A Note on Hipsters

1) I’ve tried to explain to my mother the meaning of “hipster.”ipH What these failures have indicated to me is not that you have to be a hipster to know a hipster; but that you do have to have a certain literacy to see hipsters. From my mother’s point of view, there’s no distinguishing my tastes and ideas (etc.) from the tastes and ideas of Cold Play’s Chris Martin (she’s said as much). She thinks we’re both hipsters. Neither of us are…

2) Hipsters are a particularly aesthete sub-culture. A sub-culture is always a counter-culture. That is, sub-cultures can only ever understand themselves in their difference from the hegemonic or mainstream culture – most importantly, in terms of what they reject about that culture. As a “culture,” they reject one vocabulary (images, narratives, symbols, modes of dress, music, etc.) and embrace another. Being a hipster is not a politics.

3) Nevertheless, hipster culture is particularly sensitive to “political” features of the mainstream culture of the US. The two most important features are intertwined: 1) the commodification of culture and (through 1) 2) the rendering of symbolic space into a field of simulacra. In particular, what defines the hipster is her relation to the “authentic” or her aesthetic sensitivity to its disappearance.

4) “Hipster irony” is often referred to or noted, but I don’t often see people asking why hipsters are ironic or what it signifies in relation to mainstream culture. Punk and its descendants were (are?) the last-gasp attempts at authenticity within our commodified cultural context. “Hipster” is the cultural form of post-modernism or (what is the same in the context of urban white people in the last 50 years) post-punk. The “post” does not signify “over and done with,” rather it signifies “rendered problematic.” There is much that is problematic about punk. Most importantly, its celebration of violent masculinity. But, punk has also proven exceptionally open and resilient in expanding its self-conception and accepting (even nurturing) negative responses to its expressions, codes, ethics, ideas, etc. The DEEP problem with punk was (is?) its commodification. Punk became a simulacrum (did it?). An image without original, to be bought and sold.

5) To be a hipster is to exist within the horizon of this “post.” It is to feel deeply the foreclosure of an “authentic” culture. Hipsters are ironic because there is only one language – the commidified language of the mainstream culture – AND this language is completely shallow – a copy of a copy of a copy. The work of the hipster is to assemble this language in such a way as to give the lie to this shallowness; i.e. to be ironic.

6) There are actually many inflections or flavors of hipster. Three are interesting to me: 1) the resigned hipster, 2) the artful hipster, and 3) the playful hipster. [Of course, there are also legions of the “fashionable” who hang about and absorb the hipster “cool.”]

7) The resigned hipster has given up on language as such. She still longs for god or love or authenticity, etc. but knows that such things would be unrecognizable within the space of intelligibility provided by mainstream culture. Noise and post-rock, for example, belong to the category of “resignation.” If punk screamed so as to negate the “artfulness” of singing, noise screams so as to remain outside the space of intelligibility as such. If there are “experiences” to be had, one certainly couldn’t “say” what they are.

The artful hipster uses the language of mainstream culture precisely to negate that language. This is “hipster irony” proper. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the artful hipster shows what cannot be said; or indicates the boundaries of thought from within the boundaries of thought. Certain forms of pop art and pastiche are illustrative. Musically, the whole genre of “indie pop” comes to mind. [Really, these types have the tendency to violate the parameters of their own genre and try to “say” what can only be “shown.”]

9) The playful hipster rejoices in the “end of authenticity.” “OK, so god’s dead. So, let’s party!” Language is not about expressing or understanding something else, but about assembling the wreckage of the past in ways that are amusing… or not. You can walk around with seriousness and sadness about something that was never a possibility in the first place. OR, you can take the opportunity to “experiment.” “Experiments” in this sense don’t tell you something about how to live, etc. They’re just new ventures in culture – ephemeral and senseless assemblages of words, images, behaviors, clothes, etc.

10) These ideas don’t exhaust hipster-dom. Many hipsters, it seems to me, still believe in the idea of an authentic culture. Certain “freak folk” and “indie” artists, for example, are decidedly existentialist or religious in their ideology. They approach the past and the world it has delivered to them (it seems to me) not as an empty wreckage or empty simulacrum; but as the ruins of human suffering and struggle and as a site of worship and hope.

10 points too many.

