La Teoría Comunista De Marx

Como siempre, si encuentras un error gramatical o en la traducción te agradeceríamos tu ayuda en corregirlo para mejorar nuestro trabajo.

Traducido por L Boogie y Parce

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La siguiente entrada representa una parte de un proyecto mayor sobre la teoría comunista y organización revolucionaria que se inició el verano pasado. Es un proyecto en curso que no sólo fue diseñado para proporcionar un esquema de referencia para nuestra propia agrupación. En términos más amplios, está destinado a ser una contribución a las discusiones en curso y debates sobre la teoría y práctica comunista, que, en nuestro momento histórico, no puede y no será el producto de cualquier grupo individual.

La totalidad del proyecto está dividida en tres partes principales 1) Una síntesis parcial de Marx 2) Una crítica de la historia de la organización revolucionaria 3) Pensamientos provisionales sobre la necesidad de organización hoy en día. Estamos actualmente en el proceso de escribir el borrador de la segunda parte, pero queríamos empezar a publicar la primera parte ahora, que será serializado durante los próximos meses.

El borrador sobre Marx no pretende ser un folleto introductorio popular. En cambio, está destinado para un público con un conocimiento básico de Marx. En nuestra propia práctica lo usamos como un complemento a los grupos de estudio y discusión en curso sobre Marx, así como la teoría revolucionaria en general.

Es importante decir algo acerca del concepto de comunismo que destaca esta serie. Nosotros entendemos comunismo en el sentido que Marx escribió en La Ideología Alemana:

Para nosotros, el comunismo no es un estado que debe implantarse, un ideal al que ha de sujetarse la realidad. Nosotros llamamos comunismo al movimiento real que anula y supera al estado de cosas actual. Las condiciones de este movimiento se desprenden de la premisa actualmente existente.

Este pasaje contiene todo un mundo de pensamiento y experiencia histórica que debe ser desenredado y recompuesto de nuevo. Sin embargo, lo que es importante acerca de la obra de Marx, incluyendo, crucialmente, El Capital, es que lo coloca la viviente actividad humana en el centro del concepto de comunismo. Comunismo es la lucha necesaria y permanente de la humanidad para lograr libertad – para liberarse de su propia existencia enajenada.

Hay un gran número de pensadores y tendencias políticas que han tomado el manto y han influido el desarrollo de nuestro propio pensamiento. Sin embargo, no reclamamos ninguna adherencia específica a ellos. Mientras que pueden haber hecho contribuciones importantes, no somos obligados por sus limitaciones que surgieron de sus experiencias históricas particulares. En cambio, necesitamos una nueva síntesis que surge de las realidades sociales de hoy.

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La Teoría Comunista De Marx

La historia de organización comunista no puede ser separada de la historia del marxismo como una crítica de su propia historia. Dado que la crisis de la izquierda revolucionaria es, en parte, una crisis de la teoría revolucionaria nos debemos, hasta un cierto punto, empezar de nuevo volviendo a Marx. La historia de la teoría revolucionaria en sí está marcada por tales retornos en que los revolucionarios intentaron de entender su sociedad estudiando las ideas y luchas del pasado. Esto ha sido una parte fundamental y necesaria de la teoría y la práctica comunista históricamente.

Dado que hoy nos enfrentamos de nuevo a un impasse definido por una falta del conocimiento categórico y análisis nos debemos luchar de nuevo para encontrar un terreno sobre el cual pararnos. Sólo con claridad podemos llegar a una fundación más sólida para el trabajo revolucionario.

El entendimiento de la organización revolucionaria debe tener sus raíces en un enfoque categórico y es por esta razón que intentamos a sintetizar unas de las premisas fundamentales del pensamiento de Marx. El objetivo en este caso es un poco limitado. En el momento no tenemos el espacio ni el tiempo para repasar la suma del pensamiento de Marx. Esto incluye su crítica de la totalidad de la sociedad capitalista, incluyendo los volúmenes críticos dos y tres de El Capital. En cambio, esperamos concentrar en el esquema básico de su punto de vista sobre la humanidad y sus relaciones en la sociedad capitalista.

Lo que sigue es una presentación un poco abstracto. Está destinado a funcionar como una fundación para el desarrollo posterior de la teoría, investigación, estrategia y tácticas. El logro del conocimiento categórico y metodología es absolutamente necesario para evitar los perspectivos empíricos, pragmáticos y economicistas que ronda la izquierda Estadounidense – síntomas de su propio decaimiento. Lo que sigue está destinado proporcionar la base para la investigación concreta de lo actual real, y moviendo sociedad. Sin categorías y metodología claras, estrategia y tácticas se vuelven cada vez más desligadas de nada concreto, y por lo tanto reificadas en su abstracción.

El Trabajo y La Auto-Actividad

Ya que los seres humanos están en el centro de la obra de Marx debemos empezar allí. De un punto de vista Marx considera a la humanidad en su esencia, o, para decirlo en otra manera, lo que es común a la humanidad a través del tiempo y el lugar. De otro punto de vista Marx considera los seres humanos en su existencia actual en momentos históricos particulares.

Marx distingue la esencia humana en términos de trabajo. “El trabajo,” escribe él en El Capital, “es una condición de vida del hombre, y condición independiente de todas las formas de sociedad, una necesidad perenne y natural que media el metabolismo entre el hombre y la naturaleza, y por consiguiente la vida humana misma” (10**). El trabajo es clave para su entendimiento de los seres humanos. Sin embargo, lo que entiende Marx por trabajo no es evidente dadas las condiciones de trabajo en la sociedad capitalista. Por consiguiente el concepto de Marx necesita un poco de interpretación.

¿Qué es El Trabajo?

La idea que el trabajo “media el metabolismo entre el hombre y la naturaleza, y por consiguiente la vida humana misma” es presentado por Marx en Los Manuscritos Económicos y filosóficos de 1844. En el ensayo, El Trabajo Enajenado, escribe Marx que la humanidad es “parte de la naturaleza” y sólo puede ser entendido como en “proceso continuo” con ella. Al mismo tiempo, argumenta Marx, los seres humanos están separados del mundo físico, o la naturaleza. Como dice él, la humanidad no es “inmediatamente uno con su actividad vital” en el mundo físico, pero, en cambio “tiene actividad vital consciente” dentro de este mundo. Marx usa este concepto de metabolismo para entender la esencia humana como la relación dialéctica entre su continuo corporal con, y conocimiento del mundo físico. Usando el concepto de metabolismo, sugiere Marx el dinamismo involucrado en el mantenimiento o reproducción de vida. Para Marx en su esencia la vida humana está caracterizada por un proceso energético de creación. Es una síntesis de sustancia por lo tanto el alquímico transformación del mundo físico a una nueva sustancia.

