“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.

This is a shortened version of an article I wrote in the wake of the 2003 Mayoral campaign in San Francisco, and published in The Political Edge. With all the excitement and promise of the occupation movements around the world, I still find myself balking at the slogans and framing, whether the “corporate greed” idea I critiqued in the previous entry, or the incessant clamor for “jobs”… if you want to pursue a radical reformist strategy in the here and now, i.e. in capitalism, please, AT LEAST demand a basic minimum income for all (say $1,500/mo for all residents of the planet) rather than asking to be put to work on agendas over which we have no control… anyway, here’s the piece, with an old graphic Jim Swanson drew in the early 1990s (can that really be 20 years ago?) when we were blasting demands for “jobs” at Processed World.

“Jobs” Don’t Work!

With mind-numbing regularity, we are expected to trudge to the polls and cast votes for politicians who promise to pursue policies that will “fix the economy” and “create jobs.” Predictably, nothing much changes. Why do we expect politicians and their policies to affect “the Economy,” when the rest of the time we treat it more like the weather, something that gets “better” or “worse” according to events beyond anyone’s control? The label “economy” is used to cloud in abstraction specific choices made by specific people that shape the rest of our lives for better or more usually, for worse. By framing our own daily lives of work within the abstract framework of “the Economy” we disconnect ourselves from a deciding, subjective role in determining our own activity and instead leave ourselves as unaware and relatively helpless pawns of forces beyond our knowledge or control. “The Economy” becomes a mystifying category, full of nonsensical and inexplicable categories that only experts can decipher; it is our era’s religion, an explanatory framework that offers fictional and strangely “natural” explanations for what are simple (albeit confusing), observable relations between human beings. Politicians and economists who claim they will fix “the Economy” are playing the role of contemporary priests in the Church—they and they alone are competent to communicate with the higher power that ultimately controls our lives.

This underlies the emptiness of our democracy. Clearly there is little democracy in our lives when it comes to “the Economy.” Our much-vaunted “freedom of choice” supposedly allows us to “choose” any jobs we want. By this “free choice” we exercise our tiny influence over the giant “invisible hand” of the market. But as we all know, most of us are only “free” to take one shitty job or another (or several!). In taking a job, no one asks for our ideas about what kind of work the enterprise should do, how the company impacts the environment locally and beyond, or what quality standards our work should meet. We have no say over who works there or how hiring is decided. In fact, on the job we lose most of the basic rights we take for granted as citizens in a democracy, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from search and seizure, freedom from random drug testing, right to due process, trial by peers, and so forth. On the job we are wage-slaves—if we depend on our wage, our condition can easily be construed as a version of slavery “with a human face.”

Curious, then, that people across the political spectrum, especially “progressives,” are so ready to demand “jobs” without a murmur of qualification or criticism (at best, the demand is qualified as being for “good jobs”). Most jobs today are a waste of time at best, if they aren’t actually pernicious. As a social mechanism for allocating tasks that keep us all alive, “the Economy” and its foundation on “jobs” could hardly be less efficient, less fair, or a bigger waste of time and resources. One of the most glaring failures of the so-called free market is the well-paid elevation of patently useless and/or dangerous activities and the unpaid denigration of vital human tasks. Juxtapose bankers and weapons designers to child care workers and nursing home employees, for example. Even within ostensibly useful human work, for example, doctors and nurses, at least half of their work time is spent fulfilling the parasitic, useless demands of insurers and the bureaucracies of business, instead of providing the medical care that so many can no longer afford.

Graphic by JR Swanson, c. 1991, for the Committee for Full Enjoyment.

San Francisco’s current economy is awash in the inflated equity of a housing market unmoored from historic values. This has greatly rewarded the lucky fraction that owns at the expense of the majority of renters. Meanwhile people work in offices, restaurants, stores, and hotels where real wages are stagnant or actually falling. In a city with a dozen major hospitals and tens of thousands of medical workers, at least a quarter of the residents are uninsured and prone to destitution through catastrophic illness or injury. A construction boom fueled by the dot.com frenzy, sustained after the frenzy’s collapse by the spiraling inflation in real estate and long-term infrastructure programs of the city (San Francisco airport, BART, and MUNI expansions, Bay Bridge retrofit, Moscone Convention Center expansion, Transbay Terminal) is also helping to keep economic collapse at bay for the moment.

But all the signs for a major reckoning are before us: Unsustainable debts (government, corporate, and individual); absurd investment in useless office towers and unneeded hotels and shopping centers; stagnant or falling incomes and savings; soaring rates of illness and unmeasured workplace injuries; radically increasing homeless population; food programs serving more meals than ever—the list goes on.

Newspapers regularly report “outsourcing,” the increasing transfer of even high-tech and service sector expertise to India, China, and other low-wage, high-skilled areas. These new boom zones have been knit together precisely by the globalization spearheaded by San Francisco–based multinationals (Standard Oil of California, now Chevron-Texaco, Pacific Bell, now AT&T (again), Southern Pacific Railroad, now merged into Union Pacific, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have all fled, though Bechtel, Levi’s, The Gap, and PG&E are still homegrown, world-spanning engines of economic exploitation and environmental devastation). “Competing” in the twenty-first century means lowering wages and giving tax breaks, creating conditions for the maximum profitability of business. If lower costs and bigger tax “incentives” are offered somewhere else, most jobs these days are pretty easily moved.

Primary education in San Francisco, not to mention the rest of the U.S., is abysmal. The destruction of public education corresponds to a destruction of skilled work and a reduced need for intelligence at work. (To say nothing of the problems created by thoughtful, critical citizens!) Beyond some thousands of programmers and the skilled trades, most jobs are easily learned in a day or two, and most workers are easily replaced—skills are much less important these days than attitude. And even if you have great skills and a Mormonesque enthusiasm for your job, chances are the company will move or restructure or change its focus to increase profitability—leaving you out of work and wondering what to do next. In those increasingly rare examples of stable companies that provide decent, steady wages, and benefits, there’s still a total absence of self-management or worker participation in determining what the company does, what its ecological impact is, how it connects to subcontractors and suppliers and their practices, and so on.

In 1991, former police chief Frank Jordan was elected mayor. As soon as he took office, he began trumpeting the northeast Mission district as a new “industrial zone” (Northeast Mission Industrial Zone, or NEMIZ) for the emerging biotech sector. This chimerical planning never really took hold due to neighborhood objections and an indifferent business community. The NEMIZ eventually filled up with the short-lived “Audio Alley” and other dot.com startups, only to empty out again after the dot.com bubble burst. In this new era of “vaporware” the Mission’s warehouses and garages are again brimming with hi-tech peasants. Meanwhile, a mile eastward a whole “new neighborhood” (anchored by a forty-two-acre parcel for the biomedical campus of the University of California) called Mission Bay was started during Willie Brown’s regime. Again, the assumption is that by investing public money in a fancy new campus and giving incentives to the developer (Catellus Corporation, a spinoff of the former Southern Pacific Railroad real estate division—“owners” of a real estate empire spanning the west, gained through corrupt land grants provided by the federal government in the nineteenth century as an “incentive” to build the railroads!), jobs and housing will be created. For over a decade, San Francisco has been waiting for the biotech ship to come in.

But that ship is just another in a long line of Potemkin-village promises of so-called “good jobs”:

On bad days Toby said he worked as a “pipette bitch.” With no interests other than computers, a few select hormones, and science fiction novels, Toby was perfectly poised to work as a low-level researcher in yet another lab where the muckety-mucks studied genetic tagging. And so that’s where he found himself most days, holding his trusty pipette over a box of clear gel attached to some electrodes . . . Usually he thought about nothing at all. He didn’t achieve a Zen-like state of pipette-mediated calm. There was no enlightenment. He simply immersed his entire consciousness in the tiny movements of his body, the precise measurements and procedures . . . After almost a year of unbroken routine . . . Toby realized he could spend an entire 24-hour period without ever having a single, extended thought . . . he didn’t have the kinds of multilayered or complex ideas he used to have back when he was hacking hormone pathways in graduate school.

