After Labor Day

      I've never liked the idea of Labor Day.  It's clearly a refusal to recognize the real International Workers' Day, May 1st, which has been transformed into the ridiculous Law Day.  However, if we were going to be honest, Labor Day is the holiday that the United States labor movement deserves.  Without a radical transformation of that movement, a movement that aligns itself with the imperialism and racism of our ruling class, rather than toiling masses of the world.  Additionally, without a movement that challenges the structures of misogyny and patriarchy that contribute to defining the capitalist world system, we will continue to reproduce that system, rather than resist it.   In protest of that current state, I suggest skipping the propaganda posters, and watch this documentary.

thoughts

      It's really hot out right now, so hot that my computer is occasionally adding numbers when I use the letters u, i, e, and  t.  It's not something that inspires much in the way of sustained intellectual effort, particularly when there's no real effective way to either air condition your apartment or even create a sustained draft through the building.  In effect, I'm going to let my post on the industrialization of the household go for the moment, along with my examination of Gore Vidal's essays, and create something a bit more modest to tide the blog over until the weather gets a bit less miserable.  I feel like I've been fairly isolated this summer from the events that translate into writing.  Other than my brief sojourn to Minneapolis and rural Michigan, I've spent the majority of the summer in Irvine, without much ability to get out due to finances.  (I've caught a few shows, and a couple films, but nothing that has really translated into writing.  Similarly, I've been disconnected from the politics of the region, having missed the brief uprising in Anaheim, and the general lack of political action on the campus during the summer.)

     Beyond that, I'm thinking about returning to Gramsci's concept of hegemony in the near future.  The question of how structures of domination and exploitation are able to gain consent from those who do not benefit from them seems to be particularly relevant, as is the question of how to create counter-structures that challenge the forms of common sense that allow for that support.  One of the things that I am interested in trying to do for the next year is to create some pedagogical structures to begin to challenge that.  I think that the student movement has done a remarkable job of challenging the legitimacy of the attempts to privatize the university, but our educational efforts have remained minimal and, at times, conservative.  Often, the notion of public education is reduced to the question of cost, rather than thinking about access, quality of education, and other broader questions.  There has been some very good worker solidarity, at times, but not enough exploration of the laboring structures of the university.  The question of fighting racism in the university has been brought up in slogans and conversations, but not enough exploration of what it means to fight racism in what Christopher Newfield calls, 'pseudo-integration.'  I'd love to organize a combination of speakers, reading groups, and workshops around this.  If anyone is interested, feel free to leave a message here, or contact me. 

    There have also been a couple interesting essays on this, written by a number of groups around the Occupy phenomenon.  I'll try to explore those in the near future.  I'll leave it there.

Random Record Review I: Killing Joke--Fire Dances

      In my effort to come up with some approach to keep myself writing, I thought that I might take up a bit of record reviewing.  Rather than looking at new records, however, I'm going to write reviews of records randomly chosen from my collection.  I'm not sure that it's going to translate into a lot of folks reading, but it seems like a good way of working on my writing skills as well as listening to records that might have been left moldering on the record shelves.  Additionally, it will renew my commitment to writing about music, which has dropped off a bit, lately.  My tentative plan is to turn this into a weekly exercise.  The first choice is the 1983 Killing Joke album, Fire Dances, and album that I am fairly certain was purchased from Cheapo Records in Minneapolis, although I probably couldn't tell you which of the stores in the chain it was purchased from.  I'm reviewing the LP version of the record, rather than the reissue with bonus tracks.  In any case, here goes....

