“Progress consists of the application of intelligence to the reduction of effort and dependency, and the expansion of a sphere of idleness and individual freedom.”

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After The Future

The Occupy movement is going through a pivotal moment right now, with various camps—notably Oakland, Portland, and New York City—being destroyed by police action during the past few days. The punditocracy and the politicians are all hoping this will bring it to an end, but that is not going to happen. It is likely that the focus on camping and holding public plazas may give way to new tactics, but the newly vocal populations all over the U.S. are not going to be silenced just as they’ve rediscovered their voices.

Arriving at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland on November 2, we were met with this amazing scene.

Walking around the area, the scenes of everyone together were endlessly inspiring. An historic day!

In particular, the Oakland General Strike of November 2 was an historic event. For the first time in the U.S. an urban General Strike emerged from the new working classes, the precarious, the unemployed, the unorganized, and the poor, brought together 2,000-strong in the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on October 26 and voting 96% in favor. One week later it happened, and it was an amazing day.

General Strikes are not so rare in other parts of the world, of course. Several cities in Syria have been out for almost two weeks as I write. Italy and France have had many one-day general strikes in the past decades. But those have been led by giant trade union confederations, and kept under pretty tight control.

The Oakland General Strike was an opening salvo from an unexpected quarter: the “precariat” (a neologism made by combing precarious and proletariat). Local unions could not formally endorse the call in such a short time, and are often bound by no-strike clauses in their contracts. Nevertheless, rank-and-file members of the Service workers (SEIU 1021), the Teamsters, the Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and others, enthusiastically joined in during the day-long festival that gripped the center of Oakland, culminating in the mass marches towards dusk that shut down the Port of Oakland, the nation’s fifth largest. But organized labor was following, not leading this General Strike. The people filled the city center with music, banners, marches, humor, performance, food, yoga, meditation, childcare, art-making, and more. Rappers, hip-hop spoken word artists, and folk musicians all performed in the streets. Urban farmers showed up with free vegetables grown in the city’s reclaimed lots. Free valet bike parking was provided by local bicycle advocates. Dozens of economic and environmental justice activists were in the mix. The Oakland General Strike not only halted business as usual in much of Oakland, but demonstrated practical everyday alternatives that are already well entrenched in the area.

Much to my surprise, the Teamsters showed up with a truck load of hamburgers and hot dogs from the Alameda County Labor Council which they fed to all comers for hours.

This table offered free veggies from the East Oakland schools farmers market.

This booth had already given away all its food by the time I took this photo.

Most hopefully, the Oakland General Strike excited everyone who turned out, leading to cascading feelings of solidarity and possibility, which in turn flows out of Oakland and across the networks of occupiers everywhere. Solidarity messages flowed in from as far away as Egypt, while Oakland suddenly found itself in the eyes of the world. The one-day strike was a powerful demonstration to local and national elites, but more importantly, it was a powerful demonstration to participants and allies, shifting imaginations about what is possible.

This boisterous Children's Brigade was amazing, hilarious, and wildly inspirational!

This Children's Village was an integral part of the Oakland Commune at the plaza in front of City Hall... hardly looks like a security or public health hazard does it?

The medical tent at the Occupy Oakland camp, November 2, 2011.

This IS what history looks like!

Mona and her great sign.

Music and dance erupted all over the area.

Habana Matanza played right along the route of the big anti-capitalism march during the afternoon.

The attempt to seize an empty, nearby building late that night, leading to a skirmish with police and some minor property damage in the area, gave rise to a counterspin that dominated the following days’ news coverage. In fact, a vigorous debate erupted among many participants about the limits of various tactics, the meaning of nonviolent mass action, democracy, accountability and more. All of this demoralized some, but were necessary steps in the evolution and maturation of the movement. With the state repression of the past days, occupiers will be seeking new ways to creatively advance the larger challenge to the status quo.

Several banks along the afternoon march got vandalized and windows broken.

Bank of America rebuked.

The black bloc during the anti-capitalist march, a while after the attack on Whole Foods and moments before an attack on the Bank of America near Lake Merritt.

Postcards from the revolution? The theater of the black bloc is unmistakeable, as is the petty vandalism some of them engage in. One protester was dogging them saying "this is how the Nazi Party started!"... I do wonder how anarchists and left communists can feel comfortable adopting a black uniform, masking their identities, and engaging in macho actions that depend on the safety provided by thousands who have no say about their choices.

Just after this banner we came upon an unusual sight...

... a small group of marchers had already broken off to clean paint bombs from the bank walls!

How long before this strange political theater is added to promotional advertising for the cleaning products?

Let’s take a deeper look at the social context that the Occupy movement has emerged from.

For the past few decades American politics has shifted steadily rightward. Neoliberalism swept the world and in the U.S. it was anchored in the “Washington consensus” that promoted privatization, reduced government spending, shredded social safety nets, all backed up by police and military. The 9/11 attacks were the pretext for restriction of civil liberties and expansion of police state powers, as well as a decade of wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia. Ten years later the U.S. is still bogged down there and is now murdering its own citizens in Arabian deserts (ostensibly at peace) without trial, conviction, or sentence. Obama was elected by a population ready to restore civility, honesty, and social solidarity but like every politician from our One-Party (two-faction) system, his exercise of power has served the 1% at everyone else’s expense.

The siren song of democracy dies hard though. People have streamed into the Occupy camps, often to visit and talk rather than to stay and camp. In the General Assemblies countless people are discovering a nascent direct democracy that slakes their long unquenched thirst for genuine politics. The 99% meme has been enormously helpful in opening a space that invites everyone in. Obviously the actual campers are not 99% of the population. But by holding to that claim, everyone from the unemployed white middle-aged factory worker and the laid-off middle manager, to the unemployed Ph.D.s and newly minted college students, to the millions of foreclosed and laid off, to the permanently unemployed underclass living on the streets of the U.S., have been welcomed into the process.

In the Occupy camps people from different economic situations have met face to face again after three decades of stigmatizing and ostracizing the people labeled “homeless.” To be sure, there are many people with severe mental health issues living on the streets, victims of a callous dismantling of social services during the rise of neoliberalism. The Occupy camps have been an obvious beacon to people who are hungry, cold, and alone in the harsh life of the streets. The camps have been feeding thousands of people, providing basic medical services, and reconnecting participants to a genuine social solidarity. The daily interactions and shared life of the camps have helped reduce the walls that poverty, race, and class animosities have built. Too many folks living paycheck to paycheck have been able to believe the myth that “I’m not like THEM!” That false bravado has reinforced the moralistic judgment that people living on the streets have somehow brought it on themselves. Now that most of the 99% realize they too are being robbed, and their precious lifestyles are in jeopardy, the fissures cultivated between middle-working class people and the very poor are starting to shrink.

The people of North America have watched their wealth diminish while the super-rich have grown immensely richer (often overlooked in this saga is how most of the Global South has been kept in desperate poverty during the looting of their economic resources by the same super-rich). While this shift in wealth has gone unchecked, the work that most of us do to reproduce life has changed too. Manufacturing work has plunged while digital “infolabor” has grown enormously, along with a huge expansion in low-wage jobs at Walmart, McDonalds, and other “service sector” businesses. The rapidly rising cost of health care has also fueled the vast growth of hospitals and drugstores but especially the insurance bureaucracies, with the legions of employees needed to keep it all going.

The well-documented deindustrialization of North America has also led to the destruction of many once-thriving neighborhoods and even whole cities like Detroit, and led to the hollowing out of many others, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the wake of these jarring economic dislocations, people have been on the move. Not only do we have millions of recent immigrants from Asia and South America, but Americans have been on the move too. This has led to a breakdown in established neighborhoods and communities, and a further fragmentation of daily life at the residential level. Who knows their neighbors anymore? Who knows the people they work with very well? Everyone is constantly changing jobs, changing homes.

These changes in work—in how we make our lives—have changed our social conditions too. The most obvious change is how many hours every day many of us spend on the internet, looking for jobs, looking for love, reading emails, following friends on Facebook, uploading and linking images and ideas, etc., trying to stay “connected.” But no matter how long we’re online, we are always falling behind the rush of information, the mounting pile of messages, the articles we’ve bookmarked or downloaded but not returned yet to read. All of this individualized hyperproductivity is at the root of the fragmented, atomized lives we’ve been living. No matter how much we “connect” online, we find ourselves quite isolated at home in front of our computers or TVs.

The Occupy movement, by returning life to public spaces, is a passionate rebuke to that isolation.

A smart book called “After The Future” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi provides insights into these deeper changes. He connects the increased digitization of work with the rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide in the recent past.

“I don’t think this wave of suicides can be explained in terms of morality, family values, and the weak discourse conservative thought uses to account for the ethical drift produced by capitalism. To understand our contemporary form of ethical shipwreck, we need to reflect on the transformations of activity and labor, the subsumption of mental time under the competitive realm of productivity; we have to understand the mutation of the cognitive and psychosocial system… This … produces painful effects in the conscious organism and we read them through the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic, depression, and a sort of suicidal epidemic … Cybertime (the time of attention, memory, and imagination) cannot speed beyond a limit. If it does, it cracks. And it is actually cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyperproductivity. An epidemic of panic is spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain. An epidemic of depression is following the outbreak of panic. The crisis of the new economy at the beginning of the zero zero decade has to be seen as a consequences of this nervous breakdown…. In the sphere of net-production, it is the social brain that is assaulted by the overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. This is why the social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of net-production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the virtual class. We have to become aware of it; we have to recognize ourselves as cognitarians. Flesh, body, desire, in permanent electrostimulation.”

Not everyone is embedded within the realm of digital labor. But the vast majority of the population is increasingly precarious. Full-time permanent jobs are a thing of the past and only a tiny few will ever have them. I’ve written about this in Nowtopia, and often on this blog too. Berardi does a fine job of summarizing this new social situation:

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

“The word “precariat” generally stands for work that no longer has fixed rules about labor relations, salary, or the length of the work day. However, if we analyze the past, we see that these rules functioned only for a short period at the heart of the twentieth century, under the political pressures of unions and workers, in conditions of (almost) full employment. Thanks to a generally strong regulatory role played by the state in the economy, some limits to the natural violence of capitalist dynamics could be legally established. The legal obligations that in certain periods have protected society from the violence of capital were always founded on political and material relations of force (workers’ violence against the violence of capital). Thanks to political force, it became possible to affirm rights, establish laws, and protect them as personal rights. With the decline in the political force of the workers’ movement, the natural precariousness and brutality of labor relations in capitalism have re-emerged.

If we analyze the technical transformations introduced by the digitalization of the productive cycle, we see that the essential point is not that the labor relation has become precarious (which, after all, it has always been), but the dissolution of the person as active productive agent, as labor power. The cyberspace of global production can be described as an immense expanse of depersonalized human time… Capital no longer recruits people but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers… The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semiocapital and the mobilization of the living labor of cyberspace. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux.

As we go about our daily lives in the U.S., we are bombarded by endless rhetoric about freedom. Politicians constantly brag about how free we are, how this is the greatest country in the world, ad nauseum. We know better. The Occupy movement has brought us into public together to repudiate the lies that dominate this society. Among the biggest lies is the notion that we are free as individuals when we are at work. On top of that illusion, we are also repeatedly admonished that we need a lot of education to be capable of holding the high-skilled jobs of the 21^st century. In both cases, these claims are false. We are far from free, and most jobs can be learned in a very short time. Now that we have an insecure relationship to work, too many people bury themselves in endless rounds of skill development, trying to remain desirable for at least the occasional contract job.

Here’s Berardi again, describing the real world we find ourselves confronted with:

[The person’s] liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds. If we consider the conditions in which the work of the majority of human, proletariat and cognitariat, is actually carried out in our time, if we examine the conditions of the average wage globally, if we consider the current cancellation of previous labor rights, we can say with no rhetorical exaggeration that we live in a regime of slavery… From the point of view of the valorization of capital, flow is continuous, but from the point of view of the existence and time of cognitive workers, productive activity has the character of recombinant fragmentation in cellular form. Pulsating cells of work are lit and extinguished in the large control room of global production. Infolabor is innately precarious, not because of the contingent viciousness of employers but for the simple reason that the allocation of work time can be disconnected from the individual and legal person of the worker, an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital.

