The Phnom Penh Post – Worker solidarity

The Phnom Penh Post has a paragraph, with a nice photo, of part of the May Day march that took place last Friday. The CGT sent greetings, as did the IWW.

The Phnom Penh Post – Worker solidarity.

Links J13

• Dreams and the fear of the dead. A post referencing responses to Vaughan’s earlier SciAm piece on hallucinating the dead.
• Nina Paley has a new distribution plan for her amazing Sita Sings the Blues. With any luck, it’ll be released soon so that I can show it to classes.
• They’re auctioning off the Big Bopper’s coffin. That is all.
• Keith Hart has an excellent piece on Marxism and economic anthropology. And just today, he posted a series of video lectures on “development and anthropology.”
• Raj Patel has a good intro on the concept of food sovereignty.
• Andrej Grubacic and Staughton Lynd have released a book titled “Wobblies and Zapatistas.” As a supporter of the latter and member of the former, I’m really interested, and what I’ve read about the book so far is enticing. I’m not convinced by some of the major claims yet – that marxists and anarchists need to set aside their ideological differences – however: indeed, it seems that everytime the anarchists ’set aside their differences’ with the marxists, the marxists ruin everything in their rush to accommodation and consolidation of state power. Still, massive respect to Andrej and Staughton, whose interview over at ZNet is well worth reading.

Link Dump D9 – Organize, Act, Resist

Quick draft of something I wrote for another forum; no time to appropriately write about this stuff here, but I’ve included extra links, video, etc.:

Another Starbucks in Minnesota went union this month (see also here), with workers pairing their announcement with an action to improve security at their store. In Chicago, as I write this, workers at Republic Windows and Doors are in the middle of the fifth day of a factory occupation (see also 1, 2, sign a petition of support here) .   Greek anarchists are in full-scale revolt against the police, who murdered a teenager in the streets a few days ago. (see also 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Canadians are attempting to defeat a neo-fascist government (go ahead, google Stephen Harper) by rallying in the streets of major cities, including Montreal. Those are just some of the movements that are underfoot and crossing my mind at the moment. It’s on, people.

Yes, Obama won. And immediately started appointing Clinton-era neoliberals to his bloated cabinet. Some are spinning this as a Lincolnesque “team of rivals” cabinet, while others see it as a relatively straightforward expression of the new American empire, in smarter dress and politer speech. Obama made one good move this week, when he announced his support for the workers occupying the Republic Windows factory, a statement which resulted in the immediate announcement by Illinois’ governor that the state would cease doing business with the bank (Bank of America) that refused to issue a line of credit to the company, thereby preventing it (so goes the argument) from being able to continue to do business and pay its employees its legally-obligated severance. Illinois’ state attorney general is looking into the possibility of filing charges against the management of the company, which owes 75 days of severance wages to its employees (60 days under federal law, and an extra fifteen under local law), and is refusing to pay.

Then, in a supposedly separate issue, Illinois Governor Blagojevich, the day after decreeing that all state agencies must cease doing business with Bank of America, was arrested this morning at his home.

But what are the politicians really saying? Obama and the governor are not making the proper claims: that Republic and Bank of America are parasitic criminal enterprises, impoverishing their workers and the citizens of the United States. Instead of identifying the precise mechanisms through which bosses suck the wealth out of their employees, or by describing the bailouts the government engineers for the banking sectors while denying to productive sectors, like Detroit, these politicians are reacting to worker initiatives and expressing their support in fuzzy terms.

When Argentina’s economy began its rapid fall in 2001 (a consequence the neo-liberal economic regimes perpetuated by many members of Obama’s new cabinet), Argentinians from all classes began to withdraw their money from the banks, which responded by refusing to let the citizens have their money. The consequent political crisis toppled multiple governments in a matter of months; Argentinian workers, many of whom were not particularly radical before the crisis, occupied factories and continued to produce after owners abandoned both factories and payrolls. Some of those projects succeeded and continue, in spite of repression and legal shenanigans from the former owners, who, like the owners of Republic, closed down in order to preserve their own wealth by impoverishing their employees.

We cannot rely on the boss, the politicians, or the lawyers, to save us. The workers at Republic know this – without their severance, they will have difficulty feeding their families and keeping the heat on in Chicago’s brutal winter. They aren’t waiting. They are taking the initiative, and forcing the bosses and the politicians to respond. We need to support their brave stand, and we need to replicate it. Organization, like that taking place in the IWW/SWU campaigns in Starbucks all over the world, must take priority. Direct action, like that taking place so dramatically and effectively in Republic Windows and Doors’ Factory right now, must be the tactic of organized workers. And revolt, like that taken by Greek anarchists and communities in Athens and elsewhere in Greece, must follow every assault on our lives and liberties.

