The linked commentary says pretty much all of it… except how we can unite more people to strike down this cruel and idiotic prohibition.

Marijuana occupies a bizarrely paradoxical place in American culture. Its use is widespread, commonplace among the young and ubiquitous in popular culture. Yet it remains highly illegal, and talk of legalization is usually deemed political suicide.

Here are five signs that pot should be legal soon — and five reasons why it probably won’t.

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It might be the ultimate kapu. After all, everything from child molestation to necrophilia to bestiality to gang rape is now routine fare in online porn, and anyone who’s genuinely upset by that may commonly be mocked as an old-fashioned “prude”; but most Americans are still deeply shocked/upset by the idea of a composting toilet. In many municipalities you can’t get a permit for one — i.e. it’s illegal to operate one. In other countries however, such as forward-looking Sweden, the popular composting toilet called “Biolet” is being adopted by entire small towns/villages. (more…)

Obama, as I predicted, is throwing Wright under the bus.

I’ve taken plenty of time out to beat up on Senator Clinton for her phony-baloney perception management campaign; and since I’d rather eat shit than endorse either one of these opportunists, I’m linking Reed’s piece on Obama (even thougth I have disagree with Reed a time or two in the past (on the role of Black nationalism, eg).

Nationalism is what Wright elicits, by the way, because he insists on bringing up the evidence of the colonial relation Black America is subjected to by white America. This is his cardinal sin… reminding us that we are not a melting pot, that we are not equal, that it is not all in the past, and that all the prophets of working class unity can’t conceal the fact — except by rhetoric — that the white working class in the US is complicit in the colonial subjection of African America, because as in all imperial relations the white working class gets a cut. The ruling class hasn;t had to divide white and Black workers since the 18th Century. Since then, the white working class was in the vanguard of whtie supremacy.

That’s why Clinton’s veiled appeals to racism work. That’s also why Obama is trying to play an opportunist’s (and a fool’s) game: talking racial reconciliation and unity as if it were a fact to whites and hoping he can mobilize phenotype authenticity for African Americans (as a righteous reaction to Clinton’s race-baiting, imo).

THIS is why some of us insist that elections can only be engaged tactially, and why we should place no hope in them.

I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous.

It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.

There is also something disturbingly ritualistic and superficial in the Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that the Obamistas display a cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’ criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The campaign even has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in print by such normally clear-headed columnists as…

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In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

The end of cheap air tourism may seem like a good thing. And yet the collapse of tourism, in economies where the culture and scenery have become a last-ditch cash crop, can have effects just as disastrous as the collapse of any other external commodity market in a country that has been sucked into the undertow of global capitalism.

How much more devastating is the catastrophic cascade of food price inflation? (It’s also directly related, by the way, to the plateau of global oil production in the face of relentless expansion of “demand” — more on this below.) They’re intertwined; the downsizing of air tourism reduces money income for populations dependent on the global capitalist economy for staple foods, just at the moment when scarcity, uncertainty, and rampant speculation are causing staple food prices to spike.

It’s not a pretty picture, and the mainstream media are reporting on it with breathless alarm and utterly unjustified surprise; commentators from various perspectives (left, environmental, anti-colonialist, even libertarians) have seen this coming for a while.

Why Us? Why Now?

The airline industry has been very forthright about their problems. They are saying, “We were neither tooled nor organized for $120-a-barrel oil.” Most of us get this, because we associate transport technology with fossil hydrocarbons. We drive cars; and we buy the gas to put in those cars. Planes run on No. 1 Jet Fuel and if oil prices go up, so does the cost of jet fuel. Most of us are less likely… FULL ARTICLE

This dismal accounting from the most dismal of “sciences” is not guaranteed to get your dopamine levels up through first impressons. Econo-talk is a deadly bore — designedly so to ensure that it doesn’t attract the curiosity of us proles. Nonetheless, I urge those who have the time to give this a study… perhaps with a financial-terms glosaary ready at hand. Under this battleship gray veneer is a saga of power and powerlessness that has gone on for several decades, the last act being around 18-years long, culminating in the formal repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 (it had been ignored and eroded for some time before that).

The Glass-Steagall Act was a response to the speculative meltdown of 1929-31 that walked the world into the Great Depression then World War II. It separated commercial banks (that lend money) from financial speculators, because there was a justifiable fear that the hot money of speculation would overhwelm and destabilize the cool-money of commercial lending… duh.

