passions and survival

reImagining Work Conference

2011-09-25T14:47:00.001-04:00

An All-Generation Conversation that reworks our imagination to find new ways of living, surviving and growing our souls expanding the definition of "work" helping us find what we need to move forward...

October 28-30, 2011

SAVE THE DATE!

The old economy is failing. A new economy is sprouting like shoots after a forest fire. This transition to new ways of understanding and organizing work is as significant as the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture 11,000 years ago and from agriculture to industry a few hundred years ago.

From Detroit, Michigan, where industrial jobs are gone forever, to points across the globe, there are exciting and moving stories of invention and reinvention.

In October 2011 in Detroit, a groundbreaking conference will gather thinkers and doers from the worlds of activism, community organizing, labor, crafts, media, entrepreneurship, the arts, academe, and ‘green’—in a 3-day collaborative discussion. You will come away inspired by people with whom you can collaborate in this profound economic and spiritual transformation.

REImagining Work
October 28-30, 2011
FocusHOPE
1400 Oakman Boulevard
Detroit, Michigan 48238

For more information and to register: http://www.reimaginingwork.org/
Also visit: http://www.boggscenter.org/

Contact:
Diane Reeder
dreeder@reimaginingwork.org
313.350.9091

Beyond Daily Humilitations: The Struggle for Meaningful Work Amidst the Capitalist Crisis

2011-09-12T13:05:00.004-04:00

“…work, is, by it’s very nature, about violence – to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations."
-Studs Terkel

Is it possible to find meaningful work, to make an honest living amidst the current capitalist crisis? Millions of recent college graduates are confronted with this dilemma, along with so many others who have been laid off from their jobs and those drowning in debt from health care bills, student loans and credit cards. As unemployment rates continue along a record-setting trajectory the cost of living shows no sign of declining. What does this mean for those of us looking for work or trying to create a better life?

So-called expert analysis and commentary on the dismal state of economic affairs has saturated corporate media as non/working people struggle to make sense of it all and to feed themselves and their families. But one does not need to hold a PhD in economics to be able to accurately comment on and analyze the world in which we have found ourselves. In fact, the collective experiences of people navigating the ruins of the twisted free market fantasy are more revealing and honest. These stories must be shared with each other in order to dig ourselves out of this mess and to work together in creating something better.

My own story is not unique, but I think it is worth telling. My recent experience in job-hunting and eventual employment, like those of millions of other unemployed or low-wage workers, must be looked at within the context of the crippling structures of capitalist society and its latest permutations. In sharing this I hope to make more sense of what has happened, both to me personally and in the world I have found myself.

to be continued...

-Matt Dineen

Less Work, More Living

2011-09-10T11:57:00.001-04:00

Working fewer hours could save our economy, save our sanity, and help save our planet.

By Juliet Schor

Millions of Americans have lost control over the basic rhythm of their daily lives. They work too much, eat too quickly, socialize too little, drive and sit in traffic for too many hours, don’t get enough sleep, and feel harried too much of the time. It’s a way of life that undermines basic sources of wealth and well-being—such as strong family and community ties, a deep sense of meaning, and physical health.

Earn less, spend less, emit and degrade less. That's the formula. The more time a person has, the better his or her quality of life, and the easier it is to live sustainably.Imagining a world in which jobs take up much less of our time may seem utopian, especially now, when a scarcity mentality dominates the economic conversation. People who are employed often find it difficult to scale back their jobs. Costs of medical care, education, and child care are rising. It may be hard to find new sources of income when U.S. companies have been laying people off at a dizzying rate.

But fewer work hours for people with jobs is a key step toward solving the unemployment crisis—while giving Americans healthier lives. Fewer hours means more jobs are available to people who need them. Living on less pay usually means consuming less, making more of the things one needs at home, and living lighter, whether by design or by accident.

Today, driven both by necessity and the deliberate choice to live simply, more Americans are shifting toward fewer work hours. It’s a trend that, if done correctly, could get us out of our current economic crisis and away from unsustainable economic growth.
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From the Fall 2011 issue of YES! Magazine. Read the rest of the article at yesmagazine.org

Juliet Schor is professor of sociology at Boston College and the author of the national bestseller The Overspent American.

Deprioritizing Work

2011-07-24T12:49:00.000-04:00

"I'm glad I got to try out different worlds. I think it's good to do if you can, to find out what fits you. To challenge the way you grew up, no matter which way it was. And to challenge what is expected of you from your family, from patriarchy, from the capitalist, racist, individualist world. Part of becoming adult is taking on these challenges from a place of love rather than just reaction against.

I learned to cook because it felt better than working more hours a day in order to afford restaurants. I drank in alleys and rooftops because it was more fun than working more hours a day so I could afford bars. And when I deprioritized work, I prioritized other things - writing, healing, learning to look at my community and to try and understand what it needed and where I could be most effective."
-Cindy Crabb in Doris, #28
dorisdorisdoris.com

Survival Postures: A Community Experiment in Learning How to Live

2011-06-19T00:50:00.003-04:00

Survival Postures is the latest project from Cleveland-based organizer/visionary Kate Sopko. It is "about practicing a culture that can take care of itself, re-linking culture and survival deep within our own bodies." More info at: survivalpostures.weebly.com

This winter in Cleveland, Ohio, 17 people took part in a group experiment. Each chose a task essential to their survival or well-being that they didn't know how to do. Then, over the course of February, they learned how to do it. How to build a cook stove out of soup cans, how to process wool and weave with it, how to sew homemade menstrual pads... Their Survival Postures were exhibited at a community dinner held at SPACES Gallery on March 20.

This site documents their projects, and our larger experience of working together to re-learn a myriad of lost practical skills. We invite anyone who likes what you see here to consider doing a Survival Posture of your own, and to use this forum to share what you learn with others. Contact stewardsoflostlands@gmail.com with your projects.

PROJECT BACKGROUND:

Survival Postures takes a cue from feminist performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who, since the late 1960's has used her art to make visible a hidden, stigmatized world of maintenance work that shores up our whole society. She once said that her work is a conscious attempt to re-link cultural practice with how we practice our own survival, saying that "Art begins at the same level as basic survival systems."

Lately in Cleveland, we've seen a huge growth in interest in re-localizing the work that provides for our community's basic needs (for example, there's been an exponential increase in urban farming). Many of us are volunteering to do the hands-on work of growing, processing and distributing food; salvaging and reusing building materials; remediating soil on polluted urban lots; and supporting local production of things like clothing, energy and shelter.

In doing so, it's become pretty clear that as an overall culture, we are very much in infancy when it comes to being actors in our own survival. Many basic skills are no longer in our vocabulary, and we rarely flex the muscles that make us producers (rather than consumers) of what we need. At this moment of cultural atrophy, re-learning practical skills will take practice, and in that practice, we will have to allow ourselves to be tentative, uncomfortable and inexperienced.
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http://survivalpostures.weebly.com/

The Service Industry: Turning workers into little entrepreneurs

2011-05-18T13:03:00.001-04:00

Service workers who refuse to identify with their jobs often do so in the name of a "true calling" that they pursue outside of work hours with this same enterprising spirit. As art, adventure, and social life are all absorbed into the logic of productive investment, it becomes easy to look at your time at work as a capital outlay that enables you to pursue your dreams off the clock, like a new business owner paying rent on her storefront in hopes of future success. The flexible, temporary nature of service employment encourages this attitude; if additional free time is "more valuable" than extra wages, we have the freedom to work less, and if not, we can try to work more. In this way, the mentality of self-employment is extended to individuals who might otherwise contest employment itself...A worker's personal quirks and secrets, previously the only territory beyond the reach of the market, become commodities to be sold like any other. In this regard, the service industry represents a front in the total colonization of our social lives.
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Exerpted from "The Service Industry," in Work: Capitalism. Economics. Resistance.

The Embrace of 360 Degrees

2011-04-09T23:18:00.002-04:00

by Matt Dineen

Life really does come full circle sometimes. I guess this is no surprise since our lives are not single linear journeys of constant progress. We are on a continuum that ebbs and flows and our personal histories often have the pesky tendency to repeat themselves. Our current selves are an amalgamation of all of our ups and downs, and the journey we’re on is a complex one.
On the cusp of 30, I feel like I’m 15 again. Half a lifetime ago I spent the summer washing dishes at Nonnie’s Country Kitchen in Orleans, MA—my first job. I was paid under the table, in cash, to scrape the remains of chocolate chip pancakes larger than my face, scrub lipstick stains off coffee mugs, and listen to the classic rock station that the sexist cook would sing along to all morning. It feels like yesterday.

Actually, it was yesterday.

I arrived at my new job to discover an envelope in the back room with my name scrawled in full-caps: MATT. It contained a (small) pile of 20 dollar bills for my previous week of labor. After counting the bills, I stuffed the envelope in my backpack, grabbed a glass of ice water, and squeezed into a fresh pair of bright-yellow dishwashing gloves. Something was different though.

Instead of elderly retirees filling Nonnie’s counter (and inhaling her second-hand Lucky Strike smoke), there were tables full of people gazing into laptop computers, sipping lattes and eating pasta salad. Instead of AC/DC and Van Halen on the transistor radio in the back, Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire were playing on an iPod through the surround-sound speakers of the café. Everything has changed. But as I stood in front of the industrial sink scrubbing lipstick off a coffee mug it hit me that, actually, everything has stayed the same. In one week, I will be a 30 year old dishwasher with a college degree.

How has my life reverted to this, 15 years later?

It would be pretty easy to wake up on the morning of my 30th birthday in despair that my life is not going anywhere; paralyzed by an internalized classism, making me feel like an utter failure of a human being. Luckily, I have dedicated a lot of my time since school to analyzing, rejecting, and documenting alternatives to the dominant culture that defines people by what they do for money, first and foremost. I have spent more than half of a decade now interviewing activists and artists about the dilemma of following their passions, doing what they truly love, while surviving in a cutthroat capitalist society. So I have thought about this stuff a lot.

Over the years, when people I meet ask me, “What do you do?” the answer is always complicated. “Well,” I’ll reply. “It depends what you mean.” We are all so much more than our wage jobs. We are complex, multidimensional creatures. And this should be celebrated.

As I approach 30, I think back to that requisite thought exercise throughout many of our childhoods: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Is this it? Am I grown up now? At one point, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Apparently I told my mother (who was 29 when she had me) that I would become rich as a Major League star and buy her a house. She lovingly reminds me of this broken promise every now and then. Sorry mom!

