Elizabeth Gurley Flynn with Pat Quinlan, Carlo Tresca,
Adolph Lessig, and Big Bill Haywood
Paterson, New Jersey 1913

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Arrives

On January 27, 1913 at the Doherty Silk Mill in Paterson, New Jersey, a workers committee requested a meeting with management. They wanted an end to the hated four-loom system which had doubled their work load with no increase in pay, and had caused the lay-offs of many of their fellow workers. When four members of that committee were fired, 800 silk workers, almost the entire work force, walked off the job spontaneously. They were without union organization to back them up. Being mostly foreign-born, non-English-speaking, unskilled workers, the AFL’s United Textile Workers did not want them.

But, in fact, there was another textile union in Paterson at that time: the IWW’s National Industrial Union of Textile Workers, Local 152 which local organizers, Ewald Koettgen and Adolph Lessig had established over several years of organizing. It was there, with this stalwart band of 100 Wobblies, that the strikers found a union willing to back up their strike. As it became clear that Doherty would not bargain with the strikers, Local 152 request help from IWW headquarters in Chicago.

On February 25, 1913, national IWW organizers, Pat Quinland, Carlos Tresca, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arrived to speak at a mass meeting. All three were arrested that night at the meeting. Strikers followed them to the jail and held a rally outside the jail, singing and shouting for their release. Women shouted, “When the strike is won, Gurley Flynn will be the boss!”

By the time Big Bill Haywood arrived, later that week, the strike had spread to silk mills across Paterson. 300 mills were shut down, and 25,000 silk workers were on strike. Big Bill advised the strikers: “fold your arms or put your hands in your pocket and let the manufacturers do the worrying.”

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaking to Strikers
Paterson, New Jersey 1913

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Speaks to Strikers

Meetings, rallies, marches, speeches, and singing were features of any IWW strike, and the Paterson Silk Strike fit that mold. Mass meetings were held every morning, and shop committee meetings each afternoon. Each shop elected two strikers to represent them on the shop committee, and this was the committee that ran the strike. There were also special meetings for the women and children who made up more than half of the strikers.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was much beloved by the strikers. Reporter Art Shields describes the strikers reaction to her:

Fifteen to twenty-thousand strikers and sympathizers were applauding a beautiful young woman, whose passionate voice reached everyone in the crowd. She spoke from a high platform heaped with gorgeous flowers. But violets and roses paled before this twenty-one-year-old beauty, and I fell in love with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at first sight.

I wasn’t her only captive. No other woman speaker except Mother Jones won so many hearts as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She won them in struggles against big exploiters, not in quiet lecture halls….

And there was a dramatic scene when Elizabeth called an Italian girl she knew to the platform. This was a pale, thin teenager..Elizabeth embraced her and then said, “The silk bosses are killing Angelica. They are working her to death. They put her on four looms instead of two. She’s working twice as hard as before.”

…”But that isn’t all the silk bosses did to Angelica. They didn’t give her enough to eat.” Angelica, she said, was the only support of a sick mother and her younger brothers and sisters. Her father was dead. Her family was hungry The family seldom ate meat. “She’s also striking,” Elizabeth said, “for a raise to give her family enough to eat.”

The silk bosses are robbers, Elizabeth continued. The cars they are driving, the diamonds their wives are wearing, the rich food their families are eating, their winter vacations in Florida’s sunshine-all come from the labors of Angelica and twenty-five thousand other silk workers. “And when you win the raises you are fighting for,” she said, “you’ll get back only a little of what you produced. But these raises are just a beginning. The time is coming when you will run these plants for yourselves.”

“She got to be an idol with us.”

Irma Lombardi was a young seventeen-year-old striker. She left us this description of Gurley Flynn:

Gurley Flynn called a meeting just for the women one day. She started with that lovely way of hers. She looked at us and said, “Would you like to have nice clothes?” We replied, “Oh, yes.” “Would you like to have nice shoes?” “Oh,yes.” we shouted. “Well, you can’t have them. Your bosses’ daughters have those things!” We got mad. We knew it was true. We had shoes with holes, and they had lovely things. Then she said, “Would you like to have soft hands like your bosses’ daughters?” and we got mad all over again. She was a beautiful speaker. She got be an idol with us.

Sophie Cohen was the child of a former mill worker. Though not a striker, her father was passionate in his support of the strike, and often brought her to the rallies. She later remembered Gurley Flynn:

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
IWW Organizer

Gurley Flynn looked just like the pictures we see of her now. She was young, vibrant, enthusiastic. She wan’t really a good speaker, but she gave so much of herself in her talks. She would come at night to the soup kitchens. There were big cauldrons of soup set up in a lot next to the church and she would get up on a platform. There were red flares around her, and she’d get them singing and then she’d talk with them. It was just the thing people needed to keep them together and give them courage.

Sundays in Haledon

Meetings were not allowed in Paterson, but the nearby town of Haledon had a Socialist mayor who welcomed the strikers. On Sundays thousands of strikers marched to Haledon. A striker’s family offered the use of their two-story house. Speeches were given from the upper balcony to the crowd gathered below in the street and in the large green field opposite the house. Gurley Flynn later remembered those Sunday meetings fondly:

Sunday after Sunday , as the days became pleasanter, we spoke there to enormous crowds of thousands of people-the strikers and their families, workers from other Paterson industries, people from nearby New Jersey cities, delegations from all over America and from foreign countries. People who saw these Haledon meetings never forgot them.

But there was a deeper reason for going to Haledon on Sundays, Gurley Flynn explained:

Because Sunday is the day before Monday. Monday is the day that a break comes in every strike, if it is to come at all during the week. If you can bring the people safely over Monday they usually go along for the rest of the week. If on Sunday, however, you let those people stay at home, sit around the stove without any fire in it, sit down at the table were there isn’t much food, see the feet of the children with shoes getting thin and the bodies of children where the clothes are getting ragged, they begin to think in terms of “myself” and lose the spirit of the mass and the realization that all are suffering as they are suffering…And so our original reason for going to Haledon was to give them novelty, to give them variety, to take them en masse out of the city of Paterson some place else to sort of picnic over Sunday that would stimulate them for the rest of the week.

Mass Arrests
On the picket lines, the strikers were subject to daily mass arrest. Many were sentenced to ten or twenty days, some to six months at hard labor. Most of the strikers went straight back to the picket line upon their release. Seventeen-year-old Hannah Silverman was arrested three times. She was back on the picket line the next morning each time she was released. Big Bill Haywood hailed her as “the greatest little IWW woman in America.” When Carrie Torello was arrested, she gathered her children together, put them in the patrol wagon and told another striker, “If you see Freddie, tell him to come to Jail.”

The Paterson Press
The Paterson Press openly called for violence against the IWW organizers, calling for the formation of a vigilance committee to drive them out of town:

Los Angeles, Akron, Denver, Ottowa, and other cities kicked the I.W.W. out of town in short order…What is Paterson doing to discourage this revolutionary horde?

And another example:

Akron, Ohio, could not find a law to banish this dangerous revolutionist [Big Bill] and his cohorts but a citizens’ committee of 1000 men did the trick in short order. Can Akron, Ohio, accomplish something that Paterson, N.J., cannot duplicate? The Paterson Press dislikes to believe it, but time will tell.

WE NEVER FORGET
On Thursday, April 17, 1913, Modestino Valentino was murdered by private detectives, hired gunmen imported from New York by the mill owners. This man’s only crime against the mill owners was that he was standing on his own front porch watching the strikers hoot at the scab-herders. He was not a striker, nor was he a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. The hooting so bothered the gunmen that they felt compelled to open fire on unarmed workers. Gurley Flynn described how he died:

[He] grabbed his child and started through the doorway, when he was shot in the back. His wife grabbed the child and her husband fell and dead at her feet.

Gurley Flynn went with a committee of strikers to visit the widow:

She was in bed, awaiting the birth of a second child. On the other side of a folding partition was the casket of her dead husband, parallel to the bed. The priest came in while we were there but he made no objection to our request [for the I.W.W. to provide for the funeral.] She was a simple grief-stricken woman, who expressed her sympathy with the strikers, many of whom were her neighbors. She placed the blame where it belonged-on the company thugs who murdered her husband. It was a tragic example of force and violence by the employers in the class struggle-a worker dead , a woman widowed, two children, one unborn, left orphans-a story repeated all too often in my experience.

According to IWW historian, Fred Thompson, five workers in all lost their lives in the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913.

Hunger, the Great Strikebreaker
In spite of the courage shown by the strikers and their leaders, the silk strikers were defeated. Some small concessions were made by a few of the mill owners, but for the most part, strikers went back to work defeated. Some had been replaced by scabs and were never rehired. Gurley Flynn partially blamed the Pageant for the loss of the strike, asserting that it was a distraction from strike duties. It was a financial disaster also, which only further discouraged the strikers. But in the end the strike was lost because the strikers were starving. Gurley Flynn later spoke of the suffering that the strikers endured before they were driven back to work by hunger:

I saw men go out in Paterson without shoes, in the middle of winter and with bags on their feet, I went into a family to have a picture taken of a mother with eight children who didn’t have a crust of bread, didn’t have a bowl of milk for the baby in the house,-but the father was out on the picket line. Others were just as bad off. Thousands of them that we never heard of at all. This was the difficulty that the workers had to contend with in Paterson: hunger; hunger gnawing at their vitals; hunger tearing them down; and still they had the courage to fight it out for six months.

Let us honor their courage and sacrifice by continuing the struggle for social and economic justice.

Solidarity,
JayRaye

SOURCES

The IWW: Its First Seventy Years 1905-1975
-by Fred W Thompson & Patrick Murfin
IWW Press, 1976

The Rebel Girl
My First Life (1906-1926)
-by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
NY, 1979

Women and the American Labor Movement
From Colonial Times to the Eve of World War I
-by Philip S Foner
NY, 1979

My Shaping-Up Years
-by Art Shields
NY, 1982

Solidarity Forever
An Oral History of the IWW
-ed by Bird, Georgaks, & Shaffer
Lake View Press, 1985

Words on Fire
The Life and Writing of
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
-by Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall
Rutgers U Press, 1987

Rebel Voices
An IWW Anthology
-ed by Joyce L Kornbluh
Charles H Kerr Pub, 1988

Those of us seeking a more fair, egalitarian and stable society often imagine a more-or-less utopian future. Part of what we imagine may be expressed with the old quote “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” (Wikipedia tells us that while this quote is often associated with Karl Marx, it actually precedes him – going back at least to Louis Blanc in 1839.)

Island of Utopia

The concept has a moral and practical basis. We wouldn’t want to live in a world with no sanitation workers, no janitorial work and nobody to do various other necessary jobs. So, why should those who do these jobs have less of their needs met? Suppose every adult could just as easily be the proverbial “rocket scientist” or “brain surgeon.” Such a person might find some necessary but repetitive jobs even more wearing than most people do. If there are non-rocket scientists who can work in factories, let the rocket scientists be happy they are rocket scientists and give the factory workers a generous standard of living.

And the concept apparently resonates with many people’s aspirations – they are able to imagine the quote coming from heroic figures. Wikipedia tells us:

According to a survey conducted by the Museum of the American Revolution, “more than 50 percent of Americans wrongly attributed the quote “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” to either George Washington, Thomas Paine, or Barack Obama,

We still haven’t crossed beyond the realm of society dominated by big money. Once we do, it will still take a while to reconfigure the economy and government, change habits and assumptions, and otherwise prepare for goals such as “to each according to his needs.” In the final analysis, future society will use its decision-making processes to apply (or not apply) such a rule of distribution. I’m not assuming I’ll be there to participate in finalizing how it’s done. Still, we can try to shed some light on the question today.

This goal may not have been so complicated back in the 19th century. Back then, the products of society to be shared by working people was less diverse and abundant. There were no phones, TVs, radios, refrigerators, gas stoves, microwaves, automobiles, computers, and other things we’re used to today. Now, with the rise of productivity, new technology, and labor organization, working people can have enough non-essentials there are plenty of choices. One person may go to movies for weekend entertainment, another will pay to play tennis, another go to a night club, another something else. Given the choice, one person might want access to a cabin in the woods, another to be able to travel in an RV, another would like to visit other countries and stay at hotels, another may not want to go away but might prefer so many tickets to a local sports team.

So what does “to each according to his need” mean today? Is our future society to provide basic food, clothing, shelter and medical care to all, but operate on today’s cash purchasing basis for everything else? Do we calculate a total value of all the goods and services to be distributed this year, use a formula to assign each person’s need as a fraction of the total to be distributed, then give each person cash for their part of the total distribution, but let them spend it however they want? Perhaps, that’s the best we can do, but it’s actually providing a cash equivalent of an estimate of expenses. It may not be exactly what we dreamed of, but it is based on an estimate of appropriate buying power rather than on aspects of “ability.”

Perhaps, one day there would be enough vacation options available [as in the example above] for people to just receive a voucher for “two week vacation” and be able to get their preferred version the vast majority of the time. And perhaps, they would be understanding on those occasions it didn’t work out and just select their next favorite alternative. Maybe the individuals wouldn’t always be happy about it, but society would feel it was doing the best it could.

Today, vacations often involve making advance reservations. Perhaps, future society will expect people to express preferences in advance for various options for goods and services. That could allow shifting production from what had previously been requested by citizens to what was being asked for in the latest survey. On the other hand, the people might decide they don’t want to have to decide in advance and then get what seemed like a good idea a few weeks or months ago.

Automation

Read the rest of this entry →

I have been thinking about how to introduce some of the methodologies we use in DK to augment the basic liberalism and progressivism necessary to produce more and better Democrats. This piece is intended to introduce some basic texts which for many might seem too simplistic and even heretical but are hopefully useful for those wanting to consider that many of the perspectives often refelected in DK have a sincere and authentic theoretical foundation.

I chose a recent diary by Kos on conservative understanding of the decline in bee populations to serve as an example of how an understanding of Marx can add to the interpretive strength of an already strong argument. The “light comes on” is not enlightenment in any earth-shaking sense but it is a reflection on the need to consider that there are preexisting social analysis methodologies that have made progressives more effective in guiding action and organizing resistance to the rise of RW power.

Buried way at the bottom of this piece on the increasing death rate of honey bees:

But Mr. Adee [the South Dakota owner of the nation's largest beekeeping company), who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about [pesticide use in crops], said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”

I’m going to do some stereotyping and assume that a South Dakota farmer who scorns “extremist” environmentalist is a Republican. It’s not much of a stretch. So like Sen. Rob Portman’s conversion on marriage equality because of his gay son, or Sen. Mark Kirk’s conversion on health care services to the less-wealthy because of his debilitating stroke, Adee decides that maybe the dirty fucking hippies are onto something when he, himself, is directly affected by unfettered degradation of our environment.

I emphasize the expression directly affected because it is important for acting in a way to understand Anti-Capitalism This point of view recognizes that there are changes in consciousness, the understanding that a tension between beliefs and reality has been heightened and proven transformative. In this diary Kos discusses the contradiction of GOP ideology in confronting the complex yet revelatory incidence of bee death as a sign of impending ecological disaster. This serves as a useful way to provide a foundation to discuss the theories necessary to understand a Marxist position on the need to transform the present relations of production.

But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests. While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths. The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths. Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.

This suspicion is the simple result of an economy driven by capitalist desire to systematically maximize profit that also ignores the externalities connected to the use of technologies that also harm the environment and in the long-run destroy even the industry itself. American beekeeping and honey production is both hobby-farm, small scale cottage industry and large-scale agribusiness. In other countries it can be even barely organized gathering. Ultimately change comes from knowledge and its productive application, but a knowledge that is crucially aware of direct effects as critical practices.

I have chosen two elementary texts on Marx to give readers an introduction that is often distorted by cold-war anti-communist reactionaries that one finds in the Marx 101 search on the internet, although Brad DeLong’s Understanding Marx lecture is a good one. I have chosen Peter Singer’s. Marx: A Very Short Introduction (2000) and Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right (2011). This is not a book review, although I would hope that these two accessible texts might appeal even to the less doctrinaire Kossack. Please continue reading to contribute to the discussion of the basics.

The relationship between humans and their environment is one of the ways which we can develop a position against capitalism and for a future that embraces greater democracy. For Marx it is human effort, the energy of cognitive and physical labor(sic) and its relation to the transformation of nature in language, land, materials, and activity as well as the interactions among humans. This diary is intended to introduce two introductory texts on Marx in the hope that readers might become more interested in the necessity of continuing to revisit the Specter of Marx if only to ensure that after the fall of monolithic Soviet style State Capitalist communism in the 1990s he is neither Ghost nor Zombie but with Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, the community of scholars necessary for an Anti-Capitalist future.

Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.
The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work, and 3, its instruments.
(Karl Marx. Capital Volume One Part III: The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value, Chapter Seven: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value, Section 1 – The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch07.htm)

The imagination here is as important a labor process as that of the body. In an age of increased mediation, it is not the potential magic of the cave painting but the many ideological constructions that affect the awareness of the modality of work and ultimately at scale the modality of production, from primitive communism, to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, and then to advanced communism. In each instance it is accumulation of matter, whether as cognitive knowledge formed in minds and transmitted across generations orally or by documents, or physical accumulation of knowledge shown in training, or the accumulation physical objects as wealth or machinery. Unlike the RW, these endowments are based in equity and equality and are a common-pool resource as part of our existence on this planet and remain important for our self-governance.

