Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Why Are Americans So Desperate to Marry Off Our Single Women?

By Hadley Freeman, The Guardian
Posted on December 3, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153310/wh ... ngle_women

Ladies! How are your marriage prospects looking? Good? Bad? In need of an ironing? Perhaps if you alphabetise them they will look more enticing. Attractive. Bed, in possession of incredible skills in. Cute. Doesn't earn more than any prospective suitor. Excellent at phone sex. Fiercely desirous of marrying a man whose money will give you access to business class lounges for the rest of your days; etc. Aw, your marriage prospects look adorable arranged like that! You should get them covered in Cath Kidston fabric to make them as pretty as possible.

Or perhaps you have not considered your marriage prospects at all. Perhaps you have thought that the term "marriage prospects" sounds about as anachronistic and Austenian as "22in waist." Maybe you didn't even think that "marriageability" was a quality, let alone a quantifiable one, beyond, perhaps: "brushes teeth, occasionally has a bath, all else subjective."

Yet in the much discussed article in US magazine the Atlantic by Kate Bolick – republished last weekend in the Observer and already in inevitable talks of a TV spin-off – she describes why she and an intriguingly homogenous yet amorphous sounding group of women like her will never marry due to various marriageability issues. So let's discuss marriageability.

I am at an advantage here, being based in New York City. Marriage and one's marriageability tend to be presented here with a strange combination of pragmatic formality combined with hysterical fetishisation that Bolick perhaps inadvertently captured in her piece. There are many things one can say about how feminism has affected women's attitudes to marriage but one theory of Bolick's exemplified a certain attitude that makes so many depictions of marriage in the media here feel so retrograde. "American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be 'marriageable' men – those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity." Yes, we might call it that, if one could only countenance consorting with men who earn more than oneself.

This weirdly monetised and loveless view of marriage in America will not surprise anyone who has gawped at the "Vows" section in the New York Times' Sunday edition. Photos of grinning couples sit atop detailed descriptions of not just their jobs and social standing ("Mr Jaeger, 28, works at Markit, a financial information services company in Manhattan, for which he heads product development for the index, exchange-traded-funds and research-data businesses," read one typically romantic entry from this weekend) but those of their parents ("His mother is a member of the board of trustees at the Jewish Museum of New York," another entryassures readers.) To read this section is like reading a satirical chapter of an Edith Wharton novel without a punch line, yet it is an established part of the paper, probably best known here for its appearance in an episode of Sex [and] the City, in which one of the characters frantically tries to be featured in it.

Clearly, Vows is no more representative of New York – let alone America – as a whole than Bridget Jones's daily life was of Britain, but it does reflect an attitude that plays into the fascination the American media has in single women. Such is the popularity of investigations into the enthralling mystery of single women that these articles are pretty much their own genre of journalism in America, characterised by gloomy warnings about the dangers of feminism, cod anthropological claims, regrets about leaving a nice man because the writer wanted an unspecified "more", self-flagellation dressed up as "honesty" about feminism and they are always – always – written by a woman.

Bolick's piece is a perfect example of this, as was Lori Gottlieb's similarly hoo-hahed 2008 article Marry Him!, also published in the Atlantic. The reason they attract so much attention is because the media love any stories that suggest independent women will be punished and because many women readers, in my experience, glob on to articles that voice their worst fears.

With meta irony, such an article was featured in Sex and the City just as that show itself became another example of self-flagellation with a feminist fig leaf when Carrie was featured in a piece titled, Single and Fabulous? – emphasis on the question mark.

One sees this less in Britain, beyond the pages of the Daily Mail, of course, which last week featured an article with the unimprovably hilarious headline, "Too sexy, too laid back, too independent … Why some women just AREN'T wife material." It's amazing the Daily Mail didn't self-combust after publishing that piece.

I would have thought that a far more damaging factor than a woman's career to her marriageability would be the broken nose caused by her head clunking down on the kitchen table when faced with another article about the foolhardiness of single women today.

Yet perhaps that is missing the point. Perhaps these articles, from the Atlantic to the Daily Mail, are all part of a plot to make single women feel better for having failed to "keep a man." While hanging out in a single-sex Dutch commune, as Bolick, nigh on parodically, does at the end of her piece might not be the happily ever after you dreamed of, it sure sounds better than being with the vision of humanity these articles present. This kind of talk reduces men to insecure throwbacks with machismo and ego issues, and women to conniving, venal fools. If those are the options, no wonder so many people aren't attending to their marriage prospects and would prefer to be alone.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/political-wor ... a-federici

Political Work with Women and as Women in the Present Conditions: Interview with Silvia Federici

An interview with Italian Marxist feminist, Silvia Federici which centers around austerity measures in the universities, the response from students in California and women's place and experience within these movements.




Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning1: You have written about university struggles in the context of neo-liberal restructuring. Those struggles responded to attempts to enclose the knowledge commons. Do you see the university struggles of the last years as a continuation of the struggles against the enclosure of knowledge? Or as something new? Has the economic crisis altered in some fundamental way the context of university struggles?

Silvia Federici: I see the students’ mobilization that has been mounting on the North American campuses, especially in California, as part of a long cycle of struggle against the neo-liberal restructuring of the global economy and the dismantling of public education that began in the mid-1980s in Africa and Latin America, and is now spreading to Europe—as the recent student revolt in London demonstrated. At stake, in each case, has been more than resistance to the “enclosure of knowledge.” The struggles of African students in the 1980s and 1990s were particularly intense because students realized that the drastic university budget cuts the World Bank demanded signaled the end of the “social contract” that had shaped their relation with the state in the post-independence period, making education the key to social advancement and participatory citizenship. They also realized, especially on hearing World Bankers argue that “Africa has no need for universities,” that behind the cuts a new international division of work was rearticulated that re-colonized African economies and devalued African workers’ labor.

In the US as well, the gutting of public higher education over the last decade must be placed in a social context where in the aftermath of globalization companies can draw workers from across the world, instituting precarity as a permanent condition of employment, and enforcing constant re-qualifications. The financial crisis compounds the university crisis, projecting economic trends in the accumulation process and the organization of work that confront students with a state of permanent subordination and continuous destruction of the knowledge acquired as the only prospect for the future. In this sense, today’s students’ struggles are less aimed at defending public education than at changing the power relations with capital and the state and re-appropriating their lives.

We can draw a parallel here with the revolt of French workers and youth against the decision by the Sarkozy Government to expand the working-life by two years. We cannot understand the vehement opposition this decision has generated if we only focus on the time-span workers have to forfeit on the path to pension. Clearly, what brought millions to the streets was the realization that in the balance was the loss of any hope for the future, which is the reason why so many young people also joined the barricades.

This same understanding is what has made this cycle of university struggles different and given them more or less an openly anti-capitalist dimension. This is the significance, in my view, of the circulation of the idea of the common/s in the rhetoric of the student movements internationally. The call for “knowledge commons” reflects not only a resistance to the privatization and commercialization of knowledge, but the growing awareness that an alternative to capitalism and the market must be constructed starting in the present. It also stems from the realization that engagement in a collective process of knowledge production is not possible in today’s academic environment. Skyrocketing fees, courses tightly tailored to narrow economic goals, oversized classes and overworked, underpaid, precarious teachers—all these conditions devalue the knowledge produced in the universities, calling for the creation of alternative forms of education and of spaces where they can be organized. This, perhaps, is how we can begin to think of the “politics of occupation,” i.e. as a means to take over spaces needed for the creation of new commons.

Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning: You have written extensively about education struggle and global resistance to austerity measures as struggles over institutional sites of social reproduction rather than production. What do you think is revealed by conceiving educational struggles as part of a larger set of struggles over sites of social re-production? And what kind of social inequalities and labor exploitation remain beyond the scope of this approach?

Silvia Federici: I should first stress that the shift from production to reproduction in the analysis of class relations has been the product of a transformation that, in different ways, has traversed the theoretical field since the 1970s, visible both in post-structuralist as well as neo-liberal critique, from Foucault to Becker. The main impulse towards it has come from the feminist rethinking of work and redefinition of reproductive labor as the “hidden part of the iceberg” (in Maria Mies’ words) on which capitalist accumulation is based. This shift has had a powerful illuminating effect enabling us to think together a heterogeneous set of activities—such as housework, subsistence agriculture, sex work and care work, education both formal and informal—and recognize them as moments of the social (re)production of the work-force.

From this perspective, we can read the changes that have taken place in the universities politically. We can read the introduction of fees and the commodification of education as part of a broad process of disinvestment in the reproduction of labor-power. It is an attempt to discipline the future labor force, a process that began in the late 70s with the abolition of open admission, clearly a response to the 1960s campus revolts and the insubordination of which youth were the protagonists.

