At Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico.

I went to Yucatan state in Mexico over the New Year holiday. We engaged in all the usual touristic activities, from visiting the amazing Mayan ruins at Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and other lesser-known archeological sites to beaches, cenotes (sinkholes with clear turquoise waters), haciendas, and remarkable wildlife, especially birds. While we were seldom far from a car or modern life, the combination of entering 2012 and being amidst both centuries-old Spanish colonial towns and even more ancient Mayan cities, made it easier to feel the longer stream of history we too are floating in.

Here in Northern California the New Age hype is already at fever pitch for the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the “end of the world” in 2012. But as we drove along country roads to long-abandoned cities of elegant stone towers, massive edifices that were apparently “apartment complexes,” and sophisticated systems of water management and interurban roadways, we came upon a surprising text in the local tourist magazine “Yucatan Today.” Anabell Castañeda writes that the Mayan prophecies do not predict an end of the world at all, but rather a “change of time:”

Not for a single moment have the Mayas feared the arrival of this date; on the contrary: the ancient Mayas have always told us to wait patiently for a change in consciousness and the evolution which that change will bring… Human beings don’t exist by chance or a work of fate, they are part of a plan to carry out a mission in this part of the universe. Nor is the world totally complete in its creation and perfection; mankind has a job to do on this planet and must be a part of its conservation. It could be said that life on planet Earth depends on humans and what we do during our existence…  The Popol-Vuh is their book of advice and it tells us: “It is time for a new dawn and to finally complete the task.”

… within this long-awaited change, it is expected that there will be a reawakening of the Mayan world in all its complexity…  We have an opportunity to experience a change of conscience which will help us to evolve as a species, protecting the natural resources which we need for our survival, and bringing about the long-awaited urgent social equity, finally understanding the importance of the human being in the universal order.”

It was charming and serendipitous to find such a prosaic interpretation of the much-cited Popol Vuh. In a way, Castañeda is placing the prophesied changes into the context of the political movements already underway, from the global efforts to put the brakes on chaotic climate change to the sweep of occupations from North Africa through the Middle East, to southern Europe and across the U.S. in 2011. Imagining the “Mayan world re-emerging in all its complexity” wasn’t so far-fetched while standing on the top of the ruins of Uxmal or Ek-Balam. In fact, Mayan life is quite present throughout Yucatan, albeit a relatively modern and Mexicanized Mayan life. (My neighbor David Miller, a practicing witch, just finished a rather different look at the Popol Vuh in “The Cosmic Ballgame” where he reads the myths and stories in it as the point of origin for cultural obsessions with sports and ball-playing!)

The massive ballcourt at Chichen-Itza, Yucatan.

Yucatecans playing baseball in their own "field of dreams," in rural Yucatan.

I was reminded of an excellent book I read many years ago, “Stolen Continents: The ‘New World’ Through Indian Eyes” by the Canadian writer Ronald Wright. He traces five great civilizations (the Iroquois, the Cherokees, the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas), describing their first contact with Europeans, their centuries-long struggles to resist subjugation, and their remarkable re-emergence in the late 20^th century. In fact, since the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969-1971, Indians in the U.S. have regained cultural pride, political initiative, and with the indigenous from around the world, a global treaty on the rights of indigenous peoples passed at the United Nations. The descendents of the Incan empire, a vast and highly sophisticated urban culture that spanned much of western South America (from today’s southern Colombia through Ecuador and Peru to northern Chile), have been making themselves felt in all the countries of the Andes.

While travelling in Yucatan I was reading an interesting book recently published by AK Press in Oakland, a translated work by a Uruguayan writer Raúl Zibechi (and ably translated by Ramor Ryan) called “Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces”. It’s not a long book, only 140 pages, but as the double forewords from John Holloway and Benjamin Dangl emphasize, Zibechi’s look at the rebellions in Bolivia during the past decades is an incredibly important contribution to the wider political moment encompassed by everything from the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados to Occupy Oakland and the rest. Zibechi is well-versed in the broad shift to the left that has been unfolding across Latin America during the past two decades, and has been an important critic of that process—not from the right though, but from the point of view of the social movements that pushed the states across the continent to move leftward, and then found themselves isolated and marginalized as the old hierarchies and political parties institutionalized and defanged the movements themselves. Not in Bolivia though, and this is why this is such an important book.

The Aymara of the altiplano (the indigenous of Bolivia’s highlands) have managed to create social movements that remained active, creative, and resilient even after Evo Morales and his socialist party came to power in 2006. Moreover, the epicenter of their movement has been El Alto, a sprawling urban zone of several hundred thousand adjacent to the nation’s capital in La Paz. John Holloway (author of “Crack Capitalism” and “Change the World Without taking Power”) says it well in his foreword, juxtaposing the urban Bolivian movements to the rural, peasant-based Zapatista movement that inspired so many in the 1990s:

“The question for us who are not peasants is how we create an urban Zapatismo. How can we create autonomous, anti-capitalist, anti-state spaces or moments in the city? El Alto offers us many suggestions… The real forces for social change are not where they appear to be. They are not in the institutions or in the parties but in the daily contact between people, the daily weaving of social interactions that are not just necessary for survival but the basis of life.”

Zibechi traces the history of Bolivia back through earlier social upheavals based on the once-powerful tin miners, visiting the insurrections that arose in response to the privatization of water (by San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation) in the city of Cochabamba in 2000, and the natural gas war that gave birth to new community (self-)organization in 2003 to refuse the multinational appropriation of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon wealth. With great understanding of the nuances of the Bolivian context, Zibechi shows how the community itself became a “machine of dispersal,” refusing centralization, refusing to allow its new-found powers to disappear into political parties, state-based patronage machines, or even into the organizations they built themselves at earlier moments. Insisting on recallable and rotating delegates they have developed social mechanisms where individuals “lead by following,” ensuring that power keeps devolving back to the grassroots.

The Occupy movements that swept the U.S. in fall 2001 instituted the General Assembly as the main decision-making institution, with its often ponderous inefficiencies and frustrating problems with people learning an entirely new way to do politics in the heat of the moment. The form, while new to many Americans, is far from new in history, and community assemblies were and are the bedrock of the Bolivian social movements that have kept even Morales’ government in a state of constant reaction. Zibechi’s book is a fantastic in-depth look at how they’ve done it, without overly romanticizing or distorting the actual histories he describes. To be sure, the Bolivians have not unburdened themselves of the crushing weight of the state and the world market. Zibechi traces the interaction between the forces of dispersion and liberation and those tendencies that move toward forms of the state, new dynamics of centralization and cooptation through representation. In Bolivia, like in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere, the process is unfolding and is far from settled. For those who are looking for inspiration, new ways to think about self-organization in urban contexts, “Dispersing Power” is an important book.

The famous arch at Labna, Yucatan, as illustrated by Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s.

This iconic arch at Labna is used in a lot of tourist promotions. In a book called "The Lost Cities of the Mayans" the illustration above shows the same arch as it was just being dug out of deep jungle and soil.

By happy coincidence I was given for Xmas while in Mexico a beautiful big art book called “The Lost Cities of the Mayas,” which features the watercolors of Frederick Catherwood, an artist and lawyer who came to visit Yucatan and Central America in search of “lost cities” in the 1830s and 1840s. Published by Artes de Mexico in 1999 in a big 14”x10” hardbound format, the images Catherwood drew of Mayan ruins in the 1840s leap to life, most of the buildings in far worse shape than they are today, then still partially buried in dense jungle and beneath centuries of accumulated tropical soils. The Victorian romance of exploring and discovery obscures any self-awareness of empire, and was no antidote to the inevitable malaria that hit Catherwood and most of his contemporaries who arrived in those early days. Within a decade of his visit, the Mayans long descended from the builders of these incredible cities rose up against the colonizers and by the early 1880s had driven Spaniards and Mexican upper classes two walled cities at Campeche and Merida. The nearly unknown (to U.S. visitors) “Caste War” lasted for more than a half century and perhaps provides a foundation for future revolts of the Mayan peoples going forward.

Uxmal Pyramid by Frederick Catherwood, early 1840s.

Pyramid at Chichen-Itza by Frederick Catherwood, c. 1840s.

Iconic temple at Chichen-Itza.

Standing on ancient ruins in Yucatan reminded me of our temporality, the transience of civilizations, even ones which seem quite established and permanent. Perhaps someday someone will be standing on the flooded ruins of San Francisco’s Financial District ruminating in similar ways about the fleeting passage of our own strange claim to “civilization.”

Documentary proof that the Mayans invented Lego!

Flourishing greens growing at the Alemany Farm in San Francisco.

Food is all the rage these days. Whether it’s an “Underground Market” full of local jams, candies, and homemade sauces, or a new restaurant featuring locally acquired organic food on its menu, a benefit “Feast” featuring a famous vegan chef, or even a political discussion about the food industry, there’s a huge public hunger for it.

…everything old is new again. The resurgent interest in local foods and home-scale preservation—from canning, jamming, freezing, brewing, fermenting, and otherwise experimenting with food—is happening coast to coast. Taking up the pot and the pan, the cheesecloth and strainer, the canning jar and the wine bottle, homesteaders are beginning to reweave the web of culture lost in the toxic downdrift of the industrial food supply. Food preservation is hooked into all the values of homesteading—self-sufficiency, community resilience, DIY for fun and pleasure—a reminder that food is not something that’s done for us, but something that we do with one another. Remaking our relationship to food is one of the central homesteading pleasures and practices, a radical act that can go a long way toward growing into our role as producers rather than consumers. —From “Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living” by Rachel Kaplan with K. Ruby Blume, Skyhorse Publishing, New York: 2011

Artichokes soaking up the sun in the Potrero Hill Community Garden, with Mt. Tamalpais and the Golden Gate Bridge visible across San Francisco in the background.

Just yesterday I received by email newsletters from the Slow Food organization (“Slow Food vs. Fast Food” plus news items about this year’s stunted corn crop, the rise of urban farms, food safety in China, and the Farmers’ Market explosion) and Food Democracy Now (soliciting opinions on Obama’s Farm policy, a piece about GMOs and Organics—Coexistence or Contamination?, antitrust and fair market livestock rules, Food Stamp usage increase). On any given day one can find dozens of articles on food politics, agricultural ecology, food and climate change, food and energy, as well as the usual coverage of new restaurants, markets, and products. What seemed fresh and lively a mere five or six years ago is today’s tidal wave, drowning critical engagement in a wide river of noise and marketing. It’s almost as though our obsession with food is marching in lockstep with our expanding waist-lines, as we engorge ourselves with more than we can digest.

The Street Food Festival, August 20, from my window overlooking Folsom Street.

We just had a huge “Street Food Festival” outside the front of our house that filled Folsom from 22^nd to 26^th Street, sponsored by La Cocina, a neighboring nonprofit dedicated to incubating small food entrepreneurs into full-fledged businesses. (One of their better known success stories is Chac Mool, a food truck selling excellent Mayan dishes that has the only permit to park and sell food in Dolores Park.) It seems that all the efforts that have been germinating for the past few years to bring food to the front of our consciousness have been both successful and are at the same time notably failing too.

Street Food Festival, Folsom Street between 24th and 23rd looking north.

That’s because most of the food obsession is entirely compatible with the trendy, fad-driven marketplace, which has latched onto local, organic, heirloom, exotic, hand-made, et al as the most desirable acquisitions at this particular moment. So the Street Food Festival was a big hit, tens of thousands of attendees and all the food vendors doing huge business from morning to night last Saturday, August 20.

That doesn’t make it a bad thing. I like it when thousands of people occupy the streets, even if it is a eating-and-shopping festival. There’s a lot of milling about, hanging with friends talking and tasting, and a wonderful mixing of peoples. Adriana and other neighbors seemed a bit put off by the whole thing in the days leading up to it, but I have to say that it didn’t feel like a “yuppie invasion” to me. Lots of people 35 and under, but far from a super affluent-feeling scene.

Yum! Everyone's eating!

Eaters oblivious to the image of Cesar Chavez on the school's wall behind them... Chavez's United Farmworkers led the fight to ban DDT in the late 1960s, and made it a central issue for their grape boycott. Organizers speaking about it in parking lots of major supermarkets helped sensitize working-class and middle-class Americans to the problems of chemically-soaked food, in some ways setting the stage for the boom in organics that happened in the following years.

The Slow Food movement that started in Rome about twenty years ago as a repudiation of the McDonalds that had opened at the foot of the Spanish Steps has become a global phenomenon too, with a biannual gathering in Italy that draws over 30,000 farmers and artisan producers from around the world. To promote their goals of sustainable, traditional agricultural practices (and saving heirloom species) Slow Food embraced (and helped bring forth) today’s boutique food marketplace, recognizing before a lot of us that if you want farmers to keep various heirloom species and practices going (in this capitalist world), they have to be able to sell the products at a profit. Many people conflate this logic with an older “personal is political” idea that has floated down to us from feminism in the late 1960s-early 1970s, to conclude that by buying fancy, expensive foods we are “voting with our wallets” to help sustainable, local agriculture. Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think this is all they need to do to contribute to social change!

In their beautiful new book “Urban Homesteading” my pals Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Blume address this drama in their chapter “Food is a Verb”:

…[The Slow Food and locavore] movements have been rightly criticized for their class politics, for advancing a laudable goal that is unattainable by many who might choose it if they could, and for consumption excesses that they justify as being local and “slow.” Their essential message, however, that food is an intimate reflection of our lives and culture, is not a class-based assertion but a human one. The appropriate class critique lies in the fact that not everyone can afford a Slow Food meal or the labyrinthine lifestyle of the locavore, but the drive towards localizing our food sources and reimagining our relationship with food can be shared with everyone. Generating local food sources in order to provide food security for everyone is part of the bigger story of the urban food revival currently underway.

Permaculture garden at 18th and Rhode Island on Potrero Hill in San Francisco.

Hayes Valley Farm, established on the old freeway on and off ramps at Hayes, Oak, and Fell Streets.

The Free Farm at Eddy and Gough, City Hall in the distance... the farmers here give all their produce away to locals and at the Free Farm Stand on 23rd an Treat every Sunday.

I’ve been excited about a new food politics for more than a decade, having been turned on to the Slow Food movement first in Switzerland and Italy by Mona Caron, and then uncovering the fascinating history of food politics as part of the ongoing Shaping San Francisco investigations into local history. In our “Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco 1968-78” we have a great essay by Pam Peirce (author of local gardening bible “Golden Gate Gardening”) called “A Personal History of the People’s Food System.” She describes how hard it was to find an organic vegetable when they started in the early 1970s, and that today’s burgeoning Farmers’ Markets, Whole Foods, and other organic markets all can be traced back to those early efforts 40 years ago.

