Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://www.pmpress.org/content/article. ... uledWorld/

If Women Ruled the World
Nothing Would Be Different

By Lisa Jervis
LiP Magazine

Julia Gillard’s Rise Marks The Triumph Of Machine Politics Over Feminism
March 09, 2012

By John Pilger
Source: Johnpilger.com


In 1963, a senior Australian government official, A.R. Taysom, deliberated on the wisdom of deploying women as trade representatives. “Such an appointee would not stay young and attractive forever [because] a spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years [whereas] a man usually mellows.”

On International Women’s Day 2012, such primitive views are worth recalling; but what has happened to modern feminism? Why is it so bereft of its political, indeed socialist roots that any woman who “achieves” within an immoral system is to be admired? Take the rise of Julia Gillard as Australia’s first female prime minister, so celebrated by leading feminists such as writer Anne Summers and Germaine Greer. Both are unstinting in their applause of Gillard, the “remarkable woman” who on 27 February saw off a challenge from Kevin Rudd, the former Labor prime minister she deposed in a secretive, essentially macho backroom coup in 2010.

On 3 March, Greer wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that she “fell in love with” the “matter-of-fact” Gillard long ago. Omitting entirely Gillard’s politics, she asked, “What’s not to like? That she’s a woman, that’s what. An unmarried, middle-aged woman in power – any man’s and many women’s nightmare”.

That Gillard might be a nightmare to the Aboriginal women, men and children whom this quintessential machine politician has abused and blamed for their impoverishment, while implementing punitive and racist measures against their communities in defiance of international law, is apparently not relevant. That Gillard might be a nightmare to refugees detained behind razor wire, children included, in places that are “a huge generator of mental illness”, according to Australia’s ombudsman, is of no interest.

That Gillard has pledged to keep Australian soldiers in Afghanistan indefinitely and that the overwhelming majority of those killed or wounded has happened during her period as prime minister, is beside the point. Gillard’s feminist distinction, perversely, is her removal of gender discrimination in combat roles in the Australian army. Thanks to her, women are now liberated to kill Afghans and others who offer no threat to Australia, just like their comrades in “hunter-killer” units currently accused of massacring civilians. In ending the “cultural and other taboos that have kept women from combat roles in the past”, wrote Summers, Gillard has ensured that “Australia will again lead the world in a major reform”.

The devotion of this new “feminist icon” to imperial war is impressive, if strange. Referring to the dispatch of Australian colonial troops to Sudan in 1885 to avenge a popular uprising against the British, she described the forgotten farce as “not only a test of wartime courage, but a test of character that has helped define our nation and create the sense of who we are”. Invariably flanked by flags, she makes her point well.

And the point is that celebration of this kind of politician, regardless of gender, has nothing to do with feminism. On the contrary, it is complicity in some of the wickedest crimes of our age. It was Margaret Thatcher who ordered the sinking of the Belgrano, with the loss of 323 young Argentinean conscripts, and rejoiced. It was the outspoken British feminist MP Harriet Harman, along with other Labour feminists known as “Blair’s Babes”, who supported the invasion of Iraq and stood cheering one of its principal war criminals.

In the west, “glass ceilings” remain the issue-of-choice of bourgeois feminism. How many women who “make it” in politics speak out against the machine, reaching down to women left behind? How many resist the addiction of vanity to power and the media? How many use their platforms, to analyse and expose the psychopathic militarism and its industries of death and lies that contaminate our political, cultural and media life and are the source of so much violence against women in stricken, faraway countries, if not against women at home? Who spoke out against Julia Gillard’s junket to Israel in the wake of the massacre of 1400 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, and her unctuous support for their killers? Where in the coverage of politics are the principled voices of women such as Medea Benjamin, Arundhati Roy and the bravehearts of the Rawa women in Afghanistan?

Hillary Clinton was applauded by famous feminists for her support for the west’s invasion of Afghanistan to “liberate women from the Taliban”. No matter that this was never the reason; no matter that tens of thousands were killed and maimed as a consequence. In her 2008 campaign for the White House, Clinton, supported by feminists such as Anne Summers, boasted that she was prepared to “annihilate” Iran.

Here in Australia familiar distractions apply: the same insidious corporate PR aimed mostly at women and the young that says personal identity is the limit of politics; the same organised forgetting of people’s history and any notion of class and our servitude to an undemocratic elite.

Yet, Australian feminism has an especially proud past. With New Zealanders, Australian women led the world in winning the vote. During the slaughter of the first world war, Australian women mounted a uniquely successful campaign against a vote for conscription. A poster declared illegal in several states was headed “The Blood Vote” and showed a defiant woman placing her vote in the ballot-box rather than, “that I doomed a man to death”.

On polling day all but one of Australia’s political leaders urged a “yes” vote. They lost. A majority followed the women. Such is true feminism.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/julia-gi ... hn-pilger/

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/ww ... eaver.html


An Interview with Harry Cleaver


A prominent American autonomist, Harry Cleaver lives in Austin, Texas, where he is active in Accion Zapatista.

A range of his writings can be found on the Internet at http://www.eco.utexas.edu:80/Homepages/ ... ndex2.html.

This interview was recorded in London during July 1993 by Massimo De Angelis.

It first appeared in Italian in the autonomist journal vis-a-vis 1 (Autumn 1993).

You have been the first to talk about an Autonomist Marxist tradition which includes a variety of national "schools"--in Italy, France, the U.S. and so on. What are the main elements which differentiate this tradition from other strands of Marxism such as Marxism-Leninism or the Frankfort school?

What gives meaning to the concept of "autonomist Marxism" as a particular tradition is the fact that we can identify, within the larger Marxist tradition, a variety of movements, politics and thinkers who have emphasized the autonomous power of workers--autonomous from capital, from their official organizations (e.g. the trade unions, the political parties) and, indeed, the power of particular groups of workers to act autonomously from other groups (e.g. women from men). By "autonomy" I mean the ability of workers to define their own interests and to struggle for them--to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation, or to self-defined "leadership" and to take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future.

Marxism-Leninism and the Frankfort School have shared a bias toward focusing on the power of capital and have seen workers as essentially reactive to oppression and dependent on some kind of outside leadership to mobilize them for revolution. The Marxist-Leninists, as is well known, have privileged the political party of professional revolutionary intellectuals capable of grasping the general class interest and teaching it to workers who are seen as locked in merely "economic" demands. The critical theorists, who largely accepted the orthodox Marxist analysis of capitalist hegemony within the factory and extended this vision to culture and society as a whole, have also privileged the role of professional intellectuals who alone are capable of grasping the nuances of instrumentalist domination and of finding a path through the thicket to the light. In both cases, not only the bulk of empirical and historical analysis but also of theory has concerned understanding the mechanisms of domination and the myriad ways in which workers have been victimized. What both approaches have failed to do is to study the power of workers to rupture those mechanisms, to throw the system into crisis and to recompose social structures. Unable to develop a theory of workers' power, even their understanding of domination has been limited by their inability to see the contingency of capitalist power and how it has had to adapt repeatedly, often desperately, to an autonomously developing working class subjectivity to maintain its control, i.e., to survive. As a result even their theoretical understanding has remained one-sided, and more of a paean to capitalist power than a useful tool for us in our struggles.

That brings us to my next question. What is the political importance of such a distinction between "Autonomist Marxism" and other marxist traditions?

The political importance of placing our power at the center of our thinking about the class conflicts of capitalism, about the dynamics of the development of those conflicts, lies in the simple truth that it is only on an accurate appraisal of our own power that we can usefully debate how to proceed in building that power. If we spend all our time talking about the power of capital to do this, and to do that, to limit us in this way, or to force us to do that, we have no tools for talking about what to do next and we are often led into desperate and inappropriate action. When, on the other hand, we begin from an assessment of the power we do have, and an understanding of how what capital is doing amounts to a response to that power, then we are better placed to think about how to proceed in our struggles.

For example?

We might take the current moves in Europe and North America toward the creation of free trade zones. Traditional orthodox Marxist analyses tend to attempt to understand such moves in terms of the internal laws of capitalist development, as a response to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, or as a response to the exhaustion of a regime of regulation, or as another clever move in intercapitalist competition on a world scale. None of these considerations contains much, if anything, in the way of an analysis of worker power, and therefore little sense of where we are and how we might deal with the situation. An autonomist Marxist analysis, by contrast, which began with an assessment of the current crisis of capitalism in terms of the failure of previous capitalist strategies to contain and instrumentalize workers' power would provide such a point of departure. For example, the increased mobility of fixed capital associated with free trade (e.g. production facilities are moved from country A to country B because the products can now be shipped back to country A) can be seen as a response to the mobility and power of workers (e.g. the autonomous movement of immigrants and the rigidifications and costs imposed by workers in countries of heavy fixed capital investment). Not only does such an analysis link the "free trade" issue to others, such as "racism" and "ethnic cleansing" but it suggests a political strategy of the circulation of struggle between groups whose power has been responsible for the crisis. And as fixed capital moves, it also suggests a parallel strategy of accelerating the circulation of struggle through the changing material. Thus, when we find that in North America coalitions of hundreds of groups of those in struggle in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico are linking up in new forms of continental scale organization--but not through the traditional means of trade unions or parties--we should be neither surprised nor attempt to push such organization into old molds. On the contrary, a new continental class composition calls for new forms of organization and we are prepared to participate in its construction.

How does the boundless imposition of capitalist work mean on a global scale? What spaces of 'autonomy' exist within the dynamic between North and South?