Making reproduction the window from which to analyze the capital-work relation should not be seen however as a totalizing operation. Reproduction (of individuals, of labor-power) should not be conceived in isolation from the rest of the capitalist “factory”.

Recently, instead, we have seen the development of theories (e.g. Negri and Hardt concept of “bio-political production”) that preclude a synoptic view of the field of capitalist relations, assuming that all production can be reduced to production of subjectivities, life styles, languages, codes and information. In this way, the immense struggle that is taking place across the planet, in fields, mines, and factories is lost, ironically at the very time when we are witnessing the most extensive international cycle of industrial struggles (in China and much of South and East Asia) since the 1970s.

Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning: The approximately $830 billion in student loan debt has been getting quite a bit of attention recently in the media since the total student debt now surpasses credit card debt. The international network of academics and educators you work with, Edu-Factory, has made debt a central rallying point for university struggles. As Jeffrey Williams points out, if you attend an Ivy League or comparable expensive private university, you would have to work 136 hours a week all year to be able to afford it without debt.2 Some have said that the current protracted economic crisis is not a recession but a depression masked by debt. How do you think the issue of deepening indebtedness could be turned into a significant site of struggle?

Silvia Federici: Indebtedness is already a site of struggle, but until now, at least in the US, it is a struggle that has taken place silently, under the radar, articulated through hidden forms of resistance, escape, and defaults, rather than an open confrontation. The default rate on federal student loans is continuing to rise, especially at for-profit colleges where it has topped 11.6%.

Discussions with students suggest that debt is an issue that tends to be evaded, at least in the immediate present. Many don’t like speaking about it. Weighing on them is a relentless neoliberal propaganda portraying education as a matter of individual responsibility. As Alan Collinge writes in his Student Loan Scam,3 many are ashamed of admitting they have defaulted on their student loans. The idea that (like pensions) free education should no longer be a social entitlement is seeping into the consciousness of the new generations, at least as a form of intimidation, contributing to blocking any attempts to make abolition of debt an open movement.

Still, the Edu-Factory network was right in making debt a central rallying point for university struggles. The struggle against student debt has a strategic importance. As Jeffrey William points out, debt is a powerful instrument of discipline and control and a mortgage on the future.4 Fighting against it is about reclaiming one’s life, breaking with a system of indentured servitude that casts a long shadow on people’s lives for years to come.

How to build a movement? I think it will require a long mobilization involving the cooperation of many social subjects. A key step towards it is an education campaign about the nature of debt as a political instrument of discipline, dispelling the assumption of individual responsibility and demonstrating its collective dimension. The moralism that has been accumulated over the question of indebtedness must be exposed. Acquiring a degree is not a luxury but a necessity in a context where for years education has been proclaimed at the highest institutional levels as the fault line between prosperity and a life of poverty and subordination. But if education is a must for future employment, it means that employers are the beneficiaries of it. From this viewpoint, student debt is a work issue that unions should take on, and not academic unions alone. Teachers too should join a debt abolition movement, for they are on the frontline: they must save appearances and pretend that for the university, cultural formation is of the essence. Yet, they have to accommodate to profitability requirements, like oversized classes, the gutting of departments, overworked students, carrying at times two or three jobs. Debt is also a unifying demand; it is everybody’s condition in the working class worldwide. Credit card debt, mortgage debt, medical debt: across the world, for decades now, every cut in people’s wages and entitlements has been made in the name of a debt crisis. Debt, therefore, is a universal signifier and a terrain on which a re-composition of the global work force can begin.

Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning: Last year building occupations and other kinds of direct action were critiqued as the strategies of the privileged. How can there be mass direct action in a country like the US where the carceral state is so massively over-funded and where police repression continues to fall so much more heavily on particular racialized or at-risk populations?

Silvia Federici: I will not comment on the situations that developed on some of the UC campuses and the merits of the decision to occupy buildings. I was not a participant in these events and choices of tactics are so dependent on context and balances of power that any comments on my side would be inappropriate. Instead, I will point out that mass direct action has a long history in the US, exemplified by the Civil Right Movement, despite the existence of a repressive institutional machine operating on many levels—police, courts, prison, death penalty. The Civil Rights Movement and later the Black Power Movement confronted the police, with its hydrants and dogs, they confronted the Klan, the John Birch Society. Your question as well indicates that not all people of color objected to more militant tactics. Still, the differences in the power with which students from different communities face the university authority and the police must be brought out in the open and politicized. Organizational decisions must take them into account. This should be the case regardless of whether or not buildings are occupied, keeping in mind the great diversity of conditions in which students find themselves. In addition to the higher risk incurred by people from communities of color we also must take into account in every type of mobilization students who cannot afford being arrested because they have children, have families who depend on their presence, or have illnesses and disabilities preventing them from participating in certain types of actions. These are matters of paramount importance in a movement, and they concern all students. Readiness to protect those who face the harshest consequences and accommodate different types of initiatives is a measure of the strength and seriousness of a movement, without underestimating, at the same time, the fact that situations of struggle are always extremely fluid and transformative. And those who may have not participated yesterday may be the first to occupy tomorrow.

Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning: From California to New York, women have raised concerns that there is a serious problem with gender relations within the movement. Despite their active involvement many women feel marginalized, they lack confidence in group settings, they feel constrained in expressing themselves. In some cases they have been alienated by sexist or masculinist modes of speech and action (as in “Direct Action as Feminist Practice”5). As women, we were taken by surprise. After decades of feminist struggles of various sorts, we now—yet again—feel the need to create feminist groups and find collective ways of confronting patriarchy. We find ourselves struggling to open spaces that we hadn't anticipated being quite so constricted. To what extent is our experience different from, and to what extent similar to, yours in the ‘70s? What can be learned about the past from our experiences in the present, and vice versa?

Silvia Federici: The configuration of gender relations in the student movement is very different today than it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Female students have far more power than women of my generation ever had. They are the majority in most classes and are preparing for a life of autonomy and self-reliance, at least autonomy from men if not from capital. But relations with men are more ambiguous and confusing. Increased equality hides the fact that many of the issues the women’s movement raised have not been resolved, especially with regard to re-production. It hides the fact that we are not engaged collectively in a socially transformative project as women, and that, with the advance of neo-liberalism, there has been a re-masculinization of society. The truculent, masculinist language of “We are the Crisis,” the opening article of “After the Fall,” is an egregious example of it. I fully understand why many women feel threatened rather than empowered by it.

The decline of feminism as a social movement has also meant that the experience of collectively organizing around women’s issues is unknown to many female students and everyday life has been de-politicized. What priorities to choose, how to balance waged work and the reproduction of our families so that (learning from the experience of black women) we keep something of ourselves to give to our own, how to love and live our sexuality—these are all questions that female students now must answer individually, outside of a political framework and this is a source of weakness in their relations with men. Add that academic life, especially at the graduate level, creates a very competitive environment where those who have less time to devote to intellectual work are immediately marginalized, and eloquence and theoretical sophistication are often mistaken as a measure of political commitment.

A crucial lesson we can learn from the past is that in the presence of power inequalities, women must organize autonomously even to be able to name the problems they face and gain the strength to voice their discontent and desires. In the ‘70s, we clearly saw that we could not speak of the issues concerning us in the presence of men. As the authors of “Direct Action as Feminist Practice ” so powerfully write, you do not need to be “silenced,” the very power configurations that rob us of our voice take away our ability to name the specific working of this power.6

How autonomy is achieved can vary. We do not have to think of autonomy in terms of permanent separate structures. We realize now that we can create movements within movements and struggles within struggles, but calling for unity in the face of conflicts in our organizations is politically disastrous. What we can learn from the past is that by constructing temporary autonomous feminist spaces we can break with psychological dependence on men, validate our experience, build a counter discourse and set new norms—like the need to democratize language and not make of it a means of exclusion.

I am convinced that coming together as women and as feminists is a positive turn, a precondition for overcoming marginalization. Once again, women in the student movement should not let the charge of “divisiveness” intimidate them. Rather than being divisive, the creation of autonomous spaces is necessary for bringing to the surface the full range of exploitative relations by which we are imprisoned and expose power inequalities that unchallenged would doom the movement to fail.

Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning: In crafting feminist responses to our current predicaments, we have repeatedly engaged in somewhat disconcerting, if also enjoyable, moments of identification—moments when we speak “as women,” for instance, or when we found women's reading groups. How are we to think through such moments, especially in light of recent interventions in feminist theory that highlight the multiple fractures cutting across the putative collectivity of “women,” or that insist upon the instability and mutability of gender identities? What might come of such acts of identification? What promise might they contain? What danger?