The Occupy movement is a sudden sea change in how we respond to this fragmented world. Instead of accepting our individual predicament, thousands of people have rediscovered public space, and in it a public, shared life. The implications of the Oakland General Strike in this context are huge. Sure, a portion of the working population of one city of less than a half million took a day off during an unusually summer-like November week. But having stopped our participation in the planetary work machine, even for a day, beckons us to consider what we might do instead, what we might do if we stop working for the 1% not just for a day, but forever. The possibilities that emerge from a collective strike are infinite: the beautiful world we COULD make together is suddenly almost within grasp.

It’s difficult to imagine redesigning the basic activities by which we produce our shared lives. Science and technology seem to be independent forces, outside of social or democratic control. Clearly the thrust of technological development for more than a hundred years has been to remove skill and decision-making from workers and embed it in technical systems. One outcome of this is to leave us all feeling that there’s nothing we can do about the overarching stupidity of modern life—“that’s just the way it is,” we tell ourselves. Berardi describes how this shapes democracy itself: “Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism… No room for political choice is left, as corporate principles have become embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.”

Berardi wrote the chapters in After The Future as separate essays over the years 2000-2009, and he did not imagine something like the Occupy movement being possible any longer. His diagnosis of an epidemic of depression can easily be directed at himself, but he amusingly reminds us that he could be wrong. In fact, he has a number of suggestions for the future of social revolt that dovetail closely with what I’ve written previously, especially the way I described the Critical Mass bike rides as an act of collective “assertive desertion.” (Interesting too to note Portland’s Elly Blue’s essay noting the presence of CM cyclists in many Occupations.) At this important juncture in the Occupy movement, maybe these ideas should be in the mix, especially as the tired polarization between theatrical vandalism and moralistic pacifism has again emerged to try everyone’s patience.

Berardi rejects the macho posturing of the young militants who, dressed in black masks engage in bursts of targeted vandalism and occasionally skirmish with police lines. “Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafia?” Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House” takes the argument a major step forward:

The state would like us to be violent. Violence as cooptation tries to make us more like them, and if we’re like them they win twice—once because being unlike them is our goal and again because we’re then easier to imprison, brutalize, marginalize, etc. We have another kind of power, though the term nonviolence only defines what it is not; some call our power people power. It works. It’s powerful. It’s changed and it’s changing the world.

But it’s likely that this movement for deep change and deep renewal of society will take longer than a few months. Thousands and millions of people filling the streets, occupying plazas, blocking highways, and stopping their stupid jobs through General Strikes may happen, but it won’t be sudden and overnight. In the meantime, to rebuild the social solidarity that has been so damaged by the last decades’ shattering of communities, we need a strategy that begins to build the new world in the crumbling shell of this one.

Reclaiming our time and technological know-how from the market, and directing our own work ourselves can start anywhere, and has already started in countless efforts across the world. Here’s how Berardi describes assertive desertion in his own terms:

Only withdrawal, passivity, abandonment of the labor market, of the illusions of full employment and a fair relation between labor and capital, can open a new way. Only self-reliant communities leaving the field of social competition can open a way to a new hope. … In this context, passivity does not mean ethical resignation, but refusal of participation. Capitalism is demanding participation, collaboration, active intervention in the economy, competition and entrepreneurship, critical consumption, constructive critique. All this is fake. Activism is fake, when no horizon can be seen. Radical passivity means active withdrawal, and withdrawal means creation of spaces of autonomy where solidarity can be rebuilt, and where self-relying communities can start a process of proliferation, contagion, and eventually, a reversal of the trend.

The beauty of this is that it is already underway. It’s not what most people are doing yet, but enough are that we can see in such initiatives the seeds of a new life sprouting. In Nowtopia I talked about the Marxist concept of “general intellect” as finally becoming a terrain of open contestation. Withdrawal and repurposing of our technological know-how is a good example of that in practice. I like this last excerpt from Berardi as a guidepost to the coming era:

The task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting with autonomous forms of production using high-tech-low-energy methods—while avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.

The confrontations have been at the heart of the Occupy movement. No doubt they will continue to be for some time. But if they begin to wane, or even just take a winter break, it’s good to think of the many things we can do that get us ready for the next wave of refusal and reinvention.

Here, to conclude, are some last images from the march to the Port of Oakland and its successful closure during the November 2, 2011 General Strike in Oakland.

I was with about 80+ bicyclists who rode ahead of the 4 pm march to reach the Port in time to stop the evening shift from arriving to work. We felt like a cavalry arriving as we approached on this overpass.

Other early arrivals and the bicyclists stopped the major port access area.

The 4 pm march left downtown across the freeway, heading to the Port.

At Maritime and 7th, a cluster of cyclists stopped traffic in all directions for more than an hour, preventing longshore workers from getting to their piers to work (most local workers, including the folks in the blocked cars and trucks here, expressed support for the action).

Thousands of marchers filled the Port and shut it down for the evening.

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.

From Guaranda we rode in the back of a Camioneta to Salinas de Guaranda, a little over an hour further into the brilliant green mountains of the Ecuadorian Andes. We’d heard it was a remarkable place, a town far from the tourist track full of cooperative small businesses. We travelled in gray, increasingly wet weather and arrived to a big Carnaval celebration in the town center.

Salinas is tucked in the upper left corner of this image, still several kilometers away as we approached.

The town square where folks had gathered despite the rain to enjoy live music and raffles and Carnaval celebration (and much drinking!).

Some had come down from the surrounding hills on horseback...

...While dozens of others arrived in these old mountain buses.

We dropped our stuff at the local hotel, El Refugio, one of the network of cooperatives, and ran back to the center to join the fun. We strolled around and listened to the music, talked to some locals, and got a taste of the local fire water, Pajaro Azul, a perfumey cane sugar-derived drink that packs a wallop! Soon the drizzle turned into a real downpour and everyone bolted for the balconies along the side of the square.

The rain didn't really impinge on the celebration much, since throwing water on each other is one of the main celebratory activities here, as it was in other Ecuadorian towns.

Water balloons and rain, a soggy celebration!

We took a break from the rain and darted into a nearby restaurant, which was deserted when we entered. Somewhat grumpily the proprietor appeared from the back and we were able to order dinner: fresh trout. We found out later that the trout was from another of the local coops, the trout farm.

Cold, wet, and a bit tired, we thought this simple, fresh trout dinner was one of the culinary highlights of the trip to this point.

After dinner we went back into the drizzle and, with a bottle of our own Pajaro Azul to keep us warm, we joined the dancing in the square. Eventually the two dozen remaining dancers crowded onto the gazebo to get out of the falling rain and finished our dancing with a DJ on stage… The next morning we awoke to a spectacular sunny day. Here’s a couple of views from our room balcony.

From our balcony: the red-tiled roof is the local chocolate-making coop, and at right are the ancient saltworks from which the town gets its name.

Turning left from the same balcony viewpoint, this is Salinas basking in the morning sun.

We found the Tourist bureau office on the town square when we arrived and learned we could take a tour of the town’s coops the next morning. So we got there on time and embarked on a fantastic 3-hour walking tour of this prosperous and harmonious town’s thriving cooperatives. The story we learned is that it all started in the early 1970s when an Italian priest, Padre Antonio Polo, arrived from Italy (he had been sent away by the Vatican for being too radical) and immediately started organizing locals who up to then had been nearly enslaved by the local big landowner, forced to  work in the saltworks for a pittance. Father Polo helped locals to establish a cheese-making coop (it still employs about 90% of local residents in some capacity). Years later, a Swiss visitor helped teach them how to make Gruyere, Parmesan and other varieties of cheese, which they now sell far and wide.

These pretty tiled signs adorned all of the 18 cooperatives in town. This is the Comunitarian Tourist Bureau's.

This map on the wall of the Tourist Bureau shows the coops around town, and the key at lower right lists them.

The list.

So off we went, first stop the cheese factory, a super clean, modern place, with gleaming chrome work tables, tiled hygienic pasteurizing rooms, etc.

This is the parmesan cheese aging facility, which was actually across town from the cheese factory, and had its own name, Cona.

The parmesan cheese processing coop.

We were interested to know how the different coops related to each other, whether or not there was integration horizontally among the different entities. Did they share profits? Did they provide loans, labor, resources among each other? We learned there was a coordinating council of about 5 “managers” in each coop, and that they sent one representative to a town-wide council to plan the relationships and profit/resource allocations. Our guide was very well informed and explained it all to us as best he could. Most of the locals work with the cheese coop, which is much larger than any of the others, but thanks to their success, they’ve been able to reinvest in starting many of the other coops, and help them survive the start-up periods. Another larger and more successful (in market terms) coop was the chocolate factory, and again there was a funny Swiss connection. When they started the chocolate factory they got some international money and investment from a big Italian chocolate company, who in exchange got a long-term contract for raw chocolate paste. That turned out to be a pretty unequal deal for the locals so when some Swiss visitors saw what was happening, they offered to help. They had worked in chocolate production Switzerland and were able to show the Salinas coop how to take their raw materials and produce very high quality, fancy chocolates. We bought a bunch, including some filled with Pajaro Azul, dark chocolate candy bars with rock salt, and more.

The Chocolate Factory sits at the lower edge of the town. At far right in the distance is a new facility under construction for expanded cheese production.

Sweets and chocolates, the coop sign.

Our guide took us around the town, dropping in on a half dozen of the local cooperatives.

Getting the lowdown on Salinas as a Ecuadorian model of alternative development. Saltworks and chocolate factory in background.

There's even a small soccer ball factory, selling their balls all over Ecuador and Peru.

It was well ventilated since they worked with toxic glues in making the balls... just outside on the balcony a dozen guinea pigs were kept, a common food ("cuy") in the Andes.

The sausage coop.

Drying salamis in the basement, while upstairs everything was gleaming stainless steel, super clean.

Mushroom coop: wild porcini and other types are gathered by locals of all ages and brought to this facility where dried mushrooms are prepared for domestic and international markets.

First the fresh mushrooms are hand processed. Inside giant dryers are used to process the mushrooms before packaging.

Most of the coops had big posters displayed prominently showing the structure of the operation. This shows another intervention by Swiss technology which also helped gain organic certification in 2002.

They spent $150,000 bringing old textile machines from Canada and the northeast of the U.S. to Ecuador where it's all still working.

The textile coop, which produces alpaca yarns, finished garments, blankets, and rugs.

Adri takes a dive into raw alpaca wool, super soft!

Upstairs in the textile mill (an impressively large cement structure itself) we came upon the oldest equipment used there, including this old loom which came from Lowell, Massachusetts where it was built in 1915!

Imagine a machine made within three years of the famous Bread and Roses strike a few miles away in Lawrence, Mass., still churning along a century later in a town of self-managed coops in the Ecuadorian Andes! Strange loops of history, indeed!

The white hillside behind these bucolic cows is the old saltworks, now run cooperatively.

The weather just got nicer and nicer during our tour.

We got a rundown on how the saltworks used to work, with individuals jealously guarding their little areas, carefully washing water through and then getting the salt from slow evaporation.

Of course we wanted to know about problems, what in this bucolic scene wasn’t really working, and why? Our guide admitted they had a big problem with water pollution. The textile mill in particular was pretty bad in terms of dirty effluent, but a number of local enterprises were contributing to the problem too. So they were hoping for another international grant to build a proper water treatment facility to clean the waste stream before it entered the rushing streams passing through the town. One actually comes all the way from the stunning Chimborazo volcano, visible from nearby hilltops. Salinas definitely has a much higher ecological awareness than a lot of places I’ve visited. We were pleasantly surprised to run into these recycling installations around town:

Not quite curbside pickup, but separation of waste materials seemed well integrated into the daily life of Salinas.