Make a donation to Republic Workers Solidarity Fund here.

Link Dump N13

Lots of unrelated subjects today:

A few stories running around of late about Cambodian soldiers using traditional yantra written on cloth as protection against bullets. Lots of these are written with a slightly hidden sneer, which is unfortunate. Still, yantra are cool.

Where Elephants Weep, a rock opera written by amazing Khmer composer (and nice guy) Him Sophy (who I had an opportunity to interview about Smout once) and Catherine Filloux, begins performances soon. I wish I was around for it. Mongkol has some highlights, along with a video, on his page.

Beyond Cambodia’s borders, which are under discussion again, finally, there is nasty news coming out of Burma’s courts. Awzar Thi of Rule of Lords writes that

It has been a frantic week in Burma’s closed courts. At least 60 people have in the past few days been sentenced for their roles in last year’s mass protests, including high-profile activists, monks, a blogger and a poet.

The blogger is Nay Phone Latt, who was sentenced to over 20 years in prison for posting a cartoon critical of Burma’s generals.

That’s a lot worse than what the RNC 8 are facing here (7.5 years) in Minnesota, but the principle is the same: none of the RNC 8, nor Nay Phone Latt, are accused of doing much more than using the internet and communicating with people who are opposed to current government practices and policies in their respective families. Article in local City Pages newspaper.

Two good articles on Indigenism from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (“Stop Saying This is a Nation of Immigrants!“) and Ward Churchill (Interview on Indigenism, Anarchism, and the State). The former from Dunbar-Ortiz’ own website, the latter from Upping The Anti. Both via Indigenous Solidarity: An (Un)Settler’s Place.

A group of workers at another Starbucks here in the Twin Cities has declared their affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World’s Starbucks Workers Union. Press conference today at 11 AM. Congratulations, Fellow Workers.

Oh yeah – remember Hok Lundy’s death? (That post has started receiving more hits on a daily basis than the post which is far and away my most popular post – strangely, about Clint Eastwood. I only recently figured out the reason for this). Hun Sen’s niece’s husband Neth Savoeun has been selected as his replacement. Keep it in the family, folks.

In November, We Remember

The Twin Cities IWW (General Membership Branch) has just released its thirteenth issue of its official newsletter, The Organizer. It can be viewed online for free, downloaded, printed, and distributed. This month’s issue focuses primarily on three themes: the economic crisis, electoral politics and the union, and, of relevance to this post, the theme of memory.

The wobblies have a saying, “We never forget.” They mean by this that they never forget their own real history, their goals, their tools, and the massacres and violence they experienced as the most radical working-class, rank-and-file union in the United States. This was admirably summed up in a poem by Ralph Chaplin, a member of the IWW who wrote the anthem Solidarity Forever (which the entire anglophone union movement seems to have adopted as its anthem, despite the distinct lack of actual solidarity among most union leadership).

Red November, black November
Bleak November, black and red.
Hallowed month of labor’s martyrs,
Labor’s heroes, labor’s dead.

Labor’s wrath and hope and sorrow,
Red the promise, black the threat,
Who are we not to remember?
Who are we to dare forget?

Black and red the colors blended,
Black and red the pledge we made,
Red until the fight is ended,
Black until the debt is paid.

So, let’s remember in November. The battle for the past is for the future, as Chandrasonic of Asian Dub Foundation memorably chanted. Or, as Utah Phillips, another wobbly (of blessed memory) used to say, “The long memory is the most radical idea in American history.” The issue of the Organizer is embedded below.

Organizer #13 – November 2008

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: IWW Organizer

Economics Link Dump for O15

• I have often learned a great deal from Paul Krugman, whose receipt of the so-called Nobel Prize for Economics is a win for the moderate left economists who meet once a year in a phone booth. Still, he is a very mainstream economist, and the good folks over at anarchism.pageabode have written an excellent review of Krugman’s work and training which point to precisely this aspect. Krugman is useful – not a savior. Still, congratulations, Paul!
• Thanks to Economists’ View, I note that Robert Reich is killing myths – such as the one that the problem with our economic crisis is because Americans are spending above their means. Oh also? Your salary is about to drop.
• For those more local, the IWW and Macalester SDS are hosting a Halloween Fundraiser to help support the defense team of the RNC 8. Some proceeds also go to Communities United Against Police Brutality, and Project to Stop the War Industry

Killer Quotes from Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works

Some killer quotes from Bousquet’s excellent book, “How the University Works.” See also Marc’s associated and eponymous weblog.

