Peak Food
Re-posted from The Telegraph
Global oil output has been stagnant for four years, failing to keep up with rampant demand from Asia and the Mid-East. China’s imports rose 14pc last year. Biofuels from grain, oil seed and sugar are plugging the gap, but drawing away food supplies at a time when the world is adding more than 70m mouths to feed a year…
Eric:
This fuel-vs-food argument is turning into a really annoying trope. Only when fuel and food are both equally industrialized commodity is it possible to shift production from one to the other. Local, sustainable agriculture and a culture of real food would have nothing to fear from biofuels.
23 February 2008, 3:00 pmStan:
The soil, air, flora, fauna, and water — not to mention a lot of displaced people — have a great deal to fear from mass-produced biofuels.
23 February 2008, 9:16 pmDeAnander:
“biofuels” not industrially produced wouldn’t make sense or be nearly adequate to support industrial culture… what I mean is that the sheer scale of energy slaves required for industrial culture means that in order to substitute biomass for petromass as the combustible fuel of choice, biomass has to be produced and processed on the same industrial scale as the usage.
so — if we shut down most of the industrial machinery then, yeah, the demand for fuel drops and possibly we can produce enough biofuel using localised sustainable methods to meet a very modest demand w/o impacting food production. but if we (imho stupidly) try to keep the industrial machinery at its present scale going on biofuel, then I don’t see any way it can do other than divert enormous amounts of biomass and solar/hectarage away from food production…
23 February 2008, 10:21 pmDeAnander:
btw, price of wheat per 50 lb bag went up by 60 percent in the last 90 days, reports a friend from the Cariboo who buys in that quantity.
23 February 2008, 10:22 pmEric:
I guess I was questioning the industrial-scale agriculture side of the equation more. You’re right, fuel is certainly harder to picture without large scale production. As long as we have factory farming, propped up by enormous subsidies, the balance of food/fuel will be answered by market forces.
In the long run, of course, biofuels are no panacea, either. Public transportation and thoughtful urban planning are the only good answers. In the meantime, however, we need as many alternatives as we can find, and it’s frustrating to see biofuels accused of making people go hungry. Any blanket statement like that sounds like somebody’s propaganda, and the oil industry has a record of defending their turf rivals tobacco’s.
Is that clearer?
25 February 2008, 1:29 amEric:
One assumption is that biofuels must be produced on croplands. I’ve seen a number of proposals for biofuels produced from crops which can be grown on more marginal lands.
25 February 2008, 1:38 amLegume Sam:
Who’s “we”?
“Alternative energy solutions” typically rest upon unstated, and unjustified, assumptions about the global economy which drives investment in said “solutions.”
The most important of these has got to be the assumption that (capitalist) production (within the current global economy) is to “meet demand.” The reality is that capitalist production, in this global economy or any, is for effective demand, demand backed by money. Such production, then, means nothing to that 40% of the human race which lives on less than $2/day.
Thus, to at least 40% of the human race, it hardly matters whether the energy being used by the privileged classes is fossil fuel energy or “alternative” energy. Also, then, it doesn’t matter to such a population whether or not biofuels are produced on cropland, or in Yellowstone National Park, or wherever. In the world economy, belonging is predicated on having money, and they don’t have any.
The capitalist economy produces far more food than it needs, and throws out the remainder. Carlo Petrini, founder of the “slow food” movement, estimates that the world economy produces enough food for 12 billion people, while 800 million at the bottom of the world economy are chronically malnourished. Such a statistic illustrates the aimless nature of production for effective demand. Biofuels? Capitalism is making people go hungry.
The subsidy-driven nature of “alternative” biofuels illustrates the Federal government’s potentially infinite claims to wage labor more than anything else. As the Federal government prints money (the textbooks call it “borrowing,” but when you “borrow” $9.2 trillion with no intention of paying it back, it’s not), it can use said money to direct wage labor anywhere its controllers so desire, regardless of the actual state of human need.
Which leads us to the second and third false assumptions of the “alternative energy movement.” It is assumed that “alternative energy” will make up for a shortfall in “energy need” once the world economy stops consuming fossil fuels. Will the (capitalist) world economy stop consuming fossil fuels? No. Oil production, thus oil consumption, is too profitable. Does the world economy “need” to burn 85 million barrels of oil every day? No. What drives such an incredibly high rate of consumption is the “effective demand” of corporations in a world economy designed to swaddle them in profit. Nike: corporate headquarters in Beaverton Oregon, cheap labor in Vietnam, people in Chicago paying $75 for a pair of shoes which will last maybe a year. Localize production everywhere, and all this, including the 85 million bbls./day figure, goes away.
So who’s “we”?
There is, in the context of the real capitalist world economy, no real “we” to do anything about the world energy situation. Economic realities are determined by the state of effective demand and the imperatives of corporate profit, and all “we” can do is sit back and watch. That is, if there’s a “we” in the first place, and not merely a collection of individuals competing for scraps which fall off of the tables of the corporate elites as they dine on our planet.
Want to talk about what “we” can do? First, form a “we.”
25 February 2008, 11:19 amStan:
That’s the nub of it. The very reason capitalism is paradoxically and simultaneously abundance and scarcity. Marx.
The rest of the mystifcation resides in “money” itself. What is this stuff, and what is it becoming? An eco-semiotic phenomenon? Hornborg.
The third entry I’d make here is Illich… his little pamphlet, Energy and Equity, which tangentially addresses the food issue by taking up transportation and “traffic” as subjects. Hat tip to De for putting me onto Ivan Illich and sending the pamphlet (complete in the above link) to me. This might merit a whole thread, actually.
On the “we” question, this has been the dilemma of organizers since resistance emerged. How does a “we” form? I’ve seen a lot of different we’s out there, that have been organic, recruited, issue-based, interest-based, ideological, geographical, etc etc. What forms are possible, and which ones are stable? What are the relationships between form and function?
It really is the toughest question, and one for which there are few fully satisfactory answers. “We” can’t even put up viable third-party candidates or stop an unpopular war… now. Speaking of just us norteamericanos, that is.
25 February 2008, 2:47 pmLegume Sam:
A good book on the phenomenon of money is Frances Hutchinson, Mary Mellor, and Wendy Olsen’s The Politics of Money…
25 February 2008, 4:46 pmJosiah:
Sam raises a bunch of good points. I think one way to think about money is not in terms of what it provides access to, but what it separates people from. Marx talked about the dissolvent effect of money on pre-capitalist production relations, on independent handicrafts in the case of industry and subsistence smallholding in the case of agriculture. If you boiled Marx down to two sentences, stripped of the jargon, it might be that capitalism is all about making it impossible for people to grow their own food and make their own stuff, so they have to work for money to buy what they used to make. So we should do whatever it takes to put people in control of their tools again. And I think what you hear from people ranging from Wendell Barry to Vandana Shiva to the landless workers movements in Brazil and India, etc., is that’s deeper than tools: we need to start reclaiming lands and urban (even suburban) spaces. This struggle may be more obviously at the forefront in Palestine, Iraq, Colombia, South Africa, and other settler-colonial or latifundial or imperial situations. But it has to become the struggle of everyday norteamericanos of all colors, believe it or not.
25 February 2008, 11:42 pmJosiah:
Also, in response to Stan’s comment about third-party candidates, I agree that this is a challenge we can’t shy away from by buying in/selling out to the Democrats, or by aimless ultraleft sectarianism of whatever kind. Without seeking to resurrect the interesting (but I think also slightly bitter-on-all-sides) debate on this blog over Ron Paul, I’m curious how people feel about the following comment on Ralph Nader by Ran Prieur. I know some people here will see it as evidence of the thin line between anarchism and the feel-good politics of left-liberal Democrats, but I think Ran also makes an important distinction between Obama’s power constituency (which is Wall Street and the Pentagon), and his popular consituency, which is a lot of frustrated and angry people who want the non-symbolic, substantive version of change. It’s a carrot at the end of the same old stick, in other words, but the way people are chasing it this time presents an opening of some kind. Which DOESN’T mean we should “support” Obama, just that we should want to stimulate rather than dismiss people’s hunger for grassroots mobilization and participatory politics in America right now.
“February 24. Nice timing! Ralph Nader has just announced that he will be running for president again, which gives me an opportunity to be even more clear about what I wrote yesterday. Although Nader is much closer to me on the issues than Obama, there’s no way I’ll support him this time, because the story is completely different. In 2000, Al Gore represented the Dinosaur Democrats and their strategy of playing not to lose — run the most uninspiring and inoffensive candidate, position yourself a hair to the left of the Republicans, and count on people to vote for you out of duty, or out of fear of your opponent. And Nader represented the strategy of energizing the base. This year, that’s what Obama is doing, and Nader is the cranky puritan. I’m sure he’ll be pointing out all of Obama’s flaws on corporate and foreign policy issues, and he’ll be right, but on a deeper level, he doesn’t get it. Before we can change policy, we have to establish a pattern in our collective psyche of change coming from below. Millions of us have to get in a groove of being excited, acting, and making a difference. Once we have that energy structure, then policy change will follow.
