills. I was told repeatedly that there was a law school graduate in the incoming class at the Training Center and that a dentist, a librarian, and a botanist were serving on line. At the same time, they generally expressed frustration at the fact that their skills in rescue and safety procedures were given soft play (how many tickets can you sell by reminding passengers of death and danger?) whereas their function as meal servers was highlighted. As one flight attendant put it eloquently:

I have a little bit of pride in what I do. Of course I’m going to haul ass and try to do everything I conceivably can to get that breakfast for 135 people completed in forty minutes. That means that 135 people get meal trays, 135 people are supposed to have at least two beverages, 135 trays are collected and restowed. You can imagine how many seconds we have left to give to each passenger. But what kind of condition does that put me in when I finally reach the jump seat at the end of the flight, the time when a crash is relatively more likely? And do I even notice that man slumped over in his seat? That’s really my job.

Thus because passengers see them – and are encouraged by company advertising to see them – as no more than glamorous waitresses, flight attendants usually resented the appearance of working at a low level of skills, and had to cope with this resentment. But the ways in which these two functions – managing rescue operations and serving food – are combined, and the relative priority given to each, cannot be influenced by the workers or even the trainers. Such things are determined by management.

The Transmutation That Failed

When an industry speed-up drastically shortens the time available for contact between flight attendants and passengers, it can become virtually impossible to deliver emotional labor. In that event, the transmutation of emotion work, feeling rules, and social exchange will fail. Company claims about offering a smile ”from the inside out” (Delta) will become untenable. The living room analogy will collapse into a flat slogan. The mosaic of ”as if” techniques will fall to pieces, and deep acting will be replaced by surface displays that lack conviction.

This is approximately what has happened in the US airline industry. Flight attendants who had worked during the 1960s spoke, sometimes nostalgically, sometimes bitterly, of a ”before” and an ”after” period. In the ”before” period they were able to do what they were asked to do, what they often came to want to do. As one twenty-two-year veteran of Pan American reminisced:

On those old piston-engine Stratocruisers we had ten hours to Honolulu. We had three flight attendants for seventy-five passengers. We had a social director who introduced each of the flight attendants personally and asked the passengers to introduce themselves to each other. . . We didn’t even use the PA system, and we had a vocal lifeboat demonstration. There was more of the personal touch. The plane had only one aisle, and we had berths for the passengers to sleep in. We used to tuck people into bed.

There was time to talk to passengers. Layovers between flights were longer. Flights were less crowded, the passengers more experienced and generally richer, the work more pleasant. Descriptions of flying today are much different:

Now we have these huge planes that can go forever. I mean, we have twelve-hour duty days, with 375 people to tend [on the Boeing 747]. The SP [Special Performance plane] is smaller, but it can go fifteen or sixteen hours without refueling. We used to fly with the same people, and there were fewer of us. We would just informally rotate positions. Now you come to work all set to argue for not working tourist class. When we go down the rows, we avoid eye contact and focus on the aisle, on the plates. People usually wait for eye contact before they make a request, and if you have two and a quarter hours to do a cocktail and meal service, and it takes five minutes to answer an extra request, those requests add up and you can’t do the service in time.

The golden age ended sometime after the recession of the early 1970s when the airlines, losing passengers and profits, began their campaigns to achieve ”costefficient” flying.12 They began using planes that could hold more people and fly longer hours without fuel stops. This created longer workdays, and more workdays bunched together.13 There was less time to adjust to time-zone changes on layovers, and less time to relax and enjoy a central advantage of the work – personal travel. Like the airplane, the flight attendant was now kept in use as long as possible. Pan American shortened its port time (the time before and after flights) from one and a half to one and a quarter hours. One American Airlines union official described the result of the speed-up:

They rush us through the emergency briefing . . . They’re even briefing us on the buses getting out there. When you get on the plane, you just start counting all the food and everything and start loading passengers. They’ll shut the door and pull away and we’ll find we’re twenty meals short.
Now if we worked in an auto assembly line and the cars started to come down the line faster and faster we’d call it a speed-up. But on the airplane they give more passengers to the same crew. They ask us to do a liquor service and a dinner service in an hour, when it used to be an hour and a half . . . and we do it. Now why is it we don’t call that a speed-up?

With deregulation of the airlines, the price of tickets dropped, and the ”discount people” boarded in even larger numbers.14 Aboard came more mothers with small children who leave behind nests of toys, gum wrappers, and food scraps, more elderly ”white-knuckle flyers,” more people who don’t know where the restrooms, the pillow, and the call button are, more people who wander around wanting to go ”downstairs.” Experienced business commuters complain to flight attendants about the reduced standard of living in the air; or worse, they complain about less experienced ”discount” passengers, who in turn appeal to the flight attendant. The cruise ship has become a Greyhound bus.

The companies could increase the number of flight attendants, as the unions have asked, to maintain the old ratio of workers to passengers. One union official for Pan American calculated that ”if we had the same ratio now that we had ten years ago we would need twenty flight attendants on board, but we get by with twelve or fourteen now.” One reason the companies have not done this is that flight attendants cost more than they used to. With regulations that assured their removal at age thirty-one or at marriage, flight attendants used to be a reliable source of cheap labor. But since the unions have successfully challenged these regulations and also secured higher wages, the companies have chosen to work a smaller number of flight attendants much harder. While some flight attendants find it hard to refute the corporate logic, others continue to question why this female labor was so cheap to begin with.

In the early 1980s there has been a super speed-up. The vice-president for In-Flight Service at United Airlines explained the economic background of this: ”United has to compete for the travel market with low-cost, nonunion planes, with companies with lower overhead, who only lease planes – companies like PSA, Pacific Express, Air California.” In response to this greater competition, United instituted its Friendship Express flights. After only a year and a half, such flights accounted for 23 percent of all United flights.

On Friendship Express the fares are lower, the service is minimal, and the seating is ”high density.” It is not unusual for a flight attendant to handle a thousand passengers a day. The ground time is limited to a maximum of twenty minutes. (One United flight attendant said, ”We don’t send Friendship Express flights to St. Petersburg, Florida, because with the number of wheelchair passengers there, we couldn’t make our twenty minutes deboarding time.”) With such limited groundtime, four segments of travel can be squeezed into the time of three. There is no time to clean the cabin or replace supplies between trips: ”If you’re ten lunches short on the Friendship Express, well you’re just out ten lunches. You have to live with the complaints.” But the old ways of handling complaints are no longer available. Faced with disappointed passengers, the flight attendant can no longer give out free decks of cards or drinks. The main compensation for mishaps must be personal service – for which there is virtually no time.

The recession has required United, like many airlines, to lay off baggage checkers, gate personnel, ticket personnel, and managers. Lines are longer. Mishaps multiply. There are more ruffled feathers to soothe, more emotion work to be done, but fewer workers to do it. The super speed-up has made it virtually impossible to deliver personal service. Even those who have long since abandoned that ideal – passengers as well as airline workers – find the system stressful.

Management, however, sees no escape from the contradictory policy of trying to meet the demand for emotional labor while promoting conditions that cut off the supply. The companies worry that competitors may produce more personal service than they do, and so they continue to press for ”genuinely friendly” service. But they feel compelled to keep the conveyor belt moving ever faster. For workers, the job of ”enjoying the job” becomes harder and harder. Rewards seem less intrinsic to the work, more a compensation for the arduousness of it. As one veteran of thirteen years with Pan Am put it:

The company did, after all, pay relatively good salaries and give us free or reduced rates for air travel. There was a seniority system, so the longer you flew, the better most things got – vacations and layovers got longer and more pleasant. The fact that none of us was really happy on the job didn’t matter – that wasn’t why we were flying. We were flying for money, men, adventure, travel. But the job, the work on the plane, was the most strenuous, unrewarding, alienating concentration of house work and waitresstype drudgery to be found anywhere.

