Nowtopian

We had an interesting Talk at CounterPULSE last night on “Tactical Evolution: Protest Culture, Dissent and Radical Change”. After it was over we had our usual dozens of informal chats going on and I got into one in which we were ruminating on the enormous immigrant marches last May 1 and how rapidly they had disappeared from the radar. If anything they’ve been tracked into a demographic blip that “affected the election” but the sense of an autonomous social movement erupting from its prior invisibility is well-buried again. Not that it has disappeared in fact, because it’s only a matter of time before the mechanisms of political control–primarily the electoral circus–are shoved aside again for something more direct.

The government staged a huge nationwide raid on Swift meatpacking plants a couple of days ago. Latina Lista posted an informative blog entry (hat-tip to Firedoglake for linking to it) about it, airing out a number of specific details on the illegal and inhumane proceedings carried out in the name of Homeland Security (do they do anything, ever, that is good for any humans anywhere? no). There is something painfully ironic about the round-up of immigrants at meatpacking plants in 2006. Barbara Kopple’s documentary “American Dream” told the story of Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota, a UFCW local of meatpackers that gets broken with the blatant complicity of the International. From that time in the early-to-mid-1980s to the present, the unionized meatpacking industry has shrunk to a fraction of its former size, replaced by vast meatpacking factories employing non-union, mostly Spanish-speaking workers recruited from Mexico and Central America. Big surprise, lots of them got to the U.S. “unofficially” and that makes them even more suitable for employment in the Jungle-like conditions of today’s meatpacking plants. Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” tells the grim story of how brutal, unsanitary and unsafe the meat industry has become again in the wake of the widespread de-unionization of the Reagan era. (No One Is) “Illegal” immigrants are the easiest workforce to keep unorganized historically, since if they start to organize they can be rounded up and deported… their kids be damned… family values? an inconvenient marketing label… next question? Indecipherable in this glorious defense of the homeland is the extent to which the 1,200 meatpackers rounded up were organizing themselves against the miserable conditions they’re forced to work under. Maybe someone reading this has more information they can share… Clearly this kind of repression will eventually meet its match in the millions-strong immigrant communities to which U.S. industry (what’s left of it) has hitched itself.

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