Our tour ended in the main plaza where we found some of the local youth we’d met the day before. They’d been selling chocolates to raise money for a new cultural center they were determined to build in Salinas. Father Antonio Polo was an inspiration for them too, though part of their mission was to shake up the staid, predictable lives they were leading in Salinas. They wanted a place for youth to make music, video, photography, and other arts, and to interact more with cultural impulses from other parts of the world. They were very smart, well informed, globally conscious, and clear that they had something special already in Salinas that they wanted to make deeper and better.

Taking notes on plans for a cultural center in Salinas...

Not surprisingly, they're a band too! and knew just how to strike a pose for their album cover!

Father Polo is still around, about 85 years old, but unfortunately he wasn’t in town the day we were there, so we didn’t get a chance to meet him. Hopefully we’ll go back and he’ll still be there, and the thriving scene in Salinas will only be all the better for the passage of time. We loved it!

Intrepid reporter Adriana gets the scoop from a couple of young horsemen!

Part 1: intro to TED, my speech at the conference
Part 2: Highlights of other TEDx Amazonia Talks, especially from Amazonians
Part 3: Critical look at the Entrepreneurially Minded TED speakers

Strange to be at a conference on the topic of “quality of life for all species” and have all the water available to 400 people delivered by way of tiny plastic bottles and cups.

I was so annoyed that I improvised an opening lament/complaint about it when I gave my Talk in the first of six blocs over two days. The audience cheered in support.

It’s quite difficult to summarize the just-completed TEDx Amazonia. Brazilian organizers (mostly from Sao Paulo themselves) staged the event Nov. 6-7 at the Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel which sits about 45 minutes up the Rio Negro River from Manaus in the heart of the forest (the enormous expense of flying in all the speakers and fancy hi-tech equipment was covered by corporate sponsors Santander Bank and a variety of Brazilian media and marketing companies). Normally it’s a floating hotel that can be reached directly by river ferries of all types. Here’s a photo of the place when the waters are running high (this was also taken before the conference center and dining hall we used were added).

Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel prior to some of its recent additions, and long before the drought left it aground in the forest.

But we had quite a different experience, as detailed in my previous post. We were on what felt like an ocean liner that had run aground in a lost corner of the jungle, and was slowly disappearing into the sun-baked mud as the river evaporated around it. By the time we left the rains had started again, but it wasn’t clear how long it would before this historic drought would end.

So having a gathering of 50 speakers and 250 hand-picked audience members in the heart of the jungle to address the official theme of “Quality of Life for All Species” took on a different hue once we were here, facing the impressive and unanticipated (for me at least) drought. My first stab at dividing up the presenters into thematic clusters or types produced this list: artists (including musicians and dancers), game makers, scientists (biologists, a chemist, a couple of permaculturists), residents of the Amazon involved in local business and ecological activism, and economists (which for lack of a better place, I’d put myself too), and some straight-up business people representing their companies. At least 60% of the speakers were Brazilian, but we were also from the U.S., Finland, Peru, Mexico, England, Ecuador, Colombia, and the audience made it broader still.

I should pause because it’s important to understand how we all became quite chummy and actually gained real affection for each other. We were hanging out with each other very intensely for three or four days. We were living a very privileged experience. We’d been flown across the planet to be here, we’d been met at the airport like corporate executives or rock stars and whisked to a fine modern hotel, where drinks and food were provided. Then we were taken by boat to the surreal luxury of the Amazon Jungle Palace Hotel, and each given a private room and treated like stars. We met each other in this euphoria of attention and wealth and very few speakers (myself included) can resist the temptation to feel like you’re one of the cool ones, that somehow you have earned this experience, and that your presentation along with the others is actually quite important. Why would they have spent so much money to have us there if it weren’t? An air of self-flattery inevitably clouded our judgment, and the wildly enthusiastic reception—including many standing ovations by the audience—confirmed this. While there were more than a dozen brilliant speakers, most of the presentations were not so remarkable that they deserved the adulation they received, in my (not so humble) opinion.

This atmosphere of self-importance is reinforced by our shared material experience in the lap of luxury, and it combines with a format that squelches public critical engagement. The TED format, with speakers grouped in blocs, each going for a set amount of time, leaves no room for audience Q&A or immediate feedback, and certainly no rebuttals or disagreements from the floor. You are expected to find the speakers you want to go further with during the break times, or as a speaker, you are expected to find your critics over coffee and cakes, or during one of the hurried meals when we all sit together in a huge dining hall. OK, that does happen a bit. But what is lost is any risk for the speakers or the event that actual conflict will erupt. It’s designed out of the experience. Private disagreements among “gentlemen” (whatever their actual gender) can be easily ignored or more likely, never encountered. I think there should be at least 2-3 questions of each speaker while the whole 300+ audience is assembled so a sharp listener can challenge assertions and assumptions that are, or should be, political issues for everyone. (To make time for that, there should be fewer total speakers, too.)

Case in point: one of the lectures somewhat lost in the blur of Saturday afternoon was by Brazilian geneticist Paulo Arruda. I’m sure he’s a good guy. But he was uncritical and utterly lacking in nuance as he gave a speech declaring that genetic science had already solved so many problems and that with further research (he’s one of the three protagonists of the Brazilian Genome Project which has been good for agribusiness in Brazil) there’s nothing that genetic science can’t solve! That’s just patently ridiculous! But there was no way to engage these wild assertions as part of the event. It would have to be in private later.

A funnier example happened later when Dr. Michael Braumgart, co-author of Cradle to Cradle, gave his talk. His slides and original talk had failed to arrive, so he improvised. He went up on stage with one of the audience chairs, our plastic-encased ID badge and the program booklet, and sat there very deadpan, announcing that he can’t sing, dance, or entertain like so many of the others had done. Then he stood up and said we were in deep shit, because we are afraid of shit. (Andres Soares, a Brazilian permaculturist, brought this up at the beginning of his talk on Sunday too, talking about “fecophobia.”) Then he asked who likes to eat organic food? And a bunch of us raised our hands. He was dismayed. “If we romanticize nature, we always feel guilty,” he admonished. He gestured to the fake leather chair, the plasticized badge holders we were all wearing, and the multicolored program guide printed on fresh paper as examples of design catastrophes. He suggested if you want to save the planet and conserve energy, you should always take the elevator because the electricity used in moving a human up was far less than the calories you’d burn if you walked up the stairs. Midway he threw out a random statistic, that 35 million flip-flops are thrown or lost into the world’s oceans every year, along with a half million tons of plastic. This was after Paul Bennett of IDEO had used his client’s success (Havaiana) with the flip-flop design as an example in his Talk titled something like “The River of Design.” Paul was aggravated at that stat and assured me later that it was completely preposterous, but I’d sort of gathered that anyway… 35 million?? That’s an insane number, but of course it’s true that many thousands, along with untold tons of plastic, DO make their way into the ocean every year and contribute to plunging fish and marine life. Braumgart wasn’t afraid to go out on a limb in the Amazon, though given the audience it wasn’t too risky. He urged us to become native to this planet, and wondered why we delegate “nativeness” to aboriginals? “WE are natives to this planet!” the German chemist declared. (There were only a few actual indigenous in the audience, along with a somewhat larger number of local mestizos, with no way to answer this somewhat insulting assertion in the moment.)

Funny misanthropic joke from Braumgart that I hadn’t heard before: “Two planets run into each other. Planet #1 says to the other, ‘you look terrible!’ #2 says, “Yeah, I have homo sapiens.” #1 says, “Oh I had that. Don’t worry, they go away.”

So here is the speech I gave at Tedx Amazonia:

Me on stage, November 6, 2010, at Tedx Amazonia. Photo by Zach Lieberman

I am happy to be in the Amazon to talk about “quality of life for all species.” What a simple and direct concept! And yet, so much of our life activity, our work is dedicated to other purposes, to other goals both abstract and practical, that impede the quality of life for countless species, including humans! To put it bluntly, as a global society we’re doing a ridiculous amount of stupid work.

Most of us think and talk about work in terms of our jobs, the things we do in exchange for money to survive. We are living through one of the greatest speed-ups in human history, which has both lengthened and intensified our working hours. Many people have two or three jobs to make enough money to meet their needs. Meanwhile, the hours of work are ever more intense and closely monitored. Sometimes our home lives and our familes can feel like yet another “job.” Most of us are so busy that we often don’t have time for the most simple human interactions. What does it take now? Four or 5 phone calls, a half dozen emails and twenty text messages, all to find a time three weeks in the future to see a good friend for a half hour over coffee!?! What happened?

This is not an accident. This is the outcome of a social logic over which we exercise no control, and yet our lives are strongly shaped by it. Somehow the system under which we live keeps expanding, keeps using the energy and goodwill we bring to our work lives, to make a world quite different than any of would choose freely. How is it that so many of us start to work with the best of intentions, and yet find ourselves contributing to a world that is brutalizing so many? How is it that the frantic pursuit of growth and profit has produced a world with billions of people living in abject poverty?

In fact, we are living in the midst of a Planetary Work Machine that has steadily expanded the amount of work humans do along with the consumption of earth’s natural resources over the past 250 years. This Planetary Work Machine is not improving the quality of life for all species, but instead is a machine that is out of control, and increasingly, threatens the survival of life itself.

In spite of how everyone is working all the time, where I live there is no working class. At least no one thinks there is! Instead, nearly everyone thinks of themselves as being in the American Middle Class. If you’re not so poor that you’re pushing a shopping cart down the street looking for discarded aluminum cans and bottles, or so rich that you’re riding in private jet to your next golf course, you’re considered Middle Class. This is important because as the self-identity of “middle class” fully took over, people’s sense of where politics happens shifted too. Instead of organizing at work, and challenging the structure and purpose of what we do all day, we are expected to act politically when we’re finished with work, mostly when we’re shopping.

So in the U.S. most political campaigns (outside of elections) are designed to make you feel guilty or proud about buying one product or another. Don’t eat meat! Don’t buy sweatshop garments or unfairly traded coffee! Do buy local organic vegetables! Do support small businesses in your neighborhood. And so on. But this is the perfect capitalist paradigm. You are an isolated consumer who votes with your money. At no point should you imagine you have the right to decide what work is worth doing, nor how it should be organized. And it’s no concern of the employees at a company how resources are used, what poisons are dumped in waterways on the other side of the planet, or how much carbon dioxide is produced by the corporation’s normal business practices.

Let’s face it. There’s a great deal of work to do to make an ecologically sane, healthy and comfortable life for everyone. But mostly we’re not doing that work. Instead we’re working at jobs and in industries that are perpetuating the destruction of habitats, species, and human communities, while plundering natural resources and threatening the stability of planetary ecology.

As individuals we have no easy way to address this drama. Growing up, I lived in San Francisco where there was a big downtown financial district and I was soon employed temporarily at Bank of America. I didn’t expect to stay there long and as it turns out, neither did most of my co-workers. When I looked around I saw people who looked a lot like me. We were young, college educated, smart, talented, and we were doing simple, repetitive jobs in the banking bureaucracy. When I asked my coworkers about themselves, nearly everyone would say they were just at the bank for a few months to make enough money to go on with their “real lives.” We weren’t bankworkers! As someone cleverly put it, “What you see me doing, isn’t what I do!” We were photographers, dancers, historians, philosophers, political activists, musicians, and many others things, but no one would pay us money to pursue those creative choices.

We were already living the typical modern experience of a bifurcated life. We do one thing for money, something we don’t really care about and have little respect for. And we do something else entirely that emerges from our creative capacities, the fullest sense of our humanity and our possibilities. The need to engage in useful work instead of useless toil is growing.