The ignorance of conservatives that irks Kos as well as so many here in DK is often embodied as the lack of conservative imagination and sometimes referred to as the low-information voter/citizen. Progressives have inevitably embraced the need to consider the greater system of values that exist in economic systems especially those closest to nature and its cultivation as agricultural production. Here’s some of the interpretation of the concept of “low-information” as a hierarchical term

American pollster and political scientist Samuel Popkin coined the term “low-information” in 1991 when he used the phrase “low-information signaling” in his book The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns. Low-information signaling referred to cues or heuristics used by voters, in lieu of substantial information, to determine who to vote for. Examples include voters liking Bill Clinton for eating at McDonald’s, and perceiving John Kerry and Mitt Romney as elitist for wind-surfing and jet-ski riding respectively. Some low-information voters’ views are more moderate than those of high-information voters, they are less likely to vote, and are looking for a candidate they find personally appealing. They tend to be swing voters, and they tend to vote split-ticket more than well-informed voters do, researchers say because they lack a coherent ideology. Linguist George Lakoff has written that the term is a pejorative mainly used by American liberals to refer to people who vote conservative against their own interests, and assumes they do it because they lack sufficient information. Liberals, he said, attribute the problem in part to deliberate Republican efforts at misinforming voters. Thirty-year Republican House of Representatives and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren, in a 2011 article entitled “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult”, characterized low-information voters as anti-intellectual and hostile-to-science “religious cranks,” and claimed Republicans are deliberately manipulating LIVs to undermine their confidence in American democratic institutions. Popular syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh uses the term with regular frequency to denote voters who pull the lever for Democratic candidates for largely esoteric reasons. In a March 25, 2013 transcript, Rush says “I have never said that low-information voters are stupid. I just said they don’t know what they think they know. They are prisoners to the media, which has dumbed them down. Low-information voters can be doctors. Low-information voters can be scientists. They can be among all walks of life. It has nothing to do with IQ. It has to do with what they don’t know because of their media sources. Low-information voters are clearly people that don’t have all the information available to make a voting choice. That’s all they are. And they’re all over the place. And most of them do vote Democrat. Most of them did vote for Obama. It’s not a comment on their intelligence. It’s not that they’re stupid or don’t understand the issues. They just haven’t had it all explained to them.”

This short-sightedness or false consciousness as shown in the latter example was perhaps even more common in the 19th century of Marx, the self-limiting of human potential is as evident then as it is now with those who cannot understand that the death of honey bees might signal a breakdown in an ecology taken for advantage or as in the 19th century, as easily alienated from its origins as the American frontier and its bounty was alienated from its aboriginal First Nation owners. The colonizers always have an ideology, often referred to as a form of ideology or system of beliefs that rationalizes the separation of ownership or alienation of property from its original owners as a matter of exploitable advantage or power. An individual can regain power or autonomy by appropriating it by some right imposed by a claim of comparative advantage. Money or wealth helps to establish that warrant and eventual social divisions or classes established by wealth or claims to wealth alienate land labor and eventually capital. The goal in the 19th century as it is in a world with unevenly developed economies is to command, control and coordinate the value of what ultimately has always been a more collective product. New forms that mediate that value are proxies like money which arbitrarily measures labor and mystifies its values of uses and exchange.

For the Young Hegelians the ‘superficial expression’ of Hegel’s philosophy was his acceptance of the state of politics, religion, and society in early nineteenth-century Prussia: the ‘inner core’ was his account of Mind overcoming alienation, reinterpreted as an account of human self-consciousness freeing itself from the illusions that prevent it achieving self-understanding and freedom. (Singer p. 21). When rewritten in terms of the real world instead of the mysterious world of Mind, it made sense. ‘Mind’ was read as ‘human self-consciousness’. The goal of history became the liberation of humanity; but this could not be achieved until the religious illusion had been overcome. (ibid p. 22). The solution is to realize that theology is a kind of misdescribed anthropology. What we believe of God is really true of ourselves. Thus humanity can regain its essence, which in religion it has lost.(ibid p.23) …human beings are in a state of alienation, a state in which their own creations appear to them as alien, hostile forces and in which instead of controlling their creations, they are controlled by them.
(ibid p. 69).

This reversal of control is easiest seen in even the most trivial of Easter-time constructions where the entry to Heaven in the Christian religion compares the pursuit of profit to a variety of metaphors ultimately made contradictory later in history by the practice of indulgences. One does not need to think of the money-lenders in the Temple to see Marx’s point of view:

Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as he worships it. (J 60) The final sentence points the way forward. First the Young Hegelians, including Bauer and Feuerbach, see religion as the alienated human essence, and seek to end this alienation by their critical studies of Christianity. Then Feuerbach goes beyond religion, arguing that any philosophy which concentrates on the mental rather than the material side of human nature is a form of alienation. Now Marx insists that it is neither religion nor philosophy, but money that is the barrier to human freedom. The obvious next step is a critical study of economics. (Singer p. 27)

The formation of classes is problematic for many reasons none the least of which is the synchronous/asynchronous unevenness of cultural and economic developments in a world of differentiated social divisions and cultural locations, but in a determinist sense the development of divisions of labor and technologies produce new alienations including the property relations of land, labor, and capital including means of (re)production.

Here is the germ of a new solution to the problem of human alienation. Criticism and philosophical theory alone will not end it. A more practical force is needed, and that force is provided by the artificially impoverished working class. This lowest class of society will bring about ‘the actualization of philosophy’ – by which Marx means the culmination of the philosophical and historical saga described, in a mystified form, by Hegel. The proletariat, following the lead of the new radical philosophy, will complete the dialectical process in which humans have emerged, grown estranged from themselves, and become enslaved by their own alienated essence. Whereas the property-owning middle class could win freedom for themselves on the basis of rights to property – thus excluding others from the freedom they gain – the property-less working class possess nothing but their title as human beings. Thus they can liberate themselves only by liberating all humanity. (Singer pp. 29-30) Marx had now developed two important new insights: that economics is the chief form of human alienation, and that the material force needed to liberate humanity from its domination by economics is to be found in the working class. (ibid p. 32). Marx draws another important point from the classical economists. Those who employ the workers – the capitalists – build up their wealth through the labour of their workers. They become wealthy by keeping for themselves a certain amount of the value their workers produce. Capital is nothing else but accumulated labour. The worker’s labour increases the employer’s capital. This increased capital is used to build bigger factories and buy more machines. This increases the division of labour. This puts more self-employed workers out of business. They must then sell their labour on the market. This intensifies the competition among workers trying to get work, and lowers wages. (ibid p. 33). The more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien objective world which he fashions against himself, the poorer he and his inner world become, the less there is that belongs to him. It is the same in religion. The more man attributes to God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; then it no longer belongs to him but to the object… The externalization of the worker in his product means not only that his work becomes an object, an external existence, but also that it exists outside him, independently, alien, an autonomous power, opposed to him. The life he has given to the object confronts him as hostile and alien.(ibid p. 34)

Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood” – Bee Attack from Anselm von Seherr-Thoss on Vimeo.

With beekeeping this is less so, although it is the market for the byproduct which becomes commodified and whose accumulated value becomes contestable, as in who owns the artifical hives, the land on which they sit, the logistics of bringing the honey to market, etc. But the value of the practice is even referred to in the context of cultural products such as Ridley Scott’s movie, Robin Hood, where Friar Tuck is ” a procreator by design”, rather than being a “churchy friar” and that “the bees keep (him) and much as he keeps them”.

A consequence of this alienation of humans from their own nature is that they are also alienated from each other. Productive activity becomes ‘activity under the domination, coercion and yoke of another man’. This other man becomes an alien, hostile being. Instead of humans relating to each other co-operatively, they relate competitively. Love and trust are replaced by bargaining and exchange. Human beings cease to recognize in each other their common human nature; they see others as instruments for furthering their own egoistic interests. (Singer p. 36)

Inevitably it is the emerging social divisions, owners and owned, leaders and followers, worshipped and worshippers, first in language, then in subsistence reality. The generational and intergenerational social relationships constitute with material reality a life often in contradiction to the potential of utopian futures, but in all cases social existence creates consciousness because it is living minds that cognitively produce a conscious life.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals… Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or by anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life… (Singer p. 44). This is as clear a statement of the broad outline of his theory as Marx was ever to achieve. Thirteen years later, summing up the ‘guiding thread’ of his studies, he used similar language: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness’. With The German Ideology we have arrived at Marx’s mature formulation of the outline of historical materialism (though not the detailed account of the process of change). In view of this, and Marx’s later description of the work as settling accounts with his ‘former philosophic conscience’, it might be thought that his early interest in alienation has now been replaced by a more scientific approach. It has not. Henceforth Marx makes more use of historical data and less use of abstract philosophical reasoning about the way the world must be; but his interest in alienation persists. The German Ideology still describes the social power as something which is really nothing other than the productive force of individuals, and yet appears to these individuals as ‘alien and outside them’ because they do not understand its origin and cannot control it. Instead of them directing it, it directs them. The abolition of private property and the regulation of production under communism would abolish this ‘alienation between men and their products’ and enable men to ‘regain control of exchange, production and the mode of their mutual relationships’ (GI 170). It is not the use of the word ‘alienation’ that is important here. The same point can be made in other words. What is important is that Marx’s theory of history is a vision of human beings in a state of alienation. Human beings cannot be free if they are subject to forces that determine their thoughts, their ideas, their very nature as human beings. The materialist conception of history tells us that human beings are totally subject to forces they do not understand and cannot control. Moreover the materialist conception of history tells us that these forces are not supernatural tyrants, for ever above and beyond human control, but the productive powers of human beings themselves. Human productive powers, instead of serving human beings, appear to them as alien and hostile forces. (Singer pp. 45-46)

This premise of conflict as a natural and inevitable condition is the history of human governance whether by sovereign or by elites and conditions the fictive universe of those who would manipulate mass consciousness in what the Internet has proven to be the lowest of information forms.

For Eagleton, the need to reiterate the need for Marxian thought in an age of ‘bagger Dittoheads is evermore necessary in the simplest of cultivated activities like beekeeping. The movement for urban beekeeping is such a pervasive example of the power of alterative and progressive philosophies and inverting the relation of country and city not unlike the potential for radical liberalism cited by E.P. Thompson.

“The rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property,” Marx writes in Capital, is “an inalienable condition of the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race.” 19 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, p. 219. Capitalist agriculture, he considers, flourishes only by sapping the “original sources of all wealth … the soil and its labourers.” As part of his critique of industrial capitalism, Marx discusses waste disposal, the destruction of forests, the pollution of rivers, environmental toxins and the quality of the air. Ecological sustainability, he considered, would play a vital role in a socialist agriculture. 20 See Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits,” New Left Review, no. 178 (November/ December 1989), p. 83. Behind this concern for Nature lies a philosophical vision. Marx is a naturalist and materialist for whom men and women are part of Nature, and forget their creatureliness at their peril. He even writes in Capital of Nature as the “body” of humanity, “with which [it] must remain in constant interchange.” The instruments of production, he comments, are “extended bodily organs.” The whole of civilisation, from senates to submarines, is simply an extension of our bodily powers. Body and world, subject and object, should exist in delicate equipoise, so that our environment is as expressive of human meanings as a language. Marx calls the opposite of this “alienation,” in which we can find no reflection of ourselves in a brute material world, and accordingly lose touch with our own most vital being. When this reciprocity of self and Nature breaks down, we are left with the world of meaningless matter of capitalism, in which Nature is just pliable stuff to be cuffed into whatever shape we fancy. Civilisation becomes one vast cosmetic surgery. At the same time, the self is divorced from Nature, its own body and the bodies of others. Marx believes that even our physical senses have become “commodified” under capitalism, as the body, converted into a mere abstract instrument of production, is unable to savour its own sensuous life. Only through communism could we come to feel our own bodies again. Only then, he argues, can we move beyond a brutally instrumental reason and take delight in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the world. Indeed, his work is “aesthetic” through and through. He complains in the Grundrisse that Nature under capitalism has become purely an object of utility, and has ceased to be recognized as a “power in itself.” Through material production, humanity in Marx’s view mediates, regulates and controls the “metabolism” between itself and Nature, in a two-way traffic which is far from some arrogant supremacy. And all this— Nature, labour, the suffering, productive body and its needs— constitutes for Marx the abiding infrastructure of human history. It is the narrative that runs through and beneath human cultures, leaving its inescapable impress on them all. As a “metabolic” exchange between humanity and Nature, labour is in Marx’s opinion an “eternal” condition which does not alter. What alters— what makes natural beings historical— are the various ways we humans go to work upon Nature. Humanity produces its means of subsistence in different ways. This is natural, in the sense that it is necessary for the reproduction of the species. But it is also cultural or historical, involving as it does specific kinds of sovereignty, conflict and exploitation. There is no reason to suppose that accepting the “eternal” nature of labour will deceive us into believing that these social forms are eternal as well.
Eagleton pp. 231-232)

It bears repeating: “Nature, labour, the suffering, productive body and its needs— constitutes for Marx the abiding infrastructure of human history. ” This is why we fight and why we know what is to be done.

Marx had a passionate faith in the individual and a deep suspicion of abstract dogma. He had no time for the concept of a perfect society, was wary of the notion of equality, and did not dream of a future in which we would all wear boiler suits with our National Insurance numbers stamped on our backs. It was diversity, not uniformity, that he hoped to see. Nor did he teach that men and women were the helpless playthings of history. He was even more hostile to the state than right-wing conservatives are, and saw socialism as a deepening of democracy, not as the enemy of it. His model of the good life was based on the idea of artistic self-expression. He believed that some revolutions might be peacefully accomplished, and was in no sense opposed to social reform. He did not focus narrowly on the manual working class. Nor did he see society in terms of two starkly polarized classes. He did not make a fetish of material production. On the contrary, he thought it should be done away with as far as possible. His ideal was leisure, not labour. If he paid such unflagging attention to the economic, it was in order to diminish its power over humanity. His materialism was fully compatible with deeply held moral and spiritual convictions. He lavished praise on the middle class, and saw socialism as the inheritor of its great legacies of liberty, civil rights and material prosperity. His views on Nature and the environment were for the most part startlingly in advance of his time. There has been no more staunch champion of women’s emancipation, world peace, the fight against fascism or the struggle for colonial freedom than the political movement to which his work gave birth.
Eagleton, Terry (2011) Why Marx Was Right (pp. 238-239).

top image information: The daughter of a member of an Ethiopian bee-keeping cooperative in Freweyni village looks after the hives. Her father has been appointed by the cooperative to act as a permanent manager of the colonies, which require protection from ants and small rodents. The cooperative of 19 local people – primarily unemployed and landless – bought the colonies on credit from Millennium Promise. For more information on Millennium Promise, please visit www.millenniumpromise.org, The closing image is a typical company beekeeping “factory” operation

When I started to write this blog about the sex vs. gender debate, I was going to write a nice, intellectual piece, fully referenced, stating my position. But as I sat down to write it, I realized there is no clear-cut solution and presumably, most of the discussion has been decided in favor of the gender ideology, ranging from post-modern feminists in the academy, to the queer community, to the communist left.

In a recent antiwar speech in Washington, D.C., Angela Davis, while giving a laundry list of oppressions, mentioned both gender and LGBT, but failed to mention the word “women.” Sonia Sanchez, in the same event, left out categories having to deal with women’s liberation altogether (although in her poetry she did make the pronoun gender neutral).

At the same time, mainstream feminists (what is generally referred to as the white middle class women’s movement) seem content to deal with reproductive issues such as abortion and contraception, rape and wife battering in a piecemeal fashion, with little overriding ideology or causal framework. (One positive note: there is a new coalition of young women, WORD [Women Organized to Resist and Defend] which seems to be trying to fuse the concepts of sex and gender back together – along with race, class and imperialism. I look forward to seeing what their analysis will be since so far they seem to be mainly an activist group).

So what, if anything, do I have to contribute to this discussion? As a second wave socialist/ lesbian/ feminist born to a first wave socialist feminist, I have worked on projects with third wave feminists and raised a son who is active in the gay-rights movement. I believe that my long history in these communities might give me a perspective worth sharing. I also hope younger third wave feminists will not write me off as one of those smug old second wave feminists who thinks she knows everything.

By the rambling nature of this blog, you can probably tell that I am writing in a stream of consciousness “consciousness raising” style, true to my second wave “the personal is political” roots; although I believe this form is also regaining popularity among third wave feminists.

To begin. I came into feminism out of a Left Trotskyist organization about the same time I left my marriage of several years, right into the arms of the feminist movement. Most of the women, it is true, were middle class and white and, as a working class woman, I wasn’t sure I would fit in. I remember the first time I entered the women’s bookstore and one of the women commented on my “bourgie” $26 dollar JC Penney’s pantsuit. I was working as a secretary in the college where I was putting my husband through school. I was required to wear the pants suit to work (along with pantyhose) even though the professors I worked for could wear jeans. It took me awhile to realize that most of the women in the bookstore wore jeans that cost four times what my pantsuit cost.

I relate this story because this was my first exposure to identity politics and downward mobility and the tendency of the community to identify one’s class position by external secondary characteristics, not our actual class position. This foreshadowed a similar tendency in terms of defining the issues of oppression in terms of our sexuality. Nevertheless I stayed because those women still had something I wanted and wasn’t getting in the male-identified Left.