Marx llama trabajo el proceso de creación, transformación y síntesis. Cómo el trabajo media el metabolismo entre los seres humanos y el mundo físico nos da una mayor comprensión de su concepto. En El Trabajo Enajenado, escribe Marx:

Pues, en primer término, el trabajo, la actividad vital, la vida productiva misma, aparece ante el hombre sólo como un medio para la satisfacción de una necesidad, de la necesidad de mantener la existencia física. La vida productiva es, sin embargo, la vida genérica. Es la vida que crea vida. En la forma de la actividad vital reside el carácter dado de una especie, su carácter genérico, y la actividad libre, consciente, es el carácter genérico del hombre. La vida misma aparece sólo como medio de vida.

La existencia humana se depende de la satisfacción de necesidades en una base diaria. En la sociedad de clases las necesidades humanas están reducidas a una mera supervivencia que el trabajo debe satisfacer. Sin embargo, argumenta Marx, en esencia el trabajo es más que lo “aparece” y, de un punto de vista de esencia, en cambio debe ser visto como “actividad libre, consciente.”

Para Marx el trabajo debe ser definido más ampliamente como “actividad.” La actividad de producir los medios para satisfacer necesidades es el trabajo, pero el trabajo no es sólo lo que hace la gente en un empleo. Es la gama entera de necesidades y “actividad vital” – todo que constituye un ser humano – y la satisfacción de necesidades a través de actividad es una interacción en curso entre el trabajo y el mundo físico. Actividad es un proceso de satisfacer necesidades – ambos físico y como objetos de la imaginación y el deseo. Por consiguiente, Marx tiene algo más en mente que la mera “trabajo,” tal como existe en la sociedad capitalista.

La clave para la comprensión de Marx del trabajo es que es “libre consciente actividad.” Por esta idea no se refiere que el mundo físico es simplemente un objeto que el trabajo actúa sobre. Implícito en la comprensión de Marx es que la humanidad es dialécticamente constituida por la realidad material y su propia subjetividad que surge de y altera esta realidad. Entonces, el mundo físico es el medio de vida para el trabajo en que el trabajo sólo se manifiesta por actuar sobre ese mundo. Como dice él en El Trabajo Enajenado, el mundo “aparece como su obra y realidad.” Marx subraya, por tanto, el carácter auto-reflexivo del trabajo, o su auto-actividad. Más tarde discutiremos cómo esta auto-actividad aparece históricamente como una forma específica de la sociedad.

Por el momento, es importante enfocar en el camino completamente nuevo que descubrió Marx con su concepto de trabajo. Escribe él, “El objeto del trabajo es por eso la objetivación de la vida genérica del hombre, pues éste se desdobla no sólo intelectualmente, como en la conciencia, sino activa y realmente, y se contempla a sí mismo en un mundo creado por él.” (El Trabajo Enajenado) Si el mundo físico es el medio por el cual se realiza el trabajo y está dentro de este mundo que contempla y actúa la humanidad, luego el mundo físico es un objeto por trabajo humano a través de que se materializa, o “se objetiva” en el mundo. En otras palabras, la sustancia, o el contenido, de las necesidades humanas se produce y reproduce como formas particulares de estas necesidades.

No es correcto decir que para Marx el mundo es simplemente sujeto a cambios. En cambio el mundo es una extensión de la actividad humana y, en un sentido, se convierte a su “cuerpo.” El mundo físico, como un objeto, se convierte a una parte internalizada de la actividad humana, cuyo contenido como necesidades se externaliza como formas de existencia. Como auto-actividad, el trabajo es actividad humana actuando sobre sí mismo “en un mundo creado por él.” En su relación metabólica con la naturaleza los seres humanos objetivan a sí mismos, creando un segundo mundo de relaciones sociales. A través de este proceso constante la humanidad crea y transforma a sí mismo como “la vida que crea vida.”

Para Marx, entonces, la humanidad es un objeto para sí mismo y, críticamente, un fin en sí mismo. Ya que la auto-actividad es auto-determinada, en su esencia el trabajo humano es universal. Es universal en dos maneras interrelacionadas. Primero, la totalidad del mundo físico puede ser un objeto para el trabajo e internalizado como parte de la actividad humana. Segundo, la humanidad produce más allá de las necesidades de una subsistencia física mínima y, con la capacidad de controlar la forma de su actividad, reproduce a sí mismo en un número ilimitado de formas. Por consiguiente, considerado como una totalidad, esta producción universal, o auto-actividad, da lugar a potencialmente infinitas formas de trabajo. Los seres humanos no son criaturas finitas, realizando sólo un número limitado de necesidades en un número limitado de formas. La humanidad no puede ser considerada una sustancia dada en una determinación dada. Al final, su contenido sólo puede ser entendido como la calidad de auto-creación, más bien que una cantidad finita de atributos inmutables. Como Marx dice en El Trabajo Enajenado, la humanidad “se relaciona consigo mismo como el género actual, viviente, porque se relaciona consigo mismo como un ser universal y por eso libre.” (El Trabajo Enajenado)

Para Marx, la libertad es un proceso continuo de objetivación en el cual no hay obstáculos entre la intención consciente y sus resultados. La creación humana es libre cuando su contenido – sus necesidades – se realiza a sí mismo en las formas de su propia elección como un fin en sí mismo. En la opinión de Marx, para decirlo en una manera más abstracta, la libertad es un proceso de auto-actividad en unidad inmediata con sí mismo. La auto-actividad en su estado ideal, desenfrenada por cualquier forma que no corresponde a su esencia, es el estado de libertad. El criterio de libertad para humanidad debe ser, Marx deduce en El Trabajo Enajenado, que “El hombre hace de su actividad vital misma objeto de su voluntad y de su conciencia. Tiene actividad vital consciente…es su propia vida objeto para él, porque es un ser genérico. Sólo por ello es su actividad libre.” (El Trabajo Enajenado) Sólo entonces corresponde la esencia a la existencia.

Una Ruptura Radical

La ruptura radical filosófica de Marx se resume en El Tesis sobre Feuerbach. Allí él identificó el materialismo y el idealismo como dos tendencias generales en la filosofía occidental. El problema con la tradición materialista, argumenta Marx, “es que sólo concibe las cosas, la realidad, la sensoriedad, bajo la forma de objeto o de contemplación, pero no como actividad sensorial humana, no como práctica, no de un modo subjetivo.” En particular, Marx tenía en mente aquí los pensadores materialistas del Siglo de las Luces. Estos filósofos vieron el mundo como externo, algo que sólo debe ser observado y analizado. Sin embargo, ellos despejaron el camino para la idea que la sociedad fue un desarrollo de la historia y por lo tanto sujeto a cambios. Pensaban que la sociedad humana fue determinada por leyes naturales, más bien que un orden divino, y al entender estas leyes la sociedad podría ser alterado.