Before the speed-up, most workers sustained the cheerful good will that good service requires. They did so for the most part proudly; they supported the transmutation. After the speed-up, when asked to make personal human contact at an inhuman speed, they cut back on their emotion work and grew detached.

Responses to the contradiction

The slowdown is a venerable tactic in the wars between industrial labor and management. Those whose work is to offer “personalized service” may also stage a slowdown, but in a necessarily different way. Since their job is to act upon a commercial stage, under managerial directors, their protest may take the form of rebelling against the costumes, the script, and the general choreography. This sort of protest occurred in many airlines throughout the 1970s as flight attendants set up independent unions to name and give voice to their accumulated resentment and discontent. [* These unions have fought for many things: higher wages, more soft-time trips, better health and safety regulations, and larger crews. What is directly relevant here is that they have challenged company regulations affecting whole territories of the body and its adornment, regulations on facial make-up, hairstyles, undergarments, jewelry, and shoe styles.]

For a decade now, flight attendants have quietly lodged a counterclaim to control over their own bodily appearance. Some crews, for example, staged “shoe-ins.” (“Five of us at American just walked on the job in Famolares and the supervisor didn’t say anything. After that we kept wearing them.”) Others, individually or in groups, came to work wearing an extra piece of jewelry, a beard a trifle shaggier, a new permanent, or lighter make-up. Sometimes the struggle went through the official machinery—a company “write up” of the offending worker, the filing of a grievance, and a negotiation between the company and the union. Sometimes, as in the case of body-weight regulations, the issue was taken to court. At other times a series of quietly received worker victories was followed by a company crackdown.

Workers have also—in varying degrees—reclaimed control of their own smiles, and their facial expressions in general. According to Webster’s Dictionary, “to smile” is “to have or take on a facial expression showing pleasure, amusement, affection, friendliness, irony, derision, etc., and characterized by an upward curving of the corners of the mouth and a sparkling of the eyes.” But in the flight attendant’s work, smiling is separated from its usual function, which is to express a personal feeling, and attached to another one—expressing a company feeling. The company exhorts them to smile more, and “more sincerely,” at an increasing number of passengers. The workers respond to the speed-up with a slowdown: they smile less broadly, with a quick release and no sparkle in the eyes, thus dimming the company’s message to the people. It is a war of smiles.

During a slowdown, it becomes possible to mention the personal cost of smiling too much. Workers worry about their “smile-lines.” These lines are seen not as the accumulated evidence of personal character but as an occupational hazard, an undesirable sign of age incurred in the line of duty on a job that devalues age.

The smile war has its veterans and its lore. I was told repeatedly, and with great relish, the story of one smile-fighter’s victory, which goes like this. A young businessman said to a flight attendant, “Why aren’t you smiling?” She put her tray back on the food cart, looked him in the eye, and said, “I’ll tell you what. You smile first, then I’ll smile.” The businessman smiled at her. “Good,” she replied. “Now freeze, and hold that for fifteen hours.” Then she walked away. In one stroke, the heroine not only asserted a personal right to her facial expressions but also reversed the roles in the company script by placing the mask on a member of the audience. She challenged the company’s right to imply, in its advertising, that passengers have a right to her smile. This passenger, of course, got more: an expression of her genuine feeling.

The slowdown has met resistance from all quarters and not least from passengers who “misunderstand.” Because nonstop smiling had become customary before the speedup occurred, the absence of a smile is now cause for concern. [* Even in normal times, less frequent smilers had to work at reassuring others that they were not cold or unkind just because they didn't smile more often.] Some passengers simply feel cheated and consider unsmiling workers facial “loafers.” Other passengers interpret the absence of a smile to indicate anger. As one worker put it: “When I don’t smile, passengers assume I’m angry. But I’m not angry when I don’t smile. I’m just not smiling.” Such workers face the extra task, if they care to take it up, of convincing passengers that they are not angry. This may mean working extra hard at doing thoughtful deeds, as if to say, “I’m as nice as they come, but you won’t get what you expect from my face. Look for it in other ways.”

The friction between company speed-up and worker slowdown extends beyond display to emotional labor. Many flight attendants recalled a personal breaking point. Here are three examples:

I guess it was on a flight when a lady spat at me that I decided I’d had enough. I tried. God knows, I tried my damnedest. I went along with the program, I was being genuinely nice to people. But it didn’t work. I reject what the company wants from me emotionally. The company wants me to bring the emotional part of me to work. I won’t.

The time I snapped was on a New York to Miami flight. On those flights, passengers want everything yesterday. There’s a constant demand for free decks of cards. One woman fought for a free deck and groused when I told her we were all out. Finally I happened to see a deck under a seat, so I picked it up and brought it to her. She opened her purse and there were fifteen decks inside.

I thought I’d heard them all. I had a lady tell me her doctor gave her a prescription for playing cards. I had a man ask me to tell the pilot to use the cockpit radio to reserve his Hertz car. I had a lady ask me if we gave enemas on board. But the time I finally cracked was when a lady just took her tea and threw it right on my arm. That was it.

Workers who refuse to perform emotional labor are said to “go into robot.” They withhold deep acting and retreat to surface acting. They pretend to be showing feeling. Some who take this stance openly protest the need to conduct themselves in this way. “I’m not a robot,” they say, meaning “I’ll pretend, but I won’t try to hide the fact that I’m pretending.” Under the conditions of speed-up and slowdown, covering up a lack of genuine feeling is no longer considered necessary. Half-heartedness has gone public.

The new flight attendants’ union at American, Pan American, and United has apparently decided that their best strategy is to emphasize the crucial safety and rescue skills of their members and to give a lower priority to the issue of emotion work and personal service. The companies, on the other hand, continue to emphasize service as the key to beating out their competitors. Yet what the workers are withholding and what the companies are demanding are seldom talked about in clear or precise terms. As one flight attendant put it:

I don’t think anybody ever comes right out and says to her superior, “I won’t put my emotions into this job.” The superiors know that you don’t want to, and you know what they want. And so we say a lot of things to each other that really don’t convey what we’re talking about at all. They talk about a “more positive attitude” and say you could have acted more positively. You say, “Well, I’ll do better next time,” but you think to yourself, “I’ll do it the same way next time.”

Periodically, the companies tighten their service regulations. As one veteran put it: “The more the company sees the battle, the tougher they get with their regulations. They define them more precisely. They come up with more categories and more definitions. And more emotionalizing. And then, in time, we reject them even more.”

Inevitably, a few workers will not close ranks and will insist on working even harder to serve passengers with genuinely sincere feeling. Some want to please in order to compensate for a “flaw”—such as age, fatness, or homosexuality—that they have been made to feel guilt about. [* By some accounts, the company's play on our culture's devaluation of age in women made older female workers feel obliged to "make up" for their age by working harder. There were some stories of direct harassment of older female flight attendants. One supervisor was reported to have asked a woman to take off her jacket and hold out her arms; he then remarked on the "unsightliness" of the flesh on the under side of her upper arms. Although the woman was personally distressed by this, another flight attendant and union official remarked: "They make us think age is a personal flaw. Actually, they just don't want to pay our pensions."] Some want revenge on certain co-workers. Some are professional “angels” to whom the company eagerly points as good examples. Under slowdown conditions, they become the “rate-busters” who are resented by other workers.