In other words, when we’re not at our job, we’re often working quite hard on projects and activities of our own choice, and without money as the purpose. Across the planet people are taking their time and their technological know-how OUT of the market, out of the business world, and in small invisible ways, are making life better right now—but also setting the foundation, technically AND socially, for a genuine movement of liberation from market life. I call these people Nowtopians!

These initiatives are a mostly invisible challenge to the Planetary Work Machine. Acting locally in the face of unfolding global catastrophes, friends and neighbors are beginning to redesign many of the crucial technological foundations of modern life. These redesigns are being worked out through garage and backyard Research & Development programs among friends, using the detritus of modern life. Our contemporary Commons takes the shape of discarded bicycles and leftover deep fryer vegetable oil, of vacant lots and open bandwidth. Ecological restoration work, usually done by volunteers, is reviving shorelines, riversides, urban creeks, and expanding remnant habitats on hills and in canyons, on behalf of thousands of plants, bugs, birds, and animals. Festivals, free services, restored natural areas, and anti-commodities are imaginative products of an anti-economy, provisionally under construction by freely cooperative and inventive people. They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from government or business, but are getting on with building the new world in the shell of the old.

Many people are now engaged in new ways of working, precisely to gain some control over the purpose and structure of their own activities in ways that wage-labor prevents, and a politics of consumption ignores. Most of these activities get the acronym in English DIY, or do-it-yourself (better to say DIT, or do-it-together!). Sometimes these DIY efforts are reclaiming ancient practices that have been lost to us in the modern urban environment, like growing our own food, while other times they involve a prefigurative reinhabitation of the urban environment, as in Critical Mass bike rides, or in the efforts to restore native habitats for other species, or in aquifer and water management projects.

In the community gardening movement, for example, the first impulse is often to grow some tomatoes or zucchini for oneself. It goes much further though. By putting your hands into the soil in your own city, learning about the cycles of weather and seasons, where the water comes from, what grows well and what doesn’t in that particular soil, a whole ecological sensibility is born. Moreover, it’s not an isolated activity. You meet your fellow gardeners, you learn the lessons they’ve already digested. A social exchange takes place outside of the market, where surplus produce and technical and ecological knowledge are all freely shared.

In San Francisco other efforts are also underway to restore habitat for native plants, butterflies, and birds, and some people are agitating to “daylight” creeks that have been long buried underground. On one San Francisco shoreline, restoration efforts have led to the sighting of over 80 bird species as well as seals, sea lions, and bay porpoises! We’re increasingly aware of nature in the city, and that the city IS in nature, and are working to integrate urban life with the natural systems on which it depends.

An ecological transportation alternative emerged in the new bicycling culture that has exploded across the world’s cities, often beginning with Critical Mass rides. Critical Mass is an “organized coincidence” in which dozens or thousands of cyclists meet and “ride home together” in large enough groups to displace cars. In this new public space, transforming the urban environment while rolling through it, people meet and new initiatives are hatched. Learning to rely on self-propulsion quickly leads to a simple desire to fix one’s own flat tire, or adjust one’s own brakes. From that impulse is born the DIY bike shop (in Italy they call them Ciclofficine or cycle garages). In these bike shops though, something rather different takes shape. Starting with discarded and broken bicycles and parts, a new social space emerges too. If someone like me goes to one of these shops with my broken bike, asking them to fix it for me, they look at me and just say “no, we don’t fix bikes here. But we will show YOU how to fix YOUR OWN bike!” Instead of purchasing a service, I’m being given new skills and new relationships, the kind of meaningful and practical connections that have been lost to us during the speed-up and social fragmentation that have accompanied globalization.

We want to be more self-sufficient, more locally resilient, more artistic and creative, and less dependent on large complex systems. We want to shape science democratically, and embed technologies in an ecological sanity that is often opposed by business and profitability. We want to reinvent urban life based on ecologically sound natural systems. A movement of exodus from destructive, stupid work is well underway, though still small compared to the dominance of the Planetary Work Machine. Global climate change, war, crashing biodiversity, waste and industrial pollution, mass starvation, and epidemic disease are just the top of a long list of pressing reasons to radically change how we live on earth. We work together but don’t often decide about it together. Work is shaped and driven by invisible hands and uncontrollable forces when it should be directed by us. Getting from the disparate experiments in work and technology, and early stages of new social communities that we see in these Nowtopian initiatives, to the big political challenges ahead, is an open and unknowable process of politics-to-come.

But in that effort lays the hope of a true quality of life for all species. Our shared fate is bound up in our ability to consciously redirect our collaborative energies to a world of our own design. Life could be far more wonderful than it is now. Shouldn’t that be the work we do everyday?

After my whirlwind tour of Italy (with a day in Switzerland too), I made it back to Rome on Friday, Oct. 8, in time to help Rossella Ottaviani (aka Santa Graziella) celebrate her birthday. Her husband Livio, another stalwart of the local cycling and Nowtopian scene, met me at the Termini station and after an interminable walk across a seemingly endless expanse we made it to a far corner where we took a tram loaded to the gills in the hot Roman evening. We disembarked in their neighborhood, which looks mostly like this:

Typical apartments in the Rome neighborhood where I stayed, not far from the ExSNIA social center and ciclofficine.

After an hour of decompression it was time to head to the bar for the birthday. There were dozens of people spilling onto the sidewalks, and of course, there is no problem with drinking in public there. Free wine was flowing and everyone was getting pretty drunk. Rossella and a guy who seemed to be the folk music specialist of Rome broke out guitars and started singing classic songs, and while I couldn’t understand much of the lyrics (well, none really!), I did enjoy immensely the energy and humor they brought to their impromptu performance.

Rosella and friend sing classic Italian folk songs...

I spoke with a lot of friends, mostly people I’d met when I was there in 2008, and had a great evening. The next morning we rose earlier than anyone wanted to, headed a few blocks over to the ExSnia ciclofficine (an abandoned factory, social center squat, with a DIY bikeshop in it that I visited before and is still going strong).

The garden at exSnia...

Gathering in front of exSnia, most of us pretty hung over from Rossella's birthday the night before... That's her in the foreground in orange speaking with Carlo, who later moderated my Nowtopia Talk in Zagarolo.

By 11 we were riding about two dozen strong towards Zagarolo and the Good Bike Festival, one of my co-sponsors for this lovely Italian trip. It’s about 30 kilometers east-southeast of the city, and getting there was mostly on narrow two lane roads that were clogged with cars as often as not. A lot of angry honking and swerving accompanied us the whole way, but the locals were used to it and I too was soon oblivious to the incessant bad vibes.

A consultative pause on the road to Zagarolo.

I had a great ride on a fancy Italian racing bike (thanks Nunzio!) and got to catch up a bit with Ilaria en Bici, my pal from 2008, a grad student in urban planning and economics. Later I turned to a greeting and met another Ilaria, this one a cognitive neuroscientist, cyclist, squatter, and a graduate of Boston University where she spent a couple of years doing post-doc work. We had a great time for more than an hour riding along talking about her work, my book, the squatting and housing activist scene in the U.S. (she knew way more than I did actually), the gay marriage story in California, and whatever else occurred to us. It was very fun to have such a stimulating conversationalist to ride with for this journey. We finally arrived at Zagarolo and had to climb the hill into the very old historic center.

Me and Ilaria the cognitive neuroscientist after arriving in Zagarolo.

This is the piazza where we first stopped for pizza and champagne on arrival.

Ilaria en Bici, Luciano, and me, later in the weekend.

A typical small residential piazza in the historic center of Zagarolo.

Tiny alleys called vicolos are off the main piazzas and pedestrian streets in the center.

Back in the car zone, people still walk down the middle of the street.

My luggage preceded me to Zagarolo and I found it at the Wiki Hostel where the band Tetes de Bois, my hosts, booked me for the weekend. What a nice surprise that was! Turns out it’s an experiment of a bunch of young radicals from the social center in Milan called Cantiere. They took over this abandoned mental clinic on the outskirts of the historic center and fixed it all up and now it’s a very comfy and beautiful hostel. Ulia and the others working there treated me like royalty and I really enjoyed hanging out with them and learning about their project.

Bamboo line the entry to Wiki Hostel.

Wiki Hostel grounds from the roof.

I was invited to share the staff lunch, along with Claudia and Giulia (at right) who first fed me pasta before the rest of the meal arrived.

Back into town on one of the hostel’s bikes, I wandered around prior to my own appearance at 9:30 that night, taking in the small piazzas with discussions and performances.

Piazza San Pietro where I did my bicycling talk a few hours later.

I did my Nowtopia talk on Sunday night in this small piazza.

Clown act audience in the main piazza.

Carlo cruises through on a tallbike while kids race around the piazza.

My translator for the two appearances in Zagarolo was Silvia Baraldini, a woman who sounds like she’s from New York when she speaks English, and turns out to be a famous radical who spent 19 years in federal prison in the U.S. She was convicted of being an accessory to the jailbreak of Assata Shakur in 1982, who is still living in Cuban exile at this time. Here’s a trailer from a documentary about her:

I got her to talk about it a little bit but not much. She did tell me that she is good friends with Rita “Bo” Brown, with whom she was in jail for a number of years, and by coincidence Bo was just speaking at CounterPULSE in our first Talk of the season on Incarcerated Women… small world!

from right: Andrea Satta of Tetes de Bois, Silvia Baraldini, myself, and a guitarist whose name I don't know.

Me and Silvia Baraldini.

When we went out for a glass of wine after our bicycle/Critical Mass talk, she really wanted to talk about sports, especially NBA basketball and NFL football! Turns out she survived all those years in jail, including a couple of years in an unimaginable underground solitary confinement in Lexington, KY, by doing 3-4 hours of sports a day, and avidly watching all the games she could. Luckily I’m a bit of a sports nut so I could roll with that, but it was a funny surprise. Silvia is great. She’s quite relaxed and funny, and it was great to meet her.

Ciclofficine crew (Mark, Carlo, Cristian, Livio) at their mini-repair shop in the piazza during the Good Bike Festival in Zagarolo.

On Sunday, it was the day of Removing Training Wheels for the children of Zagarolo. Dozens of them crowded the piazza where the Romans had their crazy cycles and mini-repair zone. It was a beautiful site and you had to wonder what the long-term impact of the weekend’s Good Bike Festival would be on them. Maybe it started a bunch on a life of bicycle mayhem!?!

Ilaria with one of her five successes, new bicyclists!

Ilaria was particularly good at teaching kids to ride without training wheels, getting five different kids rolling on their own in the course of a few hours.

A father teaches his daughter to ride without training wheels.

Giulia watches while some kids go to work on a bike.

Later as a kind of reward for all the kids there was a ride down the main street from piazza to piazza that turned into a Pamplona-like running of the bulls where the kids on bikes played the bulls! They were led by a Giro d’Italia racer whose name I never heard.

Kids get to race with a real life racer!

I had a great time at the festival. I really enjoyed how they did my speaking events. In both cases I didn’t have to present anything like a lecture, but instead, they posed questions to me. The first night Andrea Satta had some questions ready on bicycling, Critical Mass, etc., and the second night Carlo posed questions after the guy who was “my voice” on the Tetes de Bois CD “Good Bike” read some excerpts from the Italian edition of Nowtopia (Now Utopia in the Italian edition). He has a great voice so it was fun to hear him read and then all I had to do was roll with the questions… a very nice way to do an author event, much better in some respects than the occasionally tedious lecture style. It was a particularly nice way to end the trip and the dozen public talks I gave while in Italy.

Thanks to everyone who hosted me and made it such a great trip! Ciao tutti! I hope you’ll all come and visit San Francisco…

At the Move-up Ciclofficine table in town, staffed by the same folks running the Wiki Hostel with whom I'd lunch a couple of hours earlier.

I spent the past four days with Fernanda and Mario in their beautiful house in the countryside of Marche, nearest the tiny village of MonSamPolo, not far from the coastal city of San Benedetto del Tronti. They are incredibly generous hosts, in addition to being very enthusiastic conversationalists, avid Nowtopians, and protagonists of the “Happy Degrowth” movement here. After all the busy days prior to this stop, it felt like a writers’ retreat, or an oasis, a place of true rest and hospitality (not to say everyone prior to this wasn’t also wonderfully hospitable, but I had to keep moving the whole time, so I was growing more and more tired as the days went by).