On contingent faculty and their professional ‘identities’:

When the task is completed, labor organized on the informatic principle goes off-line, off the clock, and most important, off the balance sheets. This labor is required to present itself to management scrutiny as ‘independent’ and ’self-motivated,’ even ‘joful’ — that is, able to provide herself with health care, pension plan, day care, employment to fill in the down time, and eagerly willing to keep herself ‘up to speed’ on developments transpiring in the corporate frame even though not receiving wages from the corporation. Above all, contingent labor should present the affect of enjoyment: he must seem transparently glad to work, as in the knowledge worker’s mantra: “I love what I’m doing!” Andrew Ross has already described the way that universities, digital industry, and other employers of “mental labor” have succeeded in interpellating intellectual workers more generally with the “bohemian” ideology that previously was reserved for artistic occupations: large new sectors of intellectual labor have proved willing to accept not merely the exploitation of wage slavery but the superexploitation of the artist, in part because the characteristics of casual employment (long and irregular hours, debt subsidy, moonlighting, the substitution of reputation for a wage, casual workplace ethos, etc.) can so easily be associated with the popular understanding of normative rewards for “creative” endeavor. [pp. 62-63, emphasis mine]

Yes. I’ve done that more often that I’d like to admit.

On student labor and its social meaning:

According to one observer, in 1964, all of the expenses associated with a public university education, including food, clothing, and housing could be had by working a minimum-wage job an average of twenty-two hours a week throughout the year (This might mean working fifteen hours a week while studying and forty hours a week during summers.) Today, the same expenses from a low-wage job require fifty-five hours a week fifty-two weeks a year….

Employing misleading accounting that separates budgets for building, fixed capital expenses, sports programs, and the like from “instructional unit” budgets, higher education administration often suggests that faculty wages are the cause of rising tuition, rather than irresponsible investment in technology, failed commercial ventrues, lavish new buildings, corporate welfare, and so on. The plain fact is that many college administrations are on fixed-capital spending sprees with dollars squeezed from cheap faculty and faculty labor has been driven downward at exactly the same time that costs have soared. [p. 152]

Quoting Paul Hunter in 1979, as someone who “understood that the replacement of full-time lines by graduate student labor constituted a virtual war on young people.”:

Once the MLA encompassed a variety of languages in its meeting halls. Now there are only two: the language spoken by the tenured and secure, a language of rationalized complacency; and the language of the unemployed, the underemployed, the temporarily employed, the part-time, the untenured, the uncertain, the paranoid, the disillusioned–a language of desperation, fury, and despair. It would be easy to be sentimental about their plight, but it would be trivial to treat the issue sentimentally and thus make it easy to comfort outselves by the usual cynical rely, “But at least they are young, and their options are still open.” [p. 198]

I don’t have time to write a full review of Bousquet’s excellent book, but I will say that I’ve ordered a copy for our library here at the college where I work (I’m the library rep for my department), and will be recommending it to everyone I know.

It is a clearly-written, succinct, and forceful argument that the university (and the college, to a lesser extent) operates as a capitalist industry, and that faculty must see themselves as workers, that graduate students must see themselves as workers, and implicitly, that the solidarity between tenured, untenured, contingent/adjunkt, and student workers is the key to taking back control of our special institutions.

I do have a complaint: the title is “How the university works,” but the book deals almost exclusively with ‘knowledge workers.’ The janitors, staff, cafeteria workers, grounds crew, office staff, etc., etc., are nearly completely absent. These people could shut the university down even faster than our so-called knowledge workers. An administration faced with a rising tide of garbage, a security force that won’t allow private scabs to haul it away, and a faculty and office staff that stands in solidarity while making their own demands, caves a lot faster than the administration of a campus that seems to go on perfectly, but without classes. As Bousquet points out, producing a quality education is no longer the point of most educational institutions (it it were, he points out, why would we be employing greater and greater numbers of less-experienced and credentialed teachers to do the bulk of the teaching?). So why would faculty strikes alone accomplish much? It doesn’t hurt the administration where it counts. What the administrations care about are the appearances of respectability: these are the things that make capital campaigns hard to accomplish, and hurt major donations.