A good metaphor here is horse and cart. Ralph Nader is out on the road trying to pull the cart by himself. Barack Obama is in the stable waking up the horse. The horse is going to run a few laps to stretch its legs, and scoffers will say, “Look, it isn’t carrying anything.” But if we can keep it moving, it will.
By the way, I don’t think Nader will make a difference in November. If somehow Hillary Clinton is the nominee, she doesn’t need his help to lose, and if Obama stays on track, Nader will not be taking votes from him, but from people who would otherwise stay home.”
26 February 2008, 1:44 amJosiah:
Oh, and I think Ran is way too enthusiastic about Obama, just to clarify. I’ve heard many of these arguments before in support of the Dems, anyway. But he’s putting his finger on something important about his electoral base, which there has to be a way of feeding into/working with in a way that undermines the two-party system in the long-term.
26 February 2008, 2:59 amStan:
@ Josiah, crucial point you make is to differentiate between candidate and popular base. The manipulation of the latter by the former, the true financiers of Obama’s (1) rise and (2) acceptance by the establishment, and the failure of the poplar base to grasp issues at the essence… do not neutralize the fact that his campaign is tapping into a general restlessness, nor that this restlessness is a response to disenchantment and anxiety.
This election is the Dems’ to lose. McCain’s maverick rep was a carefully crafted bit of fable-making belied by his voting record; and this scandal-of-the-lobbyists is still unfolding. CP did a piece on him that says his closest aides are witness to an unstable temper; ands youtube has him singing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’s oldie, “Barbara Ann.” He openly let the cat out of the bag on permanenet bases in Iraq, saying the US would be there for “100 years.” He just reversed his critique of torture on a Senate vote. This guy has a stench that follows him like a little cloud. If the Dems lose this, they are completely bankrupt (in terms of viability, they have been morally bankrupt from the get)
No matter whether Clinton or Obama (and it looks now like the latter), watch this campaign for gender, gender, gender. It will be a campaign that revolves around more imagined enemies, more war, more “barbarians at the gate” male adventure fantasy… and anyone who thinks that the race-gender tropes won’t get unpacked from the bag of tricks (and elicit a class-differentiated counter-masculinity) is smoking an old sling rope. (Clinton’s frantic and amoral handlers already gave us a peek with the leakage of Obama in “enemy” attire, a message aimed at white working class voters in Ohio and Texas… Obama is an “alien,” a dark Other.)
One thing a site like this and a few others might be able to do as a public service is to watch the campaign and deconstruct the gendered content along the way. Everyone watches the spectacle… that the way of the world now. It might be a fine meme-struggle opportunity.
26 February 2008, 6:53 amxenia:
I am somewhat surprised Edwards did not make it…
I voted for Nader in the last election, out of both spite and conviction, and this time I won’t vote for a Democrat either (if I am in the US and can vote, it is going to be McKinney, I think). Thatcher, Colin Powell and Condi taught me cynicism in that respect.
Sometimes I do catch myself marginally liking Obama for his brown-ness, especially when I recall my time in the South, but then I remember his praise of Reagan, his frantic denial of anything Muslim in his background, his subtle warmongering re Iran and Pakistan…he’s definitely a product of elite mingling, especially when you imagine him in an Indonesian or Kenyan environment, as depicted by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Limos, finest food, giggling girls from good families…that was his life abroad (and in the US). He has that special hybrid flavor that thrives on the coasts…
I just think that by selecting a generic youthful *white* male such as Edwards the Dems would have had a better chance of catching all the unhappy “undecideds”. As it is, the average xeno- and gynophobic suburban family won’t go for Obama or Hillary, no matter how wide the smile and how big the promises of happiness ever after…
There is definitely something unreal and dream-like permeating the electoral atmosphere, some subterranean tendencies of dissatisfaction and yearning.
26 February 2008, 9:01 amSince the prez is not going to “deliver” and the economy is about to tank, we may at least look forward to some big social movements… f***ing finally!
xenia:
I also think there is some residual resentment about Hillary promising health insurance (when I think about it with my European mind, I do not understand why she played any part…I mean, what was her political function? But that must be tapping on the image of white house residents as our family members, to whom we should all be loyal).
Anyway, I think people experience that promise as a betrayal and that’s why a lot of them do not trust her. Am I deluded about it?
26 February 2008, 9:10 amCharles:
Just as a response to the very general, here, advocacy of “localization”, I have a problem that this fails to learn the world-historic lessons concerning racism as derived from the parochialism of the human race, its existence in “pockets” around the world. Racism and nationalism are the modern product of historic “localism”/parochialism. The rational kernel or silver-lining of the horrors of capitalist globalization ( from 200 years ago and the present as well)is that it has brought the whole species together. There is potentially one world, a oneness that hasn’t existed since the origin of the species human. And we are _the_ social species, so this worldwide sociality is eminently human.
So, “localization” must somehow retain this newly achieved social connection of the whole species, in opinion, to get my support. Otherwise we fail to learn the negative lessons of racism and nationalism. We risk future generations, divided from each other into “localities” repeating the errors of racism and nationalism. Communism is a world system. The world wide web of labor must be retained. It’s a small world afterall, and all that. Democracy, yes. Parochialism , no.
26 February 2008, 1:46 pmCharles:
Legume Sam:
Who’s “we”?
“Alternative energy solutions” typically rest upon unstated, and unjustified, assumptions about the global economy which drives investment in said “solutions.”
The most important of these has got to be the assumption that (capitalist) production (within the current global economy) is to “meet demand.” The reality is that capitalist production, in this global economy or any, is for effective demand, demand backed by money. Such production, then, means nothing to that 40% of the human race which lives on less than $2/day. AND THE REST !
^^^^^
26 February 2008, 5:06 pmWELL SAID , LEGUME SAM !
Legume Sam:
Charles, I’m glad you liked the comment about effective demand. Anyway:
My thinking about localism is shaped by Kees van der Pijl’s Transnational Classes and International Relations, which I encapsulated in this diary for DailyKos.com .
I don’t think we can imagine the history of “localism” outside of the history of capitalism. Van der Pijl writes about how the history of capitalism is the history of capitalist development, as the world is prepared for commodification. The forces opposing capitalist discipline, on the other hand, are usually communitarian efforts.
Van der Pijl’s more recent book, Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq talks about how the world has by no means been united by capitalism, but instead is constituted by major powers in capitalist competition in a world threatened by ecosystemic mass suicide.
How can we consider racism outside of the history of empire? Racism was an ideology invented to justify the employment of captured African labor in European plantations carved out of lands stolen from First Nations peoples, no? Racism didn’t come first; slavery vastly predated racism, but the slavery that existed before racism was predicated on a different brand of empire, in which the conquerors imposed their will upon the conquered and used their own, internal, forms of justification to impose slavery upon the conquered people and their descendants. Roman society, for instance, contained a complex formal class system, of which the distinction between elite honestiores and underclass humiliores was a simplification.
What’s scary, then, is not localism, but rather the return to empire, against which the separate localities will have to have concrete forms of protection. The point of localism should be held to assure that money, the power commanding wage labor in the current world economy, is controlled by communities for communities.
There will also have to be protections within each community against the regression into imperial modalities; racism, sexism, and the like.
26 February 2008, 7:21 pmStan:
The working class is one half of a duality of oppression. Unity of opposites? As such, even the “class-for-itself” has a vested interest in preserving capitalism, not overthrowing it. That is a big part of the reason the wc has never been the prime mover in any revolution… and never will. The bourgeois revolutions happened when the bourgeoisie was the third party, growing outside the main contradiction of landed lord and serf. When the main contradiction became the bourgeois and proletarian, it was the peasant who provided the most turbulent revolutionary force. The liberation of the working class is its liquidation through withdrawal from that central contradiction. This is the same dilemma that faces women in the system of patriarchy. The masculine and feminine roles are two poles of the same phenomenon, completely interdependent, though hierarchically so. There must be an independent social niche that develops before any worker, woman, oppressed nationality, et al, can escape the web of social relations that are oppressively necessary for survival. In the case of industrial imperialism, that is measurable at a minimum by two things: independence from the obligations of travel, and independence from money. Instead, most social change organizing now is butressed by massive travel and monetary expenditures… and “we” need to think about that seriously.