La otra tradición general que Marx identificó fue el idealismo, por la tradición de Kant, la cual enfocaba en cómo la mente da forma al mundo, en lugar de lo contrario. La figura más importante que Marx consideró fue Hegel. Hegel enfocaba en un sujeto auto-trascendente en lo cual el pensamiento existe y se determine sobre y contra el mundo objetivo. Al hacerlo, él reafirmó una dualidad de la historia del idealismo entre los seres humanos y la naturaleza, el sujeto y el objeto. Si bien reafirmó Hegel el concepto del sujeto auto-determinado, Marx argumentó que este “lado activo fuese desarrollado por el idealismo, por oposición al materialismo, pero sólo de un modo abstracto”, independiente de sus condiciones objetivas, y por eso “no conoce la actividad real, sensorial, como tal.” (El Tesis sobre Feuerbach)

Para Marx el problema de ambos materialismo e idealismo actuales fue que eran de naturaleza especulativa. Si la realidad determina subjetividad como dice materialismo o, como dice idealismo, subjetividad determina la realidad, Marx argumentó que ambos métodos terminan en el mismo lugar: una vista unidimensional de los seres humanos. Contra estos métodos, Marx avanzó la idea que el objeto y el sujeto no son separados, sino que forman una unidad. Su método se resume en una crítica extendida de Feuerbach en La Ideología Alemana:

Es cierto que Feuerbach les lleva a los materialistas “puros” la gran ventaja de que estima que también el hombre es un “objeto sensorio”; pero, aun aparte de que sólo lo ve como “objeto sensorio” y no como “actividad sensoria”, manteniéndose también en esto dentro de la teoría, sin concebir los hombres dentro de su conexión social dada, bajo las condiciones de vida existentes que han hecho de ellos lo que son, no llega nunca, por ello mismo, hasta el hombre realmente existente, hasta el hombre activo, sino que se detiene en el concepto abstracto “el hombre”…No consigue nunca, por tanto, concebir el mundo sensorial como la actividad sensoria y viva total de los individuos que lo forman.

La humanidad, según Marx, es “objeto sensorio” y también “actividad sensoria.” Otra vez encontramos la dialéctica de auto-actividad en la cual los seres son ambos el objeto y el sujeto. Por consiguiente, como Marx escribe en otro lugar, “objetos sensorios” no son “realmente distintos de los objetos conceptuales.” En cambio es necesario “[concebir] la propia actividad humana como una actividad objetiva.” (El Tesis) Los seres humanos crean el mundo objetivo y, en cambio, se determinan por este mundo. Donde Marx planteó una unidad de intención consciente y la realidad material, ambos materialismo e idealismo los separaron. Como resultado, últimamente la humanidad tuvo que acomodarse a un mundo predeterminado y dado, externo a sí mismo.

La alternativa propuesta por Marx tiene implicaciones metodológicas importantes. Porque la filosofía actual concibió el mundo como externo a la humanidad, como algo que la enfrentaba como una realidad preexistente, la humanidad sólo puede existir como una idea desconectada del mundo. Al establecer una relación interna entre la idea de humanidad y los seres humanos “realmente existente”, Marx enfatiza una dialéctica de esencia y existencia, el abstracto y el concreto, el contenido y la forma. En El Tesis, Marx argumenta, “la esencia humana no es algo abstracto inherente a cada individuo.” Él contrasta esta idea contra la de toda filosofía previa, en la cual “la esencia humana sólo puede concebirse como ‘género’, como una generalidad interna, muda, que se limita a unir naturalmente los muchos individuos.” Los seres humanos se crean a sí mismos y su mundo, no son dados.

Como vimos en El Trabajo Enajenado el carácter del producto del trabajo – los objetos que producen los seres humanos – expresa la esencia de la relación del trabajo a sí mismo – los seres humanos relacionando a ellos mismos. El producto del trabajo es la forma materializada de esta esencia. Lo que produce la actividad es una expresión de la forma de esta actividad, y lo que produce la actividad también lo hace de sí mismo. El carácter del producto del trabajo corresponde a la forma del trabajo que lo produjo. Como veremos, en la sociedad capitalista la relación de la capitalista al trabajador y la separación del trabajo de los medios de trabajo son la forma de la relación de trabajo a sí mismo.

Por el momento, lo que es importante es el punto metodológico de Marx sobre la relación entre el sujeto y el objeto. La objetividad del trabajo viviente significa que la actividad crea sus propias formas de existencia. La actividad entonces se media a sí misma en el mundo. Desde este punto de vista, no es posible concebir la forma externa al sujeto. Inmediatamente la esencia llega a ser como existencia y por tanto el contenido de actividad es actual solamente en su forma. Así el trabajo se relaciona a sí mismo en una forma inmanente. Sus formas son inherentes e intrínsecas a su contenido. Al contrario, el método dualista lleva a uno considerar los dos lados en simple oposición, con sólo una relación externo a uno al otro.

Marx subsumió la crítica materialista e idealista en una nueva síntesis. En esta síntesis el sujeto y el objeto ya no se plantean uno contra el otro, sino que forman una relación interna en la cual cada uno es constitutivo del otro. Al hacerlo así, Marx preservó el concepto idealista de un infinitamente y universalmente sujeto auto-determinado, también el concepto materialista que la subjetividad es determinada objetivamente, subsumiendo los dos en una nueva unidad. Para Marx, el pensamiento y la realidad ya no son separados, sino que existen como una unidad de actividad y pensamiento, la cual Marx llama la actividad “práctico-crítica.” (El Tesis)

Por lo tanto, Marx logra una ruptura epistemológica y decisiva con toda la filosofía anterior. El conocimiento, él contiende, no emerge independientemente de la realidad, o como observación de los objetos externos o sólo del mente. Más bien, como él escribe en El Tesis, el conocimiento es “un problema práctico. Es en la práctica donde el hombre tiene que demostrar la verdad, es decir, la realidad y el poderío, la terrenalidad de su pensamiento.” Como afirma el concepto “la actividad práctico-crítica,” pensar no puede ser “aislado” de la actividad sensual, o la práctica. Las categorías de pensar se explican por el movimiento objetivo de actividad. Teoría sólo puede ser realizado en “la práctica humana y en la comprensión de esa práctica.”

Marx disputa la idea que había una separación o dualidad natural entre el pensamiento y el mundo. Tal división sólo apareció surgir de la naturaleza como había pensado toda filosofía anterior. En cambio, él argumentó, esta separación se explica como una condición histórica, como una consecuencia de la sociedad de clases. Nos volvemos a continuación cómo Marx llegó a esta conclusión.

Próximamente: La Historia y Las Formas Sociales de Existencia

I’m reading this pamphlet to help a fellow organizer present a summary of it for a solidarity network we are building in Houston, the Southwest Defense Network. So far, among the potential campaigns we have come across, several have been restaurant workers confronting wage theft or other forms of exploitation in the restaurants they work(ed) for.