All of this only takes on its fullest meaning on a global scale, when we grasp the situation in the South along with that of the North. Capitalism has always been a global system. From its beginnings in the period of primitive accumulation it was global. The enslavement of Africa and the seizure of land (through genocide) in America were integral to the development of British and other Northern European capitalism. The African had to be enslaved and put to work on the stolen land of the Cherokee to produce the cotton necessary to sustain the imposition of work on English workers in the textile mills of Manchester. The story of imperialism is only very partially the story of the ripoff of wealth, of the opening of markets and of the acquisitions of outlets for capital. All of these are but moments in the global process of turning the world's peoples into workers and then dividing and redividing them with the aim of controlling them all. In the 19th Century Indian weavers had their thumbs cut off to maintain jobs in British mills; a century later Asian and Latin American workers would be put to work in relocated mills while North American and Northern European textile workers were laid off. These are not just different stages in capitalist development; these are changes in the global class composition in response to changing patterns of workers' struggles.

We cannot understand imperialism in Leninist terms of countries exploiting other countries, but must instead understand the policies of nation states in terms of the changing balances of class power. The story of the "transformation of values into prices" is the story of capital reallocating itself across differentials in the degree of its control of the working class in order to maximize that control over all. Why have some parts of the world been "developed" while others remained "undeveloped"? In part because an international wage/income hierarchy is necessary for the control of the class globally. In large part because in the developed areas people could be put to work profitably and in others they could not. What Marxists have repeatedly failed to recognize is how workers in "underdeveloped" areas have refused to work for capital on its terms, i.e., on profitable terms. Their "backwardness" was their refusal to enter the working class. Underdevelopment is a measure of their strength, not just of their weakness (e.g. inability to command a high wage). The international counterpart of seeing workers at home as victims is looking at workers elsewhere, those at the bottom of the international wage/income hierarchy, as simply exploited and oppressed. Indeed, the terms development and underdevelopment are misleading terms, not only because they designate processes as well as states-of-being, but because they also designate strategies. Today, once rapidly developing American and Northern European industrial areas are being underdeveloped (e.g. being de-industrialized) while sectors of what used to be called the Third World are being developed (e.g. being industrialized). The pattern can only be understood in terms of the changing rhythms of class struggle, shifting balances of power within a whole as the integrity of that whole is repeatedly threatened by assaults at all levels of the hierarchy. No analysis of the current crisis in class power can be useful that does not grasp the specificities of local variations within the broader context. Capital operates at a global level, working class struggle occurs everywhere, therefore anti-capitalist strategy, like capitalist strategies, must be formulated and implemented globally. Multinational capital organizes itself through the multinational corporation, inter-state relations and supranational state forms (e.g. the IMF). None of these are appropriate for us, but we must organize the international circulation of our struggles on a global level. Think globally and act locally is not enough; our local actions must be complementary and that does not necessarily happen automatically.

Section III: The Refusal of Work

After the 1970s, in Italy the explicit theoretical argumentation for the refusal of work appears to have been suspended. This is undoubtedly related to the fact that the mass worker--whose practice of refusal inspired that analysis--has been weakened, fragmented territorially, and that a new class composition has been emerging. Some even talk about the "constitutive power of labor" without explicitly theorizing the relations between this constitutive power and the struggle against work. You, on the contrary, seem to think that the refusal of work cannot be discarded either at the level of concrete struggles or at the level of political/theoretical conceptualization. Could you elaborate on this?

The emergence of the "refusal of work" as an explicit demand in Italy was an important reminder that the working class has always struggled against work, from the time of primitive accumulation right on through to the present. Sometimes the reduction of work, the liberation of life from work, has been an explicit demand, as in that for the 10-hour or 8-hour day that Marx wrote about in Capital. Between 1880 and 1940 workers' struggles in the U.S. chopped the working week in half and created the weekend. At other times, especially when the official labor movement has had the power, the demand has been suppressed and remained hidden from view, observable only in the passive resistance and sabotage of workers in everyday life.

As a result of the emergence of such an explicit, well-articulated demand, Marxist theory was rejuvenated in an important way. During the 1950s, for example, even autonomist Marxists who recognized and theorized the autonomy of workers struggles and appreciated the autonomy of sectors of the class (e.g. blacks, women) were still held back by the idea that the point of revolution was to liberate work by appropriating it. The massive refusal of the mass workers in Italy was a vivid reminder of the fundamental truth that as long as work is the means of domination, workers will struggle against work (and thus against being mere workers).

In retrospect, we can see that a great deal of the social conflict of the late 1960s and 1970s can be understood in terms of the struggle against work, even when the protagonists did not articulate their demands in those terms. Much of the student revolt amounted to a refusal of the work of creating labor power accompanied by a demand for the time and opportunity to study things which met student needs rather than the needs of capital. Much of the revolt of women can be seen as a refusal of their traditional roles in the social factory: as procreators and recreators of labor power accompanied by demands for new kinds of gender and other social relations. The revolt of blacks in the streets of American cities was not just a cry of desperation but a rebellion against the roles assigned to them within accumulation: on the margins, as part of the reserve army that made the labor market function, moving in and out of the lowest wage jobs, living under subsistence conditions, excluded from political participation, and so on. Theirs was a rejection of particular kinds of work, just like that of students and women, but a rejection of work all the same.

Unfortunately, with their traditional focus on unalienated work as the meaning of human-ness, a great many Marxists have been all too quick to forget this fundamental antagonism within capitalism and to fall back again and again into the ideology of turn-of-the-century revolutionaries who wanted to "take over the means of production", "take over the factory" (or in the social factory of the post war period to "take over the city") with the object of becoming managers as well as workers.

The fact of the transformation of the class composition, of the diffusion of parts of the factory, of the partial fragmentation of the organization associated with the mass worker into a more flexible, or fluid, organization of "socialized workers" (operaio sociale), does not change this fundamental antagonism; it only changes the forms of struggle. I was in Milano in 1978 at a conference in the School of Architecture on the "Fabbrica Diffusa" where there was much discussion of the degree to which the diffusion of the factory was a clever capitalist reponse to the struggles of the mass worker versus the degree to which it was a capitalist adaptation to the emergence of a "socialized worker" who had left the factory voluntarily. Since then there has been considerable research on this issue with evidence of both phenomena--as we should suspect. But whether we are talking about the emergence of the hollow corporation which coordinates the imposition of work indirectly through the manipulation of supply and demand (of finance, of markets, of inputs) or about the nebulous, interconnected world of high-tech which interlinks networks of researchers around the world, the fact that individuals and small groups of individuals directly control part of their means of production doesn't change the fact that they are still forced to work for capital. There have always been some workers who had direct control over their means of production, e.g. independent truckers and artisans, small farmers and peasants. The fact that those means of production may now include computers and design software or manufacturing equipment doesn't change the fact that they are still forced to work for capital. The imposition of "immaterial labor" is just as much a form of domination as that of "material" labor. To be forced to work with your head--which has always been an integral part of work and long been the specialized activities of some while others were limited to working with other parts of their body--changes the conditions of exploitation but not its reality. It only changes the conditions under which the compulsion operates and the nature of the opportunities for refusal and insubordination.

To the degree that contemporary Marxist theorists talk about the "constitutive power of labor" without locating the antagonisms of that labor and situating them amongst a wider set of social antagonisms, they are slipping back into the old, traditional socialist glorification of work. The fact that capital seeks to convert all of life into work does not mean thatit succeeds and that therefore the only thing we need to speak about is labor and its "constitutive power". The struggle against work spreads with its imposition so that it is possible to explore both the variety of refusal and the variety of activities that are substituted for work, and thus the changing relationship between work and non-work. As a result of considerable research, and practical experience, we know a lot about what it means to refuse work on an assembly line--how workers strike, how they sabotage the line so as not to have to work, and so on. Research has also revealed what it meant to refuse to work in the social factory--how women refuse to procreate, how students refuse to study, how the unemployed refuse to look for jobs and so on. Such research has begun to reveal what it means to refuse "immaterial labor"--how workers at computers play games instead of processing data, how hackers sabotage the conversion of information into private property, how scientists pursue their own interests using corporate or state research money which had other aims, how TV writers or actors inject subversive material into sit-coms plots or scripts, how teachers promulgate the refusal of discipline rather than obeisance, how university professors and graduate students detourne computer networks into the circulation of struggle instead of the circulation of counter-insurgency and so on. The refusal of work does not disappear, it merely changes form, along with the changing form of the capitalist imposition of work. What we need to study, and organize, is not merely the constitutive power of labor, but the constitutive power that we exercise in all fields of human endeavor. Only in this manner can we rethink the reconstitution of work in ways which reintegrate it as one meaningful activity among others in human experience.

Excerpted from: https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/ww ... eaver.html

[American Dream]

http://nefac.net/platform/

Anarchism And The Platformist Tradition


Platformism is a current within libertarian communism putting forward specific suggestions on the nature which anarchist organzation should take.

The origins of the Platform lie in the Russian anarchist movement's experiences during the Russian Revolution and the resulting civil war. One group of anarchist exiles (Dielo Trouda/Workers' Cause Group) came together in 1926 and published The Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, since known as 'The Platform'. They wrote the pamphlet to examine why the anarchist movement had failed to build on their successes before and during the revolution.

The Platform was an analysis of the disorganization of the anarchist movement at the time, and was an attempt to push it in a more organized, class struggle direction. The Platform was not an attempt at writing an anarchist manifesto. It was a discussion document and the authors never claimed to have all the answers.

The Platform was written because of what was going on in the international anarchist movement at that time. However, it remains relevant today in its insights on how libertarian communists should organize.

The Platform argues that to create a well organized libertarian communist movement, we need a "grouping of revolutionary worker and peasant forces on a libertarian communist theoretical basis (a specifically libertarian communist organization)" and "regrouping revolutionary workers and peasants on an economic base of production and consumption (revolutionary workers and peasants organized around production)".

Though they provided no extra insights on organizing around production, their ideas for organizing libertarian communist federations was something of controversy amongst many in the anarchist movement. To combat the disarray the movement was in, they suggested forming a "General Union of Anarchists" based on four basic principles: theoretical unity, tactical unity, collective responsibility and federalism.