Here he was, a hypereducated twentysomething, his whole life before him, and his supposedly professional middle-class job had turned his brain into nothing more than basal ganglia . . . according to all the usual news sources, his job was hot. Supposedly Toby was at the center of an economic revolution in biotech. The most-wanted jobs of the new millennium were in genomics; cities like San Francisco were developing vast office parks full of proto-wet lab spaces and special cold rooms for all the code-crunching clusters . . . Toby [felt] like he worked at McDonald’s: The plastic gloves were practically the same. But more important, there was an almost unbridgeable gulf between what he actually did for a living and the hype about it. Reading the papers was like looking at one of those glossy ads suggesting that women kicked off welfare would have great futures if they just took jobs at fast-food restaurants. Look at our shiny kitchens! Full of happy people in hair nets and gloves making toasty burgers and crispy fries! Fast food is at the center of the restaurant economy! Just like biotech. (* Annalee Newitz, “Techsploitation: Pipette Bitch Blues,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2004.)

This pattern of exaggerated expectations attached to what are quickly discovered to be boring, routine, mind-numbing jobs is all too common, and yet rarely reported with such clarity and wit. Another place to find compelling accounts is among the “Tales of Toil” featured from 1981–1994 in San Francisco’s Processed World magazine (full disclosure: I was a participating collective member). From word processing to desktop publishing and web design, jobs in new technologies paid relatively well until the field filled with thousands of people following the false promise of “good jobs,” only to find that high pay rates had disappeared. Irrespective of the pay, the crucial issue of content—of what we do, why, for whom or what, and usually how—is never confronted. And with almost no exceptions, the creative component of any job is what disappears soonest, replaced by management-controlled pacing, productivity demands, routinization, and bureaucratization.

This year’s Mayoral candidates are all promising to create “jobs.”  But if public monies are invested in training citizens to become so skilled and desirable as workers, we would still have to question which world economy we are getting prepared for. And just how this training would make San Francisco workers so well-paid (that is, expensive for their employers) that they could afford to live here! Everything going on in economic development—locally, nationally, or internationally—indicates the key trends continue to be lower wages and higher productivity (that is, longer hours, harder work).

A real alternative is called for. Tens of thousands are occupying public plazas across the U.S. and the world.  While participants have reported frustration at the absence of concrete alternatives, many people around the world are confronting the same problems. And clearly the answers require a break with the dynamics of a world economy that pits city against city, country against country, human against human. The role of government, so diminished as the power of corporations has grown unchecked during the past quarter century, requires revision. Limiting local government to public spending on infrastructure and training for the benefit of private business is clearly self-defeating. Limiting local economics to a system in which private capital employs people as wage-laborers is to guarantee that the logic that imprisons us in a suicidal and degrading system will only grow stronger.

With my tongue only partly in cheek, I propose that San Francisco take the lead in visionary urban transformation. “Jobs” as we know them are an obsolete way of organizing life. I propose a complete rethinking of what municipal government does, no longer “governing” so much as facilitating, allowing us to grow together, to begin building a life outside and against the Economy. If we are nearing a collapse in housing and other asset bubbles fueled by the insane expansion of credit, as it seems we are, then visionary citizens need to start redesigning the role of local government now, while we still have time and resources and before the coming depression and collapse begins. Not entirely seriously, but not altogether frivolously either, I propose the following New Department of Public Commons for a New Municipality, all of which can and should be integrated into our public education system for children and the continuing education of adults. A casual examination will reveal that there is a lot of work to do! But not the kind that generates private profits and sales.

Department of Public Commons

Overall, the city must focus its efforts on an economic strategy that grows the commonwealth and steadily shrinks the private sector. This is a program of decommodification, reframing work as a shared adventure in shaping and extending the quality of our lives.

A.    Division of Public Space In charge of plazas, parks, and common lands, and their expansion, maintenance, and programming, this division would administer public libraries, tool and technology libraries, and public workshops, amply stocked with materials recycled from existing stocks. It would also begin the process of converting many streets into gardens and parklands (see “H” below).

B.    Division of Agriculture With the goal of San Francisco feeding itself as much as possible, it will expand community gardens, urban farming, and aquaculture projects, working with the Division of Public Space to reappropriate the vast acreage dedicated to moving and parking cars. Relationships will be cultivated between existing slow-food restaurants, local farmers, and local markets to create an unprecedented abundance of outstanding, healthy, tasty food, eliminating hunger and radically reducing dependence on fast-food outlets.

C.    Division of Aquifer and Liquefaction Management (and Deconstruction) Irresponsible building patterns on historic mudflats and landfill should be removed before the next big quake; plans will be made for how to manage collapsing streets and buildings and how to reuse areas prone to liquefaction. Expanded use of existing aquifer will promote local self-reliance and reduce current dependence on quake-vulnerable aqueducts.

D.    Division of Creeks and Wetlands Working with the three previous divisions to open streets to make creeks visible, restore wetlands, and establish areas for aquaculture, farming, fishing, and recreation.

E.    Division of Highest-Ever Tides and Seawall Construction Preparation is needed for rising sea levels and catastrophic high tides from global warming. Technologies to protect the city from inevitable flooding should be explored now. Also, San Francisco’s strong technology-savvy population can take the lead in developing techniques for adapting existing transportation and structures to widespread flooding.

F.    Division of Work Reduction Most work done in this culture is a waste of time, if it’s not actually dangerous and counterproductive. This division will facilitate the creative reappropriation of our time and talents, redirecting our work (which is inherently social after all) toward socially determined needs and desires (see “I” below).

G.    Division of Co-ops and Collectives Businesses will be encouraged to convert themselves from private ownership to worker-owned and -run co-ops and collectives. As much as possible, such enterprises should be encouraged to contribute to the commonwealth without measurement or pay . . . from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs and desires.

H.    Division of Recycling and Reuse This important division will be responsible for innovation in more than just recycling garbage, but also in spawning whole industries to rehabilitate and reuse the discarded junk of the twentieth century. Long-term goal: Stop importing new junk!

I.    Division of Crackpot Realism Thousands of techies, artists, and tinkerers live in San Francisco. Already this city has served as world HQ for rapacious exploitation of huge swaths of the planet. It’s time to make it up. Technology transfer of global-warming-reducing technologies: energy efficient transit, shelter, appliances, and communications. Reengineering technologies to last at least twenty-five years with minimum maintenance and energy use (see “J” following). (Bechtel engineers, for example, should be encouraged to direct their own time and creativity towards projects of social importance—something useful for a change!)

J.    Division of No Home Is a Castle Housing is one of the most intractable problems facing any social transformation toward equality. A focused effort will be made to raise everyone’s dwellings to a shared standard of space, safety, comfort, and beauty. Land trusts will be established to remove all land from the market, and housing will be owned and controlled by those who live in it. Reengineering every dwelling to be as self-sufficient as possible in water, power, and waste management (fertilizer manufacturing for “B” above).

K.    Division of Free Mobility
•    First on the agenda will be the creation of a Bicycle Library with a fleet of 5,000 yellow bicycles. A municipal contest will be held annually for bike design and local manufacture with local materials.
•    To support the Bike Library—a network of 100 bike huts and repair shacks will maintain the publicly owned fleet of bikes.
•    The Panhandle will be expanded and extended on converted streets in dozens of directions to crisscross the city with greenways. The DFM, with the Division of Creeks and Wetlands and the Division of Public Space, will build green corridors along the natural terrain of creeks and shorelines, with meandering bike and multiuse paths.
•    Public transit will be free, with radical expansion of routes for full city coverage. Rapid development and adoption of new transit technologies based on wind, solar, biofuels, and magnetic, “frictionless” tracks will revolutionize energy use.

L.    Division of Public Memory
•    Publicly owned and produced media will be expanded, and multiple daily newssheets and Web sites advanced, with independent editorial boards elected by districts.
•    There will be oral history collection booths, and the Living Archive of San Francisco history will be available online and at a new city museum. Satellite museums in every neighborhood, where techniques of oral history collection and digitizing of archival materials is shared and learned, will reduce social amnesia.
•    Public history forums will be held regularly throughout the city, debating various points of view on how life has changed over the years in San Francisco.

M.    The James Brown Memorial Division of Feeling (Good)
•    Everyone will have free comprehensive health care—state-of-the-art preventive care covering medical, dental and mental for all. San Francisco is a town overrun with care practitioners of widely differing quality and philosophy. A clearinghouse and licensing system will help residents get what they need.
•    We will encourage the public declaration of desires, whatever they may be.
•    Fear abatement will get top priority with programs to help people overcome fear of others, fear of disapproval, fear of speaking out, fear of not owning enough, fear of losing possessions.
•    There will be a vigorous program of shame and guilt reduction.