HOW THE RESTAURANT IS SET UP

Restaurants are a creation of modern capitalist society
First appeared in Paris in 1760s, didn’t expand much beyond there up until 1850s

Why not? Because food-preparation was terrain of skilled craftsmen, organized into guilds

“The growth of the restaurant was the growth of the market. Needs that were once fulfilled either through a direct relationship of domination (between a lord and his servants) or a private relationship (within the family), were now fulfilled on the open market. What was once a direct oppressive relationship now became the relationship between buyer and seller. A similar expansion of the market took place over a century later with the rise of fast food. As the 1950′s housewife was undermined and women moved into the open labor market, many of the tasks that had been done by women in the house were transferred onto the market. Fast food restaurants grew rapidly, and paid wages for what used to be housework.”

Conditions for modern restaurant (established some time in 19th C): need businessmen with capital to invest in restaurants; need customers who expect to satisfy need for food on open market; need workers with no way to live expect by selling labor power. [Is open market a useful concept? Implications? Implies a closed market somewhere]

Social forces named: customer (buyer) and restaurant owner (seller of finished product & buyer of labor-power) and landlords/government (take cut of surplus value via rent, taxes, licenses, etc.) and restaurant worker (seller of labor-power)

Breakdown of value involved in production process:
1) constant capital = food, tools, restaurant, kitchen equipment, etc.
2) variable capital = workers

Prole defines value of employee as our wage – money we need to reproduce ourselves and show up for work again tomorrow. We produce more value than we are paid in wages, this is surplus value, this is how restaurant makes money.

But: “The owner buys our ability to work, and for a set period of time, we become theirs.”
And: “Employees are not paid based on how much work we do. Our ability to work is bought for a set period of time, and we are expected to do work for the boss during that time.”

Restaurants exist to turn a profit, not to meet the concrete need for food in society

Division of labor: a) management = owner, manager; b) workers / back of the house; c) workers / front of the house

Role of machines is to speed up work. It imposes a rhythm on our work. Not intended to make our jobs easier. Does not decrease the amount of work we do, we just have a smaller range of tasks to do more often.
Division is more and more specific in larger restaurants; more reliance on machines in larger restaurants

Restaurant production is such that food must be served immediately, workers not making a commodity that can be sold later. This raises intensity and stress on workers to produce more and more precise tasks at a quicker pace, amid slow periods of boredom.

Tips mean wage is paid in part by boss and in part by customer. Structure serves the boss because it means boss loses less profit in ebb and flow of business; ties wages to sales; tips reinforce division of labor (of customer over worker; of front of house worker over back of house worker).

Restaurant worker tries to fit customer into production process (i.e. getting their order quickly) but customer has power over worker. Resentment. Customers can also take side of worker against management.

Management uses competition and coercion to divide workers. Division of labor reflects and reinforces broader social divisions.

HOW THE RESTAURANT IS TAKEN APART

Prole says workers wish not to be restaurant workers any longer. Not the same as wanting to be unemployed. Hence many are aspiring actors, etc., in other words planning for different career but working in restaurant to make ends meet. Hence high turnover.

Condition as wage worker leads to rejection of work, of cutting corners, stealing from work, etc.

But work process requires cooperation and communication. Prole writes:

“We spend a lot of time with our co-workers and learn a lot about each other. In between rushes we talk about our problems at work, in our personal life, with the immigration authorities. We are no longer a collection of separated individuals. We form informal groups of workers on the job which are capable of acting together. We go out for a drink after work. We cover each other’s asses at work. These work groups then set the general work culture of the restaurant. If we are weak, the culture of the restaurant can come pretty close to the ideal of bigoted, separated individuals, and the work is absolutely miserable. In this case, our desire to escape from work may also be a desire to escape from our co-workers. If we are strong, we can make the work a lot less miserable. When the boss isn’t looking, the cooks will make food for the front-end staff, and they will steal drinks for the kitchen. We’ll warn each other when the boss or the manager is coming around, and make fun of them when they’re gone.”

These informal work groups held together by resistance to work. But since they are organized by work process, boss can undermine them by re-organizing production.

Division of labor is not “natural” to us so we resist it by taking an interest in other jobs in the restaurant. Critiques of work process often appear as critiques of boss.

Challenges to organizing in a restaurant: high turnover (both cause and consequence of majority of restaurants being non-union); restaurants tend to be small and spread out rather than concentrated like other industries, which means there are 1000 different grievances which makes it harder for people to organize together; also restaurants are not decisive industry in sense that a strike at a restaurant does not cause major disruption to economy.

Prole’s conclusion:

“We’re fighting for a world where our productive activity fulfills a need and is an expression of our lives, not forced on us in exchange for a wage–a world where we produce for each other directly and not in order to sell to each other. The struggle of restaurant workers is ultimately for a world without restaurants or workers.”

HOW CAN THIS BE USEFUL FOR SOUTHWEST DEFENSE?

How to relate this concretely to SWDN? Relate to conditions of production, more likely to be site of abuses due to immediacy of sale of product (the food); due to high turnover (bosses know they can get away with abuses); etc.

This is especially true in Houston. Houston has booming restaurant industry which according to this link and this link point to: a) large # of workers entering/exiting restaurant industry because so many restaurants in the city; b) high level of competition between restaurants, hence immense pressure to keep costs low to customer; c) what the links don’t mention is that there is also highly un-educated and under-skilled workforce in Houston (due to de-funding of TX education) which means restaurants become a primary source of employment for many workers

Helpful for thinking about organizing strategy – we want to try to tap into existing informal work groups inside these restaurants to build struggle, this is how we transition from fighting one case to helping build on-site organization that expands the struggle to other aspects of work process

Tie in question of reproductive work – Silvia Federici writes about how explosion of restaurants since the 70s is a direct response to struggles around women’s liberation and reproductive labor in the home. Specifically that capital responded to women’s struggle against unpaid reproductive labor in the home by “privatizing” the work of feeding the working class family by making available cheap (and unhealthy) eating options outside the home (i.e. fast food). This recomposition of housework in a newly “public” form was only possible because the jobs in such establishments still reflect the gendered division of labor and tend to be extremely low-paid and highly exploited. (more notes on this in a separate post)

“But labour, the subjective essence of private property as the exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as the exclusion of labour, constitute private property as the developed relation of the contradiction and thus a dynamic relation which drives towards its resolution.” [152]

“Finally, communism is the positive expression of the abolition of private property, and in the first place of universal private property. In taking this relation in its universal aspect communism is, in its first form, only the generalization and fulfillment of the relation.” [152-153]

“in this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is directly his relation to man, and his relation to man is directly his relation to nature, to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuously revealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which human nature has become nature for man and to which nature has become human nature for him. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed.” [154]