One other complaint is that I felt that perhaps Bousquet assumes too much knowledge of basic marxian economics on the part of his readers. I had no problem, but I’ve found it staggering how many of my doctorate-holding colleagues in the humanities have no idea what the Labor Theory of Value is, to choose only the most basic concept. As a work of analysis, Bousquet’s book is great. As a work of agitation among only partially radicalized faculty and workers, it needed a preface that laid these things out more clearly.

But, in all, this is a tremendous book. Bravo, Marc!

Letter to Anthropology News, on Unionization, Service Workers, and Norleans

This came across my radar today, as I finally try to get caught up on some old reading:

Regarding New Orleans Service Workers

As a full-time server (waitress) in the French Quarter of New ORleans and as a part-time adjunct professor of anthropology, I feel particularly qualified to comment on the recent letter written by AAA leaders Setha Low, Alan Goodman and Daniel Segal regarding the discussion about New Orleans as the 2010 meeting site> Their letter describes disagreements within the AAA as to whether New Orleans would be a suitable meeting location because of the general lack of unionization for service workers here. From the vantage point of a waitress accustomed to a variety of customers who pay varying degrees of attention to service workers, it is nice to hear and read about the concern anthropologists have for people in the service profession. However, I am puzzled by this concern from members of a profession based in large part on the non-unionized and generally exploited labor of graduate students and part-time adjunct professors.

In my own case, here in New Orleans, I chose a full-time waitress position because the money and benefits are much better and much more livable than anything I have earned in years of hard work as an adjunct and a research assistant at area universities. Particularly in New Orleans, because of the shortage of service workers since the 2005 flood, service people here enjoy many benefits. I am qualified to teach at the university level, yet even in semesters when I taught three courses as an adjunct at two universities, I was never able to pay my bills from adjuncting alone and I also lived without health insurance. As a full-time waitress, not only do I pay my bills, but I have enough money to make payments on student loans, save some, and I enjoy benefits such as health insurance, a retirement plan, disability insurance and paid vacation time. My position and experience are ironic in light of the current topic of disucssion regarding the location of the upcoming AAA meeting. I puzzle over the concern anthropologists have for people in another industry, when there is so much blatant inequality and exploitation of workers in the academy.

I hope the AAA holds its meetings here, as long as you tip me (and other service workers) well.

Nina Muller-Schwarze
Tulane U

Ummmm….Snap! While there is room for critique of Nina’s letter (i.e., relying on catastrophe to provide decent wages and benefits to nonunionized workers is not a strategy, and while the AAA should look at its own house, there’s no harm produced that I can see by insisting on union priorities in the AAA), I think somebody just got told. [Private to Nina - if you'd rather I not keep your letter here, let me know; but know also that there are a lot of us out here who are feeling 'big ups' for your rocking letter.]

The upcoming meeting (AAA) is in San Francisco. Sex Workers there have been unionizing for years, often quite successfully, and are in the middle of pushing forward an apparently quite popular referendum decriminalizing sex work! I bet that if this passes, what happened to poor mr schwarz (the putz in the video below) won’t happen to anyone in San Francisco for a good long while. (Hint: his paid-for date slipped him a roofie, and then took somewhere between $50,000 – 120,000 worth of jewelry, stuff he hangs around his neck, wrists, and waist. [bonus! gratefully ganked from Why That's Delightful!]

PS – WordPress won’t embed this hilarious video of Mr Schwarz hoping for a McCain administration with “More War, Less Taxes” (seriously), so you’ll have to click here to see it.

Academic Freedom Still Under Attack

Ward Churchill’s case against the University of Colorado is coming up. Go Ward! Read more here.

Support Dr. Ginsberg, fired for criticizing US and Israeli policy in the Middle East from her position at North Carolina State University!

Sure would be nice if academics could organize better, and stop having to rely solely on petitions and lawsuits to protect their jobs, huh? [link]

Regional Links for Today

Postville’s about to receive a visit. Roll on, comrades (including the redoubtable Peter Rachleff from Macalester). If you need a refresher on the largest anti-immigrant raid in US history, check this recent story from the Washington Post. Also, the official court translator has spoken out and absolutely castigated the process, arguing that justice is not even on the cards here.

The IWW (Starbucks Workers Union) campaign to organize Starbucks has gone public at the Mall of America! Especially proud to be a wobbly this week.

Lots of other stuff happening. Summer’s surprisingly busy.