It has been essential for me to talk to people who have spent their lives redefining what success means—prioritizing happiness and community over the accumulation of wealth and power. This is also true of the aging process.

In my mid- to late-20’s it was really inspiring to talk to people in their 30’s who were truly embracing getting older. Actually, I have found that if you ask people who have passed the 30 year milestone, almost across the board they will talk about how much better life is than in their 20’s. So why is it then that many twenty-somethings in our society are so scared of this moment?

I wear a pin on my jacket that reads: “Growing up is awesome!” The person that created (and gave me) this pin explained that it was in response to the popular subcultural slogan: “Growing up is giving up.”

In a culture that fetishizes youth and perpetuates “glory days” mythology, that teaches us to fear and misunderstand the natural cycles of life, embracing one’s 30’s is a radical act.

The vision I have for my 30’s is to actualize all of the things that I talked about doing in my 20’s. I want to take inspiration from, and further cultivate, the best aspects of my youthful past. Simultaneously, I want to learn from the mistakes I’ve made, the low points of my personal continuum. This is not to say that it will be easy or that history won’t continue to occasionally repeat itself. My life will inevitably come full circle once again, but I am hopefully for what the next 360 degrees holds for me. Turning 30 is awesome. I am not giving up.

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Matt Dineen lives in Philadelphia, where he turned 30 on April 7, 2011. This essay is part of his 360 Months project, which features 30 essays by 30 different people about turning 30. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival(at)gmail(dot)com

The Return of Honest Living

2011-03-27T13:29:00.001-04:00

A couple years ago now, I shared a similar project to this called Honest Living by Isabell Moore. The mission was to explore various strategies and issues for activists around "striving towards an 'honest' living in a 'dishonest' world." After a break to focus on teaching, Honest Living has returned!

Check out the new post on academia and public workers. I look forward to reading more from this important project.

Collective Impact

2011-01-26T16:52:00.003-05:00

Growing up next door to each other and being just one month apart, I have known Tyler Gumpright my entire life. Recently he began participating in a project with some buddies from college called Collective Impact. The first post explains:

I'm launching a hub that will allow us to motivate, encourage, and advise one another. It will be a forum for shared experience, thought, and innovation. As much as we are willing to contribute them, our collective energies can make a significant impact not only in each other's lives, but throughout society.

I recognize tremendous untapped potential in every one of us. Inevitably, it is sometimes wasted. It is lost to distractions; television, Angry Birds, facebook, football/hockey season, etc. We have all spent several hours in the past week on these. Distraction, procrastination, and laziness sap so much unproductive time. I know that every one of us still has lofty hopes for ourselves.

Sadly, those hopes often just remain hopes, never coming to fruition, never even recorded. As we settle into adulthood, we are in danger of comfortable complacency. We have not become the heroes we hoped to become when we were young. Life is alright, though, and we make enough to pay all the bills (usually) and splurge on fun once in a while. We become homeowners. Family men. Account holders. Office Zombies. These are not all bad things, but they sap so much of our attention that little is left for our dreams.

What was the last truly remarkable project that you pursued wholeheartedly? Can you easily think of three things you did in the past year that you are most proud of? Aren't you capable of so much more?

Here's to actualizing our biggest dreams despite the challenges of the current society. Check it out yourself at: collectiveimpact.blogspot.com

Permanent Autonomous Zone: A conversation with zine writers Erick Lyle and Jeff Miller

2010-12-02T08:41:00.005-05:00

by Matt Dineen

What if our lives were filled with moments of liberation from the everyday? Is it possible to carve out spaces that challenge the dominant logic of the market, where we can pursue meaningful work and actualize our dreams? This most daunting task must begin with conversations between co-conspirators.

At the end of this past summer, I had the pleasure of sharing such a conversation with two writers who were on a tour together with their recently-published books. Erick Lyle and Jeff Miller both come out of the underground zine community and had just released anthologies of their past work, Lyle’s SCAM and Miller’s Ghost Pine. The morning after their reading at the Wooden Shoe anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia, I escaped my stifling wage job—still on the clock—to interview them in a park in West Philly.

Do you guys want to start by talking about the tour you’re on? You did an event here in Philly last night. You’re heading to Baltimore tonight. Can you talk about the idea behind the tour and also your books that have come out recently?Jeff Miller: Originally, the tour was my idea. I’ve been doing a lot of promotional events for the book in Canada and I kind of wanted to break out a little bit. I also feel like there’s not enough cross-border, cross-pollination of zines. Erick came up to Canada in 2008 and we did a couple shows and that went really well. I just thought it would be nice to meet some people in the States, try to sell some books, tell some stories, and travel around a little bit.

Erick Lyle: Yeah, it’s neighborly to get together like this—fostering international camaraderie. Jeff’s anthology came out pretty much the same time as mine. We’ve been pen pals for almost 10 years, so the timing was pretty good. I probably wouldn’t have gone on this trip, honestly, but since Jeff was gonna do it—it just seemed like a good idea. Like, “Oh that would be fun to team up on this.” And the timing was great because I have the SCAM anthology out now as well.

I think what’s cool about this tour is that we’ve read with a lot of different folks, and it’s been all over the map. Like in New York we read with Cristy Road and Mike Taylor who have made zines for years, but also with this guy Colin who does a blog about how he’s gonna eat pizza in every pizzeria in New York City. Or with this woman Eleanor Whitney who writes about art and design, and also food. We are reading with China Martins tonight who has done a zine for years about being a mom. So I think what pulls it all together, what it all has in common, is that it is the underground press; it is indie press. And we’re reading in indie stores, and that this is about supporting underground and independent alternatives. That it’s a vital thing to do, and that there is a community that exists outside of the mainstream that’s trying to continue this tradition of independent stores.

So like last night, we read here in Philly at the Wooden Shoe which is a place that’s been carrying my zine for like 20 years. They’ve got a great new space. It’s better than ever, so it’s nice to see that. Just trying to be a part of that all the time is really important to me. We’re going to Red Emma’s in Baltimore which is a worker-owned place. So that’s pretty cool.

And it’s interesting because Jeff works at a bookstore in Canada. I have worked at a bookstore before, and I’ve seen the corporate tour where the author comes and there’s 2 people. And our shows have been pretty packed, I would say. There is a vitality in the independent scene. It is a real deal. So it’s cool to see that. We’ve put a lot of work into this over the years and work’s coming back to us too. We’re enriching it together.

JM: I feel like one of the best things about being independent is that you’re resourceful enough and economic enough to get around and there’s a community of people that will help you get around and come out and support. And yeah, it feels really good to know that more people came out last night at the Wooden Shoe than come out when we do an event at the kind of corporate bookstore where I work in Canada. There, some best-selling author will read and there’s like 3 people, 4 people. So, like Erick was saying, it is a real demonstration of independent community, and not necessarily just a zine community. I think we’re really blessed to have a lot of overlap with music communities and activist scenes. People love to come out and hear stories. Our lives are so under-represented by current media and current literature that when independent voices come along, people respond strongly and it’s really amazing.

Well Jeff, you mentioned that you’ll be going back to Montreal to work at this bookstore. I was wondering if you could both talk about life after this tour in terms of how you’re supporting yourselves while continuing to create your art and everything?

EL: Well, I recently moved to New York City—I guess it’s been about a year—and, theoretically, it’s the most expensive city in the entire country. Although I moved from San Francisco and I feel that San Francisco is even more expensive in a certain way. So, it’s a hustle. But I don’t know, for me, it’s a lot of tried and true methods; like I steal all my groceries. New York is full of plentiful, dumpstered food. I was just talking about this with a friend at this cafe here. He was like, “Yeah man, last time I was in New York I dumpstered a bike and a bag of weed.” [Laughs] People are so rich they’re like, “I got a bike at home. I’m just gonna throw this one away. I don’t feel like riding it today.” [Laughs] So there’s plenty of excess, and that’s what we’ve been living off all these years. There’s plenty of copy scams to get the zines printed. We go on tour and sell the zines. So that’s a profit. But I don’t know. It’s the same old thing: scraping by, selling writing here and there.

The stuff that’s in this new issue of SCAM was originally freelance journalism that was printed in a newspaper and I wanted to re-present it to the punk scene. It was in the San Francisco Bay Guardian so I knew people weren’t gonna know about it. The usual SCAM readers weren’t gonna see that so I wanted to get it out to the bigger punk scene.

But it’s the same old scam, basically. Making it happen in any way. I just live in such a way that my priority is time, more than money. And that’s always been what SCAM magazine is about to me: the idea that you’re taking your life back, to devote it to the things that you want to do. That’s its own kind of work but it feels meaningful to me. I basically just spend all my time writing and doing things as much as I can for the creative stuff I want to do. And I’m always broke because of it, but I feel pretty good about it.

Oh also, the government of Canada pays me to not write zines. [Laughs]

JM: I don’t understand. [Laughs] Yeah, as far as money goes, it’s always been a struggle. But I feel like when you start monetizing the things that you care about, that’s when everything goes wrong, basically. If I were to say, “I’m gonna put, like, 50 hours into this zine and after I scam the copies I better make 10 dollars an hour.” If that’s your goal then you’re kind of doomed from the start. It’s just not gonna work out for you. So, I don’t know. It’s like Erick was saying, just living cheap and trying to keep as much time free as possible. I have a bunch of friends who are writers in Montreal and some of them have tried to find jobs where they can make enough money so that in the summer they have time to write or whatever. But I’ve always felt like that’s sort of a bad idea. The key, really, is to find a way to live on nothing. It gives you endurance as a writer if you’re scraping by somehow.

But yeah, in the 13 years of doing Ghost Pine it hasn’t been too much of a struggle. When you decide you want to do something you just have to fuckin’ do it and make it happen, despite all the obstacles that get thrown in your path. And maybe now it’s a lot easier just because I know the ins and outs of it through trial and error. And I’m more confident in myself, knowing that I can do it, pull it off and get better. So my advice would be just to accept being poor, strive on, and make whatever you need to make...
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The remainder of this conversation is published on Toward Freedom.

Matt Dineen lives and conspires in Philadelphia where he is part of the Wooden Shoe collective. He is also a publicist for radical activists and artists with Aid & Abet booking. You can write to him at: mattdineen@aidandabet.org and see things that he’s written and collected at: http://passionsandsurvival.blogspot.com

For more information about Erick Lyle and SCAM check out: http://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/zines/3124/
For more information about Jeff Miller and Ghost Pine check out: http://ghostpine.wordpress.com/

The Big Life Challenges Facing the 20-Something Generation

2010-09-17T14:53:00.004-04:00

People in their 20s are taking longer to start careers and get married. What's going on?