Monsampolo del Tronti, seen from the farm where I was staying.

The countryside around there mostly like looks like this, vineyards, olive groves, and more.

I had met Fernanda via Skype a year ago when they interviewed me online, and I’d seen photos of Mario. Also meeting me at the station was Paolo M., whom I’d met briefly in Siena. He loaned me his bike and we took a great ride on Wednesday, but I’ll get to that in a bit. Sometimes you meet people with whom you share an automatic affinity, and for me and Mario and Fernanda it is like that. We just enjoyed each other’s company enormously!

Me and Fernanda and Mario on the last day of my visit, in a wild glacial valley in the Appenine mountains.

Mario, posing as a proper farmer with his elegant pear, though he is actually quite an avid pear poacher from any roadside orchard he comes upon!

Fernanda is an incredible live-wire, always laughing and telling stories or bringing an unyielding earnestness to her thoughts and inquiries. Rather tall, she doesn’t sit still for long, with an ebullience that is totally endearing. She’s originally Portuguese, and spent her childhood in Mozambique where her father lived for 50 years before choosing Portuguese citizenship when the revolution decolonized the country. She has a lot of experience in EU-funded projects, lived in Belgium for some years, and has a son in Lisbon. Mario has a charming daughter, Francesca (or Kika as she’s known) by another woman who lives nearby, and  he’s a dentist when he’s not tending his horse, his garden, shooting video, working on his amazing home, or agitating with friends against the privatization of water in Italy, for a degrowth agenda, etc. Unlike Francesca he’s not quite so frenzied, always relaxed, curious, with a huge heart and a sweet warmth. He and Fernanda also maintain a close relationship with a community in Guinea-Bissau whom they visit every year, and will be helping at the Slow Food Terra Madre Congress later this month in Turin.

The capital of this region is Ascoli Piceno, which apparently was once considered as a candidate to be what became Rome, but lost out and remained a fairly small city. It’s on the Via Salaria, or “Salt Way,” the road by which salt was delivered from the Adriatic Sea to Rome. Fernanda and Mario live on a small hill beneath the aforementioned village, about 20 minutes by car from Ascoli Piceno.

The first piazza after entering the town from the underground parking garage.

Near the 2000-year-old Roman bridge, some buildings that are nearly that old!

A government building on the piazza del popolo.

Interior courtyard of same building.

We went to see the town on the first morning as the rain hit, following me down from the northern regions where it pelted the trains I rode all day on Monday. Indicative of the kind of charming good will Fernanda is able to manufacture by dint of personality, we were leaving the parking garage without umbrellas in a downpour, and she thought, “why not ask the attendants if they can lend us an umbrella for a couple of hours?” Mario and I both thought it unlikely and perhaps not worth the effort, but she was not to be denied. And lo and behold, the guys in the booth said sure, wait a sec, and went into their storage area where they had a whole box of tiny cheapo folding umbrellas left over from some convention or another. They gladly gave us two of them and off we went laughing, tickled by the combination of serendipity and openness that had solved our problem.  The rains relented pretty quickly but left the piazzas with a mirror-like surface reflecting the ancient stone buildings. We wandered among the old narrow alleys and eventually made our way to the 2000-year-old Roman bridge, still in use, but we skirted it and stayed on the walls above.

The rain stops in the Piazza del Popolo.

Piazza del Popolo from opposite direction.

Roman bridge in Ascoli Piceno.

Mario and Fernanda enjoying the view above the bridge.

And my turn again for a photo...

These men were sitting out of the rain under an old arch, and above them was the original place for locals to check the size that bricks that they were buying in the nearby market were of proper standard size.

After our tour of the town it was time to head to the Aurora cooperative winery for lunch. It’s actually an anarchist community though I didn’t get too far into politics with anyone while we were there. As Fernanda lamented later, it was a case where we should’ve been more deliberate about focusing a conversation, but since we didn’t, everyone just stuck to their familiar topics and friends in smaller clusters and there was never a shared discussion around the big table. We did have a lot of great food and some of their really spectacular wines. They make several reds and a white that I liked a lot too from the Pecorino grapes.

Grapes!

Views from Aurora were wild with the passing storm.

These are their experimental plantings of different varietals to see what else they might grow on their farm.

Fernanda gets an explanation from one of the collective members in the wine cellar.

The gang at Aurora after lunch.

On the way home we cruised through the countryside near their home, seeing a half dozen sprawling installations of solar photovoltaics, which Mario explained was a classic greenwashing disaster in the making. Covering excellent south-facing slopes, and in one case buried in a shaded canyon, these installations are being driven by speculators who are cashing in on some combination of European subsidies for solar, and Italian incentives to make farms net energy producers. The panels being installed are very obsolete though, and while they might produce some electricity, they are far from state of the art. And the solar electricity is being produced at the expense of permanently wrecking some of the world’s finest agricultural lands. Massive application of herbicides turns the land beneath the solar panels into a desert, while the cement fittings and long-term neglect of the soil will be hard to remedy later. The speculators try to sell their schemes to elderly farmers, insisting that they needn’t worry about the long-term effects on the land since “they won’t be around to see it anyway.” Supposedly the European law that requires the price of disposal to be included in the original purchase price of a commodity will assure the removal of the panels when they’ve reached their lifespan.

These are popping up all over the area.

Construction sites for new solar installations were all over the place.

We hit a cheese farmer for some fresh ricotta and I snagged a fresh dry pecorino wheel too.

Cheese...

Where there aren't vineyards there are usually olives!

Later that night a big feast was prepared for twenty, all coming to have a friendly discussion about Nowtopia and Descrescita Felice. Roberto Mancini is a local intellectual who Mario was very excited to have me dialogue with, but since his mother had just gone into the hospital the day before, he couldn’t stay too long. He did offer what I thought were good comments on my brief summary of the Nowtopian thesis (especially considering that he hadn’t read it yet), emphasizing the need to reinvent a new kind of politics, autonomous and independent from the moribund political parties and forms we’re mostly still stuck with. A few questions and thoughts came from various folks around the table, but eventually it came to two locals, a woman named Olympia (last name I didn’t get) and Massimo Rossi, both folks who had been in the local government for a number of years, and had brought the consultative budget process from Brazil where they picked it up in 2001 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. They both challenged me on the question of politics, whether or not policies can be enacted at the local governmental level to help promote some of the transformations Nowtopia is advocating for. Massimo in particular spoke at some length about the necessity of organizing, of creating a political movement to advance beyond sporadic, individualistic, and isolated projects (and to his credit and my good luck, he’d read the book!).

Massimo Rossi lays out his criticisms while Mario films, and Fernanda translates for me in the back right corner.

I really appreciated that they took the time to seriously challenge me, and did my best to offer a nuanced reply. Ultimately, the social subjects who might develop a serious alternative to the current organization of life need time to cohere, to discover each other, to learn to trust one another through practical projects of cooperation. Maybe in Italy there’s more of that kind of “raw material” already on the ground, but I’m not convinced. I think the decomposition of the working class I describe in Nowtopia is very much a part of the story here too, and the precarious workers I’ve met along the way offered a lot of support for that thesis. Moreover, the left as it once was is in a state of precipitous decline, and nothing has yet emerged to take its place. Perhaps the “degrowth” concept has a chance to be a rallying point, a set of ideas that puts quality over quantity, a pleasurable life over a life dedicated to some future and ever receding satisfication. More importantly “degrowth” starts us thinking about the transition process towards using less energy and water, producing less waste and stopping the profligate misuse of resources.

The next day was a chance to sleep late and hang around until about 3 pm when Paolo came, along with a local journalist and former bike racer, Davida, to take a bike ride along the Adriatic coast. Paolo drove me down to the shore at San Benedetto del Tronti, and we rode north along the coast for about 10 kilometers or a bit more, before turning back.

Paolo and Davida on the coastal bike way on the Adriatic sea near San Benedetto del Tronti.

Whoever designed the bike lanes here had some odd ideas, and they get used in haphazard ways as a result.

Cruising the Adriatic coast...

Paolo and Davida chatting along the way.

We returned to the center of San Benedetto to find a small group of cyclists waiting for us to start a mini-Critical Mass ride through town. We soon found ourselves in a group of about 15, cruising slowly through the town to the great annoyance of motor traffic who whenever they could zoomed past us with horns blaring.

The inaugural "mass" in San Benedetto...

We ended at a small vegetarian organic restaurant where after another nice dinner, a meeting was held of the local committee involved in a national campaign to stop the privatization of public water supplies.  Massimo Rossi was here too, and I could see he is a skilled political mover and shaker, dominating the meeting with his command of facts, laws, and political strategies. But a good group of about 15, equally divided among men and women, took part, and after a couple of hours of discussion we headed home. I think it’s pretty unusual to have a national referendum on much of anything in Italy, let alone the plans to privatize water. So they got 1.3 million signatures to put it on the ballot and are now gearing up for an election, I think next June.

The water committee meets.

Thursday was another chance to sleep late and enjoy the slower pace of rural life. We hung around until mid-afternoon when we headed north to a public trade show, mostly focused on print advertising, but ostensibly about other things too. Mario and Fernando’s friend and colleague Maurizio Pallante, founder of Descrescita Felice with them and some others, and author of a half dozen books on degrowth and the politics of conservation, was speaking, and afterwards he was going to come home with us and give he and I a chance to discuss our respective efforts and how they might support each other (or not!). He gave a good talk that reminded me at times of an Amory Lovins presentation (Lovins was a big voice in the 1970s anti-nuke movement who later founded the Rocky Mountain Institute, which is probably best understood as an industrial design consultancy that applies whole systems—almost permacultural—thinking, to factories, machines, transportation, and almost anything you want), and at other times of a GreenFest speech, exhorting folks to reduce their consumption through efficiency. He is a sophisticated advocate though, and he talked about how a lot of jobs would be created by a degrowth agenda, and that relying on GNP was a misguided way of measuring social well-being. Then he emphasized that his agenda is not focused on creating jobs but on changing work itself.

Ding! The connection with Nowtopia was right there.

He also made an important distinction between social goods and merchandise (commodities for sale). A lot of what we depend on are social goods (water, shelter, food, cooperation, etc.) and are only sometimes turned into merchandise. He used the distinction to emphasize a need to reduce our relationship to merchandise and to increase our ability to enjoy social goods outside of the commodity system. I was with him on this.

But when it was over, and we were driving home, I started discussing with him what I felt was a missing piece. Who are the social subjects in this transitional process? It’s not enough to invoke rationality and efficiency. Arguments for more efficient use of resources have been around for a long time and still we go on producing an eco-cidal world. Somehow the mechanism of coercion, and the subjective revolt that might undo its power, is missing from the Descrescita Felice argument. Granted, the addition of Felice, or Happiness, to their organizational name, is a good step, emphasizing as it does pleasure, a good life, satisfaction independent of transactions. But the overwhelming nature of his presentation seemed to hinge on the kind of rational arguments that we already know don’t meaningfully erode the system that keeps us running in place while destroying the planet.

We found a great deal of common ground and I was very glad to have the chance to hear him speak, and discuss his thoughts. I hope we can continue the exchange over the years to come.

At the printing show where we met Pallante, there was a beautiful exhibit of Iranian graphic arts. Here are two of them.

Happy Degrowth!

The last day we headed across the Appenine Mountains to Perugia where a technology fair was behing held. We took a long somewhat leisurely ride to get there, including stopping off in the national park of Mt. Sibillini and in the glacial valley where Castellucio sits, far from the country’s population centers. We stopped of in Norcia too, a famous town in the heart of Italy, where Mario crazily bought me a jar of black truffles! Yum!

Autumn starts to show as we climb into Mt. Sibillini National Park.