“Communism is the positive abolition of private property, of human self-alienation, and thus the real appropriation of human nature through and for man. It is, therefore, the return of man himself as a social, i.e. really human, being, a complete and conscious return which assimilates all the wealth of previous development. Communism as a fully developed naturalism is humanism and as a fully developed humanism is naturalism. It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution.” [155]

“We have see how, on the assumption that private property has been positively superseded, man produces man, himself and then other men; how the object which is the direct activity of his personality is at the same time his existence for other men and their existence for him. Similarly the material of labor and man himself as a subject are the starting-point as well as the result of this movement (and because there must be this starting-point private property is a historical necessity). Therefore, the social character is the universal character of the whole movement; as society itself produces man as man, so it is produced by him. Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are social activity and social mind. The human significance of nature only exists for social man, because only in this case is nature a bond with other men, the basis of his existence for others and of their existence for him. Only then is nature the basis of his own human experience and a vital element of human reality. The natural existence of man has here become his human existence and nature itself has become human for him. Thus society is the accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.” [157]

“My universal consciousness is only the theoretical form of that whose living form is the real community, the social entity, although at the present day this universal consciousness is an abstraction from real life and is opposed to it as an enemy. That is why the activity of my universal consciousness as such is my theoretical existence as a social being.” [158]

“It is above all necessary to avoid postulating ‘society’ once again as an abstraction confronting the individual. The individual is the social being. The manifestation of the life – even when it does not appear directly in the form of a communal manifestation, accomplished in association with other men – is, therefore, a manifestation and affirmation of social life. Individual human life and species-life are not different things, even though the mode of existence of individual life is necessarily either a more specific or a more general mode of species-life, or that of species-life a specific or more general mode of individual life.” [158]

“Thought and being are indeed distinct but they also form a unity.” [158]

“Just as private property is only the sensuous expression of the fact that man is at the same time an objective fact for himself and becomes an alien and non-human object ofr himself; just as his manifestation of life is also his alienation of life and his self-realization a loss of reality, the emergence of an alien reality; so the positive supersession of private property, i.e. the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and of human life, of objective man and of human creations, by and for man, should not be taken only in the sense of immediate, exclusive enjoyment, or only in the sense of possession or having. Man appropriates his manifold being in an all-inclusive way, and thus as a whole man. All his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in their objective action (their action in relation to the object) the appropriation of this object, the appropriation of human reality. The way in which they react to the object is the confirmation of human reality. It is human effectiveness and human suffering, for suffering humanly considered is an enjoyment of the self for man.” [159]

“Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when it is directly eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, utilized in some way. But private property itself only conceives these various forms of possession as means of life, and the life for which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and creation of capital.” [159]

“On the one hand, it is only when objective reality everywhere becomes for man in society the reality of human faculties, human reality, and thus the reality of his own faculties, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself. The objects then confirm and realize his individuality, they are his own objects, i.e. man himself becomes the object. The manner in which these objects become his own depends upon the nature of the object and the nature of the corresponding faculty; for it is precisely the determinate character of this relation which constitutes the specific real mode of affirmation. The object is not the same for the eye as for the ear, for the ear as for the eye. The distinctive character of each faculty is precisely its characteristic essence and thus also the characteristic mode of its objectification, of its objectively real, living being.” [161]

“For this reason, the sense of social man are different from those of non-social man. It is only through the objectively deployed wealth of the human being that the wealth of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye which is sensitive to the beauty of form, in short, senses which are capable of human satisfaction and which confirm themselves as human faculties) is cultivated or created. For it is not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (desiring, loving, etc.), in brief, human sensibility and the human character of the senses, which can only come into being through the existence of its object, through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history. Sense which is subservient to crude needs has only a restricted meaning.” [161]

“The resolution of the theoretical contradictions is possibly only through practical means, only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is not by any means, therefore, only a problem of knowledge, but is a real problem of life which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it saw there a purely theoretical problem.” [162]

“Communism is the phase of negation of the negation and is, consequently, for the next stage of historical development, a real and necessary factor in the emancipation and rehabilitation of man. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not itself the goal of human development – the form of human society.” [167]

(Page numbers correspond to the Bewick/Ed edition, 1972; emphasis mine unless otherwise noted)

“The American worker today makes in practice the distinction which Marx made nearly a hundred years ago in theory – the distinction between abstract labor for value and concrete labor for human needs. Marx denied that the essence of value production was the search for profits by the individual capitalists…Marx was concerned with the activity of the workers. By value production he meant production which expanded itself through degradation and dehumanization of the worker to a fragment of a man. The essence of capitalist production is that it is a dynamically developing relation by which the dead labor in the machine, created by the workers, oppresses and degrades to abstract labor the living worker which it employs. Abstract labor is alienated labor, labor in which the worker ‘develops no free physical and spiritual energy but mortifies his body and ruins his spirit.’ Concrete labor for needs, on the other hand, is not merely nor even essentially the labor which produces butter rather than guns. It is the labor in which man realizes his basic human need for exercising his natural and acquired powers.” [46]

“By powers of production, Marx meant the fully developed productive powers of the individual workers, freely associated with their fellow workers. Such universality in the workers was the only means for developing universality in the rest of society. Without the universality of the workers, the dehumanization of the whole society was inevitable.” [47]

“We must begin by reaffirming the fact that the social and historical essence of the machine, stripped of its capitalist employment, is that it embodies human activities. This social essence has been lost sight of in bourgeois society which in its irrepressible need to expand surplus value by developing ever more powerful machines to exploit the workers, has increasingly designed the machine in terms of end product rather than of operation. Automatic production requires that the machines be designed in terms of operation rather than of the end product.” [Boggs' emphasis, 49]

“A social object contains the totality of human activities as perfected by the previous industrial history of man…the actual inclusion of human sensitivities in the automatic machines being designed today dramatically reveals the essentially human nature of industry.” [50]

“A social object requires for its control men who embody this human nature in themselves, i.e., social man. Without this social man, the social object has no sense…The completely automatic production unit is social also in the sense that it requires the most complete continuity of operations…Each man, therefore, in control of any particular stage of the process must be aware of the relation of his role in production to that of every other man. That is the essence of planning. Not coordination from above of pieces of steel, or inanimate chess men. Planning, as control from below, is an economic necessity based upon the enormous scope and variety of modern industry. Without the inclusion of this scope and variety in the worker, there is no planning within production but only blueprints for production…Administration for the masses is no substitute for administration by the masses.” [50]

“The yearning of the workers for universality today is no mere desire to acquire skills in a host of interesting jobs or to imitate the skilled craftsman of an earlier age. The workers conceive of their mastery of the machine as a mastery of the process of large-scale production, and hence as an all-embracing integration of the workers’ activity and judgment in a network of complex operations. It is associated humanity which will control production and it is this control which will make of each man not an isolated individual doing one job or many jobs but a social individual participating in a social project.” [51]

“…[Marx] recognized that the essence of the machine was not its employment of mechanical powers, but rather its human nature, not what it produced but how it produced…” [52]