26 February 2008, 9:49 pmJosiah:
Continuing with the difficulty of using “we” unproblematically in the U.S. (and doesn’t that say it all, somehow?):
Stan’s point about the capital-labor relationship being unlikely to yield revolution within its own entrenched terms, which have become a mutually dependent “duality of oppression,” can be usefully compared to white nationalism versus black nationalism, I think. White nationalism is an ideology which has supported a series of prison-houses of racial domination, esp. in European settler states in the Americas, southern Africa and Oceania (and, in a modified sense, in Israel). At best, Black and indigenous nationalism is a strategy from demolishing that prison-house. But when Black nationalist uprisings were crushed in the 1960s/70s, like when organized labor was crushed in the 1930s, it fostered a sort of hopeless, a tendency to re-create the guard-prisoner relationship among the prisoners themselves.
What could organized labor, in its struggle with capitalism, learn from the transcendence of that categorical duality by oppressed peoples’ national formations at their best? Maybe that labor only transcends its assigned role when it begins to undermine and provide community alternatives to the structures that dominate it (I’m thinking of the Black Panthers’ lunch programs, or Cuban agriculture more recently, here). Resistance starts to take root when people are able to break the dominant spell and think about their own work and labor in a very different way. Ultimately the category of “the working class” itself is as existentially dependent on/coterminous with capitalism as the category of “whiteness” is on white supremacy.
Our goal has to be to somehow tear down the apartheid walls dividing people from other people, something called “the economy” from real physical needs, morality, family and personal creativity; and white America from its own subordinated internal Others. But not in symbolic and disposable ways. In materially real, sustainable ways.
27 February 2008, 12:25 amDeAnander:
Often colonial occupiers speak of resistance movements as if they offered community services as a cynical PR move to “delude” the people into supporting the resistance. Certainly occupying forces offer community services with this intent. But it seems to me that the offering of community services is the resistance; that is is resistance to feed people who are supposed to be starving, to free people who are supposed to be imprisoned, to give medical care to people who are supposed to be “disposable” and die easily and unremembered, to teach people who are supposed to be illiterate, and so on.
The centrality of community-building was recognised pragmatically in S American struggles, certainly by the badguys; teachers, priests, community workers, “barefoot doctors,” labour organisers were targeted early by each (US-backed) dictatorship as “subversives”, in a tacit admission that these mycelial activities were a profound threat to authoritarian power… Which tells us, I suppose, a couple of things: one, that these “socially responsible” and “safe” activities are not safe when authoritarian power really feels challenged, and two, that they might even be more threatening to that power than more overt rebellious (Black Bloc anyone?) activities…
27 February 2008, 12:36 amLegume Sam:
The industrial working class is no longer revolutionary because, having bought into capitalist discipline, it can be placated with a raise and a pension plan. This is the notion of Craig Calhoun’s The Question of Class Struggle, which entertains a lengthy reading of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. As capitalism deepens its hold upon the economy, workers are more likely to accept reformist outcomes to class struggle.
The artisan class, and the peasantry, on the other hand, never had a stake in capitalist discipline, and so revolutionary movements could be built from them. Perhaps, as the capitalist system sheds more and more of the human race, new groups will form out of the wholesale rejection of capitalist discipline, and the creation of new human worlds outside of the money economy.
27 February 2008, 1:20 amStan:
Bringin’ it back to the thread title… food. There is a “we” emerging identified by Sandor Katz as “the underground food movement.” Its activities are confronted at every turn by power in ways that show how food is still a weapon of control. The challenge of food independence, imho, is direct, universal, perennial, concrete, and strategic. Moreover, it can be related to the very metropolitan political identities that are outgrowths of the built US environment: school parent, taxpayer, homeowner, and consumer… and subvert these identities. CSAs, struggles to get good food into and bad food out of schools, community guardens, front-yard veggies (and fighting HOAs for them), promoting good nutrition as preventative medicine, farmers markets… as well as underground raw milk and fresh humane meat networks… are the practical vanguard. One could easily write a Food Party Manifesto with more programmatic points than the Democratic Party platform.
Making non-commodified food and open commensality are activities that “build” community by building relationships where personhood is re-embedded with nature as the basis of community.
27 February 2008, 6:31 amCharles:
Van der Pijl’s more recent book, Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq talks about how the world has by no means been united by capitalism, but instead is constituted by major powers in capitalist competition in a world threatened by ecosystemic mass suicide.
^^^^^
27 February 2008, 4:54 pmCB: Maybe not unity ( umoja in Swahili) ,but there is an increase in the socialization of the labor process or division of labor in Groucho and Harpo’s terminology. It is a _silver-lining_ in the otherwise mainly “storm clouds” of capitalist globalization ( which starts with the beginning of capitalism ,not in the late 20th Century). There is a world wide web of interconnected labor processes.
Charles:
As US autoworkers, the pinnacle of the industrial proletariat in the pinnacle of industrialization, and other industrial workers, workers in general, are learning right now, their interests are not quite so securely “vested” in capitalism. GM is buying out UAW workers who have about the best wages and benefits in the working class, and is going to replace them with new workers who will make about half (!). A process of paring industrial workers down to a level in which they may be motivated to fulfill their revolutionary potential , may be starting. Of course, many “service” proletarians ( wage-laborers) have already been pared down – McJobs.
Any economic “collapse” , so often pundited about on the left net, would hit the working class hardest, further opening the eyes of millions to the fake nature of workers’ “vested interests” in capitalism.
Lacking is a Communist Party that is able to raise socialist consciousness in the working class. The history of American anti-Communism, McCarthyism has almost destroyed the CPUSA from playing that role. But with the fall of the Soviet Union , and thereby, dialectically, the end of intense anti-Sovietism and anti-Communism, a new generation of workers in the US and other capitalist countries may be ripe to gain socialist consciousness. Countries like Venezuela are exhibiting more fully the revolutionary potential of the working class, due in part to their relative poverty.
27 February 2008, 5:32 pmStan:
Food politics in Peru
…brought to you by… farmers.
27 February 2008, 7:03 pmRobert Karaffa:
“Food Politics in Peru” reminds me of when Evo Morales gave Condi a basket made of coca leaves. “Official” racism? Privatization of water and “Cultural Patrimony” in Cuzco? A new model? The gift of Morales was a moment of perfect symbolism for many things.
27 February 2008, 8:10 pmRobert Karaffa:
OK maybe the first article I read about this was incorrect. It may actually have been a guitar decorated with coca. Still……..same message perhaps? If my earlier post was incorrect, my sincerest apologies to all. It was a while ago. But the whole concept gave me hope and a vigorous chuckle.
27 February 2008, 10:33 pmJosiah:
These trade agreements are a good example of how “local” and “global” are falsely dichotomized by the corporate media, so as to discourage any positive political feedback between small farmers and workers in the U.S. and around the world. I am actually in South Korea right now, and the looming FTA with the U.S. is a hugely contested issue, especially when you go outside of Seoul. The FTA is going to wipe out thousands of small producers in the beef industry here (among others). People are mad about it, but the media here is obfuscating the situation by opposing ‘backward farmers’ with forward-looking multinationals like Hyundai and Samsung, who outsource their production line to lower-wage parts of China and southern Asia. (Meanwhile, the new right-wing president Lee Myung-Bak has been amply rewarded by the Bush administration for toeing the line on both North Korea and “free trade,” as the oligarchic Korean National Oil Consortium has now been granted access to drill in oil and gas fields in Iraqi Kurdistan, while the biggest US/UK oil majors are hoping to sign TSAs for the four biggest oil fields in Iraq in March.)
Meanwhile, as is obvious from the coverage (and as must be embarrassing to Bill Clinton), NAFTA is so unpopular in Ohio, both Obama and Hillary concluded early on they would have to call for its ‘renegotiation’ (although Clinton is having a harder time presenting herself as a NAFTA critic, having lavishly praised it as recently as 2004). And from the other thread, we know big anti-NAFTA mobilizations are taking place in Mexico right now.
All of this shows the falsity of the zero-sum “localism vs. globalism” framework being foisted on us from above. The neoliberals want us to believe that calls for localization and self-sufficiency in anything is Luddhite, parochial isolation (I’m hearing the same shit in S. Korea every other day, where the neoliberals are mocking ‘small-minded peasants’ (those who are Buddhist and less westernized than urban S. Koreans) for resisting the flood of U.S. beef). Neoliberals want us to believe that globalization always means their model of no-holds-barred corporate capitalism.
Bridging these false dichotomies, and linking U.S. movements with people on the other end of the same problems, has never been more important than it is now.
27 February 2008, 10:58 pmJosiah:
Also, I note from the Mr. Zine article that Obama is backing the U.S.-Peru FTA, which is a big fat handout to U.S. cotton agribusiness, which Oxfam says will put huge numbers of Andean cotton growers out of work.
This is an example of where it’s important for us to highlight the fundamental Obama-Clinton similarities, underneath the rhetorical/stylistic differences. Because these are things the vast majority of the general U.S. population would be opposed to if they only had the basic facts about subsidies, job losses, environmental and labor standards.