One response to the slowdown, it is said, has been that companies have considered seeking cheaper labor by lowering the minimum age and educational requirements for new recruits. In another response, Pan American has shown interest in recruiting more Asian-American women. According to company officials, Pan Am wants them “for their language skills.” According to union members, it wants them for their reputed submissiveness, their willingness to perform emotional labor: “They would love nothing better than to get rid of us and fill the plane with loving, submissive Japanese women. But for one thing, regulations prevent them from going to Japan, so they go for Japanese-American women. And there the joke’s on Pan Am. Those women are so used to being browbeaten that they are a lot tougher than we are.”

What is distinctive in the airline industry slowdown is the manner of protest and its locus. If a stage company were to protest against the director, the costume designer, and the author of a play, the protest would almost certainly take the form of a strike—a total refusal to act. In the airline industry the play goes on, but the costumes are gradually altered, the script is shortened little by little, and the style of acting itself is changed—at the edge of the lips, in the cheek muscles, and in the mental activities that regulate what a smile means.

The general effect of the speed-up on workers is stress. As one base manager at Delta frankly explained: “The job is getting harder, there’s no question about it. We see more sick forms. We see more cases of situational depression. We see more alcoholism and drugs, more trouble sleeping and relaxing.” The San Francisco base manager for United Airlines commented:

I’d say it’s since 1978, when we got the Greyhound passengers, that we’ve had more problems with drug and alcohol abuse, more absenteeism, more complaints generally. It’s mainly our junior flight attendants and those on reserve— who never know when they will be called up—who have the most problems. The senior flight attendants can arrange to work with a friend in first class and avoid the Friendship Express altogether.

There are many specific sources of stress—notably, long shifts, disturbance in bodily rhythms, exposure to ozone, and continual social contact with a fairly high element of predictability. But there is also a general source of stress, a thread woven through the whole work experience: the task of managing an estrangement between self and feeling and between self and display.

Emotional labor and the redefined self

A person who does emotional labor for a living must face three hard questions that do not confront others, the answers to which will determine how she defines her “self.”

The first one is this: How can I feel really identified with my work role and with the company without being fused with them? This question is especially salient for younger or less experienced workers (since their identities are less formed) and for women (since a woman is more often asked to identify with a man than vice versa). For these groups, the risk of identity confusion is generally greater.

To address this issue successfully, the worker has to develop a working criterion for distinguishing between situations that call on her to identify her self and situations that call on her to identify her role and its relation to the company she works for. To resolve the issue, a worker has to develop the ability to “depersonalize” situations. For example, when a passenger complains about the deprivations of the Friendship Express, a flight attendant who cannot yet depersonalize takes it as a criticism of her own private shortcomings. Or when a passenger is delighted with the flight, such a worker takes the compliments as a reflection on her own special qualities. She would not, for example, take such a compliment as a sign that a strong union stand has improved the ratio of workers to passengers. She interprets events so that they easily reflect on her “true” self. Her self is large, and many events reflect on it.

All companies, but especially paternalistic, nonunion ones, try as a matter of policy to fuse a sense of personal satisfaction with a sense of company well-being and identity. This often works well for awhile. Company emphasis on the sale of “natural niceness” makes it hard for new workers to separate the private from the public self, the “at-ease me” from the “worked-up me,” and hard to define their job as one of acting. In a sense, the two selves are not estranged enough. Such workers do not have the wide repertoire of deep acting techniques that would enable them to personalize or depersonalize an encounter at will. Without this adaptability, when things go wrong (as they frequently do), they are more often hurt, angered, or distressed.

At some point the fusion of “real” and “acted” self will be tested by a crucial event. A continual series of situations batter an unprotected ego as it gives to and receives from an assembly line of strangers. Often the test comes when a company speed-up makes personal service impossible to deliver because the individual’s personal self is too thinly parceled out to meet the demands made on it. At this point, it becomes harder and harder to keep the public and private selves fused. As a matter of self-protection, they are forced to divide. The worker wonders whether her smile and the emotional labor that keeps it sincere are really hers. Do they really express a part of her? Or are they deliberately worked up and delivered on behalf of the company? Where inside her is the part that acts “on behalf of the company”?

In resolving this issue, some workers conclude that only one self (usually the nonwork self) is the “real” self. Others, and they are in the majority, will decide that each self is meaningful and real in its own different way and time. Those who see their identity in this way are more likely to be older, experienced, and married, and they tend to work for a company that draws less on the sense of fusion. Such workers are generally more adept at deep acting, and the idea of a separation between the two selves is not only acceptable but welcome to them. They speak more matter-of-factly about their emotional labor in clearly defined and sometimes mechanistic ways: “I get in gear, I get revved up, I get plugged in.”

They talk of their feelings not as spontaneous, natural occurrences but as objects they have learned to govern and control. As one flight attendant, who had come to her own terms with this issue, explained: “If I wake up in a sunny mood, I spread it around to the crew and passengers. But if I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, all depressed, I keep to myself on the flight until I’m out of it. The way I think of it, when I’m on, I’m out; when I’m down, I’m in.”

Yet workers who resolve the first issue often find themselves brought up more sharply against a second one. While they have the skills of deep acting, they can’t always bring themselves to use them. “How,” the second question goes, “can I use my capacities when I’m disconnected from those I am acting for}” Many flight attendants can’t bring themselves to think of the airplane cabin as their living room full of personal guests; it seems too much like a cabin full of 300 demanding strangers. The closest they can come to a bow from the heart is to disguise their feelings through surface acting. Many of them want to do deep acting but cannot pull it off under speed-up conditions, and so they fall back on surface acting.

For this reason, a new issue becomes central for them: whether one is “being phony.” If a worker wants to put her heart into the work but can only lend her face to it, the risk for her lies in thinking of herself as “phony.” Among flight attendants, this word came up with surprising frequency. It was common to hear one worker disparage another for being phony (for example, “She just laid it,on in plastic”). But workers also seemed to fear that disparagement themselves; it was common to hear a sentence begin, “I’m not a phony, but….” Talk about phoniness was serious because it was usually seen not merely as an instance of poor acting but as evidence of a personal moral flaw, almost a stigma.5

Thus the third issue arises: “If I’m doing deep acting for an audience from whom I’m disconnected, how can I maintain my self-esteem without becoming cynical?” There were those for whom the issue of phoniness—and self-esteem — was resolved by redefining the job. Although some blamed themselves for phoniness, others saw it as surface acting necessary and desirable in a job that positively calls for the creation of an illusion. The editors of an unofficial flight attendants’ newsletter, the Pan Am Quipper, described this stance succinctly: “We deal in the illusion of good service. We want to make passengers think they are having a good time. It is dangerous to take any of the abuse seriously; it is dangerous to take the job too seriously. Quipper is about laughing it off.”

To keep on working with a sense of honor a person has to stop taking the job seriously. On one side, hard experience forces the worker to associate less and less of herself with the job, while on the other side the job is whittled down to “maintaining an illusion.” It is no longer the sincere smile or the person that is now “phony.” What is phony is the “good time.” And it is the work it takes to bring off the illusion of a “good time” that becomes the problem. It is as if the Quipper’s editors, like the workers they speak for, are forced to say, appropriately enough, “the job is the problem, not us.” Then, for extra protection, there is the added message, “it’s not serious not attached to us.”