Cultivation: Toward an Aufhebung

In my last post, I mentioned the “cultivation of desire.” I’ve been thinking about this issue for awhile. When I first started graduate school, I really only drank Bud Light. I didn’t like the taste of beer so much and I certainly wouldn’t pay more money for the “aesthetic” of it. My new friends (budding “intellectuals” that they were), however, were in the business of buying the good stuff. The “sophisticated palette” is a mark of bourgeois acceptability. Most of us, (my budding intellectual friends and I) were from middle and working class backgrounds. But, this seemed like the only way to fit in and to belong to the “intellectual class.” Academics don’t eat Chicken Nuggets. Prior to this time, I had never really eaten Indian or Thai food. My tastes expanded and, frankly, so did my consciousness.

Some time later, I had a summer with virtually no money. My girlfriend was preparing to move to South Carolina and she had to save everything she got just to make the move. We scrimped and saved and stayed in. When I did drink, I started drinking the cheapest thing I could by. One good thing about bringing Milwaukee’s Best to a party is that you can be sure that no one else will drink it. But, really I started to feel alienated and pissed off. At just about this time, it became fashionable for hipsters (in all their glorious irony) to drink PBR and Budweiser from cans. I became more and more aware of the class politics of beer – that my Dad stopped drinking Coors Light (well not entirely…) when he started hanging out with the yuppies in our subdivision. On television, Dan on the Rosanne show drank beer pretty much every night, all the time. But, he never drank anything other than the generic stuff (sadly, generic beer no longer exists for the most part [FUCK YOU ANHEISER-BUSCH AND YOUR RIDICULOUS BEER ADVERTISING]). I stopped drinking the “good stuff” – partly to fit in with the hipsters, partly as a mark of class solidarity.

But the truth is, I know the difference in tastes and I do enjoy the taste of good beer (not all of them of course). I also know that different beers and different kinds of alcohol cause different highs. Plus, I think the expansion of taste and the corresponding expansion of consciousness is a good thing. Sure, I’ve seen a lot of people feign an appreciation of jazz or abstract expressionism just to fit in or seem smart or cultivated – just to somehow belong (if only in their imaginations) to the bourgeoisie. That sucks. Still, jazz and abstract expressionism are not just bourgeois mental masturbation – this from a rather dull-witted communism. The point of emancipation is not to idealize the degraded state of proletarian life, nor for that matter is it just to accept the bourgeois negation of it as “unsophisticated” or “base.” Emancipation is NOT about “classism,” it’s about class. Revolution enacts and makes possible the free cultivation of taste and desire for everyone. This need not and will not amount to everyone attending the opera (with seating determined by random lottery). It will amount to a complete transformation of what it means to have a “sophisticated palette.” “Aesthetes” will always be out in front of this movement and everyone won’t be an aesthete. But taste will no longer be tied to cost and to mere survival.

Efficiency: From a Conversation with M

My Dad and I have long had arguments about politics and such things. It doesn’t happen so much lately because I stopped taking the bait. Essentially, I avoid talking about things that are substantive because I know it won’t lead anywhere. We just get angry and sad and mean. Anyway, the other day we were talking about a trip he recently took to Nebraska. He got on some rant about the state government there and how they killed ranching in Nebraska. Evil “environmentalists” pressured them (the story goes) into outlawing the feeding of animals from out of state. I imagine that very little of the story was true. He also touched on one of his longer-running rants – one of our hotter disputes. Apparently, the electricity there costs something like 14 cents per kwh. He chalks this up to the deficiencies of “public run” utilities. From his perspective, anything that is publicly owned and government-run is bad. The most important reason for this is that they are inefficient – they don’t deliver the goods. He sees this as a failure of management and one that is endemic to “political” organizations. Insofar as people are answerable to something other than the “bottom-line,” they are bound to pay less attention to the “costs of production.”

In one sense, I can understand his point of view. In general, working class people have little to show for their work and what they do have they get through a kind of debt peonage. People have to endure daily abuse, alienation, fatigue, and degradation to “get ahead.” All the while they’re asked to pay taxes that they can’t really afford for the sake of benefits that seem invisible or questionable. When you make $30,000/year it’s painful to watch thousands of it seemingly disappear. [I should say that my Dad makes considerably more than this and has for quite awhile.] If it has to be taken, surely it doesn’t have to be wasted. Surely, we can get the best “products” for the lowest costs.