“So hostile is the working class to existing social relations that it carries on an incessant revolt in the labor process itself, not only against any attempts to increase its productivity but also and essentially against any attempt to maintain productivity at all.” [53]

“The four ‘don’ts’ are the expression of the worker’s alienation from any social purpose beyond those of the protection of his working group. They symbolize the disintegration of the old social ties of bourgeois society, a disintegration going on apace at its very core. The workers create a new social tie, their class solidarity. But precisely because the class does not find within the given, i.e., capitalist society, any expression of social needs, precisely because it instinctively realizes that the existing social needs are the class needs of an alien class, this new social tie is expressed in a negative manner, creative only in devising means to oppose the given society.” [54]

“The workers today, pressing toward the revolution in the productive forces which require their classless universality or existence as social individuals, are instead forced by the production relations of capitalism into a class community. They create new social ties negatively because capitalist production relations prevent them from creating them positively. Their discipline, unity and organization as created by large-scale capitalism, are exercised in the service of their class, and class existence is not social existence but alien existence.” [their emphasis, 54]

“So long, therefore, as class existence is necessary, the workers cannot exercise their complete human capacities. They belong to the community ‘only as average individuals, only insofar as they live within the conditions of existence of their class…a relationship in which they participate not as individuals but as members of the class.’ (Marx, German Ideology)…’The lower social code’ by which they govern themselves is their only protection against the enemy class. The capitalists fear this ‘lower social code’ because it impedes their need for surplus value and they seek to undermine it by destroying the unity of the workers, creating company men, etc. The workers hate this code because it conflicts with their natural human desire to do a good job and forces them to subordinate their individual personalities to the defensive needs of the class.” [54]

“Degraded to badge numbers, the individual workers seek to distinguish themselves by their clothing, their knowledge of baseball players, movie stars, etc.” [55]

“Marx never wrote of the new socialist society without specifically emphasizing the fully developed individual who would be the basis of such a society. But the essence of individuality for Marx was the expression of self-activity in relation to the development of the productive forces and therefore a historical and not an abstract reality. To be an individual at any stage of society’s development, the person must embody the previous gains of the species and the multiplicity of talents which these has made possible.” [55]

“For nearly a century, capitalism, with its fetishism of commodities, has so dulled man’s understanding of himself that he has believed individualism to be indistinguishable from personal aggrandizement and competition with others.” [55]

“The solidarity of the working class in its struggle against the capitalist class is only one side of the concept of socialized labor…‘Social activity and social spirit by no means exist merely in the form of direct community activity and direct community spirit.’ However ‘community activity and spirit, i.e., activity and spirit which are expressed and asserted directly in actual society with other men, are to be found wherever such an immediate expression of sociality is based on the essential content of the activity and are suited to its nature.’” [57]

“The essential content of productive activity today is the cooperative form of the labor process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labor into instruments of labor only usable in common, the economizing of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialized labor, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and this, the international character of the capitalist regime. The bourgeoisie maintains a fetter on this essentially social activity by isolating individuals from one another through competition, by separating the intellectual powers of production from the manual labor, by suppressing the creative organizational talents of the broad masses, by dividing the world up into spheres of influence.” [57]

“Marx…warned: ‘We should especially avoid re-establishing society as an abstraction opposed to the individual. The individual is the social essence. His expression of life, although it may not appear in the direct form of a communal-type life carried out simultaneously with others, is therefore an expression and assertion of social living. The individual and the species life of man are not distinct.’ (“Private Property and Communism”)” [59]

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!”

In any event, there is a great monologue in the film by Smith about the novel Catcher in the Rye (see the video below). He views the novel as exploring the death of the human imagination and the alienated social relations between humans. It reminded me of how Marx describes the different aspects of the alienation of labor. Here are some relevant quotes from Estranged Labor and then check out the video of Smith’s monologue:

What, then, constitutes the alienation of labor?

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

….The life of the species, both in man and in animals, consists physically in the fact that man (like the animal) lives on organic nature; and the more universal man (or the animal) is, the more universal is the sphere of inorganic nature on which he lives. Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., constitute theoretically a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of natural science, partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, spiritual nourishment which he must first prepare to make palatable and digestible – so also in the realm of practice they constitute a part of human life and human activity. Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.

In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from man. It changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life. First it estranges the life of the species and individual life, and secondly it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of the life of the species, likewise in its abstract and estranged form.

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

….An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature.

The estrangement of man, and in fact every relationship in which man [stands] to himself, is realized and expressed only in the relationship in which a man stands to other men.

Hence within the relationship of estranged labor each man views the other in accordance with the standard and the relationship in which he finds himself as a worker.

For New Life, Blacks in City Head to South

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

For New Life, Blacks in City Head to South
By DAN BILEFSKY

In Deborah Brown’s family lore, the American South was a place of whites-only water fountains and lynchings under cover of darkness. It was a place black people like her mother had fled.

But for Ms. Brown, 59, a retired civil servant from Queens, the South now promises salvation.

Three generations of her family — 10 people in all — are moving to Atlanta from New York, seeking to start fresh economically and, in some sense, to reconnect with a bittersweet past. They include Ms. Brown, her 82-year-old mother and her 26-year-old son, who has already landed a job and settled there.

The economic downturn has propelled a striking demographic shift: black New Yorkers, including many who are young and college educated, are heading south.

About 17 percent of the African-Americans who moved to the South from other states in the past decade came from New York, far more than from any other state, according to census data. Of the 44,474 who left New York State in 2009, more than half, or 22,508, went to the South, according to a study conducted by the sociology department of Queens College for The New York Times.

The movement is not limited to New York. The percentage of blacks leaving big cities in the East and in the Midwest and heading to the South is now at the highest levels in decades, demographers say.

“I feel a strong spiritual pull to go back to the South,” Ms. Brown said.

Middle-class enclaves, like Jamaica and St. Albans in Queens, are feeding this exodus. Black luminaries — like James Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois and Ella Fitzgerald — once lived in St. Albans, a neighborhood that is now being hit by high unemployment and foreclosures.

The migration of middle-class African-Americans is helping to depress already falling housing prices. It is also depriving the black community of investment and leadership from some of its most educated professionals, black leaders say.

The movement marks an inversion of the so-called Great Migration, which lasted roughly from World War I to the 1970s and saw African-Americans moving to the industrializing North to escape prejudice and find work.

Spencer Crew, a history professor at George Mason University who was the curator of a prominent exhibit on the Great Migration at the Smithsonian Institution, said the current exodus from New York stemmed largely from tough economic times. New York is increasingly unaffordable, and blacks see more opportunities in the South.

The South now represents the potential for achievement for black New Yorkers in a way it had not before, Professor Crew said. At the same time, unionized civil service jobs that once drew thousands of blacks to the city are becoming more scarce.

