Haven’t had much time or mental focus for blogging lately. But sometimes things crop up that are just begging for a good rant. The current ad campaign by the multinational clothing corporation Levi’s is a case in point. The fact that Levi’s is originally a San Francisco company lends a certain extra twist to this saga. And that they could say “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” at a time when so much work that is handsomely rewarded is not only NOT important, it is ruining the planet while it is destroying the humans doing it! It’s an astonishingly bizarre statement to make in a society that has grown ever more hierarchical and class-divided during the past few decades, in which people who ARE doing the important work, like childcare, hospice care, public school teaching, driving public transit, etc., are being demonized and attacked and in many cases, left at the bottom in terms of pay and social esteem.
“We Are All Workers” proclaim the ads in bus shelters, on billboards, and seemingly everywhere all of a sudden. “Everybody’s Work is Equally Important” says a neon sign in the window of their Valencia Street workshop (itself a wet dream: free screen-printing, photocopying and art resources for anyone to use). Back in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a quintessential Rust Bowl town abandoned in the early 1980s by the steel industry and verging on total collapse, Levi’s has ridden in as a white knight. After a big nonprofit pulled out, Levi’s agreed to put up $1 million to bolster the efforts of John Fetterman, the youthful and burly 6’8″ mayor to bring the city back from the brink of ghost town status, putting their money into a community center, the public library, and an urban farm! On Youtoob there are a dozen videos produced by Levi’s, from one-minute ads to five-minute mini-documentaries on Braddock, designed to evoke a series of complicated emotions and speak to needs and ideas that have been buried during the past twenty years of shrill neoliberal triumphalism.
I’ve been heavily influenced by Copenhagen since my first (adult) visit in 1977. It took a while to realize that it probably set in motion most of my many years of cycle activism, which is importantly about much more than merely bicycling… watching this video strongly reminded me of how the texture of urban life gets SO much better when you have these kinds of conditions… Summertime in Denmark is pretty dang awesome too!
Off Cass Avenue, the main cycling corridor between Cobo Hall and Wayne State University, these abandoned buildings were far from unusual.
I went to Detroit for the US Social Forum from June 22-26, 2010. I’m really glad I went! I attended the Klimaforum in Copenhagen last December, and the World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil in January 2009; this US Social Forum shared a lot of qualities with those other events. Like those, the Social Forum densely filled time and space. The US Social Forum encompassed over a thousand workshops held in a half dozen different locations around Detroit over its four days, and no matter what, no individual could possibly take in more than a small percentage of all that talking and meeting. It’s another of those “blind man and the elephant” situations.
The Social Forum is structured to facilitate conversations, meetings, networking, and a rich cross-pollination among social activists. As Immanuel Wallerstein put it in front of 500 people while conversing with Grace Boggs, “the panoply of organizations at the World Social Forum (and US Social Forum) come to talk to each other instead of denouncing each other.” The Social Forum’s vitality lies in the unprecedented effort to find arenas for cooperation instead of the historically all too familiar sectarian power struggles that seek victory, submission, and control.
Immanuel Wallerstein (left) and Grace Boggs (center) at the US Social Forum, Thursday, June 24, 2010.
Formal political parties and trade unions are excluded in favor of “social movement organizations,” though participants from many unions and some socialist parties do take part (and dozens of NGOs and nonprofits are well represented). In Detroit a good number of US-based anarchists showed up too (those that weren’t headed to Toronto to protest the G-20 summit) and a “New World From Below“ convergence center was established at the Spirit of Hope Church a mile northwest of the Cobo Hall Convention Center where most of the Social Forum was happening.