When a worker is asked to do deep acting for a great many people who are totally out of her control, she is put on the defensive. The only way to salvage a sense of self-esteem, in this situation, is to define the job as “illusion making” and to remove the self from the job, to take it lightly, unseriously. Less of the job reflects on the self; the self is “smaller.” But then so is the job. Neither the passenger nor the worker is really having “a good time.”

While some workers distance themselves from the job by defining it as “not serious,” others distance themselves from it in another way. For them, the job remains serious; but they are not seriously in it. When they cannot bring themselves to define phoniness (or surface acting) as either a necessary virtue or a feature of the job, they may “go into robot.” They use their faces as masks against the world; they refuse to act. Most of those who “go into robot” describe it as a defense, but they acknowledge that it is inadequate: their withdrawal often irritates passengers, and when it does they are forced to withdraw even further in order to defend themselves against that irritation. In either case—whether she with draws by performing the work as if it were unserious or withdraws by not doing the emotional job at all—the worker is on the defensive.

In relation to each issue, emotional labor poses a challenge to a person’s sense of self. In each case, the problem was not one that would cause much concern among those who do not do emotional labor—the assembly line worker or the wallpaper machine operator, for example. In each case, the issue of estrangement between what a person senses as her “true self” and her inner and outer acting becomes something to work out, to take a position on.

When a flight attendant feels that her smile is “not an indication of how she really feels,” or when she feels that her deep or surface acting is not meaningful, it is a sign that she is straining to disguise the failure of a more general transmutation. It indicates that emotion work now performed on a commercial stage, with commercial directors and standardized props, is failing to involve the actors or convince the audience in a way that it once did.

When feelings are successfully commercialized, the worker does not feel phony or alien; she feels somehow satisfied in how personal her service actually was. Deep acting is a help in doing this, not a source of estrangement. But when commercialization of feeling as a general process collapses into its separate elements, display becomes hollow and emotional labor is withdrawn. The task becomes one of disguising the failed transmutation. In either case, whether proudly or resentfully, face and feelings have been used as instruments. An American Airlines worker said: “Do you know what they call us when we get sick? Breakage. How’s that for a ‘positive attitude’? Breakage is what they call people that go to the complaint service to cancel for illness.” Or again, as a San Francisco base manager at United remarked ruefully: “And we call them bodies. Do we have enough ‘bodies’ for the flight?” Feeling can become an instrument, but whose instrument?

NOTES

1 For a detailed picture of the Delta-Eastern competition in the postwar period, see Gill and Bates (1949: 235).

2 The Airline Deregulation Act, passed by Congress in October 1978, provided for abolition of the CAB by 1985, after the transfer of some of its functions to other agencies had been accomplished. In 1981 the CAB lost all authority to regulate the entry of air carriers into new domestic markets.

3 Despite fierce competition in some arenas, airlines cooperate with each other. According to the airlines, flying is safe but, in fact, airplanes occasionally crash. When they do, the efforts of their public relations offices call for surface acting and sometimes border on illusion making. For example, the head of Delta’s public relations office received a call during my office visit. ”A crash in Mexico City? Seventy-three died? It was a DC – 10, too?” He turned to me after hanging up. ”After that last Eastern crash, I was getting 150 calls a day. We don’t have any DC – 10s, thank God. But I try to keep the press off of Eastern’s back. I say, ‘Don’t mention those planes.’ Eastern does the same for us when we’re in trouble.”

4 When an airline commands a market monopoly, as it is likely to do when it is owned by a government, it does not need to compete for passengers by advertising friendly flight attendants. Many flight attendants told me that their counterparts on Lufthansa (the German national airlines) and even more on El Al and Aeroflot (the Israeli and Russian national airlines) were notably lacking in assertive friendliness.

5 A black female flight attendant, who had been hired in the early 1970s when Delta faced an affirmative action suit, wondered aloud why blacks were not pictured in local Georgia advertising. She concluded: ”They want that market, and that market doesn’t include blacks. They go along with that.” Although Delta’s central offices are in Atlanta, which is predominantly black, few blacks worked for Delta in any capacity.

6 Many workers divided male passengers into two types: the serious businessman who wants quite, efficient, and unobtrusive service; and the ”sport” who wants a Playboy Club atmosphere.

7 Delta does officially emphasize ”good moral character,” and several workers spoke in lowered voices about facts they would not want known. They agreed that any report of living with a man outside marriage would be dangerous, and some said they would never risk paying for an abortion through the company’s medical insurance.

8 Most of the training in passenger handling concerned what to do in a variety of situations. What do you do if an obese passenger doesn’t fit into his seat? Make him pay for half the fare of another seat. What do you do if the seat belt doesn’t fit around him? Get him a seat-belt extension. What do you do if you accidentally spill coffee on his trousers? Give him a pink slip that he can take to the ticket agent, but don’t commit the company to responsibility through word or action. What do you do if you’re one meal short? Issue a meal voucher that can be redeemed at the next airport.

9 Most anger fantasies seemed to have a strong oral component, such as befouling the troublemaker’s food and watching him eat it. These fantasies inverted the service motif but did not step outside it. No one, for instance, reported a fantasy about hitting a passenger.

10 At Delta in 1980 there were twenty-nine supervisors in charge of the 2,000 flight attendants based in Atlanta.

11 Braverman (1974) argues that corporate management applied the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor and systematically divided single complex tasks into many simple tasks so that a few parts of the former complex task are done by a few highly paid mental workers while the remaining simple parts of the task are done by cheap and interchangeable unskilled workers. To management, the advantage is that it is cheaper and there is more control over the work process from the top, less from the bottom. Braverman applies this thesis to factory work, clerical work, and service work, but he fails to distinguish between the kinds of service work that involve public contact and the kinds that do not (p. 360).

12 Between 1950 and 1970 the annual growth rate of airline companies was between 15 and 19 percent. In 1970 growth slowed, and air traffic grew about 4 percent annually. Periods of financial hardship have led to the failure of weak companies and increased concentration. Of the thirty-five airlines regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) the largest four – United, TWA, American, and Pan American – earned 43 percent of the 1974 revenues (Corporate Data Exchange 1977: 77).

13 Companies are trying to eliminate ”soft-time trips” and increase ”hard-time trips.” A hard-time trip is one on which the flight attendant puts in more than her projected daily quota of flying hours. On a soft-time trip she works below that quota. In cases where a flight attendants’ union – as at American Airlines – has won the right to per diem pay for nonflying time, the company is correspondingly eager to eliminate occasions on which the workers can use it.

14 In 1979 discount fares accounted for 37 percent of Delta’s total domestic revenue from passenger service.

REFERENCES
Braverman, Harry (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Corporate Data Exchange, Inc. (1977) Stock Ownership Directory. No. 1. The Transportation Industry. New York: Corporate Data Exchange.
Edwards, Richard (1979) Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books.
Gill, Frederick W. and Gilbert Bates (1949) Airline Competition. Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University Printing Office.
Stanislavski, Constantin (1965) An Actor Prepares. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New

by **American Dream** » Wed Sep 28, 2011 11:07 pm

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com ... error.html

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2011

Cronyism, Corruption and the 'War on Terror'

The partisan furor surrounding the collapse of solar equipment manufacturer Solyndra, a Fremont, Calif. firm which secured a $535 million government loan from the Energy Department, underscores congressional hypocrisy when it comes to widespread cronyism and corruption.