Vegetables and orchard at Alemany Farm south of Bernal Heights.

I wrote about a lot of that history in Nowtopia, and I’m happy and proud to acknowledge that George McKay, whose excellent DIY Culture I quoted a few times in the book, has given me the honor of quoting Nowtopia in his newest book “Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism & Rebellion in the Garden” (By George McKay, Frances Lincoln Limited Publishers, London: 2011). Radical Gardening is a fantastic, in-depth treatment of urban gardening and farming through time, with a particular focus on the UK where McKay is from. In England community gardens are referred to as allotments, dating back centuries and being a genuine artifact of social demands for land to grow food. George McKay dissects the history and practice of community gardens to show the subversive kernel still buried in the plots.

“Its anti-capitalism is most clear in two fundamental features of the allotment: firstly, the astonishingly low rents charged for plots by local authorities, which is a powerfully consistent rejection of spiraling urban land market values; secondly, the legislative fact that, by and large produce grown by allotmenteers cannot be sold commercially for profit. The standard treatment of a surplus or seasonal glut is to give it away: the allotment is predicated on a social and economic practice defined by, in David Crouch and Colin Ward’s term, ‘the gift relationship.’ In their view, an anarchistic ‘combination of self-help and mutual aid… characterizes the allotment world.’ Furthermore, it is a nationwide public socio-horticultural experiment that has endured and transformed itself for over a century, it is on the allotment, among the bean frames and sheds, the DIY glasshouses and the patchwork of dirty labour, that we should look for a quiet seasonal extremism… As Thomas Jellis puts it, today, for many allotmenteers, their earthy work-leisure

has come to express a tactical, grounded resistance to global capital and its negative environmental impact. Allotments and local foods can be seen as broader movements to re-localise and are often imagined as being in opposition to the conventional food system… Allotments are now also much more open, allowing women to sign-up and accepting people regardless of their nationality or background. This cultural multiplicity grants allotments resilience and durability, allowing them to adapt to change and disturbance.

The community garden phenomenon in the U.S. has also been a site of what I like to see as working-class recomposition in this era of fragmentation and isolation. Immigrants and families from rural backgrounds find common ground to plant food and share skills across cultures and time. Urbanites long cut off from practical agricultural skills get their hands dirty, begin to reconnect to cycles of sun and water and season, and learn over time what grows and what doesn’t in their particular microclimate. For many gardeners, the politics is not front and center, and often barely present at all. Still, McKay aptly underlines the deeper meaning that emerges whether or not one is inclined to pursue it:

The degree of radicalism of guerrilla gardening as practiced in western cities may in the end be questionable, or easily qualifiable—its non-threatening nature going some way to explaining its popularity in our apparently post-ideological world. Yet we should recognize that today’s guerrilla gardening, whether drawing on its mary-meadowing tradition or anti-capitalist rhetoric, is one of those apparently single-issue movements which can actually touch a multitude of contemporary questions: land ownership and access, food production and consumption, biotechnology, the environment, sustainability, slowness and modernity, grassroots politics and empowerment… p. 192

I loved how Radical Gardening, a $20 paperback, takes advantage of new printing technology to include color images throughout the book. It’s a gorgeous, highly readable, and very provocative contribution to the emergent political opposition to 21^st century global capitalism. As he concludes, “This book has aimed to be a small corrective to the parochial or suburban or landed versions of garden understanding, to trace strands of idealism, rebellion, political action and social criticism in the garden historically and presently.”

Much more of a how-to book is Rachel and Ruby’s “Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living”. It’s a big trade paperback, nearly a coffee table book in its elegant design and ample color photographs throughout. As Peter Bane writing in the latest issue of Permaculture Activist (“Hidden Connections in the Garden” is the theme of issue 81, their latest, highly recommended) describes it in his review:

“Scattered among the eye candy of seed collections, farmers markets, and romanesco broccoli is a series of Get-Going sidebars, call them to-do lists for a new society: How to Start a Community Garden in 12 easy steps, How to Get to Zero Waste in 60 months… These contain many good ideas, as much advocacy as action… In fact, there are so many side-tracks in this book that it could be argued the main stream has disappeared into an estuary of rich detail.”

Bane also points out usefully that since they have grounded their book in the examples that abound here in the Bay Area, “the world portrayed here knows nothing of winter and little of North American summers. Talk of conserving 90% of electrical energy won’t go far with people living in less privileged regions.” I would prefer he use the term ‘lucky’ rather than ‘privileged’ since the latter implies someone has been given something that they shouldn’t have (or taken it at others’ expense perhaps). But his point is well-taken, that all too much of our experiments and postulations for a post-capitalist and post-fossil fuel life don’t face up to the gnarly industrial problems that complex societies will face. Sustaining anything close to the comfort and convenience of our current world is not going to be possible unless we apply the whole systems, regenerative thinking that is so well applied to urban homesteading in this volume, to larger industrial systems too. Not that Rachel and Ruby are at fault for not doing so, since that is clearly beyond the scope of their excellent book, which already DOES include an incredible range of practical information and intelligent politics.

From the beginning, they embrace the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture that George McKay wrote about in his book about 1990s Britain, and I integrated into all my case studies in Nowtopia too.

DIY is an alternative culture strategy that helps us thrive outside the confines of the capitalist machine. It is an ethic of curiosity, exploration, and empowerment that can be applied to many aspects of our lies—growing food, sewing clothes, creating homegrown entertainment, writing books, fermenting vegetables, educating children. It feels good to do it yourself. This is a sane way to reorient our living toward a more just and equitable distribution of limited natural resources, and it supports the goal of sustainability through a maximum reduction in consumption and an expansion of creativity, and personal and community empowerment. (p. 14-15)

Mainstream culture in the U.S. has recently woken up to the demise of practical skills. The Soul of Shopcraft is a recent bestselling book about a hi-tech professional abandoning his career to rediscover the joys of working slowly and with his hands. Ruby is one of the most practical-skilled people I know, having built the huge puppets that came to decorate so many political demonstrations over the past 20 years, to more recently founding the Institute of Urban Homesteading out of her Oakland home. She renovated the place largely herself, doing everything from carpentry to plumbing. Now she has a thriving kitchen garden, keeps bees, makes cheese, jams, mead, and raises and slaughters rabbits, all while running her institute that provides over 60 classes per season in the same skills. Here she and Rachel make their pitch for the new homesteading:

It is important for each of us to have a physical skill that is satisfying as well as sustaining—knitting, or sewing or blacksmithing or canning or gardening. A “can do” attitude about all the activities people mastered as a matter of course in the past is required… Many of the solutions in this book are simple, affordable, transportable, and good to do with others. Homesteading practices are not about austerity or apocalypse; they’re about living a simpler, more joyful, more effective life. Homesteading is not a replay of a Depression-era mentality. It is a series of skills and practices that lift us out of a culture of inaction and cynicism and into a culture of abundance, care, and possibility.

I don’t have a garden. When I was offered a plot two years ago at a community garden about 12 blocks away, I declined, realizing that I would not be disciplined enough to keep it up. I think I’d like to garden in my backyard, but we don’t have access to it. So for now, I’m a cook, an avid Farmers’ Market shopper, and an enthusiastic proponent of community gardens. I might try canning and pickling soon. It’s always a time issue—do I pass on reading that book or magazine in favor of several hours in the kitchen? Do I forego that walk or bike ride to prepare food? Urban Homesteading and the Permaculture Activist both give me all I need to take the plunge. One of these days I will!…

P.S. Forgot to plug this important article called “Who Will Feed the People?” by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume over at Counterpunch. The author is a farmer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley and partners with two others to work seven acres, but used to be a veteran of urban farming in Portland. He raises a number of vitally important issues confronting the positivity that prevails among urban gardeners and new farming advocates, which are fully fleshed out in his piece, but the list is

1. Not enough farmers

2. Lack of equipment for small scale farming

3. Lack of knowledge about small scale farming

4. Lack of financial resources

5. Lack of market

6. The wasteland left behind by conventional farming

7. Extreme weather

8. Social challenges:

“Sometimes when I’m out there in the field doing repetitive and arduous by hand because there’s no other way to do it (sometimes because that’s just how it’s done and always has been done), I find myself wondering, “How do people think we are going to switch from conventional to ‘sustainable’ agriculture?” The on-the-ground facts paint a picture of mind-boggling challenges, tangled (by nature) logistics, steep learning curves, tremendous labor, and radical lifestyle change for which no one seems ready.”

I think the arguments of the permaculturists and urban homesteaders DO answer some of his important criticisms, but we’d all do well to read this and think hard about the huge challenges we face together.

Many of us watched the financial meltdown that happened in 2008 and continues its repercussions to the present idiotic debate on deficits and debt (as though it were all the public workers and poor people of the country who had massively looted the public treasury, rather than Halliburton and Goldman Sachs!) with various reactions from amusement, horror, schadenfreude, to excited anticipation. The future stretching ahead of us bodes ill, though, and while we should work towards a revolt that challenges/rejects the austerity agenda, until such a rebellion starts, life is going to keep getting harder for more and more people. Unemployment is soaring (which would be fine if it didn’t mean an abject lack of resources as a result) and the frontal assault by the ultra-rich on the social safety net is going strong. Tepid Democratic defenses that involve pre-emptively agreeing to entirely wrong-headed frames of reference only accelerate social disintegration.

I have been reading a lot lately, finally finding time to finish a few books that have been beckoning me. I read David McNally’s brilliant “Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance”, a book that I can’t recommend highly enough. I also managed to plow through all 517 pages of “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America” by Richard White, also a fantastic history that I highly recommend. Taken together they reinforce each other across time and space. Both look at periods of about a quarter century in which capitalism radically reorganized economies and enclosed vast geographies and human cultures into new market relations simultaneously—one in the latter part of the 19th century, the other about a century later.

Railroaded covers the rise of the railroads from what I’d like to say is a “Processed World” perspective. That is to say, rather than the triumphalist, Darwinist narrative of the rise of the corporation as a victory of efficiency and intelligence, and the railroads as the most compelling example of the corporate form in the 19th century, Richard White looks at the venality, stupidity, and corruption that were the deep foundation of the expansion of railroads across North America (including Mexico and Canada, which as he shows, was driven by the same logic and even many of the same men and investment syndicates). Rather than presenting the Union Pacific or Southern Pacific as these all-powerful organizations that earned the nickname “Octopus” (in SP’s case) these were inefficient, badly built, poorly maintained, largely unnecessary, and extremely destructive industrial companies. White unmasks the internal workings of these railroad corporations in all their glorious ineptitude, showing how the owners were back-biting, small-minded men (including especially Leland Stanford, the namesake of White’s university employer!) who knew nothing about railroads, and probably even less about managing businesses, but in many cases (Collis Huntington, Jay Gould, William Villard) were extremely good at buying and bullying the politicians they needed to get the public monies their grand schemes required.

The railroads were laughably unprofitable for the thousands of British and German and New England investors who were fleeced again and again by the slick salesmen of western railroads, who pointed to the federal guarantees and long-term bonds they issued as proof of their solvency. But the owners of railroads made their fortunes by building elaborate interlocking corporate structures, full of holding companies, junk bonds, insecure securities, and the whole panoply of chimerical financial instruments we’ve come to know so well in the last decade of derivatives, collateralized debt swaps, etc. When their business empires began to totter, they’d run to their bought-and-paid-for senators and congressman in Washington D.C. to get new appropriations, rollovers of old debts, new authorizations for long-term bonds guaranteed by the U.S. government, and for a time, they’d continue the shell game that made them personally rich while bankrupting dozens of railroads by the early 1890s. As White puts it, “Railroads caromed across the continent, creating systems that in toto made no rational sense but that could yield vast personal fortunes through construction, speculation, and financial manipulation.”

One of the more interesting tidbits I gleaned from his well-documented and thoughtful work has to do with the argument he makes that the railroads were fundamentally unnecessary at the time they were built. He grants that regional railroads were useful, and that in California for example, the primary function of bringing manufactured goods to the rural areas served by the railroad, and the agricultural surpluses grown there back to San Francisco for processing and export, was a real market and generated real profits. But the railroads that crossed the far west had no real purpose, and couldn’t compete with the more efficient and less expensive steamship service that connected San Francisco with the East by way of the Panamanian Isthmus. Here is an extended excerpt describing how the railroads had to buy off the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to keep it from driving them out of business:

By the late 1880s little had changed. Charles Francis Adams [president of the Union Pacific Railroad] testified before the Pacific Railway Commission that the Pacific Mail Steamship Company “could reduce the rate… until it would make the business worthless to us, and yet make something itself” on traffic to the East Coast. This was an amazing statement, one worth lingering over, for it meant that the railroads really were not necessary for much of the freight traffic between the East and the Far West. If the Pacific Mail wished to do so, it could dominate the traffic. The question then becomes why it did not do so?

 

The first part of the answer is that the Pacific Mail was a lazy and corrupt corporation. It had, as its name indicated, a federal subsidy to carry the mail. It carried coffee and fruit from Central America to San Francisco and sent rice, lumber, flour, and goods from San Francisco wholesalers in return. It also carried manufactured goods from New York and sent wine, lead, rags, and perhaps rice back. It did not carry wheat. That went by sailing ship. The second part of the answer is that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, recognizing their vulnerability to rate cutting by the Pacific Mail, offered to pay what amounted to a subsidy for the company to raise its rates. The Pacific Mail consented. It could make more money by doing less.

 

The subsidy that the railroads paid Pacific Mail remained in operation for most of the period from 1870 into the 1890s; it took the form of an agreement to buy space in its steamers at above-market prices first by the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific and later, by the Transcontinental Association. The railroads acted as a freight agent, either reselling this space at the prevailing transcontinental railroad rates to shippers, leaving it empty, or, as the Southern Pacific did, shipping the equipment it needed to build in Mexico by sea rather than by rail. In return the Pacific Mail charged rates identical to those of the railroads, did not add new ships, and refused to solicit traffic to compete with the railroads.

The notion that transcontinental railroads made life better for Americans is boosterish pap, unjustified by any rational cost-benefit analysis, and especially if one takes into account factors that don’t often enter ledger sheets. They wasted incredible amounts of money, had to be completely rebuilt not long after their original construction, took huge amounts of resources to maintain, and left a swath of environmental and social devastation wherever they went.

