I want to make sure that readers know about an upcoming event I’ve been helping to put together and organize. Chris Spannos of ZNet will be discussing visionary alternatives to social oppression, and strategies and opportunities for making change.
Check out the book Real Utopia: Participatory Society in the 21st Century edited by Chris Spannos (AK Press 2008)
“Real Utopia: What’s Possible, What’s Necessary & What’s Happening”
At The Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership
Thursday, August 26th, 2010
3061 Field Street, Detroit, MI
6:30PM – 8:30
Chris Spannos discusses vision and strategy for a participatory society. Hosted by the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership (http://www.boggscenter.org/) and The Organization for a Free Society (http://www.afreesociety.org/).
The declaration that “another world is possible” poses the difficult task of envisioning what that world might look like. Grappling with this issue is urgently needed to, not only convince ours …elves that we can win, but to reach out to others with a feasible alternative that is both real and stretches the imagination. Such vision should avoid blueprints but offer inspiration. It should be something that everyone can share, yet make their own. Chris Spannos presents the vision for a Participatory Society that delivers classlessness, self-management, autonomy, solidarity, and mutual-aid for all spheres of societal life, while also drawing connections to this vision’s roots in past and present social struggles and ideas.
Join us Thursday, August 26th at 6:30PM at the Boggs Center for Community Leadership at 3061 Field Street, Detroit, MI.
Chris Spannos is fulltime staff at ZNet. He is editor of the book Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century (AK Press, 2008), and the forthcoming, with co-editor Mandisi Majavu from South Africa, Hope, Reason, & Revolution: Debates and Exchanges with Michael Albert (AK Press).
For questions contact Aaron Petcoff from the Organization for a Free Society at apetcoff@wayne.edu, or Rich Feldman at the Boggs Center for Community Leadership at richardfeldman60@gmail.com.
My flight leaves at 2AM from the airport in Barranquilla. That is exactly the kind of thing people mean when they say, “you get what you pay for.” It’s 6:30PM right now and everybody else from my Colombian delegation has either left for the airport or gone on their own independent adventura Colombiana. Meanwhile, I’m stuck at the Hotel Genova — which isn’t bad at all, they have great food and everybody’s super nice (especially Pablo the Canadian). I’d walk around, but I was told it’s not that’s not such a great idea in this part of Barranquilla. I’m not complaining though. I mean, if I have to wait anywhere it might as well be in the Caribbean.
Our delegation set out on the 8th to meet with various communities affected by U.S. corporations, to hear their stories, and bring their stories back to the United States, and press for policy changes and just compensation for damages that have been caused. The delegation ended yesterday, where we started the day in Santa Marta grabbing breakfast and reflecting on our experience. Each of the dozen-or-so members went off on their own to think about what we had seen in the campos along the Colombian coast. I went off to the beach and bought some kitsch for my roommates. Then I bought a beer, walked out along the break wall and put my feet in the water to stare out at the mountains and the sea. I decompressed and let the past ten days wash over me.
The view of the Carribean from a beach in Santa Marta.
One moment hit me particularly hard. We had met with an organizer from a campo called Ciénega (literally “swamp”). Ciénega is historically notable as the location of the matanza de las bananeras (or Banana Massacre). Gabriel Garcia Marquez claims in 100 Years of Solitude that as many as 3,000 workers of the United Fruit Company were killed in this attack by the Colombian military in 1928. The army was called in by the United Fruit Company to put down a month long strike. Today a statue marks the location of the massacre. The organizer we were with actually works for something called the December 6th Foundation, so named to commemorate the day of the massacre and revitalize the institutional memory of the people of Ciénega.
We went there to meet with displaced fishing community. The people used to have comfortable, albeit poor, lives in towns not too far away from where they are now, but they were forced out of those lives by armed paramilitary groups years before. Many of the armed groups were funded by American companies, the legacies of United Fruit Company, such as Dole and Chiquita Bananas. As our group departed our bus to enter the neighborhood, a small, slender girl, probably younger than ten years old asked us for food. A calm light rain grew as we started to come down as we huddled with community members under a small roofed area, until it began to storm. The swamp started to flow over and take over the neighborhood until the water grew up to our ankles. The same girl that was begging for food bent over and picked a small baby crab off my ankle. Meanwhile, the people of the community told us their story.
A girl living in the displaced community holds up a small baby crab.
Many had been displaced by violence, others had been displaced by companies moving in to use the people’s waterways. People who used to gather tons of fish from rivers and the sea, now are forced in tiny boats to go out unsafe distances, to gather small fish that can hardly feed one family member. Worst of all, coal companies like Drummond, have been contaminating the Colombian coast with coal dust that falls from their transportation systems into the sea. Adding insult to injury, many of the fish that people are able to get from the sea are contaminated with coal dust! This wasn’t a one time complaint, almost every community we met that was affected by Drummond’s operations had brought this complaint up.