Silvia Federici: I must begin with the premise that I have never discarded from my theoretical and political framework the concept of “women.” For me “women” is a political category, it qualifies a specific place in the social organization of work and a field of antagonistic relations where the moment of identity is subject to continuous change and contestation. Clearly, “women” is a concept that we must problematize, destabilize and reconstitute through our struggles. I have always insisted in my writings that it is a matter of priority for feminists to address the power differentials and hierarchies existing among women, beginning with the power relation determined by the new international division of reproductive work. But to the extent that gender still structures the world, to the extent that the capitalist devaluation of reproductive work translates into a devaluation of women, we cannot discard this category, if not at the cost of making large areas of social life virtually unintelligible and losing a crucial terrain of collective resistance to capitalism.

Identification as women contains the possibility of understanding the origins, the workings and the politics of the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalization that many female students evidently experienced during the occupations in California and New York. It is a probe enabling us to decipher why and how male domination sustains the power-structure and bring to the surface a world of experiences that would otherwise remain invisible and unnamed.

Recognizing those aspects of the experience of women that constitute a ground of subordination to men, while at the same time confronting the power differences among women themselves is today, as in the past, one of the main challenges facing feminists and activists in any social movement. At the same time, identification contains many risks. The most insidious, perhaps, is the idealization of relations with women, which exposes us to the most burning disillusions. This is a problem to which the women of my generation were especially vulnerable, as feminism appeared to us at first as the promised land, the longed-for home, as a protective space in which nothing negative could ever affect us. We have discovered that doing political work with women, as women, does not spare us from the power struggles and acts of “betrayals” we have so often encountered in male-dominated organizations. We come to movements with all the scars that life in capitalism imprints on our bodies and souls, and these do not automatically disappear because we work among women. The question however is not to run away from feminism. That sex and gender matter is an irrenounceable political lesson. We cannot oppose a system that has built its power in great part on racial and gender division by struggling as disembodied, universal subjects. The question rather is what forms of organization and means of accountability we can build that can prevent the power differences among us to be reproduced in our struggle.

Maya Gonzalez and Caitlin Manning: As you know, the gender issues we've confronted seem to be particularly pronounced in insurrectionary or “occupationist” circles. Can we situate this tendency in the history of a traditionally male-dominated radical Left? How are some of the recent feminist interventions part of a history of women’s reclamations of radical politics and tactics?

Silvia Federici: I can only formulate some hypothesis as my knowledge of “occupationist politics” is mostly derived from the reading of After the Fall. I’ll start then by pointing out that the takeover of buildings and squatting in them, as a tactics, has a long tradition in the history of world struggle. The legendary 1937 strike in Flint Michigan was a “sit-down” strike. The Native American Movement revival in the 1960s began with the takeover of Alcatraz. And today students all over the world are engaging in “occupations” to make visible their protests and prevent business as usual to prevail. The problem, I believe, is when these actions become an end in themselves, carried out, as “We are the crisis” states, “for no reason.” For in this case, in the absence of any articulated objective, what comes to the foreground tends to be the glorification of risk-taking. The broader question is the persistence of sexism in today’s radical politics: that is, the fact that, as in the ‘60s, radical politics continue to reproduce the sexual division of labor, with its gender hierarchies and mechanisms of exclusion, rather than subverting it. We certainly confront a different situation from that described by Marge Piercy in “The Grand Coolie Damn,” which portrayed the role of women in the anti-war movement as that of political housewives. But what has been attained is a situation of formal equality that hides the continuing devaluation of reproductive activities in the content, goals, and modalities of radical work. Crucial issues like the need for childcare, male violence against women, women’s broader responsibility for reproductive work, what constitutes knowledge and the conditions of its production, are still not a significant part of radical discourse. This is the material basis of sexist attitudes. We need a radical movement that programmatically places at the center of its struggle the eradication of social inequalities and the eradication of the divisions between production and reproduction, school and home, school and community, inherent to the capitalist division of labor. I hope I will not be charged with gender bias if I say that it is above all the task of women to ensure that this will occur. Liberation begins at home, when those who are oppressed take their destiny into their hands. Challenging sexism and racism cannot be expected from those who benefit from them at least in the short term, although men should not be exonerated from the responsibility of opposing inequitable relations. In other words, we should not expect that, because we are in a radical setting, the forces that shape relations between men and women in the broader society will have no effect on our politics. This is why despite the leap in the number of female students in the classrooms, the terms of women’s presence on the campuses and in radical groups has not qualitatively changed. What has prevailed, instead, has been the neo-liberal ideology of equal opportunity that has validated gender and racial hierarchies in the name of merit and valorized the social qualities needed for competition in the labor market. These are all essentially the traditional attributed of masculinity: self-promotion, aggressiveness, capacity to hide one’s vulnerability. I cannot stress enough that radical politics cannot succeed unless we challenge the existence of these attitudes in our midst. It is time, then, that the broader transformative vision which feminism promoted at least in its initial radical phase, before it was subsumed under a neo-liberal/institutional agenda, be revitalized. This time, however, we must fight for the eradication of not only gender hierarchies but all unequal power relations in our schools, in this process also redefining what is knowledge, who is a knowledge producer, and how can intellectual work support a liberation struggle rather functioning as an instrument of social division.

***

Silvia Federici is a long-time feminist activist, teacher, and writer. Her published work includes Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004) and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, co-editor (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999).

Maya Gonzalez is a communist and revolutionary feminist living in the Bay Area. She is a graduate student in the Department of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in Endnotes.

Caitlin Manning is a filmmaker and Associate Professor of Film and Video at California State University, Monterey Bay.

From Reclamations Journal: Issue 3 (December 2010)

1. With contributions from Aaron Benanav, Amanda Armstrong, Chris Chen, and Zhivka Valiavicharska
2. Williams, Jeffrey J. “The Pedagogy of Debt.” Toward a Global Autonomous University. New York: Autonomedia, 2009. 89-96.
3. Collinge, Alan. The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History, and How We Can Fight Back (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009)
4. Williams, Jeffrey J. “Student Debt and The Spirit of Indenture.” Editorial. Dissent Magazine (Fall 2008); Web. 27 November 2010. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1303
5. Armstrong, Amanda, Kelly Gawel, Alexandria Wright, and Zhivka Valiavicharska, “Direct Action as Feminist Practice: An Urgent Convergence,” Reclamations 2 (April 2010). Web. 27 November 2010. http://www.reclamationsjournal.org/issu ... istas.html
6. Ibid.

[American Dream]

Body-shaming douche ad, 1932






Isn't Capitalist Patriarchy wonderful?...




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[American Dream]

The only thing worse than a person lying, cheating and robbing innocent people is the system that leads them to do it.

[American Dream]

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/co ... 007091.htm

OCTOBER 30, 2006

SPECIAL REPORT

Karma Capitalism

Times have changed since Gordon Gekko quoted Sun Tzu in the 1987 movie Wall Street. Has the Bhagavad Gita replaced The Art of War as the hip new ancient Eastern management text?


Signs of worldly success abounded as members of the Young Presidents' Organization met at a mansion in a tony New Jersey suburb. BMWs, Lexuses, and Mercedes-Benzes lined the manicured lawn. Waiters in starched shirts and bow ties passed out vegetarian canapés. And about 20 executives--heads of midsize outfits selling everything from custom audiovisual systems to personal grooming products--mingled poolside with their spouses on a late September evening.

After heading inside their host's sprawling hillside house--replete with glittering chandeliers, marble floors, and gilded rococo mirrors--the guests retreated to a basement room, shed their designer loafers and sandals, and sat in a semicircle on the carpet.

The speaker that evening was Swami Parthasarathy, one of India's best-selling authors on Vedanta, an ancient school of Hindu philosophy. With an entourage of disciples at his side, all dressed in flowing white garments known as kurtas and dhotis, the lanky 80-year-old scribbled the secrets to business success ("concentration, consistency, and cooperation") on an easel pad. The executives sat rapt. "You can't succeed in business unless you develop the intellect, which controls the mind and body," the swami said in his mellow baritone.

At the Wharton School a few days earlier, Parthasarathy talked about managing stress. During the same trip, he counseled hedge fund managers and venture capitalists in Rye, N.Y., about balancing the compulsion to amass wealth with the desire for inner happiness. And during an auditorium lecture at Lehman Brothers Inc.'s (LEH ) Lower Manhattan headquarters, a young investment banker sought advice on dealing with nasty colleagues. Banish them from your mind, advised Parthasarathy. "You are the architect of your misfortune," he said. "You are the architect of your fortune."

