Nowtopian

Crisis Talk

I’ve been a bit less attentive to the many crises analyses whipping around lately, partly because I was travelling, and partly because I get tired of reading the same old things… But here’s a few pieces from near and far that I think help move the discussion to a better place. First off, if you haven’t come upon it already, my friends from Midnight Notes have released a new pamphlet called Promissory Notes (pdf). Then, I found an excerpt from “Money and the Crisis of Civilization” by Charles Eisenstein and thought it a good contribution to a deeper critique of the economistic categories that the crises discussions usually get mired in (found it in the surprisingly politically sophisticated but New Age journal HopeDance which I was given by Lois Arkin at LA Ecovillage). Another old pal, Paul Mattick Jr., has written an excellent 4-part series on the economic crisis from a fairly traditional Marxist point of view, but in saying that, it has to be said that he’s far removed from the “overproduction” arguments that you hear from a lot of self-styled Marxists. And delightfully, he ends with this refreshing prose:

Will people instead turn their attention to bettering their own conditions of life in the concrete, immediate ways an unraveling economy will require? Will newly homeless millions look at newly foreclosed, empty houses, unsaleable consumer goods, and stockpiled government foodstuffs and see a way to sustain life? No doubt, as in the past, Americans will demand that industry or government provide them with jobs, but as such demands come up against economic limits, perhaps it will also occur to people that the factories, offices, farms, and other workplaces will still exist, even if they cannot be run profitably, and can be set into motion to produce goods that people need. Even if there are not enough jobs” paid employment, working for business or the state” there is work aplenty to be done if people organize production and distribution for themselves, outside the constraints of the business economy.

When the financial shit hit the fan last fall, everyone with access to the media, from the President to left-wing commentators like Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, agreed that it was necessary to save the banks with infusions of government cash lest the whole economy collapse. But, aside from the fact that the economy is collapsing anyway, the opposite is closer to the truth: if the whole financial system fell away, and money ceased to be the power source turning the wheels of production, the whole productive apparatus of society” machines, raw materials, and above all working people” would still be there, along with the human needs it can be made to serve. The fewer years of suffering and confusion it takes for people to figure this out, the better.

We also had a couple of very exciting Shaping San Francisco Talks in the last two Wednesdays (scroll down to Global Commons/Global Enclosures on Apr. 22, and Transition City: Permacultural Transformation on Apr. 29). So there’s a bunch of good links, but my favorite recent discovery is the piece by Franco Berardi “Bifo” that I linked to last post.Â I’m going to excerpt it a bunch below, connecting it to some arguments I’ve been making in Nowtopia:

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Of Teamsters and Turtles, Plumbers and Progressives, a MayDay rumination

Ever since the much-promoted alliance between “teamsters and turtles” at the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999, there’s been a renewed hope that the decades-long opposition between organized labor and environmentalists might be resolvable. The original Teamsters and turtles weren’t really in much of an alliance in 1999, what with AFL-CIO leaders trying their best to keep the labor march away from occupied downtown Seattle on November 30, 1999. But we don’t have to rehash that old story because we have a new, local angle on this here in 2009 San Francisco.

Steve Jones wrote about a split between “progressives and labor” in the SF Bay Guardian last week. It is an interesting framing of the current possibilities for social liberation, improvement, or” gasp” even revolution. While thoughtful and well-researched, Jones fails to escape a recurrent set of assumptions that continue to confuse the possibilities of a more thorough-going reshaping of oppositional politics in this era. The most delusional assumption is that “pwogwessives” of a green hue should find a common platform with old-style unionists, most likely over the empty demand for “green jobs.” Before laying out why “˜jobs’ don’t work, let’s recap the recent tempest in a teapot:

The basic story is that Larry Mazzola, Jr., the son of Mazzola Sr. (together they run the nepotistic Plumbers Union), was denied a seat on the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District Board of Directors that has traditionally gone to a Labor representative. Mazzola Jr. was fully backed in his attempt to get the appointment to the seat by the San Francisco Labor Council and other local Labor leaders, but was thwarted by a 6-5 majority at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The Board’s Rules Committee, chaired by lefty Chris Daly, rejected Mazzola and quietly asked local labor leaders to advance an alternate candidate at least vaguely qualified to address transportation issues, but the Labor Council and Building and Construction Trades Council and other labor luminaries refused, insisting that Mazzola get the nod. The impasse was resolved by the full Board vote which appointed Dave Snyder to the seat instead of Mazzola or any other labor choice. Snyder (a personal friend of mine) is widely credited with resuscitating the SF Bike Coalition in the mid-1990s, and later helped launch Livable City and most recently has been the Transportation analyst for SPUR. (He took this appointment as his chance to resign from SPUR, which he generally found too conservative, especially when it comes to class issues and development.)

Dave Snyder represents a new cognitariat-rooted kind of politics (for a recent, provocative essay/speech from the theoretical wing of this kind of thinking, find Bifo’s latest here), one that has been framed most often as “environmentalist” but is actually a lot more than that. It is an emergent political tendency that looks at urban design, transportation, food, housing, and every part of daily life as inextricably linked. While Snyder is no flaming radical, he at least understands that the 21st century and its unfolding crises require new approaches and fresh, wholistic thinking. He wasn’t happy to have been chosen by the Supervisors, feeling he got caught in the middle of a political spat between the progressive majority on the Board and vocal elements of organized labor.

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Springing Through NYC

I flew into New York last week. From the air it still looked like winter, grayish brownish city stretching into the distance from JFK as we flew low over Long Island Sound to land. I took the arduous trip by subway, usually 2 hours to arrive at any Brooklyn address, and got to my daughter’s new apartment where her bed is about 20 feet from the elevated tracks of the J-M-Z. I slept through it with ear plugs my first night, and then moved over to Donald N-S’s place on Grand Army Plaza at the gateway to Prospect Park. All around Park Slope in Brooklyn, and even in City Hall Plaza in Manhattan, spindly dormant trees were giving way to spectacular explosions of color in plum and apple blossoms, and wildly exuberant magnolias. Spring was springing!

Magnolia in City Hall Park, New York.

There were two reasons to be in New York, the big one for me was Francesca’s 25th birthday! Amazing to be the parent of a 25-year-old, especially such an all around wonderful person who also happens to be a smart, radical, engaged charmer… lucky me! She was part of the 2nd occupation of New School a week ago or so, and when their best laid plans were met by Vietnam war criminal and school president Bob Kerrey ordering the police to violently evict them. Francesca got heavily pepper sprayed, and jailed overnight with the rest of the occupiers, but they are now receiving great support from New School faculty and much of the student body, nearly all of whom detest Kerrey and want to see him go. To what end, though? They eschew demands, and see their efforts as a broader effort to jumpstart a more thoroughgoing student movement of social opposition.

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