One of the biggest issues we discussed in those first few heady months in the bookstore was what we called “sex role channeling.” Although it was a middle class group of women, most of them came out of the “New” Left and considered themselves some sort of Marxist or Anarchist. They believed that women’s oppression was partly biological due to our reproductive capacity; but that biology did not have to be destiny since there was no reason society could not be economically and socially structure society to eliminate the disadvantages of reproduction, especially with new technologies.

However, they also believed women’s initial childbearing function had led to a society in which all labor was divided by sex (the “sexual division of labor”) which led to a society in which men had control over women. To reinforce their control, men developed a social ideology, patriarchy, in which women were viewed as innately more passive (they were like cattle, or chattel, and could be owned and traded) and men were the aggressors and protectors (and owners).

Because this sexual division of labor began with the first societies, long before capitalism was introduced, most feminists believed this inequality needed to be overcome before one could have a true class revolution.

These ideas were shared to some degree by all the major feminist writers of the time, whatever their other differences, including Simone DeBouvoir (The Second Sex), Kate Millet (Sexual Politics), Shulamith Firestone (Dialectics of Sex), and Robin Morgan (Sisterhood is Powerful). These writers had two things in common:

1. they all believed that patriarchal oppression of women existed before capitalism and had to be addressed before a class revolution against capitalism could be achieved; and
2. that “the personal is political,” that we should trust our personal experiences as much as any abstract theoretical tracks when analyzing our oppression (especially since women’s prehistory had been written out of history – including the Marxist texts – and women had not been allowed, in many cases, to read or write books or theorize anyway).

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The only problem with the “personal is political” approach was that it often theorized that we could transform relations between men and women immediately, by the way we led our personal lives (by whether we wore jeans or skirts).

And we immediately set out to do this.

We stopped using pink and blue to identify babies by sex. Mothers got their daughters trucks as well as dolls, and kitchen sets for their sons along with transformer action figures. Girls were entered into soccer leagues and boys went to movement classes. For adults, we were encouraged to enter any profession. We refused to be slaves to traditional work such as cooking (our potlucks were frequently pretty abysmal since everyone brought chips and dips) and we protested against the traditions of patriarchal marriage and sexual monogamy (some women remember those days with great joy—me–while other women felt that the proliferation of sexual partners made them feel abused and used). While not many women (and not all men)were physically big enough to be firefighters, some were and they broke the sex segregated job barrier. The situation is even clearer when we looked at fields such as the doctor/nurse divide.

In terms of how we presented ourselves, we tried to blur or eliminate sex role signifiers. Interestingly, there were two major approaches to how this was done. Some of us went for the neutral, androgynous look. We took off our makeup and heels, we cut our hair into a short, but not too masculine, style (pixie’s were in). We wore neutral colors and sensible shoes. Since I came out of the Beat movement, I was very comfortable in black turtle necks and jeans and sandals. Interestingly, the second approach which was more visible in the gay community was to transgress stereotypical sex role classifications. At that time, the gay community mirrored the straight heterosexual community to some degree by adopting one or the other of the traditional masculine or feminine sex roles. So they were already more used to transgressing biological barriers. So in an effort to blur sexual identities, some of the women in our community began adopting traits of both sexes (i.e., a woman would not only stop shaving her legs and underarms, but let her beard grow even if she still wore feminine blouses. A man would start wearing makeup and earrings or, if he were really brave, a cheerleader skirt with combat boots.

Two other points about sex role stereotypes. Kate Millet detailed in her book how the stereotypes changed with the times and that the higher up the class ladder you went, the more distinct were the sex roles. With the advent of capitalism, women had long been divided into women of the working class and women of the bourgeoisie. By the time we reached the Victorian Age in the midst of the industrial revolution, the middle and upper class women were secluded in the home under the rationale that they were too delicate and weak to endure the rigors of the outside world. Yet as Millet shows in her book, mine owners in Colorado during that same period were more than willing to use working class women stripped naked to the waist on their hands and knees to haul coal-carts out of the mines because women were smaller and could fit into the mine tunnels (one of my favorite examples). We see the same stereotypes between the Southern Belle and female field slave before the Civil War. So the middle and upper class female sex role stereotype shifted from a passive cow (or chattel or property) to a “feminine” stereotype that was not only passive but frail and childlike, unable to do much of anything.

The second point I wish to make about sex role stereotypes is very different. In our desire to get rid of all non-biological, socially imposed restrictions, we took the blurring of sex lines to their obvious and ultimate conclusion – the bedroom. We decided that there was no logical reason for not having sex with our own sex. After all, not all sex was for reproduction. People had been having sex strictly for pleasure for centuries, so why not? Besides who would know better what gives a woman pleasure than another woman? So a whole lot of new lesbian feminists were born. Some remained lesbians for life, others resumed relationships with men after the heyday of the Amazon sisterhood was over. (Bisexuality was not an option in those days as the gay community was as “straight” as the heterosexual community and frowned [officially] on those who stepped outside the box of the binary sex roles. Bisexuality was considered nonexistent or perverted.)

The main difficulty with breaking down sex role barriers by sleeping with women was that a number of women in the lesbian feminist community saw this as the solution to the problem of sexism. They had found their answer by stepping outside of the exploitative relationships of men and women in the home. And they could still seem like good radicals because this was as big a step as one could take, individually, outside of the mainstream. Unfortunately, it meant they did not feel they had to fight the bigger war for all women; they settled for a personal solution and a little reform work.

This is not to say that separating oneself from male energy for a time in one’s life was not fruitful. Through this process many women lost their emotional dependence on men (and some learned that just changing the sex of their partners might not be enough to make an egalitarian relationship).

So we broke barriers and we did make a lot of changes. Women started wearing pants and took off their high heels, they came out of the home and into the workplace and into previously all male professions. Unfortunately, most of the unpaid work the home remained in the hands of women. They did a study sometime in the late 1970s or early 80s that showed that the actual amount of time the new “Mr. Mommy” spent with his children was 3 hours a week – and that was usually the “fun” time — to take them to play in the park while Mom cleaned the house instead of doing the tough work of cleaning or homework discipline. The situation may have improved but it is still pretty unequal.

I think our failure to fully deal with this very basic issue of who in responsible for the raising and caring of children (and disabled and elderly) also goes to the very basic issue of:

1) would the capitalist society let us change that dynamic when they had such a good deal by not having all that unpaid labor cut into their profit (the jury is still out on whether they actually can make new profit off of work in the home); and

2) “the personal is political” approach can only see it’s own personal perspective and interests. Since most of the movement was middle class (whether radical feminists Marxists in college or the Betty Friedan educated stay-at-home frustrated upper middle class housewife), neither group had to deal with this question immediately as it was not part of their material reality.

Young women in college were not planning to have children anytime soon and could avoid the issue by using contraceptives and, if those failed, could get an abortion, if they could make it legal. By the time they did consider having children, they would have a husband or a great career and could hire an au pair (like their Betty Friedan counterparts), usually an immigrant woman and/or a woman of color. In recent years, however, we have seen that this apparently doesn’t solve all of the problem as many working professional mothers are now talking about the “mommy track.” At the time, while we talked revolution, many women didn’t seem to be as determined, in fact, to fight for a broader social solution as they felt they still had individual options. Now many of them are beginning to realize this may not be the case.

Although the second wave clearly recognized the distinction between biological issues and socially defined or cultural differences and was determined to break them down, the real separation between sex and gender did not begin until the third wave of feminism in the 1980s. Although the word gender had certainly existed before the 1980s and the idea of the difference between biological differences and historical and culturally determined sex roles (gender roles) had certainly been a major concept in the second wave of feminism, it was the postmodern women’s studies professors in academia who finally made the split and prioritized gender over sex as the “locus for struggle.”

According to this body of feminist work, since sex role differences are about gender, not sex, it is gender issues that caused the beginning of the male hierarchy and oppression of women and it is gender that should be the focus of the struggle. This certainly makes sense in many ways. Just as race and class are not biologically determined, if women’s oppression is not biologically determined, we too should view the oppression against women as culturally determined and focus on that.

There is only one problem with that: unlike the race and class paradigm, there still is a real biological difference in that biological women still produce the babies for the next generation and, while we may soon have totally technologically produced test tube babies, we are not there yet.

Every civilization in the world has spent thousands of years institutionalizing the breeding process, usually at the expense of women. This does not mean that deconstructing gender differences is not critical to ending gender and sex oppression, but to do so at the expense of dealing with the underlying biological and material economic realities of most women’s everyday lives is somewhat delusional. It’s kind of like the JC Penney pantsuit and Levis all over again, only worse.

The real mind-bender occurred, however, when the issues of the gay community were conflated with the lesbian feminist model of ending sexism or gender oppression. The gay community, prior to the second wave of feminism, had always been pretty much defined by the male gay community. The main issues for gay men were the freedom to express their sexuality in an open and honest way wherever it took them —by appropriating women’s gender roles or exploring the relationship between sex and pain (S/M) or the acceptance of dominance and submission as natural parts of human sexuality. Lesbian feminism, on the other hand, had a vested interest in breaking down power imbalances between people, especially categories such as dominance and submission.

It is hard to say how much each of these paradigms was, itself, created by the very sex role channeling to which we have been subjected. Women have traditionally been encouraged to repress sexual desire whereas men have been encouraged to be aggressive and adventurous. So, are some women appalled by S/M and the culture of dominance and submission (which is considered natural in the gay male community) because they are repressed and reticent to things accept these as a natural part of animal sexuality, or even if it is, do they want to try to “educate” humans out of this aspect of animal behavior (much as we try to end war and aggression) in the name of equality after centuries of being the dominated sex. Or are these desires of dominance and submission also socially constructed so that men can win wars and “protect” (appropriate)the breeders (women)? These are real questions.

There are still women who argue that rape is “natural” and women should enjoy it – and we certainly have our share of “enjoyable” rape mythology from the times of the story of The Rape of the Sabine Women to historical romances where the pirate comes and “takes” the lady, freeing her from all responsibility for choosing to have sex in a most unladylike unfeminine manner (this is especially the fantasy of the middle class women where sexuality was repressed). Any woman who has actually been raped or read Fear of Flying gets the difference between fantasizing about rape and the real thing. What I am trying to get at is that many of the realities of male ideas of sexual freedom may also have been “constructions” of gender bias over the years and not natural at all. But the gay community (as well as some heterosexuals) has put the issue of natural biological influences on our lives back on the table.

Here I’m going to admit to a personal bias based on my own experience when people say that they were “born” gay or as a woman or that the desire for pain and dominance or submission in a relationship is biologically determined. As a bisexual (yes, a real one) who has wandered all over the map and changed back and forth many times for meaningful relationships, my experience is that things are not definitely fixed or immutable. I kind of go with Kinsey who said we are all gender neutral until around two years old when we begin to develop a preference. That being said, I believe that any man or woman who wants to assume a different gender identity from that they were born with to be all they want to be has my respect since they are breaking the social codes of patriarchy. As long as they are not implying that women have to be passive and submissive because they are born that way.

Meanwhile, all the emphasis on totally environmentally constructed realities which make real biological and economic day-to-day realities – such as trying to figure out if you can afford the hospital price in the maternity ward or that of an abortion or how to get up two hours earlier to take two buses to take your kid to a very expensive daycare so you can get to your low paying job on time – seems slightly unreal, especially when someone turns around and claims innate biological urges such as the urge to dominate as legitimate. Of course there are still other issues, but I think that’s plenty for now.

Ciao,
Your lesbian feminist socialist sister.

P.S. All the books I mentioned are worth reading and not only from a historical perspective but I want to add two other books to the list. One is brand new, Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism by Cinzia Arruzza; and Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederich Engels (even if it has some non-verifiable historical and analytical assumptions, it is still the best work analyzing women’s exploitation in the nuclear family under capitalism).

From the cover of the International Socialist Review of March 1913

MOTHER JONES ARRIVES IN WEST VIRGINIA

June 11, 1912
Charleston Gazette
Interview with Mother Jones

I am simply a social revolutionist. I believe in collective ownership of the means of wealth. At this time the natural commodities of this country are cornered in the hands of a few. The man who owns the means of wealth gets the major profit, and the worker, who produces the wealth from the means in the hands of the capitalist, takes what he can get. Sooner or later, and perhaps sooner than we think, evolution and revolution will have accomplished the overturning of the system under which we now live, and the worker will have gained his own.

This change will come as the result of education. My life work has been to try to educate the worker to a sense of the wrongs he has had to suffer, and does suffer-and to stir up the oppressed to a point of getting off their knees and demanding that which I believe to be rightfully theirs. When force is used to hinder the worker in his efforts to obtain the thing which are his he has the right to meet force with force. He has the right to strike for what is his due, and he has no right to be satisfied with less. The people want to do right , but they have been hoodwinked for ages. They are now awakening, and the day of their enfranchisement is near at hand.
[Reprinted in the March 1913 issue of the International Socialist Review.http://archive.org/stream/InternationalSocialistReview1900Vol13/ISR-volume13#page/n683/mode/2up/search/648] (pdf!)

Mother Jones gave this interview shortly after her arrival in Charleston. She came by train from Butte, Montana where she had been working with the copper miners of the Western Federation of Miners. Now, she was in West Virginia to assist the the striking miners of the United Mine Workers of America. The miners of Paint Creek were striking for renewal of their contract. The operators were refusing to sign a new contract preferring instead to bust the Union. At issue were all of the usual grievances: dangerous conditions, short weights, payment in company scrip, poor housing, low wages, blacklisting, poor medical care, and never-ending debt. But above all, the miners hated the brutal company-guard system.

To break the strike, the operators had contracted with the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency which supplied them with three hundred gun-thugs who began a campaign of terror against the miners and their families. Even before Mother Jones arrived, there had been clashes with the company guards, and loss of life on both sides. The guards had more weapons, including machine guns, but the miners had more men, seven thousand by some accounts.

MOTHER JONES BRINGS OUT CABIN CREEK

Cabin Creek was known as “forbidden territory.” Miner [Frank Keeneyhttp://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/1172] was not afraid to enter, but could find no one to go with him until early August when he found Mother Jones. Miner [Fred Mooneyhttp://www.wvencyclopedia.org/articles/2028] later told the story:

He [Frank Keeney] proceeded to locate Mother Jones and after a thorough understanding was reached, a date was set for Mother Jones to go into the forbidden territory. I was standing on the bridge at Cabin Creek Junction the day Mother Jones entered Cabin Creek. Her hair was snow white, but she could walk mile after mile and never show fatigue. When we saw her drive by in a horse drawn vehicle we knew the meaning of that visit and we fully expected to hear of her being killed by the gunmen. She arrived at Eskdale without mishap, but after she passed through the business center of town and as she approached the southern residence section a body of gunmen could be seen just ahead….

But she drove her rig near [to the gunmen] and one of the miners assisted her to alight. She surveyed the scene with a critical eye and walked straight up to the muzzle of one of the machine guns and patting the muzzle of the gun, said to the gunman behind it, “Listen here, you, you fire one shot here today and there are 800 men in those hills (pointing to the almost inaccessible hills to the east) who will not leave one of your gang alive.”

It was a bluff, there were no miners in those hills. But the bluff worked. Mother Jones held her mass meeting in Eskdale, and the miners of Cabin Creek joined the strike with Eskdale as a militant center of strike activity.

MOTHER JONES SPEAKS

Mother Jones Speaks

We have the stenographer hired by the operators to thank for the preservation of these speeches. These five speeches were later entered into the court-martial proceedings as evidence against Mother Jones. Full text of the August 15th speech can be read [here.http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/mother-jones-speech-at-a-public-meeting-speech-text/]

August 1, 1912
Charleston, WV
Speech on the levee
from the back of a dray wagon:

…We have broken the chains of chattel slavery, we changed his condition from a chattel slave to wage slave. But you say we didn’t make it any better. Oh, yes, we did, we made it better for the chattel slave. Then we entered into industrial slavery. That was one step in advance. We forever wiped out chattel slavery and came into industrial slavery. Now, industrial slavery is the battle you are in….

Today we are four hundred thousand strong, marching on to liberty, marching on to freedom. We are the United Mine workers of America today numbering four hundred thousand….

August 4, 1912
Montgomery, WV
Speech at the baseball park:

…Now, the Judge said if the operators would quit paying the Baldwin guards they would leave the State. The operators don’t pay the Baldwin guards, they don’t pay them a penny. If it had to come out of their pockets the Baldwin guards would be gone long ago. The miners are robbed in the weighing of coal, in rent and in the store, they pay the Baldwin guards. (Applause.)

You are the fellows that have got the right to clean up the Baldwin guards because you are the fellows who pay them…

August 15, 1912
Charleston, West Virginia
Speech on the capitol steps:

[After first reading a petition to Governor Glasscock for removal of the armed company guards...]