N.    Division of Public Art This division will involve itself in all urban projects, ensuring a high level of artistic participation in urban design, food preparation, historical presentation, and transportation design. Sculptures, paintings, multimedia installations, soundscapes, and new art experiments will fill the city, eliminating the visual blight of advertising in favor of art.

Photo taken in New York by Evan O'Brien

Corporations ARE the problem as the common institutional form of late capitalism, the social system that is the real root of poverty and inequality. Corporations are (temporarily) immortal, often unaccountable to national laws, brazenly criminal, murderous, and have only one purpose: to accumulate capital. They are not, and cannot be, moral actors in society. Even if the most pious, ascetic monks were put in charge of large corporations, the fiduciary responsibility of corporate leaders is to ensure the growth of profits and wealth for the stockholders or private owners. Corporations are not formed to do anything useful or beneficial to humans (except as an accidental byproduct), nor other species, nor the planet as a whole, unless (and only if) the activity produces profits. Corporate leaders can be personally very greedy or completely indifferent to personal wealth. It does not matter. If they don’t show steadily increasing “growth” (accumulating capital) they will be replaced by the next interchangeable “captain of industry.”

Occupy Wall Street and related demonstrations around the country are a welcome breath of fresh contestation. The space opened up in the occupations is prefigurative of new ways of doing politics, and has an incalculable value in radically reconfiguring popular imagination. We should all be grateful to the hardy souls who embarked on this quixotic effort, and do what we can to support them.

Demonstrating in downtown San Francisco, September 29, 2011.

Of course there is an gaping ethics deficit in our culture. But this open-ended, exciting political moment will slip away quickly if we frame it in terms of populist moralism. This is not about good and evil. To blame executives or the Frankenstein monster we call corporations for their supposed “greed” is to reduce a systemic critique into easy political demands that confirm the basic rules of the game. Clamoring for corporations to pay a “fair share” concedes far too much from the beginning. Why should corporations and their owners be allowed to control such an overwhelming share of the wealth we’ve all produced together over generations? Their very existence is the problem. And let’s not forget that their power at home and across the planet is enforced at gunpoint whenever “necessary.” Protests focused on banks and bankers overlook the vast wealth spent on the U.S. military empire. Our new movement should keep its sights on ending the wars, withdrawing U.S. troops from the 120-odd countries where they are garrisoned, and dramatically reducing the military and secret police budgets to 10% or less of their current levels, too.

If the Occupy Wall Street movements embody something more than the most tepid liberal demands for mean people to be nice, and untrammeled power to “play fair,” we’ll have to keep our focus on the deeper logic we’re up against. We 99% could get up tomorrow and decide to make a very different daily life than the impoverished mess we’re living now. In fact, OUR cooperation is the key to THEIR power. We work and shop in this society, the basic activities by which we reproduce THIS daily life together. Instead of democratically shaping our shared lives, deciding together how best to produce and make available a good life for EVERYONE, we are like old-fashioned cart-pulling horses, lashed by the 1% to pull who knows what, to who knows where, and who knows why? Clamoring for “jobs” leaves us weakly agreeing in advance to do what the 1% (those with capital) tell us to do.

Make Banks Pay demo, San Francisco, Sept. 29, 2011.

Lots of original art appears in these marches.

Why shouldn’t the 99% democratically decide what work we do and how we do it? Let’s evaluate publicly and transparently how our work affects planetary ecology. And finally, let’s abolish the system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else. How shall we share the fruits of all our work? The most hopeful outcome of the prefigurative democracy finding its voice in the occupations is a revolutionary transformation of how we make life together everyday. Why accept anything less?

This sign was originally made in the 1980s... still useful after all these years!

After strolling into the city center during a break we came back on a Calandria, a charming horse-drawn carriage still used in Guadalajara but mostly for tourism.

I just finished several days of networking and discussing in Guadalajara at the 10th annual “Towards Car-Free Cities” Conference. It’s not clear where the next one will be, or when, though my great friend Thiago Benicchio of Ciclo Cidade in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is planning one for 2013. I had a great time, as I always do at these kinds of confabulations. This is my second one, after my 2008 experience in Portland where I first met some of my Guadalajara friends.

They produced a number of charming promos like the one above, but we learned after the fact how close the whole thing came to being cancelled. Just three months before the Sept. 5 opening, there was no money, no publicity, and a barely functioning group producing the event. Two of the main organizers had dropped out for personal reasons, and a whole new team had to step into their absence and make it happen. Probably this was for the best, since now there are a number of women occupying key roles in the much more horizontal organizing group, and frankly, they did a fantastic job of producing the conference. Dozens of workshops with simultaneous translation, a good deal of media coverage, thousands of attendees during the week, and a real buzz around Guadalajara and even nationally across Mexico, all arose from their fine efforts.

A mural at the Iteso University to support the conference.

The future is the target of this ongoing international effort to move us “towards car-free cities.” How do we consciously redesign cities to move away from the seemingly inevitable domination of the private automobile? What are the alternatives? What are the mechanisms to move us? Do we engage with government and policy-making, or do we build grassroots, direct-action movements, or both? And if both, how do they reinforce each other or not? And can we really talk about mobility and transport in the absence of a more comprehensive critique of how we reproduce life in all its facets?

We emerged from the light rail system to a closed amusement park with this tell-tale children's ride, cars going round a gas pump! Perhaps this will be a relic someday!

My organizer friends gave me the great honor of giving my presentation in a most unusual location: in a pseudo-plaza amidst intersecting underground car tunnels! Somehow the organizers convinced a deputy mayor to sign off on closing one of the tunnels to cars, since the only access to the plaza is to walk or bicycle down one of the tunnel entrances on the roadway. About 300-400 people came, and the police diverted thousands of cars onto surface detours for the three hours of closure. Not surprisingly, this generated a fair amount of antagonism in the media, with journalists badgering the organizers (and me too, a little) about the inconvenience we “unjustly” created. But as I answered in various interviews, this kind of tension is actually quite productive. No one was really put out that far (Guadalajara is a big traffic jam, routinely), so another couple of hours of bad traffic can hardly be seen as a great tragedy. It’s actually perfectly “normal” here, as in most major cities. But because there was an identifiable “cause” of this road closure, the tension was productive, it generated questions, “who did this? what do they want? what is it to talk about ‘car-free cities’?” and so on. In fact, the media swarmed the conference organizers with questions and paid much more attention to the whole conference thanks to the unusual use of the subterranean plaza, and the consequent road closure. In other words, it worked like a charm!

Getting ready for my "muscular" presentation!

If you were in the back you probably couldn't see very well... projecting onto the big sheet didn't work in the bright evening light, so we moved a smaller screen into place.

Traffic diverted from tunnel to subterranean plaza.

The view from street level down into the plaza, two hours before the presentation.

Milling about in the traffic tunnel after the Talk.

The Conference demographics were skewed towards youth, with a surprising number of teens and folks in their 20s. I really enjoyed meeting a crowd of teenagers and learning that they had invented at their high school a “bike train” wherein they ride to school, going from house to house picking up their classmates until some 60-80 are riding together to school. Quite impressive! Most of the conference was held at Iteso University on the southern edge of Guadalajara, and that brought in hundreds of curious students to various workshops and lectures. Notably missing from the week’s events were the bike commuting construction workers and laborers, panaderos (bread deliverers) and other bike couriers, and the vast population of poor working class who depend on the widely disrespected public transit system.

Another view of the deserted tunnel and the traffic jam above.

The underground light rail system worked fine for us, but we heard it is pretty horrible at rush hour.