      Truth be told, my engagement with Killing Joke as a band has been fairly limited.  I own this lp, an earlier album, and the cd reissue of the 1985 lp, Night Time.  Like a lot of other folks, I first heard Killing Joke on MTV's 120 Minutes, through the video for "Eighties", which is on Night Time, and is, fairly predictably, my favorite lp from the band.  My general impression is that this aesthetic choice identifies me as a fairly casual fan of the group, rather than someone in the inner circle of their 'fandom.'  From the little research that I have done on the band.  Fire Dances was released after a brief hiatus of the band, caused by singer Jaz Coleman and bassist Youth's escape to Iceland in order to "survive the apocalypse." (The election of Thatcher and the Falklands War seem about as reasonable as it gets for signs of the apoapocalypse, I guess.  The album also features a minor line-up change, as Youth was replaced by Paul Raven on bass.  In any case, let's move on to the music.

     To begin, the record fits fairly comfortably within post-punk generic conventions, which are admittedly fairly broad.  With the exception of the dance oriented, "Dominator", the songs are built on a fairly conventional vocals, guitar, bass, drum set up.  With the guitar and bass taking the same sort of melodic and distorted sound of bands such as Joy Division and early Siouxsie and the Bansheees. (Early Echo and the Bunnymen might even be a better reference than Joy Division.) It moves away from some of the denser, more metallic sounds that linked the earlier records of the band with the efforts of Amoebix amongst other acts, to a lighter and more open sound.  The drums break out of that tradition, though.  They're up in the mix, and are the most obvious reference to the sort of proto-industrial sound of the band, pushing towards the mixture of percussion and repetition that would dominate that particular form of dance music.   It also contributes to the communal feeling contained in the lyrics, which becomes explicit in the song "Let's All Go (To The Fire Dances" and is expressed through the chanted lyrics, "Move in on them" contained in the synth driven track, "Dominator."  (A track that seems to stand between DAF and the later work in Nitzer Ebb)  It's a communalism that is remains subcultural in nature, calling for gatherings of song, dance, and sex, rather than any sort of explicit political change. (They also feel a little bland, and Jaz Coleman's normally powerful and distinct vocals lose a little of both those qualities with the communalist effort.)

     Overall, it's a pretty decent record, and the songs do a pretty good job of holding your attention.  The lyrics aren't spectacular, but there's nothing particularly embarrassing in them.  Bass and Guitar provide fairly good texture and melody throughout the tracks, but I'm not a big fan of the drums at times, which fall into the kind of stiff rhythmic qualities that often define the electronic industrial dance music that was later influenced by this sort of sound.  It's unfortunate that the band didn't draw more explicitly on some of the dub influences that you could find in their earlier music.  The tracks that worked the best were the ones that stayed in the more conventional post-punk/rock that would define the band's next album, Night Time.  The one exception is the track, "Dominator", which managed to do the best job of linking the band's sound to the dance aesthetic than the others, which felt a bit forced at times.  (I'm particularly thinking about "Rejuvenation", but the first half of the album feels a little rhythmically forced.)  Additionally, there's a bit of a tendency for the songs to blend together.  Nothing stands out in the way that they do in some of the other albums.  To tell the truth, the album strikes me as a transition between the earlier albums, and the direction the band would take with Night Time and the albums of the late 1980's (which I haven't heard, but are evidently slightly boring in their attempt to repeat the success of Night Time with reduced results.)  So, I liked the record, and I don't see myself getting rid of it, but I also don't see it getting a lot of repeat play, either.

      I think I'll leave it there.  Hopefully, I will get to another random record choice some time next week.

A Short Note on Jean Genet's Captive of Love (a bit old)

            Obviously there is a lot going on in the book, but one of the things that interested me about the book dealt with the matter of friendship.  There is a moment in the first section of the book where Genet gets into a conversation with the fedayeen.  He is asked is if he is a Marxist/  “I was rather surprised, but didn’t attach much importance either to the question or to the answer.  “Yes”, I said.  “Why?”  I was still not really interested.  Ferraj’s young face looked open and guileless.  He was smiling, but anxious to hear what I’d say.  After awhile I told him nonchalantly:  “Perhaps because I don’t believe in God.”  (113)  At this moment a colonel tries to end the conversation, but the fedayeen refuse this, and the two (Genet and the colonel have a debate upon the existence of God.)  This debate links to a conception of freedom that both are trying to express, one that links to a notion of sovereignty. 