27 February 2008, 11:13 pmLegume Sam:
Charles says:
There experience might prompt such people, given their past placement within capitalism, to ask first about how they can get that “vestment” in capitalism back. Are we to imagine that people who have spent good portions of their lives building automobiles are spontaneously going to want to do something else for a living, and that they’d feel the need to form a revolutionary movement in order to do that something else? I can’t see why, and I rather suspect they’d prefer that the union defend their jobs.
Absent those jobs, the folks who were interviewed in Michael Moore’s movie Roger & Me, for instance, merely changed professions, individually, and this was depicted as an accomodation to the decline in the standard of living in Flint, and not progress toward the revolution. Those people, the Amway saleswoman, the rabbit-breeder and so on, have stopped being auto workers. You might have a better shot with them once they’ve given up hope of going back to work in the auto industry; they’re what activist Vijay Prashad calls the “contingent working class.”
At any rate, the world doesn’t need any more automobiles. The auto industry is currently plagued by the crisis of overproduction; turn on your TV set, and you are deluged with car ads. The companies are obliged to saturate the car-buying audiences in order to get rid of their huge inventories.
In such a context, the problem of revolution, ecosocialist revolution, is sized up well by Hutchinson, Mellor, and Olsen in The Politics of Money:
Cars only provide us with sustenance in the context of a capitalist economy, where owning one is typically necessary for work in what Marx called the “circulation sphere,” whereas in an ecosocialist context further production of cars would be viewed as a threat to the ecosystem integrity of planet Earth and, therefore, to the real, material future in which the next generation will have to reside. In the future, moreover, car operation will only become more joyless, as supplies of cheap oil become more scarce globally. Thus I would expect ecosocialist communities to reject car-manufacture altogether, and I would suspect the impetus for revolution to come from people who, for instance, have no prior attachment to car culture, neither in making them nor in driving them; we might start by looking at participants in what Joan Martinez-Alier calls “the environmentalism of the poor,” or the “environmental justice movement.” Should we look for such people in the UAW first?
28 February 2008, 1:09 amkathy miriam:
RE: Josiah’s point–about ” an important distinction between Obama’s power constituency (which is Wall Street and the Pentagon), and his popular consituency, which is a lot of frustrated and angry people who want the non-symbolic, substantive version of change.”
Alas, I am skeptical about this notion of Obama’s constituency. From where I sit, supporters of Obama deflect any discussion of substantive issues, and cling to rhetoric as empty as their candidate’s. Perhaps I’m around the wrong people! But certainly– there is no evidence within the progressive media– or only in far flung corners — that the kind of passion seen in Obama supporters is anything but a potted passion, long-structured by a variety of forces in one-dimensional-society land (including Oprah-vision channels of reality) and thus a perfect fit with this campaign. I can’t see anything “real” beneath the smoke and mirrors– or you have to take a long while to get to it, first seeing the amount of energy exerted to maintain the high levels of self-deception infusing all the “hope”…
28 February 2008, 10:14 amWhere Stan sees “restlessness” i see massive complacency… I can’t see the same kind of distinction between the candidate and the constituency.
Josiah:
In response to Kathy, I don’t disagree with your assessment of the Obama campaign itself, much less with that of his financial and political backers. The Lilian Segura article on Alternet about Obama’s and Clinton’s foreign policy is very clear on this; there’s a reason why Zbigniew Brezezinski, architect of the “dirty war” in Afghanistan and author of “The Grand Chessboard,” supports him. And that’s why I wasn’t calling on people here to campaign for Obama, vote for Obama, or otherwise to jump on the latest once-every-four-years Democratic bandwagon. But by “popular constituency,” I meant the people in the general population who are voting for him, and more broadly who think he represents real “change.” I know a lot of young people who are more excited about politics than they ever have been, because it’s not about two dour old white guys who don’t look like them, or who they can’t imagine talking to face to face. Even here in South Korea, where I am, people (Koreans, not Americans) are excited about Obama. And let me emphasize again that I think that this “change” is essentially symbolic, because the policies remain the same under the race-gender signifiers, as has become a very old theme by now. But where the “change” is, or can be made, significant is in the extent to which segments of the population which usually opt out are being energized. And for those of us who see through the “smoke and mirrors,” Kathy, I’m only saying we should see the people who believe in ‘Obamarama’ as a force we can potentially work with, not just a big, dumb herd of “massive complacency.”
28 February 2008, 6:33 pmStan:
I’m going to disagree here… but only as a kind of devil’s advocate, because these are still very underdeveloped musings.
Those who are energized (new young voting registrants) seem to be absolutely moronic in their susceptibility to the vacuous pronouncements of Obama. One young woman on the radio said something to the effect of, “I don’t know what insurgents are, but I know what change and hope are. He’s really speaking to me.”
The restlessness is more broad, and it is manifesting now as economic anxiety. This dread and restlessness is affecting a constituency that is far and away the most important political bloc in the US from an electoral standpoint… the ‘burbs. The approval ratings for Bush are rock bottom, as Democrats never tire of telling us; but so are the approval ratings for Congress (as a whole) and for the media. I’m not sure it’s complacency. I’m more inclined to think its a combination of deeply-rooted ignorance of our own situation combined with the sense (not totally unjustified) of plain paralysis… or powerlessness, if you like.
The antiwar movement is emblematic of this, and of a larger crisis of political resistance. The traditional left forces took the lead in organizing opposition to the war, but once they “led” and the masses followed (at least in the opinion polls), there was no practice — no action — to deal with the refusal of the state to take notice of the opposition to the war. The traditional left have provided two options — each a source of violent sectarian opposition inside the left — to tail Democrats in some amorphous center-left coalition thing, or to follow the banner of an equally amorphous (and sometimes frighteningly adventuristic) “revolution.” The masses know how to do the former, and they think the latter is nuts… partly because many proposals for how this “revolution” is to take place are nuts.
The restlessness has no original or effective outlet, and until things become intolerable — very intolerable — the vast majority will not seek an outlet anyway. But it is a subjective and cultural reflection — a very manipulable one at this point — of some real problems that people only vaguely understand.
There is certainly no guarantee, not from history anyway, that as things go from bad to worse, people will see “the light” and compel some deep social transformation that one of us might approve.
Instead of preparing ourselves by recruiting into some ideal program, the practice the two poles of the left have in common, I have to wonder if we shouldn’t be intentionally preparing now to deal practically with the kinds of emergencies that those masses will face in the most predictable future. Stable solidarity is effectuated through community; not position statements and programs.
Moreover, there must be a philosophical/psychological/spiritual aspect to the practice of resistance-and-survival. People need to be “prepared” to weather the affective rigors of resistance… and I again cite the Civil Rights movement, where collectively singing in jail was an incalculably important practice… which the left emulated, but which originated among religious African Americans who were barely a generation out of sharecropping.
The left is notoriously sterile on this account… often out of a kind of Enlightenment machismo. The culture inside left grouplets is often positively Machiavellian in its cold instrumentality. This sterility has negatively impacted their efficacy… in addition to plain being on the wrong side of history with regard to technological optimism and hostility to feminism.
We need something far more local, practical, and emotionally resonant… and the masses — even in the ‘burbs — are not our enemies because they are ignorant. We need a way to see most people as our allies… but as-yet unactualized; then figure out how we actualize the communities to which they will seek to belong.
Again, very vague outlines of a thought.
28 February 2008, 8:07 pmJosiah:
I think there may be a generational divide here, both nationally and in this discussion. Many people on this blog are veterans, both of the military and years and years of social movements. Out of respect for that experience (and all the understanding it holds of which I am ignorant), I’m willing to acknowledge that the divergences here may be more due to my own naivete than other people’s cynicism. I’m 23 years old, but I remember the Clinton years well enough to expect absolutely nothing different, vis a vis the current administration, from the “liberal wing” of the imperial ruling class in the U.S.; and we all agree that Obama is as metabolized into the system as an“edgy” General Motors ad, or a hip military recruiter. The debate, then, seems to be around whether there is any meeting point whatsoever—not at the electoral level, but at the local, community-organizational level—between those who still hold illusions about liberalism and Democrats, and those who do not. And clearly, for many people here, to believe any such meeting point could exist at all (or that it should be a priority rather than an occasional contingency) is a sign of belonging to the former, illusion-addled, camp.
And I suspect the root of that difference is, again, generational. Many people here were no doubt burned out by time spent working with liberals. Personally, since high school, I have spent a big chunk of my time working with Marxist-Leninist “vanguard parties” in two different parts of the U.S. My mother, who is in her 60s, is a radical feminist and a believer in peak oil and eco-collapse, who lives in an “off-the-grid” community in California. At this point in my life, I’ve seen enough of the sectarian left, the new back to the land movement, and the Democrats to believe that, purely ON THEIR OWN TERMS, not a whole lot will come out of any of these formations. Which doesn’t mean diluted left-center coalitions are the answer, either. The question for me is, how does an undiluted radical understanding of the entropic unsustainability of capitalism or industrialism more generally, and the human misery the system is causing (which I saw in Vietnam, on a huge scale, just a month ago) can be spread across a broader public. All I’m asking is, “How we can those of us who not sipping the Kool-Aid reach and link with more people?”