Above the clouds in the Appenine Mountains.

After descending from the mountains we passed Trevi and other fantastic towns perched on the hills of Umbria.

In Perugia, it was quickly apparent to us that the technology conference we came for wasn’t super interesting. A local politician blathered from the stage inside an ancient stone building.

The tech conference was in here.

Gorgeous old room, tired old words...

Another civilized central city without cars, this in Perugia.

One of the main plazas in Perugia.

Hmmm.... what's going on with this sculpture?

We decided to spend our last hours together walking around in old Perugia, seeking a view, and finding a good lunch.

One view from Perugia's city wall.

Annoyingly cars are still allowed inside some areas of the old town.

Incredible stonework in this pre-Roman Etruscan arch.

Our most perfect lunch spot!

We went down an alley at Fernanda’s suggestion and came upon a gorgeous garden restaurant but it was closed. As we returned to the main street, I looked back at them and noticed that the storefront, an unassuming place that looked like a small nondescript restaurant or bar, had the same sign on it, and Fernanda immediately struck up a conversation with the young men at the doorway. One was the proprietor and the other a musician who would be playing later that night. The proprietor gladly opened the garden for us, and spent some time showing us how it’s an urban garden, full of pepperoncini, bell peppers, tomatoes, a great variety of fresh spices, and some fruit too. Wow! It was so beautiful, the sun shining, sitting in the garden under ancient medieval walls… the place is apparently owned by the local church and its priest encouraged its use as a restaurant. Lucky us!…

The hidden garden in the center of the old historic town.

The proprietor showing us flyers from some of the cultural events they hold in their place.

We finished our time together sitting and talking, imagining plans for future rendezvous perhaps in other countries altogether! We’ll see. For sure, we’ll meet again!

A final photo before leaving Perugia.

A curious stencil in the historic center: Even today I still can't fly!

After Milan, I headed north across the border into Switzerland where I had an event at the venerable social center Il Molino. My good friend Susanne Zago facilitated my visit and we had a great time.

Interesting bike sculpture made of old railroad parts, just above Lugano at the train station.

She met me at the station and after stashing the luggage in the still easily available lockers (funny how in Europe all this hubbub about terrorism hasn’t led to having to take your shoes off when boarding a plane, hasn’t closed public bathrooms in train stations, hasn’t led to the removal of storage lockers on the grounds they might be a place to stash a bomb… the “police state theater” we live with routinely in the U.S. is really an insult to our intelligence), we headed off on a short bus ride to the top of a nearby hill overlooking Lugano.

I was impressed by the brilliant design of this public toilet!

Unfortunately, the amazing views of the lake and the surroundings were obscured by a dense white fog that hung over everything during my entire visit. Luckily I’ve seen these views before, at least in part, during past trips through this area on the train. The lakes are absolutely stunning. It’s a must-see if you haven’t been to this part of the world. Alpine glaciers carved out these magnificent lakes eons ago. They are amazing! Especially with all the gorgeous stone towns along the lakeside. Lugano itself has an epic lakeshore promenade, rather touristic, but still stunning.

Susanne has explored these walks in much better weather before, and showed me photos of what I should be able to see. Here's one on her phone, with the same view behind... made eerie by the appearance of Hugh's drawing from my t-shirt in the reflection....

Susanne and me at the edge of a small lake.

So we spent the day climbing through adjacent villages, their old stone alleys and stairways always leading to yet another charming, beautiful view. There are yellow directional signs all over Switzerland that make it possible for a hiker to walk anywhere in the country and never be in doubt about which direction you’re walking in…

Our first stop was the edge of this church in Breganzona, where the view was mostly obscured, but the church itself was still quite beautiful.

An old collection of wine-making equipment, once shared cooperatively by all the local farmers of this village.

The handy yellow directional signs that are on all walking paths throughout Switzerland.

Gray skies make for brilliant greens!

At one point we came upon this strangely alien pod of garbage sorting bins.

Well organized recycling leads to... incineration?

Apparently the local government is very strict with its citizens on the sorting of refuse, and these bins lead to containers below ground that are later picked up by trucks and taken to… wait for it… an incinerator! In nearby Chiubiasco, a massive incinerator was built a few years ago. All the local garbage goes there, and according to our host Maurizio (who happens to be the chief custodian at City Hall in Lugano, and an old hardcore punk rocker from the glorious period of 1979-83), the local “sanitation engineers” scornfully admit that all the carefully sorted refuse is now regrouped into an endless stream of fuel for the incinerator. The facility is so huge that they are actually buying trash from other towns in Switzerland to feed its gaping maw! I recently did an interview with Ruth Gravanis who tells the amazing story of how San Francisco got curbside recycling as a result of a citizens revolt in nearby Brisbane that defeated plans for a similar incinerator on the City’s southern border.

We finished our tourism late in the afternoon and went to meet our hosts. Susanne told me Maurizio was an old punk rock friend and he lived adjacent to the social center where we had our event scheduled. I imagined it would be a slovenly, unkempt place, probably dishes piled in the sink, walls painted black and red, lots of dust bunnies and who knows what kind of bathroom… well, it was a gorgeous Swiss apartment, hardwood floors, lovely furniture and library, all the amenities and in great shape. What was I thinking? This is Switzerland! The Social Center Il Molino is a long-running place, over 15 years in its third location (and somehow Maurizio always ends up living near it, though he’s not much involved with it).

Il Molino's welcome mural.

We met Davida when we got there, who works in a hospital for his day job and is one of about 30 people who keep it going, running it as volunteers on a consensus basis. Very impressive! It was more of the aesthetic I expected, in an abandoned factory, lots of graffiti, dark walls, old recycled couches, etc. Quite comfy really. Multiple rooms in the place capable of handling a Talk like mine (for about 30 people, though could’ve fit about 50 in the upstairs room) with projection and amplification, another hall for music shows where the night before had been a big reggae benefit with 700 attendees, and a bar/cafe, another odd room full of theater chairs, etc. As usual, I can only wistfully look at these kinds of places and wish we were so lucky in SF. But the local government here gave some kind of tacit support to their occupation of this space, or at least did nothing to discourage it, and after all these years there seems to be a modus vivendi between the radicals and the local establishment.

I share an aperativo with Susanne and her childhood friend Flavia in the Il Molino bar... very civilized!

Inside the upstairs room while we were presenting Nowtopia.

The hard work of simultaneous translation! Thanks Susanne!

Susanne did a great job of translating and we had a good discussion afterwards, getting queried on how immigrants fit the Nowtopian argument, whether Critical Mass had joined with other organizations in SF like squatting groups to push political action, and a lot of other thoughts and comments that I’m no longer remembering. We ended after a few hours and went home for a delicious gnocchi and salad dinner, and the next morning I left on the train for La Marche, MonSanPolo del Tronto to be precise. Now I’m in the Italian countryside!

Here’s a video clip of an old song Susanne sent me after I left. Here’s her description of it:

This version of “Addio Lugano bella” was written by the Italian anarchist Pietro Gori, when he was kicked out by the Ticinesi authorities in the late 1800s. Pietro Gori was part of the generation of Italian political refugees who were ordered to leave Lugano so as to maintain stable the relationship between the swiss state and the emerging italian state. The song is performed by, among others, Giorgio Gaber and Enzo Jannacci, who have come up during the political movements of the 60′s  and 70′s. Enjoy.

The title was given me a few nights ago at the Carroponte Festival by Anita Bacigalupo, who explained it as a metaphor for going to the roots, back to the beginning, stripping away the edifice and assumptions that usually cloud political arguments. We burst into laughter when Chiara Martucci pointed out that it was not really an expression in Italian either! Anita was one of my intrepid companions for the last four days. She joined me for all my four events, sometimes as translator and sometimes as a friend, along with Chiara, who did such a great job of setting up my mini-tour of Milan, and also was a great companion and friend these past days. We will miss each other already! And of course my great friend Giovanni Maruzzelli (who I always stay with in Milan) was also part of the fun, along with his pre-pubescent son Rocco (the next time I see Rocco I’m sure he’ll have a new voice and seem much older than he did now at 12). I was laughing as I walked to the train this morning, remembering how Giovanni stood glowering behind me for five minutes before last night’s public talk. I think he was posing as a bodyguard just in case there were some old-style militants who might want to pick a fight with me? Hard to say. It seemed quite comic, as you can see in this photo.

At the Carroponte Festival during the introduction, Giovanni stands guard! (l to r) Anita, Daniela, me, Giovanni, and Lorenzo)

Chiara as we approach the Carroponte site, a former Pirelli rubber and tire factory.

Anita strikes a pose at the bikesharing station.

The audience at the Carroponte talk.

The evening was hosted by Scighera, a cooperative organization who as anarchists have somehow insinuated themselves into the national ARCI organization, which is rooted in the old Communist Party. Go figure… They are experimenting with a different system of compensation among themselves, paying according to need, though no one was paid more than a middling salary, and as an association, they were all precarious and without contracts or guarantees. The event was held at Carroponte in Sesto San Giovanni, a separate municipality on the northern edge of Milan. The space itself was originally a Pirelli tire factory (Pirelli, another name with roots in the violent rubber trade of the 19th century and the early bicycling boom). It’s now a public space and all summer they have this ongoing Festival, mostly music, but with some speakers, booths, food and booze. Later in the night I was treated to some great Noccino, hazelnut liqueur, and a raspberry one too, Lamponi. It’s the season for fancy liqueurs here, maybe being harvest time?

The eating area outside the tent where we had our presentation.

Intently listening!

Pontificating... as usual!

I was the featured speaker, always an odd sensation even after being billed as something of a star many times on this trip. We did manage to sell some books which made the publishers happy, since they hadn’t moved many up to now. But as usual I’m not really here to sell books, but to be a kind of Johnny Appleseed with the apparently hopeful and inspiring shift in political thinking that Nowtopia carries (at least that’s what I deduce from the many warm and enthusiastic people I meet after most Talks). Last night also had a big stage with a fantastic big band called Nema Problema, doing their own songs as well as a few standards from the vast repertoire of Balkan brass hits. They really rocked the place, and I got some good dancing in, even being invited down close to the stage by a woman who smilingly took my hand and dragged me there. The band had three trumpet players who were incredibly sharp, dressed as Italian “mariachis,” while the other side of the stage had the saxophones and electric guitar and bass and were dressed as the Blues Brothers… and the music was big brassy Balkan dance music. Wildly eclectic, even a touch of post-modern whimsy… Awesome!

Nema Problema, mariachis and blues brothers playing Balkan...

I jettisoned my attempts to do any reading of Nowtopia excerpts after the marathon in Bologna, and that helped, but one of the main things I realized here in Milan is that Italians have much longer attention spans than I’m used to! They don’t mind sitting and listening to someone talk for an hour, even two, without a break. Of course with the translation for every few sentences or after every “paragraph” of speaking, it’s much slower. I’ve had quite a range of translation experiences during these appearances, from amazingly comprehensive and accurate, to heavily augmented with additional opinion and information, to very bad, cursory and inaccurate. It definitely leaves me wanting to master all these other languages I find myself immersed in. Maybe I should just stop blogging and writing for two years and take intensive Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese until I can smoothly speak in each of them and switch seamlessly… is it even possible? I can’t believe it, of course, but some part of me thinks I owe it to myself and my international comrades to do it…

The curious thing about the Carroponte presentation, where about 50 or 60 people were in the audience, and the event two nights earlier at the Italian publisher of Nowtopia, SHAKE Edizioni, is how little discussion or response was forthcoming. Chiara was equally depressed and puzzled by it, as was Giovanni. I admit I didn’t end with a rousing crescendo or exhortation, and that may have been confusing for the audiences… even when there is a semi-clean ending, by the time it’s translated, the emphasis changes and it seems like I ended in mid-thought… oh well.

Gomma of Shake, Matteo Guarnacci, me, and Serena at the SHAKE book party.

