Noted: Andrea Dworkin

From "Pornography, prostitution, and a beautiful and tragic recent history", collected in Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography (2005), an anthology of essays by various authors, edited by Rebecca Wisnant and Christine Stark:

One needs a political movement because something has to change and what has to change is not individual. It's not something an individual can change without holding hands with someone else and then another person after that. And in the collectivity of person-to-person, each person cannot do everything, but every person can do something. That is why one has a political movement: because a political movement makes it possible for people to do the thing they can do in a context that gives the doing meaning; because people then can give as much as they can give of what they know, of what they think; because people can give materially. No one has to—or can—do everything. It is appalling that in the United States people believe that an individual must do everything—that if one cannot do everything one need not do anything.

[...]

One of the worst parts of being an Amerikan is that if something does not happen fast, it does not happen at all; if one cannot make an issue, an atrocity, a tragedy palpable to people in five minutes, or in a sixty-second sound byte, one cannot communicate with other people. Amerikans don't have, or refuse to have, a sense of history, which is necessary in having a sense of endurance, duration—a sense of how hard it is to make change, how long it takes, how incredible it is that one moved forward an eighth of an inch, because then one gets the boot and one is kicked way back to the place where one started, but not quite, because one knows something that one did not know before. Political activism brings knowledge.

Dunbar's number, etc

Last month Ethan linked to this Wikileaks-related post at Americana called "Pathologies of Scale". The Wikileaks stuff is pretty good, but I'm more interested here in the first part of the post, in which the author, Justin, writes about his personal experience working at a smallish company as a software developer, because it dovetails nicely with some of what I've been thinking and wanting to write about here with respect to the future and how to act, etc. Justin tells of some advice he received from an older colleague who was leaving the company on "difficult terms", to the effect that he "should get out of there as soon as possible" that he "would do best in small, loose organizations" and that he "should begin looking for a new job as soon as [he] heard talk of a security badge policy". His friend

was really describing sicknesses that are endemic to organizational growth, the point at which an organization reaches critical mass and begins experiencing new kinds of communication breakdowns from scale. Businesses often call these issues 'growing pains', where in the early days of an organization, it is possible for everyone to talk with everyone and as the company grows, open communication and unrestricted access becomes impossible and counter-productive. To function, the organization needs protocols, proper channels and badges because it is no longer possible for everyone to know everything and everyone. He could have chosen any one of numerous symptoms; help desk tickets, organizational charts, whatever, but he chose security badges, which was interesting because security badges are vaguely authoritarian, betray a puffed up sense of self-importance and neurotic insecurity approaching paranoia.

[...]

The unintended side effects of growth manifest as pathologies. The role of ‘proper channels’ in an organization is to synthesize raw data into actionable information for leadership to act upon. The problem is that any synthesis also, by definition, results in information loss. The information that is [lost] is partly determined by what underlings choose to report, which is influenced by their cognizance of the reality that no matter how rational they may believe themselves to be, leaders still sometimes resort to killing the messenger.

Other than simple recognition, two things in particular occurred to me as I read these paragraphs. The first was Dunbar's number; the second was the arguments put forth by James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State. I've written about Scott's book in the past (here, and also here; heh, that second post reads like a dry run for, or perhaps a better version of, this post of mine from last month: I do repeat myself); here I want to talk a little about Dunbar's number.

Dunbar's number is a concept first proposed by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, as "a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships"; "relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person" (Wikipedia). The number, it turns out, is roughly 150 people. I first learned about Dunbar's number by way of Stan Goff, and it so happens that Stan revisited the topic in a recent post at his essential Feral Scholar blog (seriously, Stan and his co-blogger DeAnander have been a crucial resource in recent years, in particular in such areas as gender and militarism and food praxis, among others; you should read them regularly):

. . .we ought to begin right now subjecting every institution to scrutiny, and work against the institutional tendency to transform from an in-itself into a for-itself.

Every time friends become a committee, we ought to exercise the precautionary principle; because our desire to get bigger and stronger to pursue tempo tasks can blind us to the more formidable strength we risk losing by neglecting – and underestimating – primary relations.

If we spend 80 percent of our time managing secondary relationships, then we need to figure out how we can flip that to 80 percent of our time nurturing primary relationships.

One of the reasons we have so little power to act creatively in the face of so many crises is that we are fragmented, yes, but cut off in a much deeper way by the lack of social cohesion that can only happen in the small, intimate group.

It is not hyperbole to say, I don’t think, that Management is the enemy of social cohesion, because it substitutes secondary weak bonds for primary strong ones.