The swami's whirlwind East Coast tour was just one small manifestation of a significant but sometimes quirky new trend: Big Business is embracing Indian philosophy. Suddenly, phrases from ancient Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita are popping up in management tomes and on Web sites of consultants. Top business schools have introduced "self-mastery" classes that use Indian methods to help managers boost their leadership skills and find inner peace in lives dominated by work.

More important, Indian-born strategists also are helping transform corporations. Academics and consultants such as C. K. Prahalad, Ram Charan, and Vijay Govindrajan are among the world's hottest business gurus. About 10% of the professors at places such as Harvard Business School, Northwestern's Kellogg School of Business, and the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business are of Indian descent--a far higher percentage than other ethnic groups. "When senior executives come to Kellogg, Wharton, Harvard, or [Dartmouth's] Tuck, they are exposed to Indian values that are reflected in the way we think and articulate," says Dipak C. Jain, dean of the Kellogg School.

Indian theorists, of course, have a wide range of backgrounds and philosophies. But many of the most influential acknowledge that common themes pervade their work. One is the conviction that executives should be motivated by a broader purpose than money. Another is the belief that companies should take a more holistic approach to business--one that takes into account the needs of shareholders, employees, customers, society, and the environment. Some can even foresee the development of a management theory that replaces the shareholder-driven agenda with a more stakeholder-focused approach. "The best way to describe it is inclusive capitalism," says Prahalad, a consultant and University of Michigan professor who ranked third in a recent Times of London poll about the world's most influential business thinkers. "It's the idea that corporations can simultaneously create value and social justice."

You might also call it Karma Capitalism. For both organizations and individuals, it's a gentler, more empathetic ethos that resonates in the post-tech-bubble, post-Enron zeitgeist. These days, concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "servant leadership" are in vogue. Where once corporate philanthropy was an obligation, these days it's fast becoming viewed as a competitive advantage for attracting and retaining top talent. Where the rallying cry in the 1980s and '90s may have been "greed is good," today it's becoming "green is good."

And while it used to be hip in management circles to quote from the sixth century B.C. Chinese classic The Art of War, the trendy ancient Eastern text today is the more introspective Bhagavad Gita. Earlier this year, a manager at Sprint Nextel Corp. (S ) penned the inevitable how-to guide: Bhagavad Gita on Effective Leadership.

THE ANCIENT SPIRITUAL wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita seems at first like an odd choice for guiding today's numbers-driven managers. Also known as Song of the Divine One, the work relates a conversation between the supreme deity Krishna and Arjuna, a warrior prince struggling with a moral crisis before a crucial battle. One key message is that enlightened leaders should master any impulses or emotions that cloud sound judgment. Good leaders are selfless, take initiative, and focus on their duty rather than obsessing over outcomes or financial gain. "The key point," says Ram Charan, a coach to CEOs such as General Electric Co.'s (GE ) Jeffrey R. Immelt, "is to put purpose before self. This is absolutely applicable to corporate leadership today."

The seemingly ethereal world view that's reflected in Indian philosophy is surprisingly well attuned to the down-to-earth needs of companies trying to survive in an increasingly global, interconnected business ecosystem. While corporations used to do most of their manufacturing, product development, and administrative work in-house, the emphasis is now on using outsiders. Terms such as "extended enterprises" (companies that outsource many functions), "innovation networks" (collaborative research and development programs), and "co-creation" (designing goods and services with input from consumers) are the rage.

Indian-born thinkers didn't invent all these concepts, but they're playing a big role in pushing them much further. Prahalad, for example, has made a splash with books on how companies can co-create products with consumers and succeed by tailoring products and technologies to the poor. That idea has influenced companies from Nokia Corp. (NOK ) to Cargill. Harvard Business School associate professor Rakesh Khurana, who achieved acclaim with a treatise on how corporations have gone wrong chasing charismatic CEOs, is writing a book on how U.S. business schools have gotten away from their original social charters.

Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business whose books and consulting for the likes of Chevron (CVX ) and Deere & Co. (DE ) have made him a sought-after innovation guru, links his theories directly to Hindu philosophy. He helps companies figure out how to stop reacting to the past and start creating their own futures through innovation. Govindarajan says his work is inspired by the concept of karma, which holds that future lives are partly determined by current actions. "Karma is a principle of action. Innovation is about creating change, not reacting to change," he says.

There are also parallels between Indian philosophy and contemporary marketing theory, which has shifted away from manipulating consumers to collaborating with them. "Marketing has tended to use the language of conquest," says Kellogg professor Mohanbir S. Sawhney, a Sikh who discusses the relevance of the Bhagavad Gita to business on his Web site. Now the focus is on using customer input to dream up new products, Sawhney says, which "requires a symbiotic relationship with those around us."

Kellogg's Jain, who is working on a book about the customer-centric business models of Indian companies, believes that many Indian thinkers are drawn to fields stressing interconnectedness for good reason. "We have picked areas that are consistent with our passion," he says.

Whatever the common themes, India, of course, is hardly a showcase of social consciousness. While companies such as Tata Group or Wipro Technologies have generous initiatives for India's poor, the country has its share of unethical business practices and social injustices. In addition, some Indian academics bristle at the suggestion that their background makes their approach to business any different. They're quick to point out the wide range of religions, influences, and specialties among them.

Indeed, it's not surprising that thinkers from a country with as diverse an economic and social makeup as India would have different perspectives on the influences on their work. "We are a fusion society," says Harvard's Khurana. As a result, many Indian management theorists "tend to look at organizations as complex social systems, where culture and reciprocity are important," he says. "You won't hear too many of us say the only legitimate stakeholders in a company are stockholders." What's more, India's extreme poverty imposes a natural pressure on its companies to contribute more to the common good.

Indian thinkers are affecting not only the way managers run companies. They are also furthering their search for personal fulfillment. Northwestern's Kellogg even offers an executive education leadership course by Deepak Chopra, the controversial self-help guru and spiritual healer to the stars. Chopra also is on the board of clothing retailer Men's Wearhouse Inc. and has conducted programs for Deloitte, Harvard Business School, and the World Bank.

In a stark, brightly lit classroom, Chopra, sporting glasses with heavy black frames studded with rhinestones, led a class through a 20-minute meditation in June. "Sit comfortably in your chair with your feet planted on the ground," Chopra instructed the 35 mostly midlevel executives from corporations that are as far afield as ABN Amro Bank (ABN ) and sporting goods retailer Cabela's Inc. (CAB ) "Our mantra today is: I am.' "

OTHER B-SCHOOLS ARE adding courses that combine ancient wisdom with the needs of modern managers. A popular class at both Columbia Business School and London Business School is "Creativity & Personal Mastery," taught by Columbia's Srikumar Rao. Many attendees are fast-track managers who are highly successful at work but still miserable, says Rao. His lectures, which include mental exercises and quotes from Indian swamis and other philosophers, win praise from managers such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS ) Managing Director Mark R. Tercek. "Business schools ought to be championing this stuff," says Tercek, a yoga practitioner. "We can hire the smartest damn people in the world, but many of them ultimately don't succeed because they can't motivate and work with those around them. I think the Indians are on to something."

They may be on to quite a lot. Some Indian theorists have said their ultimate goal is to promote an entirely different theory of management--one that would replace shareholder capitalism with stakeholder capitalism. The late Sumantra Ghoshal was attempting to do just that. At the time he died, the prolific London Business School professor was working on a book to be called A Good Theory of Management.

As Ghoshal saw it, the corporate debacles of a few years ago were the inevitable outgrowth of theories developed by economists and absorbed at business schools. Corporations are not merely profit machines reacting to market forces; they are run by and for humans, and have a symbiotic relationship with the world around them. "There is no inherent conflict between the economic well-being of companies and their serving as a force for good in societies," wrote Ghoshal.

In their own ways, other Indian thinkers are picking up the mantle. Khurana's forthcoming book, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands, looks at the professional responsibility to society that managers and the business schools who train them were initially designed to have.

The quest, says Prahalad, is to develop a capitalism that "puts the individual at the center of the universe," placing employees and customers first so that they can benefit shareholders. This is a lofty if improbable goal. But if it is attained, business leaders may find that India's biggest impact on the global economy may be on the way executives think.


By Pete Engardio, with Jena McGregor in New York

[American Dream]

George Katsiaficas on the "Eros Effect":




George Katsiaficas is a professor, sociologist, author, and activist. He teaches at the Wentworth Institute of Technology and specializes in social movements, Asian politics, U.S. foreign policy, and comparative and historical studies. He has written extensively on popular social uprisings in various regions and historical moments.

In these selections from an interview with David Zlutnick filmed on on March 27, 2011 in Berkeley, CA, he discusses the recent wave of demonstrations and rebellions throughout the Middle East and North Africa, placing them in a greater context of social transformation.