Many Keynesians (Glass-Steagall was a Keynesian measure) now blame the loss of Glass-Steagall, to include the systematic bypass of it by the Federal Reserve for years before Clinton signed its repeal, for the so-called “credit crisis,” or by those who need to paper over the crisis with another level of superficiality, the “subprime crisis.” This confuses symptoms with causative agents, rather like calling Dengue a “fever-and-pain-crisis.”

They are right that this is a crisis, just as a high fever, on its own, can endager a patient’s brain.

Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, once famed for his reticence and oblique statements on the economy, seems to have spent the time since he retired from the Fed in 2006 rebuilding his persona, at least the reticence part.

Yet, though he now seems unable to decline an interview opportunity, it is increasingly evident that Greenspan is not going to be of much help when it comes to the critical issue of exploring what went terribly wrong with monetary policy and the financial system.

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What is most interesting about this article, near the end of its dreaded accounting, is the mention of rising food prices, related to hyperinflation, related to oil prices, related to dollar hegemony… and so it goes.

And so the crisis comes full circle, not simply to the emblematic investors jumping out of Wall Street windows, but to the concentration of a massive global population, created by industrialism and jazzed to uber-velocity by the so-called Green Revolution, in megacities laden with overcrowded Bidonville slums along precarious terrains; the residents therein dependent on money to eat.

Meanwhile, petit-fascists like Lou Dobbs fan the flames of xenophobia against the refugees of this process with their anti-immigrant demagogy… as the band plays on.

In 1999, Mark Jones (RIP) wrote:

Immigration into the US is the direct result of the previous creation of a surplus population, principally by driving peasants off the land in the process of extending capitalist agriculture.

There is a one-to-one connection between the aggressive extension of monopolised agriculture in the oppressed peripheral countries, and the creation of the megacities in the South, which are the sumps of stagnant surplus population, and the ultimate source of contemporary tidal immigration into the US, Europe etc. The argument from social justice begins with the proposition that as of now, we have enough food production capacity to feed people all over the world comfortably. All that is needed is more equitable distribution, meaning among other things less meat in Western diets. This is the classic Green argument: if we eat more wholesome beans and vegetarian foods, there is enough food for everybody. But it is utopian. The call for social justice involves not just redistribution, but a structural change in the mode of food production itself. What will this change entail, and how can it be implemented? Once you start to examine the problem in detail, you discover that the level of food production we have today, which is historically very high, depends upon the inputs which the total capitalist system provides: everything from chemical inputs, pharmaceutical, pesticides, stock breeding, biotech — to distribution methods, the vertical organisation of agriculture, the existence of a large scale, powerful agronomy research sector, the existence of sufficient energy inputs etc.

Third World food depends on the ‘Green Revolution’ in agriculture which is itself just an aspect of modern capitalism. This ‘Green Revolution,’ which produces an abundance of food, also produces new ‘surplus’ populations, i.e., former peasants made landless and driven into the cities. But if people object on spurious grounds even to the terminology ‘surplus population’ then we are unable even to define the problem, which is that the productivity of modern capitalist agriculture creates excess population as a by-product. This surplus population is a hostage to imperialism and it guarantees that modern capitalist agriculture, far from becoming sustainable or green/organic, will be still more intensified, capitalised, and imbued with the technologies of gene-modification, germplasm patenting, chemical saturation of soils etc. … Pools of hunger, scarcity, malnutrition, epidemic disease etc. are produced by capitalism alongside and together with the enclaves of prosperity.

Over-population confronts the world with multiform crises whose scale and intensity make alternatives to capitalism almost unthinkable… [yet] the population cannot exceed Earth’s carrying capacity, and all economic processes including food production must be sustainable. The population already exceeds carrying capacity, yet it may rise to 10 bn. within forty years. This huge surplus population will be hostage to capitalist agronomy, science and technology, to monopolised agribusiness with its complete dependence on unsustainable technologies, on chemical and pharmaceutical inputs, biotechnology and gene-manipulation, to the monopolistic food producing centres which will be concentrated in the temperate zones of the rich North. The tempo of change, too swift to plan or vary; and the structural imbalances which will only deepen over time, make this fate seem all the more inescapable. But this only means that capitalism’s crises will become still more explosive and dangerous.