28 February 2008, 9:48 pmDeAnander:
The means of production under capitalism do not necessarily make any contribution to human sustenance. That is why calls for the ownership and control of the means of production as defined by capital misses the point.
that is a beautifully pithy quote, thanks LS. it summarises a great deal in a few well chosen words. given the meaning and praxis of modern industrialism, all that organised industrial labour can struggle to own is the means of destruction — the means by which every day we are vandalising and destroying the means of production of the necessities of life, i.e. food, water, topsoil, fish, trees, livable climate.
I’m also mulling over Stan’s description of the sterility of the social atmosphere of the sectarian Left and relating this, vaguely and gropingly, to the culture that JR Saul summed up in his book title as the brainchild of “Voltaire’s Bastards”… a culture that seized on one particular aspect of the Enlightenment period in European thought — i.e. reductionist rationality — and elevated it to (ironically) the status of a religion. somehow this emotional or figurative sterility of discourse, the “cold instrumentality” that afflicts so many Left formations, seems connected to me with such other manifestations as the antibiotic culture and the chilly instrumentality of “industrial efficiency”… half formed notions, these, but it seems relevant somehow that when sneeringly superior wonks on either left or right wish to poke fun of ideological opponents or competitors, they will talk about “singing Kumbaya” (as in, “har har, as if singing sappy songs would do any good in the Real World”) — while as Stan points out, collective singing and the emotional strength and comfort it lent to the resistance were “incalculably important”… and here should we stress the word incalculably which literally means that it cannot be calculated, quantified, reduced to an equation of cost/benefit or an efficiency study? that which is incalculable, which falls outside the reductionist calculus, that which cannot be quantified (including “priced”) is ignored or dismissed with sneers…
groping in the dark here, trying to corral the odd bits of resonance I’m getting from this thread…
28 February 2008, 11:24 pmDeAnander:
When Change is Not Enough: The Seven Steps To Revolution
interesting read, despite the title which tempts me to rewrite it as “the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Revolutionaries” or some other self-help cliché.
28 February 2008, 11:30 pmDeAnander:
The Food Underground Again — free internet radio shows about real food, local food, food activism…
28 February 2008, 11:39 pmJosiah:
Yeah, that Sara Robinson article is fascinating, Deanander. I’m not sure whether I agree with her after a cursory read, but the deeper “structural shift” she typologizes and identifies in the U.S. is no mere fantasy, as these contradictions have to give way at some point. The chances of it leading to a real gear shift in the machinery of the U.S. state are close to non-existent, but in organizational terms…I think something significant is brewing among the disaffect constituencies of Ron Paul AND Obama that precedes, and will outlast, both of them.
29 February 2008, 12:08 amStan:
Josiah, that veteran status may mean something, or it may mean that some of us just groped around lost longer than others. (: Appreciate your respectful approach; but you seem to me to be pretty close to the bullseye at least as far as the perennial question is concerned: How does the community get formed?
An indigenous organizer from New Mexico told me once that people don’t need to be organized. They are already organized, in everything from PTAs to workplaces to churches to bridge clubs. We need to be where they are already organized.
Another (this one African American) organizer from Eastern NC told me another good one: Do not organize around a project; organize around a need.
Where are people already coming together? Why are they there? What do they need?
The real difficulty of organizing in The Metropole is that the culture has become far more atomized, entertained safely at home and safely unaccountable, and the collective spaces are being displaced by impersonal consumer spaces.
Again, thinking of what Lassiter wrote in The Silent Majority, we tend to think of political identities along an ideological spectrum. But that spectrum is an epistemic error, and has been for several decades as it refers to the built environment of over half the US. People are voting their perceived interests, and suburban voters are perceiving them based on what they “do.” The political identities are (1) homeowner (borrower/investor), (2) school parent, (3) consumer.
What the coming economic dislocation is bringing to the fore — first among the poorer among us, but eventually across the board — is (4) debtor.
Michael Hudson’s remark in an interview linked somewhere around here in audio names the crux of the difference between the ortho-left explanation of class oppression and what we are seeing now. The open antagonism between employer-employee has been replaced (in the financialized economy) by an ever more open antagonism between creditor-and-debtor. Among the “middle class,” this is expressed in several ways. Home prices are falling here, but the county — strapped for cash — just re-appraised everyone’s houses up to get more property tax. The most common reason for middle class penury now is catastrophic (and uninsured) illness or injury. The two fastest forms of price inflation are gasoline and food. Soon enough, when this recession really bites deeply, higher rates of joblessness will affect the technocrats, administrators and managers… and we will see a period we might call the SUV Grapes of Wrath, with massive and chaotic inmigration by the MCers in search of a diminishing number of (technocrats, administrators and managers) jobs.
As Bello points out in the linked article at Insurgent American, the political response is likely to be “military Keynesianism.”
So, in addition to reading the signposts for the next five years, the question that occurs to me is: Where will people come together? Why will they be there? What will they need?
29 February 2008, 6:53 amkathy miriam:
Stan writes: “The traditional left have provided two options — each a source of violent sectarian opposition inside the left — to tail Democrats in some amorphous center-left coalition thing, or to follow the banner of an equally amorphous (and sometimes frighteningly adventuristic) “revolution.” The masses know how to do the former, and they think the latter is nuts… partly because many proposals for how this “revolution” is to take place are nuts”
I think this otherwise astute typology is missing another “option”, the counter-cultural, expressivist politics- that started out more buoyantly and vibrantly, even in its anti-political tendencies–to build alternative institutions and communities as the “political solution” to eg the patriarchy (separatism)– and has now dried up or actually become teflonized/plasticized into the kind of expressivist anti-politics characterizing the O- phenomenon. (or there are the tiny number of remnant, kind of off the grid communities that Josiah refers to) This plastic,potted passion driven “movement” is glommed onto the cold instrumentality of the empty electoral process (the diluted center-left coalition… you refer to).
I myself have no experience in the instrumental, vanguardist Left type politics that stan, you seem to refer to– except in some weird derivative form in the feminist action group I belonged to in the late 80s which was both expressivist and instrumental in some good, some anti-political ways.
There is so much in this thread- so rich- I have to print it up and read, and comment more closely later- especially to deander’s additions, etc.
29 February 2008, 7:08 amBUT what i want to say is that– I’m not saying that people per se are not organizable… (From my teaching experience I do see the hunger for *substantive* change in many of my students- and see the potential for organizing–without yet knowing exactly what form that should take), I just think that specifically the formation of the Obama-movement represents depoliticization– with its yes moronic discourse– rather than a specific context for organizing.
In terms of the vision of transformation based on community building as opposed to program making- that might be a false opposition. Community building is too easily absorbed back into that counter-cultural, idealist formation I referred to above, ultimately a political. I’m not against community-building-and the building-up of tools and resources that Stan and De are often referring to– but do not see it as a primary locus of political transformation–certainly it is a component of it.
WEll those are immediate thoughts.This is such a great thread! I love everyone’s contributions.
Charles:
There experience might prompt such people, given their past placement within capitalism, to ask first about how they can get that “vestment” in capitalism back. Are we to imagine that people who have spent good portions of their lives building automobiles are spontaneously going to want to do something else for a living, and that they’d feel the need to form a revolutionary movement in order to do that something else? I can’t see why, and I rather suspect they’d prefer that the union defend their jobs.
^^^^^
CB: Yea. I’m thinking more of the new generation of autoworkers who will be working at half the wages of the previous generation.
Of course, I don’t mean there is suddenly going to occur a revolutionary movement among even them. There is no conscious group with influence to raise consciousness. I am speaking to the more fundamental question raised by claiming that the working class is just too vested in capitalism to be potentially revolutionary even.
As to the difficulty to getting to a revolution, it is not more difficult than getting to the general program proposed around here. We are just as far from localism, gardens, no male supremacy, etc., etc, as proposed on this blog here , as we are from classical Marxist revolution. Most people are just as alienated from proposals here as they are from working class rev.
29 February 2008, 2:50 pmCharles:
Sure, there will have to be developed quickly a whole new technological regime, because of global warming, oil depletion , water depletion, etc. What ever these new means of production, instruments of production are, the aim should be that they are socially owned, not private property.
Also, even as automobiles become “extinct” , the ex-autoworkers, will , of course have to have new forms of productive activity. My arguments here do not depend upon retaining automobile production as the primary industry.