Transcontinental railroads were a Gilded Age extravagance that rent holes in the political, social, and environmental fabric of the nation, creating railroads as mismanaged and corrupt as they were long, but this argument does not meet the central contention of their defenders: life for American was better because of them… Lloyd Mercer… has calculated that both the first transcontinentals—the UP and CP—and the last of the 19th-century roads, the Great Northern… would have made adequate returns on their investments over a twenty-year time frame without a subsidy… His is the classic social benefits calculator with only plus signs and no minus signs. It has no subtracting of the possible social costs of land grants, the endless disputes over taxes and loss of local revenues from taxes, and much more. There is no consideration of environmental costs or losses to Indians. Indian economies might bleed profusely, but they are treated as so many economic blood donors: their losses are counted as benefits to non-Indians.

 

In assessing the social utility of the railroads, I want to include social costs harder for economists to measure. I want to be conscious of the price—not necessarily calculated in losses that markets measure—and to consider who benefited and who lost. The issue facing the transcontinental railroads was a simple one. Having built ahead of demand, they had to create traffic in places where there was precious little to sell. Given their high fixed costs, the railroads could not simply wait for profitable traffic to appear. Hauling something, even at a loss, was better than hauling nothing. In attempting to cut economic losses, the railroads helped create both what might be called dumb growth and environmental catastrophes. Bison became the first victims of dumb growth.

But there would be many more victims of dumb growth, going well beyond the story of western railroads, right up to the present. As we contemplate the rising tides, spreading droughts and floods, deforestation and factory farming, food surpluses and widespread famine, dumb growth is the underlying logic that keeps modern society, lemming-like, rushing towards the abyss. Suburbia alone, spreading across the best farm lands of North America and inspiring people around the world to seek an unachievable lifestyle, is maybe the biggest example of dumb growth. Nevertheless, the high priests of our society still solemnly invoke “growth” as the all-purpose solution for all human ills. The holy grail of politicians and economists is the strange combination of inputs and mysterious measurements that create the illusion of “growth” as a demonstration of social health. Meanwhile, things keep getting worse, especially when we’re “growing!” But during the past three years, the economic collapse and public bailout of private capital has been at the center of our unfolding global history.

Dave McNally’s Global Slump is a thorough, critical analysis of the neoliberal capitalist counterattack and global economic restructuring that overcame the crisis of the 1970s, and its ending in the Asian crisis of 1997. Part of his snappy book’s mission is to debunk the platitudes repeated ad nauseum by liberals, blaming evil bankers or the failure of regulation for the current crisis. His critique is rooted in a solid Marxism in which crisis starts with a fall in profitability. That in turn leads to a shrinking of investment as the possibility for profits dries up. Once there is a shortage of investment capital due to prior overproduction and excessive investment and the fall in profits, speculative pyramids that depended on free-flowing money suddenly face the abyss and soon collapse. But to understand how this happens (and it’s fascinating how similar the process was in the collapses centered on railroads in the 1870s and 1890s), he carefully reconstructs the steps that brought U.S. capitalism from its last crisis in the early 1970s to the new century’s drama.

He goes back to the delinking of the dollar from gold by Nixon in 1971 as the key moment that opened the process of financialization that has gone through several booms and busts since then. Unlike many Marxist analysts, he doesn’t agree that the current crisis is just the most recent phase of an ongoing long crisis that started in the profit crash of the early 1970s. He does think there was a “great boom” from 1948-1971, but then it ended. He argues that the neoliberal restructuring started under Carter in the late 1970s when he appointed Paul Volcker to head the Fed and engineer a sharp economic contraction. This restructuring was fully embraced and extended by Reagan in the U.S., Thatcher in the UK (both centrally concerned with breaking unions, disciplining labor, and shrinking relative wages), and throughout much of the rest of the world by the IMF’s structural adjustment programs. This economic reorganization re-established the basis for profitability, mostly by pushing down wages while reining in inflation and solidifying the unique role of the U.S. dollar as the international currency.

So from 1982-1997 there was a real period of capitalist growth and profitability, but since 1997 there has been a crash in business investment because there’s been a collapse of profits in production, more or less corresponding to a classic crisis in Marxist terms. The system has pushed itself onward with the speculative booms in internet stocks, real estate, and other assets, but the wild expansion of credit and future claims on profits have finally come unraveled. Interestingly, McNally shows how typical economic growth rates from the 19th century to the present were much closer to the sluggish pace we’ve seen in the industrialized world since 1973, and that the rapid growth and prosperity of the 1948-71 period were the anomaly. “In short, during the neoliberal expansion, the periodicity of the business cycle returned to something approximating its ‘classic’ form, with recessions every seven to ten years, rather than every three to four.”

He has three main theses about the 25-year neoliberal period:

Thesis one: Following the recessions of 1974-75 and 1980-82 and the launch of an offensive by the ruling classes in the North against unions and peoples of the Global South, severe capitalist restructuring generated a new wave of capitalist growth, albeit a much more uneven and volatile one than occurred during the Great Boom.

 

Thesis two: The upward trend in profit rates from the early 1980s underpinned a wave of capitalist expansion that began to falter in 1997 with the crisis in East Asia.

 

Thesis three: Alongside and interacting with these changes, a wholesale reorganization of capitalist finance occurred, stimulated by a metamorphosis in forms of world money. The end of the Great Boom was punctuated by a collapse of the gold-dollar standard, the emergence of floating exchange rates, heightened financial volatility and uncertainty, and a proliferation of new financial instruments designed to hedge risk in a context of unstable monetary relations. These risk-hedging instruments opened up enormous new fields for financial services and profits, while also creating an inordinately larger sphere for speculation.

McNally ends his book with a chapter called “Toward a Great Resistance?” and you have to give him credit for putting a question mark on that rather than treating it as a typical leftist exhortation (not that he isn’t partial to a bit of that too, in the chapter itself). I like a lot of his thinking (I had the pleasure of meeting him and hearing him present his argument at a Retort gathering in Berkeley earlier this year).

“In most of the Global North, of course, we are in the early stages of rebuilding infrastructures of dissent, not usually of leading mass struggles…” After detailing a bit of the dynamic within some recent upheavals (like the student movement in California, or the much larger mass strikes in Greece) he identifies the need for a sustained, long-term effort towards a new kind of revolutionary politics, consisting of

“workers’ centers, solidarity coalitions, radical community groups, alternative media, union organizing drives, campaigns against racism and in support of non-status people, the creation of artistic and cultural co-ops, and much more. It will mean building the democratic spaces and practices that develop organizers who are in the struggle for the long haul. All of this is essential to overcoming the damage of the neoliberal period—the dispossession of memory, social fragmentation, and the destruction of solidarities, the political and cultural effects of a long period without sustained mass oppositional politics. Here a rich dialectic will come into play in which a New Left learns from the rich resources of struggle from the past without mimicry—by understanding that real mass movements for revolutionary change are strengthened by remembering the compelling legacies of those who struggled before us while not being confined by their horizons and experiences. While honoring past struggles, revolutionary movements also write a new poetry for the future. And that poetry—joined to the hard-nosed work of organizing—can only develop from the soil of real social struggle, not the concoctions of small groups.” (p. 178-79)

I think McNally gets at some vital aspects of the path ahead here. He also falls back on some ideas that border the tired clichés of the 20th century Left. Lately I’m a bit leery of many calls I’ve heard to engage in “organizing” without much more specificity than that. I know we’re living through a period of extreme atomization and part of the antidote to that is to find ways to engage in public, social, assertive (and hopefully intrinsically enjoyable) politics. That only happens by organizing people to come together in public and make themselves heard.

But the issues that I consider at the top of an agenda that *might* begin to address our predicament don’t usually enter the discourse. What work do we do? Why? Why shouldn’t we have democratic control over our shared labor, over the dispensation of the products of our efforts? How would such a profound democracy work, let alone how might it emerge in the first place in a world based on buying and selling human time? Going further, how would a democratic science look? How would technologies be evaluated democratically, chosen or rejected based on reason and informed debate? How in a world of Faux News and CNN (See Nothing News) could a genuinely democratic culture emerge, one that had a foundation of shared values and a shared language for understanding the problems we’re facing and how they might be addressed?

The 21st century presents us with its own set of problems. They’re not the same ones that faced radicals in past generations, not the relatively recent New Left of 40 years ago, and not the older Left dating back to earlier in the 20th century and even earlier, in the 19th century. Richard White does more in Railroaded than just detail the cronyism and mind-numbing corruption of the Gilded Era. He also traces the radical movements that emerged to combat the newly powerful corporations, the “antimonopoly” forces, the organized farmers, and of course, the organized working class, first in the form of the Knights of Labor, and later, the highly charged story of the American Railway Union and its firebrand leader, Eugene Debs. Debs is often remembered as a socialist candidate for President who garnered more than a million votes in 1920 while he sat in a jail cell convicted of “espionage” for speaking out against World War I. But during his early days he led the American Railway Union when the federal government sent out troops to break the strike in 1894. During that time he was fully a part of the radical labor movement of the time, in other words, a patriarchical racist! Here’s some of what Richard White wrote:

Since for Debs “the government will rest upon the intelligence and virtue of the people,” a republican economy had, above all, to produce republican citizens. He embraced a nation where a worker “owns himself, is a man, a citizen, and independent.” This was quintessential nineteenth-century liberalism: society as a collection of autonomous individuals, each with a moral right to control his own labor. His whole career was an attempt to reconcile liberal ideals of a society constructed through freely negotiated contracts with the world of large corporations and dependent workers…

During the huge 1894 railway strike,

“[Debs] invoked the language of manhood and proposed tapping antimonopoly sentiment all along the line. If the workers stood up and were men, they would ‘not want for the support of courageous, manly men.’ … The American Railway Union (ARU) resonated with the antimonopoly language of improvement, manhood, equity, honor, and citizenship. It marked all these qualities as the attributes of white men. It did not accept African American members.”

This haunted them quite starkly in this epic strike, since it was in Montana, then a key center of strike activity outside California, that federal troops came in and quickly broke the strike. Which troops came in? The black Tenth Cavalry and their white officers!

Self-defeating dynamics rooted in historic racism and sexism still haunt social organizing as we go forward. But the work ahead goes well beyond these historic blights. We’ll have to raise our efforts to face the epic challenges of our times, and go well beyond the old barriers that have sunk working-class liberation movements in times past.

It’s been a while since I had the inspiration to blog. I’ve been home through the holidays, and since I was in Mexico at the beginning of December, I’ve been reading a ton. In particular I wanted to ruminate in this entry on three books that, taken together, are a fantastic primer on the current state of working class politics. Why think about that, you might wonder?

We’re living through the most excessive, blatant, overwhelming mass looting of public wealth by the plutocracy that has ever happened in this House of Mirrors that calls itself the United States. Obama, a guy I never felt any enthusiasm for, has lived down to my expectations again and again, or really, he’s plunged many fathoms lower than I could even imagine him going. The casual abandonment of rule-of-law promises (forget about Guantanamo, forget about habeas corpus—Executive Power is increasingly monarchical and the Dems are pushing it as much as the Bushies ever did) is bad enough. And handing the keys to the public treasury to the banks during the bailout, and to the defense industry the rest of the time, all pretty bad too… In the past week Obama has appointed old-style fixer Bill Daley (direct from his job at JPMorganChase) and Gene Sperling from Goldman Sachs to run his economic policy. Can it be any more blatant? There is a tiny cabal of self-serving plutocrats who are determined to take every last granule of public wealth for themselves before it all collapses in a pile of debt and empty malls, rusting ports and abandoned skyscrapers. Obama is just their smiling front man, and he’s not even trying to hide it anymore!

So where are the angry citizens? The demonstrations, pickets, strikes? (Oh yeah, they’re all signing up for Facebook groups and clicking “angry” petitions and “urgent” appeals online! Maybe they’re reading—or writing—blogs!) Where are the workers who are getting screwed in this Great Theft? What about a collective response to the destruction of the economy, the nearly one in five who are unemployed? There’s not a simple explanation, but at this point we have to wonder who exactly are we expecting to “take action”? There is not a shared sense of class among the vast majority of the population that exchanges their daily lives for wages. There is more confusion, cynical bitterness, and racial animosity than any common idea of a class enemy. The very concept of “class” is largely rejected by most people, or grossly misinterpreted to mean a wide range of strata that include such bizarre convolutions as “lower-upper-middle-class.” Most people think they’re middle class, whether they’re making $88,000 a year or $17,000. The fact that nearly all of us have to sell ourselves to an employer in exchange for money (some much better paid than others, obviously) is the real key to the picture. Nearly everyone in modern America is some kind of a wage-slave, regardless of the fantasies they harbor about their status based on their temporary ability to engage in debt spending.

Looking back at post-WWII history we can see how we got to this point. The three books I’ve been reading are a great place to start. First, “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class” by Jefferson Cowie, then “Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s” (edited by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow), and finally “Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global” by Paul Mason. I give all three of these books high marks.

I started with Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive” which attracted me because I have been speaking publicly as part of my Nowtopia touring for the past two years on this topic of the fragmentation and decomposition of the working class during the 1970s. But to be honest, I have been doing it without the benefit of a thoroughly in-depth examination of how it actually happened. Cowie’s book fills in a lot of gaps and expanded the foundations for the point of view I started with, greatly enriching my sense of the political, economic, and social history of that decade. I came of age in the 1970s, sitting in my high school classroom in Oakland watching cars queue up across the street for gas in the first big energy crisis in 1973-74. I remember watching with fascination and shadenfreude the Watergate hearings and finally seeing Tricky Dick Nixon resign in disgrace. When the helicopters lifted the last soldiers from the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975, a whole sequence of historical injustices seemed to be reaching resolution.

I stood in Safeway parking lots in 1974 encouraging consumers to boycott non-union lettuce and grapes, in support of the United Farm Workers union. In 1977 I was fired from a job in a bookstore for supposedly trying to start a union (actually my attempts to contact the Retail Clerks Union in the mall where I worked in Santa Rosa were never answered). By fall of 1978 I was volunteering with the J.P. Stevens boycott (in support of a North Carolina textile workers union campaign) and experiencing first-hand the odd drama of boycott organizers reprimanding me and my friends for effectively carrying out an informational picket in front of a department store near Union Square. We were supposed to stand to the side and not disturb patrons, and not actually make our presence felt to shoppers! Who knew? Within another year I had fallen in with an extended community of ultra-left radicals who were sharply critical of trade unions and the Leninist left as being the handmaidens of capital, and from then on I had an unblinkered view of the role of trade unions in the U.S. We all piled into Mabuhay Gardens in North Beach for a big benefit for the striking coal miners in 1978 and some of went briefly to support an oil workers strike in Contra Costa county. In the very first issue of Processed World we analyzed the self-defeating tactics of the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 3 in their big strike against Blue Shield in San Francisco in 1980-81.