There’s a complicated story to tell about why governments in the U.S. are so inefficient. A good deal of that story has to do with corruption and manipulation by the very demagogues who often decry “government waste.” Further, it’s important to emphasize that many of the organizations that are “publicly owned” conform more clearly to what has been referred to as “state capitalism” or “bureaucratic capitalism.” They have little to do with democratic political processes and communal control.

Still, I think that efficiency is a questionable (authoritarian, capitalist) value. Emancipated labor and democratic lifestyles need not be “wasteful” per se, but (by definition?) they will not and cannot conform to the demands of efficiency. When people have a say in how things are done and how they live their lives, chances are that they’ll choose to pace themselves much more slowly than what capital currently requires. One might imagine that they’ll stop eating fast food and start to taste again, for example. The slow foods movement (and cooking generally) might lose the luster of a bourgeois pastime and become a fulfilled/fulfilling activity in which people overcome their alienated relation to food. Things like this aren’t really possible within tightly managed spaces of intense executive control. Communal consensus-based decision-making is and will always be slow and often painful. But, this isn’t a deficiency. It’s worth asking what it is we value so much about executive power and DECISION. What if dialogue never came to an end? Would this be such a bad thing? It’s also important that we think critically about communal decision-making and deliberative processes. Liberalism and capitalism have done a lot to erode and destroy patriarchal, racial authority and parochial chauvinism generally (unfortunately not nearly enough). But, in the process they’ve also decimated wisdom-based notions of authority and completely devalued elders. Is everyone’s opinion just as good as anyone else’s? There’s a lot to chew on here. Maybe the Amish could be taken as a model of resistance to liberalism and capitalism. Of course, they did so in the name (at least in some measure) of preserving the patriarchal and racial authority and parochial chauvinism generally.

In hashing out some of this on the roof under the stars, M made a point that’s worth emphasizing. Those who value “efficiency” are often at a loss as to how to “spend” the time and money (it’s the same thing right..) they supposedly save with all their hard work. When time is given a commodity value it seems reasonable to people to horde it. Their work is a zone of complete alienation and slavery and so they, for example, take “vacations” or watch television. They save up, essentially, so that they can have long stretches of complete idleness, vacancy, and wasteful consumption. They’re basically stuck in the position of buying their own time. They zone out with the boob-tube. To fill time is to work, so they have to empty it. Authoritarian efficiency demands repression in the name of efficiency, “leisure” is thus undisciplined, empty consumption and base pleasure (sex as commodity). There’s plenty to say in this regard as well about consumption-based identities. For example, grown adults who horde their cash so that they can buy Lord of the Rings figurines and participate in a “fantasy” lifestyle. So the real question is why. Why faster? Why more? To what end? But even this misses the point in a way. It’s not that things should be more “productive” or differently “productive” as if people should simply fill their time with more alienated labor. Fulfilled living is not subordinated to a distant end. It is disciplined, but not repressive. It is the living movement of cultivated desire.

Maybe.

The Struggle Continues in Greece!

From Infoshop:

“The decision of the Dean of the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Manthos, to evict the occupation of the University administration headquarters by students and radicals who are demanding the immediate end of all university contracts with subcontracting cleaning companies in solidarity to K. Kouneva and the cleaner’s struggle was hailed by conservative media as a pioneer tough measure against the rising social movement. Earlier this week the Dean had called on academic staff to stage a counter-demo against the occupation, but nobody turned up in his support. Instead declarations of support to the occupation’s cause were made by dozens of academics. During the assembly called by the Dean on Tuesday morning 31/1 to discuss the occupation and its demands, university authorities were overwhelmed and heckled by hundreds of students. The assembly ended after an egg landed on the Dean.

Moreover, threats of lifting the academic asylum (claiming it was being violated by the occupation, a dirty and unprecedented trick believed to be a test for further repression) and allowing riot police forces on university grounds in case the occupation was not dissolved by Tuesday noon backfired when Deans’ offices and university administration headquarters were occupied in a domino of solidarity across the country: Athens University Dean’s offices, a salient building in the center of the city, were occupied with a huge banner dropped on its entrance reading: “hands off the occupations!”. Similarly the Dean’s offices of Panteios Social Sciences University of Athens, and the Dean’s offices at Patras were occupied by students demanding immediate end to subcontracting of cleaners and respect for occupations as a means of struggle.