“New York has lost some of its cachet for black people,” Professor Crew said. “During the Great Migration, blacks went north because you could find work if you were willing to hustle. But today, there is less of a struggle to survive in the South than in New York. Many blacks also have emotional and spiritual roots in the South. It is like returning home.”

Ms. Brown, who spent 35 years investigating welfare fraud for New York State, may have seemed the embodiment of the black American dream in New York City.

In the 1950s, her parents moved to Harlem, and then to Queens, from Atlanta. Her grandmother was a maid; her grandfather was a brick mason. One generation later, her parents were prospering. Her father became a senior tax official for the state; her mother was an executive assistant to the state corrections commissioner.

But Ms. Brown says New York is now less inviting. She plans to join her 26-year-old son, Rashid, who moved to Atlanta from Queens last year after he graduated with a degree in criminology but could not find a job in New York.

In Atlanta, he became a deputy sheriff within weeks. She is hoping to open a restaurant.

“In the South, I can buy a big house with a garden compared with the shoe box my retirement savings will buy me in New York,” she said.

The Rev. Floyd H. Flake, pastor of the 23,000-member Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens, said he was losing hundreds of congregants yearly to Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

“For decades, Queens has been the place where the African-American middle class went to buy their first home and raise a family,” Mr. Flake said. “But now, we are seeing a reversal of this as African-Americans feel this is no longer as easy to achieve and that the South is more benevolent than New York.”

Some blacks say they are leaving not only to find jobs, but also because they have soured on race relations.

Candace Wilkins, 27, of St. Albans, who remains unemployed despite having a business degree, plans to move to Charlotte, N.C.

She said her decision was prompted by an altercation with the police.

In March 2010, witnesses say, Ms. Wilkins was thrown against a car by a white police officer after she tried to help a black neighbor who was being questioned. She was charged with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, according to the Queens district attorney’s office.

Ms. Wilkins disputes the charges, which are pending, and has filed a complaint against the police. A police spokeswoman said the department was investigating her complaint.

“Life has gone full circle,” said Ms. Wilkins, whose grandmother was born amid the cotton fields of North Carolina and moved to Queens in the 1950s.

“My grandmother’s generation left the South and came to the North to escape segregation and racism,” she said. “Now, I am going back because New York has become like the old South in its racial attitudes.”

Many black New Yorkers who are already in the South say they have little desire to return to the city, even though they get wistful at the mention of the subways or Harlem nights.

Danitta Ross, 39, a real estate broker who used to live in Queens, said she moved to Atlanta four years ago after her company, responding to the surge in black New Yorkers moving south, began offering relocation seminars. She helped organize them, and became intrigued.

Ms. Ross said she had grown up hearing stories at the dinner table about segregation. She said the Atlanta she discovered was a cosmopolitan place of classical music concerts, interracial marriage and opulent houses owned by black people.

A single mother, she said that for $150,000, she was buying a seven-room house, with a three-car garage, on a nice plot of land.

Ms. Ross said she had experienced some culture shock in the South, and had been surprised to find that blacks tended to self-segregate, even in affluent neighborhoods.

She said that the South — not New York — was now home.

“People in Georgia have a different mind-set and life is more relaxed and comfortable here,” she said. “There is just a lot more opportunity.”

*************************************************

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

This is the first installment in “The Great Return,” an occasional HuffPost BlackVoices series about the shift of African Americans toward the South after the Great Migration to the North.

CHICAGO — Nearly seven decades ago, James Middleton was just a toddler when he watched a white man shoot and kill a black man in the little town of Lambert, Mississippi.

He had tagged along with his father to run errands and, giddy with excitement, sat in his daddy’s Ford as they pulled up to a local restaurant. There was a commotion out front —a family friend arguing with the eatery’s white owner, who had a pistol in his hand.

“You nigger!” Middleton recalls the white man shouting. “I’ll kill you!”

The friend ran. Gunshots followed.

“I looked down and I could see this man, still trying to breathe, and blood was coming out of his chest,” says Middleton. “I don’t like to remember bad things. But it seemed like bad things were always happening to black folks.”

Middleton’s baptism in Southern violence was a consequence of being black at a time and place of cradle-to-grave segregation and senseless death. The specter of violence and inequality that his family endured eventually drove them more than 600 miles north to Chicago, making them a ripple in the wave of millions of blacks who fled the South in search of a better life.

They moved into a little place on Chicago’s West Side with other working-class blacks. (The South Side, he said, was reserved for the more well-to-do and professional set). They joined a network of relatives, friends and other migrants.

The Middletons were among an estimated six million blacks to flee the South between 1915 and 1970, to northern cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Detroit and Los Angeles in the west. They found work on automobile assembly lines or in manufacturing plants and factories in the industrial North. They laid roots, raised families and gave their children opportunities that many could never have imagined for themselves back home.

But today, generations later, amid higher costs of living, concerns over crime and what many perceive as too few job opportunities in those same cities, African Americans are returning to the South in the largest numbers since the first Great Migration, according to sociologists and those who have studied the new migration. During the 1940s, roughly 1.5 million blacks migrated to the North. Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 1,336,097 blacks moved to seven major southern cities alone, according to the Brookings Institute, which compiled the most recent data from the U.S. Census.

THE NEW DEMOGRAPHICS

Former magnets for black migrants, including Illinois, Michigan, New York and California, all have had black population declines. Atlanta has even overtaken Chicago as the city with the second-largest black population behind New York City. The black population in Atlanta has grown in the past decade by 473,493. In Dallas it grew by 233,890, and in Houston by 214,928 over the same period. Today, 57 percent of the country’s black population lives in the South, a 50-year high, according to the most recent census data.

Today’s migrants are chasing the same things their forebears sought decades earlier, according to those who have studied the return migration. Others are retiring or returning to familial homesteads, reclaiming land their relatives never let loose.

“There are places like Harlem that no longer have majority black populations because many of the black folks who have lived there for the last 50 or so years have decided to cash in, and they are going to live somewhere more affordable, places that don’t come with the urban baggage that maybe we didn’t ever want but put up with because this was our best chance at a solid economic future,” said Khalil Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library and renowned for its collections of historic artifacts. “Those people are going to places that look just the way they want them to look. They are not going to be shackled by a political nationalism or the segregation of the past.”

Meanwhile, Chicago has lost about 181,000 African Americans over the past decade, a drop of 17 percent. Many have fled to the Chicago suburbs. But to a greater extent, who is leaving and where they’re going is difficult to determine, according to demographers. But Brookings Institute reports that these new migrants tend to be financially stable and more educated. Many are students, professionals or retirees.

James Middleton, who is 72, and his wife of 53 years, Barbara, have a grown son, now living in Houston, and a granddaughter in Chicago who is considering moving to the South or West, they say — an indicator of just how much less promise many see in what was once the “promised land” of the North.