It only seems symmetrical to suggest that by restrengthening primary bonds, we develop a greater capacity to resist, but also to creatively adapt to, the forces that seem so threatening now.

When I first learned about Dunbar's number the idea made immediate, intuitive sense to me. Stan opens his post by linking to a short video in which Dunbar explains the idea and some of the underpinnings of it. I recommend taking a look.

(Incidentally, in the course of his brief lecture, Dunbar mentions almost in passing the importance of touch in maintaining relationships, something that science has pretty much completely overlooked. I naturally thought immediately of Gabriel Josipovici's book-length essay Touch, and again my sense that this all matters a great deal is mutually reinforced everywhere I turn.)

I don't have a lot of time to explore this topic right now, but I did want to throw it out there, in part in connection to the question of how we are to act, given the forces aligned against us and our own complicity in it all, the hugeness of it all. The battles before us seem massive, intractable, impossible even. The sheer scale of the problems we face tends to lead us to believe that large-scale solutions are needed. I admit that I am just as susceptible, if not more so, to this way of thinking as anyone else; I am an impatient git. And, lacking any personal connection to a tradition of political or social action, the tendency for me to just say it's impossible and do nothing is still all too strong. Nonetheless, action is possible. Lately I've come around to the idea that action must be local to have any hope of succeeding. But succeeding at what? Is a locally sustaining food economy going to arrest global warming? Well, no. Of course not, not when you put it like that. I don't honestly think anything will help when it comes to problems of that scale. We can only do what we can do. My position is one of both pessimism (we will eventually be forced to make do locally, so we may as well learn now) and optimism (we really do work better in small groups, live better when we know those around us, work better when we work together, etc).

As so many previous posts have been, this one is little more than a pointer towards future writing and activity. Localism is unpopular in certain quarters of the left, which tends to view it suspiciously as often so much mystical blood and soil fascist shit, and which itself is still very much wedded to the large-scale solution of state socialism. So this is another theme to which I hope to return. (Also: what does it mean to be left? or socialist? or liberal? or conservative? how meaningless are those terms?)

May Day Celebration

I've been reading in Capital about the struggle over the length of the working day and its intensification for the enhancement of relative surplus value and, of course, the capitalist mode of production more generally. To step outside of the book for a moment, it seems appropriate to note that Saturday is May Day. For all the workers on the front lines, still fighting the good fight while many of us seem to have forgotten, in remembrance of all the workers killed earlier this month in the mining disaster in West Virginia and the oil rig explosion in the Gulf Mexico, for all the workers who are unemployed and about to lose unemployment insurance, for all the workers working two or three jobs to make ends meet, for all the union members, for all the shift workers, for all the custodial workers and service employees, for all the teachers and nurses, for all the workers with horrible commutes, with long hours, with dangerous conditions, for all the workers: Happy May Day.

And in that spirit of May Day, I'd like to draw your attention to an event being held by United Workers, an organization of low-wage workers here in Baltimore that has been doing amazing work for several years now. They first came to our attention a couple years back during their (ultimately successful) fight for a living wage for workers at the Camden Yards stadium. The group was formed in 2002, as their site puts it, "by homeless day laborers meeting in an abandoned firehouse-turned-shelter . . . inspired by past human rights struggles, such as the fight to end slavery, the struggle for civil rights, calls for immigration with dignity, the labor movement, the fight for international economic justice and other human rights and justice movements." They spent years learning about this history and the roots of poverty, which led directly into the Camden Yards campaign.

This Saturday, for May Day, United Workers is hosting Our Harbor Day, an event they've been planning for more than a year:

a day of neighborhood plays and parades, including a march to the Inner Harbor. We’ve made giant puppets, rehearsed musical performances, and been developing a series of art and community actions. Everyone is invited to join in the writing of Baltimore’s history by taking part in community and cultural action together!

[...]

The first three acts of Our Harbor Day explore different themes related to economic and social justice. ”Earth” explores issues of environmental justice, especially in relation to development and sustainability. ”Work” explores issues of economic and social justice, focusing on fairness and equity and also on the power of our work to shape history. ”Education” explores the intersection between education and justice, between cultural creation and social movement. Together we will explore the themes of earth, work and education as we think of ways to assert a positive vision for our city.

[...]

The final act connects the themes of earth, work and education, and the many histories of our city, to the current struggle for fair development at the Inner Harbor. Just as with the B’More Fair and the Human Rights Zone March last spring, we see our community as interconnected, requiring a diversity of approaches as we work together for the common vision of a just and fair Baltimore for everyone. We’ll finish Our Harbor Day with the final act, culminating at the Inner Harbor and launching the next chapter in our fight for fair development by creating a Human Rights Zone for all workers in heart of our city.