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... nstructed/


DISNEY PRINCESSES, DECONSTRUCTED
by Lisa Wade, Oct 25, 2009

Jeff Brunner put together this analysis of the evolution of the Disney princess. What do you think? Progress?



Sent in by Fiona A.

UPDATE: Commenter Jackie sent in this version for the Disney princes:



NEW (Mar. ’10)! Kristyn G. sent in this entertaining Disney Princess spoof on Cosmo (by Dan O’Brien and Matt Barrs):

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... s-playboy/

MOLSON’S DIVERGENT MARKETING: COSMO VS. PLAYBOY

by Lisa Wade, Nov 29, 2011

Anjan G. sent in an interesting pair of ads that ran as part of a Molson beer campaign in 2002/2003. One appeared in Cosmo; it involves a man in a sweater cuddling with puppies and drinking a Molson. It’s an example of an ad that glamorizes a soft and sensitive masculinity:




The other appeared in men’s magazines, including Playboy and FHM. It tells readers, explicitly, that the first ad is designed to manipulate women into being sexually attracted to men who drink Molson:




The text is worth reading:

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF WOMEN.
PRE-PROGRAMMED FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE.

As you read this, women across America are reading something very different: an advertisement (fig. 1) scientifically formulated to enhance their perception of men who drink Molson. The ad shown below, currently running in Cosmopolitan magazine, is a perfectly tuned combination of words and images designed by trained professionals. Women who are exposed to it experience a very positive feeling. A feeling which they will later project directly onto you. Triggering the process is as simple as ordering a Molson Canadian (fig. 2).
…
Extravagent dinners. Subtitled movies. Floral arrangements tied together with little pieces of hay. It gets old. And it gets expensive, depleting funds that could go to a new set of of 20-inch rims. But thanks to the miracle of Twin Advertising Technology, you can achieve success without putting in any time or effort. So drop the bouquet and pick up a Molson Canadian…

The second ad, then, portrays men as lazy, shallow jerks who are just trying to get laid (not soft and sensitive at all). And it portrays women as stupid and manipulable.

The two ads are a nice reminder that marketers count on their audiences being separate. They can send each audience contradictory messages, confident that most women will never pick up Playboy and most men will never pick up Cosmo. This is an assumption that marketers have long counted on. Miller Beer, for example, includes pro-gay advertising in magazines aimed at gay men, counting on the idea that heterosexual men, many of whom are homophobic, will never see that Miller markets itself as a gay beer.

So Molson was counting on women never seeing their ads in men’s magazines. Alternatively, they were perfectly happy to alienate female customers. Or maybe both.

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... cupations/

GENDERING AND RACIALIZING OCCUPATIONS

by Gwen Sharp, Dec 6, 2011

Jake C. sent in a good example of the racialization and gendering of jobs within the service industry. This photo shows two notices for openings at a restaurant, one in English, one in (misspelled) Spanish:





The notice in Spanish isn’t a translation of the one about the hostess job; rather, it announces that two people are needed as dishwashers. It shows the way that particular positions within a workplace are often associated with certain groups, and how organizational policies may reinforce occupational segregation by sex or race/ethnicity. The role of greeting and seating customers is explicitly gendered as a hostess, while the language difference will channel applicants into different jobs. These types of practices are one part of the process that channels individuals into different positions in the workplace, both by restricting access to information about jobs and providing subtle messages to potential applicants about which positions are the best fit for them.

[American Dream]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... ight-away/

LIFE’S SHORT, SO YOU BETTER START THAT AFFAIR RIGHT AWAY

by Gwen Sharp, Nov 17, 2011


Two years ago we posted about the Ashley Madison Agency. Several readers brought our attention to a new ad campaign for the company, so we’re reposting it; scroll down for new material.

Lisa C. sent in a link to the Ashley Madison Agency, which she heard advertised on a talk radio station that generally targets a male audience. The site specializes in providing dating services to married individuals looking to have an affair:



The company clearly plays on its notoriety and the shock value of the idea that a dating site would cater to married people looking to cheat on their partners — as well as, in this case, appearing to promise men oral sex.

The company has come out with a new ad campaign that has received significant criticism. The ads, sent in by Danielle Q., Christie W., and an anonymous reader, combine “promotion of adultery, body shaming, and female objectification,” according to Christie. They present wives as fat (and therefore presumably unappealing) women who practically drive men to cheat on them with the thin, hot women they deserve to have sexual access to:



(Via.)



(Via Jezebel.)

One source of criticism comes from Jacqueline, the plus-sized model used in the two images. She apparently posed for a photographer years ago and is now faced with seeing her image used to elicit disgust at large bodies. As Jacqueline pointed out in a post she wrote for Jezebel, these images aren’t just about mocking large women; they’re about policing all women’s bodies:

A size 2 woman who sees this ad sees the message: “If I don’t stay small, he will cheat”. A size 12 woman might see this ad and think “if I don’t lose 30lbs, he will cheat”. A size 32 woman could see this ad, and feel “I will never find love”.

Thus, all women are told that they are perpetually in competition with all other women for the sexual attention and approval of men, and always on the verge of being ridiculed for the failure to meet impossible standards of feminine attractiveness.

[American Dream]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/15

Published on Thursday, December 15, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

The Spiritual Jackpot

by Robert C. Koehler

The topic was “Indians of the Midwest” and the professor was knowledgeable and conveyed serious respect for Native culture, but something kept gnawing at me as she talked.

There are two types of Indian stereotypes, she said — the negative (the ignorant savage, the abductor of white women, etc.) and the romantic (woo-woo, New Agey, let’s play Indian, “go ’Skins!”) — and left it at that, implying, OK, if you are non-Native, the best attitude to strike is a certain respectful distance, neither denigrating the culture nor seizing hold of it like an idiot. If you want more, attend lectures and look at the artifacts on display behind glass cases, but DO NOT TOUCH.

This was all academic and sensible, the voice of the expert, an anthropologist, and given the history of the last 500 years — given colonialism, land grabs and boarding schools, given the genocide perpetrated by Western governments on every continent during and beyond the Age of Exploration — understandable, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, it’s just more cultural arrogance, a denial of the relevance of indigenous consciousness in the present moment.

The question I finally blurted out was: What’s beyond the stereotypes? What about the actual interaction between cultures? She shrugged. It happened in the 18th century, at least sporadically, she said, before American independence and the new nation’s systematic conquest of the continent.

Something inside me was pushing hard against her matter-of-fact expertise. What about in the 21st century? I asked. I didn’t, in that moment, have the words to articulate what I really meant: What about the flow of Earth-connected awareness from indigenous peoples to the planet-conquering, cluelessly arrogant West? Where is that happening? In any case, she shook her head. She didn’t see any significant cultural integration, any flow of values, happening anywhere, and seemed surprised that I asked.

This was about a month ago. I was reminded of the encounter the other day, when a New York Times story gleefully informed me that values are indeed flowing between the cultures, in the wrong direction, as Western belief in the sacredness of money, and the smallness of consciousness that accompanies money worship, infects tribal culture.

Specifically, the story examined how casino money has led to the phenomenon of tribal disenrollment — the casting out of lifelong members of casino-rich tribes, particularly in California — where in 2010 casinos on 60-some reservations took in over $7 billion.

According to the article, “The money and the immense power (casino income) has conferred on tribes that had endured grinding poverty for decades have enticed many tribal governments to consolidate control over their gambling enterprises by trimming membership rolls, critics and independent analysts say.”

California tribes have disenrolled at least 2,500 people over the past decade, alleging lack of authentic ancestry in that tribe — one more silent consequence of the Western genocide of previous centuries, when “dozens of tiny tribes . . . were decimated, scattered and then reconstituted.”

And now the disenfranchisement continues, often to devastating psychological as well as financial consequence for the disenrollees, who find themselves instantly stripped of their heritage by a legal document and sometimes forced, with their children, out of their homes.

Ironically, critics of the disenrollment trend are forced to appeal to the U.S. government, asking Congress to empower federal courts or the Bureau of Indian Affairs “to provide legal recourse to Indians who believe they have been disenrolled improperly.”

But this, of course, not only diminishes tribal autonomy, it also continues the process of shattering what was once whole into ever smaller shards of legal squabbling. The Times story evinced no awareness of indigenous values that are significantly different from Western values — who, after all, is going to question the sacredness of $7 billion? — and presented the dispute as just another struggle between aggrieved parties.

And whatever values that were once overarching in the indigenous worldview — the living universe, the connectedness of all living beings, the sacredness of place and relationship — retreat behind the glass case of historical curiosity.