The Washington Post reported that "The Obama White House tried to rush federal reviewers for a decision on a nearly half-billion-dollar loan to the solar-panel manufacturer Solyndra so Vice President Biden could announce the approval at a September 2009 groundbreaking for the company's factory, newly obtained e-mails show."

According to Post stenographers Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig, those "August 2009 e-mails released exclusively to The Washington Post," shorthand for a controlled leak by Republican staffers, "show White House officials repeatedly asking OMB reviewers when they would be able to decide on the federal loan and noting a looming press event at which they planned to announce the deal."

In response to White House pressure, "OMB officials expressed concern that they were being rushed to approve the company's project without adequate time to assess the risk to taxpayers, according to information provided by Republican congressional investigators."

Solyndra, a poster-child for the administration's PR campaign to expand "green jobs" was part of Obama's lifeless "stimulus package" which White House flacks argued would ameliorate unemployment through tax cuts and other perks to corporations in the wake of the on-going economic meltdown.

"It was alarming," Frank Rusco, a program director at the Government Accountability Office, told The New York Times.

GAO auditors found "Energy Department preliminary loan approvals--including the one for Solyndra--were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects."

"They can't really evaluate the risks without following the rules," Rusco said.

But in Washington, the well-connected follow their own rules so it was hardly surprising that Solyndra executives hired Washington lobbyists in early 2009, retaining McBee Strategic Consulting.

"Five lobbyists employed by the McBee group eventually worked on Solyndra's behalf," the Times disclosed, "including Michael Sheehy, a former top aide to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader. Solyndra has paid McBee Consulting $340,000 since 2009."

However, despite intense pressure to approve the loan the firm's business model in the highly-competitive solar energy market was flawed from the get-go.

Although the unique design of their solar panels may not have relied on silicon, and executives assumed their "competitors would continue to pay a relatively high price for silicon, allowing Solyndra to charge the premium required to turn a profit," industry experts "outside the federal government, going back to 2008, were predicting silicon prices were headed for a steep fall."

Between 2008 and 2009 when the loan was approved, sinking demand for solar energy as a result of the economic crisis, drove down the price of silicon from more than a $1000 a pound to less than $100 in the twinkling of an eye.

Despite high-profile investors, loan guarantees, a new factory, and frankly a better made, more efficient product, Solyndra was forced to sell its panels well-below production costs, seriously wounding the company.

Taxpayers and laid-off workers were left holding the bag.

Factor in the collapse of the commercial and home real estate markets, the dearth of new factory construction, and allegations of "unfair-trade complaints against China for out-sized subsidies to its clean-energy companies," Bloomberg News averred, and the entire renewable-energy sector was in deep trouble.

"China provided $30 billion in credit to its biggest solar manufacturers last year, about 20 times the U.S. effort, Jonathan Silver, executive director of the Energy Department's loan program, told a congressional panel Sept. 14," Bloomberg reported.

The former socialist republic, which learned a lesson or two from other Asian "tigers" and the United States for that matter when it came to development, "frequently provides both zero-cost financing, occasionally free land and other kinds of incentives and subsidies" to its wind and solar companies, Silver told Congress.

The problem is not that the Chinese state subsidizes manufacturing but that the United States refuses to do so. Witness the near hysteria by rightist troglodytes over modest efforts by the federal government to construct a network of high-speed bullet trains across the United States.

Grifters in Congress, academia and the business press however, in thrall to Reaganite fantasies of "free trade" and "free markets" are willfully blind to the historical role played by the American state, and it was hardly an "invisible" one, in directing national priorities and resources during the period of rapid industrialization.

As readers are well aware, Antifascist Calling does not carry water for the Obama administration, a government as duplicitous as the previous Bush regime. However, there is more than a hint of a manufactured scandal by congressional Republicans over the Solyndra affair. While political blood sport may titillate Washington pundits, something far more sinister than a questionable loan is going on here.

In fact, the targets of the Republican attack machine are two-fold: discredit any government efforts to boost the industrial sector while disparaging renewable energy entirely as a potential, albeit weak threat, to the multinational energy conglomerates who provided 77% of their $18.8 million in campaign contributions to the GOP, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Contrast congressional market fundamentalist zeal here with their deafening silence when it comes to the heavily-subsidized U.S. "defense" industry, where mammoth cost overruns and mega-profits for the Military-Industrial Complex are factored in to the acquisition of weapons systems which have cost the American people trillions of dollars in investments elsewhere.

Deepening Crisis

That Solyndra went belly-up and filed for bankruptcy protection last month, laying off nearly 1,100 workers, is another sign that the global crisis which eviscerated productive sectors of the economy, continues to have disastrous effects for the vast majority of Americans.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported, "census bureau figures that came out Tuesday, showing the largest number of Americans living in poverty since records began in 1959, are a damning indictment of American capitalism and the entire political system."

The manufacturing sector, long the staple of a healthy economy, has undergone a major transformation since the 1970s. As U.S. firms, challenged by stiff competition from their capitalist rivals, sought to lower costs and increase shrinking profit margins, jobs were offloaded to low-wage platforms.

Yankee corporations however, that fled offshore to hide their assets and dodge taxes in so-called "free trade" and other "special" industrial zones where high productivity and low labor costs were guaranteed by repressive, U.S.-allied comprador regimes, made out like proverbial bandits.

As a result, entire industries withered and died, and large swathes of America's industrial heartland were transformed into economic dead zones.

Those corporatist chickens, demented stepchildren of neoliberal globalization, have now come home to roost.

"In 2010 there were 46.2 million people--almost one out of every six residents--living below the official poverty line, including 16.4 million children," socialist critic Jerry White wrote. "Of these nearly half, or 20 million, were described as living in deep poverty, subsisting on less than half the income the US government says is needed for basic food, shelter, clothing and utilities."

Contrast deepening levels of poverty with administration moves to secure a "settlement" with financial elites who profited on both ends of the 2007-2008 crisis. Their reckless, and fraudulent, credit default swaps and brisk trade in worthless mortgage-backed securities have cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars with no end in sight.

But as New York Federal Reserve board member Kathryn Wylde told The New York Times, "Wall Street is our Main Street--love 'em or hate 'em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible."

As the World Socialist Web Site noted, "In the name of the free market, they slashed taxes on the corporations and the rich, deregulated industry and the banks and backed a corporate offensive against the jobs and living standards of the working class."

And despite the fact that "corporations and the banks are now sitting on a cash hoard of $2 trillion," said economic gangsters are "refusing to hire any workers," thus exacerbating the crisis for average workers through unemployment, wage deflation and the loss of basic social benefits while boosting profits.

In his latest iteration as a "fighter" for "ordinary Americans," Obama's budget director told The New York Times that the president's new "deficit-reduction plan" would impose "a lot of pain," cutting some $320 billion from Medicare and Medicaid.

That proposal would impose higher premiums and deductibles for beneficiaries while slashing payments to "teaching hospitals and rural hospitals" as well as charging "co-payments to frail homebound older people who receive home health services," the Times reported.

Under the plan the federal government would also "reduce the growth of federal payments to states for treating low-income people under Medicaid," effectively telling older citizens and the poor, "hurry-up and die," the mantra of "libertarian" Tea Party loons who view the lack of affordable health care as "the price of freedom."