By Aliza Bartfield

People in their 20s are taking a perplexingly long time to grow up these days -- at least that's the story we're hearing in the media. According to this narrative, young people are stuck in a phase of arrested development, moving in with their parents more often and committing to jobs and marriages later. Most recently, the notion that young people refuse to grow up is the premise for a widely discussed New York Times magazine cover story, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?”

The title alone is enough to put a 20-something-year-old on the defensive. In the piece, "growing up" is defined by five goals: finishing school, leaving home, financial independence, getting married and having kids. Apparently, we're taking much longer than the previous generation to fulfill these goals, and therefore are failing to enter true adulthood.

While author Robin Marantz Henig concedes in the piece that these milestones can be fulfilled out of order and some never fulfilled at all, she nevertheless insists that 20-somethings are taking too long to grow up. We are “slouching toward adulthood at an uneven pace,” she claims, and this seems to be cause for concern.

The article explores a theory put forth by Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor who believes that those of us in our 20s are forming a new stage of life. He chooses the term “Emerging Adulthood” for the fickle time between student life and independent adulthood. It’s a unique stage, according to Arnett, that requires careful examination. For 10 years, he has been advocating for Emerging Adulthood to be recognized as an official developmental stage.

Henig explains this would necessitate new social accommodations; attitude shifts and programs to prevent what might otherwise devolve into years of aimless meandering. Proposed solutions include expanding post-graduate options like the Peace Corps or City Year. (Although a year or two of service work may leave one rich in experience, the meager education award of under $6,000 is barely enough to pay for one semester of college. This doesn’t seem like an optimal step toward financial freedom in our 20s.)

The classification of these years as a stage suggests we are less evolved on an emotional level, and maybe even in our mental abilities, than those who are older or went through this time in prior generations. Even if that's true, doesn’t everyone progress emotionally over time? If, instead, we see the odd behavior young people exhibit as the result of economic, cultural and social changes we may have a better shot at some pragmatic solutions.
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Read the rest of the article on Alternet.org

Looking Back on Capitalism, in Haiku

2010-08-23T13:27:00.003-04:00

By Matt Dineen

In the recent past
before the revolution
everyone worked.

Things were different
work was separate from meaning
work was meaningless.

Back then, some were rich
the rest were poor or in debt
work was survival.

Time was limited
true passions were not valued
they were just hobbies.

Greed and boredom ruled
imaginations suppressed
by clocks and bosses.

One year all that changed
seeds were planted all over
a new world was born.

We refused to work
wild dreams were cultivated
passions were realized.

Money disappeared
and life had meaning again
work was redefined.

We wake up each day
grateful of this great struggle
and what we now have.
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Submitted to a collection, a "large-scale reimagining," proposed by Cleveland-based writer and activist Kate Sopko who writes, "We’re in new times now, and new times call for new myths that answer to the times, making sense of the world as we know it. So, I want to start asking people a question: what could you use a myth to explain for you?" Read more on her blog: Stewards of the Lost Lands.

Contact Matt Dineen at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Reorganizing the Workplace: Call for Submissions

2010-06-29T18:15:00.003-04:00

Reposted from Briarpatch:

Queries due July 2, 2010
How can we reorganize our work - the means by which we sustain ourselves - to be more fulfilling, empowering and socially beneficial? What would a workplace that reflected our deepest values actually look like?
Briarpatch’s annual labour issue, “Reorganizing the Workplace” (Nov/Dec 2010), will explore alternative models for structuring workplaces. This theme is timely indeed, as Briarpatch itself is presently undergoing a shift to participatory economics and balanced job complexes in an effort to organize our workplace in a way that reflects our values of solidarity, self-management, cooperation and equality.
Especially at a time of economic uncertainty and ecological catastrophe, how are people within and beyond the labour movement responding in creative ways that change not just the balance of power in the workplace, but the nature of work itself?
If you’ve got something to contribute to this discussion, then we want to hear from you. We are looking for articles, essays, investigative reportage, news briefs, project profiles, interviews with luminary thinkers, reviews, poetry, humour, artwork & photography that shed light on issues related to workplace organization and activism. We are particularly interested in contributions informed by an anti-capitalist and anti-oppression analysis of labour and the workplace.
We also invite unions and other organizations who could use this issue of Briarpatch as an organizing/educational tool to get in touch to discuss opportunities for shared distribution, bulk issue orders and possible in-kind exchanges.
Possible topics include (but are no means limited to):

Case studies or profiles of alternative models for workplace organization, either locally or internationally;
Creative responses to the recession, both within and outside the organized labour movement;
Experiments in extricating ourselves from the capitalist economy through skill-sharing, mutual aid, bartering, local currencies, etc.;
The non-profit industrial complex: the role of non-profits and service provision in social movements and the politics of working in these sectors;
Organizing among migrant and undocumented workers, exclusion of migrant workers from Canadian labour laws and barriers to unionization;
The crisis of child care in Canada;
Challenges facing the labour movement, efforts to reinvigorate traditional approaches to labour organizing;
The role of the labour movement in fostering international solidarity;
Reviews of relevant books that tackle these or other related issues.

Queries are due July 2. If your query is accepted, first drafts are due August 6. Your query should outline what ground your contribution will cover, give an estimated word count, and indicate your relevant experience or background in writing about the issue. If you haven’t written for Briarpatch before, please provide a brief writing sample.
Please review our submission guidelines before submitting. Send your queries/submissions to editor AT briarpatchmagazine D0T com.
We reserve the right to edit your work (with your active involvement), and cannot guarantee publication.

Seeds of the New

2010-04-11T16:30:00.010-04:00

A talk by Nowtopia author Chris Carlsson

"My whole work life, for years, was always characterized by the fact that I was doing something for money but I wasn't that--I was something else, usually quite a few other things. And I think that's a pretty characteristic experience for a lot of people in the last 20 to the 30 years. It's that our lives are split, in a really profound way, between how we survive in a capitalist world and what we do to feel fully engaged as human beings."
Listen HERE for a recording of a presentation by Chris Carlsson from Setember 1st, 2006, at Bluestockings in New York. Chris is discussing the book he was writing at the time, tentatively titled "The Seeds of the New," which was released by AK Press under the title "Nowtopia" in 2008. The talk was recorded by Stevphen Shukaitis.

Call for Submissions from the UK

2010-03-08T16:33:00.004-05:00

Class (still) Matters*

This is an informal call-out for contributions for a zine/pamphlet I am putting together on class, it feels overdue, but also in good time, what with the recession and ever widening socio-economic inequality in the UK (and elsewhere); the use of class by political parties recently to try and win support in the forthcoming election; class stereotypes around how particular ‘classes’ feel about immigration; climate change policies that tend to involve raising prices, which in affect means that working class/poor people are asked to contribute and sacrifice more, but arguably benefit least, but also I am interested in less conventional explorations of class – class as a process, feeling etc.
I am particularly interested in the loose themes outlined below, but I want to know what class means and feels like for you, in your words, pictures or however you express yourself.
-the relationship between economic and emotional scarcity
-notions of the ‘poverty mentality’
-intersections of class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality and so on, and experiences of inhabiting multiple marginalities
-being working class and in academia
-the need to prove oneself
-creativity and class/art and survival – i.e. staying in touch with your creativity when meeting basic needs are a struggle.
-class and the body -how class is worn/felt/affects how you use space.
-class and trauma – I am especially interested in notions of bodily remberance (the relationship between memories and flesh), how trauma lives on the skin and so on
-how you understand class/your class? i.e. is class a position or process, how does education effect ones class location etc?
As you can see this is all very rough, but meant merely as an impression of intentions and suggestions. If you are interested in contributing please contact me at: Sabr1na_s@yahoo.co.uk preferably by mid/late March to express interest or send contributions. In order to include as many contributions as possible I ask that contributions don’t exceed 4 pages. Thanks!
-Sabrina
* a nod to the wonderful Bell Hooks and her book Class Matters.

--
Reposted from Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism

Recession Diaries

2009-12-03T15:46:00.004-05:00

Tales of Philly's young, educated and underemployed.

By Daniel Denvir

[Excerpted from the Philadelphia Weekly...]
Twenty- and 30-somethings are heading back to the basement in droves. According to a recent AFL-CIO report, about one in three workers under the age of 35 has been forced to move back in with their parents. Wall Street boosters and politicians may herald an economic recovery (despite the unemployment rate creeping past 10 percent or 17.5 percent if you include the underemployed and those who just gave up looking for work), but it’s more than clear that the so-called comeback has not trickled down to young people, who are more unemployed than at any time since the government started to keep track in 1948.
While people of color and the less educated are getting hit the hardest— 17.1 percent of black males are unemployed—things are quickly deteriorating for the college-educated work force. Experts say that one in five college graduates say they’re overqualified for their current jobs. It’s no surprise that I myself haven’t had the easiest time cobbling together a paycheck given that I’m somewhat blithely walking into a collapsing news industry. Many of my friends, however, young people with bachelors and graduate degrees and more reasonable goals, are struggling, too. Here in Philly, where the unemployment rate is just above the national average (11 percent in September), many of my peers—knocked way off their career paths—are joining countless others working in so-called survival jobs.
---

Daniel Denvir is a freelance writer independent journalist based in West Philly. He is a contributing writer at the Philadelphia Weekly and more can be found at http://www.danieldenvir.com/
Read the article in its entirety at: philadelphiaweekly.com

"Redemptive Moments Without Disaster"

2009-09-20T10:45:00.004-04:00

"We devote much of our lives to achieving certainty, safety, and comfort, but with them often comes ennui and a sense of meaninglessness; the meaning is in the struggle, or can be, and one of the complex questions for those who need not struggle for basic survival is how to engage passionately with goals and needs that keep such drive alive...Much in the marketplace urges us toward safety, comfort, and luxury--they can be bought--but purpose and meaning are less commidifiable phenomena, and a quest for them often sends seekers against the current of their society."

-Rebecca Solnit, from her latest book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Whittled Down Inspiration

2009-09-17T20:50:00.004-04:00

I was delighted and honored to discover a really insightful post on my friend Libby Reinish's blog today. As you'll see below, she articulates her struggles (and recent breakthrough) with the dilemma that I have described here over the years, and graciously cites my old radio show and this project as an inspiration for her thoughts.