Of all the policy wonks, transit geeks, and bicycle activists who were in attendance, my favorite speaker was Miguel Valencia. He’s a chemical engineer who has been working at the Autonomous University of Mexico and he has an extremely articulate critique which goes well beyond the typical clichés of transit wonkdom. He built a much broader and deeper edifice on his rejection of the principles of modernism and industrialism. He went on to say that life has to slow down and the very notion of “the job” is part of the problem. Rather than belabor the obvious problems of cars and cities tied up in traffic, he emphasized the deeper assumptions about economic growth and urban design that are rooted in pre-WWII modernist thinking. He clearly advocated a “relocalization” agenda, putting transport into a larger agenda of social transformation and transition. I listened to him in Spanish (foregoing the translation headphones) so my understanding of him was well short of 100%, but later he mentioned that he had been in communication with Jan Lundberg (of Culture Change) and Richard Register (Berkeley) for at least a couple of decades. Clearly his thinking is rooted in a green city, post-petroleum, sensibility. His critique was as much of the capitalist organization of life as it was the obvious depradations of automobiles and the infrastructure that supports them.

Roxana Kreimer of Argentina is the author of a book “The Tyranny of the Automobile,” and she gave the final keynote talk. I was not impressed, in spite of attending with relatively high expectations. Regrettably she lost me early, with bad use of statistics (comparing the number of deaths in autos to those in trains to make a case that cars are worse), and a repetitive and all-too-familiar critique of cars based on the death, disease, and societal mayhem they are directly responsible for. We left before she was finished, shaking our heads at the “sky-is-falling” Helen Calidicott approach that pounded the audience with arguments about cars causing fatalities and injuries, as though we all didn’t already know it.

Which highlights the biggest problem of these gatherings—too many people preaching to the converted, repeating the same tired points that have been said so many times previously. As Thiago wrote me in an email a couple of days before I got here, after he’d arrived and had been quickly swept up in local activities in Guadalajara:

“It’s really global and people are really starting to talk [about] the same things all over the world, at different levels of perception. I just don’t know how much it can reach the “outer world” and how much we’re talking [to] ourselves [about] things that we already know. At least, it’s a great exercise to spread the words and thoughts.”

It is heartening to see the surge of visionary activism here in Guadalajara, and to realize it is happening in fits and starts in places as diverse as Sao Paulo and Oslo, Norway, San Francisco and Quito, Ecuador. We got reacquainted with Anna Nygard here too, whom we’d first met in Oslo (she’s actually a Swede), where she’s helped launch the Planka.nu project there. I wrote about planka during my Scandinavian trip in 2009, a group that is committed to free transit for all (they favor having taxes pay for all public transit) and supportive of fare evasion (they offer an insurance policy against fare evasion tickets!). Unfortunately we missed her Talk but everyone said it was excellent.

We saw this odd religious flyer posted to the wall... Guadalajara's congested streets might "drive" a bicyclist to religion I guess!

Old friend Jason Meggs was here too. Imagine my surprise to walk in on his workshop to find him showing a series of impenetrable powerpoint slides and advocating for more on-the-ground statistical research about how people get around! Here’s one of the stalwarts of Bay Area activism, who was a crucial character in getting the bike/ped lane added to the new Bay Bridge east span with his incessant pressure and rides across the bridge a decade ago. Now he’s living in Bologna, Italy, where the University is supporting him while he studies eastern European cities and their relationship to bicycling. But Jason has long been a guy seeking that balance between wonky advocacy work and the soaring passions that sent him to jail dozens of times in the 1990s, so it was lovely to see him still going.

Eric Britton, founder of Carfree Day, gave a week’s worth of daily workshops to local bureaucrats, which somehow managed to cover most of the Conference costs. He made a splash in the Saturday newspaper, denouncing local politicians for failing to take advantage of all the free, high quality “transportation consultants” on hand during the conference. And he insisted that he could turn Guadalajara into the most bike and ped-friendly city in Latin America in a month, with the funds being squandered on another of a series of pointless bridges being built over big intersections around the city.

There is no question that a new vision of modernity and the future is taking shape globally, and one of the arenas of this emergence is the movement for bicycles and car-free cities. Miguel Valencia’s critique of modernism was on point, but he didn’t try to reclaim or reinvent the concept, perhaps because our confidence in a better future is at low ebb. It is hard to believe the future will be better in light of the collapse of social democracies in the face of relentless neoliberal redistribution of wealth to the rich, and the rising tide of climate chaos to boot. But it is precisely in the transition towns idea, for relocalization and resilience, reduced consumption/waste of energy and other resources, an extension of social rights to everyone regardless of nationality or race, etc., that we CAN imagine a world much better than the one we’re in now. No doubt the “Car-Free Cities” movement will have to break out of its dependence on a narrow slice of the population to contribute to this broader social transformation. And after ten years of meeting, this latest iteration of the Conference held many clues as to the directions that such a break-out might take.

My sweetheart Adriana Camarena brought a great idea forward that emerged from a conversation with her mother: the young people who attend could be encouraged to speak to the maids and gardeners who work at their parents’ homes, and insist that they be paid a regular day’s wages to come to such a future Conference, rather than working. Who better to describe the failures of existing transit options and to envision their radical improvement than those people who depend on buses and other options every day? They spend up to 2 or 3 hours a day moving across vast cities to get to low-wage jobs in rich people’s homes. Imagine allying with them and inviting them into the process of social transformation, of which the transit component is just one (vital) part? Clearly the car-free agenda needs to integrate more aggressively a class component, and this might be a good beginning…

Adriana enjoying the ride in the horse-drawn Calandria....

Jason Meggs, me, Gloria, and another friend during our drunken carousing around Guadalajara on a tour of Cantinas organized as part of the conference... a great evening!

An old bike sits on a type of altar in one of the cantinas.

My concluding slide from my presentation in the tunnel...

Flourishing greens growing at the Alemany Farm in San Francisco.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yum! Everyone's eating!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vegetables and orchard at Alemany Farm south of Bernal Heights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Not enough farmers

2. Lack of equipment for small scale farming

3. Lack of knowledge about small scale farming

4. Lack of financial resources

5. Lack of market

6. The wasteland left behind by conventional farming

7. Extreme weather

8. Social challenges:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During the huge 1894 railway strike,

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

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

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

Woke up yesterday to a glorious sunny, warm day, unusual for San Francisco in the summer, and after a cold fog last night, it’s beautiful again today. In the news yesterday I read a cyclist was killed by an SUV jockeying for position on a Los Angeles street, and in downtown SF a woman cyclist was run over (she died today) by a truck after she turned left in front of it. The dull routinization of slaughter that our transit choices depend on…

A few days ago SF police shot a guy ten times when he ran away from them after apparently evading his $2 bus fare in Bayview (there are conflicting claims about whether or not he was armed and whether or not he shot at the police, and now the police are claiming he shot himself!). Two nights ago a spirited anti-cop demo went roaring through the streets, leading to 35 arrests and a smattering of property damage. Some people produced a flyer (art below). I loved the banner in front of the march: “You can’t shoot all of us: Fuck the Police!” It is a deep insult to the social fabric of our daily lives that people are getting murdered by police for any reason, let alone something as petty as avoiding a bus fare.

This is a flyer distributed at the march July 20 in San Francisco.

I’m reminded of Peter Linebaugh’s magisterial “The London Hanged,” an incredible book in which he profiles several hundred individuals who were hung (by the neck) at Tyburn Gate in London between the mid-1600s and mid-1700s, the vast majority for stealing rather small amounts of “property” (often food). As Linebaugh shows, this was the time in capitalist and British history when the basic idea of the inviolability of property rights was being established, and it took a good deal of state-sanctioned murder to reinforce that new logic. Could it be that we’re living through an analogous process in which refusing to pay for small things like bus rides, or even petty shoplifting, is going to face much more severe punishment, even random death?

This, in turn, dovetails interestingly with an article I just read in the latest Mute called “Short Circuits: Finance, Feedback, and Culture” by Benedict Seymour. It’s a complicated essay that is making a difficult comparison between culture and finance. One of his arguments is that we’re living through an era in which capitalism is abandoning its historic role in supporting the cost of reproducing the working class (and the society that facilitates the accumulation of capital).

“Today we see expanding forms of ‘non-reproduction’, including: the annexation of labor-power outside the advanced capitalist countries through globalization; the bolstering of profits by paying workers less than the cost of their reproduction; the non-maintenance of infrastructure; the non-replacement of natural resources, etc.”