Theoretical Unity meant simply that if you don't agree with someone, don’t be in a political group with them! This doesn't mean that everyone has to agree all the time (they won't) but there does need to be a certain amount of ideological unity. Everyone being 'anarchists' or 'libertarian' isn’t enough. If half the group believe in class struggle while the other half don’t, then both sides would benefit from having two smaller groups rather than one big group which spent all its time arguing.

Tactical Unity meant that the members of an organization should struggle together as an organised force rather than as individuals. Once a strategy has been agreed by the collective, all members should work towards ensuring its success saving resources and time concentrating in a common direction.

Collective Responsibility meant "the entire Union will be responsible for the political and revolutionary activity of each member; in the same way, each member will be responsible for the political and revolutionary activity of the Union." This means that each member should take part in the collective decision-making process and respect the decisions of the collective.

Federalism is an organizational structure based on "the free agreement of individuals and organizations to work collectively towards a common objective". All decisions are made by those effected by them as opposed to centralism, where decisions are made by a central committee for those effected by them.

Though Platformism had a shaky start with many prominent anarchists denouncing them as trying to 'Bolshevize' anarchism, it has now been taken on by many libertarian communist groups across the world such as the Workers' Solidarity Movement in Ireland, Northeastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists in North America and the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation in South Africa.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://shesamarxist.wordpress.com/2012/ ... ng-fact-2/

The Most Astounding Fact
Posted: March 8, 2012 | Author: Sycorax |



This video explains the way every atom we are composed of, was actually forged in the death of a dying massive star. At the moment of its death, a massive star burned hot enough to fuse together atoms into elements that are required for life. We are built of those elements. We are literally made of stars. The video points out the way this reveals our interconnectedness with the universe and our interdependency.

Materialist Marxists cannot deny, that there is something spectacularly ‘magical’ about this human existence. In fact, I think the pursuit of communism at its heart is about the fact of our interconnectedness and interdependency as a species and as part of this universe. Capitalism is anti-social, hides our interdependency and breeds the notion that we are all discrete individuals responsible for our lot and in perfect control of our lives. Interestingly, this orientation towards life is one that is arguably aligned best with the functions of our Ego*– the part of our brain hardwired for Self preservation.

Capitalism = Ego, pursuit of one’s own well being against and apart from the interests of the larger community.

Communism = Relates to our higher self, and is aligned with the realization of our universal interconnectedness and mutuality, an injustice to one, is an injustice to all.

This does not mean that under communism, we would all be wearing gray burlap sacs with no individuality and that there would be an erosion of the self as we know it. It is quite the opposite actually. As Marx writes:

“Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution”

In other words, communism would be a situation in which the truest and most fullest development of the SELF, would not be antithetical to the health of the community. Under capitalism, self preservation is fundamentally opposed to the well being of others. For example: you get the job, and live, but only because someone else did not get the job. This is the essence of capitalist social relations. Competition makes it so that being “self-seeking” is synonymous with being antagonistic and competitive with others. In a communist society, we would want a situation where the full realization of the individual is in harmony and not opposed to the realization of the community.

That’s my communism.

* Our Egos (some say) are rooted in the reptilian part of the brain. ‘Reptilian’ refers to our evolutionary ancestry (reptiles) and it means this portion of our brain is one of the oldest and most primitive. It deals with baser instinct, as well as fight or flight responses, and is where fear and anger come from (which are both defense mechanisms that we evolved in order to protect ourselves from danger).

[American Dream]

http://chaka85.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/to-be-free/

To be free




I like my body when it is with your body.

I like the familiarity of our limbs

the warmth and comfort they provide.

I like the feelings of ease

feelings some take for granted

feelings that are often denied to us.

Loveless systems breed repression

We are not suppose to exist

there is no language to help navigate our movement.

Instinctual,

we fumble through the dark

building our own paths

finding our tongues along the way.

[American Dream]

http://www.narconews.com/Issue67/article4554.html

Nothing Is Ever Won Without Organizing
Remarks to the First Nonviolence Training Session of the Mexican Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity

By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
February 27, 2012

(These are the author’s words, spoken in the first nonviolence training session of the Mexican movement against the war on drugs, attended by leaders and members of the movement’s national work commissions, held in Mexico City on February 17 to 19, 2012.)

Thank you to the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity for inviting me and to all of you present for your work and commitment. I will speak about organization, based on my own experiences as a community organizer and a journalist. The first thing you should know is this: All organizing begins with the telling of a story.

When we listen carefully to somebody’s story, we learn what motivates him, what she is passionate about. When we listen and learn from this story, we can then organize that person to do things that help us get what we want, by helping him and her get what they want, too. Listening is the first skill and duty of a community organizer. Before we can get somebody to do something, we have to learn what he and she want, which is usually different than what we presumed they wanted.

My story began at a workshop very much like this one. I was 17. It was an eight-hour nonviolence training session for people who wanted to participate in an occupation of a construction site in the Northeastern United States where a nuclear power plant was being built in a town called Seabrook. The movement that organized the occupation had decided that not everybody could participate. To be part of it, one had to attend the training in nonviolence, agree to certain guidelines, and organize one’s self with others in a small group of 10 or 15 people that they called an “affinity group.” Each group included people who would occupy the site, breaking the law in an act of civil disobedience, much like you saw the other night in the video about the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins. Each small group also included others who would not commit criminal trespass and instead organize support – legal, financial, public relations – for those that did.

On May 1, 1977, during that occupation, I was arrested with 1,414 other people. I lied about my age, told the police I was 18, so they kept me in jail for three days with the adults. It was the first of what would be 27 arrests for political activity. These occupations generated a lot of media attention at first. That brought more people to the anti-nuclear movement. But the movement kept repeating the same tactic over and over again. The tactic of occupations got repetitive and boring for the public and the press, and meanwhile a more militant faction sought to change the agreed-upon rules so as to allow and promote the destruction of property: for example, they wanted to bring wire cutters and cut down the fence that surrounded the nuclear site. After a long series of assemblies and arguments, those of us who didn’t think that was a good idea got worn down, tired and bored by the stupid endless meetings with their unwieldy consensus decision-making process, and one by one, fewer and fewer of us who had built that movement attended. The fence cutting faction eventually won the day. They were able to complete exactly one sit-in with their plan to destroy property. The protests turned from impressive and popular displays of our movement’s high level of organization and discipline into a battle between protesters and police. The media covered it that way. The tactic of the occupation lost public support: much like what has happened in recent months to the “Occupy Wall Street” protests in the United States.

I was only 19 by then but I had learned a lot about how to do things – I was trained to train others in nonviolence – and also a lot about how not to do things. My passion remained stopping the nuclear power industry because I believed, and still do, that it was a great danger to public health and the environment. By then I had dropped out of university and gone to live in the mountains of Massachusetts, near the oldest nuclear power plant on earth in a town called Rowe. There was no local movement to close that nuclear plant. A majority of the local population supported it. Many had jobs there. The company paid most of the town’s taxes. And it was a conservative farming region that saw that the anti-nuclear movement was dominated by former 1960s hippies in their 30s and 40s with long hair and all the other fashion statements that came with that. It was very difficult to reach a population already skeptical about our cause.

At first I tried to repeat the old tactic of nonviolent sit-ins, marches and occupations, going back to the original way we had done them with strict nonviolent discipline and rules. But it wasn’t getting the response I had hoped from the local community, which even if I did it with short hair and an American flag pin on my shirt, they still saw getting arrested as something outside of their own personal experience, something strange and something to fear because it was illegal.

I had already studied and read all I could about nonviolence; about Gandhi and King and Cesar Chavez, and analyses by authors like Gene Sharp, who was then a young Harvard University professor, and learned the histories of their struggles and the tactics they used. The nonviolent struggle by union workers of the Solidarity movement in Poland was also in the news and I read everything I could find on it. But very little had been written about that side of their movements; most of the books and media reports were about the big protests and marches, but not about all the little things they did to organize before and between those big media events.

Then I learned about something called “community organizing.” There was a man in Chicago named Saul Alinsky who wrote about it, who had created his “Rules for Radicals” – here, I’ll pass out copies of those rules, translated to Spanish, to each of you right now to take home and study – and also a famous radical named Abbie Hoffman had just published his autobiography and told of all the things he had done to organize the youth movement against the Vietnam war that did not get attention on the news. Another community organizer had moved into our mountain region from Philadelphia. His name was Bill Moyer. He had arrived when we were still in the protest and occupation stage of the movement. He was a lot older and more experienced than I. One day he had coffee with me and he had the nerve to tell me I was doing everything wrong!

“You have to learn more about the people you are trying to organize!” he told me. I resented him at first but after thinking about what he had said I realized he was right. So I went to talk with him again. And he made me a challenge: That if I were willing to spend one night going door to door asking people in their homes to sign a petition against a local nuclear plant, he would agree to train me in how to do it. And then he would meet with me after that and we’d talk about what I learned. I agreed and together we devised a petition and I went down the street, alone, knocking on the doors of total strangers, talking with housewives, farmers, workers of every kind who had just come home from their jobs. Some were having dinner and said they couldn’t talk. Some worked for the nuclear plant and slammed the door in my face. Others invited me in for coffee and maybe 30 percent signed the petition. When I tried to recruit those people to come to our next protest march, nobody wanted to do that. Even those who signed the petition didn’t want to risk arrest or get their names in the newspaper as protesters. I learned that regular people don’t like protesters! And some had a lot of questions about me. What was a young man with a heavy Bronx, New York accent doing in their community trying to tell them what to do?