Libby was an early pioneer in the creation of Valley Free Radio before I joined the station's board of directors. She left the area to be the Prometheus Radio Project's full power-FM coordinator, guiding social justice organizations through the FCC bureaucracy to start their own radio stations. Now that I live 2 blocks down the street from Prometheus' office in West Philadelphia, Libby is Santa Fe, NM where she founded her own nonprofit, Santa Fe Community Gardens empowering local folks with the education and resources for growing their own food.

This self-described "community media activist turned urban homesteader" has also spent the last couple years, "[d]ocumenting my attempts at reducing the amount of trash I accumulate, the energy I waste, and the money I spend, while improving the food that I eat, honing some new skills, and learning to have fun without consuming so goddamn much," on her fantastic blog Whittled Down.

It's funny how inspiration works. After a few months of dormancy I have something to share with you all here, and an urgency to share more soon about my own experiences and observations. For now, here's Libby's...
-Matt Dineen
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Passions and Survival

My friend Matt Dineen used to have a wonderful radio show on our local station, Valley Free Radio, called Passions and Survival. He still maintains a blog by the same name, which you should check out. His show explored what has been a central question in my life; how do we manage to follow our passions in life while managing to meet our needs for survival? I have struggled with this problem particularly since relocating to Santa Fe, where the job market was tight even before the recession and interesting organizations were hard to come by.

My initial solution was to separate passion and survival completely. I got a regular job so that I could make money to survive, and I endeavored to maintain my passions (which are outlined in detail on this blog) in my "spare time". As it turns out, this is a terrible plan. Being stuck in a chair in an office under the watchful eye of your boss, doing pointless work and getting treated like crap, is, as many of you are keenly aware, unbearable. It becomes more and more difficult to tend to your responsibilities at work because all you want to do is go home and plant things or play music or organize a gardening workshop or what have you.

My unhappiness at work was becoming so extreme and my desperation to escape so intense that I could barely stand it. What I did is probably a lot easier than for some people than it was for me. I quit. Without a plan (I really like plans). I had some savings that were supposed to go towards purchasing land, but I knew that if I didn't make this break now that before I knew it I would be a 30-year-old receptionist with a useless BA and no soul left in her body. I had no idea how much of this fund for my future would be exhausted as I held out for a job that meant something to me, but I was prepared to go the long haul.

As it turned out, I got lucky. Or the universe rewarded me for being brave. I found a wonderful new job that allows me to use my passions for history, media production, organizing, and even sustainable living. The position is part-time, and though that's a challenge financially, there are several benefits to working less than 40 hours a week. After a few months on the job, I can tell you that for me, running low on cash at the end of every pay period is much less stressful than feeling constantly drained at home and bored at work.

Working part time means that I always have enthusiasm and energy to bring to my job, because I don't feel overworked. When I need to put in extra hours to get something done, I don't think twice about it. Most days though, when 2 o'clock rolls around I breeze out of the office and find myself ready to get to work around the homestead by 3. Having more time and energy for projects at home means spending less money on stuff I can make for less, like bread, cheese, veggies, and household stuff like the bicycle wheel pot rack. Oh yeah, and there's more time for the nonprofit I run on the side. Are my savings growing faster than radishes, like they were when I worked 40 hours a week at a law firm? Hell no. Do I care? Yeah, it bugs me sometimes. But I think that I can find a way to save for my future without sacrificing my well-being in the present. With all this extra time on my hands, I just might be able to find ways to make a little extra cash without having to work for someone else. Now wouldn't that be nice.
---
Originally posted on Libby's blog Whittled Down which you can read here.

Solidarity in Slowmotion

2009-05-03T20:36:00.003-04:00

By Charles Hale

Between sips of Miller High Life I glance down the length of the bar: there is a twenty-six year old PHD candidate in mathematics; the assistant to the dean of the graduate school in her early thirties; a girl with more tattoos than fingers; our 53 year old elder statesmen, and me a window cleaner.

It is Monday evening and after we finish this round of drinks at The Jubilee we will begin our weekly shuffleboard tournament. More than likely these same people will be in the same bar at least three more nights this week. None of us are married, only one of us has ever been, and none of us seem to feel any pressure to do so.

Outside observers may accuse us of living a prolonged college existence or wallowing in some kind of slacker lifestyle. Yet these people have serious work ethics, spending our energy on personal progress instead of professional goals. This is a choice we have made and continue to make despite sacrificing things like financial security and health insurance. Throughout this night and other nights the people that come by and say hello, are people who have, like I have, chosen this life of quiet autonomy and solidarity over doing what we have been told for a lifetime we ought to do.

To really understand how this life that I and so many around me here live is so different than what the American public thinks life ought to be, I only have to look at my brother. He graduated college a year after I did; during his sophomore year an older friend from church suggested he get a summer job with his company. My brother took him up on the offer and by the time he graduated they had offered him a professional position. He’s been promoted and transferred several times. He’s married to the girl he dated in college, they own a house, and in August they had their first child. Most of their college friends are married and have ‘real’ jobs. The ones that don’t are whispered about when they all get together. My brother has a good life and is happy.

His social network is small and doesn’t really grow. He probably has a couple of Bud Light’s in the fridge but he couldn’t tell you when he last had more than three in one night. His life is as normal to him as mine is to me. These are the choices he has made and most days he is pleased with them.

This essay is not about how much someone in this town can drink and on how many consecutive nights without being ostracized. This is not an essay about the ability to work below your qualification level without whispers of a life wasted. And this essay isn’t about me saying that my life is superior to someone else’s. There aren’t any bras being burned in front of the courthouse here, and no one is sticking flowers in the barrel of a gun, but this doesn’t mean the way people are living isn’t revolutionary. Slowly, significantly transformative.

Like the clothes I tend to wear and my general approach to life, this is a casual revolution. One without organization or manifesto and certainly without membership dues, or listservs. One’s position isn’t changed by the quality of their employment or any external factors. Actually there are no positions whatsoever. No one at the weekly shuffleboard tournament wants to live differently, and these lifestyle choices that have been made are made based on the only criteria that matter: their own pleasure, their own affiliation and affinity.

Some Mondays there are as few as six players in the tournament and some nights there are as many as 16, but the number of participants doesn’t much matter. Neither does winning, as I am often a loser, but hate to miss a week. This doesn’t mean that I’m a terrible shuffleboard player; if there is a beer or tequila shots on the line I can take out most anyone in the room. But the point of the shuffleboard tournament is a good time, is friendship, which always extends longer than the actual matches.

Winning doesn’t necessarily mean I advance to the next round of the tournament, winning is a condition of fulfilling the standards and expectations I place on myself. This is how the shuffleboard tournament and life in this town intersect. The people around here that I associate with are winning because they are fulfilling the standards and expectations they place on themselves. We have chosen to place personal progress above societal standards. We are living here; in the manner that we are because we have found what we are looking for. Of course there are some living here that are living lives nearly identical to mine because they haven’t found what they are looking for yet, and the difference in the two is merely in attitude.

There are people around here that leave, marry and have children, or get ‘real’ jobs and don’t get out as much. In the same breath we envy and pity them. The only standard on which we base our judgment of their decision is their contentment.

As a window cleaner my status falls somewhere between glorified housecleaner and unskilled construction worker. But it is the job I have chosen and the job I continue to show up for. I could wax nostalgic about the Zen qualities of the window cleaning profession, because they are there, but there are more significant reasons why I like my job. Almost everyday is different and I am able to see inside of people’s homes and lives without feeling like a stalker or voyeur. It is a job that allows me to be outside and away from a cubicle, and it is a job that I can leave at the job site. I could tell you that I take pride in clearing the view to the outside for my wealthy customers; that I hope giving them clean windows will change the way they view the world.

These things are more or less true, but they are not the reason I go to work everyday. I go because I see a pane of glass differently than anyone else in this town. I go because I’m good at it, because it is something I do as opposed to who I am. I go because I know what a worse job feels like; one that strangles the life out of you and replenishes you with nothing more than a meager paycheck. I go because it allows me to enjoy the more important things in life; like Monday evening shuffleboard tournaments.
---
This essay is anti-copyright but republished here by permission from the latest issue of Fifth Estate. More info at FifthEstate.org

Honest Living

2009-04-27T12:56:00.003-04:00

This is from Isabell Moore about her project Honest Living which is asking some of the same questions as Passions and Survival. Please post and forward...

Hey Friends,

I've been working on a project called "Honest Living" throughout this semester, as my final project for school. Its about how people who care about social justice and radical social change figure out how to make a living. A lot of folks I know (myself included) struggle with what direction we want to go in our lives, and how to make a living within a system we don't agree with, in a way that is personally sustainable.

Please check out this new blog that I started and get involved in the conversation!

http://honestliving.wordpress.com/

I'm hoping that through the blog, we'll be able to have some conversations about processes that help people figure out issues of vocation, and that I'll be able to share some of what I've been learning as I've done research for school.

Also, I want to learn more about your experiences with work, money and social change. Please visit my survey at:

http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HLJKM_198ea0e5

Thanks!!!

Your pal,
Isabell

Chasing Windmills (Revisited)

2009-04-17T11:57:00.008-04:00

Recently, I have thought about an article I wrote 7 years ago. Not so much the article itself but larger issues it addressed. Inspired by a 1960's antiwar activist's charge of living one's life in a way that "does not make a mockery of one's values," I reflected on the prospects of continuing to lead a principled existence after college--in the compromising, shark-infested waters of the so-called "real world."

The article, first published in the student newspaper and then in Clamor, told the story of my interaction with an alumna of the college and her thesis which I discovered on the life of the legendary anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman. I contacted her through the alumni association and soon learned that she had become a high powered, corporate lawyer working in the Manhattan office of one the nation's largest firms. This experience forced me to address the privileges of my idealism and negotiate a sense of self-righteousness with the complex implications of my own post-collegiate future.

After turning 28 last week, I now find myself in that future moment that I pontificated about as a student. About as far away from being a corporate lawyer as one could possibly imagine, I think that 21 year-old me would be proud of my resiliency in avoiding compromise or "selling out" over the past 7 years. But there's nothing glorifying about being in denial of student loan debt that still looms over me or being uninsured and unemployed. Or is there?