Coal Miner's Benefit 1978, Dirksen-Miller Productions, Design: Rico, borrowed from "Streetart: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981"

The world that shaped my sense of politics, of power and historical agency, was definitely a world in which the working class was a major player. The century and a half of conflict between the rising bourgeois owning class and the ever-expanding millions of exploited wage workers was (and surely, still is) the major cleavage and tension in the modern world. More narrowly, the social upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s had as a major component a huge revolt of workers against their companies and quite often, their unions too. The new anthology “Rebel Rank and File” offers the best in-depth look at that wave of workers’ strikes and insurgencies. In the essay “Understanding the Rank-and-File Rebellion in the Long 1970s” by Kim Moody the basic statistics of 1970 top an era of generalized discontent and resistance.

“… in 1970, 66 million work days were lost during 5,716 walkouts (the most ever at the time), and more than 17 percent of union members (one in six) went on strike. The strikes of 1970 turned out to represent the crest of a decade-long strike wave and a culmination of the mounting rank-and-file militancy in the late 1960s. Thirty-four major work stoppages involving 10,000 or more workers took place, the most in eighteen years. Included among these were a 197-day strike by 27,000 construction workers in Kansas City, two strikes by 13,000 teachers in Philadelphia, a wildcat of 25,000 coal miners, a sixty-four-day walkout of 23,000 rubber workers, a stoppage by 13,000 longshoremen in New Jersey, a one-day walkout of 35,000 airline workers, and a strike by 42,000 New York taxi drivers. Five of the biggest and most dramatic national strikes were those by 133,000 electrical workers against General Electric in January, 152,000 postal workers wildcatting against the U.S. government in March, 110,000 Teamsters in an unauthorized walkout against the nation’s interstate trucking companies in May, 355,000 auto workers versus General Motors in September, and 360,000 railroad workers against the country’s railroads in December.” p. 133

Though this impressive revolt didn’t produce much in terms of increased wages (averaging about 1% over inflation), it did shape the political response of the president, Richard Nixon. The economic pressure on the United States caused Nixon to take the Dollar off the gold standard in 1971, setting in motion the debt expansion that has sustained a decades-long boom. We can also see with the benefit of hindsight the role of credit (card) expansion in helping to keep wages essentially flat since the early 1970s, making it possible for people with stagnant income to expand consumption with debt instead of increased wages. The 1973-74 oil shock, similarly, was used as a catalyst for economic restructuring that hollowed out the industrial U.S., destroying the economic and social heart of many major cities. The loss of employment and widespread migration were key components to the decomposition of the working class during the 1970s and 80s.

Jefferson Cowie does a great job of tracing the evolution of Nixon’s presidency including some of the internal debates among his advisors with regard to the relationship with “labor.” It is widely known that Nixon orchestrated the “southern strategy” that turned Republican attention to the conservative (but up until that time, mostly Democratic) South. After construction workers attacked anti-war protesters on Wall Street shortly after Kent State in 1970, Nixon directed his administration to embrace and welcome the blue-collar workers who, out of patriotism, were angry with hippies, students, and anti-war radicals. Cowie analyzes Nixon’s strategy:

“Richard Nixon was simultaneously the last president to work within the logic of the New Deal political framework of material politics, the first postwar president to try to recast the ways in which workers appeared in American presidential strategy, and the last to court labor seriously. While ‘struggling to change the political fortunes of the presidential Republican party by dressing it up as the congeries of the silent rather than the rich or propertied,’ in David Farber’s formulation, Nixon helped to push the concept of ‘worker’ out of the realm of production and helped drive a long process of deconstructing the postwar worker as a liberal, materially based concept. Knowing as he did that there was not a single working-class identity or a pure working-class consciousness, he sought to build political power on new forms of discontent… Nixon sought to recast the definition of ‘working class’ from economics to culture, from workplace and community to national pride. En route to his hoped-for New Majority, he paved the way for a reconsideration of labor that, in its long-term effects, helped to erode the political force, meaning, and certainly economic identity, of ‘workers’ in American political discourse.” (p. 164-165)

By now some of this seems commonplace, though the credit is usually given to Reagan more than Nixon. But the great Culture War of the past generation is firmly rooted in the deeply challenging revolts of the 1960s-70s and the ongoing effort by authorities of right (especially) and left to undo the achievements as well as the expectations of people shaped by that era. The successful political appeal to patriotism and conformity against experimentation, anti-authoritarian radicalism and slovenly, prolifigate hedonism reached much of Middle America and continues to resonate up to the present. The decomposition of the working class after this remarkable upsurge cannot be explained with politics alone of course. Still, the role of politics (both right and left) in shifting attention to identity and away from class and economic injustice, cannot be ignored.

During the epic landslide re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972, the message and language we’ve seen dominate the political landscape since that time are already fully in play. With the most pro-labor Democrat, also an avowed opponent of the Vietnam War, George McGovern, as a presidential nominee, the Party warred with itself right up to the election, paving the way for the Nixonian conservative working man to become the new norm:

“In the public imagination, semi-mythical places of country attitude like Muskogee, Oklahoma, evolved into a political and geographic counterpoint to Woodstock, New York, site of the famous 1969 music festival. One was southern, western, gritty, masculine, working class, white, and soaked in the reality of putting food on the table; the other was northern, eastern, radical, effete, leisurely, affluent, multi-cultural, and full of pipe dreams. One was real, the other surreal; one worked, the other played; one did the labor, the other did the criticism; one drank whiskey, the other smoked dope; one built, the other destroyed; one was for survival, the other was for the revolution; one died in wars, the other protested wars; and one was for Richard Nixon, the other was for George McGovern.” (p. 178)

What’s harder to see, even just reading Jefferson Cowie’s book, is how the upsurge of worker and citizen revolt was the culmination of a post-WWII process in which the trade unions and the Democratic Party mutually undercut their own base. (As we watch Obama reproduce it yet again, as he fails to push for any legislative remedies for the historic impasse of organized labor.) This is where the more political-economically grounded work in “Rebel Rank and File” provides some helpful insight. This is Robert Brenner writing in the “Political Economy of Rebellion”:

“The [labor] dependence on the Democratic Party set in motion analogously self-defeating processes, not only for the unions but also for the party itself, especially as a vehicle of liberal aspirations. To the extent that they sought to substitute the electoral struggle, in which workers as individual citizens ostensibly fought the class war in the relative safety of the voting booth, for the much more perilous processes of collectively confronting employers in industry and on the shop floor, the trade unions eroded their power independent of the Democratic Party. The unavoidable result was to forfeit their ability to exert leverage over the Democrats and to become increasingly reliant upon them for their members. The Democratic leadership could therefore count ever more securely on the unions’ services and support for ever less in return, especially in the area most vital to the labor movement (and the employers), that of union rights, where the Party was, throughout the postwar epoch, conspicuous for its indifference to union interests. The Democrats were thus left ever freer to move, in accordance with purely party-political calculus, to broaden their legislative, electoral, and financial base by consolidating the support of forces on the right, notably their traditional supporters in the South and, of course, business. But in so doing, the Democrats, like the union officials, furthered the disintegration and political dispersal of their own most powerful and most reliable social base.” (p. 44)

Why would the unions behave so stupidly? What was it about trade unionism that made it so misguided, so myopic about its own strength and capabilities? Anti-communist, anti-radical, pro-Cold War unionism dominated the U.S. after World War II and it contained the seeds of its own demise, nearly a half century ago. By the early 1960s union leaders had largely crushed any independent rank-and-file power. Here’s Kim Moody again in “Rebel Rank and File”:

“The underlying raison d’etre of bureaucratic business unionism was of course to deliver regular improvements in living standards for the membership by insuring, to the extent possible, rising profits by way of rising productivity by delivering a disciplined labor force to the corporations. It had accomplished this, on the one hand, by facilitating technical advances and the transformation of the labor process in aid of rising output per person, and, on the other, by undermining, over the longer run, the capacity of the rank and file to battle management at the point of production. But the combination of productivity decline and unaffordable benefits that suddenly gripped industry [in the late 1950s] left the labor leaderships disarmed. Having long accepted the priority of profits and having corroded, over the long term, the capacity of their memberships to fight back, they appeared to lack either the will or the capacity to launch a counterattack. As one close observer concluded, ‘Unions have lost much of their vitality and forward motion; they are playing an essentially conservative role in the plant community, seeking to preserve what they have rather than make gains.’ (p. 122)

The upsurge documented in this volume came in direct response to what happened as business unionism dominated the U.S. industrial economy. Workers organized hundreds of rank-and-file organizations, shop stewards committees, Leagues of Revolutionary Workers, and published hundreds of newsletters and newspapers too. The stories in “Rebel Rank and File” include histories of the United Farm Workers (a brilliant piece by Frank Bardacke), the United Mine Workers, Telephone workers, auto workers, clericals and other pink-collar jobs. A fascinating piece on Teachers strikes and Urban Insurrection offers a brief look at how the rise of teachers unions in the midst of the black rebellions of inner city New York, Newark, Detroit, etc. ran into unexpected and ultimately unsolved contradictions.

The new Republican Congress, along with some prominent new Republican governors, are publicly targeting public sector and especially teacher unions. 2011’s first issue of The Economist put organized public sector workers on their cover as a target for attack. So the last remnant of organized labor in the so-called “advanced” economies is now going to be under assault. The great advantage for public sector workers has always been that their workplace cannot move overseas. Often, too, the service work they provide is not easily automated. So their relative strength has held out longer than private sector and industrial unions who have fallen to under 8 percent of the workforce.

I’ve always taken the position that I’m in favor of workers being organized, but I’m usually against doing it in the form of the highly bureaucratic and legalistic trade union as we know them in the U.S. They are intermediaries in a business transaction and behave just as you would expect a self-interested business to behave. In the past three decades, I’ve seen far fewer moments of honorable and well-organized union work by and for workers than I have a whole raft of stupid, empty, and self-defeating behaviors. The latest nightmare of self-defeating union behavior has come from the SEIU and its thuggish approach to the independently minded health care workers of California. No surprise that former SEIU leader Andy Stern is now cooperating with the Obama Administration in its plans to privatize and reduce Social Security.

Just as the facts pile up too high and there really seems no way out of the dark hole that is the U.S. labor “movement,” Paul Mason’s book “Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global” comes along to shake up the narrowness of a U.S.-centric view of labor history. Mason’s a great writer, so reading his book is more like reading a great series of short stories than anything like a dry labor history book. His trick is to juxtapose some of the most important (and often most forgotten) episodes of labor history in the 19th and 20th centuries, to gripping journalistic tales of worker organizing going on right now in various parts of the world. In nine separate chapters he manages to cover an incredible amount of history and current events. A few of his juxtapositions are: The Peterloo Massacre, 1819 and Shenzhen, China, 2003; The silk weavers revolt, Lyon, 1831 and Varanasi, India, 2005; The Paris Commune, 1871 and Amukoko, Nigeria, 2005; Shanghai 1920s, and New Delhi, India, 2005; The Bund, 1920s-30s and El Alto, Bolivia, 2006; Turin, Italy 1920 and Neuquén, Argentina, 2006. This book rips you out of your despair and reminds you of the long history, with its many setbacks and outright defeats in addition to some of its glowing bright spots. And while the working class in the U.S. is by any reckoning pretty quiescent these days, fragmented, frightened, and unable to mount an independent challenge to the organization of life, the story is completely different in other parts of the world. And given our near One-Party State with its near One-Party Media, it’s not too surprising that it’s hard to get news of these revolts in other parts of the world.

After reading these three books, I find myself looking at the twentieth century rather differently. The common liberal American framework that the fascists were defeated in WWII and there’s been a steady expansion of democracy, inclusiveness, openness, progress, prosperity, etc., since then is clearly a farce. The long twentieth century looks more like a major, potentially revolutionary breakdown in capitalism resulted from the first decades’ World War and nationalist, imperialist system. The Depression and accompanying working-class revolts and widespread social tensions produced a series of structural changes that led to the post-WWII welfare state in the U.S. and social democracy in Europe. That began eroding almost as soon as it was established, and by 2011 we can see that the “deal” made has proven untenable. The capitalists figured it out way back in the 1970s and have been on the attack ever since. Unfortunately the global working class has been so thoroughly, reorganized while work itself has become much more closely controlled than ever before, that a comparably global working-class upheaval is still ahead of us. Meanwhile, the work we do, globally, is destroying the planet. How much longer can any of this go on? Luckily it’s not only up to us here in the befuddled U.S. Perhaps initiatives arising elsewhere will enliven our own responses as we rediscover how to make history.

Lastly I leave you with another quote from Jefferson Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive”. One of my favorite things about the book was his ability to go from politics to economics to culture in his analysis of the demise of the working class during the 1970s. He has his blind spots to be sure. For example, I don’t think he mentions ecology at all! (I suppose by his “blue-collar” definition of working class, ecology was only of interest to “middle class” people, a common misunderstanding even today.) Anyway, among his ruminations on music (including a great section on Devo!), he does an extended riff on Bruce Springsteen, a musician that I liked a lot in 1976-78, but lost interest in later. His writing made me go out and get several CDs to catch up, and especially to listen closely to “Born in the U.S.A.” which I had always dismissed as the anthem of mindlessly patriotic suburban white boys and girls… Here’s Cowie on that song:

“Lost to listeners on the Right and the Left was the fact that “Born in the U.S.A.” was consciously crafted as a conflicted, but ultimately indivisible, whole. Its internal conflicts gave musical form to contradictions that grew from fissures to deep chasms in the heart of working-class life during the ‘70s and their aftermath. The song was first written and recorded with a single acoustic guitar during the recordings for Nebraska (1982)—a critically acclaimed collection of some Springsteen’s starkest and most haunting explorations of blue-collar despair, faith, and betrayal during the economic trauma of the early Reagan era. ‘That whole Nebraska album was just that isolation thing and what it does to you,’ Springsteen explained. ‘The record was basically about people being isolated from their jobs, from their friends, from their families, their fathers, their mothers—just not feeling connected to anything that’s going on—your government. And when that happens, there’s just a whole breakdown. When you lose that sense of community, there’s some spiritual breakdown that occurs. And when that occurs, you just get shot off somewhere where nothing seems to matter.’… ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ was actually more about silence—both existential and political. (p. 359-360)

Existential and political silence seems to be what we get (and what we choose) these days, even when the enormity of the crimes pile up in plain view and the overwhelming inequity of it all grows worse by the day. Until we choose something else…

That’s the title of a piece (pdf) I wrote in 2003 and published in The Political Edge. On this Labor Day, it’s more true than ever. The way we make the world we live in is seriously broken. There’s a lot of work to do, but mostly we’re not doing it. Then there’s a lot of jobs out there that should be abolished and the work stopped tomorrow! We’d be wealthier as humans, and the planet would be healthier immediately too (banking, insurance, advertising, real estate, military production, shoddy commodity manufacturing instead of making things to last 75 years, etc. etc.) The soaring unemployment rates, the crashing economic production figures, the severe ecological crisis (call it climate chaos, global warming, whatever), endless war and widespread famine and thirst… it’s not rocket science to see that things aren’t right.

