Six Degrees of Separation, Alienation & Imagination

I recently watched Six Degrees of Separation for the first time. How is it that I’ve slept on that movie for so damn long? What a great film. I’m not sure if this was the director’s intent but the film is a critical and humorous attack on the shallow decadence of the ruling class and how it relates to the working class. It portrays an attempt by a young black proletarian, played by Will Smith, to flee the alienation and mediocrity of day-to-day life by attempting to become part of the elite through imitating them. Needless to say, he is ultimately unsuccessful. By the end of the film he is unable to distinguish what is really his life and what is not, sinking into a new kind of alienation that merely replaces the one he previously lived. Meanwhile, a wealthy woman is seemingly liberated by his psychological self-mutilation. A twisted ending, the meaning of which I’m still mulling over.

Side note: how come every time I’ve ever heard someone mention this movie they always say, “Isn’t that the flick where Will Smith played a gay dude?” Uh, yeah, but that’s a minor element of the story. No one ever mentions I Am Legend and says, “Hey, that’s the movie where Will Smith played a hetero dude!”

Black Migration From Chicago/NYC to the South

Tagging these two articles to save them for an ongoing project on political/economic analysis of the U.S. South

For New Life, Blacks in City Head to South

Chicago’s Great Migration: Blacks Leaving Historic Neighborhoods To Return South

A Case for Rape & Domestic Violence Survivors Becoming Workplace Organizers

A good article you should check out if you haven’t seen it before:

My body, my rules: a case for rape and domestic violence survivors becoming workplace organizers

Liberté Locke, a Starbucks Workers Union organizer, writes about how violence at work and in our personal lives are similar, how domestic abusers and bosses use the same techniques of control and that we need to fight both.

TRIGGER WARNING: sexual violence

Dalla Costa on Joy & Fatigue

Been doing some reading on women, gender & revolutionary organization. I saw this quote the other day by James Baldwin about how talent is insignificant, that the real content of “talent” is discipline, love, luck and endurance. I was reminded of that quote while reading this piece by Maria Dalla Costa about her reflections on being a militant in the 70s among Italy’s feminist and operaista political currents. She wrote:

“At some point in the dark 80s, when I had to face some life problems – militants also have a life, much as it is repressed – I felt the need to reflect, from other points of view, on the previous period, and subject that period to the unfailing test of emotions. I had to admit that neither in my militancy in Potere operaio, nor in that in the Feminist movement, I ever had a moment, I mean even a single moment, of joy. I only remembered an enormous, immense fatigue.”

That’s real talk. There is a need for “revolutionary cheerleading” at times – any good team, sports or otherwise, needs to feel like a winning team, feel a sense of pride in what it does, feel driven to keep putting in the hard work day after day and develop itself so it can bring home some (or many) victories. But that has to be balanced with an understanding of and a sensitivity to the real costs and consequences of struggle. Sometimes there is a romanticizing of the life of a militant as if it is like walking in a rose garden, singing and skipping along towards revolution, and that every sacrifice along that path is done joyfully and without hesitation. The reality is this work can chew people up, distort personalities, break apart relationships, separate people from loved ones, even steal lives.

Baldwin’s words are helpful for bringing back down to earth a sense of what it takes to be “talented” at what we do – organize, struggle, build up organizations and movements. Dalla Costa’s words highlight the tragedy (for her at least), the contradiction of that “talent.”

The Relationship of Race & Class

From Charles Denby’s Indignant Heart (which I discussed briefly here):

“Three years ago the lunch wagon owned by an outside chain company, brought food into the plants to sell to the workers at lunch time. They raised the price of their food after a few weeks. The workers felt this was too much to pay and put up a holler so the union decided to boycott all the lunch wagons. The stewards were to see to it that no one bought anything. The first day no one came near the wagon. The second day five Negroes went to the wagon and began getting food.

The white chief steward yelled and said, ‘Put down that damn stuff.’

The Negroes looked around, very angry, and continued to pick up food.

The steward rushed to me and said, ‘What I say about your people is true, they won’t cooperate. Go over and see if you can stop them.’

