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.
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? Continue reading A Car-Free Future?