As I reflected on the madness and confusion of hearing and seeing displaced people scrambling to tell their stories while rain came down and brought water up to our ankles, I realized how remarkable it is that the people here had not yet broken apart, sought their own way out, but instead, against almost all odds, had stuck together as a community to solve their problem. And that gives me hope.
Displaced persons living in Ciénega.
Moreover, I realized the responsibility that we as American citizens have to the people of these communities. Colombia is the third greatest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world, next to Israel and Egypt, and has been the primary Latin American subject of American corporate intervention and influence for over a century. Almost 80% of the revenue generated from one of Colombia’s largest industries, bananas, go straight to the United States and Europe. U.S. companies have been funding paramilitary violence (the chief source of murder and violence in Colombia, by leaps and bounds over left-wing guerillas) for decades, seeking to protect their own interests in profit and resource extraction over the welfare and safety of their workers and stakeholders. These corporations sell us our energy, our fruits and more, at an enormous cost to the people of Colombia.
Let me make something clear though, I’m not saying that we should feel necessarily guilty for being on the upper-hand side of that relationship. Guilt is a self-righteous, unconstructive, hopeless response to something that warrants action and solidarity. Being a sap and a mope doesn’t do anything for the victims of U.S. backed violence and imperialism. As the benefactors of an unjust system of privilege and oppression, we are responsible for fighting for a new, just, ecologically sound system that grants everyone, everything they need to realize their full potential.
I plan on writing a lot more about my experience here, as well as giving public presentations and more, so keep your eyes and ears open for that. I’ll definitely be posting about that on my blog and the Book (where you can find more of my pictures from Colombia) and Twitter, and so on. I’d like to end this post by clarifying that I totally recognize that I’m leaving a lot of holes open here (what’s “fighting for a new system” and so on mean, etc.) This isn’t by any stretch meant to be a comprehensive analysis of my experience here. Just a short post about something I had thought about during my time here.
Well, writing this just about ate up all my time (I went for a swim, ate some dinner and read a little in between starting to write this post and now). I’m gonna head out to the airport in a bit.
Until next time,
UPDATE: I hate Spirit Airlines. They almost didn’t take my luggage on the flight because of the stupid baggage check charge. My bank is blocking my card, presumably because I’m in another country. So I was about to leave the bags here, in Colombia, and have them sent to my house until this profoundly kind couple actually gave me the $30 to check my bags! How awesome is the kindness of strangers!
Ending Oil Addiction Means Confronting the System!
Worker cleaning up oil from the Kalamazoo River yesterday.
As if the troubles facing the Gulf region weren’t enough to totally discredit the whole oil industry, the news came in late yesterday that a burst pipeline has spewed over 800,000 gallons of crude oil into a creek that feeds the Kalamazoo River in Kalamazoo, Michigan (the state I live in). And if that weren’t already disturbing enough, than maybe the fact that a second oil rig burst into flames yesterday in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, right on the heels of finally plugging the BP leak, will. Somebody’s out to ruin your day (allow me to clarify that I’m just the messenger).
The BP oil spill tragedy was always less about BP, than it actually was about oil addiction, period — and I think that this shows that. Until we end this systemic addiction to oil, fossil fuels, and all dirty industry in general, than these types of tragedies will occur — it’s inherent in the practice. It’s pathological.
Breaking that oil addiction particularly means addressing the systemic nature of the addiction — confronting those institutions in our society that are maintaining that addiction, forcing them to change their behavior in the short- and medium-term, and then replacing them in the long-term with new institutions constructed around the values we seek (i.e., new sustainable industry, new methods of pricing goods and services that account for ecological and social costs and benefits, etc). This means moving people beyond “green living” and into “green activism” and organizing.
A friend the other day pointed me toward a book that opens with that notion in mind. Mike Davis, author of Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism, says:
“Here’s the awful truth: even if every person, every automobile, and every factory suddenly emitted zero emissions, the earth would still be headed, head first and at full speed, toward total disaster for one major reason. The military produces enough greenhouse gases, by itself, to place the entire globe, with all its inhabitants large and small, in the most immanent danger of extinction.”
The military in particular is just one example, albeit a crucial one. There is a strong desire in this country to end our country’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and also a strong desire to prevent catastrophic climate change, and the two are clearly related in a number direct ways. For just two examples: The U.S. military is the biggest consumer of oil in the world, and many blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan squarely on U.S. oil addiction.
Our movements for environmental and social justice become more powerful as our interconnections become deeper — the more we cooperate and recognize that we have common goals and common enemies. And I say “enemies” because a system that allows somebody to dump millions of barrels of crude into the ocean and than pays them millions of dollars a year for doing that very thing, is definitely my enemy.