I went over and before I could speak one said, ‘Matthew, we want to cooperate but yesterday we went outside and the restaurant where we can eat was packed. There was a long line waiting and half of us didn’t get anything to eat. We were so hungry in the afternoon we had to check out early. We just couldn’t make the day without eating. All the whites ate because they can go in any restaurant. We can’t bring lunch because we don’t have wives to fix them.’

All the restaurants around the plant are jim crowed, there are only three places where Negroes can eat, and there are about three thousand Negroes working on my shift. I went to the white chief steward and told him the story.

I said, ‘If you can get some white workers tomorrow, I will get some Negro workers and we can go out and break these restaurants discriminating around the plant. We will see that the restaurants serve all of our union members. I will stand guard every day after that and guarantee that no one will buy off of this wagon.’

This stunned him. He said he couldn’t do it. He would have to take it up with our union officers and that would take some time. The Negro fellows continued to eat from the wagon and pretty soon all the workers came back to eat there too. The lunch wagon kept selling at a high price which hurt both Negro and white workers.” [148-149]

Sex Work is Alienated Labor

Had a great discussion today with Mike & Sarahtopz about street harassment and sex work. Here’s a few notes [1] towards synthesizing a marxist view of sex work:

1. Sex work is a form of exploited, alienated labor under capitalism.

- Sex workers sell their labor power and not their bodies. Under capitalism, our bodies are consumed by capital quite literally, but Marx argues we do not sell our bodies, we sell our ability to labor to the capitalist. When women or others do sex work, they are selling their ability to labor, i.e. to make someone cum, to give someone pleasure or arousal, to be someone’s shoulder to cry on or their emotional outlet, etc. In exchange for money or other commodities, a sex workers’ body becomes the tool they use to carry out the labor of pleasure. The vagina and mouth are no less tools of labor than are the head and hands (which are usually associated with male labor). Further, they are tools that are consciously honed and developed by sex workers in order to produce an improved or competitive product. [2] To say that waged workers sell their labor but sex workers sell their bodies is to make a false distinction based on a false premise: that one is a legitimate or acceptable form of exploitation while the other is not.

Fanon, Alienation and Sexual Harassment

* Eventually I’m gonna finish this post. It just ain’t gonna happen until I get a chance to return to Fanon in a more serious way. Which means the second part of this post, arguably the most important part is extremely underdeveloped. But I’m still posting it to clean house behind the scenes and get some writing drafts onto the blog.

Over the past few months I’ve had some good conversations with R, E and maza de adelita about street harassment. We were sharing war stories of what we’ve experienced and the conversations have really reminded me of how often and, frequently, how violent street harassment of female-bodied people can be. It also reminded me of the contours and relationship of gender, patriarchy and alienation which come out in harassment. Here’s some of the war stories I shared with them, and a couple others.

Paul Mattick Jr on the Decline in the Rate of Profit

Paul Mattick Jr: The Decline in the Rate of Profit from brandon jourdan on Vimeo.

What is a demand?

I really dig this definition of what a demand is:

“[A demand] is a goal which is not only a thing but, like capital at any moment, essentially a stage of antagonism of a social relation. Whether the [demand] we win will be a victory or a defeat depends on the force of our struggle. On that force depends whether the goal is an occasion for capital to more rationally command our labor or an occasion for us to weaken their hold on that command. What form the goal takes when we achieve it…emerges and is in fact created in the struggle, and registers the degree of power that we reached in that struggle.”

Taken from a footnote in The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James

Attacking the Divisions from Within

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues for a reinterpretation of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation (broadly speaking, the social processes that characterize the development of capitalist relations). A central point she makes is that primitive accumulation is not only the accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital, it is also the deepening of divisions and differences within the working class. The most recognized “differences” are race, gender and sexuality, but others like age and ability exist.

This point is so important for two reasons. One, it helps us understand how capitalism has developed historically and one of the reasons why working class struggle has often fallen to defeat. Two, it drives home the point that the struggle against white supremacy and patriarchy are central to the class struggle; or, rather, they are the class struggle. That doesn’t mean the fight against patriarchy or white supremacy always has only revolutionary implications (we can look for proof at tendencies within Black Power that strove to reform white supremacy in ways that permitted some black folks to participate in the rule of capital). It does mean that capitalism cannot be overthrown without overthrowing the divisions it sows within the class.