Maybe you live in Baltimore and haven't heard about this but would like to come and participate. Or perhaps you're in Delaware or Philadelphia or Washington, DC, or Virginia? Why not give it a whirl? Well, anyway, we're planning on being there for a good chunk of the day ourselves (of course, I have Aimée to thank for getting us involved; I usually have to be knocked over the head to get it in the mix; it does me good). It begins at 11am, at 2640 (where else?).

Terminal Crisis?

Last week I wrote: "It appears that the capitalist system, which necessarily undergoes periodic crises, may have entered its terminal crisis." What could I mean by that? What would it mean for capitalism to be in terminal crisis? (And how equivocal can I be? Appears! May!) It sure sounds like the end of capitalism doesn't it? Does it seem like that's likely? In a comment to that post, Aaron Bady expressed his discomfort with this very rhetoric of "terminal crisis": "Capitalism is such a protean term", he reminds us, "that something capitalist will survive, even if it isn't anything recognizably similar to what we're blessed with now." True. Probably. For all my offline joking about collapse ("we're not even going to have cars in 16 years" being my stock response to the question of Mirah one day learning to drive. . .), I hardly think capitalism is simply going to end. And if it did, it's not as if we're ready for it.

So it's likely that we're going to be embroiled in some version of the capitalist system for the foreseeable future. What about it, then? The point is not to attempt to accurately forecast the demise of one system (as if such a thing were possible), an imaginary in which we end up scraping by in the rabble. The point is how to force a change in a time of possibility, or how to carve out viable, perhaps expandable, alternatives. This is just one reason why events such as the City from Below conference, which I belatedly advertized below, are so important. People coming together, developing ties, trying to figure out ways to, at least, force the hand of capital to resolve the current crisis in a way that doesn't utterly fuck those who are not super-rich.

We had hoped to learn a lot at the conference, meet new people, and so on; unfortunately, we were unable to attend much of it, for a variety of reasons (most of them having something to do with a certain little girl's sleep problems). I did, however, manage to catch the opening panel discussion on Friday night. Gratifyingly, the room (at 2640, of course; where else?) was diverse and packed (and there seemed to be plenty of people in attendance the one other time we made it down to check things out). To give you a little bit of a flavor, the participants in this opening panel were Max Rameau, from Take Back the Land in Miami; Shiri Pasternak, from Toronto; Esther Wang, from CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities in New York; and David Harvey. The first three were unfamiliar to me and all had interesting and inspiring things to say about work they've been doing. You may, for example, have heard about Take Back the Land's work in Florida, placing homeless people in abandoned houses or returning families to their foreclosed homes. Pasternak talked about continuing enclosure among Canada's indigenous communities, as well as abandoned properties more generally, and a proposed "use or lose it" bylaw. Wang reminded us that communities like that of Chinatown in New York--a poor island surrounded on all sides by wealth, Soho, Tribeca, etc--have been facing crisis for some time, which has only been intensified by the particular crisis of the last year. These were just some of the things touched upon; if I can get my act together, perhaps I'll assemble and post some more detailed notes I took during the discussion.

For now, I want to mention a couple of things Harvey said. His opening remarks were in essence a review of the thesis of his valuable book A Brief History of Neoliberalism. He reminded us that the nature of each successive crisis in capitalism depends on how the previous crisis was resolved. The solution to the crisis of the 1970s was the current neoliberal regime.

It so happens that in recent weeks I've been slowly making my way through Harvey's monumental book, The Limits to Capital. I've found it rough going in parts, primarily because, not unlike getting lost in all the Russian names in a Tolstoy novel, I tend to have difficulty keeping straight ideas that go by similar-sounding names (the obvious basic ones being "value", "use value", and "exchange value"), which is only exacerbated by not having time to sit and take detailed notes while reading. In short, Harvey's book is a sort of critical explication of Marx's Capital and his related economic writings, such as the Grundisse, along with critical surveys of the subsequent Marxian and bourgeois analyses of both Marx and various economic concepts in general. Let's face it: this stuff is enormously complicated. Marx defines capital as a process, and keeping track of all of the elements of the process--socially necessary labour time, class struggle, surplus value, accumulation, technological and organizational change, money, credit, finance, circulation, rent, mobility, etc.--and their inherent contradictions isn't easy. For all that, the book has been very helpful; though many of the technical details remain, for now, confusing, the argument as a whole is helping to illuminate much. It was especially interesting reading the chapters on money, credit, and finance in light of current events (and how, with each successive crisis, the financial system necessarily gets more and more rarefied, removed from the production economy, which only makes subsequent crises potentially more dangerous).