I want to say with all due respect to the Governor-I want to say to you that the Governor will not, cannot do anything, for this reason: The Governor was placed in this building by Scott and Elkins [industrialists] and he don’t dare oppose them. (Loud applause.) Therefore, you are asking the Governor of the State to do something that he cannot do with out betraying the class he belongs to…

We will give the Governor until tomorrow night to take them guards out of Cabin Creek..Here on the steps of the Capitol of West Virginia, I say that if the Governor won’t make them go then we will make them go…

It is freedom or death, and your children will be free. We are not going to leave a slave class to the coming generation, and I want to say to you that the next generation will not charge us for what we have done, they will charge and condemn us for what we have left undone. (Cries of: “That is right.”)…

I see that hour. I see the Star breaking your chains; your chains will be broken, men. You will have to suffer more and more, but it won’t be long. There is an awakening among all the nations of the earth…

Oh, men, have you any hearts? Oh, men, do you feel? Oh, men, do you see the judgement day on the throne above, when you will be asked, “Where did you get your gold?” You stole it from these wretches. You murdered, you assassinated, you starved, you burned them to death, that you and your wives might have palaces, and that your wives might go to the sea-shore…

[They say] “Oh, them horrible miners. Oh, that horrible old Mother Jones, that horrible old woman.” I am horrible, I admit, and I want to be to you blood-sucking pirates. I want you, my boys, to buckle on your armor. This is the fighting age. This is not the age for cowards, put them out of the way…

This day marks the forward march of the workers in the state of West Virginia. Slavery and oppression will gradually die…The day of oppression will be gone. I will be with you whether true or false. I will be with you at midnight or when the battle rages, when the last bullet ceases, but I will be in my joy…

September 6, 1912
Charleston, WV
Speech in the courthouse square:

…When we were on the Capitol grounds the last time you came here, you had a petition to the Governor for a peacful remedy and solutiion ot this condition. The mine owners, the bankers, the plunderers of the State went in on the side door and got a hearing, and you didn’t. (Loud applause.)…

Now, then, go with me up those creeks, and see the blood-hounds of the mine owners, approved of by your public officials, see them insulting women, see them coming up the track. I went up there and they followed me like hounds But some day I will follow them. When I see them go to Hell, I will get the coal and pile it up on them….

Now then, let me ask you. When the miners-a miner that they have robed him of one leg in the mines and never paid him a penny for it-when he entered a protest, they went into his house not quite a week ago, and threw out his whole earthly belongings, and he and his wife and six children slept on the roadside all night. Now, you can’t contradict that. Suppose we had taken a mine owner and his wife and children and threw them out on the road and made them sleep all night, the papers would be howling “anarchy”…

The whole machinery of capitalism is rotten to the core. This meeting tonight indicates a milestone of progress of the miners and workers of the State of West Virginia. I will be with you, and the Baldwin guards will go. You will not be serfs, you will march, march, march on from milestone to milestone of human freedom, you will rise like men in the new day and slavery will get its death blow. It has got to die…

September 21, 1912
Charleston, WV
Speech on the lawn of the YMCA:

…We have entered West Virginia-I have – and a hundred thousand miners have pledged their support to me, “If you need us, Mother, we will be there.” Five thousand men last Sunday night said, “We are ready, Mother, when you call on us.” The revolution is here. We can tie up every wheel, every railroad in the State, when we want to do it. Tyranny, robbery and oppression of the people must go…

This strike ain’t going to end until we get a check-weighman on the tipple. That is the law. It is on the statute books-that your coal will be weighed…You miners here have stood for it [being robbed of weight], you have starved your children, starved yourselves, you have lived in dog-kennels -they wouldn’t build one for their dogs as bad as yours. You have lived in them and permitted them to rob you, and then got the militia for the robbers. You can get all the militia in the state, we will fight it to the finish-if the men don’t fight, the women will. They won’t stand for it….

I don’t worry about [jail], I am down at the Fleetwood when they want to put me in jail for violation of the law, come along for me, come. There is coming a day when I will take the whole bunch of you and put you in jail. (Applause.)

TRAVELING AND SPEAKING

Throughout that fall and winter, Mother Jones continued giving speeches for the miners. She led parades for the women and children, always advocating for the education of the miner’s children and end of child labor. She traveled to Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, and Washington D.C, giving speeches and raising money for the strikers. Sadly, these speeches have not been recorded for history.

THE ATTACK ON HOLLY GROVE & THE BATTLE OF MUCKLOW

At about 11 PM on the night of February 7, 1913, the “Bull Moose Special,” an armored train equipped with machine guns, opened fire on the miners and their families at Holly Grove. Maud Estep later [testifiedhttp://www.wvculture.org/history/labor/paintcreekestep.html] that her husband, stiking miner, [Francis Estephttp://www.wvgenweb.org/wvcoal/estep.html] was shot dead as he tried to get his pregnant wife and son to safety in the cellar.

Three days later the miners marched in protest to Mucklow where they were met by the gun thugs. Twelve miners and four company guards died in the battle that followed. Governor Glasscock declared martial law in the strike zone, ordered six companies of militia to occupy the area, and established a military commission. A wave of arrests soon followed.

IN THE MILITARY BASTILLE

Mother Jones in the hands of the military.

On February 13, Mother Jones was in Charleston attempting to lead a protest march and speak with the Governor when she was taken into custody along with 125 other protesters. Charleston was outside the area of martial law, yet those arrested were transported into the martial law district and imprisoned in Pratt to await trial by the military court. The miners were held in harsh conditions, but Mother Jones was held in a [commandeered boardinghousehttp://www.nps.gov/nhl/DOE_dedesignations/Jones.htm], and cared for by the landlady, Isabel Carney.

Meanwhile, a new governor, Dr. Henry Hatfield, was sworn in on March 4, 1913. In later years he recalled traveling to the strike area where he found Mother Jones sick with pneumonia and with a temperature of 104 degrees. He recalled having her treated in Charleston and then returned to the boardinghouse prison, although there is no official record of this.

Visitors were forbidden, but one reporter did manage to get in to see her, A.J. Hollis of the Pittsburgh Leader who managed to interview her through the basement floorboards. He was detained for several hours in the bullpen for his efforts. An exception was made for Cora Older, wife of the editor of the San Francisco Bulletin, who quoted Mother Jones:

I can raise just as much hell in jail as anywhere.

Mother Jones did write letters from the military prison, perhaps smuggled out as she later remembered. She had some powerful allies in Washington D.C: William B Wilson, former UMWA official and, now Secretary of Labor, and also US Senators Borah and Kern. She was able to get messages out to all three of them. Some of her letters were published in the [Appeal to Reasonhttp://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAappealR.htm] and other socialist newspapers of the day. Other letters were more personal:

March 6, 1913
Letter to [Terence V. Powderlyhttp://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USApowderly.htm]
(as written, without correction):

Pratt W Va
Military Bastile
My dear friend
You no doubt have heard of my arrest by the hounds of capitalism they have me in close confinement-there are two military guarding me day and night. No one is allowed to speak to me. they squashed all constitutional rights and handed me over to the military. here I am-the first thing I will do if I am turned loose will be to go up and see you.
Tomorrow at ten o clock we will be taken before the Military Court for trial. They charge me and 3 national organizers besid the Editor of the Argus a local labor paper. neither one of us was in the marshall law zone they picked me up on the streets of Charleston-kidnaped me moved me with 2 others down in the military camp. here I am now for 22 days! not allowed to speak to anyone or see anyone. Just think of it I have lived 80 years and never before charged with any crime. Now I am charged with stealing a cannon from the Military-inciting to riot-putting dinamite under track to blow up A.C.O. road-We were not there at all. Just think what the tools of the olagarchy can descend to. I know they are death on me for I have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They came to me yesterday wanted to get a Lawyer & witnesses I refused to get either. I said if I have brok the Law of the State or nation I do not want any Lawyer or Witnesses. One fellow Said I should be Drummed out of the State. I have a lot to tell you when I see you God spare me the Heart to fight them Love to my dear Emma [Mrs Powderly] tell her not to worry-I’ll fight the Pirates forever.
Mother

THE COURT-MARTIAL OF MOTHER JONES

Friday, March 7, 1913, 10 AM
Pratt, West Virginia
From the Proceedings of the
Military Commission:

Mary Jones: Will you permit me to make a statement, General Wallace?
The Judge Advocate: Proceed, Mother.
Mary Jones: I have no defense to make. Whatever I have done in West Virginia, I have
done it all over the United States, and when I get out, I will do it again. The Judge Advocate: We will enter a plea of not guilty for you.

Mother Jones along with four other defendants refused to recognize the validity of the military court. Pleas of not guilty were entered for them. The forty-five other defendants pleaded not guilt and were provided counsel. The charges included murder and conspiracy to commit murder, and conspiracy to commit property damage, charges of being an accessory after the fact, and weapons charges. They were all facing long prison sentences, and even the death penalty was a possibility.

The five speeches noted above were entered as evidence by the prosecution in an attempt to prove that the Mother Jones had inflamed the miners and had caused them to murder company mine guards. When in fact, she had counseled only self-defense. The mine guards who died, were killed in battle with weapons in hand. Unlike Francis Estep who was shot and killed, unarmed, in his own home.

The editor of the socialist newspaper, Labor Argus was one of the defendants, and several pages from that newspaper were read into the record, including this:

It has always been said that it was a hard job to keep a woman’s mouth shut. Governor Glasscock is evidently of that opinion as he sent sixteen soldiers with guns and ammunition to keep an old woman over eighty years of age from making a speech and then failed. We would advise the Governor to send the whole regiment along the next time he wants to stop Mother Jones from speaking.

March 12, 1913
Captan Charles R Morgan for the defense:

Now, gentlemen, as to one of my clients, the aged lady, who has sat here so patiently and listened to the testimony…this old lady is fighting the battles of the laboring man and has been for years and years…

[Those] speeches that she made were made all the way back last summer, shortly after the poor old woman had waded the creek in order to get to the place she was going to speak. My God, it is enough to make the blood of an old woman boil when she is force to do things of that kind; when men-will stand on each side of the creek and force an old woman to march in the middle of it, in order that she may get up to say a few works to “the boys” that she-whose interest she thinks she is advancing-Where is there a single item of evidence connecting this old woman with the conspiracy, if a conspiracy has been shown, and which we say we do not think has been shown. Now, the state has failed.

The verdicts and sentences were submitted by the military commission to Governor Hatfield under seal, and were never revealed by the Governor. No official record has ever been found. However, many of the prisoners were soon released. Mother Jones was one of those who remained a prisoner of the military. According to Edward Steel, the “ringleaders” were kept as hostages to strengthen the Governor’s hand in forcing the the national leaders of the UMWA to accept his proposed settlement of the strike.

ON THE SENATE FLOOR

Meanwhile, Senator John W. Kern of Indiana, Democratic Majority Leader, had introduced a resolution calling for an investigation into the conditions of coal mining in West Virginia. During debate on the resolution, Senator Goff of West Virginia referred to Mother Jones as the “grandmother of all agitators.” Senator Kern then took the floor and read this telegram from Mother Jones into the Congressional Record:

Hansford, West Virginia
May 4, 1913
Senator Kern
Care Senate Chamber
Washington, D.C.
From out the military prison walls, where I have been forced to pass my eighty-first milestone of life., I plead with you for the honor of this Nation. I send you groans and tears of men, women, and children as I have heard them in this State, and beg you to force that investigation. Children yet unborn will rise and bless you.
Mother Jones

The Kern Resolution passed and the investigation eventually totaled over 2000 pages of testimony. The final report is available online and makes interesting reading:

U.S. Congress. Senate. Subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor. Investigations of Conditions in the Paint Creek District, West Virginia. 1913.
[Final Reporthttp://ia700202.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924002217234/cu31924002217234.pdf] (pdf!)

The strike was eventually settled with some concessions by the operators as to checkwieghman, bimonthly pay, and a grievance procedure. But the hated company-guard system remained intact.

Mother Jones was released May 10th, and the last prisoners were released in June, about the time that the Senate committee arrived in West Virginia to begin hearing testimony.

MOTHER JONES AT CARNEGIE HALL

May 27, 1913
New York City
Speech at Carnegie Hall:

I hope you do not believe that, as Comrade Wanhope has said, that the miners of West Virginia simply decided casually “to take guns and do a share of the killing.” They got guns only wen it became clear that the authorities, acting on behalf of their masters would not accede to the just and peaceful requests of the miners.

I organized a meeting at which a committee was chosen to go to Charleston to present a petition to the Governor asking him to remove the Baldwin gunmen from the mine territory. We went, several thousand miners and myself to Charleston, and met on the grounds in front of the State Capitol. The Governor came out and heard the petition read….

The petition was unavailing. The guards were not removed. The men came back to Charleston, and held another meeting on the river bank. Then they went and bought up every gun in Charleston. They had appealed to the constituted authorities for protection, but they had failed, and they decided to fight for themselves-not because they favored violence but because they had no other choice.

Meanwhile, encouraged by the indifference of the Governor, the thugs began a veritable reign of terror. The war was then begun. Some guards were killed by miners in self protection, and the militia came. A short period of peace followed, and militia was withdrawn. This was the signal for the agents of the mine owners to intensify the war against the workers. Men, women and children were evicted from their home; miners were shot down in cold blood, and reign of terror grew even more terrible. When I protested the barbarism of the capitalists and their henchmen., I was deprived of all the rights of an American citizen and imprisoned in a military bastille for three months…

West Virginia is on trial before the bar of the nation. The military arrests and court-martial to which I and others were forced to undergo in West Virginia was the first move ever made by the ruling class to have the working class tried by military and not civil courts. It is up to the American workers to make sure that it is the last.

Mother Jones,
Grand Old Champion of Labor:
O’er the hills and through the valley
In ev’ry mining town;
Mother Jones was ready to help them,
She never turned them down.
On front with the striking miners
She always could be found;
And received a hearty welcome
In ev’ry mining town.

[The Death of Mother Jones, sung by Gene Autry, 1931https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDVqPxqW0KA]

SOURCES

Struggle in the coal fields:
the autobiography of Fred Mooney
With JW Hess
WV University Library, 1967

Mother Jones Speaks
Collected Writings and Speeches
Edited by Philip S Foner
NY, 1983

The Correspondence of
Mother Jones
Edited by Edward M Steel
U of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

The Speeches and Writings of
Mother Jones
U of Pettsburgh Press, 1988

The Court-Martial of
Mother Jones
Edited by Edward M Steel, Jr
U Press of Kentucky, 1995

The Mother Jones Museum

http://www.motherjonesmuseum.org/

(Amazing photo collection!)

FOR FURTHER STUDY

Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party
in West Virginia, 1898-1920
by Frederick A. Barkey
WV U Press, 2012

And see this link for interview with Barkey:

http://wvgazette.com/Entertainment/Books/201301060031

A Union Man: The Life of C. Frank Keeney
Charles Belmont Keeney
Available here only:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/union-man-the-life-of-c-frank-keeney/oclc/47358602&referer=brief_results

The Autobiography of
Mother Jones
With Mary Field Parton
[Charles H Kerr Publishinghttp://www.charleshkerr.com/], 1990
Pittston Strike Commemorative Edition

This diary is dedicate to
Francesco Estep
Who lost his life in Freedom’s Cause.

Francis Estep, from Holly Grove, W. VA,
In 19 and 13 loaded coal, twelve hours a day.
Six days a week, 47 and a half cent a ton.
He was hot down by gun thugs
At the young age of 31.

So is this little marker his only memorial today?
For a man who gave his life to the UMWofA.
Is this how we remember all the sacrifices he made?
To let the briars and the weeds
Take over his union and grave?
-Hazel Dickens

Let us honor our Martyrs by keeping our Unions
strong and democratic.
Solidarity,
JayRaye

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Mother Jones

Today, instead of presenting a diary written by one of our regular or guest members, we are presenting an excerpt from a paper on “Crowdfunding” by Minsun Ji and Tony Robinson. Crowdfunding is the term used for raising money over the internet. In most cases, a political candidate or charity solicits donations to fund their organization. Recently it has also been used to solicit donations for socially responsible businesses (usually cooperative start-ups). And since Obama’s JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, it has been used to solicit not just donations but equity investment funds for cooperative start-ups by exempting these ventures from Security and Exchange regulations.

It is this last feature which has led to all the brouhaha. On one side, are anarchists, libertarians, the cooperative movement and silicone valley free traders, supporting Crowdfunding as democratizing the investment process so that the 99% can develop capital which has previously been controlled by — well, the big capitalists–or the 1% ; on the other side are the unions, most Marxists and some liberal democrats who see the crowdfunding provisions in the JOBS Act as a plot by Wall Street to avoid SEC regulations in the Dodd-Frank Act and that will, once again, allow for speculation, fraud and destabilization of the economy at the expense of the 99%.

The political compromise in the JOBS Act was to establish regulations to limit the size of the investment (both in terms of a $1 million cap and no more that 10% of an investor’s income), exclude the investment of pension funds, exclude investors from decision making rights, etc. The authors of the paper excerpted below also note that so far there has been very little fraud in crowdfunding due to its emphasis on smaller, more socially responsible ventures. (They failed to note, however, that most of this fraud free history was when crowdfunding still consisted of donations, not profit making equity — also, does anyone remember the 1984 Saving and Loan scandal after government regulations had been decimated under Regan, where Wall Street types stole billions from the small Banks set up to help the “little guy”?).

Personally, when I first heard about crowdfunding, my reaction was pretty much like most class conscious workers and Marxists — I was afraid, not only of individual investors and small businesses being duped, but that the whole thing was a Wall street scam which could cause the whole economy to go under due to speculative financial “bubbles.” (And I wrote as much in a diary in this very venue).

On the other hand, in a paper on a hybrid union- cooperative model from the United Steelworkers (“An Emerging Solidarity:Worker Cooperatives, Unions,and the New Union Co-op Model,February 1, 2013), Rob Witherall does not totally discount the idea of crowdfunding as one of many methods to develop capital investment for coops — as long as it controlled and regulated by the union. At this point, my own position(and that in Ji’s and Witherall’s papers) place crowdfunding in the context of a global economy where changes in technology, capital mobility and the end of centralized industrial manufacturing has resulted in the growth of the informal workforce (both here and abroad) that has greatly damaged traditional union organizing solutions. This has led us to explore if we can use new possibilities to our advantage in a changing world. And whether these possibilities will take us toward or further away from a true anti-capitalist future. So here is a full discussion, presented primarily from the pro-crowdfunding point of view since this is the view, as anti-capitalists, that we don’t often hear. Let the argument begin.