So now we are reading about food riots… not because the food is in shortage (though our system is one where food is simultaneously over-abundant and scarce depending on where and who you are), but because of money… because the prices increased for this monocropped, globalized food.

And population is not an issue of the fecundity of the poor. It is an issue of what we are doing to the earth to simultaneously reduce its carrying capacity (destruction of biomes, of soil, air, water) and support the over-developed, energy-intensive, industrialized metropoles (especially the USA).

“Explosive and dangerous,” Mark said…. that’s the essence of it. “Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t,” as they say; but what goes on in the wake of “won’t” should alarm us enough to think seriously about how this crisis is about to affect us, and those within our proximity. The stranded billions in the megaslums are not the only hostages to this inertial capitalist agronomy.

If it comes for “them” in the morning, it shall come for us in the afternoon.

I was impressed by your insight that the motivation of U.S. volunteers overseas springs mostly from very alienated feelings and concepts. I was equally impressed, by what I interpret as a step forward among would-be volunteers like you: openness to the idea that the only thing you can legitimately volunteer for in Latin America might be voluntary powerlessness, voluntary presence as receivers, as such, as hopefully beloved or adopted ones without any way of returning the gift.

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…the case for suburban-dwellers to stay and work in the suburbs…

The subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S. has raised just outrage at the behavior of predatory lenders. It’s wrong to push a mortgage which the lender knows the borrower won’t be able to pay back, driving homeowners into foreclosure and bankruptcy.

But when poor nations have unpayable debt—often the result of Cold War favors to corrupt dictators—they can’t declare bankruptcy. They have to just keep paying, even if all they can pay is the interest, never touching the principal. Even if it means ignoring desperate needs at home for education, antipoverty strategies, or fighting the AIDS pandemic. And even if, as is all too often the case, the creditors—wealthy nations or institutions like the IMF—impose harmful economic policies on debtor countries…

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I’m asking folks to do this, it’s easy to call your congress-critter (Congressional Switchboard 202-224-3121)… takes about a minute and a half to call, give your zipcode to confrim you are a constituent, and say “I’m asking Congress(wo)man XXXXXX to please vote for the Jubilee Act.” When I did my stint as a registeredc lobbyist (long story), elected officials told me that fifty calls on the same topic was a very scary “flood” for them; and it made them sit up and pay attention.

The comments in response to Elizabeth Palmberg’s article are interesting all on their own.

When I said class needs to be re-analyzed, I refer specifically to Michael Hudson’s point that the employer-employee relation has been eclipsed by the creditor-debtor relation. It’s an important distinction when we start the mass movement conversation again.

Stan- you have a lot of interesting thoughts but I still can not hear the response to some of the questions I raised about the difference between community work and movement-making, and the false polarity of bureaucratic model centralized politics and community-making as the only alternatives (it seems you assume) of political change (clarify if I’m wrong). Again my question about how something like sexual slavery would be abolished within the myocelluarl/community-making model??
I’ll just pause on one of your statements: “Our own underground food movement here is germinal”

again- how does food praxis count as a “movement” if it is just going on within small family and community networks? I like the idea of food-praxis as “potential” for building something..

so- a new thread??

Yes, and soon.

In the meantime, I’ll try to take more time to clarify this false polarity (I agree there are false dichotomies that crop up in these conversations).

A little amateur political geneology as preface. My own intro to radical feminism was through MacKinnon’s work. In many respects, this was easiest for me because I had been swimming in Marx’s materialist conception of history (now shorthanded for better or worse as “historical materialism”) for a while; and MacKinnon started out heavily influenced by Marxism (Lukacs, especially, I think). MacKinnon’s grounding in law (she is a law professor to this day, I think) and in the feminist upwave of the late 60s/early 70s, along with her very keenly developed grasp of the deeper epistemological implications of Marxist critique, led to her out-Marxing the Marxists, who had substituted orthodoxy for critique on what they called “the woman question.” She took the method and followed it to its logical conclusions on the question of gender, and the pinned a great big tail on leftist phallocentrism masquerading as solidarity with a (liberal) feminist position called “equality.”