In addition, it strikes me as somewhat comical that the self-congratulatory so-called empiricism of Anglo-American intellectuals and bourgeois economists should have essentially dismissed Marx out of hand--after all, merely reading Capital is tantamount to being a communist, isn't it? it's the same as The Communist Manifesto, right? and Stalin was pretty bad, wasn't he?--when you'd think it would be important to try to actually understand how capitalism actually works. But ideology can be a bitch (speaking of which, free market libertarians and Friedmanites really need to read this stuff and stop talking blather about freedom and nature and other such ill-understood bullshit). For my part, I consider this only a first pass at really getting my head wrapped around the contradictory workings of capitalism (adding to what I have been able to glean from works by Ellen Meiksins Wood, other books by Harvey, etc). My plan is still to read Capital, while either watching or listening to Harvey's lecture series on it. Anyway, the point is that I find myself heavily immersed in working out the theoretical problems of capitalism, not so I can smugly tell myself, "well, I've tackled that! time to move on to Finnegans Wake. . .", the acquistion of knowledge for its own sake being perhaps of entertainment value, but little else. No, I want to better understand what it is we--I--could do under the circumstances, other than just sit around waiting for things to happen, in part by better understanding what those circumstances really are.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to the other remark made by David Harvey that I'd like to mention here before finishing up. He talked about "the myth of home ownership". This has been a rant-worthy topic of mine for several years ("home ownership is a scam", I'll tell anyone who will listen, which unfortunately for them is usually my wife or my co-workers), so naturally I was pleased to hear him say it. He said that capital started pushing home ownership among the working classes during the Great Depression, which was obviously a time of massive labor unrest. The idea is that "people with mortgages don't go on strike". Truer words have rarely been spoken. It's brilliant, really. More powerful than getting workers to invest in the stock market (how stupid is a 401k? why do I have one? I don't believe in the stock market!). I've been trying to come to some point of action in my own life--selling the house and not buying another is but one potential part of that. But it's not as if renters are secure. This is one reason why an important battle is for rights to the city, rights to the commons, reclaiming the commons, re-establishing the commons, recovering abandoned territory, and so on. In this context, Harvey also mentioned the need for a right to residency (you can't vote if you don't have an address). There is much to do.

The City from Below

I'm a bit late in posting this, but this weekend here in Baltimore, beginning this evening, is the The City from Below conference. Numerous workshops and panel discussions are planned, with scheduled participants including, among many others, David Harvey, George Caffentzis, Sylvia Federici, and numerous local, regional, and national groups committed in various ways to fighting back and taking back the city. This is from the description on the site's main page:

We are committed in organizing this conference to a horizontal framework of participation, one which allows us to concretely engage with and support ongoing social justice struggles. What we envision is a conference which isn't just about academics and other researchers talking to each other and at a passive audience, but one where some of the most inspiring campaigns and projects on the frontlines of the fight for the right to the city (community anti-gentrification groups, transit rights activists, tenant unions, alternative development advocates, sex worker's rights advocates, prison reform groups) will not just be represented, but will concretely benefit from the alliances they build and the knowledge they gain by attending.

At the same time, we also want to productively engage those within the academic system, as well as artists, journalists, and other researchers. It is a mistake to think that people who spend their lives working on urban geography and sociology, in urban planning, or on the history of cities have nothing to offer to our struggles. At the same time, we recognize that too often the way in which academics engage activists, if they do so at all, is to talk at them. We are envisioning something much different, closer to the notion of "accompaniment". We want academics and activists to talk to each other, to listen to each other, and to offer what they
each are best able to. Concretely, we're hoping to facilitate this kind of dynamic by planning as much of the conference as possible as panels involving
both scholars and organizers.

THEMES TO BE CONSIDERED

Gentrification/uneven development

Policing and incarceration

Tenants rights/housing as a right

Public transit

Urban worker's rights

Foreclosures/financial crisis

Public education

Slots/casinos/regressive taxation

Cultural gentrification

Underground economies

Reclaiming public space

The right to the city

Squatting/Contesting Property Rights

Urban sustainability

It sounds like it will be a fun, informative, potentially exciting weekend. We hope to be able to take in what we can. If you're anywhere near Baltimore and can make it, please try to come out and take part.