Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

http://climateandcapitalism.com/2013/02 ... ory-farms/

So God made factory farms

Farming in America used to mean hardworking men and women who worked the land to produce nourishing food. Now it is mostly about giant corporations using chemicals to produce biofuels and corn sugar for junk food.

One of the big Superbowl commercials this year used farming nostalgia to sell Dodge trucks. You can see it here.

The folks at Funny or Die made this brilliant and accurate parody.

[American Dream]

Hidden Minorities. A documentary by Syracuse University Students.

This is a short documentary about the true diversity in certain minority groups, and how inaccurate portrayals in the media create incorrect assumptions about people in these minority groups. This documentary was made by students in the Race, Gender, and the Media class at Syracuse University.

[American Dream]

http://latinegro.tumblr.com/post/183505 ... -childhood

[American Dream]

Sekou Sundiata : Blink Your Eyes

[American Dream]

http://libcom.org/blog/wrong-work-two-p ... k-03012013

Wrong to work! Two perspectives on the abolition of work



ALL MUST WORK! declares the cabinet of millionaires. 'Workers not shirkers!', they implore. 'Strivers not skivers!' The divide-and-rule rhetoric trying to pit those in work against those without is as relentless as it is transparent. But what's so good about work anyway?


Junge Linke's short piece nicely skewers how attempts to mobilise resentment of claimants and the unemployed undermine even those in work who aren't claiming benefits. What I'd like to focus on is two perspectives on what an explicitly anti-work politics might look like.

Robocommunism
Traditionally, anti-work politics has been bound up with rising productivity and technological development. A famous passage from Karl Marx's notebooks, the 'fragment on machines', envisages a day when living labour moves to the side of a highly automated production process. Marx's son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, authored a polemic titled 'the right to be lazy', which proclaimed:

...not to demand the Right to Work which is but the right to misery, but to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her.

At the dawn of the 20th century, sociologist Max Weber suggested the protestant, and particularly Calvinist, work ethic was a significant factor in the rise of capitalism. Weber's thesis is considered unproven, but the glorification of work is certainly still with us, as the demonisation of claimants and the unemployed shows. Indeed, the introduction of workfare, Universal Credit and Universal Job Match threatens to transform unemployment into constant unpaid, supervised, psuedo-work - updating CVs, searching and applying for jobs, stacking shelves in Poundland... all subject to managerial discipline without even the sweetener of a wage.

Yet this is happening despite a big resurgence in the 'tech debate' from across the political spectrum - from neoliberals like Jeffrey Sachs, to Keynesians like Paul Krugman and comment pieces in the Financial Times, as well as the more usual anarchist and communist figures. Could it be that the renewed attempts to impose work on everyone masks a crisis of what Kathi Weeks calls 'the work society'?

The thrust of the argument here is that technology-driven productivity rises are driving ever-greater output with ever-lower requirements for labour. Foxconn's infamous iPhone manufacturing plant - the one with the suicide nets where workers have rioted and fought for better conditions - is facing automation by one million robots by 2013. When even intolerable sweatshop conditions are cheaper to automate, what future for work? There's even developing technology which can replace traditionally labour-intensive sectors such as fast food and fruit-picking. Add in bittorrent distribution of digital media and literature, 3D printing technology... and work starts to look quite quaint.

Under capitalism, this means rising unemployment, and intensified work at lower wages for those 'lucky' enough to keep their jobs (due to the competition from the 'reserve army' of the unemployed). Historically, the service industries have absorbed some of this surplus labour, but as they automate too, potential abundance and increased leisure for all instead translates into generalised misery.1 But only so long as we put up with capitalism.

This kind of techno-utopianism promises a quantitative abolition of work, down to Lafargue's maximum three hours a day and beyond. Just think how much labour-intensive work - like call centre cold-calling - is basically pointless except from the point of view of private profit. Abolishing capitalism - private ownership of the means of production, with consumption rationed by the market - promises to harness productivity improvements to reduce toil for everyone in a context of unprecedented abundance.

Rethinking 'work'
The technological optimism of the above account has been criticised from some quarters. Maria Mies, in her book 'Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale', suggests 'the abolition of work' only makes sense if it takes the typically boring, repetitive - and male - production line work as its archetype.2 Mies suggests a redefinition of 'production' as 'the production of human beings' as opposed to 'the production of surplus value for capital', and suggests a radical rethink of work by replacing the archetypal figure of the production line worker with that of the mother.

A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and wealth, of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work. (...) A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organisation of time prevail, the length of the working day is no longer very relevant.

Mies' account is not unproblematic, and is bound up with a somewhat romantic advocacy of a return to the subsistence agriculture of her childhood, and more than a hint of gender essentialism. For this reason, it would be good to read her alongside an explicitly anti-work feminist text such as Kathi Weeks' recent 'The problem with work'. However, I think Mies' reconception of work points towards a sort of 'qualitative abolition', that is, a breakdown between the separate spheres of 'work' and 'life', production and meaning.