 

            “When you start by putting the discussion under the aegis of God you cut the ground from under my feet—I don’t claim the patronage of anyone so grand.  And your God is all the grander because you can increase His dimensions as much as you like.  But the reason you also insisted on beginning with the seal of friendship is that even though you’re a Muslim you’ve got more faith in friendship than you have in God.  For here we all are, armed, an unbeliever among believers, and yet I’m your friend.”

            “And where does friendship came from but God?… To you, to me, to all of us this morning.  Would you be our friend if God hadn’t inspired you with friendship for us, and us with friendship for you?” (117)

             Obviously, I don’t want to get into the theological implications of such a discussion, which are not that interesting, but the notions of social structure that come up.  For Genet, the matter of importance is the friendship among men.  It is what attracts him to these various modes of rebellion.  When he makes the statement, “I am a Marxist”, he hollows it out of all its traditional meaning and links it with a form of contingency of relationships.  Whereas the colonel links the modes of friendship with the figure of God.  I would push this farther to see a discussion of whether the revolutionary community is based on a telos or end, or whether it is based on the interactions and the love that its members hold for each other.

            We can see this in the way that Genet relates a certain Marxist-Leninist belief system with a religious belief.  “The worst were the ones whose heads were full of neat but crude slogans that they unloaded on you like a ton of bricks.  The one I dreaded most was Thalami, who I believe meant to turn me into a perfect Marxist-Leninist.  The Koran had a surat for every occasion: David Thalami had a quotation from Lenin.  And he wasn’t the only one.  In the early days I told myself the revolutionaries were only young after all.” (281)  Both these modes of telos are put into relationship with each other, and are expressed within the most deadening language possible.  Genet later links them up with certain notions of the European state.  These things in effect, kill the possibility of the revolution.

            Certainly, it is difficult to argue against that fact.  Postcolonial and postrevolutionary states have really not managed escape out of this bind.  But on the other hand, it seems that Genet’s model (if we can use such a word) points to any mode of organization creating the preconditions for this.  The question becomes is there a way of thinking this question that escapes this?

Initial thoughts on patriarchy and the status of the workplace

     I've been thinking about feminist critiques of the concepts of the private and the public for the past few months, coming out of some of the framework offered by the last class that I worked as a teaching assistant for.  The main text of that class framed the house within the context of the private and places such as work as the public.  However, the more I think about this, the more problematic it becomes, particularly in regards to the notion of categorizing the workplace squarely within the public sphere.  Corey Robin has done a pretty good job spelling out the fact that one abandons one's rights when one goes into the workplace, rights that are only partially reinstated by the collective bargaining process.  When one goes farther into the origins of the industrial revolution, it becomes abundantly clear that the forms of paternalism and patriarchal control that Robin identifies in the present have ample precedence in the long history of capitalist accumulation.  Within this context, I want to pose an alternative argument.  Instead of posing the workplace as a public space, the categorization of the workplace as either public or private is matter of contestation, or to put it more polemically, a matter of class struggle.  Secondly, with the exception of a brief period between 1948 and 1975, the brief period of the labor peace, the workplace has largely stayed out of the public sphere, with the gains of that period quickly being lost in the present.

     To spell this out, we need to think about the concept of patriarchy.  Classical patriarchy was never limited to the control of women, by men, although it certainly an aspect of the social structure.  Instead, classical patriarchy was a structure of propertied men controlling women, children, and propertyless men under their control.  Sylvia Federici amongst others have argued that the primitive accumulation of capitalism was achieved in part by offering women as a commons as an alternative to the common property that was destroyed in the process.  In effect, propertyless men were, in part, induced to break out of what Federici calls the 'anti-feudal alliance' through the creation of a cross-class alliance of men on the basis of the common control of women, marking the proletariat as a deeply divided (Federici and most other contemporary radical thinkers would also recognize the importance of the structures of racialization created through that other engine of 'primitive accumulation', colonialism, as a structural determinant.)  While I largely agree with Federici's intervention, the continued patriarchal structures of a variety of workplaces complicates this perspective.  Within this context, workingman's associations simultaneously challenges the patriarchal structures of the capitalist workplace, while accepting or even reinforcing the patriarchal structures of the households that they benefit from.  (There are notable exceptions to this, for instance the Voice of Industry's support of the demands of the Lowell factory girls, but these have largely been exceptions until recently.)