In the last weeks the persecution authorities of both Athens and Thessaloniki have launched an attack on squats and occupations of university premises, demanding investigation of the status of occupied buildings and legal charges against their owners who fail to evict the squatters. Athens and Salonica are home to dozens of political squats, a nail in the eye of state authority.

The developments in the campus come at a time when the Greek state and its lackeys are trying out all their propaganda arsenal and legal tricks to stop the rising social movement on the eve of the General Strike that will immobilize the country on the 2nd of April.

Tension around the country is high, especially after Monday night’s barrage of attacks in both Athens and Thessaloniki against state and capitalist targets. Five banks, a car expo and several state and diplomatic vehicles were torched in Athens, while in Thessaloniki a simultaneous gas-bomb attack rocked the center of the city targeting the political offices of government ministers and MPs, leading to a general cordoning off of the high street by the police.

At the same time, labour strife in the final run to the General Strike is also high, rendering the Athens in standstill on Tuesday 31/1 as weavers and herders took to the streets

Hundreds of workers of Lanaras weaving factories had been camping outside the Ministry of Economics since Monday demanding State intervention to avert the collapse of the industry and the immediate payment of their salaries. Last year similar mobilisations by the Lanaras workers had led to clashes around Syntagma square.

At the same time hundred of herders gathered before the Ministry of Agriculture and marched to the Greek Parliament demanding support for their sector. Earlier the same day the herders had occupied the Ministry of Agriculture and had surrounded the Minister of Agriculture in his car, leading to the violent intervention of riot police forces.”

*****

The struggle continues!!

G20

From the Huffington Post:

“G-20 protesters clashed with riot police in downtown London on Wednesday, breaking into the heavily guarded Royal Bank of Scotland and smashing its windows. Earlier, they tried to storm the Bank of England and pelted police with eggs and fruit.

At least 4,000 anarchists, anti-capitalists, environmentalists and others jammed into London’s financial district for what they called “Financial Fool’s Day.” The protests were called ahead of Thursday’s summit of world leaders, who hope to take concrete steps to resolve the global financial crisis that has lashed nations and workers worldwide.

Some protesters spray-painted the side of the RBS building with the phrases “class war” and “thieves.” Others pushed against columns of riot police who swatted them away with batons.

Demonstrators shouted “Abolish Money!” and clogged streets in the area known as “The City” even as Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Barack Obama held a news conference elsewhere in the British capital.”

*****

The Guardians coverage is here.

*****

Debt and Debt Collectors: Know Your Rights

Banks Walk Away: Crisis, Foreclosure Bailout

From NYT:

“City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure.

The soft housing market and the vandalism that often occurs when a house sits empty are the two main factors influencing the mortgage holders’ decisions to walk away, said Larry Rothenberg, a lawyer for Weltman, Weinberg & Reis, one of the larger creditors’ rights firms in the country.

‘Oftentimes when the foreclosure starts out, it’s a viable property,’ Mr. Rothenberg said, ‘but by the time it gets to a sheriff’s sale, it might not have enough value to justify further expense. We’ve always had cases where property was vandalized or lost value, but they were rare compared to these times.’

‘The whole purpose of foreclosure is to take title of the property, sell it and recoup what money you can,’ Mr. Cecala said. ‘It’s just a sign of the times that things are so bad no one wants to take possession of the property.’

In South Bend, boarded-up houses for whom no one has stepped forward are dotting the landscape, adding a fresh layer of blight to communities that were already scarred from the area’s industrial decline.”