Here, 'work' is understood as off the clock, variously affective, arduous, meaningful, frustrating, rewarding. Childcare not line assembly. (Re)producing life not value. It's undertaken not because of a need to earn money to survive, but because it directly contributes to the reproduction of people, whether by raising children, growing food, cultural activities and so on. As it's not production for the market, capitalist notions of efficiency fall by the wayside, and instead the focus is on making necessary toil tolerable through sharing the burden.

Mies views technology as embodying an instrumental relation to nature, which reflects a patriarchal logic of the domination of (male) culture over (female) nature. Hence she rejects the abolition of work through technology and instead advocates low-tech subsistence as an ecological, feminist alternative to both capitalism and state socialism. Her argument is well made, but I think a more emancipatory view of technology, informed by the feminist critique of the invisible domestic labour on which such utopias often rest, could see these two perspectives combined to good effect.

A critical application of technology could abolish, or at least dramatically reduce, repetitive toil, while rethinking production as the reproduction of life could abolish both the gendered division of housework and the capitalist production of care, in favour of something produced in common and distributed according to needs. Work, as a separate sphere of life would be abolished. In place of the pursuit of profit, ecological limits and human needs, including the abolition of boredom, would guide the production of things. Productive activity would consist in the reproduction of human beings in place of the relentless production of value. Do the conditions of this movement follow from premises now in existence?


1. A counter-tendency here is the proliferation of affective labour in things like food service jobs, 'the human touch' being the one thing robots can't offer.
2. Furthermore, she argues it relies on the continued exploitation of women's housework, and of neocolonial exploitation of much of the world for the raw materials.

[American Dream]

Jessica Hagedorn reads "Loft Living"

[American Dream]

Sponsor an Activist

[Hammer of Los]

...

Rethinking 'work'
The technological optimism of the above account has been criticised from some quarters. Maria Mies, in her book 'Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale', suggests 'the abolition of work' only makes sense if it takes the typically boring, repetitive - and male - production line work as its archetype.2 Mies suggests a redefinition of 'production' as 'the production of human beings' as opposed to 'the production of surplus value for capital', and suggests a radical rethink of work by replacing the archetypal figure of the production line worker with that of the mother.

A feminist concept of labour has to be oriented towards the production of life as the goal of work and not the production of things and wealth, of which the production of life is then a secondary derivative. The production of immediate life in all its aspects must be the core concept for the development of a feminist concept of work. (...) A feminist concept of labour has, therefore, to be oriented towards a different concept of time, in which time is not segregated into portions of burdensome labour and portions of supposed pleasure and leisure, but in which times of work and times of rest are alternating and interspersed. If such a concept and such an organisation of time prevail, the length of the working day is no longer very relevant.

Mies' account is not unproblematic, and is bound up with a somewhat romantic advocacy of a return to the subsistence agriculture of her childhood, and more than a hint of gender essentialism. For this reason, it would be good to read her alongside an explicitly anti-work feminist text such as Kathi Weeks' recent 'The problem with work'. However, I think Mies' reconception of work points towards a sort of 'qualitative abolition', that is, a breakdown between the separate spheres of 'work' and 'life', production and meaning.

Here, 'work' is understood as off the clock, variously affective, arduous, meaningful, frustrating, rewarding. Childcare not line assembly. (Re)producing life not value. It's undertaken not because of a need to earn money to survive, but because it directly contributes to the reproduction of people, whether by raising children, growing food, cultural activities and so on. As it's not production for the market, capitalist notions of efficiency fall by the wayside, and instead the focus is on making necessary toil tolerable through sharing the burden.

Mies views technology as embodying an instrumental relation to nature, which reflects a patriarchal logic of the domination of (male) culture over (female) nature. Hence she rejects the abolition of work through technology and instead advocates low-tech subsistence as an ecological, feminist alternative to both capitalism and state socialism. Her argument is well made, but I think a more emancipatory view of technology, informed by the feminist critique of the invisible domestic labour on which such utopias often rest, could see these two perspectives combined to good effect.

A critical application of technology could abolish, or at least dramatically reduce, repetitive toil, while rethinking production as the reproduction of life could abolish both the gendered division of housework and the capitalist production of care, in favour of something produced in common and distributed according to needs. Work, as a separate sphere of life would be abolished. In place of the pursuit of profit, ecological limits and human needs, including the abolition of boredom, would guide the production of things. Productive activity would consist in the reproduction of human beings in place of the relentless production of value. Do the conditions of this movement follow from premises now in existence?

Nice one.

Thanks man.

...

[American Dream]

Thx HoL!


Buddy Wakefield - Convenience Stores

[American Dream]

Buddy Wakefield- Guitar Repair Women

[American Dream]

Poetic Labor Project

http://labday2010.blogspot.com/2013/01/ ... lover.html

Some people say that the practice of making poems is a lot like labor, that they are structurally or phenomenologically similar, and I don’t really believe this. Poetry, not being compelled in that material sense, not being a source of value, will always be absolutely, qualitatively different from labor.