      So what is the significance of this?  To be honest, I'm not sure, but it might allow for another avenue for thinking through structures of social oppression if followed through on.  We might be able to link the limitations of a variety of workingman's organizations to challenge the patriarchal structures of the workplace with their broad acceptance of the public/private division of production and consumption, and production and reproduction.  At the same time, it offers a possibility of rethinking the patriarchal structures of capitalist accumulation, of re-imagining feminist alliances.  Obviously, it would take a lot of theoretical, empirical, and practical work to follow up on this, but it strikes me as an interesting prospect.  (To avoid hubris, obviously this sort of work has been taken up by feminist, marxist, and other radical thinkers, but the question of the public, private, and the workplace seems to remain relatively unthought within a lot of basic work, from both the feminist and the labor studies perspective.  I'm going to be spending most of my time on the dissertation, but I'm hoping to work through this question a bit more.

Interlude (6): Koerner, Ray, and Glover Documentary

Continuing with my interludes, here is a Tony Glover directed documentary about the Minneapolis based folk blues trio, Koerner, Ray, and Glover.  Worth the watch.

On the summer joint council meeting

Since the former leadership caucus, who used to be known as USEJ, but now call themselves SWITCh in a desperate attempt to avoid their own history, have quoted this particular blog.  I would like to remind everyone who reads this blog that AWDU helped lead the fight for refunding public education through the Make Banks Pay coalition campaign, a campaign which got no support from the former leadership.  Dozens of AWDU activists were arrested in this campaign, which made Governor Jerry Brown compromise on the Prop. 30 language, which was substantially less progressive in its taxation structure.  (I slightly edited this to acknowledge that the Make Banks Pay campaign was a coalition event, involving a lot of unions, but we substantially pushed it towards the questions of public education that it took up.)


     It struck me that I forgot to produce a substantial account of the previous Joint Council meeting, a meeting which produced a few small reforms in the bylaws, as well as a couple substantial arguments. all in a hot and miserable union office, frankly unfit for the number of folks that were there.  I thought I would try to make up for that error with a short report on the interesting aspects of the meeting, along with a similar report concerning the latest Joint Council meeting.  After all, these informal modes of communication often translate into more rank and file engagement than the official channels of communication, and I've tried to pass on my perspective on things since our election.

      The first and most notable aspect of the Berkeley meeting is that it was fairly pleasant for the most part, if you ignore the oppressive heat in the room.  For the most part, conversations remained productive with a number of minor reforms to the bylaws being passed, guaranteeing local access to the union listserves, elections committee reform, changes in staff membership requirements, and requirement that Northern and Southern Vice Presidents are members in a campus that they're representing.  Each of those points passed with minor debate, and cordial conversation.  The two exceptions were notable.  The first came around a request for a small amount of money to help with a bail fund for UCLA protestors, which was opposed by the Santa Barbara contingent, who continue to insinuate that these events were not sanctioned by the union despite the fact that the protests in defense of public education have been discussed extensively at Joint Council meetings.  The Santa Barbara contingent was asked why they had taken this position, which translated into a fairly spirited back and forth between AWDU folks and the Santa Barbara crew.  Despite claims on the the part of the Santa Barbara folks otherwise, the response on the part of the UCLA folks was pretty minor, given the absolute lack of solidarity shown by Santa Barbara.