The title of my article was appropriated from the project about Emma Goldman: Chasing Windmills. Just as Goldman quixotically pursued her anarchist ideal after being deported from the US because of her incendiary beliefs, I pledged to continue to live in accordance with my politics.

What actually evoked the 2002 article was learning that someone I grew up with also moved to Philadelphia recently and reflecting on the vastly different paths that led us both to this city. He moved here to begin a career upon completion of a PhD. I moved here for love and to simply start over. In true 21st Century fashion, I only know this through the Internet, where we are "friends" on a popular social networking website. My old little league teammate has proudly documented his new life here through photographs of his upscale apartment and backyard patio along with brief life updates such as the recent gourmet meal he consumed at a ristorante in his neighborhood.

There might be a river that seperates where we live here but perhaps the social and economic barriers that divide us are more artificial than my initial reaction would indicate. Maybe not. We have both been invited to attend our 10 year high school reunion next month, to reunite with people that neither of us have seen since then; who, unlike us, have not left since graduation. I think about getting in touch with him and catching up. It would be interesting to see where our experiences and aspirations overlap and where they diverge. If nothing else, I could ask him for a ride back home for the reunion.

-Matt Dineen

Philadelphia Chronicles: Part One

2009-03-27T17:00:00.008-04:00

I moved to Philadelphia on New Year's Eve with no safety net. Well, at least not economically. During the 3 months that I've lived here I have faced a number of challenges as far as following my passions while also managing to get by goes. Much of this has been related to the process of transitioning from one place to settling in somewhere new. From the bureaucratic nightmares of forwarding mail and opening a bank account to just figuring out how to frugally access resources in an unfamiliar city.

Before I moved to Philly I planned on structuring an independent work week in which I would get up every morning (at least Monday through Friday) and spend the days working on my own projects: Booking tours and doing publicity work with Aid & Abet, the activist booking agency I started with former Clamor editor Jen Angel, along with publishing my own writing. The idea was that if I worked on this stuff as if it were a full-time job then I could get paid enough to sustain myself, to at least be able to scrape by without an hourly wage job working for someone else.

The first challenge that arose involved my previous hourly wage job working for someone else, in Massachusetts. I was depending on my final paycheck being mailed to me in a timely fashion, as my former boss had promised, in order to get by during my first month in Philly. What actually transpired is a long frustrating story that, most significantly, involved that promise being broken/forgotten and me not having access to the money that I worked hard for until early February; over one month after the fact.

In addition to the immediate material problems that this situation posed, it affected me psychologically in terms of my ability to work on my own projects full-time. With no money in sight I was distracted from fulfilling this goal. The economic imperatives of survival trumped my motivation and desires. With basic needs like access to food becoming uncertain, I began to delve into the dark, disempowering world of job hunting. But because my heart was never in it, because I never intended to begin my experience here working for someone else, this process simultaneously impeded my own projects and only served to perpetuate my lack of income.

This brings up larger systemic challenges that I have been confronted with in this new city: The cultural and economic pressure to conform to the capitalist work ethic along with the dominant definitions of work and employment. Because our identities in the US are so shaped by our occupations, it's hard not to internalize a certain amount of shame around "unemployment." This is the case even as we struggle to redefine what work means by devoting endless hours to the things we are passionate about--often for little or no money. It can involve more risk than most folks are able to take though, as debts multiple or we become ostracized by family members and peers, among countless additional challenges. The system is designed to prevent many of us from even attempting to engage in new ways of living and working.

I continue to struggle with this especially amidst the economic crisis that seems to be profoundly affecting this city and the entire world. My work booking tours and writing still has not been able to provide me with enough money to live, but that continues to be the goal.

-Matt Dineen

Update and 'Downward Mobility' Story

2009-03-20T10:42:00.005-04:00

Hello everybody. First of all, I just want to announce that I will be updating this "blog" more often now. In fact, my goal is to post something new every Friday...starting today! So make sure to check back again next week for the next installment. It will be a mix of: my personal reflections on a variety of issues related to this topic of surviving under capitalism while simultaneously struggling to actualize my passions, what I truly want to be doing with my life; transcribed interviews with other folks discussing their experiences with this dilemma; and other essays and conversations that I find relevant to this project.

I have been living in Philadelphia since the final day of 2008 and have a lot to share about my experience here. That will likely be the theme of next week's post. For now, I just want to share one short story about something that happened recently...

In early February, I went back to Massachusetts with a friend who also recently moved to Philly from there. On the ride back we were talking about a cafe in my neighborhood here where a lot of punks and activists hang out and she mentioned the one time that she had been. She overheard a frustrating conversation some folks were having that inspired her to write some grafitti in the bathroom (where chalk to write on the walls is provided) about "downward mobility."

When I got back I discovered, and appreciated, what she wrote. Then a couple weeks later, I came across an essay on the excellent website Enough, written by its co-founder Tyrone Boucher, that was inspired by my friend's grafitti! I got in touch with Tyrone, who apparently lives in the same neighborhood as me, and shared this connection. We are meeting up for coffee next week to discuss issues around wealth, privilege, and "the personal politics of resisting capitalism." I'm obsessed with the potential of ideas spreading, and how they are like seeds being planted. We hope that they grow into something bigger eventually, beyond just words on a screen or a bathroom wall...

-Matt Dineen

Final Episode of "Passions and Survival" on VFR

2009-01-05T11:59:00.003-05:00

After nearly 3 years, Matt Dineen produced the final episode of Passions and Survival on Valley Free Radio WXOJ-LP in Northampton, MA on Monday December 29th. Since January 2006, the program explored the collective dilemma of following our passions while surviving and transforming capitalist society, mostly in conversation with amazing activists and artists in Western Mass. Listen to the recording here!

Seth Tobocman Performance and Interview

2008-12-11T16:52:00.004-05:00

Political artist and founding editor of World War 3 Illustrated Seth Tobocman performs pieces from his latest book Disaster and Resistance (AK Press) on the Valley Free Radio program "Passions and Survival" in Northampton, MA. Fellow World War 3 editor Rebecca Migdal also performs a piece. They were joined by musicians Steve Wishnia, Eric Blitz, and Andy Laties before a conversation with host Matt Dineen. Recorded on October 13, 2008.

Listen to the recording here.

On the Lower Frequencies: An Interview with Author Erick Lyle

2008-07-11T12:38:00.007-04:00

By Matt Dineen

When I was asked if the community radio station I'm involved in would like to co-sponsor an event with legendary zinesters Erick Lyle (aka, Iggy Scam) author of Scam and Cindy Crabb (Doris), I enthusiastically signed us on right away. Before their reading at Food For Thought Books Collective in Amherst, MA, I was going to interview Erick on my radio show about his brand new book, On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City, and about the struggle to do what you love while surviving in a capitalist society. But that interview didn't happen. They were doing a late night event in New York featuring a performance by one of Erick's bands, Onion Flavored Rings, and my show is pretty earlier in the morning. So we just waited until after the event to chat.

Going into the interview I was inspired from their reading in which they took turns sharing stories from their books and zines. Cindy read about moving to the Ohio countryside and the challenge of talking about politics again without being dogmatic, while Erick told San Francisco tales of the city's most infamous 25 hour-a-day donut shop, transforming an abandon building on Market St. into a cultural center, and an April Fools Day "Pro-War" march right after the Iraq War began. I rode in their borrowed tour van back to Northampton, Ramones on the stereo, where Erick and I sat outside the local bowling alley off the freeway onramp and had the following conversation about writing, work, his book, and creating the kind of world we want to live in.

How do you usually respond when people ask you, "What do you do?" What does that question mean to you?

EL: What do I do? Well, I guess I've always felt like I'm a writer since I was a little kid. It's how I see the world—in terms of being a writer. I don't ever take pictures of things on vacations and stuff like that. I'm always just describing things in my head. I think writing informs my basic interaction with the world. And I've never thought of myself as an activist and all that, but I have always thought of myself as a writer.

Can you talk about living in San Francisco and not working a full-time wage job and what that means for someone who identifies as a writer?

EL: Well, it depends on what you call work. I haven't had a real, straight job in almost 20 years, but I live in one of the most expensive cities in the country to live in. So this is the paradox. I would say that I'm part of a community of folks in San Francisco—activists, writers, artists—that work harder than anybody, that are working like 80, 90 hours a week on their own projects. When I was at the Coalition on Homelessness working there, people didn't quit working until 10, 11 at night and then a lot of people slept in the office. None of those folks are really getting paid but it's their life's work to do this stuff.

In the book I talk about this street newspaper I used to do called, The Turd-Filled Donut with my best friend Ivy. We were putting out this skid row newspaper, living in welfare hotels and writing about the neighborhood, trying to highlight people's struggles: For tenants to organize against their shitty hotel owners, or for homeless people who were organizing to demand housing and things like that. We spent hours, all the time working on this paper, interviewing people, editing the paper, getting art for it, putting it out on the streets. It was a free newspaper. We gave it away. So that's work, but it's not work for financial remuneration.

That's kind of the subject of my buddy from San Francisco Chris Carlsson's new book [Nowtopia], how people are looking for community and meaningful work outside of, let's say, wage slavery. You know, most of the work that people are doing is completely meaningless and is not benefitting themselves or each other or the planet. It's just totally busy work and people are really dissatisfied with it. So there's all kinds of folks that are willing to work themselves to the bone 25 hours a day for what they believe in, but we're not working for…I haven't had a service industry job or something for a long time. The last real job I had was in 2000, I worked at a queer youth homeless shelter. That was the last "official" job I had. Since then, it's been freelance writing, crime, things like that…make ends meet. That's how it is. But always working on other stuff like putting on punk shows, protests, putting out a magazine that doesn't really pay for itself.

I think that element of community is so important, like the one in San Francisco you are part of, and relating that to the social pressure that a lot of people who don't have a community like that face. They can have these ideas, wanting to work on their own projects, doing things that aren't completely defined by a status job. But then they have pressure from their families, the larger society and just the economic realities of daily life. And that can be challenging even for people who do have really supportive communities.

EL: Yeah, I mean, things are awful right now with the economic situation…We're so far from changing things. We're sitting next to a freeway onramp. Everything is geared toward people having to drive everywhere they need to go. The food's being trucked in. The wage level is so low. The work is unskilled. People are working practically minimum wage. They need two or three jobs to make it. The economic situation in this country definitely makes it so that people are totally alienated and isolated. It's very cutthroat. It's an awful situation.