“Crowdfunding the Future of Union-Coop Collaboration” by Minsun Ji,
Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, mji@du.edu.
Tony Robinson, Department of Political Science, University of Colorado Denver,
tony.robinson@ucdenver.edu, February 2, 2013:

In 2012, United States union leaders and the worker cooperative community split ways over President Obama’s “Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act,” which significantly liberalized regulations on small business equity financing, including “crowdfunding” practices. Both the AFL-CIO and SEIU took vigorous stands against the JOBS Act, claiming that by diminishing government oversight over small business crowdfunding, the JOBS Act promoted corruption and destabilizing investment bubbles.

Major American labor leaders condemned the bill, claiming that the “cynically named JOBS Act” would weaken government SEC regulations and expose workers and small investors to fraud and financial disaster (Elk, 2012). AFL-CIO president Trumka said he was “personally outraged,” with the bill. “This is a vote against investors in the real economy and for Wall Street speculators. When the next bubble bursts, Americans will know who to blame” (Kapur, 2012).

Even as U.S. labor leaders criticized the JOBS act and its crowdfunding centerpiece, other progressive leaders—and in particular leaders within the workers’ cooperative movement–celebrated the act as ushering in a new era of democratic, decentralized capital investment (Fink, 2012; Mann, 2011). Progressive champion of economic localism, Michael Shuman (2009), has long lauded crowdfunding for taking investment decisions out of the hands of an elite circle of SEC accredited investors and giving them to millions of small-scale, local investors. The 2012 Conference of the Federation of Worker Owned Cooperatives hailed crowdfunding as ushering in a “new era of innovation” (http://conference2012.usworker.coop/) Kassan and Long (2012) summarized the enthusiasm for crowdfunding among many supporters of an alternative economy: “While crowd funding alone isn’t a silver bullet, it does play an important role in revitalizing the entrepreneurial small business sector of the economy. Its simplicity and ingenuity is American capitalism in its finest form.”

This paper explores the crowdfunding revolution celebrated by the JOBS Act, and examines reasons for the striking disagreement between labor unions and the coop community regarding the JOBS Act. We argue that instead of resisting crowdfunding, labor unions should embrace it as a democratic financing tool that can support union-friendly worker owned cooperatives in growing a progressive economy. We also explore how the owners of worker coops should consider union membership, for both pragmatic and political reasons, as union connections can help finance and strength worker cooperatives, even as they can help keep the worker owned cooperative movement grounded in political transformation, rather than just pursuing economic growth.

The Crowdfunding Revolution and the JOBS Act. … Taking advantage of the democratization of information and connectivity afforded by social media, crowdfunding appeals in the last decade have raised millions of dollars in donations to support thousands of small-scale initiatives. Crowdfunding—the mobilization of small scale donations or investments from a crowd of individuals—has funded activities ranging from indie band tours across America ($60,000 raised by the UK rock band Marillion), the production of independent movies (The Age of Stupid film project raised £1.5 million British Pounds), and social purpose ventures (the Tesla Museum project raised $1.4 million). In 2011, there were over 500,000 crowdfunding appeals made over the internet through crowdfunding portals like Kiva, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which ultimately attracted millions of small donors who gave over a billion dollars to small businesses nationwide (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012: 25; Drake, 2012).

The new JOBS act promises to dramatically grow these numbers. Until the JOBS Act, all crowdfunding transactions were required to be donations to small businesses, rather than equity investments. Under U.S. Securities law, it was illegal for average people to give their support to a small or local business with the expectation of economic return. This is because prior to the crowdfunding law, all companies (even the smallest) were prohibited from offering equity to the general public without full registration with the SEC and adherence to all SEC rules, which is costly and complicated. Furthermore, only SEC accredited investors (less than 2% of the population [Shuman, 2009]) were allowed to directly purchase those equity securities, substantially limiting the kinds of companies allowed to offer their stock publicly and the pool of people who were allowed to invest in those companies. … But rules changed after the JOBS ACT.

The 2012 JOBS Act amended federal securities law to benefit small and emerging businesses by easing rules on public offerings by small businesses and by broadening the base of people allowed to buy equity in those companies. In signing the law, President Obama was responding to a groundswell of pressure from innovative venture capitalists, small businesses locked out of traditional venture capital circles, and progressive economic thinkers who all supported crowdfunding liberalization as a way to decentralize capital formation, foster innovative businesses and social enterprises, and encourage small business florescence (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012; Bradford, 2012; Sustainable Economy Law Center, 2012). The idea united liberal economists with free-market conservatives, and the JOBS Act sailed through Congress with historic speed, passing in mere months with solid bipartisan support.

Perhaps the most dramatic reform was Title III of the JOBS Act, which created a new exemption from federal securities law for “crowdfunded” securities offerings. This exemption is meant to substantially democratize investment into small businesses, by making it possible for small businesses to raise money through small investments from a large number of people, even without filing an array of financial and registration documents with the SEC under traditional securities law. Furthermore, small-scale investors in the company do not need to be SEC accredited (Bradford, 2012; Vidra, 2012). Anyone in the public who is attracted to a small entrepreneur’s internet crowdfunding appeal can invest in the company, joining with a crowd of other small donors in mobilizing what can be huge cash infusions into the business. In 2012, for example, Pebble Watches raised more than $10 million dollars in less than 30 days from 69,000 small web donors (Heesan, 2013).

The JOBS act dramatically democratized the capital financing landscape. Small companies with unique business models now have an alternative source of “venture capital,” which has historically been controlled by a small circle of traditional profit-seeking investors. These small companies can now turn to “community finance” circles—crowds of small scale donors contacted across the internet and who are more likely than accredited Wall Street investors to support small, local businesses with a “social purpose” (Lehner, 2013). In this way, crowdfunding “stands to revolutionize small businesses and entrepreneurial capital raising by permitting any individual to invest in private companies over the internet with limited regulatory hurdles” (Fink, 2012: 4).

By decentralizing processes of capital formation, crowdfunding undermines the power of traditional capital investors, transfers the social web’s model of informal cooperation to the world of investment, “and leads to democratization and transparency in finance” (Rothler, 2011: 5; see also Best, Nice and Jones, 2012: 3).

There are, of course, restrictions meant to direct crowdfunding to small businesses and to balance the desire for freely flowing, decentralized capital investment with the need to minimize investor risk and the dangers of financial chicanery or ineptitude by either businesses or investors. For example:
• A business can sell no more than $1 million of securities in the aggregate to all investors;
• No single crowdfund investor can purchase more than $2,000 of securities, or 5% of the investor’s annual income or net worth (10% for investors with annual income or net worth exceeding $100,000);
• The transactions must be conducted through a registered funding portal or broker who must adhere to rules meant to insure investor knowledge of the risks involved.
[Editor's Note: Further important restrictions prohibit investment of any pension funds and do not allow investors any decision making power over the business/coop]

With these basic regulations, supporters hail the Act as ushering in an era where average people will have the ability to support local business or social purpose business ventures, and where businesses can turn to sources of capital beyond the Wall Street moguls who prioritize high profit rates over such concerns as local embeddedness, social purpose, or fair labor practices (Elk, 2012). In so doing, the JOBS Act represents a democratization of capital formation—a radical “disruption of the finance supply chain and distribution mechanism” that has been previously controlled by a tiny percentage of accredited institutional investors (Drake, 2012). Scott Purcell, President of the Crowdfunding platform Arctic Island, argues that the Crowdfunding allowances of the JOBS act “will completely transform capital formation for small businesses, [enabling] small businesses to get the capital they need.” (cited in Drake, 2012)

The scale of democratic capital that could be unleashed through crowdfunding is immense. Even before the JOBS act, when crowdfunding could only be through donations without any equity return, $750 million was given through 532,000 American crowdfunding campaigns (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012: 25). Industry consultants are now predicting equity crowdfunding to grow to somewhere between $4 and $6 billion by 2015 (Price 2012; Best, Nice and Jones, 2012; Fink , 2012). Analysts predict a global trillion dollar crowdfunding market in the years to come, and the Word Bank is partnering with groups like Crowdfund Capital Advisors to explore crowdfunding’s potential benefits in developing countries (Lawton and Marom, 2012).

As Kassan and Long (2012) describe the future of the United States:

“The vast majority of the American public, the 99 percent of us who
are ‘unaccredited’ investors, will soon have the opportunity to keep
their money local. The half of our economy made up of small, independent
businesses will now have access to capital that previously could only go to
giant public companies. Americans have $30 trillion dollars invested in
securities — imagine if even 10 percent of that went from Wall Street to Main
Street. What could $3 trillion dollars do in our communities?”

Labor and the JOBS Act

Why did labor leaders resist the 2012 JOBS Act? It comes down to labor’s enduring concern with the dangers of deregulated capital. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, labor leaders and a many economists found it dangerous that the government was once again on a bi-partisan path to financial deregulation. Simon Johnson, the former chief IMF economist, called the bill “a colossal mistake of historic proportions,” that “would gut investor protection in the United States” under the cloak of creating jobs (Johnson, 2012). William Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth for Massachusetts, expressed similar concerns:

“As regulators we must be vigilant that the exemption will not
become a tool for financial fraud and abuse…Unscrupulous penny stock
promoters have used misrepresentations to market obscure and low-value
stocks to individuals, often through pump and dump schemes. These kinds
of fraud operators have not gone away…In this segment of the market,
company information may be limited or simply false, and investors typically
lack investment sophistication and are often insufficiently cautious (Sullivan
and Ma, 2012).”

In the AFL-CIO’s statement opposing the Act, labor leaders argued that the Act deregulated Wall Street, weakened the regulatory ability of the SEC, and allowed companies to sell stock “without complying with key corporate governance reforms in the recently passed Dodd-Frank Act” (Elk, 2012). Small, untested companies would now be allowed to circulate all sorts of promotional claims, without producing the audited financial documents now required by the SEC (Moberg, 2012).

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said he was outraged by the act, which would do nothing but “re-inflate a stock market bubble” (Kapur, 4). Critics found particular animus for the “crowdfunding” exemption in the bill, with the IMF former chief economist Johnson calling it “perhaps the worst part of the bill,” allowing companies to solicit small investors with little government oversight (Johnson, 2012). Moberg (2012) explained specific labor union concerns as follows:

“For at least two reasons, unions have a stake in how the financial markets work. They are interested in protecting investments that provide retirement security for their members and other workers. And they have seen how deregulated financial markets have disastrous effects on workers. They encourage financial speculation and engineering that worsens inequality and often destroys jobs (witness the merger and takeover craze), exploits the vulnerable (witness the predatory lending during the last decade), and creates bubbles [...] all at the expense of the real economy and the majority of working people.”

Though such concerns are understandable, there is substantial evidence that fears of a crowdfunded “stock market bubble” destroying the wealth of millions of small investors are overstated. First, the reality is that the JOBS Act maintains a healthy set of regulations on both the issuers of crowdfunding appeals and those who invest in them. Issuers must file disclosure documents with the SEC detailing the names and addresses of business owners, providing prior year’s tax returns, outlining the business plan and governance structure, describing the intended use of crowdfunding proceeds, and setting targets for the offering (with regular progress updates). Offerings can only occur through registered brokers or funding portals, which must show due diligence to insure that companies listing on the portal are legitimate and that investors are aware of the risks of investing. In fact, some economists find that the regulations remain too excessive for the kind of small-scale investment contemplated under the Act (Bradford, 2012).

Second, the Act limits funding appeals to no more than $1 million in a 12 month period, and restricts any individual donor from giving the greater of $2,000 or 5% of their annual income/net worth (10% of income or net worth if the individual is worth more than $100,000). These restrictions substantially limit the damage that can occur from bad investments and financial fraud, and hardly suggest that a massively inflated stock market bubble such as the pre-2008 market would be likely.

Third, the crowdfunding marketplace has been remarkably fraud free for years. Though billions of dollars have been donated through crowdfunding portals over the last decade, there has not been a single case of prosecuted fraud involving crowdfunding (Fink, 2012). The absence of fraud and investor disaster is due to several factors, including the small scale of crowd-funded investments (most people invest less than they do in lottery tickets during the year [Forbes]). Additionally, the “transparency and social networking dynamics of crowdfunding have been excellent at keeping fraud near zero” (Lawton and Marom, 2012) as crowdfunding typically involves thousands of small investors tracking the businesses they are investing in and sharing information across the web. Furthermore, the kinds of social ventures that take the crowdfunding route are inherently less likely to engage in the kind of profit-seeking fraud that characterized the moguls of finance preceding the 2008 meltdown.

“The trustworthiness of social entrepreneurs is regarded to be much higher due to the primacy of the social aim, and the thus the costs of fraudulent risk should be reduced in theory,” Lehner (2013) explains. “We see early empirical claims for this based on the traditional non-profit literature” (see, for example, Haugh, 2006 and Laratta, 2010)…..

Unions and Cooperatives Face the Informal Economy.It is well established that the rise of an increasingly informal and flexible global economy, populated by non-standard and casual workers, has resulted in shrinking union density in the United States and elsewhere. Temporary work is a rapidly growing sector of the U.S. economy, and the explosion of non-standard and casual workers across the globe has led to the new concept of a global “precariat” (precarious/informal workers, who are unlinked from dependable job prospects), which is increasingly replacing the large factory based “proletariat”– once the backbone of union organizing campaigns (Standing, 2011; Davis, 2006).

A related development is the decline of manufacturing and the rise of service-sector employment: 85% of today’s U.S. economy is service-sector work (Curl, 2010), which is typically more informal and precarious than the manufacturing employment of old.

These trends of an increasingly informal service economy help account for dramatically shrinking private sector union density in America (falling from 24.6% in 1973 to 6.9% in 2010), simply because informal workers are much more difficult to organize and because employers can flee unionized sites for non-unionized locales of more exploitable workers (Schmacher 2000, 2).

While formal unions have found their strength eroding in the new global order, decentralized workers cooperatives have grown rapidly, as their organizational model matches the decentralized and fluid dynamics of today’s global world. “Today, increased technology, globalization of labor markets and the mobility of capital has ended the reign of large centralized factories. The new casual and decentralized labor force has decimated the major strength of trade unions’ power—a large, unified labor force. Unions have been forced to look at the creation of unionized worker-coops, not just as a fall back during depressions, but as the new order of the day” (Geminijen 2012).

As union strength declines globally, worker cooperatives are growing. In 2010, the International Cooperative Alliance represented co-operatives with over one billion members, in 180 countries (including cooperatives of all sorts, not just worker coops). In some countries, like Spain and Italy, workers cooperatives have grown to constitute a sizable share of the national economy. Some studies have found that worker coops have proved more resilient than mainstream businesses after the 2008 crisis, creating more post-recession jobs in many countries than has the traditional business sector (CICOPA, 2012) .

In the United States as well, the trend of economic informalization has been coupled with expanding worker owned cooperatives, especially within the service sector (i.e., cleaning, food catering, moving assistance, landscaping, child care), and with an especially notable growth of immigrant worker own cooperatives (Ji and Robinson, 2012). In New York City and the Bay Area, worker cooperative networks are rapidly growing. In Cleveland, city, university and business leaders have united behind the innovative “Evergreen Initiative,” a well-funded plan to build an expanding network of worker cooperatives across the city (Alperovitz, et. al.2010; Johnsen, 2010).

Still, the economic scale and impact of worker cooperatives remains very small overall—especially in the United States. Even as workers cooperatives blossom across the globe, with a model of decentralized, small-scale employee ownership that responds well to the growth of the precariat in the increasingly informal global economy, these small businesses still lack mass numbers, organizational power, and—most importantly—adequate access to capital resources (California Financial Opportunity Roundtable, 2012).

Non-traditional small enterprises like a local worker cooperative face tremendous difficulties raising adequate capital (Bauer-Leeb and Lundquist. 2012; Lehner, 2013; Schwienbacher and Larralde, 2010). For one, the typical “social purpose” goals of worker cooperatives are often seen by investors as undermining financial returns. Furthermore, the unfamiliar corporate governance and legal structures of workers cooperatives can dissuade traditional investors (Artz and Kim, 2011: 47). There is also a deep cultural distance between the social entrepreneur and the traditional wall street investor, who speak fundamentally different languages (“social purpose investing” versus business/managerial excellence) (Lehner, 2013: 2-4; Ridley-Duff and Bull, 2011). These obstacles help explain why a 2003 bank of England study found that “social entrepreneurs indeed have a hard time accessing traditional debt finance,” and why the business plans of small social entrepreneurs are rejected 98% of the time by traditional venture capitalists (Lehner, 2013: 4).

With their decentralized and flexible business model, worker owned cooperatives are a good match for today’s globalizing informal economy—yet they lack adequate capital to fully exploit their potential. Unions have deep wells of intellectual capital, financial resources and organizational might, and yet their membership and power is shrinking as they face new economic realities. Both coops and unions, therefore, can benefit greatly from partnership and collaboration. But in a country like the United States, with little history of deep union-coop collaboration, the question remains: how to do it? The JOBS Act offers one answer to that question, because the “relatively new form of informal financing” (Hemer, 2011) that it has set free—crowdfunding—presents unique opportunities to bring labor and coops together around a flexible and decentralizing funding strategy that well matches today’s underlying economic trends.