*****

I want to cast the economic crisis and the bank bailout in a new light – or at least one that is different from the mainstream. First, the economic crisis is not an accident or a catastrophe for the ruling class. Rather, the crisis and the bailout have really amounted to a relatively well-planned and orchestrated transfer of material wealth. The wealthy have, for at least the last twenty years, been in the process of “creating wealth” by speculating on the “futures” of immaterial goods. “Derivatives” are the prime example. One could, as it were, accumulate wealth and capital without tying it up in “material reality” – or the links to material reality would be far removed from the acts of purchasing, trading, and speculating and tangled and difficult to comprehend in any case. After “accumulating” wealth in this manner – really inventing it out of thin air – for twenty years, the bottom precipitously falls out. Material reality, so it would seem, has finally caught up with abstract speculation. In massive numbers, people can’t afford to pay their home loans and these loans are a large part of the “assets” that were being bet on. Here comes the fun part: The system has to adjust to this reality. The invented wealth must disappear and bad bets can’t really pay out. So what happens? The government gives the real cash that belongs to the people in exchange for the bad bets or “troubled assets” – in some cases the government doesn’t even get control over the “assets.” That is to say, the money that belonged to the people for the purposes of social services, etc. is now in the hands of elite members of the ruling class. Not only this, but because of the crisis, there is a large-scale movement toward solid capital. Most importantly, this means foreclosing on homes and factories, etc. To put the point plainly: The ruling class invented fake wealth, exchanged it for real wealth, and is now using that capital to buy up a good portion of the material wealth on the planet. All the while, they appeal to “contracts” and “laws” to produce bargain basement prices – houses, for example, are a lot cheaper when the government shows up with guns to demand that the owners leave.

To tie in a bit to the article, it looks like property destruction and vandalism are important ways to resist this process. Maybe we should start making it cost more to seize properties than they will really be worth to the rulers. I’ve thought about this in the past as a way of resisting gentrification, as well. Of course, one has to take a different view of one’s house than the one typically pushed on people under capitalism. For such a strategy to make sense to you, your house has to be your shelter and the place where you make your home and take a stand. Not another commodity. The whole point of this kind of resistance would be to destroy it’s commodity-value.

Environmentalists and Timidity

From Mike Roselle at CounterPunch:

“After getting out of the police stationed [sic] (we were not jailed) we went to Power Shift, a very big and much ballyhooed conference in Washington that was to be attended by 12,000 student activists and was to be followed by the Capitol Climate Action, a call to mass civil disobedience by writers Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry and top NASA scientist Dr. James Hanson accompanied by several dozen Coal River residents who wanted to get arrested.

Billed as an historic action, the event did indeed recede quickly into history. No one back in West Virginia saw it on TV or in the newspaper, and of course when we got home nothing had changed. Every day except Sunday, at around 4:30, the blasts go off at the mine and it rattles the panes in my window. Of the 12,000 students at Power Shift we managed to recruit only two, and on March 5th they had joined two residents and one other West Virginian and hiked up to the dam that we had intended to climb and unfurled another banner and shut down traffic on the main haul road leaving the mine, in direct violation of a recent temporary restraining order (TRO) from Judge Hutchinson of the Raleigh County Circuit Court. Another hearing was set for March 9th.

The Coal River delegation to the Power Shift rally was a little disappointed that they did not have a chance to be arrested with the writers and the Nobel Prize winner, as were many of the volunteers from Mountain Justice and Rising Tide, two of the more militant groups that sponsored the Capitol action.

I was even more disappointed that now we may have to wait a few more months before another nation [sic] mobilization. What went wrong in DC? I know getting arrested isn’t always as easy as it should be, but we had the best organizers in the movement with plenty of advance notice on this and it did not happen. So far they have offered us no explanation for it, other than the event continues to be billed as ‘historic’. But why?

Perhaps I know the reason. Civil disobedience has gotten a bad rap lately as being a worn out and ineffective tactic. This rap is undeserved, and certainly getting Mr. Hanson and McKibben arrested would have garnered the international attention that the the big rally simply did not receive. The wave of gloating over media coverage of the event that is now filling my e-mail boxes from the many sponsoring organizations that I have joined is starting to get irritating. When do we admit our mistakes? Never?

The CCA organizers wanted to recreate the glory days of the WTO protests in Seattle and elsewhere and recycled the slogans and costumes and some were even in face masks and bandannas (although it was so cold and snowy that no one even noticed!). I applaud these efforts, as I do all honest effort to address climate change,  but while this may be indeed be civil disobedience it has little to do with non-violence, which is a strategy as much as it is a philosophy.  To continue to use tactics that aren’t effective isn’t non-violent, it smacks of laziness and fear. You have to abolish fear if you wish to prevail in a non-violent struggle. What was the CCA afraid of?”

*****

As a person who helped in some (very) small part of the outreach and organization for the CCA, I think I should try to respond to this a little bit.

1) The CCA was, obviously, intended as a symbolic action and as an opportunity to expose many to their first real direct action.  It should not be forgotten that many of the people in attendence at the Power Shift and, thus, at the CCA were young college activists with little (even zero) experience on the street.  This is why the CCA organizers conducted trainings for weeks in advance of the event.