Over the weekend I came across this post over at Cracked.com called “Six Most Statistically Full of Shit Professions,” which included stoke market experts, wine tasters, and criminal profilers. The article is pretty self-explanatory. The real point that I bring it up, is to say that while I was reading this article, I began to think about how much people with these so-called “full of shit professions” get paid to be, well, full of shit, especially compared to people who do things that aren’t full of shit – educators, airline pilots and mechanics, autoworkers and so on.
People who spend all day on the golf course “networking,” tasting wine, or even, just hypothetically saying, plundering the Gulf Coast and committing one of the worst violations of the natural world in the modern era, almost always, as a rule, make vastly greater incomes than those people who have to bear the most dull, labor intensive jobs.
But why? This goes against everything we were taught about making it in America at least, and at most goes against the very values upon which we’re many of us were raised to think about a just society. That if you put your nose to the grindstone, break a sweat, and work hard, you’ll get what you need. Now more than ever, it seems to be the inverse is true. Almost any economist will tell you that real wages have held steady for almost over a decade now, while the wealthiest have gotten even wealthier. The harder you work, the less you get paid; and the less physically intensive, more exciting jobs, typically earn more.
So people aren’t actually paid for the work they do (I’m not telling any secrets here), but instead get paid, based on their relationship to decision-making and to production. In other words, people are rewarded for their bargaining power — That’s why Tony Hayward can basically destroy the entire Gulf of Mexico and leave BP with an almost $1,000,000-a-year pension, instead of having to pay reparations and being sent to prison. Or why bank executives can basically rob the country blind, and throw literally hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and rob the country blind, than pay themselves decadent bonus packages. Of course, if you went out and committed a crime that caused even a sliver-of-a-fraction of that kind of destruction you’d be hauled off to a prison. The reason that Tony Hayward, bank executives, and others people with “full of shit professions,” can get away with this is that they have more bargaining power, because they control the right property (these people are called capitalists), or they control special knowledge and access to decision making (these people are called “coordinators”).
Working people on the bottom of the ladder get paid less because, by themselves, they have less to bargain with. Some individual workers have been able to gain more by increasing their bargaining position by gaining special experience, knowledge and so on, but this is harder and harder to do nowadays, with skyrocketing costs of living and education. However, historically workers have increased their gains by organizing together and forming unions which pressured employers to increase people’s wages, benefits, improve working conditions and even given workers real power in the workplace to make decisions collectively.
The class of people in the middle, coordinators, who control specialized knowledge and monopolize empowering tasks, have also formed organizations to increase their own position for bargaining, like professional organizations, for example, that have given coordinators a secure hold on certain policy, and so forth.
This whole ordeal is not a matter which can be simply solved by changes in government policy, or appealing to the right politicians (although there are policies that could be put in place to curb this: steep, progressive income taxes; wealth caps and such). It is a fundamental component of the way capitalism works. The goal of capitalism and the free-market is to grow endlessly (regardless of ecological or moral limits), and it is set up to funnel that growth into the fewest, most privileged hands, at the top.
So what’s the alternative? We can push for reforms that ensure more just rewards for our work, but unless we change the system, our economy will never live up to the notion that for so many, unfortunately, falsely defines capitalism and America: that you can make it in this country with hard work and a readiness to make sacrafices. We need to change the system, to one that is built around economic justice at the core, so that people are no longer rewarded for coming from the right family, or winning the genetic lottery, but earn an income based their work and sacrifice.
RIP Harvey Pekar
I think comedian Patton Oswalt said it well on Twitter when he said that there’s “a little less splendor today,” with the news that comic writer Harvey Pekar of American Splendor fame passed this morning.
Pekar was a real working class hero, making most of his living as a filing clerk while writing mostly autobiographically about his life, his struggle with various illnesses and more. In addition to this writing though, he also helped write two graphic novels chronicling the experiences of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Students for a Democratic Society (both co-authored with the educator Paul Bhule). In addition to these he also created a graphic adaptation of Studs Terkel’s classic Working.
His work as a comic book writer brought him to the national stage several times, most notably on Late Night With David Letterman. Here are two classic appearances where Harvey tries to protest General Electric (NBC’s owner):
And finally, who could forget this classic moment from the biopic American Splendor?
Of course Harvey points out to Toby later in the movie that those people in Nerds aren’t the same kinda nerd Toby is:
“It’s an entertaining flick and all, and I can see why you like it, Toby. But those people on the screen ain’t even supposed to be you. They’re college students … who live with their parents in big houses in the suburbs. They’re gonna get degrees, get good jobs, and they’re gonna stop being nerds! … The guys in that movie are not 28 year-old file clerks who live with their grandmothers in an ethnic ghetto … They didn’t get their computers like you did, by trading in a bunch of box tops and $49.50 at the supermarket … Sure, go to the movies and daydream, but Revenge of the Nerds ain’t reality. It’s just Hollywood bullshit.”
Well said, Harvey. Rest in Peace.