Union-Coop Collaboration: A Crowdfunding Solution.

The SEC has not yet fully written the new investment regulations that will guide the implementation of the JOBS Act’s crowdfunding regime. But as those rules are announced, workers cooperatives will be able to directly market the social vision of their business through internet platforms, attracting crowds of small investors. In preparation of the new rules, Websites like “The Crowdfunding Cooperative” are emerging with a goal to “massively scale” cooperatives, “making it easy to manage community share issues and find coops to invest in” (http://uniteddiversity.com/projects/crowdfunding-cooperative/) .

For these reasons, the 2012 National Worker Cooperative Conference called crowdfunding a revolutionary “new era of innovation” for worker coop financing . Reflecting on the favorably changing landscape of worker cooperative financing, Melissa Hoover (Director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives) concluded that “there are some substantive things happening in the past year that feel different. There was the International Year of the Cooperative, more media attention, more academic inquiries, enough lawyers to start a [workers coop] legal professionals group, interest from sustainable business and socially responsible business people, crowdfunding tools starting to be used for worker cooperatives, and first calls from outside investors wanting to develop funding vehicles for worker cooperatives.”

Unions can be part of this crowdfunding revolution. There is already a history of financing collaboration between unions and coops, as unions have sometimes helped finance worker buyout of companies. But most union-facilitated worker buyouts in the last several decades have resulted in only nominal worker ownership and governance of a company— as in the case of most Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOP) that do not give workers democratic control of management and which do not always result in workers have majority ownership of all the stock (Bell 2006; Olsen, 1982; Hochner et., al. 1988) . Through the creative embrace of crowdfunding, unions can go beyond ESOPS and help finance actual worker-owned and worker-managed cooperatives. We are seeing movement in this direction already.

Republic Windows.

In 2012 the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) successfully executed a buyout campaign to turn one of their unionized workplaces into worker owned cooperative. This coop campaign had been pursued since 2008, when 250 workers from the Republic Windows manufacturing company in Chicago occupied the factory to demand unpaid wages, and then occupied again in 2012 in order to prevent a second owner from shutting down the factory (Kunichoff, 2012).

The largest obstacle to the success of the worker buyout of Republic Windows, and the same obstacle that has undermined so many other worker cooperatives, was inadequate access to start-up finance capital. The Bank of America, which owned most of the debt at Republic Windows, refused to consider financing a worker cooperative buyout. In the absence of traditional capital to finance the worker owned cooperative—known as New Era Windows– the Electrical Union Local 1111 played a critical role in solidifying community support, developing worker leadership and negotiating with a bank for financing (Flanders, 2012). But additional funding was needed. In the end, to fully fund their vision of a worker coop, Republic Windows workers turned to a grassroots microcredit organization, Working World, which helped finance the worker buyout with no-interest loan money. This loan money came from a small scale capital loan fund for locally based worker cooperatives, that was seeded by community crowdfunded donations (Gonzales, 2012; see also www.theworkingworld.org/us/ex-republic-windows-and-doors/).

Though such examples are promising, the fact is that these kinds of union-facilitated cooperative start-ups have been quite rare, and typically involve very limited capital. Part of the reason is that before the JOBS act, U.S. securities law meant that community supporters wishing to crowdfund such businesses as New Era Windows had to donate their money without hope of financial return. But after the JOBS act, community supporters can now choose to actually buy an equity investment in social purpose companies. It is predictable that even more community crowdfunding dollars will flow into businesses like New Era Windows , since there is now a possibility of receiving a return on one’s social investment.

In this new environment, labor unions could choose to embrace crowdfunding, and deepen their connection to the workers cooperative movement by developing strategies to catalyze the investment dollars of individual union members into community-sensitive, socially responsible worker cooperatives, as now allowed by law. For their part, workers cooperatives could self-consciously “earn” union support by building business models in accordance with union friendly practices, becoming community members of local unions, and involving their worker-owners in broader political causes than the economic success of their cooperative.

To be clear, unions would not be allowed under the JOBS act to channel their pension fund investment dollars or any other institutional investment fund into crowdfunded worker cooperatives—simply because the JOBS Act targets individual donors and frees them to make small investments in non-SEC registered businesses. Nor would union leadership be able to offer specific investment advice to their members, urging them to invest in any specific crowdfunded business, as such formal investment advice remains illegal under the JOBS act, except when done by accredited brokers, promoting SEC registered companies. But, there are several ways that unions might use the new Crowdfunding law to build on the latent support that their members might have for worker cooperatives, and to bring the efforts of unions and coops closer together. We lay out some possibilities below.

[…]Certify Unionized Crowd Fund Advisors. The National Crowdfunding Association has launched a Certified Crowdfund Advisor (Best, Nice and Jones, 2012) certification program. As described on the CCA website, The CCA certificate “identifies the holder as being an expert in crowdfunding and thus professionally able to help everyone from small business owners to investors regarding how to participate in crowdfunding” (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/here-come-the-certified-crowdfund-advisors-172244921.html). Dedicating union dollars to helping members of union locals and state labor federations achieve such certificate would facilitate the educational strategy discussed above, while providing authoritative and specialized investment education to union members interested in building up worker cooperatives.

Establish a Union-Sponsored Crowdfund Portal. Unions have been successful at mobilizing social purpose spending by their members when they have self-consciously created the “environmental conditions” to catalyze such actions (Zhullo, 208). In the field of crowdfunding, one of those environmental conditions could be to establish a union-sponsored crowdfund portal that facilitates investment in worker cooperatives that share union values of worker empowerment and broader social justice. Such crowdfunding investment portals are necessary because under the JOBS act, crowdfund investors and businesses cannot connect directly. Rather, to better insure the validity of businesses seeking crowdfunds and the knowledge level of potential investors, these two parties must connect through an independent “middleman” portal—a web-based platform that must insure that the businesses on their site meet minimum standards outlined in the law and that small investors using the portal are educated into the risks and opportunities of investing. Many of these crowdfunding platforms already exist, such as IndieGoGo, Kiva, and Kickstarter. Furthermore, many of these extant portals have a specific angle—such as portals that focus on green businesses (Green Unite), arts related businesses (New Jelly), local agricultural initiatives (Three Revolutions), innovative product designers (Christie Street) or on projects friendly to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered individuals (FundPride). There are also several emerging portals already dedicated to cooperative financing, such as coop.org and the crowdfunding co-operative.
Along those lines, a union collaborative could come together to launch a crowdfund portal that features only worker-owned cooperatives that share union-friendly business practices and values. In providing information about businesses featured on the union crowdfunding portal, the portal could publish metrics to rate businesses on a “social purpose” scale, using such tools as the Social Return on Investment (SROI) method, as standardized by the SROI network (www.thesroinetwork.org; see also Lehner, 2013). Union members (who arguably are more willing to accept lower rates of return in favor of “social investment” goals [Quarter, et. al., 2001]) could be directed to this portal to facilitate their investments into union-friendly worker cooperatives.

Such a portal would have important legal restrictions on its communications with users. Under the law, crowdfunding portals cannot offer investment advice or recommendations, but it as of yet unclear how the SEC will interpret this principle in terms of what kinds of information portals can and cannot share with their visitors. Clearly portals cannot advise investment in any specific company, but it seems likely the SEC will allow them to act as a kind of educational clearinghouse, focusing all their offerings only on one kind of business (worker cooperatives) and sharing information such as which businesses are union organized and where businesses might be rated on the SROI scale.

n.b. Cartoons come from The Scoop Shovel, the official Organ of the
Manitoba Co-operative Dairies, Manitoba Egg and Poultry Pool, Manitoba Co-operative Livestock Producers at http://www.ecclectica.ca/issues/2007/1/photos.ecc.asp?i=0

It has been said many times that “sustainable capitalism” is an oxymoron. There are reasons why people believe this. The nature of capitalism has the need for growth built in. If there were any really strong contradictions in Tuesdays SOTU speech they rest right here. The call for economic growth and some sort of action toward addressing the climate change problem are really at odds with each other in their present context. Here is one example of the claim that capitalism is not in harmony with sustainability: Is Sustainable Capitalism an Oxymoron?

The root problem with capitalism is not that individual firms are incentivized to grow, but that the economy as a whole must grow…

When oligopolies are the form of economic structure the need for regulation and the effect of regulation on growth is even more important.On the Need for Regulation of Oligopoly and Oligopsony

This is the important point. Unregulated oligopy, with its extra normal profits, when it becomes extensive, arrests the growth of the entire economy. Indeed, the situation is actually worse, because by continuing to purge the rest of the economy of its normal income, it can cause the rest of the economy’s revenue to be less than its expenses. Thus, the remainder of the economy, the oligopist’s market, may actually be forced into contraction. But this is bad for the oligopist as well.

This is a familiar theme and would be resented by those who detest regulation. Maybe if their wishes are not followed the result is more favorable for growth, but what will that growth do to sustainability?
The nature of oligopolies

Firms often collude in an attempt to stabilize unstable markets, so as to reduce the risks inherent in these markets for investment and product development. There are legal restrictions on such collusion in most countries. There does not have to be a formal agreement for collusion to take place (although for the act to be illegal there must be actual communication between companies)–for example, in some industries there may be an acknowledged market leader which informally sets prices to which other producers respond, known as price leadership.
In other situations, competition between sellers in an oligopoly can be fierce, with relatively low prices and high production. This could lead to an efficient outcome approaching perfect competition. The competition in an oligopoly can be greater when there are more firms in an industry than if, for example, the firms were only regionally based and did not compete directly with each other.

The way these things are discussed in economic theory would lead you to believe that these are just another form of business groupings. Yet is seems clear that they are a natural way for a capitalist system to develop. Read on below and I will try to make this clear.

Here are some of the attributes of oligopolies:

Profit maximization conditions: An oligopoly maximizes profits by producing where marginal revenue equals marginal costs.

Ability to set price: Oligopolies are price setters rather than price takers.

Entry and exit: Barriers to entry are high. The most important barriers are economies of scale, patents, access to expensive and complex technology, and strategic actions by incumbent firms designed to discourage or destroy nascent firms. Additional sources of barriers to entry often result from government regulation favoring existing firms making it difficult for new firms to enter the market.

Number of firms: “Few” – a “handful” of sellers. There are so few firms that the actions of one firm can influence the actions of the other firms.
Long run profits: Oligopolies can retain long run abnormal profits. High barriers of entry prevent sideline firms from entering market to capture excess profits.
Product differentiation: Product may be homogeneous (steel) or differentiated (automobiles).

Perfect knowledge: Assumptions about perfect knowledge vary but the knowledge of various economic factors can be generally described as selective. Oligopolies have perfect knowledge of their own cost and demand functions but their inter-firm information may be incomplete. Buyers have only imperfect knowledge as to price, cost and product quality.

Interdependence: The distinctive feature of an oligopoly is interdependence. Oligopolies are typically composed of a few large firms. Each firm is so large that its actions affect market conditions. Therefore the competing firms will be aware of a firm’s market actions and will respond appropriately. This means that in contemplating a market action, a firm must take into consideration the possible reactions of all competing firms and the firm’s counter-moves. It is very much like a game of chess or pool in which a player must anticipate a whole sequence of moves and counter-moves in determining how to achieve his or her objectives. For example, an oligopoly considering a price reduction may wish to estimate the likelihood that competing firms would also lower their prices and possibly trigger a ruinous price war. Or if the firm is considering a price increase, it may want to know whether other firms will also increase prices or hold existing prices constant. This high degree of interdependence and need to be aware of what other firms are doing or might do is to be contrasted with lack of interdependence in other market structures. In a perfectly competitive (PC) market there is zero interdependence because no firm is large enough to affect market price. All firms in a PC market are price takers, as current market selling price can be followed predictably to maximize short-term profits. In a monopoly, there are no competitors to be concerned about. In a monopolistically-competitive market, each firm’s effects on market conditions is so negligible as to be safely ignored by competitors.

Non-Price Competition: Oligopolies tend to compete on terms other than price. Loyalty schemes, advertisement, and product differentiation are all examples of non-price competition.

Here are some examples in our economy:

Many media industries today are essentially oligopolies.
Six movie studios receive 90% of American film revenues.[citation needed]
The television and high speed internet industry is mostly an oligopoly of seven companies: The Walt Disney Company, CBS Corporation, Viacom, Comcast, Hearst Corporation, Time Warner, and News Corporation. See Concentration of media ownership.
Four wireless providers (AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel) control 89% of the cellular telephone service market. This is not to be confused with cellular telephone manufacturing, an integral portion of the cellular telephone market as a whole.
Healthcare insurance in the United States consists of very few insurance companies controlling major market share in most states. For example, California’s insured population of 20 million is the most competitive in the nation and 44% of that market is dominated by two insurance companies, Anthem and Kaiser Permanente.
Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors control about 80% of the beer industry.

In March 2012, the United States Department of Justice announced that it would sue six major publishers for price fixing in the sale of electronic books. The accused publishers are Apple, Simon & Schuster Inc, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins Publishers.

In today’s global economy there are far more:The world’s seed oligopoly

PLAYERS: A fistful of transnational firms, the Gene Giants, dominates global seed sales. Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta – all among the world’s top-ranking pesticide firms – lead the pack.

The fossil fuel oligopoly has its special qualities:Capitalism = Corporatism = Oligopoly = Rentier Stagnation

I contend that corporations have always been the main instrument of this drive toward oligopoly, and they have been the only significant modern form of it. It would have been difficult if not impossible for Oil Age economic actors to achieve oligopoly if not for the way the corporate form tilted the playing field and rigged the markets. Cheap, plentiful oil in itself would have been a radically democratizing force. (Who knows? Perhaps textbook “free markets” could even have thrived.) Only a severe artificial restriction on economic freedom could ever have enabled oligopolies to cohere. This artifice was the corporation.

Similarly, modern technology, whatever its other issues, would have been a tremendously liberating egalitarian force if not artificially enclosed and controlled. The corporate form was the main mode of this enclosure.

In all ways legally and politically possible, corporations have monopolized the vast bounty and freedom which fossil fuels and the modern human mind held in potential. Privatization of public commons like the resources of the earth, including fossil fuels, is at one, physical extreme. The radical extension of the IP regime to the point that it constitutes a new enclosure of a potentially infinite public commons is at the other extreme of intellect and spirit. In both cases, and all in between, there’s been little of private individual involvement. In every case I can think of, the corporate form is preferred. Certainly if the genius of capitalism could conceive of a non-corporatized way to compete, someone would be doing it.

Not only is the corporation the most efficient wealth-extracting machine. By design it’s forbidden to do anything but all it can to maximize its extractions. According to the responsibility of management to shareholders, a corporation is required to subvert the rules of capitalist competition. If the more effective expenditure for short-term gain in lobbying for anti-competitive legislation or regulatory treatment, that must be chosen over longer-term research investment. Same for the mergers and acquisitions and offshoring which we know are so destructive and serve no purpose even from the “capitalist” point of view, but which can accomplish a short-term goosing of the stock price.

It’s clear that in reality capitalism always seeks oligopoly; that corporatism is the only viable form of oligopoly under the conditions of the Oil Age and now energy descent; and therefore that capitalism is synonymous with corporatism.

Economic theory is one thing. Actual practice is another. We are witnessing what is being said above in many ways right now. The corporations with successful oligopolies are quite content with what we have. They will only welcome changes (growth) that increases their profit. They will distribute propaganda that projects various myths about the role of government to protect themselves. These groupings of corporations are one reason for limits on growth that are systemic. Changing this is a goal that can only lead to a better situation if the changes are done in an intelligent manner with planning and ongoing monitoring to change course when the outcome conflicts with desired goals. As we make fun of republican obstruction it may pay to ask ourselves if they are really as dumb as we paint them. Clearly profits are high and their world is grinding along very securely. Meanwhile speeches from the Whitehouse seem to speak to a fictitious world.

The economy we have is locked into well established patterns of resource depletion, needless consumption, and deadly waste production. Clearly we do not want that economy to grow. We do not need growth we need change. We need to build a sustainable system and to create jobs for both the unemployed and those who now work in places that are doing us harm. If people are to live a decent life they need to earn wages to make that possible. Excess profits and needless consumption can be eliminated to make this happen. Manufacturing those things we need to last and in a form that is repairable is imperative. Growing food in sane ways locally whenever possible is also a part of such a transformation. Such measures would include green energy sources and life styles that cut back on energy and other resource consumption.

No, it is not possible to ask a sitting president to start such a revolution. Yet if you understand what is really needed the kind of theater we are given in our political world is not even close to satisfying. We need better weathermen to tell the people which way the wind is blowing. And we need them soon.

Author’s Note: Some of this has already been posted in my previous diary. I was asked to write again and include a description of the circumstances of our arrest, the charges, my plea, and some of the process we have been through leading up to this precipitous dropping of charges. While there are those who want to say this is just a matter of incompetence or an overburdened system or laziness, that simply isn’t true here. The press is a willingly manipulated in a calculated system of repressing and dissuading dissent, whistle-blowing and accountability of those in power.

As one of those awaiting trial, I find this whole affair, from illegal arrests, to injurious treatment, to 14 months of harassment via making us show up at multiple hearings, with many delays, to the propagandist stenography of the Boston Globe, to be a heinous abuse of justice.

Please keep reading to learn of the final bit of foul play by our government. They saw the writing on the wall and, once again, they abused their position of power and cheated justice and democracy.