In counterpoint to the casino story, I make note of the sawmill in northern Wisconsin owned and operated by Menominee Tribal Enterprises, which for decades has been incorporating sustainable forestry practices with its business operation, “balancing harvest with annual growth” and keeping the forest viable, a place for spiritual rejuvenation as well as a source of timber.

I also note that the global restorative justice movement — with its emphasis on honest communication and healing rather than punishment — emerged in indigenous communities in Northern Canada and New Zealand, and is now slowly catching on in, and transforming, crime-beset pockets of Western culture.

We’re skidding toward global economic and environmental collapse unless we can reclaim our shared humanity and rediscover our place in the circle of life — that is, embrace values bigger than money and power. I believe this is possible, but only with indigenous consciousness as our spiritual cornerstone.



Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

[American Dream]

http://web.mac.com/iseelove/Other_World ... le/(((read)))/Entries/2009/3/14_Solidarity_Economies.html

What Goes Around Comes Around

Solidarity Economies


As free market capitalism is being globalized, so too are solidarity economies – non-standard forms of social organization and economic enterprise which rely on humane principles instead of the competition and greed often underlying the free market. Though they take many shapes, solidarity economies all focus on getting everyone's needs met without exploitation, expanding possibilities for those who are too poor to participate in standard cash markets, and embedding ethics into every step of the economic chain: creation, production, exchange, consumption, and surplus distribution. Solidarity economies do not depend on survival of the fittest, but instead promote the sustainability of human beings and the environment.

They strive to keep the values of respect, cooperation, and democracy at the core of economic relations. They emphasize humane, generosity-based transformation of relationships between basic needs, community, and the earth's abundance. They advance collective processes that constructively involve all who are engaged in the economic relationship. As Ethan Miller of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network said, “They are the seeds of a new economy - an economy of cooperation, equality, diversity, and self-determination.”

The systems are, for the most part, based in the local and the grassroots. Solidarity economies function through networks, associations, social movements, the non-profit sector, and coops. They emphasize women's initiatives, ecological agriculture, ethical financing, and democratized technology. In some places the economic organization involves ancient traditions, in others a scrappy way to survive in the streets, in still others an explicit rejection of capitalism. Sometimes they are highly intentional; in other cases, people are just trying to get by.

Solidarity economies are taking off. Just a few examples of the countless number found in cities and villages around the world include:

•Baby clothing exchanges where parents leave too-small clothing for younger ones and pick up the next size for free;

•Open-source technology;

•Community kitchens;

•Coffee production cooperatives;

•Free community bike systems in dozens of urban centers;

•Leave-a-book-take-a-book systems in various subways.

Kadidiatou Baby, the director of the Malian Association for the Support of Schooling of Girls, tells of an ancient solidarity practice widely used throughout her region of Africa and the world: revolving loan funds. Distinct from micro-credit which invariably involves interest (and often traps women in hideous cycles of debt), these interest-free funds are a way to make cash readily available to a woman in the neighborhood or village or office. Going by the name pari in Mali, they work this way: Each woman contributes a fixed amount per month, depending on the socio-economic level of her group –anywhere from fifty cents to $50 on up. The lump sum is then given to one of the women, allowing her to repair her roof, buy a new cooking pot, contribute to a nephew's hospital bill, or invest in marketing. The pari can be key to survival for women who have no access to banks, no credit line, and no other way to gather a sum of money adequate for a large investment.

Like many other solidarity economy networks, central to the pari are trusting human relationships. Kadidiatou says, "Beyond the monetary system, we are always together to support each other. For happiness, for sadness, for the children, for the problems of the family."

A newer example in use throughout parts of the world is time banks, in which people offer services they can provide in exchange for services they need. An individual performs a service - replacing a toilet, cutting hair, or babysitting, say - and earns hours which he can use in the same network to get his fence fixed or have a photo portrait taken of his family. No cash is involved and all hours are valued equally, expanding the realm of what low-income (and other) people can access, changing the nature of the interaction, and creating community. Pasadena, Maryland has used time banking for sixteen years to help keep older and disabled adults independent and in their homes. A young neighbor might give time to build a wheelchair ramp and, in exchange, receive Portuguese lessons from a different senior who is a native speaker. There are now about 80 formally organized time banks in the U.S., with more in 20-plus other countries.

Venezuela shows what can happen when the state gets behind the concept of solidarity. The government has begun providing large grants to 3,500 communal banking organizations which administer the resources of community councils. These “people’s banks” give communities the ability to finance social projects, help out citizens in trouble, and invest in infrastructure and other needs of the area. The 2009 Venezuelan budget contains US$ 1.6 billion for these banks.

A few indicators of the growth of these solidarity-based alternative economies are: Nearly 700 delegates from 26 countries participated in the Asian Forum on Solidarity Economy conference in the Philippines in 2007. Brazil has an Assistant Secretary of Solidarity Economy. The World Social Forum now hosts a permanent Solidarity Economy Network, and the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network holds its first national meeting the same month we publish this report.

Even if you have never before heard of solidarity economies, you just may begin to recognize their practice all around you.

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/library/class-class-s ... troduction

Class and class struggle - an introduction

An explanation of what we on libcom.org mean by the word "class", and related terms such as "working class" and "class struggle".




Introduction

The first thing to say is that there are various ways of referring to class. Often, when people talk about class, they talk in terms of cultural/sociological labels. For example, middle-class people like foreign films, working class people like football, upper-class people like top hats and so on.

Another way to talk about class, however, is based on classes' economic positions. We talk about class like this because we see it as essential for understanding how capitalist society works, and consequently how we can change it.

It is important to stress that our definition of class is not for classifying individuals or putting them in boxes, but in order to understand the forces which shape our world, why our bosses and politicians act the way they do, and how we can act to improve our conditions.

Class and capitalism

The economic system which dominates the world at present is called capitalism.

Capitalism is essentially a system based on the self-expansion of capital - commodities and money making more commodities and more money.

This doesn’t happen by magic, but by human labour. For the work we do, we're paid for only a fraction of what we produce. The difference between the value we produce and the amount we're paid in wages is the "surplus value" we've produced. This is kept by our boss as profit and either reinvested to make more money or used to buy swimming pools or fur coats or whatever.

In order for this to take place, a class of people must be created who don't own anything they can use to make money i.e. offices, factories, farmland or other means of production. This class must then sell their ability to work in order to purchase essential goods and services in order to survive. This class is the working class.

So at one end of the spectrum is this class, with nothing to sell but their ability to work. At the other, those who do own capital to hire workers to expand their capital. Individuals in society will fall at some point between these two poles, but what is important from a political point of view is not the positions of individuals but the social relationship between classes.

The working class

The working class then, or 'proletariat' as it is sometimes called, the class who is forced to work for wages, or claim benefits if we cannot find work or are too sick or elderly to work, to survive. We sell our time and energy to a boss for their benefit.

Our work is the basis of this society. And it is the fact that this society relies on the work we do, while at the same time always squeezing us to maximise profit, that makes it vulnerable.

Class struggle

When we are at work, our time and activity is not our own. We have to obey the alarm clock, the time card, the managers, the deadlines and the targets.

Work takes up the majority of our lives. We may see our managers more than we see our friends and partners. Even if we enjoy parts of our job we experience it as something alien to us, over which we have very little control. This is true whether we're talking about the nuts and bolts of the actual work itself or the amount of hours, breaks, time off etc.

Work being forced on us like this compels us to resist.

Employers and bosses want to get the maximum amount of work from us, from the longest hours, for the least pay. We, on the other hand, want to be able to enjoy our lives: we don't want to be over-worked, and we want shorter hours and more pay.

This antagonism is central to capitalism. Between these two sides is a push and pull: employers cut pay, increase hours, speed up the pace of work. But we attempt to resist: either covertly and individually by taking it easy, grabbing moments to take a break and chat to colleagues, calling in sick, leaving early. Or we can resist overtly and collectively with strikes, slow-downs, occupations etc.

This is class struggle. The conflict between those of us who have to work for a wage and our employers and governments, who are often referred to as the capitalist class, or 'bourgeoisie' in Marxist jargon.

By resisting the imposition of work, we say that our lives are more important than our boss's profits. This attacks the very nature of capitalism, where profit is the most important reason for doing anything, and points to the possibility of a world without classes and privately-owned means of production. We are the working class resisting our own existence. We are the working class struggling against work and class.

Beyond the workplace

Class struggle does not only take place in the workplace. Class conflict reveals itself in many aspects of life.

For example, affordable housing is something that concerns all working class people. However, affordable for us means unprofitable for them. In a capitalist economy, it often makes more sense to build luxury apartment blocks, even while tens of thousands are homeless, than to build housing which we can afford to live in. So struggles to defend social housing, or occupying empty properties to live in are part of the class struggle.