But when this critique was put into practice, the logic of MacKinnon’s critique led to two kinds of campaigns: the civil (as opposed to criminal) anti-porn campaign, and the “wages for housework” campaign (a al Thelma James). In a way, each of these addressed two faces of patriarchy: one, the sexual apsect, and the other, an economic class aspect. They definitely called some major questions, especially on the left, and both campaigns raised a hell of a ruckus among intellectuals and activists.

But neither campaign ever evolved into a mass movement.

At the same time, the class-left remained mired in the trade union movement, which itself began withering away to the extremely low union density we see today in the US.

At one point, the trade union movement was a real mass movement, so much so that it triggered some pretty dramtic social changes, as well as state repression, and even acquired a powerful organizational expression in the CIO. Then Taft-Hartley came along and codified the gains, at the same time limiting them (as clever a cooptation as we are likely to ever see… using the sacrosanct contract as its basis); then outsourcing combined with suburbanization de-concen trated workers in both workplace and living quarters; financialization removed the owning class from the line of fire; and the eft hangs on in the unions, fighting one rearguard action after another…. and blaming “false consciousness” for the abandoment of union-based class struggle.

Yet Historical Materialism 101 taught that material conditions have the more determiniative influnce on social development, compared with the ideological feedback (ideas) that reinforce and reproduce these conditions.

Leftists to this day invest 90% of their capacity and effort into convincing people of the validity of their arguments. That this might be a strategic error does not in any way inivalidate the theoretical arguments. It simply means that we have not found a way to practice what we preach.

We have copped to the notion that bad ideas produce bad practice, and in the process we have implicitly accepted that better ideas will produce better practice. So we lay out all the items we would like to see, then set about making elegant arguments for each of them… programs. The arguments are logically sound for the most part, but they never translate into changed practices in society at large.

So there is a larger question — a strategic one — that operates on a deeper cycle of reality than our logics; and it has to do with the way we do politics.

The logics that explain how class oppression works (which need serious updating), the logics that explain how racism is the stunted consciosuness of a colonial condition, and the logics that explain why sex cannot “dream its innocence” in the presence of actually-existing male dominance… are all sound logics with profound explanatory power.

But logic is a mental realm. And as we see with “wages for housework,” even though it mentally calls the right questions in a very provocative and clear way, it gains no real traction in the realm of social movements.

That is not to pose a false dichotomy that opposed mental phenomena to social phenomena; but to suggest that we are prone to assume that because we can recognize the problem, we have also solved the riddles of how to make movements happen. The evidence tends to refute that.

There are several pieces of this train of thought that I’ll just put out there to do with what you will.

One is the idea that we can make movements happen at all. Can we? What kinds of conditions emerged in past movements that made the social soil fertile enough for the potential in these ideas to actualize themselves into real movements?

Two is the question of tactical agility and organizational structures. I do not suggest that everyone be off on their own to do local stuff without any coordination. What I suggest is the organizational expressions of campaigns in the past and present might carry wihtin them certain strategic assumptions that inhibit their performance, and that mitigate toward preserving power only among the most monolithic organizations. We can all join a campaign to fight sexual trafficking, but does the organizational expression of that campaign have to mirror the centralizations we have seen in the past? I have serious doubts about the strategic efficacy of centralizing control for the purpose of “aiming the main blow.” This is an Old Left article of faith; and I believe it is an anachronism… a dangerous one. And networked coordination does not have to be chaotic voluntarism… what it is, is potentially a way to determine strategic direction by consensus and leave the tactics to tightly-knit, culturally-embedded structures, who can bob and weave quickly in response to local developments.

I will also say for the record that localism can easily be reified into some kind of panacea (there, I just did it by calling it an ism). There are no panaceas. But the stick has been bent so far in the direction of strategic-centralism and all its dodgy assumptions for so long that we can be forgiven if we bend back pretty hard.

Finally, I’ll say that there is no polarity between community-building (we should lose that construction metaphor) and movement-building (ditto) if we understand one to be the material precondition for the development of the other. The relation is phased, temporal, not competitively spatial or even a dynamic polar tension.

The conditions we have now, with the extreme atomization of suburbanizing consumer culture, have dissolved the material bases of social solidarities, leaving us with our logics to be “like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.”

Combine that with the Grasmcian structures so well-encapsulated above, and we need to look pretty deep.

And now more errands call.

Hope this makes a bit of sense.