I realized that if I were going to create a movement against the local nuclear plants I would have to blend in with the local people. I had already cut my hair. But now I began to wear the same clothes they wore. I got myself a job on a farm doing the same work they did. I learned as much about their craft as I could in order to have a chance to teach them mine, which was and is rebellion, but I had to find a better word for it! The local people didn’t want to talk about nuclear power or politics. But they loved to talk about what was important to their daily lives and work: at the local store and café people talked about cutting their wood to heat their homes in the winter, they’d tell stories of a farm animal escaping how they chased it down. They’d talk about fishing in the local river, and like everyone on earth, they talked a lot about their children and grandchildren. Once I got to listen enough to what was important to them I found ways to talk to them about the nuclear plant: how it’s electricity was more expensive than the wood we all used to heat our homes; how the radioactive waste from the plant would enter the food chain and contaminate the pig on the farm and the fish we caught in the stream; and how long after the nuclear plant would no longer be making electricity its poison waste would still be contaminating their children and grandchildren. To the extent that anybody listened to me it was because, in their eyes, I had become one of them; another farmer and good neighbor.

After listening to all their stories I was able to find a small group of them that agreed with me and wanted to close the nuclear plant. We got together and formed a small organization. We weren’t doing occupations and protests any more – they had become unpopular with the public because of the behavior of the fence-cutting faction – so the media had lost interest. One of the first things we did was to publish our own newspaper. We filled it with patriotic images (much like the Zapatistas use the national flag and sing the national anthem at all their gatherings) and told them the facts about the nuclear plant – how it harmed the environment, threatened their children and their farms, and made their electricity more expensive – in ways that focused on what was important to them.

We then made a plan on how to get that newspaper into the hands of every local citizen. We went to every store in the region and asked if we could leave some on the counter for customers to take for free. Some said no, some said yes. We made a list of every one who said yes so for future issues of the newspaper we knew already where we could put them. Only a very few of us did this at first. That’s all it takes. We also had conversations with them and learned their stories. We used what we learned about them to find ways to involve them in our movement. There was a priest sympathetic with our cause, so we invited him to come to our meetings and do a prayer to start each one. We accepted donations in the form of farm products and whenever somebody donated a barrel of tomatoes or a cake they had baked, that person was now invested in our movement and wanted to see it win. Once we got them to do that tiny first step we could go back to them again and again and ask them to do other things. We looked for ways to involve people with the skills and talents they already had. And we made sure to follow up with them, to always go back to their kitchen tables and ask them how they viewed the movement’s progress. That way nobody felt used by us only when we needed something from them.

One of my friends and organizing teachers from those days, Renny Cushing, explained to our School of Authentic Journalism class last year that “community organizing was sort of like social networking, except without the Internet!”

Taking the lesson of Bill Moyer with me, the guy who had taught me how to knock on doors, we organized a door knocking petition campaign in the county capital of Greenfield. I made a map of the city and divided it by voting districts and recruited people to go door to door with our petition on specific streets, until every street was covered and we had visited the entire city in a few weekends. I found that once we started doing community organizing, others who were already organizing their neighborhoods and towns around other matters flocked to us and helped us in the work, including a local political boss named Charles F. McCarthy, who could talk to an entire electoral district himself in a single day, and also knew everyone there by first name. Planning and discipline attract people who are already good at those things!

By then I had gotten a job in a restaurant where all the workers were also owners. I used the restaurant both as an organizing center and also as a kind of cover. It was an excuse, as a “fellow business owner,” to visit all the other store and restaurant owners in that city, ask them to put our movement newspaper on the counter, and seek to recruit them to our movement. In doing so, I learned to remember everyone’s names, make little notes about things they had told me, about their stories, so that the next time I saw them I could show them that their stories were important and memorable to me. That’s a lot harder to do now at my age, there are more names and faces I’ve forgotten than many will ever know – that’s an organizer’s life – but a 20-year-old is hard-wired for that kind of memory. In computer terms, you younger people have the available disk space.

These new tactics – they had been developed for decades, really, but they were new to me – succeeded in getting many more people involved in our struggle. I learned that ordinary people were much more willing to do things like knock on doors than attend protest marches. The movement lasted many years and many more things happened. We kept developing new tactics. We had learned that repeating even a successful tactic didn’t work as well. Repetition – holding the same marches with the same slogans and emblems – gets old and boring to people. I did a lot of crazy things for media attention, too. One time I sued the nuclear plant owner for six million dollars and represented myself in court. It was kind of a joke, really, meant to make them look ridiculous with their high paid lawyers up against a 20-year-old in a court of law. But when it became a front-page newspaper story people began to stop me on the street and ask, “so, what are you going to do with the six million dollars?” Those are the things everyone noticed. But for the most part the work I did was not aimed at media attention. The part that few ever saw were the things like going door to door, or calling 100 people on the same night to invite them to hear a speaker on the dangers of nuclear power, or organizing a dance concert to pay the costs of the movement.

Our movement also came to realize that the most important problem for most people was economic. We had learned to emphasize that these nuclear plants made their electric bills more expensive, especially the new plants that were being constructed. We intervened against power company rate hikes and filled public hearings by state regulatory agencies. And by delaying the process of the companies getting permission to raise electric rates, we succeeded in making them even more expensive, and uncertain for investors. We followed the money and began to cut it off from our enemy, the nuclear power industry.

During those same years I participated in the first Wall Street occupation, in 1979. We organized 20,000 people from communities like my own, people who lived near and organized against other nuclear plants, to all go to New York and hold a legal rally urging Wall Street banks and investors to stop nuclear investments. The next day 2,000 of us, trained in nonviolence, blocked the doors of the Stock Exchange and got arrested for it. We were orderly, calm, peaceful, we didn’t yell at the police and we succeeded in creating a calm enough situation that the police didn’t abuse us as much as they did more militant protests. We got a lot of public sympathy for it. And the whole thing lasted only two days. Then we went back home and continued organizing at the local level. More importantly, we brought the risky nature of nuclear investments to public attention. It didn’t take too long before the banks and finance industries began to take a second look, to notice how we were delaying plant construction and making their investments worth less, and they began to divest from the nuclear industry.

In those years, orders for new nuclear plants ground to a halt, and no new ones were built for the next three decades in the United States. The local nuclear plant in Rowe where we had started from zero with a hostile population and worked step by step for years to organize and educate the local people, that nuclear plant no longer exists. There is a grassy field where it used to operate (some of the waste is still there, but at least it’s not making any more of it).

And I’m going to tell you what Abbie Hoffman – the American dissident – told me when he noticed my organizing work and, later, took me on as his student to teach even newer and better methods of making political change. Abbie said, “there is no greater high than challenging the power structure, giving it your all, and winning.” And we did win battle after battle and I learned that he was right. To take on a struggle and win feels like nothing else on earth. I’ve felt that way here in Latin America a few times too, like when Banamex sued me and we beat them in court! That’s a high that no drug can ever provide. I guess it’s kind of like winning the World Cup or the Super Bowl except it really means something and changes life for the better for millions of people. And by doing it, we learn that we have all the power we already need, more power than most of us know. We learn to stop consenting and giving that power to the State, to the private sector, to the media, and to take it back for ourselves. And in doing that we become more human in the process, and more able to organize, defend and advance everything we care about on this earth.

Nonviolence gave me the tools I needed to begin this life of struggle. Community organizing and authentic journalism gave me the tools I needed to finish and win many of those battles. Marches, protests, occupations, caravans, media events, all of those things are important but, alone, they have never won any struggle. Jim Lawson, architect of the desegregation of Nashville in 1960, who Martin Luther King called “the foremost theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world,” is still doing that work today – he is a professor in our School of Authentic Journalism – and he says he learned the same thing. It’s all about the organizing.

Here is a very important point: Organizing is not activism and activism is not organizing! Activists contact people that already agree with them and hold a protest or event aimed at getting media attention. They hold endless meetings and argue as much about stuff that doesn’t mean anything to the public – ideologies, political correctness, philosophical debates, identity politics and all the rest of the garbage taught in universities – as they do about stuff that does. Organizers are different than activists. We’re less interested in those that already agree with us. We are more interested in reaching, persuading and organizing people who don’t yet agree, or who agree but think nothing can be done, and finding the ways bring them into projects of mutual interest. That all begins by listening to their stories. After that, there are thousands of different tactics and methods that can be deployed toward winning a goal. Thirty-five years into this story, I’ve only done hundreds of those tactics. I still have many more to learn. Another thing about organizing is it never becomes boring. There’s always something new to find out, a new puzzle to solve.

The last thing I will tell you about my story is one of the reasons I ended up coming to Mexico fifteen years ago. Let me make you a challenge like the one Bill Moyer made to me: Today, I’d like you to practice at being an organizer. You can do that by listening very carefully to my story because it will tell you how to get me to do things that you want me to do. If you listen well you will understand my motives, what I want, and when you can devise ways to help me get them that also help you get what you want, that’s organizing!

Your struggle against the drug war is one I have fought for more than two decades, as an organizer and as a journalist. But I found in the United States that the many organizations and individuals who share that goal had zero interest in the two best weapons to get anything done: nonviolence and community organizing. They’re more interested in protesting, getting media attention, looking to “important” people up above – celebrities, politicians, academics, people with titles and degrees, “respectable” people – to endorse the legalization of drugs than they have ever been in going door to door and organizing on the most local level to build a mass movement to stop the war. I realized in the 1990s that my own people, the gringos, were the most clueless people on earth when it came to changing their own lives. And so I came to Mexico to learn from people here, I began with the indigenous of Chiapas, who were succeeding at changing their own lives where my own nation was not.

In the past eleven months the journalists at Narco News and I have reported your steps in this young movement. We think it’s pretty obvious that we have reported it differently than the rest of the media, even the rest of the independent media. Now, I want you to remember what Abbie said about there being no greater high than challenging the system, giving it your all, and winning. Now, imagine winning the struggle to end this war that has taken 50,000 lives in Mexico in five years. Imagine how good that will feel. Imagine how that will change your daily life and that of everyone else for the better when there is not so much violence and repression all around us. But also imagine how the very idea of “winning” might change you and everyone you are working with on behalf of this struggle.