Circumstances of arrest:
On December 10, 2011, the Boston Police Department arrested me for standing on public property. I had been on the property for a few hours prior the arrest. I had been on the property, off and on, for the previous 2 months. I came to Dewey Square – public land owned by the State of Massachusetts and managed by The Greenway Conservancy – to be part of delivering a political message to our government: we the people want justice for what the banks and elite class have perpetrated against this country.

Our message was clear, as is shown by the fact that these protests changed the public discourse. Until Occupy hit the streets, no one was talking about the inequity of power and justice between the 1% and the 99%.

Our message was still needed. Just because people were talking, doesn’t mean the issues were resolved or even being addressed by our government.

So, we had the right to stay in the streets and keep delivering this message.

I don’t believe it makes a difference – as our First Amendment gives us the right to assemble and address our grievances to our government, without any limitations of when and where being put on that right – but, in my case, I was not camping at Dewey Square. I visited one to three times per week.

I want to get back to that First Amendment statement. It is of tantamount importance that we all remember that it is our right to assemble and to speak out, at our discretion. It is not up to the government to tell us when, where and how we can assemble and speak. The whole point to explicitly naming this right is so that we, the people, maintain tools to keep abuse of power in check. Here is the text of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

“Congress shall make no law”… They are not allowed to curb, in any way, our right to assemble and petition our government. They can’t say, “you’ve been out there too long.” They can’t say, “You can’t do that here.”

When we just idly accept these “free speech zones” and complain about the “nuisance” of a protest and even support the forceful arrests of people who are peaceably assembling, in any way, we are giving up one of the single most important tenets of democracy. There is no point to almost anything else we stand for, if we don’t stand for this. We are not a democracy without it.

Yet, I have been told that I deserved to be arrested and injured for my apparently heinous crime of standing in a public space and talking. I refused to bow to a militarily armed “authority” and walk away and be silent just because they wanted me to. For that simple act, I was treated as a “terrorism threat.”

new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves.

Why aren’t people around the country outraged about this? Why aren’t we out in the streets until this kind of abuse of power is dismantled and the people who perpetrate it held accountable? There is a direct link between this approach to governance – at the service of corporations – and the apocalyptic destruction of arboreal forest land for the sake of putting more money into the coffers of the already rich.

As I told the Boston Phoenix,

“If I can watch people in Syria march when they know that they’re going to be shot at,” Nevitt tells the Phoenix, “then I can’t stand here and let our government tell us that we don’t have the right to assemble in a public space.”

Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/144030-catching-up-with-the-ongoing-trials-of-occupy-bost/#ixzz2KQxFazvg

How many people in the US cheered and supported the protesters in Egypt? Look at this statement from Obama, at the time:

“I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protestors. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere.”

Except in the United States, apparently. The protesters in Egypt defended themselves by throwing rocks at armed agents of the government. They even burned down the headquarters building of the ruling political party. They turned a public square into an encampment where they controlled who came and went. For this, they were given international attention and our President proclaimed that they were within their rights.

Yet, here, at home, no such proclamations are made. No one threw rocks at government agents, or anyone else. No one burned any buildings. No one denied entry anyone else entry into any public spaces. Still, President Obama was silent when his own citizens exercises these “universal” rights. And people throughout this land have supported the repression of protest and the violent arrests. The vast majority have simply remained silent, going about their lives as though nothing is wrong. Basic, “universal”, human rights are being violated and suppressed in this country. The very foundation of democracy is being ripped out from under our feet. And the people who get the vitriol or lack of support are those who are saying something.

In a diary I posted two days before getting arrested, I explained why I was willing to take this risk. I implore you to ask yourself why you don’t care enough to do the same. Does it really take them coming for your or someone dear to you before you get how critical this is?

Initial Treatment
It was very disturbing to me to see the media report about how well the Boston Police handled the arrests of peaceable protesters. First, there is no justifiable reason to arrest people expressing their First Amendment rights. Second, it is an authoritarian abuse of power to approach those peaceful protesters, who are letting the police know they are willing to be arrested without resistance, with what was basically a battalion of fully-armed riot police, including big guns, large canisters of tear gas and a sound canon. (As someone with hyperacusis from a chronic illness, a sound canon would have been excruciatingly painful and likely deafening, for me.)

More important, is that Boston was one of the later cities to forcibly remove peaceable protesters. They had had time to see the public response to pepper spraying and rubber bullets. So, they came at 5am, in the dark, when no one was up. They pulled their trucks in to the square and kept the press back, so that no one could witness how they handled us.

They committed their abusive treatment more surreptitiously. For instance, I and eight other women were handcuffed and placed in the back of a transport vehicle. The inside was a metal box with metal benches. No seat belts. With our arms bound behind us and no body restraints, the truck was sped up just before making a turn and we were all whipped around inside the truck. The truck was then jolted to a stop and the back door flung open, as a police officer was yelling at us in anger. I suffered a permanent back injury from this. There are other injuries, but I will only speak of my own, as I don’t want to jeopardize anything for anyone else. But, the police department was given much public adoration for their gentle treatment. I suppose we should be thankful they didn’t send drones into Dewey Square or shoot us on site for having the audacity to gather and speak. That’s how many in public seem to view things these days.

In jail, I was not able to stand. My comrades made space for me to lie down on the cement benches in our cells. (I was moved to three different cells during my stay.) When I was called out, after several hours, to have my charges read to me and filed, I had to ask for a seat. We told the police that I was in pain. One of my beautiful sisters was so good about yelling out the bars to tell them that we needed medical attention. None came. I was simply processed as though nothing was wrong. (I would learn in the emergency room later that I had a ruptured disc and fractured facets.)

When my charges were read to me, they listed “trespassing” and “resisting arrest.” I laughed at the latter charge and asked how they could make it when I had asked the arresting office to help me stand up. The two officers present were not at the arrest scene. One walked away and came back a few minutes later and said, “we’re removing the resisting arrest charge. You don’t look like someone who would resist arrest.”

I was furious. What does that mean? I’m white and I’m a woman and I was in my late 40s. If I were a 23 year old black male would you say that? What if I were a transvestite? Of course I don’t look like I could resist arrest, now. I can barely walk because you injured my back!

That’s how our justice system works? A capricious decision by a cop based on how he views you in the station, even though he had nothing to do with the arrest and had never had an interaction with you before? One could say that I got the benefit of this by having them scratch that charge. Yet, I wanted my day in court over that charge. I was all too aware of how that subjective power is used against people that don’t fit the demographic that this cop is sympathetic to. I felt like a traitor to my comrades. Especially my comrades of color or youth or not perceived as a hetero cis-female. It wounds me deeply to gain any benefit from the systems of oppression while my fellow citizens are murdered, beaten, jailed and otherwise crushed by it. It is simply not right. I didn’t stand out there, risking my body, for this abuse of power. One reason I was willing to risk myself was for the sake of those for whom the risk is even greater, due to their demographic status. I want them to know that those of us who can benefit, don’t want to when it comes at their expense. I’m still furious about this.

We would later learn that although almost all of us had originally been told we had a charge of resisting arrest, when we got to our arraignment, only the men had that charge remaining. None of the women. I sat in Dewey Square with men and women. I behaved no differently from the man sitting next to me. On what basis were these charges meted out?

After about 8 hours of laying on concrete with an injured spine, I was released on bail. I was not told of any restrictions. I would not have accepted them. I would have stayed in jail.

Processing Our Case
I’ve lost count of how many hearings we’ve had since our arrest. I have been at the court house at least six times in 14 months. There were some motion hearings that defendants were not required to be present for. So, the City has attended at least 6 court appointments regarding my case, but it maybe closer to 10.

Of the 47 of us who were arrested on December 10, about half of us plead “not guilty.” I do not believe that I was trespassing. I was on public land. I was exercising my First Amendment right to free political speech to address my government. I cannot have been trespassing.

I did not accept any restrictions to my actions while the case was being processed. None of us, who plead “not guilty” did. Many of us have traveled out of state. Many of us have been back to Dewey Square. Many of us have been in other protest actions since our arraignment. Had the State tried to impose restrictions on me when I had not been determined to be guilty of any crimes, nor have I been shown to pose any sort of physical threat to anyone or anything, I would have defied those restrictions.

We made it clear from the beginning that we were going to fight these charges and fight them loudly. Our first motions were extensive requests for materials and statements from multiple governmental agencies regarding who was involved in monitoring us and determining what actions to take against us. We had seen Homeland Security trucks and various surveillance cameras on site. At one point, after we had filed a motion demanding to know if BRIC – a regional counter-terrorism agency – was involved in any part of the monitoring or decision-making regarding Occupy Boston, the DA had the chutzpah to return to the courtroom and tell the judge, “I asked somebody at that office and she said, “no.”"

The judge wasn’t too happy with that defiance of a court order. He then gave the order very specific wording which required signed statements from someone accountable.

This was the process. We would make discovery motions and the City would respond with delays and absurd statements that did not fit the definition of meeting discovery requests.

Fourteen months into this, and we were starting to feel that, not only were our charges bogus and the arrests illegal, we were now being denied our right to a speedy trial. We wanted the court to rule on the very legality of the arrests. To see if the court would support the notion that the police can arrest people who are doing nothing but gathering and speaking for sake of political expression.

That would have been one avenue of having our day in court. Having the court determine that the arrests themselves were illegal would have been a very strong political statement. We made our case for it in a hearing this past Monday. The judge said he would make a ruling this coming Monday.

Yesterday, on a Friday with a blizzard underway, one business day before the judge would have made a public ruling, the District Attorney let the Boston Globe know that the City was dropping all charges related to Occupy Boston. After 14 months, many court hearings, many rounds of being forced to comply with motions, and declaring that we must face criminal charges for our actions, they suddenly decided to drop the charges with this claim:

“There’s now parity with prior cases arising from the protests,” Jake Wark said. “They’ve served essentially the same sentences.”

Guilty. Sentence served. No trial.

My Reaction: (yes, this was an immediate reaction with fast-flying fingers. This is me being reactionary. I allow myself those moments. I had only learned of the news just hours before posting this.)

Occupy Boston Protesters: Guilty and Sentenced Without Trial
I wanted my day in court. It was clear, they were going to delay and delay. Over one year later, I still did not have a trial date. I was also never told with whom I would be a co-defendant. (we wanted one trial and the judge insisted we be broken into groups of 5. He then only named one group and the rest of us were left in limbo) All of this was designed to make it impossible for us to prepare. Trying to crush our resolve and our souls slowly.

When we pushed back and filed a motion for charges to be dismissed, the judge said he would rule this coming Monday. Preempting what the judge might say in court, the City surreptitiously dropped the charges today. During the beginning of a blizzard. On a Friday afternoon. Without letting any of the defendants know. We didn’t get the courtesy a single communication to us. We all learned by reading it in the Boston Globe. And that is where we read outright lies:

but at least five defendants will contest the dismissal in hopes of fighting the accusations on their merits.

um, we filed the motion to have the charges dismissed. the hearing for that motion was this past Monday. that’s on the public record. high quality stenography, I mean journalism, there.

“Our clients feel that they deserve a day in court to contest their arrests on constitutional grounds,” said Jeff Feuer, of the National Lawyers Guild, which is defending the demonstrators. “They were using a public park.”

that’s my lawyer. I wonder when they got that quote. I’m pretty sure that’s from an earlier time when we were being asked about why we didn’t accept a plea deal. Since we’ve had no contact from anyone about this latest move of dropping the charges, I doubt this is a contemporary quote.

A spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said prosecutors decided to resolve the cases because the defendants had abided by certain restrictions imposed by the court for more than a year. Other protesters charged with trespassing and unlawful assembly had agreed to similar conditions in resolving their cases.

What restrictions? This is just outright fiction. I pleaded not guilty. I was not under any restrictions, as I had not been found guilty of any crime and I would not consent to be punished as though I had. I dare the Boston Globe to tell me exactly what restrictions I have supposed adhered to and to prove that I consented to and complied with them.

“There’s now parity with prior cases arising from the protests,” Jake Wark said. “They’ve served essentially the same sentences.”

This is their way of saving face. Trying to claim that we somehow accepted guilt by serving a pre-sentence. Who needs a trial when you can just get people to agree to “restrictions” and then say that they’ve “resolved” their case by “essentially” serving a sentence?

I will not stand idly by and be portrayed in the public as though I have served a sentence for a crime I did not commit. Nor will I allow our justice system to proclaim that they can determine, without a trial or a sentencing process, that someone has paid enough of a penalty that they can consider the case resolved. It’s bullshit. And makes me wonder what they thought the judge was going to say, on the record, on Monday.

Here is the press release about this from the National Lawyers Guild, who are representing us.

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD, Massachusetts Chapter, Inc.
14 Beacon St., Suite 407, Boston, MA 02108  
PRESS RELEASE
______________________________________________________________________________
Contact:
Urszula Masny-Latos
Tammi Arford (defendant): 617-686-8892 National Lawyers Guild, Mass. Chapter
Andrea Hill (defendant): 574-206-5632 617-227-7335
______________________________________________________________________________
CRIMINAL CHARGES AGAINST OCCUPY BOSTON DEFENDANTS DROPPED
Boston, February 8, 2013.   Today, without any notice to defense counsel or the defendants, Suffolk County prosecutors went into court and in an unscheduled, unilateral action dismissed the criminal cases that had been brought against five Occupy Boston activists which were scheduled to begin trial on Monday, February 11. The prosecutors also dismissed all of the criminal charges remaining against the other Occupy Boston activists who were still awaiting trial as a result of the mass police arrests in October and December, 2011.

We believe that the DA’s decision amounts to an acknowledgment of the unconstitutionality of the arrests and criminal charges that had been brought against hundreds of Occupy Boston participants, and shows that the state has finally
admitted that the demonstrations by Occupy activists were legal and constitutionally protected.

Fully ready to contest the charges at trial, the defendants and their representatives from theNational Lawyers Guild (NLG) had subpoenaed Mayor Menino, Police Commissioner Ed Davis, and Nancy Brennan (former head of the Greenway Conservancy) to explain why the City of Boston and its police department unconstitutionally applied the Massachusetts trespass and unlawful assembly laws to impinge upon Occupy Boston participants’ rights to assemble, to express their protected speech, and to petition the government. In addition, they had also subpoenaed Joshua Bekenstein and Mitt Romney (of Bain Capital), and Robert Gallery (CEO of Bank of America) to address their role in constructing and perpetuating excessive corporate power and an economic system that favors the wealthiest 1% of the population at the expense of the remaining 99%– an undemocratic system in which the voices of the people are ignored. The police action in arresting occupiers demonstrated that voices of conscience that speak out against
social and economic inequality are not only ignored, they are unlawfully silenced by the state’s use of violence, fear, threat, and repression.

This decision by prosecutors comes after 14 months of delay, during which defendants were repeatedly required to show up for court dates, only to have their day in court and their right to a jury trial delayed time after time. Defendants and their NLG lawyers spent months working to prepare a case that would potentially embarrass the City and set valuable precedent that would reaffirm the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly.

In making this decision, Suffolk County prosecutors have not only prevented the defendants from having their day in court, they have employed yet another way to trample upon those who voice dissent and discouraged them from challenging injustice and inequality in this country. In fact, a spokesperson from the District
Attorney’s office today admitted that these defendants, who never had the chance to present their case to a judge or jury, “served a sentence” imposed unilaterally by the actions of the District Attorney without ever having been found guilty of any criminal offense.

### END ###

Don’t be complicit in the repression of voices of dissent. Please take in the way this was handled: peaceful protesters arrested by using a battalion of militarily-armed riot police, then dragged through repeated courtroom delays, then charges dropped with a statement that they had “essentially” served a sentence. See how that works? Guilt determined and sentence handed down without the bother of a pesky trial.

Raise your voices, people. When these things happen, we need to yell louder that we will maintain our rights.

If you look in the comment section of that diary, you will see some people arguing that there is no malicious intent on the part of The Globe. It’s really just under-funded, lazy journalism. You will also see some arguing that the legal process is just a matter of an over-burdened system and incompetency.

I don’t buy it. This is the way the corruption of democracy works. Death by a thousand little cuts. Newspapers are struggling financially because they have abandoned their role and, therefore, don’t receive support. The role of the 4th Estate in a democracy is to be an independent check on anyone or any institution which manages to garner power over others. Instead, they’ve become a part of the power structure. Corporations have all the power in this country. Now, corporations own all the media outlets. When that shift occurred, when the mission of objective, investigative journalism in service to the public good was compromised for the sake of shareholder profits, the 4th Estate abandoned democracy. That they are a shell of themselves, with no budget and no journalistic integrity now and, therefore, don’t have the capacity to “intentionally” do a disservice to us all, does not exonerate them. They have made the choices which have landed them where they are. They made those choices in service to the 1%. It is not accidental that they can now look lame and beg for ‘understanding’ while they are complicit with the systems which abuse us.

If the courts are “over-burdened”, it is not because we have such high rates of criminal people who just have to be taken off the streets. It is because we have criminalized things for the sake of feeding a for-profit prison system and to maintain a system of oppression. We can relieve the court system of much weight by ending the prosecution of non-violent drug use, for instance.

In our case, the dropped charges had nothing to do with a court which was too busy to handle us. It wasn’t the judge who complained about having the cases processed in court. It was the DA who decided that we had already served our sentence.

It wasn’t incompetence, either. The City was very skilled at arguing against and evading our motions. They were very clear that we needed to be prosecuted for our audacity. There was never any indication that the Assistant DA handling the case didn’t know what she was doing. In fact, our attorneys expressed respect for her skills early on.