As to the means of production vs the means of sustenance , the classical terminology already makes this distinction, but your “means of sustenance” is termed “means of personal consumption” or “means of subsistence”. So, the argument made using “means of sustenance” is already implied in the classical analysis.
^^^^^^^
Cars only provide us with sustenance in the context of a capitalist economy, where owning one is typically necessary for work in what Marx called the “circulation sphere,” whereas in an ecosocialist context further production of cars would be viewed as a threat to the ecosystem integrity of planet Earth and, therefore, to the real, material future in which the next generation will have to reside.
^^^^
29 February 2008, 3:13 pmCB: I agree. There must be a simultaneous socialist and technological revolution. Not easy. Some are not thinking we need or can have a socialist rev. in the classical sense, and place importance only on the techno-eco rev.
Stan:
Something I noticed in the army, and life generally… at some stage related to size, “organization’s” organizational goals begin to oveshadow then consume the stated “missions” or goals of the organization.
That’s why the discovery of this “Dunbar’s number” thing has been a kind of obsession over the last year or so. It’s a difficult thing for which to establish “rigorous, scientific” validity, but anecdotally it keeps ringing a little verisimilitude bell in my head.
R. I. M. Dunbar, a London-based anthropologist, wrote a paper in 1993 iirc, where he associated the human neocortex, language capacity, and social group size. He came up with this number, like 147.5 (most folks just say 150). Beyond that population in a social network, spontaneous undirected social cohesion begins to break down rapidly.
The suggestion, of course, is that something besides this organic cohesion is then required to take over to maintain cohesion. De had just put me onto Illich when I read about this, so the most natural conceptual leap I cold make was that is what “management” does… what is universally required to overcome the degradation of social cohesion beyond the cortext-delimited 150 is management. What Illich repeatedly critiques is management by “technicians” and specialists, and how these specialized divisions of labor flee from conviviality.
In reflecting on my own experiences of management, and of experience in small organizations composed of generalists, for me at least, management structures and cultures are always, without exception antagonistic. Each specialized position by virtue of its specificity becomes a thing-for-itself; and each specialty by virtue of its specificity competes with other positions for status and social value. Mutual antagonism inheres in management; as Weber and others noted in very large organizations with regard to bureaucracy.
Here are Weber’s famous six characteristics of B:
1. A formal hierarchical structure
2. Management by rules
3. Organization by functional specialty
4. An “up-focused” or “in-focused” mission
5. Purposely impersonal
6. Employment based on technical qualifications
7. (post-Weber) The Peter Principle
I have this persistent notion that Dunbar’s number is (1) onto something and (2) has something very important to tell us about whay many of our efforts at social transformation fail.
Thoughts?
29 February 2008, 5:53 pmLegume Sam:
Look, Charles –
We can look for revolution anywhere we want. In fact, if we are to imagine revolution as involving an eventual return to local production for local use (as opposed to global production for exchange-value), we had better look for revolutino in that spot where we are standing now. If we are to have some sort of revolution in time to save practically all of Earth’s planetary ecosystems from capitalism, we had better overcome our shyness to working with groups of people which, at first sight, do not look like they have the least chance of being revolutionary. Bourgeois political economy is bad for, hell, probably 99% of the public, and the news is increasingly revealing this as fact. Check out, for instance, Dave Lindorff’s diary of Wednesday.
So it’s high time we, following Gramsci, start sifting through the public looking for some half-decent organic intellectuals. We’re also going to trade in the all-or-nothing concept of revolutionary action for something based on Joel’s concept of “prefiguration.” Joel Kovel’s 2nd edition of The Enemy of Nature is vastly improved over the first, and tries to explain how social institutions and cultural practices can (to greater or lesser degrees) “prefigure” the socialist future. My essay on the Pomona College Natural Farm can only provide a gloss on this.
How meaningful is it to say “We are just as far from localism, gardens, no male supremacy, etc., etc, as proposed on this blog here , as we are from classical Marxist revolution.”?? Localism is an ideology; what’s important to those who want local control is the extent to which autonomy can be established for local groups. Gardens are local creatures, too: they live or die to the extent to which they can defend themselves against incursions by moneyed forces with other plans for the land. Feminism is a force of many, many facets which is part of what Gramsci called the “war of position.” The “classical Marxist revolution” is, on the other hand, the complete package — both the “war of position” and the “war of movement.” Comparing apples and oranges? What would the “classical Marxist revolution” look like these days?
1 March 2008, 12:45 amStan:
ref my above
Look at the Green Party right now. Comparatively strong organizations in certain places like CA and NY, but the pretension to “national” status is an ongoing cohesion nightmare. Even more miniscule, when I was affiliated with CPUSA, the USA refering to the whole US, the cohesion was enforced by a clique-dominated form of absolute ideological conformity… the membership numbers always grossly inflated for public consumption (trying to create the appearance of momentum and popularity)… when we collected the first (and only) five members in NC (a state of 8 million), they triumphantly announced a NC CPUSA… while their few well-established local clubs mainly in the NE had some semblence of effect on local issues… almost all based on personal relatioinships.
The Democratic Party, otoh, continually consolidates its power with massive infusions of the most potent and abstract form of social power — money, and a lot of it — which serves to dissolve community attachments, delocalize power (and accountability), dis-embed (deracinate, as Cornel West says) individuals and dis-enchant then with non-monetized values. That money is provided by those with plenty to spare, who are defending their interests, in part by defending their legal claims to power (state), and in part by defending their epistemic standpoint (media).
The attempt to compete inside this same model (which I hypothesize is characterized in common by management) without financial parity (the sources of which can still be found in the social relations of capital, gender, and race) is an attempt to push a string.
< i>The Program becomes a Constitution, the basis of the rules-based management (a la Weber above); and it destroys the one advantage that small resistance formations can apply against larger ones: tactical agility.
What the “program” intends is to unite efforts; but what it does, in a practical sense, is exclude all but the “evolved” or disciplined. Then the assumption that one program is better than the next creates a proliferation of grouplets which exist in a tiny “market niche.” Each is driven by the perceived need to grow; but the pool of the evolved-and-disciplined remains small (because it is almost purely ideological). No grouplet is even in the running to complete with the behemoths of real political power. Their competition is with one another… always at the earliest impasse — membership recruitment; and when ten marketers are seling the same thing to fifty potential customers, it is not what they have in common that gets the emphasis. It is how they are different. This is the symptom of sectartianism.
Our fear, it seems, is that without mangaement and rules, the scratches of “incorrect thinking” will turn into the gangrene of “parochialism” or “deviation.”
As one who is still enough of a marxist to believe that Marx was fundamentally right in his critique of Hegelian idealism, I believe that this assumption can be re-worded and unmasked as idealist — only right thinking can lead to right practice.
Pursuing that thread, then, is it realy possible to “build” the kind of culture that self-organizes and self-corrects as an alternative to rules that tend toward becoming ends-in-themselves as part of institutions that become things-for-themselves? Might we ought to consider that certain forms of relevant practice that are established in groups that are small and proximal enough to maintain stable social cohesion will express themselves organically in a culture of accountability?
Gotta go to work.
1 March 2008, 6:39 amJosiah:
This discussion intersects with the rape culture thread, in a way. Derrick Jensen writes somewhere that there is a huge difference between a woman saying to her abuser “I have a right to not be raped,” and saying “you have no right to rape me.” In the former, the focus is kept on her, as if she was the problem; in the latter, it’s on the abuser, the real problem. What he’s pointing out is that systems of domination typically invert cyclical causality, putting the spotlight on the victims, and making the abuser look reactive or even defensive, rather than aggressive. This principle of inversion has played out in ever settler-colonial war in history: during the Indian Wars, the focus in U.S. newspapers was luridly fixated on “savage Indian violence” against white settlers. In Kenya, the Mau Mau were portrayed in the British press as bloodthirsty monsters after 32 white settlers were killed on their plantations, even though a quarter of a million Kenyans died in the prison camps set up by the British during the counter-insurgency campaign (according to historian Caroline Elkins). Exactly the same pattern is being followed in the coverage of the latest Israeli military attack on Gaza, with the death of dozens of Palestinian civilians being portrayed as a defensive retaliation for the death of an Israeli in a Sderot rocket attack.
So what does this have to do with the discussion? This inversion principle is part of a larger dynamic of internalizing the framework of the abuser. And I think this is reflected, in a different way, by the internalization of capitalist market logic by Marxist-Leninist groups. In the last 5 years, I’ve been to more SWP meetings in Philadelphia than I care to list. And while the SWP were full of well-meaning and dedicated people, they matched Stan’s description all too closely, and there are deeper reasons for that than coincidence. What is the relentless sectarianism (differentiating our revolutionary praxis from competing group x’s revolutionary praxis), the subscription-drive atmosphere of pamphleteering and promotional bluster, and the fetishizing of Our Agenda on the M-L left, if not a well-meaning but misguided mirror image of a struggling start-up company selling pine-scented air fresheners?