The Shake audience, with Giovanni and his son Rocco in foreground.

The Shake bookshop, interestingly located in the middle of the biggest drug dealing buildings in Milan!

After a long pause at the end at Carroponte we did get some questions, one of which came from a woman who started by explaining how a friend of hers had died on Milan’s streets this past June while riding her bicycle, hit by a car. She wondered what my attitude towards the state was, especially in terms of the kinds of infrastructural changes we often advocate for. Who else would implement these new ideas if not the government? A reasonable question. I tried to explain my long antipathy to organizing towards influencing government and policy, and that I still believe we’ll have much better success if we build our own power and activity to the point that local government (and maybe at higher levels too) begins responding to our initiatives rather than continuing to shape our activities to what might be possible to extract from a basically recalcitrant state.

This is the woman asking about my attitude towards the State.

The first night at the Utopia bookshop we got some questions, but that was a very small, intimate setting. Similarly, at the University of Milan political science class, hosted by Daniela Danna, I had the pleasure of presenting, followed by some good, pointed questions, and then sat back as the class erupted in a spirited debate among themselves that carried on for the last 20 minutes or so. There is also the typical Italian (and maybe typical leftist) phenomenon of preceding a “question” with 5-15 minutes of prologue/speechifying. Far be it from me to criticize this since I’ve been known to do the same on many occasions, but it is striking how common it is here. The guy in the class who raised the first question spoke for a good 8 minutes before he wrapped it up. Somewhere in there, towards the beginning actually, I heard him identify the two main problems as power and conflict, and indeed, these are the best questions to challenge the Nowtopian argument with.

Anita at left, then Daniela, who also hosted the class at the University of Milan, me, and Giovanni. Having three translators to take turns worked really well!

Lorenzo from Scighera and his friends sat right in front...

Similar to criticisms I got in Sweden, and from my own daughter at other times, there’s a real objection to the presentation of something as radically subversive that isn’t somehow directly conflictual and  antagonistic. But it leads naturally to my continuing promotion of radical patience, neither passive nor pacifist, but just a way of being that makes it possible to sustain a radical oppositional current through this dark age and into a time when there are more of us, more coherently self-organized, when our power might really be a threat to the way things are. Thinking that somehow if we are just antagonistic enough, active enough, brave enough, etc., and that will trigger a spontaneous uprising among millions of our co-inhabitants of this society, is a quasi-religious fantasy. We will be in the trenches of daily life for years to come—I advocate that we enjoy the process of creating associations and communities that have enough internal trust that we can actually argue about the shape of things to come. From such a foundation we might be able to reimagine revolution, but at this point such a term is floating in search of a reference point. In other words, there’s an awful lot of daily cultural work to do to create the momentum for a political shift of the sort I think most of us are interested in. In other words, we have to start from the sausages!

Milan has a lot of gorgeous old buildings. This one, the House of Big Men, is from the 1500s.

You come upon buildings like this quite often walking around in Milan... check out that chimney!

Typical street scene in Milan... you can see why lots of people are intimidated to ride bikes here.

Milan is a city that I like, even though there’s no denying that it is a fairly gray burg, usually overcast, and somehow a bit bleak. The frenzy of commerce is in its pores, along with the haute fashion industry, which are also joined at the Hip. The number of extremely good looking women and men, dressed to the nines, walking around Milan is always surprising and frankly pretty fun for a few days. I don’t mind enjoying the eye candy!

One moment among hundreds of similar ones in Milan...

I had the pleasure of reconnecting with Zoe Romano, one of the protagonists of Serpica Naro, a fake fashion brand launched some years ago to generate a counter-tendency from within the clothing world. This time I met her at a big 3-day event she helped organize called “So Critical” which I told her should have been called “Sew Critical” since it was mostly DIY clothing makers, using healthy materials, locally manufactured mostly by themselves. The clothes and shoes and bags were innovative and beautiful, and it reminded a lot of the Trunk shows that have been growing in San Francisco over the past few years. In fact I think this constellation of designers and creators is very similar. Zoe sees her role as bringing a political sensibility into the edges of the fashion world, building on the healthy revulsion a lot of new graduates and entrants into that world feel when first confronted with the preponderant weight of capital, of conformity, of the arbiters of taste. In addition to their enthusiasm for local production and ecological sustainability, they are seeking a collaborative creative model online through a new project called “Edufashion”  which is has partners in Milan, Ljublana, London, and Copenhagen.

Zoe Romano at So Critical.

So Critical... or Sew Critical?

Anita Bacigalupo and Maresa Lippolis in one of Milan's rare garden spots in the inner city.

Maresa Lippolis greeted me at one of the early stops in Milan, and I remembered her from two years ago when I first met the Serpica Naro gang. She helped me to borrow a bike from Tibi, whose 14-year-old is the youngest participant in one of the local DIY bikeshops (cicclofficine). Both Maresa and Tibi are involved in the nascent community gardening scene in Milan that you can check out here. And then I got to ride behind her as we bolted across the City several times—nothing like chasing a bold, safe, and aggressive rider through an unfamiliar city with chaotic traffic! I love it!

Same inner-city garden, view in from outer edge.

"Cave paintings" at back of community garden.

More Garden art...

Maresa also set up a lunch with Travis Meinholf and his charming partner Iris. He’s an artistic weaver who hails originally from the wilds of West Marin, the lost starting point of Ernest Callenbach’s 1970s novel Ecotopia. Born in 1978, he’d never read it, but it was fun for him to meet someone who knew immediately what West Marin meant in terms of environment and culture. He and Iris are living in Berlin, the mecca for artists looking for cheap housing and a dynamic arts scene, but he’s iconoclastic in his approach to his “career.” My impression is that he is truly obsessed and enamored with making fabric, playing with colors and textures, and beyond his common need for food and housing and the basics, he’s not particularly motivated by money or fame. He said he was very fond of sitting over the loom, making fabric, one of the oldest industrial activities, but one he is reclaiming as an artisanal pastime and skill. He gave me his thesis, printed on newsprint with a weaving card inserted into it. It’s a great piece and I want to quote some of it:

From “I Object”:

Is there any more valid standard by which to judge a System of Social Organization the General Level of Satisfaction it enables? By this criterion, current conditions are intolerable!! I propose a different way. I can’t deny the legitimacy of certain satisfactions to be gained from Modern Market Capitalism. One’s physical experience of a Sweatshop-Made Garment or Product can remain positive and fulfilling, even when is mindful of the hypocrisy and Global Structural Violence embodied by these commodities. Mass-Produced Objects can also be contextualized in a way that makes them unique personal statements. The contradictory nature of these experiences remains for the most part unacknowledged, vaguely unsettling, and though there exists within this structure an Easily Consumed World of Comfort and Distraction for some of us, for many more the reality is harder to ignore… Consider the Global Market Economy, in which seductive objects are hastily made by near Slave-Labor to be impetuously consumed and swiftly discarded… rather than wearing blinders to remain ignorant of the grotesque Production Processes that made all of your Stuff, you could celebrate and enjoy the Vision of its Creation you hold in your mind like that Grandmother-Knit Sweater! What if you could feel that warmth for each item in your Household: clothes, plates, chairs, blankets, bicycles? Each thing imbued with an awareness of its Loving, Familiar Source. And what if it was all Free? You could ask for anything you needed, knowing that your own Contribution was likewise used with Respect and Care. This is basically the life I envision and advocate for.”

He goes on to call for a Free Market, which is more like what we in San Francisco know as a “really really free market,” because it’s more of a gift economy than any kind of familiar market. He rhapsodizes about materials and the making of fabric, as he is a weaver first and foremost, and describes how he has made several dozen woolen blankets and distributed them freely to those who are cold, sometimes directly, sometimes as an “art project.” I am extremely impressed with his oversized tabloid manifesto which lays out a very Nowtopian sensibility. He elaborates his philosophy, “We CAN gather Materials and Tools and make things ourselves, slowly gaining momentum, starting with simple staples like Blankets and Bread. As commodities of our Gentle Nation, they would be offered free to all who need them, with innovative options left open to cope with the realities of operating within the Current Capitalist Structure. The space that we create for this Free Market would belong to all who share the vision: the free exchange of gentle commodities, the Product of Productive Play. It can be in any open Storefront, for a day in a Park, or in a Museum. Anywhere that people can collect Tools and Materials and arrange for somebody to demonstrate their use, things can be made and distributed in this manner. This is a way to begin.”

Iris with one of Travis's textiles, and Travis at dinner.

Maresa studies the map to pick a route that I can follow home...

One of the wild highlights of my time in Milan was at the end of the SHAKE presentation (which I shared with Matteo Guarnacci, a Tom Wolfe-esque character in a light gray pinstripe suit with long flowing white hair who has written about the Dutch Provos, psychedelics and the history of rebel style in two volumes for the same publisher), when I was called to come outside to the street. There was the Milan Critical Mass clamoring for me to join them!

Coming out to greet Milan's Critical Mass, Sept. 30, 2010.

Critical Mass says hello!

I am led to a quadricycle for a ride.

And off we go!

It was one of those moments that is in some way deeply embarrassing but you can only enthusiastically join the moment because that’s what everyone wants. So I waved and cheered them, of course, and suddenly I was being pulled to a quadracycle, and put on the front seat. Off we went on a long circuit of the block, with me in front of the front vehicle, all the cyclists laughing and cheering behind me. It was great fun! I was soon brought back to the starting point and I went back to the book release party. But it was truly magical—one of the Milanese CMers told me they’d brought the mountain to Muhammad, and I could only laugh as I tried helplessly to reduce the attention. Try as I might to correct it here, the Italians still insist on labeling me as the “inventore” or “fundadore” of Critical Mass. I’ve told dozens of people and at least four of my audiences that this is the wrong understanding of history, and that such a phenomenon as Critical Mass could not possibly be invented or founded by one person. One guy in the Milan ride asked me in an endearingly sweet way if I would please tell them about the beginnings of CM, even though he knew I must have told the story a million times. So I told him, yes, we were at least 20-40 people who had been talking about it for about two years before it began. The first ride took off with close to 50 people, but it had taken the efforts of several dozen to make it happen… not to mention that every other city that has a Critical Mass has a parallel experience, where some group of local cyclists has taken it upon themselves to invent it anew for that town.

Typical architecture...

I enjoyed riding and walking around Milan. The architecture often reminds me of Mexico City, with the big 4-6 story palazzos, ornate balconies, baroque decorations, wide tree-shaded boulevards. Annoyingly the scooter is omnipresent here, and you often come upon a sidewalk jammed with them.

Scooters, scooters, everywhere!

Parking regulations here seem to be a joke, and the few bike paths I saw are useless.

This weird bike path extends about two blocks, running down the middle of a wide boulevard. As you can see the center area is jammed with parked cars, and as it happens, I rode a bike along this street and never even realized there was a bike lane in the middle of it... From the next photos you can see it ends pretty uselessly at a big cross street.

End bike path...

There is a bike-sharing program which Giovanni told me was a complete failure, but actually I did see at least a half dozen of them in use, always by middle-aged people. The system requires pre-registration online or at transit office, so I didn’t both to set up an account for the four days I was there. That alone seemed a dumb arrangement, where an interested tourist like myself is dissuaded from trying it out because of a cumbersome bureaucratic procedure. Anyway, bike stations are all over the center of the city, but Milan is a city choked with traffic and aggressive motorists. I don’t mind riding through that, but I don’t think it’s very inviting for folks who are not regular urban cyclists, so the bike-sharing program will probably be pretty underutilized until they begin to alter the streetscape too.

Most of the bikesharing stations I saw were pretty full, like this one late at night (when you'd expect them to be mostly not in use).

I did see a few folks, mostly older, using them...

I met Filippo again, whom I’d first met back in 2002 on my first visit here. He’s very active in all sorts of bicycling and other radical political projects in Milan, and he invited me to visit the University’s DIY bikeshop, called Free Wheel…

Filippo hoists a beer as I arrive at the Cicclofficine Ruota Libera.