2) It may be thought that symbolic action is seriously misguided.  In fact, I even sympathize with the view to some degree.  Plainly, if you’re not affecting the day-to-day operations of the industry and of society at large, then people in power are not going to pay attention to you.  On the other hand, if people are not inspired to take the battle to the streets and to the mountains, then they’re not going to do it.  Actions galvanize a movement even as they disrupt business as usual.  And, Power took notice of this action even before it happened…

3) The Power Shift conference is run largely by liberal green-reformists.  They’re super-happy with the Obama bailout.  They want more, but they like what they’re seeing and they believe that they can pressure “elected officials” to change the course of things – primarily through the “green-capitalism,” inaugurated with Obama’s “green-new-deal.”  While the CCA was going, on these people were leading college students to lobby their legislators.  Energy Action – the sponsor of the Power Shift – did not endorse the CCA.  It’s worth asking why there weren’t 10,000 people on the streets.  And, the answer is because they were receiving mixed signals from organizers.  Perhaps a better criticism than the one offered by Roselle is that radicals need to stop associating themselves with these reformist-types.  I think this is true, but of course we also have to be aware of the fact that few people begin life as radicals.  Even the march and rally could have been a radicalizing experience for some of the people involved…

4) Roselle’s action has recently consisted of two- or three-person jaunts onto MTR sites in West Virginia.  To be clear, he isn’t from West Virginia (he’s co-founder of Greenpeace, EarthFirst!, Rainforest Action Network, Ruckus Society [basically, an eco-anarchist BAD ASS]).  Unlike most of his neighbors in Appalachia, he has the power to leave.  This is not a criticism, but it is something important to keep in mind.  Anyway, the kind of action that he supports includes direct actions that obstruct day-to-day operations, up to and including sabotage, most of which can and will be carried out by small groups.  Frankly, these actions have resulted in less media attention and symbolic import than the CCA.  And, they’ve only really succeeded in obstructing operations to a VERY small degree.

5) At the end of the day, Roselle’s model of non-violent resistance is probably the right one.  Certainly, it’s more material and substantive in its engagement with people in Appalachia and with MTR generally.  But, if he’s being honest, he’ll admit that success requires a committed cadre of several hundred to a thousand people carrying out his kind of action on a routine basis.  If one looks at the CCA as a vehicle for recruitment into that cadre, then we have a start.  Mass insurrection from inside and outside Appalachia is required to end MTR.

6) A neglected piece of this puzzle, of course, is that we have to start offering and developing serious economic alternatives that aren’t exploitative of peope or the Earth.  Short of this, we could engage in open warfare without altering the basic economic organization of Appalachian society and without ending coal – c.f. Blair Mountain.  This is why Mountain Justice has now sponsored two conferences on the Appalachian economy.

Homebrewing, Alienation, and Commodity-Fetishism

From Benjamin Dangl at Truthout:

“Just three companies control approximately 80 percent of the beer industry in the US. Brewing beer at home is one way to counter this corporate monopoly. However, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma still outlaw the craft. Recently, a victory for home brewers was scored in Utah, when on February 19, the State Senate legalized home brewing, bringing the state out of the shadows of Prohibition.

It was in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, where first emerged the trade of beer and barley, according to “Fermenting Revolution: How To Drink Beer and Save the World” by Christopher O’Brien. The need to cultivate crops for this important product may have been the initial reason for the settlement of the world’s first large-scale community. In Babylonia, where beer was safer to drink than the canal water, barley and beer were used as a form of currency. The foundations of modern society appear to be built on, well, beer.

Home brewing is a wonderful pastime that can also help build community. In Burlington, Vermont, my friends and I recently pooled our money together to buy brewing equipment, and started a collective that shares its equipment, recipes and beer with other locals around town. In this way, home brewing has built community and allows us to cut out the corporate middle man.

Similarly, the home brewers’ victory in Utah is one step close to enabling the beer drinkers of the world to take back their brew from the corporations of the world.”