I think the problem, going back to Jensen, is that these groups attempt to act radically within a framework of domination determined by their abuser. When I was in the SWP, for example, we went to the coal towns of rural Pennsylvania to support a workers’ strike, and to try to build an organizational coalition for better working conditions in the coal plant. Part of this involved lobbying against the closing of a particular mine to save jobs (as it was becoming unprofitable, for the classic entropic reasons that applies to all extractive industries).
Now, all of this was defensible within the framework of meliorist trade-unionism, but not of a sane way of living: the landscape of the region has been turned into a disaster area by coal mining, and it obviously needs to end. Moreover, we were regarded with a high degree of suspicion by the workers. And I think that’s because they had accepted a cold, hard truth which we had not: even if they managed to improve safety standards and/or raise wages, it would only increase the likelihood of mine closure, making relocation to a lower-wage state like Wyoming (where plenty of Mexican migrant workers can be bused in) all the more likely. So even the workers themselves had rejected reformism within the capitalist framework (even while remaining dependent on it), and so regarded us as a nuisance, much like an abused woman telling her friend, “You don’t understand him like I do. I can’t change his behavior. Refusing to have sex [read: going on strike] isn’t going to do the trick.”
The other thing is that, in keeping with the internalization of their abuser’s framework, these groups tend to keep the spotlight on their Party Platform, and why people should join them, and why they’re getting better every day, and why it’s going to be different this time around. Indeed, the way they talk about “the revolution” is much like the way some abuse victims will talk about overhauling their abuser: some day, they wrest control of him from himself, and change the way he acts for good. Someday, we will control the means of production. (Cf. Sam and Deanander’s comments upthread.)
Above all, there is the fetish of the pie-in-the-sky end goal instead of the here and now, and what we can actually do. Because the ends are utopian and abstract, the means are utopian and abstract, too. And two vital things are lost: a) stopping the abuser’s crimes by whatever means possible, with whoever possible (because sectarianism is the kryptonite for any attempts to build strength in numbers); and b) a committed engagement to concrete, tangible alternatives to the system in our own communities.
Sorry if that went on a bit too long
. People have made some really thought-provoking comments in this thread, and it’s got the mental cogs turning (is that a too-mechanistic metaphor?).
1 March 2008, 8:23 amxenia:
One significant problem that I see in much of the US is how frequently people move. Before I was 25, I lived in only 2 different houses, one of them for 20 years. Once I came to the US in my late twenties, I moved every year because of the instability in university housing (first as a student, then as an instructor). Most people I know in the US are similar, eg born in Chicago, educated in California, getting a job in Atlanta. To some extent, this may be more of an academic or white phenomenon, and I know it is less important in the South. But in Europe I have never met 20-year olds who moved once a year all their life, whereas in the USA there are plenty of kids like that, my partner included.
(The strange paradox to me is that there is simultaneously a lot of talk about community, and much of the popular imagination is very small-scale, with the dream of people marrying their high-school sweethearts and staying in their town.)
So, my question here is: How do you build a community if you move so frequently, whether that’s because of a job or the perennial selling and buying of houses? Maybe people will be more settled because of the housing crisis, but maybe they will also become more uprooted because of lack of jobs. If you live in one place only for 6 months, how can you be politically active and connect with people in a real, active way?
1 March 2008, 1:58 pmStan:
The same way we build community and sustainability by flying from the four corners of the earth for a convention.
This is a very good question because it describes a real aspect of the system.
1 March 2008, 10:18 pmJosiah:
Xenia, Stan, you’re both absolutely right. Many of us are living lives that are more scattered, unnatural and dependent on long supply lines, than our ancestors could have imagined. And it is all the more ironic that we can do so (as I know I have been) while talking about sustainability and grassroots community, and having the gall to critique others at the same time! Our own lives are often as problematically a part of this system as the big stuff we are critiquing more readily, like the U.S. state.
And you both put your finger on a big, fat contradiction in my earlier posts, where I’m talking sustainability and community, but also saying I’m in South Korea, and went to Vietnam a month ago. What a joke, right, as if globe-hopping wasn’t killing the planet? On that note, I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by any earlier criticisms of Marxist-Leninists and people trying to unplug from the grid; I respect both and I’m no one to judge. Just to briefly explain how non-impressive my actual situation is: I grew up in Seattle, and in 2000, my parents (a high school Spanish teacher and a psychotherapist) split up, and my mother realized she was a lesbian, and moved to a center of sustainability experimentation, Willits, California. She’s now 61 years old, and working with dysfunctional families for the last years of her career. My father still teaches at an inner city high school in West Seattle, and hopes to retire soon himself. I dropped out of high school in 2000, went to community college, then to college in North Philadelphia, where the inequality probably comes as close to South Africa as you have in the U.S. After graduating in 2006, and working shit jobs for 1 year, I responded to an internet job offer to teach English in South Korea for 1 year (August 2007 to August 2008). So here I am in my early 20s, teaching the “international business language” to the children of middle-class Koreans for 50 hours a week. And I got a chance to spend 6 days in Ho Chi Minh City during our Lunar News Year’s vacation in February, where I saw the biggest panorama of squalor I’ve ever seen along the banks of the Saigon River.
What could be more emblematic of this empire, and its wastefulness, and the power relations within it?
So there are no moral arguments coming from this quarter, at least, against any of the people in this thread. Just trying to disentangle the web we’re all caught in, some of us more deeply than others (!)…
1 March 2008, 11:18 pmLegume Sam:
Xenia and Stan ask:
Maybe that will change when gasoline reaches $10/gallon. Or later, when it’s obvious to all that ecosystems are collapsing everywhere under the weight of capitalist “development” — you’ll be able to go anywhere on Earth to see the same misery…
2 March 2008, 10:25 amaudrey:
I don’t know that the time factor has much to do with a sense of community. I’ve been places for relatively short times – as short as a week at times, where I felt a strong sense of community with the people there. And I’ve lived in other places for years without feeling a sense of community with the people who lived right next door to me. In the times where I had a sense of community most, it came about through shared work, sometimes benefiting ourselves, sometimes benefiting others.
I quoted that second sentence because I am interested in the decision to include the word “politically” there. Maybe we need to really think about the ways in which we define that word, and whether we see it as referring to changing laws or physical work, or some combination of the two. The last few political events I went to, the ones where we had speeches and walked around afterwards with signs through somebody else’s neighborhood, I felt disconnected from the community we were (literally) using.
One of the reasons I liked the gulf march was that some of the people involved had been already working in the area for months on relief efforts, some stayed on afterwards to rebuild the homes of people we met along the way, and some returned afterwards to help the community. In my daydreams – where everyone listens to my ideas – I imagine every march through a neighborhood culminating (or beginning) with real work that the community needs. We have a group that meets at the corner of a street once a week for an anti-war rally. They have maybe 20 – 30 people there every week for one hour. What if all of them stood for the hour, but then afterwards they converged on an abandoned lot and cleaned it up for an extra half hour, or maintained a community garden in it, or asked a local school if they need any sort of maintenance they could pitch in and help with?
This is how some political (and church) groups gain community support, both at home and abroad – by helping to build the communities they are in, in direct ways.
2 March 2008, 5:33 pmJosiah:
Wow. You put it so well, Audrey:
“In my daydreams – where everyone listens to my ideas – I imagine every march through a neighborhood culminating (or beginning) with real work that the community needs. We have a group that meets at the corner of a street once a week for an anti-war rally. They have maybe 20 – 30 people there every week for one hour. What if all of them stood for the hour, but then afterwards they converged on an abandoned lot and cleaned it up for an extra half hour, or maintained a community garden in it, or asked a local school if they need any sort of maintenance they could pitch in and help with?
This is how some political (and church) groups gain community support, both at home and abroad – by helping to build the communities they are in, in direct ways.”
This is like what Deanander was saying, about how people providing services are the resistance, even more than the armed guerillas. And now that I think of it, your point makes so much sense. It’s actually a way better explanation than the one I gave above for why groups like the Socialist Worker’s Party are often met with hostility from workers in their well-intentioned organizing efforts. It really is as simple as helping or not helping people in practical ways. The feeling you describe, of feeling “disconnected from the community we were (literally) using” is one I had while going door to door and selling papers with the SWP. Many people, I think, saw us as takers, coming through to get subscription money, time, wasted effort, etc., rather than giving them something that their families could use. And the only way to dispel that notion is not to be that, to actually give something back.
I know, when I’m done doing this crazy overseas thing to pay off my student loans (tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and for an unusable BA), I’m going back to my hometown to do some of the practical, down-to-earth kind of stuff you’re talking about.