Meanwhile, Obama's Air Force Secretary Michael Donley "signaled the service is ready for a fight and vowed to 'protect' most big-ticket hardware programs from steep budget cuts," including the cost-overrun-plagued F-35 fighter program, The Hill reported.

As well, Donley "placed the multibillion-dollar effort to develop a new bomber aircraft on his don't-cut list" saying, "developing the 'long-range strike family of systems,' including the new bomber, is essential."

According to the Secretary, accepting cosmetic reductions in the bloated "defense" budget will mean "we will need to accept greater risk," if by "risk" Donley means shaving a penny or two off the share price of the largest defense corps.

Grifter's Ball

The Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) enacted by the Bush regime in 2008, and supported by then-candidate Obama and the Democrats, followed by 2009's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the so-called "stimulus package," were rushed through Congress under crisis conditions allegedly to "save the economy."

In practice however, both legislative edicts were fantastic boondoggles that rewarded "too-big-to-fail" investment banks that brought on the crisis in the first place while shortchanging foreclosed homeowners and tens of millions of laid-off workers.

A so-called "stimulus" that disavowed any direct creation of jobs by government action, such as massive spending on public works and infrastructure repair as was done during the Great Depression, was doomed to fail.

This failure is borne out by an official unemployment rate of 9.1% with some 14 million people looking for work. However, the government's broader, and more accurate index of the jobs crisis, which measures those who either stopped looking for work or are involuntary part-time workers rose to 16.2% in August, a staggering 25.3 million people.

As economist Michael Hudson observed: "From the outset in 2009, the Obama Plan has been to re-inflate the Bubble Economy by providing yet more credit (that is, debt) to bid housing and commercial real estate prices back up to pre-crash levels, not to bring debts down to the economy's ability to pay. The result is debt deflation for the economy at large and rising unemployment--but enrichment of the wealthiest 1% of the population as economies have become even more financialized."

How has this played out in the real world?

Marxist economist Richard Wolff wrote scant weeks before Solyndra's collapse: "As demand for goods and services shrank fast, businesses and the rich stopped investing in production. Their investible funds were idled, and that only aggravated the crisis. The self-regulating, efficient capitalist market system proved to be the myth its critics had mocked. However, the market system did spread the US crisis quickly to Europe and beyond."

"The bailout of casino capitalists vested a new ruling class with $13 trillion of public IOUs (including the $5.3 trillion rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) added to the national debt," Hudson noted. "The recipients have paid out much of this gift in salaries and bonuses, and to 'make themselves whole' on their bad risks in default to pay off."

"An alternative," Hudson wrote, "would have been to prosecute them and recover what they had paid themselves as commissions for loading the economy with debt."

The result of these reckless policies are plain as day: from rising unemployment to collapsing infrastructure, and from a steady rise in home foreclosures to increased levels of immiseration, Bush-Obama policies have benefited those who wield real power in the capitalist world: the financial oligarchs and militarists who prospered from the bailouts and "War on Terror" military spending.

But the "government could have used its equity ownership and control of the banks to provide credit and credit card services as the 'public option'," Hudson noted. In other words, rather than bailing-out the fraudsters, the state could have invested public funds in programs that actually benefit the public, a novel idea rejected out of hand as "socialist tinkering."

However, Hudson averred, "this is not the agenda that the Bush-Obama administrations chose. Only Wall Street had a plan in place to unwrap when the crisis opportunity erupted."

"Stockholders were bailed out, counterparties were saved from loss, and managers today are paying themselves bonuses as usual," Hudson wrote. "The 'crisis' was turned into an opportunity to panic politicians into helping their Wall Street patrons."

But the bailouts did far more than merely enrich the thieves, it actually exacerbated the global meltdown.

"As the crisis flared in 2008," Wolff observed, "governments unfroze credit markets by pouring money into tottering banks and insurance companies. Governments printed and created new money to pay for part of these policies; to cover the other part governments borrowed."

And whom, pray tell, were the American people's new creditors? Why "the banks and insurance companies they had bailed out" of course! "Governments," Wolff wrote, "also borrowed from the companies and rich individuals who had withheld investing in the production of goods and services and had thereby worsened the crisis."

Is this a great system, or what!

Ponzi Republic

Not a single top executive of any Wall Street firm has been prosecuted by the federal government for their crimes. Take Goldman Sachs as a prime example, a firm which journalist Matt Taibbi memorably described as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

As McClatchy News investigative reporter Greg Gordon revealed, on the cusp of the housing bubble's collapse, "Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting."

Those fraudulent deals "enabled the nation's premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies."

"Only later," Gordon wrote, "did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk" and that "pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses."

Taibbi recounted last spring for Rolling Stone that the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations mammoth 650-page report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, supplied "a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history--'a million fraud cases a year' is how one former regulator puts it."

"But the mountain of evidence," Taibbi wrote, "collected against Goldman by [Senator Carl] Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators--details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department--stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008."

Contrast Justice Department inaction regarding Goldman Sachs, including ignoring potential perjury by Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein as Taibbi and other investigators revealed, with their zeal to lower the boom on Solyndra.

In connection with the company's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, the FBI "executed a search warrant" on the firm September 8, the Los Angeles Times reported, "but declined to discuss what they were investigating. FBI spokesman Peter D. Lee said documents related to the search had been sealed."

This is the same secret state agency that is curiously indifferent to far-larger grifts run by the big money boys. Keep in mind, this is the Justice Department satrapy waging covert war against the antiwar movement, illegally spying on Muslim-Americans, ginning-up phony "terror" plots through their employment of paid informants and provocateurs while allowing real terrorists, such as the network which assisted the 9/11 plotters as The Miami Herald recently disclosed, run wild in Florida. Yes, that FBI!

"Republicans," the Los Angeles Times observed, "have seized on Solyndra's downfall as a sign that President Obama's stimulus and 'green jobs' campaign were failures."

"They have also noted that key Obama backer George Kaiser was a major investor in Solyndra, the first company to receive a Department of Energy loan guarantee to boost alternative energy companies." But then again, so was Madrone Capitol, a private equity fund affiliated with the powerfully-connected Walton family of Wal-Mart fame, long-time GOP supporters.

Kaiser, a Tulsa, Okla. billionaire and head of The George Kaiser Family Foundation, "holds about 35.7 percent of Solyndra, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kaiser made 16 visits to the president's aides since 2009, according to White House visitor logs," Bloomberg News reported.

A "bundler" for Obama's 2008 presidential bid, Kaiser raised somewhere between $50,000 to $100,000 for the campaign and contributed some $2,300 personally, according to the Federal Election Commission. What Bloomberg fails to report however, is the more than $7.5 million in campaign contributions made over the last decade by the Walton family to the Republican party and assorted right-wing causes.

While evidence of irregularities may suggest that Solyndra executives were less than forthcoming in their application for federal loans, and that well-connected billionaire donors to the president's campaign may have helped tip the scales in their favor, their behavior, and potential losses to taxpayers, pale in comparison to the far larger, and more damaging, crimes of Wall Street con artists who continue to thumb their noses at the public and evade justice.

Crony Capitalism Gone Wild: The 'War on Terror'

While Republican bag men for the superrich point to the Solyndra scandal, and there is something fishy going on here, as evidence of corruption in the White House, the fact is, Obama, like every president who occupied the Oval Office before him, is a wholly-owned creature of the ruling class.