This was a calculated political decision. A series of calculated political decisions, in fact. The decisions to have Homeland Security trucks show up at the protest site was to intimidate us. The decision to arrest us was made to end the protest. The decision to do so with a military-style action was meant to frighten others from attempting to protest. The decision to push for our cases to be processed was to signal that it would be a long, painful process you would have to go through if you dared to protest. The decision to drop the charges before hearing what the judge had to say on Monday, was to avoid having a public record of what the judge would say on Monday.

I have no doubt about it. None of this was ever about whether we had actually committed any crimes. It was all about silencing dissent. Mayor Menino made that very clear, early on:

“I will not tolerate civil disobedience in Boston.

Civil disobedience is the cornerstone of democracy. It is a powerful tool that The People must use stop abuse of power. Voting is not enough. We are not relegated to one tool for our role in keeping democracy true to form. When those in power can control who runs for office, what we learn through media and what those people do once they are in office, you must use your other tools. Here in Boston, we enshrine this truth in our memorial site of the “Boston Tea Party.” An action against corporate interests controlling tax policy and fair trade. Yet, we now have a Mayor who made it known that he will crush any civil disobedience. You don’t think that Mayor is directing and/or strategizing the actions of the police and the DA? Think again. Our police chief is appointed by the mayor. Our current police chief has been on the job without the security of a contract for years, now. Every day, his job is only his if the mayor deems it is. Is that police chief going to defy this mayor’s wishes?

We now know that the FBI was monitoring Occupy. We know they helped coordinate the crackdowns and deemed peaceable protesters to be potential terrorists. The mayor of Oakland admitted that 18 mayors around the country were talking to each other about how to handle Occupiers.

None of this is about incompetence, laziness or an over-burdened system. It is about silencing voices which would demand accountability of those in power, justice for the “99%” and analysis and adjustment of our worship of predatory capitalism. Some aspects of the system have been crumbling to a state of auto-complicity for so long that we’ve become complacent. But that doesn’t make it any less unjust or any less responsible for the resulting oppressions.

Our responsibility, as citizens of a democracy, is to never become complacent. To never allow ourselves to be silenced or cowed into coerced obedience. When there is an attempt to repress our voices or deny us justice, we are obligated to speak louder and stand up taller. Every time. You know this is true. You know that there is no other way to maintain a just and sustainable democracy. Don’t vilify those who are pointing this out. Stand in solidarity. It is our only hope.

“Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of ‘the Banality of evil’ and meant with this … the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was a perhaps extraordinary shallowness…., and the only specific characteristic one could detect on his part as well as in his behavior … was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

–Hannah Arendt

Whether political theorist Hannah Arendt was correct in her assessment of Adolf Eichmann–and I am inclined to believe she was duped by his testimony in Jerusalem and hence overstated the extent to which he was an example of the banality of evil–she was onto something important with the concept. For while the idea of the banality of evil may have become at times a cliche and, far worse, a facile evasion of moral responsibility, it nonetheless provides a way to understand how Late Capitalism’s Imperialism creates conditions that necessitate self-alienation on the part of the individual as well the social formation as a whole.

Torture doesn’t matter anymore, at least not to the Barack Obama administration. Four years ago, John Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the CIA, was forced to withdraw his name from consideration to be CIA Director (DCI) because of his public support of–and likely participation in–the Bush administration’s programs of torturing terrorism suspects and/or sending them to foreign prisons to be tortured. Apparently wishing to maintain his anti-torture credentials at the time, Obama appointed Brennan to a White House job that did not require Senate confirmation.

Four years later, his human rights record irretrievably tarnished by the illegal drone assassination program, Obama nominated Brennan–who has been running Obama’s drone assassination program from the White House–to be the next DCI. If confirmed, he would succeed Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned following revelations of an extra-marital affair in November 2009.

So, according to Obama, it’s okay to kidnap and torture and kill terrorism suspects without even a hint of “due process of law,” but if you put your dick in the wrong person, you’re unfit to run the CIA.

Obama is, sadly, right: Under the Imperialism of Late Capitalism, only a moral degenerate like John Brennan is fit to run an utterly amoral outfit like the CIA.

By “the Imperialism of Late Capitalism” we mean the forcible opening up of all spatial, ecological and cultural boundaries of peoples and nations to the global flow of capital and goods and services, according to the needs of capital and of Late Capitalism, which itself is wracked by ever-worsening crises that fuel the need for ever-more globalization.

But unlike Barack Obama, whose tolerance for torture and other human rights abuses seems of recent vintage, Brennan’s views were warped from a relatively young age. Born to Irish immigrant parents, John Brennan earned a B.A. in Political Science at Fordham University in 1977 and an M.A. in Government with a concentration in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin in 1980.

Although Brennan officially joined the CIA in 1980—he tells reporters a story of how his “wanderlust” was piqued by a CIA recruiting ad in the New York Times—some of his activities at Fordham suggest his recruitment dates back to his school days. Bob Keane, a classmate from the 4th grade through sophomore year at Fordham, told reporters that Brennan spent the summer after freshman year in Indonesia with a cousin who was working for the Agency for International Development, and visited Bahrain on the way home. “I wondered if he had even been recruited that early,” mused Keane. In fact, Brennan spent his junior year abroad learning fluent Arabic and taking Middle Eastern studies courses at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, a well-known site for CIA recruitment and training.

At UT, Brennan wrote an M.A. Thesis, “Human Rights: The Case Study of Egypt,” in which he denied the existence of “absolute human rights,” defended censorship in Egypt and indicated an early tolerance for torture. “Since the press can play such an influential role in determining the perceptions of the masses, I am in favor of some degree of government censorship,” wrote Brennan.

Taking his relativistic view of human rights to its logical conclusion, Brennan argued that

“the fact that absolute human rights do not exist (with the probable exception of freedom from torture) makes the [human rights] analysis subject to innumerable conditional criticisms.” (emphasis added.)

Think about that for a moment: John Brennan wrote that, in his opinion, not only are human rights not absolute, freedom from torture is only a “probable exception”–meaning that at the young age of 25, the Jesuit-educated Brennan was rejecting the 200-year-old anti-torture teachings of the Jesuit-educated Cesare Beccaria, the father of modern penology and human rights, who argued that torture is always wrong. Just a few years after his probable recruitment by the CIA, Brennan’s mind was already being warped by the needs of capitalist imperialism.

Working for Bush in the 2000s, Brennan became the embodiment of the banality of evil, helping to facilitate illegal kidnappings and torture in the name of the greater good–in this case so-called “national security.” Under Obama, Brennan has become the chief Angel of Death in the White House, selecting which terror suspects are to be murdered via unmanned drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere–and then lying about it later, as when he publicly claimed that drone attacks in Pakistan in 2010 did not cause “a single collateral death” when authorities knew better.

But the tragedy here lies with Barack Obama, who is able to make statements about the horrors of the Sandy Hook massacre while blithely raining down equivalent massacres on schoolchildren in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is this banality of evil–Obama’s ability to commit evil acts while pretending (to himself and to the world) that he remains a basically decent human being who loves his wife and daughters–that is one of the most corrosive aspects of Late Capitalist Imperialism.

Just as capitalist production alienates the worker, not only from the means of production and the product of his labor, but from his true species-essence as a human being, so too the reproduction of the Late Capitalist system requires acts of moral evil that alienate, not only the doers of these deeds but the entire social formation, from their human essence as creative and moral actors. Because such a reality would be intolerable if faced with honesty, the banality of evil represents a form of social-psychological ideology of denial that perpetuates Late Capitalism and the suffering attendant upon it.

Sitting there looking vainly at the growth, or lack of it to be more precise, of the British economy quarter by quarter following the introduction of austerity measures is a dubious use of time. So rather than sit there each quarter and discuss a dismal economy, I think the first step is to understand that we are in a world-wide economic crisis of the capitalist system. We also need to understand that the policies being introduced are actually not only extending the current crisis, but given that they are leading to increased income and wealth inequality, they will have a devastating impact upon the working classes in the countries introducing these measures. Moreover, the impact of austerity is not accident, it is being introduced specifically to create the economic contraction and the increased wealth and income inequality in the hope that private sector will take over the state sector services being undermined.

Triple-dip recession?

We need to understand that the introduction of austerity in an economic crisis does not lead to economic growth contrary to the absurd pronouncements of Prime Minister, David Cameron. Essentially, following a slight blip caused by the Olympics, I suspect we will be witnessing rather bad news. The combination of “beggar thy neighbour” low corporate taxation (to supposedly encourage investment in Britain) and cuts to public spending, services and benefits is not leading to a reinvigoration of the economy; rather the opposite is occurring.

Quite simply, the fall in service sector activity (which accounts for 75% of British economic activity) for the first time in two years (note that it was not in great shape beforehand) means that the economy is contracting.

“The closely watched CIPS/Markit purchasing managers index (PMI) for services dropped from 50.2 to 48.9 in December, below the 50 mark that separates expansion from contraction. It is the lowest reading since April 2009 and substantially undershot analyst forecasts of a rise to 50.5 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/04/uk-service-sector-contracts-pmi).”

There are additional things that indicate future problems. The manufacturing sector is geared towards export; decreases in demand due to the introduction of austerity in the periphery in the EU are starting to be felt in Great Britain (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/11/honda-cuts-800-jobs-swindon), whether this will be balanced by increased demand for luxury cars in China (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21003670) is another important question depending on the amount of trade to each area.

The collapse into administration of three high street companies [Jessops (2000 jobs at risk), HMV (4500 jobs at risk) and Blockbuster (4190 jobs at risk) will clearly add to unemployment. The fact that the internet buying is replacing these businesses means that workers who have lost jobs will not be rehired by these companies and some of these companies pay minimal taxes in Britain (e.g., Amazon).

In Britain we are seeing declining productivity because businesses use cheap labour rather than making capital investments (it makes no sense to introduce capital and increase productivity both due to labour costs being so low and no demand for increased goods and services); it also indicates that they are keeping people on irrespective of declining demand for goods:

“Figures for the economy as a whole were not much better, with a 2.4% decline in productivity over the year. The figures take the sheen off supposedly buoyant employment statistics that showed companies continuing to create jobs throughout last year.
Some companies have retained staff by forcing employees to accept pay freezes, or in some cases a cut in wages. But, as productivity declined, labour costs per unit of output rose by more than 3% over the year to October (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/03/business-productivity-declines-demand-falls).”

If businesses are keeping workers on irrespective of demand for their goods and services and waiting for the economy to pick up, what will happen if the economy does not pick up? Clearly, they will sack workers if the economy contracts. Moreover, if the economy picks up, most probably, they will force an increase in productivity by using speed-up or forcing workers to work harder to raise productivity. In either case, it is not a good sign for employment possibilities for workers in the near future. Additionally, there may be some problems with the government’s argument that jobs are being created in the private sector as they seemed to have misused the employment statistics of Office of National Statistics by including as employed those in government programmes who are not being paid by employers but rather through benefits (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/jan/15/uk-jobs-soar-real?INTCMP=SRCH) which are far lower than even the woefully inadequate minimum wage that is not a living wage.

Government concentration on the supply side of the labour market, as though people are lazy and do not want to work is the reason for unemployment is more than an obvious denial of reality. It is part of a divide and rule campaign demonising the poor and disabled as scroungers rather than addressing the fact that there are no jobs. This amounts to punishing the victims of the economic system (the poor and unemployed) and those that quite simply are unable to work due to illness and chronic health conditions. Cutting benefit will not force people into work, there need to be available jobs for that to occur; it will simply increase impoverishment and misery. An estimated 200,000 children are being pushed into poverty by the government’s policy of a 1% benefit cap over the next three years, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/17/benefits-squeeze-200000-children-poverty), a statistic not being disputed by the government.

Quite simply, the attack is hitting the most vulnerable: the disabled, single mothers, the elderly and the long-term unemployed who are already barely surviving on benefits that are meagre to say the least. The government’s argument when introducing the 1% cap on benefits that benefits should not increase faster than wages (when stagnating and decreasing wages is part of government policy and benefits are so very low) is playing off the working class and the poor against each other. In a period of deliberately created increases income and wealth inequality fuelled by the incorrect view that profits and the income of the wealthy are the basis for economic growth, it is the majority in British society that are paying for the class warfare being waged in the advanced capitalist world.

Austerity and its impact:

While leading members of the IMF claim that they underestimated the impact of the introduction of austerity and pretend to be shocked at the situation in Greece, the British government pretends that it does not understand that austerity is introduced to contract an economic system in the short run; both claims are extremely dubious to any person that has studied mainstream macroeconomic theory.

So, why is austerity being introduced and how has the government (and the Troika for that matter) got the strange idea that austerity will lead to economic growth? This relates to the impact of these measures in the long-run which attempt to remove “imbalances” between the public and private sector in favour of the later; in fact, David Cameron alludes to this when he makes the absurd argument “that the public sector cannot create growth.” However, for those that have any memory of the post-war period, we are well-aware that the public sector can create growth; it does so in three ways:

1) Hiring people in the public sector (direct government job creation) creates jobs and income for those that did not have it who then use that money to buy goods and services from the private sector;

2) The social welfare state provides additional income for those that do not have it and also provides services so that income is not spent on things provided by the government (e.g., health care), this means that there is more income to buy goods and services from the private sector;

3) The government demands goods and services from the private sector; this removes uncertainty for the private sector in terms of investment, output production, and job creation.

All of these things benefit the private sector and are part of what enable economic growth especially following a bust in the economy; both government investment and higher incomes can create economic growth. Austerity measures will not do this in the short run and it is debatable whether this will be a successful strategy for economic growth in the long-term; the increasing instability introduced by increased wealth and income inequality and lack of regulation will certainly lead to deeper and stronger fluctuations.
However, the government and large numbers of people in extra-governmental agencies (e.g., the IMF and the World Bank) believe that it is the private sector that are so-called “wealth creators” and they believe that privatisation (which enables the private sector to make profits providing these services instead of the government) and squeezing wages will enable profitability leading to economic growth. What we are seeing is that while this ideological argument may sound wonderful, reality is quite another story.

It is necessary to understand the interrelationships between production, consumption and distribution in the context of a capitalist economic system to understand what is happening today. The capitalist system hit a point of over-accumulation in the collapse of the financial sector in 2008 and we are still in an economic crisis. While the financial sector recovered from the crisis due to bank bailouts and centralisation of surviving capital, the rest of the economy is not faring as well as an understatement.

We are seeing the result of the long-term attack on the standards of living of working people in the advanced capitalist world from the late 1970s forwards, falling rates of profits in the industrial/manufacturing sectors in the advanced capitalist world due to high wages and decent working conditions leading to MNCs shifting production to the capitalist periphery to cut both labour costs and costs of raw materials has led to the creation of persistent unemployment in the advanced capitalist world and the shift of the economies in the advanced capitalist world to dependence upon the service sector.

Instead of shoring up the social welfare state and the state sector to keep employment and income up following the crash to enable a recovery, austerity measures have been either forced upon so-called debtor countries or introduced by right-wing governments throughout the majority of the advanced capitalist world. Bailout of the financial sectors led to both rising government deficits and rising public debt/GDP, the introduction of “austerity measures” essentially forced the majority to pay for the crisis due to deficit and debt reduction policies that they had no responsibility in creating. Shrinking the public sector, privatisation of public sector services (e.g., public health services) and selling off of nationalised companies (e.g., Greece, Spain and Italy), lowering pensions directly (e.g., Greece) and through changes in inflation indices (e.g., Great Britain), decreasing benefits, and wage and pension freezes for state workers is a direct assault on incomes. The attack on the public sector has also led to increased unemployment and the ability to introduce a wage squeeze for those still employed. While theoretically this will cut costs and raise profits, the problem arises that decreased incomes means that demand has decreased and there will be no increased investment, employment and output in the absence of demand for these goods and services.

While this has limited effect on the export-oriented manufacturing sector, that sector will certainly be affected by the introduction of austerity in the periphery of Europe.

Who are the wealth creators?

When Cameron (and other leaders in the advanced capitalist world) describe businessmen as “wealth creators” they seem to have forgotten the contribution of labour; land lying fallow creates nothing except spontaneously, capital does nothing in and of itself … it is the direct application of human labour (in combination with land and capital) that enables the creation of wealth. In the absence of sale at a price ensuring that profits are returned, profits remain unrealised. It is the incomes of working people that enable the sale of goods and undercutting their incomes means that goods and services will remain unsold. This deliberate inversion of the reality of the capitalist system serves them ideologically, but demonstrates a lack of understanding of the interrelationship between production, consumption and distribution.

So while privatisation potentially creates an area of profitable exploitation for the private sector, the decreased incomes of the majority means that they are unable to purchase services that were formerly socialised. For those on lower incomes and those on benefits, purchase of services is far too expensive and it is women that are filling in the gap in services (e.g., child-care, caring for the sick and elderly) in their homes. Contrary to neoliberal expectations, the private sector has not jumped into fill the gap, that is, because demand is not being matched by the income to pay for these things and the private sector will not create growth in the absence of perceived increases in demand and hence profitability. That means, that all these policies will do is eliminate access to services on the part of the majority as they cannot pay for them and further increase impoverishment. The so-called wealth creators cannot create wealth without labour both in production and in consumption.

Perhaps, they are taking their inversion of reality too seriously … without demand there is no growth, without income there is no demand, without labour there is neither production nor consumption!