On the other hand, some people say that poetry is an opposition to labor, because it refuses to be useful in the measures of capitalism — that it isn’t only non-labor but anti-labor, rifted with some slivers of real autonomy. I am not really swayed by this position either, anymore than I am swayed by the idea of a gift economy or going off the grid. Poetry may not produce value but it is nonetheless entirely within the market, we do not escape those forces when we work on poetry. We monetize poetry in explicit ways, or implicit ways, or we do not monetize it and it resides in the sector of our lives that is not monetized, but which still must obey the discipline of the market — most obviously the discipline about how much time you can spend on non-monetized stuff, be it poetry or Yahtzee.

So poetry really isn’t labor, and it really isn’t anti-labor. What then can we say about it, in relation to labor, that isn’t just Yahtzee?

I’m not really sure. But given the situation I have set forth, I don’t think that poetry can intervene in the situation of labor. I think that the relationship of labor to poetry is that you have to attack labor to free poetry from this set of problems. And that attack won’t be poems. So for me the relation of labor to poetry exists in neither labor nor poetry but in a set of directly political practices that can undo the present pseudo-relationship. When we speak of “the Poetic Labor Project,” if we speak of anything beyond a community ethnography, we speak of total war on labor.


JOSHUA CLOVER is a writer and political antagonist living in the Bay Area. He has monetized his poetry by becoming a teacher, sometimes.

[American Dream]

Suheir Hammad - Into Egypt

[American Dream]

Black Organization of Soul Sisters 1968

[American Dream]

Hadeel Ramadan, 'Swine Flu'- Brave New Voices

[American Dream]

Dope Dog




U.S. Custom Coast Guard Dope Dog, nicknamed "BUST EM"
Like most dope sniffin' dogs, he's got a habit, trained to have to have it.
Pick up the tracks of the trafficker, and track em' like a rabbit up the coastline.
Canine controlled substance retriever.
Receiver of the "Golden Nose" award, for leadin' em' to the cash, cashin' in on the stash.
Now he's in line for his issue of the booty.
Never do a line in the line of duty, he's a dope dog.
U.S. Custom Coast Guard Dope Dog
Keen sense of smell trackin the tell-tale trails of Cartels,
Dope Boats, Big Dope
Never a gram or O.Z.. kilo too low key.
Gotta be tons a "P" blow, bales of lumbo.
When other dogs sniff at other dog's tails, he can track the profits from a dope sale straight to the stank account.
Big banks, bankin' on laundering, the dirty money no stinkin' he follows his nose.
And as the wind blows, he get a whiff, he take a sniff.
A Dope Dog
A Dope Dog
Old Mac Uncle had some drugs, C.I.A. I-O
And with those drugs he bought some arms,
C.I.A. I-O
It was a bang, bang here and a snort, snort there.
Bangs and snorts everywhere.
Old Mac Uncle starts a war, C.I.A. I-O
But the war on drugs is hell on Dope Dogs nose.
It smells where the nose goes when the doors close and the dealer want to hide the dope.
in the booty, in the twat.
Then they squat and make the dog sniff their bowel.
Foul, as they fart in his face.
DAMN for a shitty half gram.
A DOPE DOG.
U.S. Custom Coast Guard Dope Dog, nicknamed "Bust em"
Like most dope sniffin' dogs, he's got a habit, trained to have to have it.
Pick up the tracks of the trafficker, and track em' like a rabbit up the coastline.
Canine controlled substance retriever.
Receiver of the "Golden Nose" award
Dope Dog-A Dope Dog.
Out of the toxic waste comes a fox that wastes no time.
A genetically improved smell capability, the long and dragging tales of the possibilities of "clone canine."
Conceived under the influence of toxic wasted doctors.
Computer bugs debuggin' devices and vice verses and various viruses.
And until his retirement don't mention, no requirement nowhere in his pension for the upkeep, the keeping up of the habit.
The system have a habit of making sure you get, a habit that can't be kept up with unless you're a dope dog.

A Dope Dog
A Dope Dog
An undercover NARC with a bark.
He took a bite out of crime.
Posin' as a seein: eye dog he bit the blind,
the man with the cane in the coke.
Soon as the dope boat float, the media goes comatose.
Unrelated over-the-counter overdose now becomes drug-related.
Aided and abetted by alot of apprehension and indifference.
the bigger the headache the bigger the pill.
Take your medicine cause you gonna be ill when I tell you the deal on dope.
There's more profit in pretending that we're stopping it, then selling it.
Selling out, we're in for the shock of a lifetime.
Stop and we might find faces in primetime.
The faces of yours and mine.
Over the counter, under the counter.
On account of the drugs:
it's not the drugs that drag you through the mud.
It's the money. It ain't funny.
A Dope Dog.
A Dope Dog.
Old MacUncle has a bank: drugs are sure to flow.
BCC-I-CIA-DEA-IOU.S.