Never mind that Team Obama recently abandoned plans to beef-up national air quality rules to reduce the emission of cancer-causing chemicals in smog. That move followed an intense lobbying campaign by polluters in the chemical, mining and petroleum sectors and their bipartisan congressional pets who alleged that the $90 billion price tag would "kill American jobs." Or that the "environmental president," in a course reversal sure to have oil industry executives jumping for joy, will soon approve plans to build the Keystone XL pipeline that will carry mega-polluting Canadian tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries.

And never mind that the White House, the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate are conspiring against the American people to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid through a congressional Supercommittee whilst continuing to bailout financial jackals to the tune of some $13 trillion, even as the Securities and Exchange Commission blithely shredded thousands of incriminating documents that let the gangsters off the hook as Rolling Stone revealed in August.

And of course, pay no attention to the expansion of the imperialist Empire's endless wars and occupations, its extension of outsourced "War on Terror" CIA torture programs into Somalia, or that the Obama administration, as The Washington Post recently reported "is assembling a constellation of secret drone bases for counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula," the on-going assault on civil liberties here in the heimat or mounting evidence that the provocateurs who murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11 may have been given a leg up by U.S. secret state agencies as they prepared to slam hijacked passenger airliners into buildings.

What partisan hacks in both corporatist political parties will never acknowledge, let alone investigate or prosecute, are orders of magnitude greater, "War on Terror" boondoggles. Two examples:

• The National Security Agency's multibillion dollar fiasco, Trailblazer. As The Baltimore Sun revealed, the firm that NSA chose to head the project, Science Applications International Corporation, "forged close ties to several key defense and intelligence agencies, including the NSA. Among those who have served on SAIC's board of directors are former NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Directors John M. Deutch and Robert M. Gates; and former Defense Secretaries Melvin R. Laird and William J. Perry." As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock pointed out for CorpWatch, "SAIC is deeply involved in the operations of all the major collection agencies, particularly the NSA, NGA and CIA. SAIC, for example, managed one of the NSA's largest efforts in recent years, the $3 billion Project Trailblazer, which attempted (and failed) to create actionable intelligence from the cacophony of telephone calls, fax messages, and emails that the NSA picks up every day. Launched in 2001, Trailblazer experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and NSA cancelled it in 2005." Indeed, the Sun's exposure of SAIC's shoddy work on the project, as journalist Jane Mayer disclosed in The New Yorker, led Obama's Justice Department to prosecute whistleblower Thomas Drake, not those responsible for ripping off taxpayers or standing-up illegal driftnet spying programs. Congressional action? Zero, but SAIC walked away with the money and continues to be rewarded by the secret state and now ranks No. 6 on Washington Technology's "Top 100" list of largest government contractors with some $5.1 billion in Defense Department contracts.

• The Department of Homeland Security's Secure Borders Initiative or SBInet, a failed project to construct a "virtual electronic fence" along the border with Mexico. When DHS finally pulled the plug earlier this year, SBInet's lead contractor, Boeing Corporation, held contracts valued between $2 and $8 billion according to estimates by the Government Accountability Office. Boeing is a major "War on Terror" beneficiary, clocking-in at No. 3 on Washington Technology's "Top 100" list, with some $8.4 billion in revenue largely from the Defense Department. As the CIA's torture flight "booking agent," Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. profited handsomely from illegal Agency programs that secretly kidnapped and transferred "terrorist" suspects to foreign prisons and CIA "black sites." Victims who tried to litigate their claims against Jeppesen in the federal courts were rebuffed by Obama's Justice Department which asserted bogus "state secrets privilege" claims, alleging that litigating cases involving CIA kidnapping and torture would endanger "national security." In 2008, the GAO determined that there were "significant problems" with deployed technologies. Designed to detect a "target" with radar and then use video cameras to locate illegal entries, GAO investigators found that the radars were "too slow" and were often triggered by rain and "other weather phenomena." Information derived from sensors were to be forwarded to "command centers" where a "common operating picture" would be compiled by Customs and Border Patrol analysts and shared with other agencies. The so-called "common operating picture" would appear on computer screens as a geospatial map where "border entries" could be tracked in "real time." Despite congressional criticism, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said in January 2011, that the agency would be redirecting funding originally intended for SBInet "to a new border security technology effort." At the time of this writing, Boeing gets to keep the boodle already doled out and will soon rake-in even more. Last month, Defense Systems reported that Boeing's Phantom Ray, a jet-powered drone that can cruise at more than 600 miles per hour at 40,000 feet, is in the running to secure multibillion contracts for the Pentagon's next generation fleet of killer robots. "Key to its intended role," Defense Systems informed us, "the Phantom Ray can carry up to 4,500 pounds of ordinance, extra fuel and/or sensors in its payload bays. The bays are large enough to accommodate two 2,000 pound Joint Direct Attack Munition satellite guided bombs." There's no word yet from the Phantom Ray's intended targets--Somali herders and Afghan and Pakistani villagers--what they might think about Boeing's latest technological marvel.

What lessons can we learn from the examples cited above? Not many, if we rely on corporate media.

As part of capitalism's manufactured "debt crisis," the Associated Press reported that the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), a Washington, D.C. lobby shop which represents America's Military-Industrial-Security Complex, claimed that cuts to the bloated "defense" budget "would have a devastating impact on a defense industry."

To meet the challenge, AIA has launched their "Second to None" campaign and a related web site. According to industry flacks, which include usual suspects BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and dozens more, "American leadership in aerospace and defense is being threatened by forces in Congress and the administration. The security of our troops, our technological future and our economic stability are all at risk. We must preserve jobs across the nation that keep our nation strong. Join us and act now before it is too late."

Though there's little chance AIA's dire predictions will come to pass, alarmism sells particularly when the target audience are members of Congress.

As the bipartisan congressional Supercommittee prepares to gut the social safety net while leaving imperialism's war budget virtually untouched, an investigation by Alternet and Salon revealed that "when it comes to the military budget," Democrats "have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than [Arizona Senator Jon] Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel."

"Since 2007," investigative journalist Nick Turse wrote, "Democrats on the supercommittee have received more than $1 million in defense industry donations, while contributions to the Republicans added up to only $321,000."

Indeed, "panel co-chair Sen. Patty Murray ... has received more defense industry dollars over that period than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients on the supercommittee. Even so, her haul from the Pentagon's weapons-makers isn't the largest by a panel Democrat, a distinction held by her colleague from South Carolina, James Clyburn."

"An analysis of official government data paints a disturbing picture of big money, cozy relationships and potential influence that, alongside a concerted lobbying effort by the Pentagon and its powerful defense contractors, makes substantial reductions to the Department of Defense's budget improbable and steeper cuts to entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, more likely."

"Before Thanksgiving," Turse notes, "Clyburn and his supercommittee colleagues will be forced to make a clear decision for cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid or the type of budgets that have resulted in nearly $8 trillion in national security spending since 2001."

Any bets on which way the axe will fall?

By the way, what was that $500 million loan flap to Solyndra about?

by **American Dream** » Thu Sep 29, 2011 5:57 pm

Women Should Use Sex to Get Ahead? Controversy Erupts Over "Erotic Capital"

By Ida Hartmann, AlterNet
Posted on September 27, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/152555/wo ... capital%22

Balancing her 5-foot-8-inch frame on stilettos, she glides down the red carpet, cameras flashing. Graceful as a greyhound, she greets the cheering crowd. She could be heading for the Oscars, but it is the title of Denmark’s first female Prime Minister that waits her at the podium.