Some things you see are positive examples, like tonight we had an event sponsored by several collectives. People have come together to collectivize their workplace. That's one step in a positive direction. Is that gonna happen everywhere? I don't know. I don't think that invalidates the work that my community does, to say that we don't have an answer for how to get out of Wal-Mart or something. I know there are movements nationwide of people trying to hold these chain stores accountable for their labor practices, for their environmental practices...

Read this interview in its entirety at TowardFreedom.com
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Matt Dineen is a writer and the host of Passions and Survival, a weekly program on Valley Free Radio in Northampton, MA. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Home of the Brave?

2008-04-05T11:02:00.005-04:00

A Vision of the U.S. Beyond Money

By John Steinsvold

Economists concede that economics is an inexact science. What does that mean? Perhaps it means their economic forecast is better than yours or mine. Recently, economic indicators have been rising and people have their fingers crossed. Economists have given us reason to hope that the job market will improve and that the stock market will continue on a steady climb. Yet, the newspapers continue to report more layoffs and more jobs going overseas.

Meanwhile, our economy is getting more and more complex. We associate complexity with progress for some ungodly reason. The following problems, however, have become inherent in our economy. What does that mean? It means they will be around for a while:

Needless poverty, unemployment, inflation, the threat of depression, taxes, crimes related to profit (sale of illicit drugs, stolen IDs, muggings, bribery, con artists, etc.), conflict of interest, endless red tape, a staggering national debt plus a widening budget deficit, 48 out of 50 states in debt, cities in debt, counties in debt, skyrocketing personal debts, 50% of Americans unhappy at their work, saving for retirement and our children's education, health being a matter of wealth, competing in the "rat race", the need for insurance, being a nation of litigation, being subject to the tremors on Wall Street, fear of downsizing and automation, fear of more Enrons, outsourcing, bankruptcies, crippling strikes, materialism, corruption, welfare, social security, sacrificing quality and safety in our products for the sake of profit, the social problem of the "haves" vs. the "havenots" and the inevitable family quarrels over money.

Have we become gluttons for punishment? My college professor once said, "You can get used to hanging if you live long enough!"

We Americans love our freedom; yet, we have allowed the use of money to completely dominate our way of life. Indeed, we are no longer a free people. We are 7.4 trillion dollars in debt. We live in fear of depression, inflation, inadequate medical coverage and losing our jobs. Our freedom is at stake if not our very survival. Yet, we put our collective heads in the sand.

Yes, there is something we can do. We can look into ourselves for an answer. We may find that we have the strength to carry out our internal economic affairs without the need to use money. Yes, we will still need to use money when dealing with other countries.

There is no question that a way of life without money will alleviate if not completely eliminate all of the previously mentioned problems. Yet, we scoff at the idea. We are totally convinced that money is a necessity. We cannot imagine life without money. Perhaps the time has come to think otherwise. It is completely obvious our present economy no longer satisfies our present day needs. As individuals, we will gain complete economic freedom. In return, a way of life without money demands only that we, as individuals, do the work we love to do. It is a win/win situation. Let us consider the following arguments:

Can we learn to distribute our goods and services according to need (on an ongoing basis) rather than by the ability to pay? Why not? Poverty and materialism will be eliminated! Our sense of value will change. Wealth will no longer be a status symbol. A man will be judged by what he is; not by what he has. He will be judged by his achievements, leadership, ideas, artistic endeavours or athletic prowess; not by the size of his wallet. Yes, everything will be free according to need. All the necessities and common luxuries will be available on a help yourself basis at the local store. Surely, this country is capable of supplying the necessities and common luxuries for everyone in this country many times over.

The more "expensive" items, such as housing, cars, boats, etc. would be provided for on a priority basis. For example, the homeless would provided housing ahead of those living in crowded quarters. How will this priority be established? Perhaps a local board elected by the people in the neighborhood such as a school board. Or perhaps the school boards could absorb this responsibility in addition to their present duties.

Since cooperation will replace competition, can government, industry and the people learn to work together as a team to meet the economic needs of our nation as well as each individual? Again, why not? Yes, competition is great; but cooperation is even better. Cooperation avoids duplication of effort. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have everybody freely working together, sharing ideas, thoughts and technical knowledge? Patents and industrial secrets would be a thing of the past. Competition, however, will still be around. Individuals will still compete with their co-workers in ideas, achievements, leadership and getting promotions.

For example, Ford, Chrysler & GM would work together to build automobiles that are truly safe and efficient and environmentally friendly. Perhaps, with everyone working together, we can invent a car engine that would eliminate the need to import oil from the Middle East. (Note: Ford, Chrysler & GM would gradually become one entity.)

Unfortunately, what immediately jumps into the minds of most people is: "It simply won't work!" The idea of a way of life without money is then dismissed without further thought. After all, what motivation is there for people to work if there is no paycheck? How can we possibly satisfy the labor needs of our nation? The following reasons are offered why people would be completely happy working in a way of life without money: Today, only 50% of Americans enjoy their work. That will change. In a way of life without money, we will all be free to do the work we want to do or even love to do without any economic fear. We will be free to pursue our passion or as Joseph Campbell suggests we "follow our bliss".

Cooperation will replace wasteful competition. We will all work together as a team. Work will become a way to help people, to meet people or to be part of something meaningful. It is a proven fact that people like to help one another. An esprit de corps will naturally build up and make work more enjoyable. Even the most menial task becomes easier when people work together. Yes, work will become more of a "togetherness" thing.

The profit motive will no longer be a hindrance to efficiency. There will be no need to sacrifice quality and safety in our products for the sake of profit. We will, like in the olden days, take pride in our work. Yes, there is very likely to be a shortage of people volunteering to do the more menial tasks. One option is to offer "perks". A perk can be of various forms such as front row season tickets to the opera or to his or her favorite sports team. Can you imagine an NBA basketball game where the celebrities are sitting in the back rows while the dishwashers and janitors are at courtside? (My apologies to Spike Lee & Jack Nicholson!) Or the perk could be the latest model boat or sports car which would not be immediately available to the public. Another option is to draft everyone once in their lifetime, to do a half year or so stint at a menial task. Perhaps a humbling experience is in order for all of us. It might serve us well in the area of character building.

Also, consider the fact that perhaps millions of people will be freed from jobs associated with the use of money. Millions more that are now unemployed or on welfare will also be available to help fill the labor needs of our country. Thus, we will have the work force necessary to do the work which is not economically feasible in our present economy such as cleaning our environment (land, sea & air), conservation, recycling, humanitarian work, research in medicine, education, science & space and now we can include national security.

Perhaps the most difficult problem is in the administration of a way of life without money. Can we learn to determine our economic needs, allocate our resources from the federal on down to the neighborhood levels? Perhaps some sort of economic bodies must be created to coordinate, monitor and carryout our economic needs. These economic bodies would exist similar to our governments, one for the federal, one for each state and one for each local level.Yes, in order to administrate a way of life without money, economic bodies, boards or councils or whatever you wish to call them would be created to absorb economic responsibility from our various governments. They will interact and cooperate with one another to meet the economic needs of our country and of each individual. They will be empowered by Congress to tend to the economic needs of its constituents. Thus, a balance of power will be safely maintained.

Our federal needs, which would be similar to the federal budget we have today, will be resolved by an economic body comprised of representatives of the various branches of government, our industrial & labor resources, research (in medicine, education, science & space), our environment, conservation, importing & exporting, and now, national security and whatever facet of our way of life should be represented. This economic body will arrange for the labor and material resources necessary to meet the economic needs of our nation.

Similarly, the same will occur at the state and local levels. The economic body at the local levels will be responsible for providing services to the people in the neighborhood. If the labor needs cannot be met with volunteer workers, "perks" must be offered. Also, the economic body at the local levels will be responsible for keeping the stores stocked with food, clothing and the common luxuries which will be available free. Thus, the economic needs of the nation right on down to the neighborhood levels would be determined and satisfied by these economic bodies.

How much economic responsibility will these new bodies absorb from our federal, state and local governments? How much will be shared? Can a balance of power be maintained? At any rate, our federal, state and local governments will be relieved of considerable amount of economic responsibility. Thus, our various governments will be free to catch up on all the other domestic and foreign issues that face us.

Yes, we will still import and export goods with foreign countries as our needs dictate; but what money will be used in place of the almighty dollar? Would the dollar have any value if everything is free in the USA? Would that be a problem? We would, however, still be able to use the currency of the country we are doing business with. For example, if we export goods to Germany, we would accept marks or euros in payment. The euros would then be deposited in our national treasury for future use. The money could then be used to import goods or perhaps send Americans overseas on vacation.

Yes, a way of life without money could be compared to the kibbutz which now exist in Israel. Can you picture the USA as one big kibbutz? However, ownership of property will remain the same as it is today. Our government will remain the same. Our free enterprise system will remain in place as it is today. There will be no need for money or any substitute for money since everything will be free.

The advantages of a way of life without money stagger the imagination; but they are real and cannot be disputed. Perhaps it is time for us to grab the brass ring.

"The Human Race has improved everything except the Human Race." -Adlai Stevenson
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Article republished from The American Daily.

Happy Leap Day!

2008-02-29T13:30:00.003-05:00

Leap Day Action

2008 is leap year -- a fantastic opportunity to leap into something new. Are you gonna to use your extra day like you use so many other days -- toiling away at your job to make the bosses richer? Using up more of the earth's resources while the forests, the oceans and free communities are being killed? Watching it all go on around you -- an "information consumer" -- feeling helpless to do anything to resist it?

Life is far too short to spend days, weeks, years just getting by -- getting treated like an object. How much of your life do you really get to control? How often are you really fully alive and free?
If you wish things were different and dream about a better world, you're not alone. Vast numbers of people from all walks of life realize that life as we know it isn't satisfying our real needs and has to change. But hoping and dreaming isn't enough.

Lots of people have developed and articulated ideas for how life could be transformed. We need to love each other, take care of each other, share and cooperate, live with the earth instead of destroying it, and embrace diversity, not hatred and violence. Social structures that promote power and inequality need to be dismantled, and arrangements that promote freedom and sustainability constructed in their place.

So if things are to change, how can each of us be part of creating these changes? Most people feel like they're too isolated as individuals to really do much of anything effective against a massive, entrenched system. This collective feeling of individual helplessness and inertia is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- but it isn't real -- it is just a collective illusion.