*****

When Marx wrote of commodity fetishism, his idea was that the products of human labor can seem to stand apart from human life – that they can seem to have a value of their own indepently of our actions, that they can even determine the value of our actions.  My last post about unemployment and the stock market is a perfect example.  Somehow, the trade in mostly frivolous goods can determine whether children will eat.  This doesn’t have to be the case.  But, we endow the “market” with this power over us – the power to determine who eats and who doesn’t.  We could just as well decide that we should all be able to eat, or for that matter we could play spin the bottle or do a “cakewalk.”  Commodity fetishism, for Marx, is just one part of the overall alienation of people living in capitalism.  Not only do we set our products apart from us and allow them to determine our life-process, we are also fundamentally alienated from that very life-process (what Marx refers to as “labor”) since it is rendered just one more commodity among others.  One’s own personal life-process becomes abstract “labor power” to be sold and, again, whether one eats or not is determined by the “market-value” of this “commodity,” which appears to us somehow a product of nature.  In the article quoted above, Dangl talks about homebrewing as a way of brekaing corporate monopoly and building local community – one way of cultivating “grassroots democracy.”  I’m not opposed to this characterization, but I think a deeper analysis might see the entirety of the anarchist-DIY movement through the lense of alienation and commodity fetishism.  For Marx, the answer to the alienation produced by capitalism is to seize the state apparatus – to undo commodity fetishism by submitting production to democratic state control (“democratic” here does not refer to “representative democracy” in the vein of the liberal tradition).  Through conscious processes people can ensure that everyone has enough to eat.  Marx, however, might best be understood as attempting to institute a new kind of fetishism – one that has been realized in many places all over the world in the 20th Century (and not only in “communist” societies).  This would be a fetishism of consciousness and the state.  Here again, human “products” – better “constructs” – are given the power to determine life and death and to decide the value of one’s labor and products.  Anarchism responds to this in the spirit of “direct action” by reclaiming and de-commodifying the life-process at its root.  Marx and others are right to say that capitalism is a system and that one cannot exempt oneself by fiat.  But, they are wrong to then turn history into one massive either/or to be decided in the revolutionary moment.  Anarchism means (to me at least) reclaiming one’s life-process and realizing oneself as a biological, spiritual, and civic being through direct action.  If you like, one undoes capitalism in the garden or kitchen or garage, in one’s soul, and in the streets – and each of these is a necessary moment.  Homebrewing ,then, can be part of something a lot deeper than “grassroots democracy” – it can be revolutionary.

Unemployment Rises… Stocks Fall…

From Dean Baker at Truthout:

” The February employment report showed the labor market deteriorating at an even faster rate, with the unemployment rate rising from 7.6 percent to 8.1 in February. The economy lost 651,000 jobs in the month, but job loss for the prior two months was revised up as well. Job loss for the last three months is now reported at 2,013,000, an average of 671,000 per month.

Job loss continues to be disproportionately in construction and manufacturing. Construction lost 104,000 jobs in February; it has lost 512,000 jobs since September, 7.2 percent of employment in the sector. Employment in the non-residential sector is falling almost as rapidly as in the residential sector.

Manufacturing lost 168,000 jobs in February, bringing job loss in the sector to 845,000 since September, a decline of 6.3 percent. Hours per worker have also been reduced; the index of aggregate hours is down 9.6 percent since September. All sectors of manufacturing have been hit hard, but the auto sector has seen the sharpest decline, with employment down by 128,600, or 15.3 percent, since September. The hours index is down by 21.9 percent over this period.

Retail lost 39,500 jobs, bringing its loss since September to 318,300. Employment in auto dealers has been holding up in spite of the plunge in sales. Employment is down by only 167,000, or 13.4 percent, since the pre-recession peak, even though sales are down more than 30 percent. In the same vein, employment in real estate is down by just 70,000, or 4.7 percent, even though sales are down by 40 percent. In both cases, workers are paid largely on commission, and therefore have likely seen their wages slashed even though they still have their jobs.”

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The media has been fixated on the stock market recently, which continues to fall.  And, of course, the current state of unemployment is not unrelated to the the falling price of stocks.  The are some real questions about what kind of losses can be sustained by the status quo.  How long, for instance, can stocks continue to slide before there is a major collapse in the market?  How much more unemployment and foreclosure can people endure before they’re on the streets?  I don’t have solid answers to these questions, but it seems clear to me that Obama and co. are pretty concerned about both possibilities.  Perhaps the best we can do is organize to the degree possible and wait to see if this thing hits critical mass.