The most common demand and solution heard from the so-called “Left,” as well as the more populist strains of the Right, is for Jobs! At the recently held Community Congress in San Francisco, representatives of the Living Wage Coalition and Jobs With Justice were among many who put forth the demand for Jobs (albeit with wages that can support people in this expensive city). Local trade unions in the East Bay are clamoring to build the wildly expensive and completely unneeded Oakland Airport Connector because it will create “jobs.” Big Oil and other transnational corporations are on the bandwagon too, having the gall to launch an Astroturf campaign called “Jobs Not Taxes.” The mainstream liberal left, including the AFL-CIO and a number of Democratic politicians are calling for One Nation Working Together at a big mass rally October 2 in Washington DC, which is supposed to “put America back to work,” as though we’re not working all too much doing idiotic things already!

If you are unemployed, or underemployed, and certainly if you’re underpaid as at least a quarter of the working population of the U.S. earning $9/hour or less is (not to mention the rest of the world where it is even worse), the demand for jobs is misguided at best. In a capitalist economy what we need is a livable income, and to get that we need a radical redistribution of wealth. I read a stat recently that the past two decades’ severe skewing of wealth towards the top has led to the situation where 5,600 families in the U.S. have as much wealth as the bottom 138 million people. (An analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that despite several periods of healthy growth between 1973 and 2005, the average income of all but the top 10 percent of the income ladder — nine out of ten American families — fell by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation. For three decades, economic growth in the United States has gone first and foremost to building today’s modern Gilded Age. The recipients of those gains don’t care about a fully funded Social Security system or a healthy Medicare program — they don’t need them.)

Obviously having a job and some income is better than abject destitution, but it fails to address the deeper issues we face. For many, the urgency and desperation that unemployed people face requires them to demand jobs. Why not demand income ahead of jobs? I suppose it’s because there’s something acceptable and supposedly “dignified” about “earning” your own living, even if most jobs put people into ridiculous situations of doing pointless, or pernicious, or just bad work, in exchange for inadequate wages and often no benefits.

A recent book, The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy by Lisa Dodson, tells heartbreaking stories of people trying to play by the rules, taking low-wage jobs and finding it impossible to make ends meet, especially when their children or elderly parents need care as most do. Dodson interviewed dozens of workers and middle-managers and what she reveals is that at least occasionally there is a well-developed conspiracy to pad workers incomes and reappropriate time and goods, often with the complicity of their front-line bosses (who cannot ethically enforce the rules of the market). It’s fascinating although exasperating too, especially when she’s recounting the interviews with the managers who repeat ad nauseum the casual racism and blame-the-poor mentality that sustains so many self-righteous American attitudes. Overall The Moral Underground dovetails well with Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed of a few years ago, wherein she tried to live as a low-wage worker and found herself falling further and further into a debt trap.

Years ago in Processed World we put this poster out and I stand by it twenty years later:

There’s more to this though. We spent a lot of years (1981-1994 and again in 2001 and 2005) in the pages of Processed World making arguments like what you’ve read above. But what we’ve been living through since at least the late 1980s didn’t correspond too well to our utter disdain for jobs. I, for one, was blind to how many people were coming to embrace their jobs, claiming to love them. Moreover the old 40-hour work week faded away and suddenly everyone seemed to be either working multiple low-wage jobs up to 80 hours a week, or if you were salaried in an upscale “profession” you were expected to put in 50-70 hours a week routinely. The massive speedup and intensification of work was engulfing most people, but weirdly, there wasn’t a lot of overt anger or hostility about it (Processed World did dedicate the 20th anniversary issue to “The Greatest Speedup in Human History”). In fact, most people just went along with it, and compensated for their lost lives by buying more stuff, or so it seemed.

I wrote Nowtopia to get beneath this story and try to rediscover a radical impulse under this glossy surface. Lisa Dodson’s book about the “Moral Underground” does the same from a very different angle. But a well-known Italian autonomist, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, published a book in 2009 called The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, that goes in a different direction again. The book suffers from a severe jargon overload and I don’t recommend it because it’s impenetrably dense for large sections. But here’s one short excerpt that I thought absolutely nailed a key piece of the story:

“Now we can finally answer the question: how did it happen that work regained a central place in social affectivity and why did society develop a new affection for work? One reason is well-known: in a situation of competition workers are obliged to accept this primordial blackmail: work as much as possible or die. But there is another answer we can give, concerning the impoverishment of everyday life and the relation to others, the loss of eroticism in the communicative experience. The reasons behind the new love of working are to be found not only in a material impoverishment derived from the collapse of social warranties, but also in the impoverishment of existence and communication. We renew our affection for work because economic survival becomes more difficult and daily life becomes lonely and tedious: metropolitan life becomes so sad that we might as well sell it for money.”

Jason Smith, writing in the preface to Bifo’s book, summarizes his argument this way:

“Bifo calls the contemporary organization of production in which the soul and its affective, linguistic and cognitive powers are put to work the factory of unhappiness because the primary function of the work the post-Fordist factory commands is not the creation of value but the fabrication of subjectivities—the modeling of psychic space and the induction of psychopathologies as a technique of control. In a phase of capitalist development in which the quantity of socially necessary labor is so insignificant that it can no longer seriously be considered the measure of value, the ghostly afterlife of the order of work is an entirely political necessity. Work is a matter of discipline, the production of docility.”

It would seem that the production of docility has been doubly effective, since the range of political demands being uttered among supposedly oppositional tendencies is so narrowly circumscribed by the logic of work and wage-labor. There is a radical political agenda with respect to work, but it does not involve demanding jobs. It involves the seizure of wealth and its redistribution, the production of a fair and egalitarian society based on democratically chosen work, shared and organized to maximize human and ecological well-being. The narrow, myopic demand for jobs, even with living wages, ostensibly because that’s what poor people want (or desperately need), only reinforces a system in which such empty demands will go unmet indefinitely. We need systemic change, not a reinforcement of our passivity and powerlessness. Life could be grand, everyone could live quite well, IF that were the target towards which our daily lives were directed. Getting a job only ensures that we’ll go on working to fulfill an agenda that only meets human needs as an accidental and occasional consequence of the real goal: profit making.

Sunset over Puget Sound from the train I was on yesterday to Vancouver.

Two books I read in the past month overlap with each other in useful ways. The first, Commonwealth by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, is the third volume of their epic theoretical work that began with Empire and continued through Multitudes. While I’m not a camp follower per se, I did get a lot out of these efforts and was glad to read Commonwealth as the conclusion. It made some parts of their argument clearer, but left some important areas unresolved and even self-contradictory. I suppose that’s to be expected with such an ambitious effort to unravel this moment in history, the rise of new paradigms of both capitalist self-perpetuation and (potentially) revolutionary subversion.

The other book is by my host in Vancouver this week, Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future. His book, like Nowtopia, is published by AK Press, and I had the pleasure of hearing him present some of his arguments at the Studio for Urban Projects in San Francisco a few months ago. I like a great deal of his argument, pitting a grounded sociality against the forces of capital that continually render everything that is solid into air, or in the case of his book, turning the solidity of urban space into endlessly liquid flows of capital. As he asks, “how can we imagine commonality and neighborhood in such a relentlessly liquid world?”

The amazing Free Farm Stand in San Francisco, free food gleaned from markets and gardens around the area, every Sunday at 23rd and Treat.

The key for Hern, parallel to the arguments by Negri and Hardt, is a form of exodus, to “actively expand the non-market sectors of the economy and society.” But where Hern’s is practical, based on new forms of trust, friendship, and hospitality, and rooted in specific places (Vancouver is his chosen locale), the Negri/Hardt (N/H) version is largely a theoretical assertion based on their odd and contradictory notion of “biopolitical labor.” Given my own years of helping produce Processed World, a magazine that documented well ahead of its time the rise of precarious labor when it was still in its early, affirmative, assertive form of exiting as much as possible the stupid world of wage-labor, I’m quite sympathetic to analyzing the important emergence of immaterial labor. A sweeping argument of N/H is that biopolitical labor is becoming hegemonic (something that invariably gets yowls of protest from anyone who wants to check on the statistical fact that there are more people working in tightly managed industrial factories today than at any previous time in history). By biopolitical labor they mean the activities that comprise all of our lives; a crucial piece of this line of thought is to assert that a new form of capitalist exploitation is taking shape in the cutting edge industries and geographies of the modern world, and that it is becoming increasingly dominant.

On page 142 of Commonwealth, they provide a conveniently concise summary and in it is the contradictory notion clearly stated:

“In the biopolitical context capital might be said to subsume not just labor but society as a whole, or, really, social life itself, since life is both what is put to work in biopolitical production and what is produced. This relationship between capital and productive social life, however, is no longer organic in the sense that Marx understood the term because capital is increasingly external and has an ever less functional role in the productive process. Rather than an organ functioning within the capitalist body, biopolitical labor-power is becoming more and more autonomous, with capital simply hovering over it parasitically with its disciplinary regimes, apparatuses of capture, mechanisms of expropriation, financial networks, and the like.”

Is” biopolitical labor” autonomous or is it an example of the real subsumption of labor? Are freelance web designers working precariously “autonomous” or are they an individual who is ALWAYS working, always expanding their commercial contacts (via social life) and their networks in the hope of the next job—in other words, an individual who is fully integrated into capitalist life as a quasi-independent worker/entrepreneur? In this way I think their argument starts to look suspiciously like Richard Florida’s flattering (and sycophantic) portrait of the “creative class” in which anyone working in a bank or insurance company is somehow “creative” because they have to work with computers all day! In N/H they get tagged “autonomous” because so much of the labor process requires a fair amount of self-directed cooperation. Just because you are working on a project that has different teams working on various components stretched across the planet (designers in Manhattan, programmers in New Delhi, graphic artists in San Francisco, packaging and manufacturing in Guangdong China) does not make the work you’re doing autonomous. Granted, there are parts of the work you’re doing that have an autonomously cooperative quality and perhaps in that quality we can see the kernel of something more interesting, a capacity for radical self-management. I want to give N/H the benefit of the doubt here, but if you look at their own quote above, you can see how they first define the biopolitical context as one in which the entirety of society is subsumed under the logic of capital. How then are individuals whose activity is apparently fully subsumed simultaneously becoming autonomous from capital (especially if that autonomy is defined as a quality of the work they’re doing while earning wages)? That’s never satisfactorily explained.

Free lettuce awaits at the Free Farm stand.

On the other hand, I’m a proponent of finding the revolutionary possibilities in our everyday lives. By the time you get to the end of Commonwealth, they unabashedly make a teleological argument, but one not based on any invisible hands or inevitable forces, just that we CAN push the world towards one of our own making, one based on our own self-direction, cooperation, and general happiness.  On page 242 they say “Today, in fact, revolution is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the future but has to live in the present, an “exceeding” present that in some sense already contains the future within it.” A little later they continue to argue for the inability of capitalism to adequately capture the value produced in the new realm of biopolitical labor: “…the results of biopolitical production, including social subjectivities and relations, forms of life, have an immediately ontological dimension. Value is generated in this process, but it is immeasurable, or rather it constantly exceeds the units of any accounting scheme; it overflows the corporation’s double-entry ledgers and confounds the public balance sheets of the nation-state. How can you measure the value of an idea, an image, or a relationship?” If only it were only such things that comprised wealth. And perhaps that is one of the points here, that as we reach the self-destructive end of the capitalist mode of production, an important path out is to recognize the enormous value of “not-things,” of aspects of our common life that have gone unmeasured and radically undervalued in this social arrangement.

Snow-capped volcano in background at upper left, white egret in foreground lower right, on Klamath Lake from the train yesterday.

Matt Hern stays resolutely on the ground in addressing the revolutionary qualities of social activity. He is an enthusiastic localist, waxing rhapsodic about Critical Mass as a proving ground for social problem-solving and creating convivial common experiences, while also arguing that if we REALLY cared about reducing violence against teens (as all the gang and drug taskforces claim) we’d be radically reducing the use of autos wherever possible. Way more youth are killed every year on the roads in car crashes than in any other activity, and yet we treat that like it’s a fact of nature or something. He talks about the 130,000 trees in Vancouver and wonders why 10% or even 30% can’t be converted to fruit trees, thereby providing free food to everyone? But he knows why:

…We cannot have global capitalism and embrace localization… Our only alternative is to constrict the economy. We cannot have economic growth and ecological sanity… Maybe the easiest way to think about contracting the economy is getting your hands dirty and growing some food. There’s not much ambiguity there. It’s simple and cheap and convivial. But more than that it represents exactly how we need to be de-commodifying our relationship with the natural world and reconfiguring our cities as common ground.”

Negri and Hardt build on some of the autonomous theorizing that’s been going on during the past couple of years’ rupture of the neoliberal model. Again the two books come together in interesting ways on the question of the city as a locale of exploitation and reinvention.

“The metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to be the industrial working class… metropolis primarily generates rent, which is the only means by which capital can capture the wealth created autonomously… Rent operates through a desocialization of the common, privatizing in the hands of the rich the common wealth produced and consolidated in the metropolis.” (N/H p. 250 and 258)

Earlier in the book they describe the rise of financialization as a mechanism to capture the wealth produced outside the logic of commodities for sale. If it’s true that we’re together producing an ever-richer shared life, and that most of that new richness is unmeasurable, we’re nevertheless seeing a significant part of that wealth siphoned away from us as rent, whether for residential or commercial spaces, to landlords or to banks. They describe this a bit differently:

“… in the contemporary networks of biopolitical production, the extraction of value from the common is increasingly accomplished without the capitalist intervening in its production. This renewed primacy of rent provides us an essential insight into why finance capital, along with the vast stratum that Keynes designates as functionless investors, occupies today a central position in the management of capitalist accumulation, capturing the expropriating the value created at a level far abstracted from the labor process.” (p. 141-42)

Matt Hern offers a definition of urban vitality that in a more vernacular way describes the kind of wealth N/H are talking about too:

“…that’s my definition of urban vitality: constantly running into people who aren’t like you, who don’t think, look, or act like you, people who have fundamentally different values and backgrounds. And in that mix there is always the possibility to reimagine and remake yourself—a world of possibility that is driven by public life and space, that it its best turns into common places and neighborhoods. That’s what makes a great city, not the shopping opportunities.”