A closer look at it.

On the wall inside...

It was fast and furious, though I managed to squeeze in some tourism too. We made it to the shopping district and found ourselves facing a massive installation in the Piazza del Duomo. The NBA had come to town to drum up interest in its increasingly international game. Italians seem pretty interested in basketball anyway. I saw a lot of ads even in Siena for local professional games, and as I recall Kobe Bryant grew up in Italy so maybe that helps the interest too… funny to think of him speaking Italian.

NBA Day in the Piazza del Duomo!

Lastly, here are some shots that didn’t get into the narratives above, but I wanted to include. Anita took me to see this giant Blue mural on the side of one of the main train stations:

Blue mural on the train station.

Closer up...

This is another part of the same huge wall by Blue.

Yes, it's fun! 4 appearances in 4 nights in Milan... next stop: Lugano!

Haven’t had much time or mental focus for blogging lately. But sometimes things crop up that are just begging for a good rant. The current ad campaign by the multinational clothing corporation Levi’s is a case in point. The fact that Levi’s is originally a San Francisco company lends a certain extra twist to this saga. And that they could say “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” at a time when so much work that is handsomely rewarded is not only NOT important, it is ruining the planet while it is destroying the humans doing it! It’s an astonishingly bizarre statement to make in a society that has grown ever more hierarchical and class-divided during the past few decades, in which people who ARE doing the important work, like childcare, hospice care, public school teaching, driving public transit, etc., are being demonized and attacked and in many cases, left at the bottom in terms of pay and social esteem.

“We Are All Workers” proclaim the ads in bus shelters, on billboards, and seemingly everywhere all of a sudden. “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” says a neon sign in the window of their Valencia Street workshop (itself a wet dream: free screen-printing, photocopying and art resources for anyone to use). Back in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a quintessential Rust Bowl town abandoned in the early 1980s by the steel industry and verging on total collapse, Levi’s has ridden in as a white knight. After a big nonprofit pulled out, Levi’s agreed to put up $1 million to bolster the efforts of John Fetterman, the youthful and burly 6’8” mayor to bring the city back from the brink of ghost town status, putting their money into a community center, the public library, and an urban farm! On Youtoob there are a dozen videos produced by Levi’s, from one-minute ads to five-minute mini-documentaries on Braddock, designed to evoke a series of complicated emotions and speak to needs and ideas that have been buried during the past twenty years of shrill neoliberal triumphalism.

The first time I saw the “We Are All Workers” ad, featuring a small African American boy in an oversized adult workshirt, I was shocked. Who or what could be sponsoring an ad with that as a title? I felt that typical ripped-off feeling when my own words, sincerely uttered with real meaning on many occasions, were reflected back at me as a vapid advertising slogan. And then the puzzlement. Why Levi’s? What are they getting at? Don’t they want to hide all the sweatshop work that goes in to their products? Isn’t it the point of the modern capitalist economy to disguise the relationship between work and product? Aren’t we supposed to be kept blissfully ignorant of what it takes to produce the common items of our lives? Aren’t the objects supposed to be the lively characters and the people who make them completely invisible? Has Levi’s broken with the playbook of fifty years of capitalist consumer marketing?

Yes and no. I think they spent a lot of time and money with focus groups, testing this whole campaign out, long before it appeared to us publicly. I think they, or at least their advertising agency, realized that something is developing that has so far been out of sight and out of mind in terms of mass culture. There is a deep frustration with the stupidity of work that rarely gets mentioned. But most people live it every day, and have to pretend to like their jobs (if they have one), to pretend to care about the company they work for, to want it to be more profitable (even if they are faced with stagnant wages and shrinking benefits), etc.  The desire to do real work with a sense of its purpose and ultimate utility to our lives, and to do it with a lot of control over the process and its results, including who we do it with and how it affects the natural environment, has led many people to engage more fully with work they do when they’re not “at work.” This is what I wrote about in Nowtopia.

The Levi's Workshop on Valencia Street near 17th, in San Francisco.

Peering in to the energetic scene within.

Michael Hardt and Toni Negri writing in the 3rd volume of their theoretical trilogy Commonwealth argue that there is so much productive activity going on outside of traditional economic measurement that capital is seeking new ways to capture that value. I think this whole Levi’s campaign is a cutting-edge example of this effort. I find it unimaginable that the designers of this campaign haven’t been studying their Hardt and Negri, and who knows, maybe they even read Nowtopia!

Here’s how Hardt/Negri put it on page 140-141: “Capital expropriates cooperation as a central element of exploiting biopolitical labor-power. This expropriation takes place … from the field of social labor, operating on the level of information flows, communication networks, social codes, linguistic innovations, and practices of affects and passions… Capital is predatory, as the analysts of neoliberalism say, insofar as it seeks to capture and expropriate autonomously produced common wealth.”

The Levi’s workshop is a fascinating experiment in this effort to “capture and expropriate autonomously produced common wealth.” Dan Connor is labeled as a Levi’s photographer in the online video, “Pre-Print Opening July 1, 2010,” where he describes their strategy: “The point is to come into a town, find a bunch of nonprofits that are in that area, and work with them, to create an environment that is collaborative, an artspace, to kind of talk together, work on projects in a collaborative nature…”

The place opened in July and will close at the end of August. (Locals in the Mission are suspicious that the short time of their renting the place conveniently avoided their having to get a normal business permit and encounter the shitstorm of neighborhood chainstore opposition that their competitor American Apparel ran into when they tried to open a store a few blocks up the street a year ago.) But it’s not a regular store. It’s a community workshop with a beautiful old letterpress, silkscreening tables and screens, a free photocopier for zinesters to help themselves to, and a surprising largesse of resources. Frankly, the workshop is the kind of fantasy place that anyone involved in radical publishing or printmaking and community politics has dreamed of forever. The catch of course is that this is a Levi’s facility. While they’ve been relatively open and uncensorious, encouraging dozens of local artists to come in and do whatever they want, even offering some of them modest amounts of money to produce art there, they are using the place as a showcase to gain brand loyalty and they’re freely using the folks who come in as advertising props. They have a marquee outside bragging about who is going to be there “making art” in coming days, and a lot of the output is connected to various local nonprofits. There’s even a spinning wheel with three local nonprofit groups who get the cash when you buy some jeans or a shirt there (because in spite of everything, they do have a couple of shelves of clothes for sale). It’s as though they’ve hit upon this new strategy for capturing a whole stratum of productive energy in the ultra-hipster Mission, co-opting it to their own purposes while also inserting the corporation into it as the provider of hardware, free space, and endless paper and ink and other resources, but at the last moment they can’t resist also doing what they’ve always done: sell bluejeans!

Few of these were actually created at the workshop, but they had 'em displayed to encourage free use of their copier.

The payoff for Levi's: This guy was shooting while I was taking photos. First he was roaming among the various "workers" and then he went upstairs to get this overview shot...

Hardt and Negri describe the problem of capturing the immeasurable wealth, which maybe this Levi’s workshop is managing to do.

“Furthermore, the results of biopolitical production, including social subjectivities and relations, forms of life, [do generate] value, 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? The quantitative indicators of professional economists offer little … in particular since production of the common constantly exceeds not only relationships of control but also frameworks of measure. Useful economic indicators instead would have to be qualitative.”

“Join us, roll up your sleeves, and get to work.” They have a half dozen slogans like this. Another one is “Ready to Work” echoing the millions of unemployed who would be glad to get a job rather than being thrown on the discard pile like they were a broken piece of plastic. Yet another version is splashed across big billboards near the Bay Bridge: “Made Strong for the New Work,” with three men wearing the requisite branded clothing while posing among machines and in brick rooms as though waiting for them to come back to life. What is this “new work”? One guy stands in front of an out-of-context motor in an otherwise empty room. The guy on the right is sitting on an old motorcycle in another empty room, probably a former factory work space. The guy in the middle is walking through some kind of archway with a cityscape behind him—is he entering an empty factory or leaving a dying city? These guys aren’t working exactly, they’re waiting. They’re embodying the precariousness of modern worklife, a dangerously accurate portrayal of the lassitude and emptiness that fills all too many lives in an economy with 22% unemployment. Waiting for the New Work that hasn’t yet started, or if it has, only in brief fits and starts, enough to keep you from total penury, maybe even enough to keep the payments going on the credit card where you charged the new Levi’s you bought, or so the ads imply…

But precarity is a permanent state now. The lost world of full-time work for stable employers actually making things that other people can use and will buy, is now reduced to phantom references floating in and around an ad campaign. The images are meant to invoke a (false) sense of nostalgia, but one that has a real yearning in it, a persistent wish for a stability and security that were never available to most of the world and only to a fraction of the American working class during the peak of U.S. global power. That time is definitively over.

But in good old American bootstrapping ideology, Braddock is being showcased as an example of the can-do spirit, the circular fantasy that once you’ve been kicked to the ground by the decisions of a tiny elite who control wealth and power, you can work yourself to the bone to regain your former middle-class comforts. I’m pretty sure Mayor Fetterman, who looks like he was part of Survival Research Laboratories or some equally edgy urban art project (and is an Ivy League grad to boot), knows better. The Braddock website features a stark and gritty urban aesthetic but has a photo of a big urban garden as the first thing you see, with the slogan under it, “Reinvention is the only option.”

So if you were the Mayor of Braddock, or even just someone who moved there to be involved in a radical effort to reinvent the place, how would you respond to the sudden appearance of a major corporation who offers serious money with the only caveat that they can make and use representations of you for their own marketing purposes? Not an easy call. Because anyone facing that level of economic collapse and urban decay knows that they need serious resources to get out of the hole. You can only bootstrap yourself so far, and without serious capital (in this culture) to work with, you’ll probably hit a wall.

Obviously Levi’s is co-opting Braddock and its Mayor. Does that mean he’s lost all autonomy and is now a fully captured entity of Levi’s? I doubt that too. Maybe he thinks he’s playing Levi’s and as long as their money stays in the buildings and facilities they’ve invested in, Braddock comes out way ahead no matter what dumb advertisements Levi’s runs for a few months or even a year or two… Time will tell for Braddock’s gamble.

Here's another weirdly edgy slogan: There's Work to be Done and Undone! Whew! That's putting it mildly... how about we eliminate advertising, insurance, banking, real estate, military production.... for starters?

But here in San Francisco, the naïve young hipsters who are flocking to the Levi’s store are doing what comes natural. They’re playing, they’re making art, they’re finding friends and community in practical projects that are based on their own sense of meaning and purpose. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we always had access to practically unlimited resources to make our zines, our posters, our t-shirts, our creative fantasies? Why don’t we have such workshops as a matter of course? And not limited to printmaking and clothing, but a whole range of tools and machinery so we could begin to make the world we want to live in, a world of our own design? Levi’s is tapping that yearning, but will soon pull it all away, just like Lucy always pulls away the football just as Charlie Brown is really ready to give it the kick of his life.

Hardt and Negri say “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to be the industrial working class… the metropolis primarily generates rent, which is the only means by which capital can capture the wealth created autonomously.” And it isn’t coincidental that during the past two years of economic breakdown, mass foreclosures, and rising unemployment, San Francisco rents have remained in the stratosphere. Aggregate capital is doing a fine job of exploiting the flourishing, unmeasurable creative output of San Francisco’s residents through the harsh regime of rents here. Now we have Levi’s opening a temporary workshop to experiment with a new form of cooptation, simultaneously more overt and more opaque, more insidious and more subtle. How will this play out? Can we turn this inside out? Or does it automatically turn us inside out? Love to hear your thoughts…

I’ve been heavily influenced by Copenhagen since my first (adult) visit in 1977. It took a while to realize that it probably set in motion most of my many years of cycle activism, which is importantly about much more than merely bicycling… watching this video strongly reminded me of how the texture of urban life gets SO much better when you have these kinds of conditions… Summertime in Denmark is pretty dang awesome too!