      The second debate was probably the more significant of the two, that being over the compromise millionaire's tax, Prop. 30.  The proposition was initially advocated for by Santa Barbara's Steve Attewell, who did a good job of defending the initiative's positive qualities, emphasizing its level of progressive taxation, and the funding that it would bring in.  However, the proposal was quickly amended for opposition by Jason Ball of UCLA, who brought significant counter-arguments, notably the regressive aspects of the bill around taxation, and our exclusion from the compromise process itself, both by the governor and our fellow allies in other social movement organizations and unions.  Eventually, a middle position was taken by the union as a whole, taking no position on the bill, leaving it to individual members to decide how they should vote, a position which might be revisited in a later online vote.  The thing that really struck me in the debate was that Attewell simply couldn't conceive of a reason why a reasonable person might disagree with the logic he presented to the JC.  This sort of myopia is all too represented of the reasoning of the former leadership, who all too frequently refuse to recognize that there might be an alternative to their version of trade union politics, and a view that's going to leave them a small and irrelevant force until they rethink that position.

       Moving from there, the summer meeting was much smaller than the earlier spring meeting, being made up of 16 members of the AWDU caucus, and about 8 members aligned with the former leadership, and the Riverside leadership did a good job finding us a space to meet in that was both air conditioned and spacious, two qualities that I appreciated after the Berkeley experience.  The initial section of the meeting went quite well.  We passed a number of minor proposals, money for organizing kits, more money to send folks to a conference, we took positions on a number of initiatives (more on that in a later post) and postponed a re-visitation of Prop 30 for a later online conversation (this conversation is necessary after the recent budget passed, a budget that will freeze tuition costs, but only if the proposition passes.  I'm also going to write a more substantial post on this later.)  Additionally, my first official proposition (in conjunction with Charlie Eaton) in support of a change in our letterhead to emphasize our position as "UC Student-Workers Union" passed, which I see as a minor part of our attempt to link our upcoming contract fight with the larger worker and student struggles in the university.  We will have to wait to see if we can live up to the claims made in the title.  I certainly hope we do.

     From there, we took a short break.  However, when we returned, a member of the caucus of the former leadership, Guanyang Zhang, called for quorum, effectively ending the official section of the meeting.  At that point, a fairly lengthy and unproductive conversation broke out over the interpretation of the contract and Robert's Rules broke out, and effectively ended any meaningful conversation.  Without getting into the details of that conversation, we came to the conclusion that the meeting could not continue officially.  In effect, this decision translated into our inability to pass any of the bylaws reforms that we had wanted to pass, nor could any of the more substantial bylaws reforms that we were going introduce get their first hearing.  The decision froze out any meaningful decisions about the contract campaign from happening, and kept us from a number of other necessary decisions.  There is a possibility of holding an emergency meeting early in the fall, but that action is going to create a lot of problems.

     Not surprisingly, a number of folks in AWDU were unhappy about the turn of events, and expressed this over the Joint Council website, which translated into a fairly predictable debate with the former leadership circling the wagons.  My thoughts are a little different than both sides of the debate.  Not surprisingly, I don't agree with the position of the former leadership.  Zhang's position was clearly political, designed to shut out the ability to introduce a number of proposals that I suspect that he opposes.  Zhang avoids the polemics expressed by the other members of his caucus, but he fairly faithfully represents the sort of conservative politics exemplified by that caucus.  To put it simply, he's not as neutral as he thinks he is.  At the same time, it's difficult to argue that his action was in any sense illegitimate.  His action is allowed by both the bylaws and the arcane rules of Robert's Rules of Order.  I don't agree with the action, but that is a matter of political disagreement, rather than some sort of ethical infringement on the part of him.  That distinction is significant.  We might want to make efforts to reform the way we enforce quorum, or perhaps more significantly, make sure that we make that requirement, but it doesn't make sense to condemn someone who uses a legitimate rule for his own political position.

Hopefully, we'll be able to make up for this problematic ending with an emergency meeting in September.