“At that time there wasn’t a lot of differences between there and here, in terms of the way people took care of their families,” Middleton says of Chicago when he first arrived. “It was simple. We stayed with relatives, and other relatives had relatives, so you were always around people that was concerned about you.”

“It was a vast difference between how things are today and how things were then,” he adds. “Then it was like that saying, it took a village to raise a child. Everyone chipped in, whether they were neighbors or not. Now the professionals, the school teachers … they are trying to get away.”

THE END OF EXILE

During the summers of her youth, Sherry Williams and her siblings relished the trips back “home” from Chicago to Inverness, Miss., where they ran free and spent lazy summer days by the local fishing hole, living, if only for a few weeks, an idyllic country life.

Those connections still run deep in Williams’ family and in other families whose roots stretch back to the South.

“For the most part, most of the people who I know that have started to return to the South, their mindset is that they never were Chicagoans,” says Williams, 51, who was born in Chicago but whose mother left Inverness in 1942. “They physically lived here, but really, they truly believe the South is home, and that this is just the place that they moved to seeking work and absolutely for the opportunity to vote, attend better schools and just better themselves.”

She said that many of the children of those migrants found themselves financially strapped. “But back home, the family has always had that land, that ‘heir property’ that many people find themselves going to,” Williams says. Her family still owns a home and some land in Mississippi, which a revolving cast of cousins has occupied off and on.

Williams’ daughter, Joi Tucker, 20, a third-year student at Alcorn State in Lorman, Miss., said she chose to leave Chicago because life is “definitely a lot easier” in the South. She said she plans on staying there after she graduates to attend graduate school and find work there. She says she’s “courting” Alabama, Tennessee and Atlanta.

“It’s kind of like a sci-fi movie,” Tucker says. “You go home and see people just disappearing.”

“AIN’T GOING BACK”

Quinn Chapel A.M.E church is Chicago’s oldest black congregation. During the Civil War era it played a pivotal role in the abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad. On a recent afternoon, more than a dozen men and women, many with graying hair, met for Bible study. Many were born in the South, in Mississippi, Georgia or Tennessee.

“Oh, I’ve seen the change, people moving back,” says Dorothy Cunningham, 83, who was raised in Memphis but moved to Chicago with her family when she was 13.

Her church has seen its ranks dwindle amid generational and geographic shifts, as well as the closing of nearby public housing complexes. Cunningham has spoken with family or friends, and she says that they’ve told her that one downside to moving South is culture shock for the younger children and teens unused to the social mores and the slower pace of life there.

Still, while many African Americans have opted to return “home” to the South, there are still some who intend to stay in the North. They say they have left the Old South behind, and they’re unconvinced the New South has much more to offer.

“I left a long time ago,” says Mack Sevier, owner of Uncle John’s Barbecue, a little no-table joint on the south side of the city. Sevier moved from Augusta, Ark., on May 18, 1962, the day he graduated from high school. “I ain’t going back,” he says.

Sevier says he found exactly what he was looking for: the opportunity to be his own boss. He occasionally goes back down South, he says, usually to pick up favorite foods, like the southern-grown sweet potatoes he uses to make his pies.

Bronzeville is a South Side neighborhood in Chicago that historians cite as the city’s first black neighborhood, founded by former and fugitives slaves in the 1840s. On an unseasonably warm evening recently on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Arlander Wade, 63, stood on the sidewalk outside of his recently purchased condo in one of the area’s huge, historic “greystone” homes.

He pointed across the street to a parking lot where the Regal Theater once stood, a place where jazz and blues greats once sang or played. The street, running through the heart of historic Bronzeville, once was Grand Boulevard, a gem in the black community and home to people like Robert S. Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, Daniel Hale Williams, one of the nation’s first black surgeons, and Oscar Stanton De Priest, the first post-Reconstruction African American elected to Congress.

“It took me 63 years, but I finally made it to Grand Boulevard,” says Wade, a retired postal worker whose mother was born in Georgia, his father in New Jersey. “I don’t know why people are going. All these young people are moving because they don’t know what they have right here. They are hoping for something better, but what they’re running from, they’re running to. Everyone they saw on 43rd Street last week will be waiting for them in Atlanta by the time they get there. They can have that. I finally made it.”

However determined Wade is to stay, he is surrounded by a fast-flowing ebb tide of African-American migrants leaving Chicago behind — people like Joi Tucker, the Alcorn State University student.

“A lot of people are going back to their mother’s home, grandparents’ home and going back to their land,” she says. “People down here show black people love.”

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

I was raped by a boyfriend on August 18th, 2006. The very next day I held back tears while I lied to a stranger over the phone about why I was unavailable to go in that day for a second interview for a job that I desperately needed. When I hung up the phone I saw a new text message. It was from him. “It’s not over. It will never be over between us…”

The next day I went in for the second interview. It was inside of the Sears Tower Starbucks in Chicago. I took the train to the interview constantly looking around me and shaking. I needed work. I had just been fired from Target two weeks prior and had no prospects. I knew I would have to go through a metal detector in order to enter the building so despite every instinct in my body I did not bring a knife with me.

“What would you do if you caught a coworker stealing?”

My mind is racing. I’m thinking that I risked my safety by leaving my house for a stupid job that pays $7.75/hr. Aren’t I worth more than that? Aren’t we all worth so much more?

“I’d tell management right away, of course. I’ve never understood why someone would steal from work…”

I tell them what they want me to.

I started working at Starbucks on August 22, 2006. That was a little over five years ago. Every year we have annual reviews where I generally get to argue with someone younger than me who makes significantly more than do about why my hard work, aching back, cracking hands, sore wrists, the bags under my eyes, the burns, the bruises on my arms, the cuts on my knees, the constant degrading treatment by the customers, the “baby, honey, sugar, bitch”, the “hey, you, slut…I said NO whip cream!”s, the staring, the following after work…I get to argue why all that means I’m worth a 33cent raise rather than 22cents, Degrading for any worker. Degrading especially for a woman worker. Only for me, I get to do this every year just four days after the anniversary of when someone I was in love with raped me. My annual review is truly the only reason I’m reminded of the anniversary of the assault.

I wish I was exaggerating but truthfully I’ve just toned down how I really feel about it. Since we’re talking about labor, I could also mention how when I was raped I didn’t leave the house where it happened until the morning because of two main reasons 1) I feared riding the subway home at 3am and 2) I was getting picked up in the morning by my then best friend (and my boyfriend’s other partner) to head to her wealthy parents’ house in the suburbs where they were paying me to clean. Desperately needing to sell my labor in exchange for simple cash kept me laying awake next to my attacker. Not wanting to lose the gig had me lying to him. Promising that I’d never tell anyone. Promising not to leave him. Promises that at the time I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t keep.

It was when I was on my hands and knees literally scrubbing the floor of her parents’ house that it occurred to me that being poor was truly enough of an assault.

Read the rest here.

“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.”

“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]