Seymour importantly brings the inquiry to the question of social media and networked economies, because these new forms (increasingly ubiquitous) generate huge amounts of free work by users, which then become monetized by online sites like Google, Facebook, etc. Finance capital, which expanded at a dizzying pace during the past decade or two, depends on promises of future production and future profits to justify the value of bonds, stocks, derivatives, and the whole fictional mess of “financial instruments.” But capitalist production has long depended on acquiring free inputs—environmental, infrastructural, and reproductive—and in that way presages the supposedly cutting edge co-optation of unpaid labor via the precarious labor processes of online and immaterial production. Culture and finance both depend on the current form of capitalist exploitation, annexing unpaid inputs from any and all sources, and importantly, refusing to pay for the costs of producing or maintaining those inputs (whether the natural environment or the cultural environment of a rich artistic scene). As Seymour cleverly puts it: “Culture and finance are increasingly interchangeable; finance is aestheticized as its claims become absurdly fictitious; culture is reduced to finance as its fictions become absurdly monetized.”

He hits an important point when he brings in the kinds of activities that I wrote about in Nowtopia, but sharply underlining the common failure to target value itself as the problem. (I wrote about this extensively too, as the problem of cooptation when interesting projects that seem to escape the logic of wage-labor and commodification eventually get absorbed as they become small businesses and/or dependent on nonprofit grants.) Seymour claims the neo-avant-garde of the 1950s and after saw “a route to a more autonomous and egalitarian cultural and social existence, a way of dissolving the hierarchical structures of a bureaucratized mass society, [but] the pioneers of cybernetic and network culture generally failed to target the Ur-form of feedback, that is, the value form per se.” Touting the gift economy and the cooperative, liberatory advantages of freely chosen activities outside of wage-labor is one path towards a kind of escape, but only a temporary and geographically limited one so far. Crucially, the enthusiastic embrace of coops, collectives, free DIY projects, etc., without a critical understanding of the role of “free” in the restructuring of the global economy leaves one open to reinforcing some of the worst dynamics we originally set out to overturn.

“An ethos of self-limited and self-sustaining activity, freed from the hubris of modernist teleologies of growth, linked to a notion of ‘generosity,’ ‘gift economy,’ and ‘DIY’ emancipation may (still) seem appealing. Yet, however militant the refusal of instrumental reason, linear time, progression, etc., this ethos predominantly operates by bracketing out the dull compulsion of the value form. This leaves it hostage to the kind of reappropriation now being conducted by the capitalism of the Big Society.”

This reappropriation is probably a bit more starkly visible in Britain, where municipalities and art bureaucracies are everywhere coopting artists and the “new creatives” into their schemes for urban renewal. But it has been super clear too in the realm of biofuels, a push from below against petroleum oil as the exclusive fuel for engines, but then rapidly co-opted by big agribusiness, government subsidies for ethanol, and the oil industry itself. Still, on this side of the pond it’s more about subtraction than absorption. Seymour again: “Capitalism as an open system is increasingly dependent on the annexation of the ‘outside’ in all its forms, and where this outside is definitively assimilated it must be recreated endogenously by the subtraction of existing social reproduction.” Can shooting fare evaders be seen as a particularly harsh version of a ‘subtraction of existing social reproduction’? Maybe that’s a bit of a reach… but if options for survival in the interstices of this culture’s vast wealth are being squeezed and shut down, that is a version of eliminating existing channels of social reproduction.

The harshness of state violence has grown in the past decade. The Patriot Act and its invasive provisions for state surveillance have given enormous powers to the spook bureaucracies. The Drug War, recognized as an abject failure in terms of any of its ostensible goals, is actually maintained not to stop drugs but to keep them coming, and the many lucrative businesses that depend on them—from the actual drug cartels and their bankers, to the police and spy agencies, to the hardware manufacturers servicing the prison-industrial complex. Inmates went on hunger strike in the California prisons in early July, generating a certain amount of support, but mostly ignored in the mainstream press. The radical expansion of incarceration at any public cost shows no real signs of abating yet. The fiscal crisis is being used as a blunt weapon to further degrade the lives of those who already suffer the most; no discussion of bloated military, police, and prison budgets is allowed in the frenzy to cut spending, only the services that poor people depend on, and the workers who provide those services.

It’s a dark period, no doubt. But the sun is out, and it’s remarkably easy for many people to go on living as though none of the darkness on which their lives depend really existed. Declinist narratives that see the current global crisis as the stage from which the U.S. finally exits its post-WWII hegemonic role are no comfort when you consider how the destruction of a social commitment to general well-being has succeeded ideologically—but even more harshly, materially. That Obama is the enthusiastic author of the coming round of cuts and reductions in the social wage is no surprise. Imagine the wrath of African Americans if a white president was pushing these attacks! Obama is the perfect guy to carry out the neoliberal, structural adjustments in the United States, given the demobilized, depoliticized working and poorer classes, and the guilty paralysis that besets white pwogwessives when it’s time to combat the war-mongering, torturing policies of the administration, not to mention its brazen catering to the agenda as set by the ultra-right. We’re actually going to have to put up with the sickening spectacle of a year-long frenzy of liberal imploring, urging us to vote for Obama because of how awful it would be if a Republican won… really? How different would it be? Wars have been expanded, CIA torture and kidnapping continue apace, and the military budget grows and grows… And now there’s Obama’s enthusiastic support for attacking Social Security and Medicare… what Republican president could’ve gotten away with that?

The (un)funhouse mirror world of U.S. politics is well demonstrated in the emergence of the latest Alice-in-Wonderland Talking Point by the Republicans, when representative after representative appeared in the media last week talking about the ultra-rich with one term only: “job creators”!! I’ve railed against jobs before (see “Jobs Don’t Work!” in The Political Edge), so I was pleased when I came across a link to this essay “Work, Production and The Common: A Provocation” on a South African blog. One of the recurrent problems with attacking the tired leftist demands for “jobs” or “work” is the inevitable rejoinder by sanctimonious leftists: “You can only say that because you have money, you’re privileged, you’re not hungry… etc. etc.” Not far behind those kinds of assertions quickly comes the racist argument that “It’s racist to be against jobs, because people of color are the most unemployed…” or some variation on that theme.

I hope that these arguments appearing in the context of post-apartheid, neoliberal South Africa will give them more credibility with the U.S. leftists who are so quick to resort to their tired clichés and old 20th century paradigms. The essay begins by recounting how the hopes of South Africans for a better life after the overthrow of apartheid have gone unmet. Mbeki’s administration did little to redistribute wealth and certainly did nothing to meet popular demands for “decent work.” The Jacob Zuma government continues the African National Congress’ ongoing embrace of neoliberal capitalism, with its commitment to private ownership, capitalist development, and trickle-down economics. Here are some choice excerpts from the essay:

“Labor struggles have constantly reminded the country’s rulers of how democratisation is supposed to be not just a procedural and constitutional matter, but also the fulfillment of popular demands of redemption of work, which past racial domination turned into a largely oppressive reality but unions tried to rescue as a condition of solidarity and empowerment. Social movements have, finally, made the “dignity of work”, and even the “right to work” a central ethical-political component in their demands for redistribution and recognition…

 

“Once “job creation” becomes the pinnacle of emancipative imagination, it becomes easy for [employers, liberal reformers, and assorted free marketers] to argue that a bad job is better than no job at. In this way, the labor market is naturalised as an objective law of social advancement, redistributive claims become pathological symptoms of “dependency”, and social conflicts are threats to prosperity and the expansion of employment. As the definition of “decency” ceases thus to be a matter of political contestation, the subsequent, consequential step is to assert that it is up to market conditions and the characteristics of the job itself to determine how “decent” it is allowed to be…

 

“Confronted with this impressive discursive slide, where the dignity of work is upheld to reinforce the centrality of the labor market in determining the measure and reward of life, indeed the very meaning of being human, the left’s concerns with “decent work” have fallen quite short of a convincing alternative narrative or a radically oppositional recasting of desire. Having failed to contest the multitudes’ meanings and values on the terrain of work and production, traditional left forces have rather fallen back on the state as the ultimate guarantor of fairness, development, and decency. And from the state the left has received further injunctions to rely on employment, and employment only, for any meaningful social inclusion and security, with no other considerations attached as to the conditions and remunerations of work, or the measures that can at least limit a complete domination of employment over life…

 

“We cannot think of the global decline of the twentieth century socialist and nationalist left(s), themselves a major factor in the neoliberal hegemony of the past forty years, without questioning the ways in which they have idealised employment and unquestioningly associated it with progress. Within this broader devastation in the terrain of political power relations and public discourse, the left’s attachment to “decent jobs” only reveals a comprehensive failure of imagination, of which the acceptance by progressive forces of a subordinate role in a game of which capital is writing the rules is consequential…

 

“It is time to ask, is “decent work” still a valid tool to criticise capitalism and oppose the disciplining of multitudes by market forces? Or is it time to finally realise that today employment-based claims and identity lead not to emancipation, but to renewed subjugation, repression, and reaction? Should we start placing liberation from, and not through capitalist work at the core of new languages and grammars of politics, which uncompromisingly break with the legacy of the twentieth century left(s)?”