Those in charge encourage feelings of isolation, helplessness and passivity in a million ways. They want everyone to individually conclude that nothing very big or important can change -- that the big things have to be the way they are. They love cynicism, resignation and isolation. They fear community and discussion about alternatives. But most of all, they fear action -- the moment when individuals take matters into their own hands and stop just hoping for a better world.

Anyone and everyone can take action. Taking action means moving from wishing things would change to changing them -- in your family, in your neighborhood, in your workplace, in your school . . . in your own mind. Change in your mind is the most accessible change and yet often the most difficult -- we're all embedded in deep patterns that hold us back from building change out in the world. We've learned to feel powerless and take for granted lots of fucked up power relations. Working on changing our internal mental state goes hand and hand with taking action to change the external world. As we take action in the real world. we help liberate the parts of our mind that hold us back. Each new experience with action -- creating change ourselves -- helps open possibility for even more action and change.

Action in the world can mean living differently yourself in a variety of ways -- the way you relate to others, the way you communicate, the way you eat, the work you do, the way you move around, etc. And it can mean organizing with others to build new ways of living -- building community gardens, cooperative houses, alternative businesses, and revolutionary decision-making bodies. And action also means rising up to fight those who dominate power and try to prevent change -- joining protests, sit-ins, riots and strikes. The historical dates in this organizer chronicle all the amazing ways people have taken action through the ages: non-violently and violently; on a local level and on a global level; alone and together in every year across every place on earth. When you take action, you are far from alone! The key is for each individual to make the leap from hopelessness to action in as many ways as they can in any particular moment.

This leap day *February 29* imagine everyone who feels smothered living a mediocre life within the current insane system rising up to resist in whatever way they can. Take leap day off work and live life like it really mattered. Spend the day as a free and whole being. Maybe that means spending time alone, or maybe it means with friends, or with your whole block, or even the whole city. Maybe it means tearing down the forces that seek to force you back to work and back onto you knees on March 1. Maybe living free for a day means spending the day creating new structures, new ideas, new forms of cooperation and a whole new reality which make you happier and freer. You don't have to wait for tomorrow, and you don't have to ask anyone for permission.

Leap for it!
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For more information visit: http://www.leapdayaction.org/

There is a Difference Between Life and Survival

2008-02-05T17:11:00.001-05:00

Whatever medical science may profess, there is a difference between Life and survival. There is more to being alive than just having a heartbeat and brain activity. Being alive, really alive, is something much subtler and more magnificent. Their instruments measure blood pressure and temperature, but overlook joy, passion, love, all the things that make life really matter. To make our lives matter again, to really get the most out of them, we will have to redefine life itself. We have to dispense with their merely clinical definitions, in favor of ones which have more to do with what we actually feel.

As it stands, how much living do we have in our lives? How many mornings do you wake up feeling truly free, thrilled to be alive, breathlessly anticipating the experiences of a new day? How many nights do you fall asleep feeling fulfilled, going over the events of the past day with satisfaction? Most of us feel as though everything has already been decided without us, as if living is not a creative activity but rather something that happens to us. That's not being alive, that's just surviving: being undead. We have undertakers, but their services are not usually required; we have morgues, but we spend most of our time in office cubicles and video arcades, in shopping malls, in front of televisions. Of course suburban housewives and petty executives are terrified of risk and change; they can't imagine that there is anything more valuable than physical safety. Their hearts may be beating, but they no longer believe in their dreams, let alone chase after them.

But this is how the revolution begins: a few of us start chasing our dreams, breaking our old patterns, embracing what we love (and in the process discovering what we hate), daydreaming, questioning, acting outside the boundaries of routine and regularity. Others see us doing this, see people daring to be more creative and more adventurous, more generous and more ambitious than they had imagined possible, and join us one by one. Once enough people embrace this new way of living, a point of critical mass is finally reached, and society itself begins to change. From that moment, the world will start to undergo a transformation: from the frightening, alien place that it is, into a place ripe with possibility, where our lives are in our own hands and any dream can come true.

So do what you want with your life, whatever it is! But to be sure you do get what you want, think carefully about what it really is, first, and how to go about getting it. Analyze the world around you, so you'll know which people and forces are working against your desires, and which ones are on your side... and how you can work together with us. We're out here, living life to the fullest, waiting for you-hopping trains across the United States, organizing political protests in French public schools, writing beautiful letters at sunrise in Bangkok. We just finished making love in the corporate washroom a minute before you walked in on your half hour lunchbreak. And Life is waiting for you with us, on the peaks of unclimbed mountains, in the smoke of campfires and burning buildings, in the arms of lovers who will turn your world upside down. Come join us!
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Reprinted from Crimethinc.com.

The Suspension of Fear: A Conversation With Sailor Holladay

2007-11-20T12:50:00.001-05:00

By Matt Dineen
There's something oddly alluring to me about college towns. Perhaps surrounding myself in such an environment provides an illusion that my college years will forever live on and allow me to deflect the cold permanence of the so-called real world. Moving from one transient community to another, I found myself in Northampton, MA in 2005 looking for a cheap place to live after a few months of apartment-hopping. This was when I first met my new roommate Sailor Holladay, who like most people in this area, moved here for school. We lived together for the remainder of Sailor's time at UMass-Amherst. The following interview was conducted on my radio show "Passions and Survival" in May of 2007, just before thousands of diplomas were handed out, summer plans were actualized, and the population of this peculiar valley turned over once again. Our conversation covered the politics of debt and academia, traveler culture, the desire to desire, and the forging of practical ways to create and support radical projects.

Matt Dineen: Let’s start by talking about the de-politicization of the academy. Can you talk about how the Social Justice Education program at UMass-Amherst has differed from other higher education environments you have participated in?

Sailor Holladay: Yeah. What’s been interesting is, that while I’ve been cradled in this program within Higher Ed., I’m still in this huge research university that’s continually getting more and more elite. They say the average family income of UMass-Amherst undergrads at this point is $100,000 a year. So UMass is getting more conservative, more economically oppressive, however you want to put it. On the one hand I’ve been around some really radical, really amazing people in my program, but I’ve also been situated in the larger university and taken classes outside of my program. I didn’t come to the realization until maybe four months ago, in my third semester, that one of the functions of educational institutions, is two fold: Quarantine a small minority of radical or potentially radical intellectuals into tenured positions and push them farther and farther away from communities struggling towards a more desirable system; while the rest of us, public intellectuals—people who don’t need buildings to think—many of us who have fought to get here, we get saddled with debt, huge amounts of debt. I have undergrad students that I work with who are three years into their education with $60,000 of debt. So we internalize the belief that we have to get a job. You know, “there aren’t any other options.” That’s what we’re told. “What would you do other than get a job out of college?” And this process—getting the job, paying off the debt—serves to estrange us from the communities that we may have been connected to in struggle before we became indebted, or prevents us from being able to connect with those communities. That is why I’m so excited about the notion of having passions at all, of being in an incubator enough to figure out what my passions are amidst the system. To be able to survive in the system with our passions is one thing, but many of us don’t know what we want to begin with. So these processes, the miseducation and the debt that comes with them, is one complex way to keep us from even figuring out what we want, let alone act on those desires.

MD: Speaking from my experience, being out of school for four years now and avoiding this route of going back into academia, it’s been a political decision on some level. It’s the challenge of self-education, continuing to talk about ideas and create change outside of these academic institutions is a challenge because of these structures you’re talking about.

SH: Also, it’s not something that’s possible alone. We need other humans to do that with. There’s also the issue of fear. There are systems in place that are selling fear to us and when we buy into that we go down roads that may be comfortable to us, but they’re not things that are creating new alternatives.

MD: Well, let’s talk about the suspension of fear. After college there is this social pressure to go out and use your education to get a well paid job, to reap the material rewards. I think most of us who have been in this situation have realized that it’s not that easy, but there are also some of us who reject those values.

SH: In terms of the ease, both of us come from poor and working class backgrounds. Without the institutional connections it’s that much more challenging.

MD: That’s something we should get into: the privilege it takes to suspend fear. For me, coming from a working class background that privilege hasn’t come in terms of material abundance. It hasn’t come in terms of capital, or financial wealth, but by first taking the risk of applying to college. Most of my friends in high school who came from similar class backgrounds didn’t even bother applying, thinking, “Oh, I can’t afford that.” But I took the risk to go for it. I got financial aid, went to school, and jumping into it I accrued what some call social capital or cultural capital. And I think getting out of college I had that sort of privilege which helped me really suspend some of these fears, enabling me to not have a job for a while, leaving to travel and acquiring more cultural capital through experiences that I brought back with me and then figured things out.

And there have been so many challenges and struggles, but at the same time there’s been a lot of privilege involved with those decisions. But let’s talk about the present moment in our lives. We’re both at sort of a crossroads. Let’s look forward. Let’s talk about the trajectory that we may or may not be following. [Laughs]

SH: Yeah, I think that looking forward is possible when we suspend fear. I have a want to notice how much of those messages are coming from all over, at least in my world. They’re coming from the system but also from people that I care about, who deeply care about me and care about my wellbeing, who are locked in, who are afraid. They are afraid for me. They’re afraid for themselves. They’ve seen the ways in which people who don’t conform are ravaged in some way—economically, emotionally—by the current system. So it’s tricky. I guess, for me, the suspension of fear becomes possible when I’m in an environment where I’m surrounded by people who are interested in that, interested in suspending fear. That’s what I appreciate about having you as a roommate, Matt Dineen. [Laughs]

This is where identity becomes messy. Just because I share certain identities or backgrounds with folks, doesn’t mean that we’re going to be launching into the future together in a way that is more desirable. In fact, so much of these fear recordings are implanted specifically around identity—poor folks, LGBT folks, for different groups that I’m a part of, fear is a huge piece of keeping that identity in place. Choosing to mobilize around identity, and only identity, is something that I’m not interested in at this point. Mobilizing across identity, around desire, and the mutual desire to desire is what I find fun and worthwhile. Because these kinds of conversations are not encouraged in the current system they become challenging to have if we have the fear piece. So if we can shake it off or suspend it then we can get somewhere.

MD: Well here we are. [Laughs] Let’s talk about desire. In terms of incorporating my desires into this trajectory of what I’m doing with my life, I left a job and have been traveling off and on the last two months but am now committing myself back to this area, coming back to this piece of geography. So now for the first time since I’ve lived here I feel grounded and I want to stay here, but then it’s: what do I do with that? I do have a potential job opportunity that I’m pursuing right now that could lead me to financial stability for the first time in my life. I’ve been playing around with that idea and want to be very conscious of it. I’m not lusting after the material success. I’m more focused on getting rid of my debt and maybe saving some money, but most importantly doing what I truly want to be doing with my life. I want to be around people who are talking about these issues and this potential job could also help me incorporate my desire for participatory democratic organizing. I’ve been thinking about these possibilities.