A good deal of his book takes us from Vancouver to other cities around the world, but the promise of a comparative study is rarely fulfilled. Mostly he’s interested in and talking about Vancouver with the odd juxtaposition to New York, Montreal, Molokai, Diyarbakir Turkey, Fort Good Hope near the Arctic Circle, and other locales. I understand what he’s up to. As he notes in his introduction, you really see your city most clearly when you are away, in other contexts. He spends a fair amount of time critiquing what I assume are various initiatives in Vancouver of the “New Urbanist” variety, efforts to promote and celebrate a developer-driven vision of urban vitality.

“…there’s more color and nuance to be added in, more than simple capital-labor contestation. There is a shared cultural response to the challenge and value of public space, and in some ways Living First has morphed into another subtle variant on enclosure, delicately displacing the power of public space into private hands…This speaks to a fundamental difference between public spaces and common places, and this is one of the core themes of this book: how can a city, this city, become a city of common places. Public space, lots of it, is crucial but we have to realize that we need more than that. People move through public space—but common space is where they stop, what they learn to inhabit, and make their own.” (p. 58-59)

As an urbanist Hern gets to speak with other planners and bureaucrats, and I assume he’s made the rounds of plenty of those promotional conventions for architects and planners where they are faced with the relentless pressure to “sell” their cities to investors.

“…economic globalization is driving municipalities into direct competition with one another for capital resources, seeking to attract funding with incentive packages promising juicy profits for investors… Running a city in the twenty-first century is all about the hustle.”

This parallels the N/H discussion of rent, because broadly understood, this is precisely what these development schemes and sales campaigns are promising capital: come to OUR city and you’ll make a great return. You don’t have to run factories or offices, or even hotels or restaurants. Just make capital available to the city for its development plans and the rising wealth of a successful urban revitalization effort will handsomely reward the lenders with steady payouts for years to come (this is mostly done through the municipal bond market). At one of the conferences Hern recounts, he captures the emergent conflict quite well:

“Overwhelmingly present, but entirely subsumed was a critical discontinuity between a neoliberal globalization agenda articulated by the World Bank, IMF, and an omnipresent array of private financiers and development companies, and an apparent consensus on the importance of decentralization, local economies, local energy production, local control, and local democracies.” (p. 171)

This is another variation on the argument I made in Nowtopia about an emergent working-class movement with an agenda that escapes the logic of wage-labor and the perpetuation of capitalism. The still mostly invisible presence of an agenda based on local economies and local democracy is bubbling up in many locations. It just hasn’t found its political voice yet.  Negri and Hardt do a nice job of capturing this historical process:

“Capital will not continue to rule forever, and it will create, in pursuing its own rule, the conditions of the mode of production and the society that will eventually succeed it. This is a long process, just as was the transition from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production, and there is no telling when it will cross the crucial threshold, but we can already recognize—in the autonomy of biopolitical production, the centrality of the common, and their growing separation from capitalist exploitation and command—the makings of a new society within the shell of the old.” (p. 301)

Both books offer deeper suggestions about orientation and values too, much more than I can accommodate in this already too-quote-heavy blog entry, but nevertheless here’s a couple more:

Matt Hern:

“…otherness cannot and should not be collapsed into a tolerant multiculturalism, but requires an acknowledgement of, appreciation for, and trust in profoundly different ways of living and social organization. A city of immigrants has to learn to live together, but if it is going to thrive people have to learn to trust each other. Paradoxically, that trust cannot emerge without community, but community needs trust to develop. Perhaps hospitality and friendship are a partial way out of the chicken v. egg thing here.” (p. 104)

Negri/Hardt:

“The refusal of work is a central slogan of this project, which we have explored at length elsewhere. The refusal of work and ultimately the abolition of the worker does not mean the end of production and innovation but rather the invention, beyond capital, of as yet unimagined relations of production that allow and facilitate an expansion of our creative powers……Revolutionary class politics must destroy the structures and institutions of worker subordination and thus abolish the identity of worker itself, setting in motion the production of subjectivities and a process of social and institutional innovation.” (p. 332-33)

My argument is that this process of self-abolition of the category of worker is already visible in the activities many of us are engaged in when we’re NOT at work, when we’re busily appropriating technologies in innovative and artistic ways, when we’re addressing the ecological crisis by using the waste stream in unpredictable ways. Hern gets it too: “…when lots of us start riding bikes everywhere, we stop buying cars and gas and it hurts business. This also occurs when we start closing streets down or living in co-op housing or planting fruit trees all over the city. All of this is all good and fun and ecological and “green,” but really it presents a direct, antagonistic challenge to capitalism. And so it should be. I want planting gardens to be not just an aesthetic activity or an attempt to ameliorate capitalism’s worst excesses but the first punch in a street fight.”

So let’s put up our dukes!

Members of the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth stand in front of the Karl Marx tree in what is now Sequoyah National Park (photo c. 1889).

I’ve been attracted to utopian thinking for as long as I can remember. The concept of utopia implies for some “perfectability” but I never really took it that way. Seen in that light, it’s easy to see why some now hold utopia with suspicion, seeing it as harboring totalitarian nightmares of total control, an entirely prescribed and regulated life. For me, utopia has always been a kind of beacon, a challenge to think big, an opportunity to cast aside the patently stupid institutions and assumptions that plague our everyday lives and to imagine a life that proceeds under different structures. This doesn’t mean that the humans living in such an imaginary alternative society are suddenly perfect, or always good, or even that they all are committed to the same vision. Just that we could do a helluva lot better than this madhouse when it comes to imagining, and then implementing, a social system that facilitates human and ecological well-being.

There are hundreds of utopian visions in literature and history. Utopias as imaginary places are usually commentaries on the real world from which they emerged. Some go back to Plato’s Republic, but a more common starting point is Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516. Plenty of analyses have been written about utopia as a concept and as an historic phenomenon. One of the better treatments is Marie Louise Berneri’s Journey Through Utopia, in which she identifies the authoritarian Utopian State as a concept running through much of the literature. A desire to orchestrate good behavior through various hierarchical arrangements, analogous to a mechanical system with predictable results ensured by regulated consistent behavior, is a dark shadow over many utopias.

Berneri, in her introduction, quotes Herbert Read’s “test of art” as the antidote to this totalitarian tendency:

“If you want to express the difference between an organic progressive society and a static totalitarian regime, you can do so in one word: this word art. Only on condition that the artist is allowed to function freely can society embody those ideals of liberty and intellectual development which to most of us seem the only worthy sanctions of life.”

German anarchist Erich Mühsam’s “The Artist in the Future State” echoes this critique, recognizing that a society is only as free as the artists within it. The readiness of Communist dictators Stalin, Mao, even Fidel Castro, to purge their countries of dissenting artists and writers, either through incarceration, exile, or murder, is well documented. All of this is to highlight the departure of one-party totalitarian systems, whatever label they use for themselves, from anything remotely utopian. But the common left-liberal meme in the early 21st century is that utopia conceptually leads to totalitarianism, as if any attempt to think big about how differently we might organize our lives can only produce nightmares. This refrain is repeated ad nauseum in the mass media and in the blogosphere these days, and seems to be largely taken for granted.

At the core of this line of argument is a deeper dispute over human nature and history itself. Instead of seeing the systems we live under as products of human choices, class struggles and attendant social conflicts, and recognizing thereby that the systems could be different than they are if things had gone differently at any number of historic junctures, the utopia-leads-to-dictatorship arguers assume that this is already the best we can hope for, and any efforts to radically overhaul it can only lead to something worse. Humans are fundamentally selfish and venal, and any claims to altruism, solidarity, or a broad social good are cynical lies to advance the personal interests of those cloaking themselves thusly. In other words, the status quo for all its inherent injustices and dysfunctionalities, is still far better than any deliberate attempt to create a more fair, egalitarian, and just society.

The other way to dismiss utopian thinking and argument is to claim that it is naïve and unrealistic. To this I can only say that in my opinion utopian thinking is far more realistic—not to mention urgently necessary—than any attempt to maintain society on the current trajectory of ecological suicide, social anomie and isolation, and an endless treadmill of increasingly self-destructive and pointless work to enrich a tiny minority of the world population at everyone else’s expense.

It’s very irritating to have utopianism conflated with totalitarianism. Not just irritating, it’s historically false. Long before the Russian or Chinese revolutions, before 20th century Communism existed (which some of us would argue was a variant on capitalism anyway, just a state-capitalism rather than a private corporate one), there was a rich vein of utopian socialism going back to the late 18th century, and developing a broad following during the early decades of industrialization in the first half of the 1800s. Some of its better known proponents (who by the way did not share the exact same ideals, but held variations of new approaches to property and social organization) were Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Etienne Cabet, and Henri de Saint-Simon.

Charles Fourier (1772-1837) is

“distinctive in the generous, indulgent, and epicurean, rather than Spartan or stoical emphasis, given in his vision of the future and of human nature. In Fourier’s phalansteries, work, as well as the rest of life, was to be organized according to the grand psychological principle of ‘passionate attraction,’ whereby the passions rather than reason were to be harnessed to ensure the maximum gratification of sexual, social, and other instinctual desires, and the commensurability of aptitudes with socially necessary labor… Labor itself would be organized according to the principle of ‘attractive association’ in ‘compound groups,’ with the aim being that ‘attractive labor’ would make work as free, and as interesting as possible. Individuals would rotate tasks up to eight times daily, work no longer than two hours at any job, and have as many as forty activities in all. A typical day would involve five meals, attending a concert, visiting the library, hunting, fishing, and cultivation, with manufacturing occupying no more than one-quarter of the total labor.”

(“Socialism and Utopia” by Gregory Claeys in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, New York Public Library/Oxford University Press, 2000)

Interesting for folks here in Northern California was an attempt to create a similiarly inspired communal society near Cloverdale called Icaria Speranza in 1881. The French founders of this community were followers of Etienne Cabet, who had been a revolutionary in France in 1830, later expelled, and finally ended up with a group of followers in Louisiana, then St. Louis (where he was evicted from his own group) and later in Iowa before a break-away group landed in Cloverdale. French revolutionary refugees, first from the failed revolution of 1848, and then later from the suppressed Paris Commune of 1871, were the main source of Icarians. The communes, like dozens of other examples, failed, this one succumbing to a weak economy in the mid-1880s, and the rising pre-eminence of families over the community. When they dissolved in 1886 the land was divided among the participating families.

Radical newspapers published at Speranza Icaria in Cloverdale, California, 1885.

Another fascinating chapter of California utopian efforts starts in that same era, the late 1880s. Burnette Haskell, who had been editing The Truth as the newspaper of the San Francisco labor movement, and had been a founder of the Coastal Seamen’s Union, led a group of San Francisco radicals to the mountains to start a new community, dubbed the Kaweah Cooperative. From the original filing of papers in 1885 to its sudden incorporation into a new national park called Sequoia in 1890, the Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth sought to build a utopian settlement among the biggest trees in the southern Sierra Nevada. Like many communal efforts, they were torn apart by jealousy, lack of resources, hunger, and uniquely, the daunting difficulty of building an access road into the mountains.

The most important utopian novel of the 19th century in terms of mass appeal was Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” which inspired a widespread social movement of Bellamyites, all trying to create something of his very 19th century vision of planned socialist communities. But a more important novel from the same era was William Morris’s News from Nowhere, the best utopian novel ever written by many accounts. In it the protagonist awakens in an utterly transformed greater London, no longer the dark and dirty hellhole of untrammeled 19th century capitalist industrialism, but a bucolic, semi-rural, artisanal culture well rooted in its natural rhythms. No longer a world dedicated to useless toil, but instead one founded on self-directed, useful work, and in that regard a worthy successor to the utopian socialists of the early 19th century.

And there are dozens of amazing utopian and dystopian novels, many in the science fiction and speculative fiction genres, that have extended the field in many directions. A proper look at Utopia would require a good survey of this rich vein of literature, too.

Anyway, I wrote about this to contextualize my frustration with two shows at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The first was on Saturday night under the title “Pirate Utopias.” The catalogue blurb claims the humorous and innovative shorts elaborate “a systematic approach to pleasurable non-productivity,” but the nine short films shown had absolutely nothing systematic about them, little connection to one another, and none whatsoever to the idea of utopia, pirate or otherwise. A couple of shorts “Embrace of the Irrational” and “Release” each had something to offer, but in no way respond to the claims of the descriptive blurb. That program felt like a real rip-off, and I wanted to ask for a replacement ticket to make up for it.

Then on Sunday night a big packed house in Theater One showed up to see local friend and filmmaker Sam Green’s latest offering, “Utopia in Four Movements.” This was a non-film, a product of many journeys, a lot of film shooting, and a good deal of grant money (one presumes, from the long list of foundations thanked in the program notes). Green traveled with crew to China, Cuba several times, and probably a number of other locations, but in the end he didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what to do with it. My strong impression is that he doesn’t really have much to say about the idea of Utopia. He certainly doesn’t say anything during the 90 minutes he walks around on stage giving a memorized talk with his series of stills and short video vignettes, all accompanied by the talented Quavers, a small ensemble from Brooklyn, and Dave Cerf’s audio soundscapes engineered from the back of the room. There were dozens of friends and acquaintances in the audience and it was striking to have so many come up to me afterwards with a puzzled look wondering what I’d thought about it, or whom I heard from later because they ran out as fast as they could, disliking the show intensely.

I like Sam personally, and it’s always difficult to lambaste a friend’s creative work. As the show concluded, I looked down at my blank notepad where I had intended to scribble critical thoughts as the show proceeded. I hadn’t had a critical thought. There was really nothing to sink my teeth into. Several people told me they felt like they’d watched a motivational speaker, and everyone concurred that it had been surprisingly superficial, and lacked any politics. My first thought was that it had been deliberately very impressionistic, and deliberately eschewed any effort to intellectualize or analyze or explain. But as the cacophony of negative reactions rose around me, I couldn’t help but join in.