I am here with you because in eleven months you have done more to end the drug war than my colleagues in the United States have been able to do in 40 years, even after they have spent millions of dollars trying to do so. You have already created the world’s largest mass movement, its biggest mobilizations, against that war, and you have already won public sympathy and opinion over to your side. I’m here reporting your story because I think you are advancing and have a better chance of winning this struggle than any other people in any other land. And when you win it, you will collapse the drug war almost immediately in the United States as a consequence and that will end it in most of the world, too.

That victory is in the present moment and in the space around each of you that you can reach out and touch. It is in the door that you will knock on and in the person whose story you will seek and listen to in order to be able to organize that person. That’s how our victories against nuclear power happened: one door at a time, one person’s story at a time. That always begins with the person nearest to us; our neighbor, our co-worker, our friend or family member.

If this movement stays on the path of serious nonviolence and mixes it with the art of community organizing, you are going to win. You’ll learn along the way that it’s not about protests or about denouncing or complaining. It’s not about how many people come to a demonstration (although you’ve already had more than have been at any action against the drug war in the history of the world). It’s not about asking for permission or endorsement from important people or powerful institutions. Victory is about what we build from below. It’s about organizing combined with the power of nonviolence.

My life was changed when we began this story, when I was 17, at a nonviolence workshop very much like this one. I really look forward to seeing, and reporting, your next steps. So what are you going to do?

[American Dream]

http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress. ... 03/11/iwd/

Occupy Patriarchy and Class Struggle: Speech at International Womyn’s Day
Posted on March 11, 2012 by jomo206




Some awesome folks from Gender Equality Caucus of Decolonize/Occupy Seattle put together a International Womyn’s Day event yesterday. They invited me to share some thoughts around gender and labor. Here is the speech:

International womyn’s day is about unity. But we can’t have unity unless we address the existing divisions. and we can’t address the divisions except through struggle, because the system we live in, the capitalist system, is based on divisions.

We live in the international division of labor, where we are divided by race, gender, and disabilities. we are divided alongside these categories — we are made to believe that oh, this is woman’s work, oh, this is men’s work; oh, this is peope of color work, this is white people work, or, this is work for people w disabilities — This system we live in teaches us to value, or devalue one another, based on the roles that we think each other fit under this division of labor. How does it do that? It does it by making it seem that it’s natural for some people to do certain kinds of work. Natural for white men to govern, natural for women of color to be silent, natural for immigrants to work long hours with little pay. When it’s natural for someone to be a servant, to be hardworking, to be overworked, then you don’t have to pay them for the work that they actually do. Then you don’t have to recognize and value the labor.

But the point of so much of this, is to make us internalize a lack of self worth. It is to hide the fact that we have power. We do not know our power and no one dares to tell us. In fact, everything tries to deny us that. How many of us have worked in jobs where we know that we are key to running the workplace, but are constantly told by the bosses that they dont need us? How many of us have been fired from jobs simply because we stuck up for ourselves, and been told that we have “attitude” or are “non compliant”?

For women and queer people, this devaluing of our self worth is taken a notch deeper. For many of us, it extends beyond our workplaces, into our homes, into our relationships and sex lives. We are told not only in our workplaces that we are dispensable, many of us are also told in our homes, or our relationships, that we aren’t good enough, aren’t light skinned enough, aren’t skinny enough, aren’t straight enough, that we deserve the violence, that we deserve the shame, the gossip. Our dignity and self confidence are open ground, for the haters to stomp on.

This system invests so much in our self denigration because if recognized our worth, we would take over. Who wouldn’t? Who would wanna live in poverty, under constant threat of police violence, economic oppression, under increasing threats of global warming caused by industrial pollution? We have so much collective intelligence, so much creativity, street smarts and knowledge, that if we had the time and freedom to pool all of that together and to develop ourselves, we would be unbeatable.

In my memory, in the best days of Occupy, when we had the camp here, we saw glimpses of that solidarity, unity and collective intelligence.

It’s not just work that receives a wage that keeps this world running. It is also the unwaged labor, the work that our parents and family do to raise us, to reproduce this society for a next generation of workers. This unwaged work is never paid for. It’s the extra work after the paid work. This work in particular, is gendered. It is feminized, and it is also racialized. Historically in the US, it is women of color who have reproduced this society in these invisible ways.

So when we talk about the unity we need for International Womyn’s Day, we include among us the varied ways in which women and queer warriors have resisted the exploitation of their labor. Including those that are waged and unwaged. We include among us sexworkers in the Tenderloin who fought for their dignity, against transphobia and police harassment in the Compton cafe riot in 1966, before Stonewall. We include among us the women of color who defended themselves against the sexualized violence of slave masters and bosses, women who have insisted on giving birth to their children under the pressures of forced sterilization, women who have fought for reproductive justice, women workers in the maquiladoras and factories around the globe who resist everyday in and out of the shopfloor. Everyday, internally and externally, we resist this system that devalues, exploits and beats us down. This system that wants us to reproduce it everyday in submission and in silence. We honor this strength because it does not come easily. It will only be through common struggle, where we put into practice the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, across race, sexuality, gender expression, that we will have a shot at reproducing a different kind of world.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://sarahtopz.tumblr.com/page/5

QUEERS OF COLOR AGAINST PRIVILEGE POLITICS

The flipside of privilege politics, the side that really irks me, is that it claims that oppressed people are weak and incapable of overcoming the material conditions that have held us back. Essentially, it meets us where we’re at and leaves us there. Privilege politics take away our Subjectivity. For example, I could say that when straight, white men take up a lot of space in conversations with me, this is because of their privilege and my lack of privilege. And this may be true. But my answer is not that men should just give up their privilege and everything is ok; my answer is that I am strong enough to intervene, take up more space for myself and tell that man that he is dominating our conversation. Centering our theoretical arguments around one side giving up their privilege is to center the fight for queer liberation on straight folks: if they just stop being homo/trans*phobic, we will be free. RIDICULOUS!

¡¡¡We will only win our liberation by fighting for it ourselves!!!

[American Dream]

"Males of all ages need settings where their resistance to sexism is affirmed and valued. Without males as allies in struggle feminist movement will not progress. As it is we have to do so much work to correct the assumption deeply embedded in the cultural psyche that feminism is anti-male. Feminism is anti-sexism. A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behaviour infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat."

-bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000.

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://boingboing.net/2012/03/13/seekin ... emale.html

Seeking Asian Female
By Xeni Jardin at 8:17 am Tuesday, Mar 13



In the WSJ, Jeff Yang reviews "Seeking Asian Female," Debbie Lum's documentary about white guys romantically fixated on Asian women—specifically, one white guy, and his quest to marry the Asian lady of his dreams. The film debuted this week at the annual SXSW festival in Austin, and follows the story of Steven, "a 60-year-old, twice-divorced white male with an uncanny resemblance to Aussie actor Geoffrey Rush and a case of yellow fever bordering on the terminal."

Steven’s quixotic mission to find and marry a “young Asian bride” had already taken up years of his life and cost him thousands of dollars in memberships to online matchmaking sites like Asian Friend Finder and international “introduction services” that promised to connect him with the “cherry blossom” or “sunshine girl” of his dreams. When Steven is first introduced, Lum says in voiceover that “the first time I visited him in his own home, I had to fight the urge to leave.” We can immediately see why. A giggling Steven, addressing Lum as she ascends the stairs, shouts a hearty hello while waving her in: “Welcome! Welcome! Your hair looks cute! You look very Chinese, with the bangs…and you know I like that!”


Read the rest here. Trailer below.

[American Dream]

Wayne Price

What is Class Struggle Anarchism?


Part I: Why the Working Class

Recently an activist friend, who has been influenced by Michael Albert’s Parecon program, wrote to me. He asked, “Why should we call ourselves class struggle anarchists instead of feminist-antiracist-green-class struggle anarchists?” In other words, why single out the struggle of the working class? At least his approach includes class conflict as one of the aspects of social struggle. There are many, liberals and radicals, who completely reject class struggle. Many denounce unions (from the right). Hardt and Negri have been influential in replacing the working class theoretically with a concept of the “multitude.”

Among anarchists, a great many reject any major role for class struggle by workers. This is true of those who say they reject civilization and industry altogether. Although otherwise disagreeing with such primitivists, it was also true of Murray Bookchin. In his “Listen Marxist!” essay, for example (in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 1986, Montreal: Black Rose Books), he denounced “The Myth of the Proletariat.” “The working class [has been] neutralized as ‘the agent of revolutionary change’....The class struggle [has been] co-opted into capitalism.” (p. 202) He denied the revolutionary potential of workers, instead focusing on “youth,” the “people,” or “citizens,” who would change society for solely moral reasons.

Rejection of the working class is the real position of almost all Marxist-Leninists (including Communist Parties, Maoists, and orthodox Trotskyists). The Marxist-Leninists pay lip service to Marx’s belief in the centrality of working class struggle. Actually they believe that there can be “socialist“ revolutions without the working class (as in Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, and Cuba). And that there can be “socialist” (“post-capitalist” or whatever) societies without working class participation, and, in fact, with the workers being brutally oppressed (as in the Soviet Union, China, etc.). In nonrevolutionary conditions, these views lead them toward class collaboration (reformism). Since socialism does not require rousing the workers, in their view, their parties might as well form alliances with capitalists.

Why then do we revolutionary anarchists call ourselves class struggle anarchists? My friend offered a partial explanation: It is not controversial on the left to call ourselves feminists or antiracists. Even liberals do. Some sort of ecological thinking or environmentalism is accepted by almost everyone but the far right. But a belief in a class-against-class perspective is held by only a minority. To be sure, there are many people who are for unions. Right now John Edwards is running for U.S. president on a program of supporting unions and fighting poverty. Yet his program is the opposite of class struggle. It is to get the workers to support his capitalist party.

Similarly, Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (and far from the worst of union officials), makes coalitions with business. He has written, “Employees and employers need organizations that solve problems, not create them.” This is not the same as, “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working class themselves” (the first clause of the Rules of the First International, written by Marx and loved by revolutionary anarchists). By calling ourselves class struggle anarchists, we make a point about who we are for....and who we are against.