Yes! Let’s get on with it! And not to turn to the right, or the miserable chimera of the ‘center’ as endlessly trumpted by (the often very funny) Jon Stewart. Who are the mysterious “centrist” voters who now find themselves between the palpable, frothing insanity of the ultra-Right and the head-in-the-sand, business-as-usual Right, where all discussion of human liberation and social transformation are dismissed out of hand as the ravings of unrealistic loonies? Why is the Left in the U.S. so completely irrelevant and incapable of articulating anything that actually addresses the multiple crises of economy, ecology and social anomie? I’d say its fixation on “Jobs” is one of the main reasons.

Let’s end today with a last paragraph from The Tribe of Moles in South Africa:

“…another question: does the irrelevance of employment to a politics of liberation mean that production-related struggles are no longer worth fighting for? Our response is an emphatic “no”, but on condition of profoundly redefining what we mean by “production”. In other words, “production-related” can no longer simply mean “workplace-based”. Workplace struggles are, for sure, still important in affirming the autonomy of life and the common from the dictates of the market, for example through demands for wages and benefits that are impossible to meet in terms of productivity, therefore subverting wage labor from within. But struggles for production especially imply for us the production of social relations and political possibilities that emanate from the power of the common as it manifests itself across the social and the everyday. They hint, in other words, at the production of subjectivity and the refusal of the modalities of subjection along which capital and government want to align conducts and values. We are referring here not only to subjectivities premised on waged employment and the consumption of commodities but also to their correlates in the institutional sphere: liberal democracy and the idea of the individual rooted in property and market relations as the only legitimate carrier of socio-political agency.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a guest post from my good friend Eddie Yuen, who was in Cancun for the COP-16 Climate Conference… it follows on my extensive coverage a year ago from Copenhagen, so I wanted to keep it going, even if I wasn’t there and didn’t follow it so closely this year… thanks Eddie!

Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and rendered extinct 70% of all life on Earth. In December of 2010 in Cancun, a mere geological stone’s throw from the Chicxulub crater that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, a conclave of political and corporate leaders presided over a conference that failed to slow down the next great extinction event on this planet.

But for this geographic coincidence it’s unlikely that this conference will be remembered as anything more than another tedious and predictable step towards a future of managed climate chaos and accelerated global enclosures. Cancun is most significant, though, not as the scene of a crime but as a laboratory of climate apartheid.  Whatever fearsome predation the Yucatan of the late Cretaceous may have harbored, the Cancun of the early Anthropocene is the model of a
naturalized social order even redder in tooth and claw.

Even to use the language of “climate talks” is like speaking of the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. As linguist Noam Chomsky said years ago, the mere utterance of this phrase validates the discourse that there is such a process. This particular conference, rightfully overshadowed by the Wikileaks saga, was both anti-climactic and anti-climatic, in the words of Laura Carlson, director of the American Policy Program in Mexico City. The Indigenous Environmental Network summed it up nicely:  “The Cancun Agreements are not the result of an informed and open consensus process, but the consequence of an ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord during the months leading up to the COP-16 talks”.

Hidden in the dismal wonkery of the summit, however, an important shift has taken place. The Economist of Nov 25th, 2010 pronounced the end of any effort by states to seriously seek to lower emissions. We are in a post mitigation world now, and elite effort will focus on adaptation. Some analysts estimate that the current ratio of prevention to adaptation in terms of funds spent is about 80 to 20, and this will likely be reversed.  But what kind of adaptation to climate change are we talking about?  Cancun in this regard is the perfect site for this conference, as it presents a vision of the future that elites are very comfortable with. Exclusion zones of concrete walled leisure, ringed by layered barricades and social apartheid. Like Dubai or Beverly Hills, its obvious who is a worker and who a consumer, and enough of the workers are security guards to ensure that “safety” and property will always be respected. Outside kilometer zero, in the city of 700,000, the highest suicide rates in Mexico. Inside the Hotel Zone, debt ridden Americans lounging on eroding beaches are convincing themselves that they’re having a good time.

The elites like this model, but it’s fragility is evident. Cancun itself can only take so many more category 5 hurricanes before it will be retired like Mazatlan or Atlantic City. When this happens, new frontiers of commodified leisure, whether in Colombia, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, will be developed, but even so the economic and political costs of the 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise that the world leaders have deemed acceptable are staggering.

How can we understand the utter failure of the leaders of the world’s nation states, with the sole exception of Bolivia, to make even a perfunctory effort to assuage the crisis? It’s certainly not climate denialism, as few if any countries are host to a political entity such as the US Republican Party. On the contrary, global elites know full well what is happening. China and many other Asian countries, where 9 of the 10 most at-risk cities are located, are run by engineers and
technocrats. Can it be attributed primarily to a lack of vision – a systemic inability to look beyond electoral cycles and quarterly profit reports, something that liberal, communist and even fascist elites all seemed able to do not so many decades ago? Is it due primarily to a lack of cohesion amongst global elites resulting from the vacuum caused by the US’s precipitous fall from hegemonic status? Or is it the failure of the boosters of green capitalism to pitch a plausible new bubble opportunity to global finance capital? Whatever the combination of these factors, there is a “growing acceptance”, as The Economist says, “that the effort to avert serious climate change has run out of steam”.

As insane as this is, it’s not hard to see why Northern elites are warming to the idea of managed climate change. After all, they know that in this game of “lifeboat ethics”, we’re not all in the same boat. As Mike Davis has eloquently described, the existing inequalities between North and South will be exacerbated by temperature rise – and ideologically “naturalized” in the process.

The consolidation of this approach is perfectly symbolized by the city of Cancun. A concrete blight on the “Mayan Riviera”, chosen by computer under the Echeverria regime that presided over the massacre of Tlatelolco plaza in 1968, Cancun boasts the most anti-democratic geography for a global summit since the WTO meeting in Qatar. From their orbit in the Moon Palace, state delegates, corporate lobbyists and credulous journalists were free to discuss the  finer points of carbon markets and neo-liberal nature without even a mention of the alternative solutions proposed in the Cochabamba Accord from earlier in the year.

The “acceptable” level of sacrifice allowed for by the Cancun agreement is breathtaking even by the standards of global capitalism. These include the predictable starvation and displacement of millions, the obliteration of entire eco-systems such as coral reefs from the planet, the desertification of the Amazon, the disappearance of the glacial fed rivers of Asia and South America, the extinction of up to 35% of global species, and the advent of the “sea of slime”, to name a few. We are enjoined, however, by governments, media and many environmental groups, to hail the signs of progress at Cancun, and to engage in the conceit that these summits are where serious people must come to hammer out policy. But is it really better that climate talks are now on “lifeline” rather than “zombie” mode if questions of climate debt are off the table and the collapse of biodiveristy is seen only as an “accounting” problem?

In what may ultimately be a positive sign, however, the dedicated social movement participants who did make the journey to the gates of Cancun were not discouraged either by the tedium inside or the barricades outside. The spectacle of the expulsion from the Moon Palace of dissenting and indigenous voices, as documented by Democracy Now!, says all we need to know about the legitimacy of the conference.

Many activists were disappointed with the street level climate movement after Copenhagen, but there were no expectations for a major mobilization this time around. Instead, campaigners, many from the vibrant social movements of Mexico, understood that life, and politics, is elsewhere. Issues such as the commodification of nature, new rounds of enclosures justified by REDD, and climate apartheid are crucial, but will only truly be challenged and acted upon outside of the framework of “climate talks”. The facts on the ground, and in the atmosphere and oceans, will ensure that there will be climate movements in the next century. These may not take the form that many expected before Copenhagen, but the coming century of global defrosting will be nothing if not surprising.
Eddie Yuen teaches in the Urban Studies Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the co-editor, with George Katsiaficas and Daniel Burton-Rose, of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (Soft Skull Press).