Why had he done such a weak piece on such a potentially rich topic? The four “movements” are 1) Esperanto (which is conspicuously absent from any of my half dozen books on Utopian movements in history); 2) “The Revolution” (which by Green’s presentation would seem to be mostly about Stalin and Mao and his Little Red Book, though he also included a black American woman living in exile in Havana, but she’s not given any space to address questions of utopia, socialism, revolution, or much of anything); 3) Capitalist globalization (presented here as the largest mall in the world, built in China, and nearly entirely empty except for some costumed Teletubby mascots running around amidst the empty escalators, security carts, and random visitors); and 4) (and most mysteriously) forensic anthropology (where mass graves are being exhumed in Rwanda, Bosnia, Guatemala, Argentina, etc.)

I’m sorry but this is a bizarre way of framing the question of Utopia. It strongly reinforces the conflation of utopianism with totalitarianism, cynically removing some of the most hopeful trends in history from the picture entirely. How can you address Utopia and show the May 1968 slogan “sous les pavés, la plage” (beneath the paving stones, the beach) as an isolated thought, without developing anything further about May ‘68, either in the 10-million strong strike in France, or the massive upheavals that took place all around the world? How could you make the mass hysteria of Maoism in 1966 the symbol of utopianism instead of a thoughtful probing of the multifaceted Spanish Revolution during its brutal Civil War in the 1930s, when anarchists rose up against fascists and their “own” nationalist government, as well as the international Communist movement who started a civil war within the civil war to squelch the possibility of another path than that of the 3rd International’s Comintern? Why include a lengthy treatment of the quirky, prescriptive, and ultimately quixotically pointless effort to create a universal language in Esperanto? And then to randomly point out that billionaire George Soros was raised in an Esperanto-enthusiast family? So what? Finally, what the hell does forensic anthropology and the excavation of the victims of mass murder (many facilitated or at least put in motion by earlier socially disintegrative interventions by British and U.S. imperialism after all) have to do with utopianism? Green throws it all in there in an inexplicable, intellectually incoherent jumble. He tries to escape his bleak view of humanity by putting some footage of the recent 350.org demos at the front of his exposition (“These people are the real utopians”?? Green is obviously not a part of it), and at the end he brings in Rebecca Solnit and her book “Hope in the Dark,” as though all we can do is hope as individuals, and there are no social actors, and certainly no paths of social activity that could actually take us in another direction from the genocides and defeats his presentation focused on.

Sad to say, “Utopia in Four Movements” was a quintessential slacker/hipster approach to history. A 90-minute traipse through images and juxtapositions that lack any narrative or intellectual or political point, often historically distorted, and in any case reinforcing a culture with an extremely short attention span. Each image and concept remains unexamined, the director engaging in a wink-and-nod relationship with the audience, assuming that by showing certain things everyone will understand and acknowledge the deeper critique implied (whatever that is—it actually reinforces the dominant culture’s glib dismissal of utopian political thinking). It’s another post-modern exercise in American anti-intellectualism, a refusal to do the hard work of digging through history, finding the lost nuggets that shed light on how our (mis)understanding of utopia was created. Instead, he just phones it in, relying on his unmistakeable personal charm, the success of his previous film on the Weather Underground, and an American audience unlikely to demand a deeper, more nuanced, more historically grounded treatment of the topic, to carry him through.

Sorry Sam. I wish I could endorse this project, but I think it should be buried. Utopia deserves a far more serious and thorough treatment, and by going shallow and glib, you’ve reinforced the dead-end thinking that keeps so many confused about how to change our condition. Life is what we make it, and we COULD make something quite different than this sorry mess. Utopia is one way to free our imaginations and ultimately our activities.

Paris Commune, 1871: citizens wait for shooting to stop.

I live in San Francisco’s Mission District, going back to 1987. It’s a neighborhood undergoing intense gentrification, even with the current economic and housing crises. Sometimes I think with all the cafes and bars and trendy new galleries and boutiques that we’re sliding towards becoming a Greenwich Village.

There are different populations living here, among each other and side by side, but for the most part we don’t overlap or intersect that much. I’m basically invisibile when I walk past young Latino drug dealers on a nearby corner. They don’t see me (I’m not a customer) and I don’t see them (eye contact can lead to dangerous encounters, I learned growing up in Chicago and Oakland as a kid). Similarly, chronic alcoholic homeless men roll past my building all day, sometimes cajoling a buck out of me, but mostly not seeing me as I don’t see them. A few blocks away a modern-day “shape-up” goes on all day every day, where hundreds of mostly undocumented immigrant men stand on Cesar Chavez Blvd. hoping to be selected for some short-term day labor.

My partner Adriana has recently been going out to interview some of these day laborers, and also started a similar process with some of the “homeys” on the corner. Suddenly the boundaries of invisibility start to crumble. The individual lives, the specific voices, thoughts, and motivations of what were generic humans come into focus, no longer easy to ignore. The stories are unique, compelling, sometimes hard to believe. As Adriana is writing about this herself, I cannot divulge much, but yesterday she met some of the kids on the corner (they’re probably 18 or 19 at least) and they described themselves as “norteños,” those from Northern California, and they defend the campesinos, they are “Cesar Chavez’s bodyguards,” and as soldiers, when they’re doing time, their elders command them to learn their histories. Who knew? Fascinating that the local corner’s drug dealing crew see themselves in a politicized lineage that is almost overtly left-wing.

Along with learning about the immigrants and their harrowing stories of crossing the U.S. border dozens of times, the corpses and cops, we’ve also gotten hooked on “The Wire.” I had a lot of folks tell me about this TV series and I watched the first episode a year ago or so, and thought, “ugh, I hate cops-and-thugs-and-heroin stories. No way!” So it took me a while to try it again, and knowing what the first show was like I braced myself, went through it, on to the 2nd and 3rd episodes, and before I knew it I was hooked too. “The Wire” is hands-down the sharpest, most detailed and humanistic look at the reality of decaying American city life I’ve seen. It portrays Baltimore, Maryland, a city far from its glory days of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drug-dealing gangsters vie for housing project turf, cops bust heads to build stats, political grandstanding destroys morale in the police department while undercutting it from within, corrupt politicians compete for payouts and real estate deals, dockworkers in an obsolete port sell their integrity to try to save their industry, one police commander unilaterally experiments with quasi-legalization with remarkable success only to be cashiered himself, and on and on, over the seasons. It reminds me a lot of the remarkable Oakland-based novels “Way Past Cool” and “Six Out Seven” by Jess Mowry, other works that capture the incredible humanity and resilience of people in the most dire circumstances, the humor and love that can and does hold people together against large odds. In both portrayals, too, the finely tuned language, the street slang, is one of the enduring triumphs of the writers. To hear and reproduce such clever and innovative twists and turns in the daily slang of the street is no small accomplishment.

Ultimately The Wire is a soap opera of course, but with great, complex, unpredictable characters, fantastic casting, and brilliant scriptwriting. But more than all that, watching it has changed how I see people in my neighborhood. Suddenly everyone is potentially a fascinating story, a complex individual with multiple overlapping interests and conflicts and confusions. Just like me and all my friends! It’s always been so, but part of the grind of daily life in America, and the incredible self-segregation that we’re all so good at reproducing, is to lose sight of that—to not see people in their own depth and complexity, to reduce them to simple categories, to ciphers easy to remain disconnected from and fundamentally indifferent to.

"Vengereuses" in Paris, May 27, 1871, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

Similarly, the police are easy to dismiss as uniformed thugs of the status quo, people who are so deluded and politically reactionary that they’re willing to be the enforcers of this crazily unjust society. And for sure, sometimes that’s what they are. But after watching The Wire, and gaining a greater appreciation for the many different ways of handling police work, even recognizing that there are cases (like wife-beating, child abuse, etc.) that require some kind of forceful intervention to defend the victims, I look at cops differently now.

I was already talking about this in the context of my Nowtopia talks, that someday if we succeed at building this new way of life, it will eventually become a threat to those who believe in and benefit from the way things are. My story has taken the form of a fractured fairy tale, the Tortoise and the Gangster. We Nowtopians are rather slow-moving, taking our plodding steps day after day towards a new way of living, and doing our best to maintain radical patience. The world changes, history moves, but at unpredictable times, and sometimes a sudden lurch is sideways or backwards as likely as “forwards” toward a better future. We have to keep going in the face of history’s intractable pace. But our contest is not with the Hare, the speedy racer who runs circles around us. No, our opposition is the Gangster, the criminals (and their syndicates, and most crucially, the logic of their violent, authoritarian behavior) who run governments and corporations, and when threatened do not hesitate to kill, even on a grand scale, to maintain their power. Someday, if we succeed at opening enough space outside of Capital, outside of money, they will come to kill us.

At that point it will be vitally important that we have human relationships with individual police and military that makes it conceivable that they will refuse to shoot, they will refuse to repress, and they will even join us in resisting the Stupid World as it tries to save itself from the Smart Life we’re trying to create, a world in which everyone has what they want and need, and no one has to suffer from the stupidities and cruelty that dominate the world as we know it. And this Smart Life has to welcome everyone, especially the folks who we live amidst but so easily don’t see, and in welcoming everyone our own ideas of what the Smart Life looks and feels like will have to show some flexibility too…

Plum tree bursting with fruit at Mullen and Franconia on the north side of Bernal Heights, June 2009.

I’m deep into researching a new book project these days, covering San Francisco history from the late sixties to the late seventies. It’s incredibly fun to be in discussion with a couple dozen great writers and historians, learning as I go how much more complicated and nuanced all these stories are than my first (rather glib) overview. It goes hand in hand with the ongoing push on the wiki FoundSF.org, which is getting almost 5,000 visitors a month already. We redesigned it a couple of weeks ago, so if you only saw it once a few months ago, have another look. And we’re going to have a much simpler system for submitting material by the end of summer. Part of the fun of that project, and part of what makes it so damn infinite, is getting turned on to new resources. Case in point: via my friends at the Bernal History Project I learned about this amazing photo collection by Charles W. Cushman at Indiana University.

A couple of great books on local history have further enriched my work. Just out is “Street Art San Francisco: Mission Muralismo” edited by Annice Jacoby (full disclosure: I have a short piece in it about Mona Caron‘s Market Street Railway Mural, but in fact it only bears a passing resemblance to what I actually wrote, which was not a big deal anyway.) Jaime Cortez has a great article in this book, as do another half dozen contributors, but the best thing is having a fancy coffee table book with such fantastic reproductions that really captures the breadth and depth of the street art scene in San Francisco going back to the 1970s. The other book that transported me to a time before mine is “Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” by Elizabeth Pepin and Lewis Watts.  Between the amazing photos, reminiscences, and narrative text, it’s an incredible history all in one volume. Drives home the sense of loss regarding the black community in San Francisco, which of course is a story still unfolding, though the geographic focus has shifted to Bayview-Hunter’s Point from the once vibrant Fillmore.

That photo I started with highlights another theme I’m increasingly interested in, urban agriculture. In San Francisco there are a couple of efforts underway, one called SF Glean, and the other Produce to the People. They are discussing a closer working relationship on one of the lists I’ve been lurking on, but in any case, they’re each doing great work connecting hungry people, willing workers, and untended fruit trees in the city, of which there are many. I came upon that plum tree above yesterday, with a rich bounty ready to eat, and a couple of weeks ago I found this loquat tree on the south side of Bernal:

Loquats ready to harvest on Bernal, early June 2009.

Not a quarter mile further south is the increasingly well known Alemany Farm, looking pretty dang good from the hillside above:

Alemany Farm with I-280 to its south, June 22, 2009. Note the orchard in foreground.

In my Nowtopian way, I can spend weeks at home, researching, reading, emailing, discussing, and then go out for a long walk on one of our glorious sunny summer afternoons and find all these great examples of ways people are already busily reinventing city life. Lately, the city itself has gotten some good work done too, from the newly greened center median on Guerrero and small plazas at 17th and Market, and Howard and Van Ness, to the jumble of new staircases descending from the southern edge of the Bernal ring road.

Bernal Heights, such a small area when you look at a map of the city, is one of the best walkers’ paradises in town. The new staircases join an existing network of stairs and ghost streets that make it possible to walk up and down the hill and avoid streets for long stretches of the walk.

One of many "ghost streets" on Bernal Heights, this one with some old wooden steps inviting the walker to enter.

Kingston stairs on west side of Bernal, older and more established.

When you walk up and down these stairways and realize how much time and effort neighbors put in to making these places the lush, attractive gardens they are, it’s quite impressive. In some areas it’s more than just pretty flowers and plants too, they’re actual community gardens, like this one on Cortland and Prospect:

Prospect and Cortland Community Garden.

Funny to think of San Francisco as a windswept, barren, sandy and flea-ridden peninsula. These days it’s starting to look like a garden oasis, and if you spend time walking on the hills, behind Noe or Eureka Valleys, on Telegraph Hill or Russian Hill, Bernal or Potrero, you are in for a treat!

All this is to highlight the invisible WORK that’s going on all the time, that we barely notice or register as such. Since it’s not remunerated, it’s relegated to “mere hobby” instead of being seen for what it is, cutting-edge labor to reinvent urban life. Of course I’ve been ranting about this for some years now, and regular readers won’t find this surprising. But I think the cultural zeitgeist *might* be shifting towards a more interesting discussion on “work worth doing”.

In the June 22 issue of The New Yorker Kelefa Sanneh writes about some new titles, and by serendipitous coincidence, brings into the discussion a book that I thought quite important when I read it when age 17: “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” I don’t recognize his account of that book’s relevance much, but do remember how much author Robert Pirsig’s obsession with dualism, and the difference between classical and romantic thinking, set me off on a whole track towards philosophy back there in 1974. Sanneh is using the more prosaic aspect of the book, the interest in motorcycle maintenance, to link it with some new titles that have just come out recently: “Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” by Matthew Crawford, and “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Alain de Botton. I caught Crawford on “Your Call” (mp3) not long ago, and even had to call in to brag about recently fixing my leaking kitchen faucet. He was on with the editor of Make Magazine, and it was a ramp-up to the Maker’s Faire that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

In this essay Sanneh usefully surveys a lot of parallel analysis out there, from Bill McKibben’s great “Deep Economy” to Michael Pollan’s food writings. As we can see, there are many ways that people are turning away from straight-up capitalist markets and beginning to redefine “need,” “desire,” “enough,” and even, hopefully, “growth.” He even brings Victorian philosopher John Ruskin into the discussion as an advocate of “freedom through toil,” albeit with a focus on the quality of the work experience rather than an endorsement of slaving away in coal mines or the hellish factories of his era.