Similarly, healthcare provision can be a site of class conflict. Governments or companies attempt to reduce spending on healthcare by cutting budgets and introducing charges for services to shift the burden of costs onto the working class, whereas we want the best healthcare possible for as little cost as possible.

The "middle class"

While the economic interests of capitalists are directly opposed to those of workers, a minority of the working class will be better off than others, or have some level of power over others. When talking about history and social change it can be useful to refer to this part of the proletariat as a "middle class", despite the fact that it is not a distinct economic class, in order to understand the behaviour of different groups.

Class struggle can sometimes be derailed by allowing the creation or expansion of the middle class - Margaret Thatcher encouraged home ownership by cheaply selling off social housing in the UK during the big struggles of the 1980s, knowing that workers are less likely to strike if they have a mortgage, and allowing some workers to become better off on individual levels, rather than as a collective. And in South Africa the creation of a black middle class helped derail workers' struggles when apartheid was overturned, by allowing limited social mobility and giving some black workers a stake in the system.

Bosses try to find all sorts of ways to materially and psychologically divide the working class, including by salary differentials, professional status, race and by gender.

It should be pointed out again that we use these class definitions in order to understand social forces at work, and not to label individuals or determine how individuals will act in given situations.

Conclusion

Talking about class in a political sense is not about which accent you have but the basic conflict which defines capitalism – those of us who must work for a living vs. those who profit from the work that we do. By fighting for our own interests and needs against the dictates of capital and the market we lay the basis for a new type of society - a society based on the direct fulfilment of our needs: a libertarian communist society.

[American Dream]

Christian Fundamentalists and Private Military Contractors?
The Strange Bedfellows of the Sex Slavery Anti-Trafficking Movement

By Emi Koyama, Bitch Magazine
Posted on December 15, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/153457/ch ... g_movement

In the 2008 film Taken, Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, a retired CIA operative whose undercover past is called into action when his daughter is kidnapped while traveling abroad and sold into sexual slavery. Using his counterterrorism skills to torture and murder those who stand between him and his daughter’s captors, he eventually rescues his daughter and comes home a hero, with no consequences exacted for the violence he’s inflicted in the name of his daughter’s safety.

The film was a commercial, if not critical, hit (a sequel is forthcoming in 2012), perhaps because, like many a made-for-TV movie or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode, it served a voyeuristic interest in the world of forced prostitution and sex trafficking involving attractive young, white, middle-class female victims and ethnically Other (Eastern European in this particular case) male perpetrators. Its success also mirrored the real-world events of a presidential administration that justified the use of torture—euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—as a valid means of preventing catastrophic terror attacks, and which dismissed reported cases of extreme prisoner abuses like those at Abu Ghraib as exceptions: safety at any cost, by any means necessary.

The self-purported inspiration for Bryan Mills was retired colonel Bill Hillar of the U.S. Army Special Forces (a.k.a. the Green Berets), who was a popular keynote speaker, trainer, and consultant on the topic of human trafficking. Claiming to have multiple advanced degrees, he gave lectures, trainings, and consultations in which he described his daughter’s abduction into sex slavery to law enforcement officials, private groups, and college audiences. According to Hillar, his daughter was abducted and sold to a brothel while traveling through Southeast Asia with a friend. Using his professional connections as a counterterror specialist, Hillar supposedly, like Neeson’s character, traveled around the globe in search of his daughter. But, as he sadly told audiences, his story did not have the same ending: Despite his efforts, his daughter never came home.

Hillar was widely acclaimed as an American hero who, despite his loss, continued to share his experience and expertise in an effort to end human trafficking. In November 2010, he was scheduled to present the keynote lecture at the annual conference of Oregonians Against Trafficking Humans (OATH), on whose board he served. When, at the last minute, he canceled his appearance due to personal circumstances, OATH instead presented a video recording of one of Hillar’s earlier lectures.

As an audience member at that presentation, I felt unsettled by Hillar’s demeanor in the video. There was something off in his graphic, detailed description of the taking, selling, and murdering of his daughter, and the fact that there was little to no mention of their relationship prior to her abduction. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn, months later, that the “personal circumstances” that precluded Hillar’s appearance at the conference included a pending investigation into his long history of fraud. As it turned out, Hillar never served in the U.S. Army, let alone the Green Berets. He had no academic credentials, nor any expertise in counterterrorism. And his daughter was never kidnapped, trafficked, or murdered.

Yet the simulacrum that is Bill Hillar has become part of the reality of the anti-trafficking movement, in which a language of militarization and vengeance is the basis for a disturbing take on activism in the name of the exploited.

“Human trafficking” is a relatively new term to describe the selling and trading of people. While it had been used in policy contexts in the past (as in the 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others), it entered common parlance around 2000 with the passage of theTrafficking Victims Protection Act. A quick search on a news database shows that there were only three references to “human trafficking” or “trafficking in humans” before 2000. It was mentioned 9 times in 2000, 41 times in 2001, and broke 100 mentions for the first time in 2005. In 2010, there were more than 500 references.

The proliferation of the term signifies a rhetorical shift on the part of the U.S. government. Simply put, framing forced migration and labor (sexual and otherwise) as the work of international criminal enterprises, comparable to the smuggling of drugs and weapons, elides the reality that it is a social and economic issue arising from poverty, economic disparities, globalization, and unreasonable restrictions on migration. The U.S. government’s approach places the focus squarely on identifiable enemies who are often construed, like the kidnappers in Taken, as evil, sadistic, ethnic Others—ignoring the ways in which capitalist social and economic structures (some of which the U.S. government has actively promoted) make people vulnerable.

As a result, the United States’ recent committment to a “War on Trafficking” mimics previous efforts—the epically failed “War on Drugs,” the nightmarish “War on Terror”—copying the “Just Say No” urgings of the former and the “Either you’re with us or you’re against us” rhetoric of the latter and offering an easy, black-and-white worldview that lacks structural analysis into systems of inequality and domination.

Take anti-trafficking newcomer Stop Child Trafficking Now (SCTNow), which is quickly gaining the support of companies like Facebook and Microsoft as well as the blessing of celebrities like Ashton Kutcher. The organization describes its “innovative approach” to addressing the trafficking of minors thus:

Stop Child Trafficking has chosen to fund a bold, new approach, one that addresses the demand side of child sex trafficking by targeting buyers/predators for prosecution and conviction. […] SCTNow has launched a national campaign to raise money for retired military operatives targeting the demand side of trafficking…. These operatives use the skills developed in the War on Terror in this war to bring down predators. Professional law enforcement have vetted this strategy and are eager to work with these operative teams once funding is secured.

Special Operative Teams gather information about child predators both in the U.S. and abroad…. These teams possess skills beyond the average military or law enforcement individual—skills that enable them to achieve their goals in foreign lands independently, without support of U.S. law enforcement resources.

Part of me wishes that this approach could really work. But shouldn’t we be a bit hesitant to trust military operatives who developed their skills in the War on Terror, seeing as how these same “experts” led the United States to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, detained Arab and Muslim Americans without due process, tortured innocent civilians and prisoners of war, conducted surveillance on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States, “renditioned” suspects to countries to outsource torture, and illegally wiretapped our telephone calls?

SCTNow’s description of its “special operations”—which the organization outsources to Global Trident, a private for-profit military intelligence firm with close ties to defense contractor Northrop Grumman, evangelical Christian outlet Middle East Television, and former members of military and domestic intelligence agencies—is troubling. Equally disturbing is the fact that, as a private organization, “the Special Operatives are not bound by the same restrictions that keep U.S. law enforcement from conducting research against sexual offenders.” Thus, the intelligence they gather need not be limited to something that is directly related to trafficking or even prostitution. Operatives are encouraged to record anything and everything that they deem relevant or interesting, which means they can collect information about immigration status or the personal lives of people uninvolved with sex trafficking. Because the organization is a private entity, the usual policies of evidence discovery do not apply, and neither do prohibitions against racial profiling and entrapment. There is no public oversight. So while the organization claims to obey all applicable laws, can we feel truly confident when these same experts violated laws and regulations in their supposed pursuit of “terrorists”?

SCTNow, like many contemporary anti-trafficking organizations such as Shared Hope International and Love146, is part of a Christian fundamentalist movement (an article in the November 2011 issue of Christianity Today even carried the subtitle: “Leading [Portland, Oregon’s] efforts to halt child trafficking is a network of dedicated Christians. Just don’t go advertising it.”). SCTNow was founded by Ron Lewis, the televangelist pastor of North Carolina mega-church King’s Park International Church, and his wife, author Lynette Lewis. Though I have spoken to several members of SCTNow who insist that most of the organization’s money comes from its nationwide “awareness walks,” King’s Park appears to be the organization’s single largest funder. Other prominent funders of anti-trafficking groups include NoVo Foundation, started by one of Warren Buffett’s children, and Hunt Alternatives Fund, founded by heirs to the fortune of Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt.