With her impeccable style, eyes framed in black, face framed in blond, Helle Thorning-Smith is as far from the typical balding, bearded, pipe-smoking Social Democrat as could possibly be. Along with my country, I raise the flag of victory in a century long fight for gender equality, but a creepy thought lingers in the back of my mind. Could my new Prime Minister, known as Gucci Helle, be the hot proof of the power of erotic capital?

The term was coined in the recently published Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom. The author, Cathrine Hakim, successfully set off a blizzard of controversy arguing that women should exploit their sex appeal to move ahead. Her theory is perfumed with the compelling smell of radical pragmatism. To the Sunday Times she says: “We live in a sexualized age: that’s the trend. Let’s just relax ... There’s not much point in swimming against the tide,” and reporter Kate Spices concludes that in “Hakim’s world, a female historian is in no way devalued if she chooses to strip off in order to publicize her book. Nor is there anything wrong with being a gold-digger.”

Erotic capital, highly visible yet – according to Hakim -- generally overlooked, is a combination of beauty, social skills, good dress sense, physical fitness, liveliness, sex appeal and sexual competence. Both genders have this x-factor, but women have a longer tradition of developing it and should use it to gain influence, in bedrooms and boardrooms. Jessica Bennett, writing for the Daily Beast, notes that the thesis could be straight out of a Paris Hilton self-help guide, but Hakim is a London School of Economics professor with a string of scholarly publications to her name.

Let’s undress the idea of erotic capital for a moment.

The fact that good looks and charm can help you succeed in life is, as Elisabeth Day from the Guardian remarks, “unlikely to come as a surprise to almost anyone with a pulse rate.” Jessica Bennett points out that the beauty advantage has been long documented and Jessica Grose, blogging for Slate, refers to a New York Times article in which economy professor Daniel S. Hamermesh explains that the ugliest one-seventh of Americans earn as much as 15 percent less than the one third most attractive.

Do the numbers give reason to the fact that Americans spent more than $10 billion on cosmetic procedures last year? Hakim seems to think so. To the Daily Beast she explains, “This isn’t a frivolous spending of money. It has real benefits.” She argues that erotic capital is as important in today’s workplace as intelligence or skill.

If women successfully outrun men by throwing the body business card, as Hakim argues they could and should, the future looks glamorously gloomy: CEOs with PhDs in pedicures and politicians running campaigns on cross fit machines.

But before turning pale, let’s remove the polish from her argument.

Hakim frames her theory in economic terms and makes a simple supply-demand equation. She argues that the labor market suffers a sexual deficit, because men’s sexual desire outstrips women’s. That gives women a comparative advantage because their erotic capital is in high demand and short supply. This revival of the survival of the fittest logic, dressed as free market theory, makes her argument seem perfectly rational.

Caitlin Moran, columnist and author of How To Be A Woman, points out that investing in erotic capital looks like an unsustainable business strategy. Arifa Akbar, in the Independent, quotes her as saying: “I would say you're working in a company that's not really operating at its full potential if women are only getting ahead because they're being successfully, effortfully and expensively sexy... I mean, what kind of tuppenny ha'penny organization is disabling 52 percent of its potential brainpower in favour of only listening to the chicks who have nice legs?”

But it would not be the first time the free market has been known to prioritize short-term profit over long-term sustainability. Could investments in erotic capital be the newest branch in the adventure of disaster capitalism?

Guardian reporter Zoe Williams does not think so. She rips the idea of a sexual deficit altogether, arguing that Hakim’s evidence is tainted by age and culturally fringed. Besides relying on 20-year-old data, Hakim ignores stereotypes of the horny male and the frigid female influencing how people respond to questions about sexual desire, masturbation and porn, unfaithfulness and celibacy. Williams speaks to the point that if women after the age of 30 show less sexual desire than men, it is a social construct, not a biological fact. It seems like the job market is as hot as it gets.

From the woman’s perspective the investment seems equally unsustainable. Echoing the free-market logic roaring, “Everyone forges his own happiness,” Hakim tells the Daily Beast, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.” She argues that, “In affluent modern societies, extremely high levels of erotic capital can be achieved through fitness training, hard work, and technical aids.” Hakim leaves out the little detail that time and money for the majority of the world population are scarce resources. If women spend hours at the gym and thousands of dollars on cosmetics it must inevitably come at the cost of something else.

Lisa Hickey recently described on AlterNet how beauty nearly ruined her life as she chased an image she could never quite catch up with. “A treatment of Botox is a tuition payment. A month's worth of yoga classes is a textbook. A mani-pedi is an hour of tutoring. Not to mention the time not being with my kids. I’d get nervous if I couldn’t fit the three hours of exercise in. If a yoga class was at suppertime, yoga it was.”

Beyond time and money, counting on physical appearance for success has another cost. For Hickey, boosting her erotic capital wrecked her self-image. “I like to think I’m intelligent, and funny, and kind, and that those qualities will be enough for any interaction,” she writes, but wearing a silky dress, the perfect bra and funky shoes, made her question those skills because “intelligence doesn’t walk in the door the same way beauty does.” And honestly, who would not prefer a promotion based on professional skills rather than a well-fitted miniskirt?

But Hakim’s theory has an attractive sex appeal. She is launching an attack on feminism, which depicts women as “the victims of male oppression and patriarchy, so that heterosexuality becomes suspect, a case of sleeping with the enemy, and the deployment of erotic capital becomes an act of treason.” She claims that Anglo-Saxon feminists are unable to understand how erotic capital can be a source of female power, because they have been brainwashed by patriarchal ideology.

The attack makes some women greet her as liberator. Bryony Gordon of the Telegraph cheers: “Her book should be read out to young girls as part of the national curriculum. Because it states something important that mothers have been frightened to tell daughters for fear of undermining their intelligence: that you can be a feminist, you can be strong and independent and clever, and you can wear a nice frock and high heels while you do this.”

Julio Ruvolo, blogging for Forbes, joins the cheering choir and nominates Hakim’s book the Feminism 2.0 Manifesto for Gen Y, the women between 15 and 35. Embracing the “If you got it, charge for it” message, she writes: “Smart women recognize the value of their erotic capital and make the most of it, in one way or another, while the rest of us call them names and sell ourselves short.”

It seems like we are facing a gap between two generations of feminists. If the message to take away from this is that you can be successful and sexy, that high heels and high-ranking jobs are compatible, I buy it. And if feminism claims otherwise, let’s give it a face-lift. I even buy the idea that on some level we are all for sale, that there is an aspect of deal-making in everything.

The question is if the road to success has to be cat-walked? By claiming so, I think Hakim is the one selling women short. If I need to carve out my abs in the gym before I can even dream of carving out a career, I smell imprisonment, not liberation. Using erotic capital to move ahead sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. If Gucci Helle had been preoccupied with maintaining her nails, she would not have climbed the podium of power. She earned the title of Prime Minister because she gave a deteriorating Social Democratic Party a makeover, not because she wore a spray-on dress.

With 39 percent women in office, the new Danish Parliament sees more high heels than ever. It speaks to Hakim’s advantage that the majority of new female politicians have pretty faces, but an article on Danish National News (DR) shows that the academic achievements behind those white smiles are, on average, significantly more impressive than those of their male counterparts.

Ida Hartmann is a student of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

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