References:

The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/17575027?story_id=17575027

Indigenous Environmental Network
http://redroadcancun.com/?p=1700

three good articles:

http://www.counterpunch.org/carlsen12092010.html

http://ecosocialismcanada.blogspot.com/2010/12/dispatch-from-cancun-de veloping.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/bond12132010.html

and a great one from last year:

http://www.countercurrents.org/davis290110.htm

Video from Center for Biological Diversity:

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/polar_bear/starving _bears_video.html

Interview on Global Defrosting with Colin Duncan on Against the Grain

http://ia700104.us.archive.org/12/items/ES080523/ES_080523_Show_LoFi.m p3

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

I was so happy when tropical rains began falling on us.

Ironically, we had come to the most fecund place on earth, facing a world economy based on a logic—endless growth–that has generated one of the greatest species extinction pulses in the history of the planet. Could we explore new ways of working and living that could ensure a quality of life for all species, without addressing the elephant in the room, the economic system based on perpetual growth? Apparently that was the hope, since few of the participants took on that larger question (notably, the two economists Enrique Leff and Hugo Penteado, as well as yours truly, DID try to attack dysfunctional economic thought). Opposing capitalism and growth wasn’t the stated purpose of our gathering, to be sure. TED is an organization rooted in the quasi-libertarian high-tech boom that started with the personal computer and accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s, and as such, seems to be a self-selecting culture of a subsection of the global elite that favors entrepreneurialism as the answer for the world’s problems, including the topic of this gathering in the Amazon.

Hugo Penteado's chart put it to economics: what is dependent on what exactly?

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and it’s a very specific brand that has been spreading itself globally with enormous success, especially during the past 8 years (it actually started back in the 1980s). The x after TEDx indicates that it is an independently organized event, licensing the format and reputation of the main TED organization, which is centered in the U.S. Former WIRED magazine publisher Chris Anderson took the helm of it in the early 2000s and absorbed it within his not-for-profit foundation. Their motto is “ideas worth spreading,” and you can find hundreds of their Talks online, free to watch, and many are indeed brilliant. That said, you won’t hear a lot anti-capitalist rhetoric or thinking at a TED conference. In general, they are fellow travellers of Stewart Brand and his early 1970s Whole Earth Catalog, followed by the new computer culture that accelerated in the 1980s after the emergence of the personal computer. Ideologically they share a belief that the gray bureaucracies of government and old-school corporate giants are the problem (on their website they advertise that the TED Talks are “untainted by corporate influence”), but the answer lies in independent entrepreneurialism rather than in any kind of social or collective action. Brilliant investors and inventors will continually produce technological breakthroughs that will solve the problems humanity and the planet face. (Fred Turner’s fantastic history of this is in “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Milleniallism”—highly recommended!)

This TEDx event drank deeply from this long-running river of self-congratulatory entrepreneurialism. Let’s face it, the past thirty years has been a long nightmare (for people like me) of triumphant business ideology, and the folks at WIRED magazine, the Long Now Foundation (Brand and Kevin Kelley’s thinktank) and other quasi-libertarian tech culture types have been an important wing of that, complementing the straight-forward glorification of wealth and greed as pushed by Reagan, Bush, Wall Street, et al.

I saved a grouping of TEDx speakers for my last entry. These contributors include some of the people I made great friends with, but also represent the cutting edge of modern capitalism, in terms of their use of games, business, participation, and crowd-sourcing. I’ve been saying for the past couple of years, “better is better than worse,” and many of the efforts described here are bettering things in their own ways. But I’m interested in the way they also begin a process of renovating capitalism, of advancing this crazy, exploitative system’s capacity to capture new activities, new ways of thinking, and channel them back into the typical forms of products and commodities, markets, wage-labor, and monetary relations.

Rafael Kenski gave a presentation that revolved around the Portuguese word “Divertaçao,” which is usually translated as “fun.” He described a variety of multimedia projects and games, highlighting the successful ones for their ability to attract participants by being fun to use. In some basic way this parallels my own political thinking for the past years: that a politics of sacrifice and suffering is a dead-end. We need a political practice that is enjoyable in itself, and creates a contagious attraction through the pleasure of participation. Interestingly, this is what a lot of game-designers are trying to do too, but not to overthrow capitalism, but to bind us more tightly to it.

Paul Bennett is a congenial fellow who I got to talk to a lot. He’s from London, and is the creative director for IDEO, a multinational design consultancy with clients everywhere, including Brazil. He gave a talk that used the Amazon as a design metaphor, and encouraged us to seek the small idea that can become large. He showed slides of daily improvisations by Brazilians that he saw as great models for product design, and in particular gave high  marks to his client, the flip-flop and bag maker Havaianas (and he gave me a pair later too!)

Paul Bennett of IDEO talking about Brazilian design.

The hairs on my neck were standing up through a lot of Paul’s presentation, as he matter-of-factly described the launch of the OpenIDEO platform. It’s a separate website from their main corporate home, and offers for free a human-centered product design guidebook, targeted at NGOs and innovators in the Global South. It’s a powerful combination. On one hand, you take the latest in design process technology and open it up for free to anyone. Then you solicit ideas from the world (“What global challenge do you think innovation leaders should work to solve right now?” and “How can today’s technology address the environmental challenges we’re all facing?” are current queries on OpenIDEO). Bennett described a recent successful effort that gathered more than 500 ideas from submissions, which were eventually whittled down to 17 good ones, most of which are now being test-marketed and prototyped in various markets around the world. He didn’t describe the licensing procedures, the intellectual property agreements or waivers that one has to sign off on to get the IDEO push, nor how potential profits would be divided. Even if they offer very generous terms to the idea originators, it’s still a fantastic deal for IDEO, gaining huge attention, participation, and a river of ideas from unpaid world citizens.

I recognized it immediately in the same light as I recently wrote about the Levi’s campaign here on my blog too, an attempt to capture the enormous creativity and wealth being generated in urban environments but often remaining outside of the commodity circuit. My effort in Nowtopia was to describe a growing trend of refusing the logic of business, of working very hard precisely when we’re NOT at our stupid jobs, and exceeding the narrow logic of being “mere workers” when we’re doing it. Negri and Hardt also write about capitalism’s difficulties in measuring or capturing these new forms of wealth creation in their latest volume Commonwealth. And here in the Amazon we had a representative of the one of the world’s more successful product design corporations describing how they are co-opting that wide world of creative wealth, but framing it as a nearly philanthropic activity of their own, giving away their professional know-how for the good of the world.

The autorickshaw challenge.

Sustainable Dance Floor!

Stef Van Dongen is a contagiously enthusiastic young entrepreneur. He started a company called Enviu and sees himself as rooted in the “co-creation economy.” In fact his firm has been involved in some interesting projects. “We believe in the economy of  the crowd!” he declared. One project he shared that got a warm reception was the “Sustainable Dance Club” which consists of dance floor built on electric sensors that generate electricity as the dancers bounce up and down on the floor. Their slogan for this project is “People, Planet, Party!” and you can imagine how easy a sell that is among the global dance club culture. Facing a greater challenge, they launched a project to change the noisy, polluting technology of the ubiquitous autorickshaws (TukTuks) that fill the cities of Asia. They launched a “Hybrid TukTuk Battle” among a half dozen design faculties on campuses in India and Holland and after the dust settled two winners emerged, one with the 2-stroke engine and another for the 4-stroke engine. A partnership was established between Enviu and an Indian entrepreneur, leading to the founding of SocioEnviro, whose goals are stated on the Enviu website:

SocioEnviro has developed a business model around three pillars: financial services, advertising and clean technology. By offering fair loans and advertising income to rickshaw drivers, we aim to create better and more sustainable income for the drivers. The installing of clean technology will further increase the income potential and also decrease the environmental footprint of the rickshaw eco-system.

The new hybrid TukTuks.