Class struggle anarchism continues the tradtions of communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, and overlaps with libertarian (autonomist) Marxism, such as council communism. In his overview of current British anarchism, Benjamin Franks writes, “The organizations identified under the heading of ‘class struggle anarchism’ include those that identify themselves as such, as well as those from autonomist marxist and situationist-inspired traditions.” (Rebel Alliances, 2006, Edinburgh: AK Press & Dark Star, p. 12) I do not claim to speak for all such organizations, nor am I an official spokesperson for my own federation. Yet I think my views are consistent with the mainstream of class struggle anarchism. I am not going to review all aspects of class struggle anarchism (such as our goal of decentralized, self-managed, socialism). Instead, I will focus on the importance of a working class, class-against-class, approach.

Class Struggle is Central to Capitalism

Let us look at the “economic” system of capitalism — without yet considering how it relates to other systems of oppression, such as race or gender (these will be discussed in Part 2). I make no claim that individual workers are better, nobler, or nicer than individual capitalists, or farmers, or college presidents. Individually, workers can be just as mean as anyone else. The issue is the potential social role of the working class.

Workers, as a collectivity, have a special relation to the means of production. The means of production (and distribution, and social services) are owned by a minority, the capitalist class, who are driven to accumulate capital. We workers, lacking land or machines, must sell ourselves to the capitalists, or rather, must sell our ability to work for a time (the commodity labor power). We work until we have produced enough commodities to equal the value of our wages (or salaries). Then we continue to work, to produce more commodities, creating extra — surplus — value, which is the basis of the bosses’ profits. That is, we are exploited. We are exploited, not only as individuals, but as a collectivity, a whole cooperating mass of people, who are required to work together at the workplace and in society as a whole in order to keep the system going.

Looking at tables of employment, Michael Zweig defines 62 percent of the U.S. labor force as working class (in The Working Class Majority, 2000, Ithica, NY: ILR/Cornell Univ. Press). The U.S. Department of Labor, he also notes, classifies 82 percent of private sector, nonfarm, employees as nonsupervisory employees. “That is why I say, we live in a country with a working class majority.” (p. 30) The workers include blue collar and white collar workers, workers “by hand and brain” (and pink collar workers, as much of women’s work is called).

The working class, as a CLASS, is broader than immediately employed wage workers. It includes unemployed workers and retired workers. Besides employed women, it includes women homemakers married to male workers, and their children. It is a whole class, counterposed to another class.

(There is also what is usually called the “middle class.” This is typically regarded as including better-off workers — white collar and skilled workers — independent professionals, small businesspeople, and the lower levels of management. These middle layers are not really an independent class. Mostly they are part of the two main classes, capitalist and working class, and they usually orient toward one or the other.)

Traditionally, anarchism, like all varieties of socialism, opposed class exploitation, the alienated work which goes with it, and the poverty it creates. Anarchists and Marxists alike aimed at a classless society. Who would create such a society? Morally it is in the interest of all humanity. But surely those who are immediately exploited have a special interest in ending their exploitation. Their experience makes it easier for them to take a moral view. It is wrong to elevate “the people” or “citizens” over the workers in their direct need to end exploitation. This view would mean that those who are not immediately exploited by capitalism have as much reason to fight against exploitation as those who are forced into alienated labor. It regards the capitalist, the police officer, and the manager as just as likely to oppose capitalist exploitation as those who are “under the lash” as they work. This opinion is convenient for those who want to deny the need for a revolution.

In her brilliant defense of a working class perspective, The Retreat from Class (1998, London: Verso), Ellen Meiksens Wood criticizes various “post-Marxists” (but could just as well be criticizing Bookchin): “The implication [of their nonclass views — WP] is that the workers are no more affected by capitalist exploitation than are any other human beings who are not themselves the direct objects of exploitation. This also implies that capitalists derive no fundamental advantage from the exploitation of workers, that the workers derive no fundamental disadvantage from their exploitation by capital, that workers would derive no fundamental advantage from ceasing to be exploited, that the condition of being exploited does not entail an ‘interest’ in the cessation of class exploitation, that the relations between capital and labor have no fundamental consequences for the whole structure of social and political power, and that the conflicting interests between capital and labor are all in the eye of the beholder....This makes nonsense out of...the whole history of working class struggles against capital.” (p. 61)

It is not inevitable that the workers will become revolutionary (although Marx and Engels can be read as implying this). Better-off workers can be bought-off. Worse-off workers can be demoralized and beaten down. Bookchin argued that the hierarchical nature of the capitalist workplace teaches the workers to accept subordination. Be this as it may, those who are oppressed will resist. It is in the interest of the workers to resist their exploitation. In fact, there is dissatisfaction and constant (if low-level) struggle going on in every workplace. This conflict has resulted in revolutionary consciousness for at least a minority. Since the workers (unlike, say, peasants) do not have land or machines of our own, we tend to be collectivist and cooperative in our organizing and our programs. And, having our hands on the means of production, transportation, distribution, communication, and service, our class has an enormous (potential) power, which could shake all of society. Again, these are tendencies and potentialities, not inevitabilities.

The Negative Stereotype of the Working Class

It should not be surprising that most of the left — anarchist and nonanarchist — should have antiworking class views. The left is dominated by people from the middle class. Some, such as college students, may be more easily radicalized than most workers, because students do not have the immediate responsibilities of earning a living or supporting a family. But their relative privileges make them more likely to have class prejudices against workers. They may have unconscious elitist assumptions about their “right” to rule. Liberals look to bettering society by rising within the existing centers of power. The more radical are attracted to visions of bureaucratic class rule, with nationalization and centralized planning, as existed under the state capitalism of the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Castro’s Cuba. Others imagine that they can create a better world by only living in bohemian personal freedom (which is not bad in itself but is not an alternative to building popular movements).

Middle class enemies of the working class argue that U.S. workers are ignorant, racist, sexist, superpatriotic, religiously superstitious, anti-immigrant, and politically passive. This is the negative stereotype. Like most stereotypes, it contains both truth and falsehood. It ignores the fact that the working class includes most People of Color, immigrants, women, etc. It leaves out that workers are generally for universal health care and for other social services, against the Iraqi war, suspicious of big business and politicians, pro-union, antifascist, and pro-democracy. To the extent that the negative stereotype is true, it is true of all classes. Workers are not more politically ignorant, racist, etc. than U.S. middle or upper classes.

What is certainly true is that workers (in the U.S. and everywhere else) are not revolutionary anarchists. But this is another way of saying that the population of the U.S. and elsewhere, regardless of class, is not for anarchist revolution. While some parts of the population may be more radical than others, overall we are very, very, far from a pre-revolutionary period in which most people want a big social change.

Unfortunately, there is all too much truth to the negative stereotype of the working class. It is not enough that the workers are no worse than the middle or upper classes. The working class needs to be better than the other classes if we are to create a self-managed society. How will the working class transcend its weaknesses? Only by fighting. In the course of struggle — from shop floor and community issues to revolution — our class learns and improves. Through struggle we educate ourselves. We become capable of a true democracy. There is no other way.

Right now, the minority which is in favor of anarchist revolution should be thinking about long-term strategy: who has an interest in ending capitalist exploitation? who has the potential power to stop all society and change the system? who has a history of fighting against capitalist exploitation? The answers to these strategic questions will lead us to a working class perspective.

Part II: The Relation Between the Working Class and Nonclass Oppressions

Why do we call ourselves class struggle anarchists instead of feminist- antiracist-Gay liberationist-green-class struggle anarchists? What is the relationship among class and nonclass forms of oppression, such as gender and race? Instead of the base/superstructure metaphor, we should have a model of an overlapping network of oppressions, of which class is at the center. This leads to strategic conclusions.

As I argued in Part 1, the working class is central to the fight against capitalism. But what is its relation to other sections of the population and their systems of oppression? How does class relate to women and patriarchy; to African-Americans and white supremacy; to “Third World” nations and neocolonialism; to immigrants and nativism; and to other oppressions, too numerous to name? How does class relate to apparently nonclass issues such as war or global warming? I am not discussing the morality of oppression, let alone whether one form of oppression is worse than another (such as anti-Semitism vs. discrimination against the Deaf). All oppression is evil and should be opposed. I want to discuss an analysis of the relations among oppressions and the strategic conclusions which can be drawn from this.

The Base/Superstructure Model

Marxists have traditionally used a model of a base and a superstructure. The base is supposed to be the process of production as it is organized in any particular society, particularly the relations among the classes. The superstructure is everything else: the state, culture, gender and racial relations, etc. The advantage of this metaphor is that it points to the enormous influence of class relations upon every aspect of society; this is the strength of historical materialism. But there are difficulties with this model. For example, if the state is essential to the maintenance of capitalism, then why is it in the superstructure and not the base? Strategically, this image can lead to regarding every nonclass issue as only derivative. It may be taken to mean that revolutionaries should only focus on class issues, because nonclass oppressions will automatically be resolved once a classless society is reached. In this view, nonclass issues are irrelevant distractions from the real issue. They are not quite real. Once the workers seize power, it may be felt, nonclass oppressions, just like the state, will “wither away”, without any special effort to deal with them.

Sophisticated Marxists have a subtler, more dialectical, interpretation, but the model lends itself to this mechanistic politics. Consider the statement by the libertarian Class War Federation (U.K.) that the middle class functions “to promote ideas that keep us divided like racism and sexism.... to divert our energy into harmless activity that is called reformism, e.g. Greenpeace, CND [Committee for Nuclear Disarmament], feminism, unions....” (Unfinished Business..., 1992, Stirling, Scotland: AK Press; p. 57) The book has a cartoon in which rich people are dancing on a platform which is being supported by people who are foolishly thinking ( in balloons), “Ecology; No Nukes; No Meat; Feminism; Third World; Save the....” (p. 8 ) At least in this statement and cartoon, movements for ecological balance, women’s liberation, national liberation, and opposition to nuclear war are not seen as possible allies of “ class war” but only as middle class diversions. Racism and sexism are seen as problems only because they divide the working class, rather than as issues in themselves.