Given this background, it is not surprising that SCTNow, along with similar anti-trafficking concerns, uses a simplistic language of good and evil in its discussions of trafficking. In this way, its selling of the anti-trafficking movement closely mirrors the selling of the “War on Terror” in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Instead of untangling the resentment against American imperialism built up globally through centuries of exploitation, many Americans rushed to accept the nonsensical explanation, put forth by politicans and pundits, that terrorists “hate us because they hate freedom.” We wanted enemies that we could name and locate so that we might destroy them, not lessons in humility and self-reflection. Likewise, today’s mainstream anti-trafficking movement appeals to middle-class Americans with the idea that trafficking happens because there are bad people out there just waiting to take your kids away from schools and malls. Thus, its prevention efforts focus less on the systemic realities of poverty, racism, domestic abuse, and the dire circumstances surrounding runaway and thrownaway youth, and more on installing high-tech security cameras at schools and stationing more security guards at malls. And it measures the success of its activities by the number of criminal convictions it achieves, rather than by the long-term health and well-being of the women and children who are most at risk.

Furthermore, contemporary anti-trafficking efforts like SCTNow and USAID, with its “anti-prostitution pledge,” conflate prostitution and trafficking, even when their efforts are well-meaning. They may rightly reject the Hollywood myth of the glamorous, happy hooker who’s fully in control of her circumstances, but in doing so they substitute an equally simplistic trope that denies resiliency and agency in the choices people make to survive structural inequalities. This, too, appeals to a simplistic idea: Namely, that no one chooses to engage in prostitution unless they are physically or psychologically forced to do so. If we believe that prostitution happens because bad people (often depicted as men of color) force good children (often depicted as white and middle-class) into engaging in it, all we need to worry about is how to keep these bad people out of our schools and communities and let law enforcement handle the rest.

Indeed, there’s a historical precedent for what we’re witnessing today. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the profile of the American citizenry was changing: Racial and sexual anxieties took hold in the United States as emanicipated slaves moved north, white women organized to demand suffrage, and immigrants from Eastern Europe and Asia flocked to the country. One result was a “white slavery” panic stoked by xenophobia. In response, an evangelical Christian movement was mobilized to combat the alleged evil. The presence of Asian women in brothels drew particular attention; because Asian women were considered hyper-submissive and therefore incapable of exercising agency, it was assumed that they had been imported for the purpose of sexual slavery. The panic eventually subsided without producing any actual evidence of such slavery, but its rhetoric did produce the nation’s first federal law against prostitution and trafficking, the Mann Act, and effected the extension of the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act.

It’s not a stretch to say that the United States today is in the midst of similar anxieties about the nation’s racial and ethnic makeup. Anti-immigration sentiment is violently high, and legislations, such as that enacted in Arizona in 2010, are dangerously broad. Fear of terrorism is used to justify discriminatory treatment toward Muslims, Arabs, and many others who don’t fit a status-quo “American” look. Queer and trans people are still marginalized, but are coming closer to equality every day, at least in their legal status, including the right to marry someone of the same gender. And of course, we have a president of the United States whose father was an immigrant from Kenya and whose middle name is Hussein. So it’s particularly frustrating to witness the rise of a simplistic, military-minded anti-trafficking movement that refuses to engage with the social, economic, and political nuances of the environment in which it exists. Even more galling is the movement’s failure to acknowledge (and is, in fact, responsible for) undoing the many existing collaborations between public health officials, anti-violence activists, healthcare professionals, homeless advocacy groups, advocates for youth, immigrants, queer and trans people, groups led by people of color organizing within their own communities, sex workers, and other groups that took many years (beginning in the early stages of the 1980s AIDS epidemic) to develop.

Many of the groups in this broad coalition, especially the small grassroots groups led by members of vulnerable communities themselves, have been forced to shut down or scale back due to harsh economic conditions in recent years, while groups led or influenced by religious ideologues and law enforcement officials are expanding their reach as they receive anti-trafficking grants. Groups that have traditionally worked together are split between those that prioritize working with and seeking to empower the people who engage in the sex trade and those that support using state powers to crack down on prostitution. Some feminist foundations that previously supported grassroots groups—the Women’s Funding Network and New York Women’s Foundation among them—seem to have put their dollars on the anti-trafficking bandwagon. Women’s Funding Network, for instance, recently sponsored and promoted a methodologically flawed study claiming that sex trafficking of minors on Internet classified sites in New York, Michigan, and Minnesota had increased by up to 65 percent in just six months.

Groups committed to social and economic justice are being replaced by a movement that promotes religious ideology, action-hero solutions, and flawed research (e.g., the oft-repeated but false claim that the “average age of entry into prostitution” is 12 to 14, or that 100,000 to 300,000 youth are forced into prostitution in the United States). The mainstream anti-trafficking movement negates the history of resistance against violence and self-empowerment within marginalized communities, and seeks to further militarize our schools, our borders, our public spaces, our society. And, as has been pointed out by the likes of INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, granting more power to police, courts, prisons, immigration enforcement, and counterterrorism “experts” very often makes women and girls of color, as well as other marginalized people, more, rather than less, vulnerable to violence.

Take, for instance, the November 2010 raid of Club 907 in Los Angeles, a “hostess club” where men pay women to drink nonalcoholic beverages with them and to dance for them, fully clothed. According to the L.A. Times, the raid was intended to investigate allegations including labor code violations and human trafficking, but 81 out of the 88 people arrested were women working as hostesses, many of them undocumented immigrants who had been instructed by club management to obtain fake IDs. The Times further reported that the hostesses were “required to earn $600 a week for the club, which means being selected by men to socialize for at least 20 hours.... Those who don’t meet the quota see their wages drop to 16 cents a minute and receive no paycheck at all until they make up the shortfall. If a customer leaves without paying, the dancer is in debt to the club.” The police knew in advance that many women working at the club were likely to be undocumented, and that they were likely to be severely exploited by the club owners, in conditions possibly reaching the legal definition of human trafficking. Yet the cops moved in as if the women were the criminals rather than the victims. That they arrested more than 80 women on criminal charges arising from their undocumented status should lead us to question the authorities’ commitment to enforcing labor laws and protecting victims of human trafficking.

The battle feminists and human-rights activists are facing now is not a simple rehash of whether sex work should be legal, or can be empowering, or is itself grounds for victim status. It’s about how to acknowledge the realities of trafficking and work to curb it while not tacitly supporting and furthering the tone set by religious fundamentalists, myopic law enforcement, and sensationalistic media. In September 2010, Third Wave Foundation issued a statement that emphasized a need to recognize “young people engaged in sex work and impacted by the sex trade as critical partners in ensuring health and justice” rather than viewing them as powerless victims in need of unilateral “rescue.” With support from INCITE! and Third Wave Foundation, a group of radical women of color, queer people of color, and indigenous people who have engaged in or are currently engaging in the sex trade held a national leadership institute, which led to the recent formation of FUSE (Fed Up and Strategizing for Empowerment). FUSE works to counter the worldview that collapses the complexities and diversity of people’s experiences within the sex trade as well as social and economic factors that shape them into an overly simplistic notion of “modern-day slavery.” It opposes Hollywood-style “solutions” that harm the very people—like the hostesses at Club 907—they ostensibly aim to help, and calls for approaches that engage and empower those of us who experience the sex trade. The struggle must be ongoing, because no single policy change—decriminalizing prostitution, for instance—will fundamentally transform the social and economic structures that abet the exploitation of marginalized communities.

Activists like those in FUSE face an uphill battle in an environment dominated by organizations that mask their moralism with a desire to protect the vulnerable, politicians who want to score tough-on-crime approval points, the private security industry that makes money off crisis and panic, the mass media that profit from oversimplification and sensationalism, and celebrities who need a pet cause. Still, regardless of how one thinks about prostitution and pornography, feminists have a common investment in solutions that actually reduce violence.

Feminists have been organizing against trafficking of women, children, and others for the purpose of sexual exploitation long before televangelists, counterterrorism experts, and celebrities got on board. We can lead society once again by refocusing the anti-trafficking movement to center the voices and struggles of people whose stories are not the ones dramatized on the movie screens—and who are all the more vulnerable for their erasure.


Emi Koyama is a multi-issue social-justice activist and writer. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and blogs at eminism.org.