If boring labor is a threat to one’s humanity, it stands to reason that interesting labor can be a form of redemption. The Victorian sage John Ruskin helped invent the modern cult of the craftsman: he was both an idealist and an aesthete, and he argued that miserable workers produced miserable work, and vice versa. In “The Craftsman,” [Richard] Sennett portrays Ruskin as a quirky and quixotic radical, sensitive to the intricate demands of great craftsmanship, and hopeful that the glories of Venetian architecture might help inspire workers to resist the ravages of “mechanical domination.”

..But how do you serve craftsmanship without serving the market? How can an independent artisan insure that he doesn’t become an entrepreneur—and, in time, a corporate executive? This question haunts Crawford’s book, and it helps explain why he takes pains to present himself as merely an aspiring craftsman with “execrable” skills; a professional mechanic who still feels “like an amateur.” These disclaimers are meant to assure readers that, in a society afflicted by hyper-specialization, Crawford isn’t some technical wizard; he’s just a regular guy who happens to be handy with a seal puller. The idea is that we can become him, and that he won’t become someone else—he won’t build a bigger shop, hire more mechanics, expand into Maryland and then Delaware, create a lucrative line of Shockoe Moto leather jackets, and, finally, collaborate with BMW on a gleaming series of R69S replicas. He won’t, in other words, end up like Gene Kahn, the organic-farming pioneer who appears in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” as a vexed figure: Cascadian Farm, which he founded in 1971, has thrived and grown and joined the corporate food chain; Kahn is now the vice-president for sustainable development at General Mills.

I like Sanneh’s essay for lots of reasons, not least his erudition. But it leaves me wanting, especially wanting to be part of the conversation! This is where, perhaps, publishing Nowtopia with AK Press leaves the ideas in it out of the discussion. Maybe if it had been published by a NY publisher, Sanneh would have noticed that it addresses the same topics from a quite different, and perhaps edgier point of view? We’ll never know. Unlike Crawford, the author of Soulcraft, or Sanneh, the reviewer, I see all this work going on outside of wage-labor as crucial proving grounds, places where imaginations and skills are shared, sharpened, and focused. Sanneh lets Crawford have it by the end, having revealed that his groping for a reconfigured political landscape is just so much blather.

In this decade, the revival of traditional craftsmanship and homegrown food has generally been seen as a progressive cause, loosely aligned with environmentalism, blue-state snobbery, and all-purpose anti-corporate activism…

Crawford seems to yearn for a rethinking of left and right, as they’re now configured. Agrarianism, like environmentalism, hasn’t always been considered a progressive cause, and there’s nothing inherently liberal about artisanal cheese, or artisanal bikes—and, just as important, nothing inherently conservative about multinational corporations. Rod Dreher, a National Review contributor and the author of “Crunchy Cons,” is ardently pro-organic and ardently anti-gay marriage. Victor Davis Hanson, the author of “Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea,” is also the author of “Mexifornia,” about the dangers posed by immigration. And one of the heroes of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” describes himself as a “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmental-lunatic farmer.” Part of the appeal of the localist-artisanal creed, for certain liberals and conservatives alike, is precisely that it’s anti-cosmopolitan, anti-corporate, anti-progress—an alternative to the creative destruction of capitalism…

Sanneh critiques Crawford (and Michael Pollan) as fundamentally connoisseurs who are more concerned with quality workmanship than quality work conditions. Their politics is a politics of consumption rather than production, which is odd when you consider that Crawford’s primary goal seems to be to reconnect millions of computer/office geeks with manual labor. And it’s in the reclaiming of our work, wresting control of our daily activities from the mindless stupidity imposed by markets and wage-labor, where something approaching liberation might emerge. Clearly Crawford doesn’t get it, nor does de Botton’s effort, which apparently gets stuck accepting a great deal of the work being done and prefers to examine the workers’ experience of it up close without questioning the larger stupidity of which it is a part. Again and again, this is the problem with our culture, an inability and unwillingness to take responsibility for what we do all day, not just from the point of view of wanting to like your job, but from a social point of view: Why work? Why do what we do? Mightn’t we do something different? Isn’t the point of all this to achieve a good life for all? Well, that’s not happening is it? So what shall we do to reinvent our daily activities to direct them towards this goal? Crawford, like so many others, is addressing the issue from too narrow a point of view, one that is sadly quite suitable for full co-optation by the Stupid World of Work he’s ostensibly beginning to critique:

With a minimum of tweaking, he could turn “Shop Class as Soulcraft” into a first-rate motivational speech for business groups nationwide.  His encomium to “tangible work that is straightforwardly useful” could easily be taken as a general exhortation to excellence. In extolling “mindful labor,” he captures precisely the quality that most managers would like to reinforce in the workers they supervise. And when he writes about the importance of “seeing clearly, or unselfishly,” and “the experience of being fully engaged in what you are doing,” he sounds like one of those business consultants he despises, delivering a message that is all the more effective because it comes covered in a sweet glaze of anti-corporate rabble-rousing. Crawford wants his readers to become better, happier, more productive workers.

Sanneh concludes with the last sentence: “Who could argue with that?”… uh… me? why yes, I do!

This redtailed hawk is reaching for its dinner off the south peak of Twin Peaks, June 09.

From Twin Peaks you can see two dominant industries that straddle the Bay: past the freeway the new office buildings make up UCSF Mission Bay, a biotech campus, and across the bay is the abandoned Alameda Naval Air Station with the many cranes that dominate the Port of Oakland and have been the linchpin of globalization.

I’ve been a bit less attentive to the many crises analyses whipping around lately, partly because I was travelling, and partly because I get tired of reading the same old things… But here’s a few pieces from near and far that I think help move the discussion to a better place. First off, if you haven’t come upon it already, my friends from Midnight Notes have released a new pamphlet called Promissory Notes (pdf). Then, I found an excerpt from “Money and the Crisis of Civilization” by Charles Eisenstein and thought it a good contribution to a deeper critique of the economistic categories that the crises discussions usually get mired in (found it in the surprisingly politically sophisticated but New Age journal HopeDance which I was given by Lois Arkin at LA Ecovillage). Another old pal, Paul Mattick Jr., has written an excellent 4-part series on the economic crisis from a fairly traditional Marxist point of view, but in saying that, it has to be said that he’s far removed from the “overproduction” arguments that you hear from a lot of self-styled Marxists. And delightfully, he ends with this refreshing prose:

Will people instead turn their attention to bettering their own conditions of life in the concrete, immediate ways an unraveling economy will require? Will newly homeless millions look at newly foreclosed, empty houses, unsaleable consumer goods, and stockpiled government foodstuffs and see a way to sustain life? No doubt, as in the past, Americans will demand that industry or government provide them with jobs, but as such demands come up against economic limits, perhaps it will also occur to people that the factories, offices, farms, and other workplaces will still exist, even if they cannot be run profitably, and can be set into motion to produce goods that people need. Even if there are not enough jobs—paid employment, working for business or the state—there is work aplenty to be done if people organize production and distribution for themselves, outside the constraints of the business economy.

When the financial shit hit the fan last fall, everyone with access to the media, from the President to left-wing commentators like Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, agreed that it was necessary to save the banks with infusions of government cash lest the whole economy collapse. But, aside from the fact that the economy is collapsing anyway, the opposite is closer to the truth: if the whole financial system fell away, and money ceased to be the power source turning the wheels of production, the whole productive apparatus of society—machines, raw materials, and above all working people—would still be there, along with the human needs it can be made to serve. The fewer years of suffering and confusion it takes for people to figure this out, the better.

We also had a couple of very exciting Shaping San Francisco Talks in the last two Wednesdays (scroll down to Global Commons/Global Enclosures on Apr. 22, and Transition City: Permacultural Transformation on Apr. 29). So there’s a bunch of good links, but my favorite recent discovery is the piece by Franco Berardi “Bifo” that I linked to last post.  I’m going to excerpt it a bunch below, connecting it to some arguments I’ve been making in Nowtopia:

This is not a crisis, but the symptom of the incompatibility of the potency
of productive forces (cognitive labour in the global network) and
the paradigm of growth. This is not a crisis but the final collapse of a system
that has lasted for five hundred years.

I quote Marx to make a similar point:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From [helping] development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.
—Karl Marx

Bifo goes on to describe two faces of the “post-modern” economy during the last thirty years: the ‘Net-Economy’ and ‘Criminal capitalism’. Interesting how closely this parallels my earlier post, the Tortoise vs. the Gangster! I think Bifo’s argument is a bit flakey after this initially solid assertion, because he uses the concept of “General Intellect” (something I talk about a lot in Nowtopia too) too narrowly. He conflates it with the cognitariat, the people working in immaterial production. He even goes so far to say that Obama winning was a victory of “the peaceful army of the general intellect all over the world” (!), and that Obama won thanks to the votes of cognitive labor (he might want to read Mike Davis’ “Obama at Manassas” in New Left Review for a painfully exhaustive analysis of the voting trends in the last election). In spite of this weakness, I still like his characterization of the underlying conflict: “it will be the fight of intellectual force against the brutal force of ignorance, violence, and profit.”

The privatization of life has pulverized social solidarity, and forced each person to think in isolation about his/her own necessities. Take for instance the privatisation of mobility, as a distortion of the public sphere. An irrational, polluting and cumbersome object, the private car (three tons of iron for the displacement of a body that weighs only eighty kilograms) has been the central object of the industrial production in the 20th century.

Why do cars have to be private? They could be public objects that every person could take and use for the time needed, then leave open in the street, ready for everyone else’s transportation. They could be substituted by much more comfortable public systems of transportation. Why has the public system of transportation been sabotaged by the ruling class, during the last decades? We know why very well. The capitalist economy creates scarcity in the domain of transportation, as in every other domain. The creation of scarcity is the premise of accumulation, made possible by the privatization of need.

Gotta love this clarity about the Car. All us Critical Massers have been arguing things like this for almost two decades. But not very many cyclists are this clear about the role of markets in creating scarcity. Bifo’s argument goes a lot further too. He characterizes his own invocation of a new kind of “communism” as a “Therapy of Singularization”. It sounds a bit silly at first, but spend a bit of time perusing ads for lonely hearts and you will surely encounter again and again a self-labeling “spiritual, not religious”. I had trouble figuring this out years ago when I noticed this, but I think it means simply “emotional literacy,” an ability to feel and express those feelings. I think Bifo is addressing the same thing:

The privatization of need and the reduction of well-being to acquisition has destroyed any sense of dignity and self-love. The social time of attention has been occupied by the flow of info-labor and advertising. Language has been absorbed by labour and deserted by affection. Love, tenderness, sex, affection, and care for others have been transformed in merchandise. Every single person has became the owner of many credit cards, a shopping machine, obliged to work more and more in order to pay an ever growing debt. Debt turned to be the universal chain, and this created the perfect conditions for universal collapse. At last the collapse did happen.

Growth will never be back, not only because people will never be able to pay for the Debt accumulated during the past three decades, but also because the physical planetary resources are close to exhaustion, and the nervous resources of the social brain are close to breakdown.

Bifo is nothing if not bizarrely comprehensive. He addresses himself to the fantasies of youthful anarchists too:

Scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should not expect much from them. They’ll be unable to touch the real centres of power because of the militarisation of metropolitan space, and they will not be able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. As the long wave of no-global moral protests could not destroy Neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not unless a new consciousness and a new sensibility surfaces and spreads, changing everyday life, and creating NON temporary autonomous zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network.

Full employment is over. The world does not need so much labour and so much exploitation. A radical reduction of labour-time is necessary. Basic income has to be affirmed as a right to life independent of the employment and disjoined from the lending of labour-time. Competence, knowledge, and skills have to be separated from the economic context of exchange value, and rethought in terms of free social activity.

Long-time friends of the Committee for Full Enjoyment will appreciate his further elaboration:

In the anthropology of modern capitalism well-being has been equated with acquisition, never with enjoyment. In the course of the social turmoil we are going to live through in the coming years, the identification of well-being with property has to be questioned. It’s a political task, but above all it is a cultural task, and a psychotherapeutic one too.

This parallels pretty closely some of the commentaries I’ve gotten involved in after my Nowtopia talks. The need for radical patience as we continue to challenge the deepest institutions of our culture, wanting them to change quickly, but having to accept that it will take a lot longer than any of us want. As Bifo notes, it’s a cultural task and a psychotherapeutic one too. Luckily, the psychotherapeutic side IS accelerated by changing material conditions and experiences. The fact that we have daily experiences of unlimited noncommercial abundance helps corrode the religious adherence to private property. It’s also incumbent on us to rethink our notions of revolution, abandoning finally the militaristic fantasies the Bolsheviks and other communists stuck us with in the past century. As Bifo says: “We are not going to witness a cathartic event of Revolution, we’ll not see the sudden breakdown of State power. During the next months and years we’ll witness a sort of Revolution without a Subject.” The political and cultural task before us, according to Bifo? “Subjectivate this revolution [by] proliferating singularities!” Ouch!

Singularity does not mean “individual”, because you can have collective singularities. By the world singularity I mean an agency that does not follow any rule of conformity and repetition, and is not framed in any historical necessity.

After opening the space for this amorphous idea of the social subject, the rest of his piece reads very much like some of Nowtopia’s arguments:

Rather than a swift change in the social landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends: communities abandoning the field the crumbling ruling economies, more and more individuals giving up their search for a job and creating their own networks of services.

The myth of Growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new modes of wealth distribution. Singular communities will transform the very perception of well-being and wealth in the sense of frugality and freedom. The cultural revolution that we need in this transition leads from the perception of wealth as the private ownership of a growing amount of goods that we cannot enjoy because we are too busy purchasing the money needed for acquisition, to the perception of wealth as the enjoyment of an essential amount of things that we can share with other people.

The de-privatization of services and goods will be made possible by this much needed cultural revolution. This will not happen in a planned and uniformed way, this will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of singular individuals and communities, and the result of the creation of an economy of shared use of common goods and services and the liberation of time for culture, pleasure and affection.

The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of non temporary autonomous zones) will be a pacific process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority is frightened by the fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be described as a fight between the Mass Ignorance produced by Media-totalitarianism and the shared Intelligence of the General Intellect.

But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting [with] autonomous forms of production based on high-tech-low-energy production: whilst avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.

This last bit will be sure to annoy all formal Leftists and party-builders (my previous post on Teamsters and Plumbers was put up on sf.streetsblog.org and got a flurry of responses, including the most predictably old style CP smear: I’m clearly a right-winger!), but I think it’s a helpful way to think about things (if not necessarily the best behavioral guide!):

Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming time…

Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion.

Bifo gave his speech in London in February 2009. Lots to chew on!