On the other hand, the Marxist historian, Ellen Meiksins Wood, concluded, “The base/superstructure metaphor has always been more trouble than it is worth...It has been made to bear a theoretical weight far beyond its limited capacities....” (Democracy Against Capitalism, 1995, Cambridge, Britain: Cambridge Univ. Press; p. 49-50) (As I stated in Part 1, class struggle anarchism overlaps to a great extent with libertarian Marxism; I regard myself as a Marxist-informed anarchist.)

There is an alternate metaphor which I also reject, that of a strict pluralism. The different oppressions of society are seen as parallel to each other, each by itself, standing on its own. Women’s oppression is seen as real but distinct from racism, which is separate from the oppression of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, and Transexuals, and they are all parallel to something called “classism.” While this view accepts the reality of distinct oppressions, it leads to a reformist view: that it is all right for the women’s struggle, for example, to ignore class and race (and therefore be dominated by white middle class women who accept capitalism), just as the parallel workers’ movement can ignore sexism and racism, since these are distinct oppressions. Instead, I would emphasize that all oppressions are intertwined and overlapping, leaning on and supporting each other. I like the metaphor of a pile of pickup sticks, all leaning on each other, although some may be more central in the pile than others.

White Supremacy

Many treat oppressions as distinct populations, as though workers were over here, women over there, and African-Americans in another area. This is misleading. The U.S. population, for example, can be analyzed in terms of class: capitalists, workers, and middle sections. It can also be analyzed in terms of race and nationality/ethnicity: European-Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and others. It can be analyzed in terms of gender: male and female. It can be analyzed in terms of sexual orientation: heterosexual, GLBT people. Etc., etc. But these remain the same humans. These analyses are abstractions: we abstract (take out) certain features in order to understand them better. The analyses of systems of oppression are true, that is, they are useful for understanding how people behave and how they identify themselves. But this is still the same population. The systems overlap and interact. For example, an African-American working woman is not oppressed part of the time as Black, and then part of the time as a woman, and then oppressed/exploited part of the time as a worker (considering that even her non-working hours are dependent on her income earned as a worker). We could analyze her that way, but in fact her life is a totality.

Consider white supremacy. Africans were first kidnapped and brought to North and South America for clearly economic reasons: to be a kind of laborers, namely slaves. They produced commodities (tobacco, cotton, etc.) which were sold on the world market. Today African-Americans are overwhelmingly in the working class, most being in the poorest sections. Their oppression serves two class purposes: it creates a pool of workers who can be super-exploited at low wages, and it weakens the overall working class, due to racial divisions and the white workers’ belief in their superiority. While ethnocentrism is as old as the human species, racism as an ideology was first invented during slavery to justify slavery and the robbery of Native Americans. It was elaborated in the era of imperialism to build support for colonialism.

But this analysis does not mean that white supremacy is only a matter of economics. There are, after all, some rich African-Americans, who may still be arrested for Driving While Black. Whatever its origins, racial oppression is real. In their struggle against it, African-Americans created themselves as a people, with their own culture and consciousness — a people which still fights for its freedom. As a set of opinions, racism is near-universal among whites, ranging from the liberal “blindspots” which even we antiracists have, to the moderate prejudices of most whites, to the virulent race hatred of fascists. Racism affects not only the economy but also the politics and the culture of society. This will not go away just through reasonable arguments; it requires mass struggles — struggles by Black people as Black people, in alliance with white antiracists.

The struggles of African-Americans overlap with all other struggles. In the fifties and sixties, the rebellion of African-Americans played a key role in shaking up all of society, inspiring the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, the Gay movement, as well as working class struggles (M.L. King was shot while in Memphis to support a mostly-Black sanitation workers’ strike). Great progress was made in limiting white supremacy — namely the end of legal (Jim Crow) segregation. But the various mechanisms of racist-capitalist society have kept African-Americans on the bottom of society. It will take a total revolution to change that.

Patriarchy

Patriarchy — male supremacy — also interacts with all other aspects of our oppressive, authoritarian, society. Women’s lives are directly affected by their race and by their class. Approximately half of adult women are employed workers. Even nonemployed homemakers depend on the incomes of their husbands, which depends on their class, and is influenced by their race.

More fundamentally, women’s lives are determined by their role in the family, which is shaped by the kind of society it is in. The nuclear family of late capitalism is a center of consumption of commodities. It is where the labor power commodity of workers (male and female, adult and children) is created and re-created. It is where the social psychology of our society is passed on to the next generation. The relations between the family and capitalism is subtle and complex but very real. The image of women is directly related to their role in the family (and before capitalism, in the families of feudal, slave, etc., class societies).

Interestingly, Engels included the role of women as being as much in the “base” of society as was the production of goods. “According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the final instance [Note — WP], the production and reproduction of immediate life. This, again, is of a twofold character: ...the production of the means of existence...; on the other side, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.... The social organization...is determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labor on the one hand and of the family on the other. “ (Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1972, NY: International Publishers; p. 71-72) He speculated that the oppression of women predated class society and was its origin.

Without accepting Engels’ base/superstructure model (note his highly qualifying “in the final instance”; do we ever reach the “final instance”?), I agree that “the production and reproduction of immediate life” strongly influences all other social processes. I also agree that the oppression of women goes way back in prehistory and is very deep in the structures of our society. It directly affects, and is affected by, the class structure and all other aspects of our politics and culture. This too will take a total revolution to end.

I could go on to cite many other forms of oppression and to relate them to each other and to the class structure. For example, national oppression is directly related to imperialism, rooted in capitalist class relations. Ecological destruction is related to the drive of capitalism to constantly accumulate capital, treating the natural world as a mine. Homophobia is directly related to the social definitions of gender, rooted in the capitalist family structure and its social psychology. And so on, in complex forms of interaction. The point is that each oppression supports all the others; they all support capitalist exploitation and are supported by it. The fight against each requires a fight against all; the ending of each requires the ending of all. There will be no classless society unless there is also a society with the liberation of women, People of Color, etc.

In his study of trends in anarchism, Benjamin Franks summarizes the view raised here: It “regards capital relations to be dominant in most contexts, but not the sole organizing force....Capitalism interacts with other forms of oppressive practices that may not be wholly reducible to economic activity. Here different subjugated identities are formed.... However, as capitalism is still a significant factor, economic liberation must also be a necessary feature.” (Rebel Alliances, 2006, Edinburgh: AK Press; p. 181)

The Special Role of Class

Each form of oppression must be analyzed in its concreteness. For example, the oppression of women does not work the same way as the oppression/exploitation of the working class. Looking at the class system, there are specific aspects which distinguish it from other forms of systemic oppression.

First, is the goal. The goal of women’s liberation is not the destruction of men but the reorganization of relations between women and men (although the definition of what men and women are is likely to change over time). The goal of Black liberation is not the destruction of white people but the reorganization of relations between European-Americans and African-Americans (although, in the long run, the races may dissolve as separate groups). But the goal of a working class revolution is the total overturning of the capitalist class, its destruction as a class, and replacing it with the stateless rule of the working class (moving toward a classless society).

Second is the power of the rulers. As a collectivity, men dominate women. But that does not mean that men — all men — run society. There are no meetings of men to make decisions on how to run the government. (If there are, I have not been invited.) Most men are in the working class and have little power. Given their choice, they would probably prefer child care programs and an end to job discrimination against women (who include their wives and daughters). Similarly white people, as a collectivity, dominate People of Color. But white people do not have special meetings where they decide on domestic or foreign policies. Again, most European-Americans are in the working class and are really powerless (whatever they imagine).

However, the capitalist class really does run society! This is why it is called the ruling class. (Of course, most businesspeople are white and male.) The capitalists own their businesses and run them (directly or through hired managers). Although only 1 to 5 percent of the population, they control the production of goods and services by which we all live. They determine employment and unemployment for the workers. By their wealth and influence, they control the two political parties. They own and run the mass media, which are the main outlets for news and which shape popular culture. They dominate the government at all levels. Their class rule must be completely overturned if there is to be a better world.

Third is the potential power of the oppressed. As already stated, the struggles of African-Americans in the fifties and sixties shook up all aspects of U.S. life. I should also point to the influence of the Vietnamese, an oppressed nation which resisted U.S. imperialism. Their struggle for national liberation greatly added to this period’s shake up of the U.S. (and the world). The women’s liberation movement also affected all our culture and politics. The Gay movement was more marginal in size, but its impact was quite large in causing reconsideration of sexual stereotypes. (Women’s rights and Gay rights are still major issues in U.S. politics.)

However, the working class is unique among oppressed groups in its possible power. As I said in Part 1, only the workers (as workers) can actually stop this society altogether. And only the working class can start it up again on a new basis. Our class produces the goods; we transport them; we distribute them; we serve the people’s needs. We have an enormous potential power. Anyone who has been in a city during a major strike knows how true this is. One successful general strike in a major city would transform U.S. politics. Almost the whole of capitalist politics exists to prevent the working class from being aware of this power and using it.

Strategic Conclusions

From the above analysis, I draw conclusions on a strategic (not a moral-only) level. The first is that we are right to call ourselves class struggle anarchists. We are right to put class struggle specifically at the center of our politics. Strategically, the key enemy is the capitalist ruling class and its allies. We seek to mobilize the enormous, unique, power of the working class majority against them.

Second, we revolutionaries should support each and every struggle against oppression, no matter how big or small, whether obviously connected to class or not (although all such issues overlap with class). Besides having its own sources, each system of oppression supports capitalism, and is supported by capitalism. Which is to say that fighting against each oppression undermines capitalism, as fighting against capitalism undermines each oppression.