So the Indian entrepreneur and our friends at Enviu will be developing new cleaner vehicles along with a more aggressive system of small business loans and advertising, all of which is promised to improve the lives of the poor rickshaw drivers, as well as reducing CO2 emissions and providing cleaner city air. Who could complain? Well, me for one. Because an idea like this could have been given away to the drivers in combination with encouragement to form cooperatives and collectives, depriving the middlemen of an endless stream of profits from interest payments and advertising revenues (only a fraction of which will go to the drivers under this system). The drivers could have been given a path towards complete autonomy and relative self-sufficiency but instead, this green entrepreneurialism seems committed to creating new forms of dependency and exploitation. Maybe I’m wrong but that’s what it sounds like.

Zoe Melo

Zoe Melo used to be a top model in the 1980s and lived life in the proverbial fast lane for a couple of decades. Now she’s older and wiser, and has long since abandoned that crazy life. I got to know her a bit in the Amazon and we became friends. Since she abandoned her alienated life as a model, she has become a product designer and gallery owner. After ten years away from her native country Brazil, living in Los Angeles, she is now returning to open a branch of her product design firm in Sao Paulo. She specializes in using sustainable materials, local and healthy sources, and is quick to state her aversion to exploiting nature or other people. But she is also a very typical modern entrepreneur, employing subcontractors to make products for clients. From her point of view, she respects their independence, and wouldn’t want to put them into a wage-labor relationship where she’s the boss and they’re her employee. But the so-called independence of the subcontractor is a fake independence anyway. In Italy and France and some parts of the U.S. and the UK, this model is better known as precarity. No one has any guarantee of work, but everyone must be continually available to work. Moreover, each individual has to constantly upgrade and renovate their skills as to be more employable when potential contractors do come around. The insecurity and lack of stability is a given, but there is no support either for the range of additional costs to reproduce labor, from medical and dental to the taxes that support the unemployment, disability and other “safety net” systems. No doubt Zoe herself suffers the same predicament, wondering where the next revenue will come from, watching the ebb and flow of projects and overheads with no certainty that she’ll come out in the black or sink into the red. But for sure, this is no model of personal and social emancipation, except in the narrowest capitalist sense of being free to sell (or not) your labor to whomever you choose in the open market. (I am in a similar boat in San Francisco as a small prepress book and magazine designer, never sure if my clients will stay in business or if I will get extra work or no work.)

Biologist and author Joan Roughgarden is now retired in Hawaii, but she ran for office in 2000 in the first district elections for San Francisco supervisor since the 1970s. After attending her first gay pride march in 1998 her resolve to change from Jonathan to Joan was strengthened and soon she carried out her desire to transition from male to female. She presented a compelling critique of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, an argument she’s developed more fully in her book “Evolution’s Rainbow.” She shows how Darwin’s assertion, parroted ever since, that males are “passionate” and females “coy” is patently false, and that there is an incredible diversity of roles, behaviors, and gender realities in the animal kingdom, not to mention that homosexual behavior is extremely common among many species. But I was disappointed when she concluded her argument by using microeconomic categories of “demand curves” and “real prices” to describe how baby birds differentiate themselves to their parents and get fed. I doubt Joan is really committed to those metaphors, neo-social Darwinian as they are, but it’s a commentary on how hegemonic neoliberal economics is in this time that a radical contrarian biologist who is also a transsexual would use such concepts to bolster her own arguments.

Aaron Koblin is from San Francisco and he’s an engaging fellow, an artist and computerist. He devised the famous software that showed daily airplane flights across North America as a series of flashing beams of light on a dark continent. He described his project of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to have thousands of people do small things as part of something much larger, but without knowing anything about what they were actually contributing to. To me it sounded exactly like the labor process of the Department of Defense, or even object-oriented programming, where dozens to thousands of skilled technical workers do finite tasks that satisfy some part of their desire to solve problems, but they never really know if they’re designing nuclear bombs, drone missile navigational systems, or what. Aaron’s projects are quite benign compared to that, at least so far! He offered 2 cents to anyone who would send him an original line drawing of a sheep facing left. He received thousands of them. Later he packaged them in collections of hundreds and sold them for $20 a block, earning a big profit and incurring the wrath of some of the original contributors. For him it was primarily an art project, a demonstration of the possibilities of a broad crowd-sourced creative process. Later he did another project having thousands of people collaboratively draw a forged $100 bill, which later everyone was free to download and use as they saw fit.

These kinds of projects make me uncomfortable. I don’t like the idea of a master entrepreneur hiring basically anonymous, brainless labor to do narrow tasks for teensy bits of money, and then use the results for any purpose. The methodology is bothersome, and based on what Aaron showed, the results don’t do much for me either. I suppose you could strike great subversive blow to the status quo, at least in theory, but there was no evidence of any such purpose lurking in the middle of the thousands of sheep or squiggles that became the $100 bill. Mostly it seems to reinforce the kind of alienated labor that we’ve been doing all along, and worse, it establishes the notion that you’ll work for fractions of money so infinitesimal that any notion of a minimum wage is forgotten.

Demos Helsinki promoting a "Superpower of Happiness" in Brazil!

Simo and Roope, the guys from Demos Helsinki, had come even a longer way than I did. Their consultancy works on quality of life issues with a particular focus on trying to understand happiness. Coming for a long-established social democracy in which the basics of life are guaranteed to all, from clean water and good housing, education, and medical care, they realized their prescription for happiness might be a bit out of place. But they went ahead and gave it a shot anyway, and it was quite amusing when they gave a rousing pitch for Brazil to become a “Superpower of Happiness” especially considering that Finland, along with Sweden and Norway, is considered among the more depressed countries in the world! I liked their argument though it is mostly couched in terms of what policy changes can be made at the governance level: e.g. more free time, longer vacations, shorter workdays, support for bicycling vs. private cars, more childcare support, more time off to raise children and care for elderly, etc. Why not? But coming from the land of Nokia, it seems a long way to the Brazilian Amazon, and their prescriptions might have universal application if we were able to see the planet more universally in terms of distribution of wealth, resources, technologies, etc.

Lastly, Edgard Gouveia, Jr. was easily the most charismatic guy I met at TEDx Amazonia. He’s about 6’5” with his big afro, and has one of the most beautiful smiles you’ll ever see. He is on fire with warmth and creative ideas and it only took him about 15 seconds to get the audience on their feet when he took the stage. A minute later we were all tied in pretzels trying to keep in contact with the people on either side of us with our left and right hands, as well as our left and right feet, and then he said we had to tip our head to reach yet another person!

Edgard got all of us out of our seats...

He got everyone laughing and then launched into his own creative use of game-playing applied to practical dramas. His best example was the massive flooding that afflicted southern Brazil a year ago, and how it had left the region under water and paralyzed for weeks. He and his colleagues devised some games to get the locals to start taking matters into their own hands, and before too long a whole series of challenges were being pursued by teams in many of the submerged areas, often with the younger teenagers taking the lead. “Build a bridge over this creek, but you can’t use any money and must get all the materials and labor donated. You have 3 days.” And the job would be done in 1 day! He was passionate about bringing people together in practical projects, but using online social networks and gaming metaphors to promote an activist and engaged population. I was really impressed and quickly came to share his excitement, but the more I thought about it later, the more skeptical I grew. And then a few days ago someone pointed me to the Gamepocalypse Talk by Jessie Schell, which plays the logic out to its logical (capitalist nightmare) conclusion. This is not to say that Edgard is trying to generate a world of game-playing to serve the needs of capitalist marketers, but that his use of it and enthusiastic adoption is probably not going to find it easy to avoid co-optation by the larger society’s rush to the same kinds of ideas.

Human ecological reinvention depends on adapting better to natural systems, but the latest business schemes to capture the value of all these experiments and keep them safely within the logic of commodities and privatized resources undermine the deeper transformation, don’t they? Is planetary and human survival only possible if we proceed through price signals and market relationships (or games) or can we reinvent a democracy that represents our best interests but also those of all species, as this conference set out to do? Heady questions to be sure.

I hope I haven’t written too harshly about people I just spent a lovely time with. I want to separate genuine human affection and an all around respect for everyone I met, from my disdain for some of the assumptions embedded in some of their Talks. In other words, I hope my new friends from this event will read what I write as comradely criticism, rather than a personal attack on anyone. I don’t doubt anyone’s good intentions and only want to challenge the comfort zone so many appeared to have with business models as the appropriate way to organize human and planetary life.

Farewell for now friends!