3 March 2008, 3:30 amxenia:
I admire the gulf march a lot, and the combination of anti-war plus local school help appeals to me as well; it is explicitly political as well as practical. However, I think my question still stands. What if you do not belong to any church group? What if you want not to just clean up the school grounds, but also to problematize the way that schools are organized and what they teach? In other words, working on your neighborhood often works out fine if there is stability (ie if most people continue to live in the area, are of similar backgrounds and such). Also, if you focus on your own neighborhood, you are doing it more or less explicitly for your local needs. This makes sense in the immediate way, but it does not help connect the neighborhoods, and the little middle-class world remains the same.
I know that the arrangement of forces in the US has not allowed for it, but I still think it is the duty of the state to maintain the schools, and I am deeply against any kinds of tuition. Can I express such views with my nice libertarian neighbors without being shunned? Can I go and help black kids in the ghetto without being the nice white lady who is telling them that the world is basically a fine place if you merely struggle a bit? Can I talk openly about incarceration rates and what they mean? How do I work with homeless people without being attached to a church?
Many of my deliberations come from having being the object of help when arrived to the US as a refugee in the mid-1990s. Many families among us were assigned volunteers, and even though there were nice people among them, the experience as a whole was abysmal. Some of them were lonely and confused and wanted sex and romance. Others thought they were civilizing us. Most of them did it for the sake of their CV, and 95% either did inane things (take us to the mall to show us how shopping is done in America) or stopped helping as soon as there was the slightest disagreement. It ended up in all the Bosnians making constant cynical jokes about Americans helping us…very sobering.
Stan has emphasized many times the strategic need to approach people without sounding like a ranting angry leftist. Often, that makes sense. However, if you are conspicuous immediately as an outspoken Muslim immigrant or a radical bisexual feminist, or a physically disabled leftist, it becomes much harder to interact with certain kinds of people, hence the withdrawal into sectarian circles (which I think has a lot to do with the social origins of the US and Protestant sects, but does not help long term). But I do not want a world in which the local Catholics fix their church and the local Methodist theirs, the local gay activists hold their meetings by themselves, the Wall street guys do their business…that’s the world we already have.
I am not talking about being a provocateur or a marxist missionary, but merely about being honest to myself as a radical leftist and helping while knowing I will not be in the area same time next year, and I will not enjoy the fruits of the struggle directly.
3 March 2008, 4:28 amStan:
@ xenia, I am hearing two issues here: (1) the practical issue of hypermobility, and (2) the qualitative distinction between service-provision and political strategy. Together, they present a more than additive problem, it seems; and how to deal with tomething like that is definitely situation-dependent.
I have tried hard to lay of of travel for the last year; as far as I’ll go now is an occasional hour and a half by car to see a child/grandchild. I had to do two things to do that… take a drop in income (because I was being paid better — albeit sporadically — for the stuff I’d fly for) and find a regular job here (which at 56 was challenging, and the pay is quite low).
I also joined a start-up church that is ten minutes away. This part is not for everyone. But I retain every method of discernment I have acquired from marxism, from feminism, from Black nationalism, from ecofeminism, and even from the army, and aspects of each method continue to serve me very well. I find many self-identified Christians on record who have incorporated these same kinds of perspectives and theoretical lenses; but they also have a language and perspective in common with a far larger body of people in using scriptural exegesis, questions of theology and theodicy, etc. This stuff can be “translated.” Blessed, for example, means “being made whole.” Salvation (root word, salve) means healing [brokenness]… not being dragged out of the grave and cleaned up to become a harp-player.
Hezbollah — who Aud has reffed here before — has combined service-provision, religion, and politics to strong effect in Lebanon.
I guess the point I am working up to is this: I’ve started to germinate relationships with the people at this church, who live nearby. That is taking time. All of us are — like everyone these days — a little wary of strangers, because people who are massively and overwhelmingly disconnected from any community can become exceedingly and unpredictably weird. Wendell Berry noted that in a long-standing community, everyone knows the crazy person, the thief, that guy who is terminally irrascible… and this knowledge allows for stable co-existence. But nowadays, because of hypermobility, you never know what you are dealing with when you drop your guard against someone you really know nothing about… and that “brokenness” is exacerbated precisely by the more general deracination… xenia, you have pretty large experience of uprootedness.
Anyway, as I was saying, it takes a while to build trust (no one trusts a stranger that rings the doorbell to sell a paper, eh). It also takes a bit of work to accept people the way they are; but this is a necessary starting point. Someone had to accept me the way I was, and many still do. I can’t render a relentless political judgement against everyone if I am going to gain and retain trust. An old organizing mentor told me once, you win trust by the teaspoon, and lose it by the bucket. This is, in fact, a very attractive feature of the faith community for me: Accept for now, and believe in the possiblity of change (with my past, this has to be a core belief). People take time to (1) understand, (2) confess, (3) repent, (4) atone… describing my own process here, in terms stated by an IVAW member who identifies as atheist.
Then someone asks — knowing a little about my background — why I have an antiwar bracelet. My deepest urge is to drive through the breach with a massive convoy of political analysis; but if I’m smart, I just say, “It’s a bad war. And I have two sons in the military.” Then we can have a step-by-step conversation that goes as far as that person is comfortable, without it ever going into debate format. They will need time to reflect, because most of this stuff is new.
They do not have the capacity to take it all in at once; they need time to chew on one new bite. I’ll see them again in a week, maybe have another talk in three weeks. Meanwhile, they do not see me doing scary things. They see me putting away chairs, eating brownies, and playing with kids. And I like to put away chairs, eat brownies, and play with kids. I also like the fact that we come together with one thing in common, articulated or not: neither of us is perfect, and both of us are redeemable.
I guess one point I am circling here is that I still retain what I need from marxism, from feminism, et al; but I am learning how to take off my ideological uniform that announces this as my Identity. I’m just a middle-aged guy who likes kids and gardens… and a veteran who opposes the war. Maybe I’m also the guy who (hopefully, and by intent) doesn’t shift personality-gears between men and women, and has the interracial grandchildren.
But none of it is threatening. Much of this may be threateniing in the world, but it is not threatening there, and people can get used to it… maybe even say hmmm, let me rethink a few things.
Many of them go to church because they are spirtually starved, alienated, and afraid. Most are middle-class technocrats who work in or around Research Triangle Park. Those problems represent needs. Addressing the needs can be the most effective vehicle for finding (not writing out of abstraction) a program, by and by. These are not related as polarities, but chronologically and developmentally.
Over in Durham, a group called Seeds has a community garden. They are not providing the participants with an ideological roadmap. The garden, though, serves as a pretty explicit and pretty powerful counterpoint to the dominant episteme of late metropolitan consumer capitalism… as perceived from the standpoint of low-income African Americans.
I’m not zeroing in on any particular point here, just responding in a very unstructured way to xenia’s points… which I appreciate. I guess my final “point,” if it merits such a title, is that my own “discoveries” with regard to strategic theory can be summed up as: we cannot control, therefore cannot know, what our solutions will look like; because we cannot know what the circumstances and most proximal emergencies will be at those critical junctures where systemic disruption and collective consciousness will come together as “intolerable.” I think the left’s greatest self-delusion is that “we” can create these conditions; because we spend all our effort in this vain endeavor, when we’d be better served by trying to position ourselves ahead of conditions as the future go-to practical cadres. Some macro-trends are predictable… like the financialized economy sequelae we are seeing now. But the local needs arising from these trends will be highly indosyncratic.
ADDENDUM: Today’s political work (day off from paid-work)… dig out two dying boxwood shrubs (very very deep roots, ugh), shake out roots, sift soil and add lime. Redirect water spout from sidewalk to soil terrace. Prepare to build a cold-frame (totally from recycled material taken out of demolished houses)… three 12″ x 24″ casement windows (double-pane), vertical and side-by-side, into 2×6/2×4 frame (39″ x 27″ total surface, hand removable, with ability to cock open for ventilation), frame-stand at 30 degree sun-facing angle, insulate side-frame with styrofoam insulation and cedar panels, staple aluminum along inside surface to reflect light inward. This will be put in place of one boxwood, facing south. Frost-proof. One to two-month jump on vegetables, with good, strong, light-nourished mainstalks. Vague idea of future worm bin incorporated under the cold-frame, underground (it is a mini-greenhouse, after all). Note: this is agrarian, but not backward-facing historically (“peasant”). It is also applied science. I live in the suburbs on less than 1/5 acre.
3 March 2008, 8:15 amxenia:
thank you stan, i appreciate the response and the sensitivity. the practical work of building a garden **in a suburb** is deeply political as well…i do not have much experience with gardens, but i am sure it helps the soul as well as the body. yet, in the process of acquiring a practical skill by oneself it is not always easy for a person to alleviate alienation and loneliness (i’m talking about wider, social loneliness on a community level here, as my family and romantic relationships fortunately tend to be rather pleasant). so, the search continues!
3 March 2008, 11:52 am