This system is very powerful and complex. It will take everything we have to overthrow it. We must point to every evil in this society to open people’s eyes to the need for revolution. We need every issue which might mobilize people to fight on their own behalf . In practice, a revolutionary group needs to prioritize its limited energies, but in principle we must oppose every evil effect of this society, and to be on the side of everyone willing to fight for a better world.

These two strategic conclusions do not contradict each other. It is at the intersection of exploitation and nonclass oppressions that we find the greatest potential for revolutionary passion — among working class immigrants or working class women, for example. In every workers’ struggle, we should look for its effects on women, African-Americans, immigrants, youth, etc. We should use such connections to strengthen the struggle — otherwise they may become sources of splits and weakness. On the other hand, in every nonclass movement, we should be looking for the class conflicts. We should oppose the middle class, pro-capitalist, leadership of the women’s movement, African-American movement, peace movement, etc. — and also of the unions! Instead, we raise a program which is in the interests of working class women, African-American workers, etc., and which exposes the capitalist causes of war. Capitalism is at the center of the authoritarian network of oppressions. They all must be abolished.

The Communist Manifesto states (and class struggle anarchists would agree), “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent, movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.” Alternate translation: “The proletariat...cannot stand erect without bursting asunder the whole superstructure of strata that make up official society.” (in H. Draper, The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto, 1998, Berkeley CA: Center for Socialist Studies; p. 133)

In other words, the rebellion of the working class, especially those on the very bottom, shakes up everything, raising evey issue of every section of capitalist society. However, Marx and Engels knew that, even in Britain at the time, wage-workers were not a majority, let alone in other countries. (Even today, when we have a working class majority in many countries, the core of the proletariat, industrial workers, remains a minority — if a large one.) They saw the working class as winning allies among the oppressed (even if they did not have a full understanding of all oppressions). Twenty years later, Engels wrote, “The class exclusively dependent on wages all its life is still far from being a majority of the German people. It is, therefore, also compelled to seek allies.” (in Draper, 1998; p. 232)

A working class-led revolution is not going to be a seizure of state power by an elite but the conscious self-liberation of the “immense majority”: all the oppressed, at the center of which is the proletariat. And it is only the proletariat — the multi-national, multi-racial, multicultured, (etc.,) working class — which can hold together all these rebellious forces, and channel them into a revolution. The existence of a majoritarian proletarian movement is not to be found but must be created through revolutionary practice.

For approximately two centuries our class has fought. It has achieved victories and suffered terrible defeats. This working class of capitalism has been ground down, bought off, massacred, lied to, had its worst prejudices appealed to, denied all rights, granted limited democratic rights, sent off in wars, had its unions and parties turned against it, been slandered and counted out by middle class theorists. Yet in this brief time, it has fought more than any other exploited class ever did over millenia. It has built mass organizations, had major and minor strikes, forced the capitalists to grant it democratic rights, and made world-shaking revolutionary uprisings. Is there some guarantee that our class, with its allies among all the oppressed, will destroy capitalism and all oppressions? Will we — “inevitably” — overturn capitalism before capitalism destroys the world with nuclear wars and/or environmental disasters? No, there is no guarantee. This is an issue to be decided in struggle! But neither is there some fatal flaw which guarantees that our class will never triumph. History is far from over.



Source: Retrieved on May 7th, 2009 from http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=6031

[American Dream]

http://nothingbutahuman.wordpress.com/2 ... ted-labor/

Sex Work is Alienated Labor

DECEMBER 8, 2011

Had a great discussion today with Mike & Sarahtopz about street harassment and sex work. Here’s a few notes [1] towards synthesizing a marxist view of sex work:

1. Sex work is a form of exploited, alienated labor under capitalism.

- Sex workers sell their labor power and not their bodies. Under capitalism, our bodies are consumed by capital quite literally, but Marx argues we do not sell our bodies, we sell our ability to labor to the capitalist. When women or others do sex work, they are selling their ability to labor, i.e. to make someone cum, to give someone pleasure or arousal, to be someone’s shoulder to cry on or their emotional outlet, etc. In exchange for money or other commodities, a sex workers’ body becomes the tool they use to carry out the labor of pleasure. The vagina and mouth are no less tools of labor than are the head and hands (which are usually associated with male labor). Further, they are tools that are consciously honed and developed by sex workers in order to produce an improved or competitive product. [2] To say that waged workers sell their labor but sex workers sell their bodies is to make a false distinction based on a false premise: that one is a legitimate or acceptable form of exploitation while the other is not.

- The argument that sex workers sell their bodies rather than their labor power obscures the source of the problem of sex work and, thereby, its resolution. Selling one’s body implies giving all of oneself to someone else in exchange for money; giving all of oneself implies a physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual sacrifice that is not present in other forms of labor where one does not sell one’s body (i.e. factory work, call center work, etc.). You are supposed to give all of yourself in “love”, not in an economic transaction. The sexual act becomes conflated with the psychological/etc. loss of self and so this form of degradation appears to only occur in sex work. But the degradation, emotional or otherwise, that goes along with sex work is not due solely to its sexual character but to its exploited, and thus alienated, character. [3]

- The argument that sex workers sell their bodies is often accompanied by or based upon a type of moralism. This moralism – ultimately very subjective and idealist – tends to crudely critique sex work based on feelings or static notions of virtue, morality, etc.: i.e. sex work is bad because it makes sex workers feel bad. Sex-positive feminists who respond by pointing to sex workers who like what they do as proof that sex work isn’t exploitative are also using a subjective approach. A materialist approach must instead recognize that morality, like human nature, “is no abstraction inherent in each single individual…it is the ensemble of the social relations.” [4]

2. Sex work reflects the gendered division of labor under capitalism, and thus is marked by the specific forms of patriarchal violence reserved for women, queer, trans and genderqueer folks.

- Sex work, like all work under capitalism, has real, serious physical consequences that threaten the physical well-being of those engaged in it.

- Yet sex work is also a uniquely dangerous profession, compared to say a factory job, because of the specific forms of patriarchal violence that are used to discipline women/queer/trans folks. Sex workers face rape, physical abuse, police violence, verbal harassment, stalking, STDs or other health issues, murder, etc. Sex work is dangerous in particular ways that other forms of labor are not because of its underground and criminalized character. And sex work is underground and criminalized because of the gendered division of labor under capitalism.

- The gendered division of labor under capital has entailed the devaluation of women’s labor as “natural” and undeserving of a wage. It has gendered reproductive labor as a form of non-work that women do because we are (supposedly) naturally good at it, naturally inclined to do it, etc. Sex work is a reproductive labor that may not produce surplus value, but it does reproduce the workers who are producing surplus value for the capitalist (and it often reproduces the capitalists who are exploiting workers!). Federici argues that women have historically been excluded from other forms of waged work and so have turned in mass numbers to sex work as a way to secure some economic independence and social power from men. In response, capital has sought to criminalize sex work and delegitimize, it under an ideology of love, morality, etc., even though sex work is needed by capital. [5]

- Tragically, working class organizations (i.e. unions, left parties, etc.) have often not struggled against this gendered division of labor. For instance, historically working class organizations have not fought for better working conditions for sex workers. If today coal miners can worry “less” about black lung or auto workers can get workers’ comp when a machine cuts off their arm, that is only because workers via organizations fought to win better conditions and health care or other resources to help mitigate the physical toll of capitalist exploitation upon their bodies…

*****

[1] I would say these points apply more to sex work and not sex slavery; to “public” or waged sex workers (i.e. doing sex work for men who are not their husbands, partners, etc.) though that shouldn’t ignore that there are “private” sex workers (i.e. wives, partners, etc., who may do a form of sex work as part of their unpaid reproductive work in their homes and families); and to female-bodied sex workers, without teasing out the finer points of the experiences of others who do sex work such as queer men, trans and genderqueer folks.

[2] Here I have in mind this argument by Maria Mies about reproductive labor as praxis, or conscious social activity:

“…We see that women can experience their whole body as productive, not only their hands or their heads. Out of their body they produce new children as well as the first food for these children. It is of crucial importance for our subject that women’s activity in producing children and milk is understood as truly human, that is, conscious, social activity. Women appropriated their own nature, their capacity to give birth and to produce milk in the same way as men appropriated their own bodily nature, in the sense that their hands and head, etc., acquired skills through work and reflection to make and handle tools. In this sense, the activity of women in bearing and rearing children has to be understood as work. It is one of the greatest obstacles to women’s liberation, that is, humanization, that these activities are still interpreted as purely physiological functions, comparable to those of other mammals, and lying outside the sphere of conscious human influence.

In the course of their history, women observed the changes in their own bodies and acquired through observation and experiment a vast body of experiential knowledge about the functions of their bodies, about the rhythms of menstruation, about pregnancy and childbirth. This appropriation of their own bodily nature was closely related to the acquisition of knowledge about the generative forces of external nature, about nature, about plants, animals, the earth, water and air.

Thus, they did not simply breed children like cows, but they appropriated their own generative and productive forces, they analysed and reflected upon their own and former experiences and passed them on to their daughters.” [Mies, Patriarchy & Accumulation on a World Scale, 53-54]

[3] Here I have in mind what Marx wrote in Estranged Labour:

“What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends, they are animal functions.”

[4] From Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, #6.

[5] Federici argues that the rise of capitalism depended upon the defining of women as non-workers. Reproductive work became gendered as female and went unwaged since it was considered women’s natural duty or desire. The denial of access to waged labor by capital and, in some cases, men from their own communities, led to the massification of prostitution. Federici goes on to write that:

“No sooner had prostitution become the main form of subsistence for a large female population than the institutional attitude towards it changed. Whereas in the late Middle Ages it had been officially accepted as a necessary evil, and prostitutes had benefited from the high wage regime, in the 16th century, the situation was reversed. In a climate of intense misogyny, characterized by the advance of the Protestant Reformation and witch-hunting, prostitution was first subjected to new restrictions and then criminalized.” [Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 94]


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