You know, there’s that term “disposable income” and I think that term is rooted in this culture of disposability, and I don’t want income that I’m just disposing of. Any surplus income I have, I want to be redistributing to projects that I support. For example, the Catalyst Project in San Francisco working for collective liberation across these identity lines that you mentioned. Supporting them, supporting various organizations that are doing really important work that need the financial support of people who can afford to support them because of the system we’re living in. And I think a lot of people who are working toward social change don’t have the privilege of supporting them monetarily and that perpetuates the system. These projects that are trying to create fissures within this structure, they’re struggling too and their effect is limited.

So for you, what are your thoughts about finishing school and leaving this area soon?

SH: It’s funny because I have spent many years being angry at young people who I perceive as coming from middle-class backgrounds, who I perceive as “living simply.” I’ve had rage towards folks who have made choices to not work, who have made choices to travel around and eat freely or cheaply. You know, eat my food and take showers in my shower…but now I’m turning into one of those people! [Laughs] So right now I’m trying to suspend the fear. I plan to spend the summer, as much of it as possible, traveling to conferences and gatherings. I came to the realization just a couple weeks ago that I don’t actually have to get a job as soon as I graduate. One of the things I’m interested in is the notion of—and this comes from Heinz Von Foerster—acting so as to always increase the number of alternatives. I come from a place where if you have one choice that’s good, to have at least one choice. But what I’m learning is that if I don’t have at least three choices it’s not a choice, whatever I’m choosing. So I want to act always as to increase my number of alternatives. So for me to say, I don’t have to work…Sure, I could say that I have to work, that I’ve got $48,000 of debt that I'm graduating with and that my choice, my one choice is to work. But as a way to move towards self-actualizing my own liberation I’m making a language choice to say that I don’t have to get a job when I graduate and to state that in language is to create another alternative for me. So yeah, I’m working against my internal patterns and also my external environment that tells me that my only option is to get a job. One of the other things about that is that in the last couple years, especially in the last year, I’ve placed so much emphasis on personal relationships and the idea creation that comes out of them. It seems as though, I’m learning, that when we place value upon relationships other things fall into place. If I am only placing value on, say my job and my housing situation—the things that get my needs met—I don’t leave as much time for relationships and those don’t automatically come into place. I’m noticing that I’m actually an inspiration for folks. I see people shake off their ties to the current system around me, just by simply existing and thinking in different ways, encouraging thoughts that happen with me and around me to be other than patterned thoughts.

MD: That’s definitely inspiring to me and I’ve been thinking about all of this over the past two and half months of not working myself. There’s this assumption in our society that if you’re not working a paid job then you’re lazy, but a lot of us our involved with many different projects. I think that some people can’t even imagine what their lives would be like if they didn’t have school to go to and than after school straight to a job. So there’s the politics of boredom, because without these structures to mold us, “what could we possibly do with our lives?” Part of it is realizing that desire, to go beyond this structure and remain productive in our own ways, doing a lot of work that’s not necessarily defined as a job.

SH: Yeah, it’s also pointing towards when we get ourselves out of the hierarchical structure. The idea isn’t to not have a structure. The idea is that look, we can create our own together. By creating our own structures we become accountable, not responsible, to them and ourselves. The more people that we can get to take a second glance at the structures we all find ourselves in, in those moments we can begin to create our own temporary structures together. That’s what I’m off to do. And those begin in conversation…Another thing that has come up for me lately is noticing that I have a new feeling of being able to receive. I definitely got it real young that I was to be valued based upon my labor, whatever I could produce. It’s been interesting to receive and be open to the potential of future receptions. And it’s funny because those folks who are making offers are people who are working really hard to survive in the current system. So, how can I support those people? One thing I’ve been interested in lately is acting without fear of future funding and actually recruiting funders into projects as collaborators—knowing that there will always be funders, but that we need more makers. We need more artists. We need more thinkers, more project participants. And so if we can act without fear of funding than those folks who typically see themselves as funders of projects can become co-conspirators creatively with what is being made.

MD: And that fear is often what brings us back to these jobs that steal so much of our time away from us, and prevent us from engaging in those projects. That’s also related to what I mentioned before: if we do find ourselves in a situation where we have surplus income, to really seek out who is doing important work that truly needs that funding. It’s what some people have called social change philanthropy—so not just these large nonprofit organizations, but really grassroots folks who are doing radical stuff.

SH: As opposed to, you know, “Well, I haven’t had a car in six years so I’m gonna go get that Prius now.”

MD: Yeah, exactly. Trying this mental exercise: What would I do with four times the income that I lived on last year? This is a similar exercise that people go through when they fantasize about winning the lottery, and oftentimes the response to that question is: more stuff. The term I thought of for this is acceleration of lifestyle. I’m interested in injecting into this mental exercise, or if I ever find myself in this situation, the challenge to resist that acceleration of lifestyle materially.

SH: And how much of the acceleration of lifestyle is brought on by the deep sadness that we feel as individuals when we are pushed away from our communities that we were a part of or never got to get in touch with? It’s what Kathleen Cleaver calls the ‘personal aggrandizement’ that happens: My community is left back here suffering and somehow I figured out how to do this thing. And so now I’m going to comfort myself with X, Y or Z… I like this notion of actually figuring out practical ways of “giving back,” supporting projects from the communities we have solidarity with.

MD: Yeah, it’s working towards a redistribution of wealth on that level too.

Matt Dineen did not get hired for the job that would have paid him a living wage, but he still lives in Northampton, MA. Dineen serves on the Board of Directors of Valley Free Radio, the low-power community radio station in which he also hosts "Passions and Survival." This show is part of a project exploring the dilemma of following our passions while surviving in a capitalist society. Dineen also books tours for radical activists and artists with Aid and Abet Booking. Write to him at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Sailor Holladay spent all of Summer 2007 travelling and conversing and is currently living in Urbana, Illinois participating at the School for Designing a Society.

Call for Submissions: Enough

2007-10-04T15:38:00.001-04:00

Dean and Tyrone met at the Building a Queer Left meeting that preceded the US Social Forum this summer, and began a conversation about the politics of wealth, poverty, being an anti-capitalist while living within capitalism, and more that is beautifully blossoming into a very special and potentially transformative web project. Perhaps you'd like to participate?
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What is the difference between financial security and hoarding wealth?

What are some ways we can share resources to support community and movement-building?

How can we talk to each other about personal money issues and politics without guilt, shame, and judgment?

What does a politics of wealth redistribution look like in the day-to-day, and what are the
obstacles to developing conversations about this in political communities we belong to?

These are some questions we've been thinking about, and we're interested in jumpstarting conversations about how we conceive of and live a politics of wealth redistribution. We'd like to invite you to contribute some writing to a website we're creating to explore this topic, called Enough.

The ubiquity of capitalism in the U.S. can limit our ability, even in radical communities, to conceptualize creative responses to oppression and injustice. This can manifest both in how we build movements (reproducing bureaucratic, hierarchical, business-type models; packaging and "selling" social justice work to foundations in exchange for grants), and in how we deal with personal finances in our own lives (defaulting to patterns like hoarding, excessive consumerism, and individualism in how we conceptualize our lives and futures and economic security).

We'd like to address some of the ways that class privilege and capitalist dynamics function even within communities and within the lives of individuals working to fight oppression and economic injustice. It can feel taboo to share details about things like income, inheritance, class background, debt, and spending. Silence and secrecy about money make it difficult for us to challenge ourselves and each other when classist dynamics arise. Social conditioning trains us to hoard money rather than share it and build community. We want to get people talking about building shared values and practices around wealth redistribution, because we think figuring out how much is enough, and when to give away money, are key under-discussed questions in anti-capitalist politics.

Some examples of the kinds of things we're looking for:

-Pieces about how your class position has changed over the course of your life, and how that has affected feelings of responsibility about wealth redistribution.
-Stories about cool methods of figuring out what is "enough" when it comes to making/saving money.
-How do class background, class conditioning, fear, guilt, and other factors influence how you think about this question?
-How do you figure out what you need versus what you want when it comes to consuming?
-Examples of (or ideas for) community-based support systems that serve as alternatives to individualistic models of taking care of ourselves.
-Strategies for redistributing wealth in your community, or to support social justice work.
-Discussion of how ideas about wealth, security, scarcity get reproduced in families.
-Diatribes on the politics of inheritance.
-Discussions of professionalism and salaries.
-Exciting models of people dealing with money ethically in activist spaces and organizations.
-Strategies for overcoming immobilizing guilt about class or money.
-Anti-capitalist/anti-racist/anti-imperialist analysis of personal choices about saving for retirement, buying real estate, taking certain jobs, supporting our community, etc.
-Diagnostic worksheets to help people figure out any of the following: My place in the economy (local, domestic, global) Am I rich? What sources of security do I have that I may not be aware of? How do I know if I need something or just want it? What are my resources besides money?

The two of us come from very different class backgrounds (Tyrone grew up in a first- generation owning-class family, and Dean grew up on welfare) and we're hoping for a specifically cross-class conversation about these issues. We think that the anxiety that can arise when talking about these things among folks with different experiences of class can be useful and productive, and we hope to create a space where we can learn by sharing our experiences and challenging each other.

Please send us an email if you have an idea you'd like to write about, a resource you think we should know about, existing writing you think we should post in this conversation. Your piece can be short or long, written in any style. Please send submissions to: tyronius.samson@gmail.com and/or deanspade@gmail.com.
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Reposted from The Bilerico Project by Jessica Hoffmann.

On Passion and Jobs

2007-09-13T13:03:00.001-04:00

...If you are part of the corporate world, theres a constant refrain that is heard "I don't love my job" or "I would rather be doing something else". The corollary is "My job doesn't pay me enough" or "I am in this job for money" or "I wish I could sing/dance/teach for a living but it does not pay me as much as my job does."

Sitting in a cubicle trapped by three moulded walls and a boss, it is easy to take a judgement call on ones job. But the fact is that it really is your bread and butter (or chappati or idli). Most of us view our passion as an escapist route to get out of our routine mundane jobs. The sentences start with, It would be great if I could...

There are many who love their job - research, project management, accountancy, central excise (one of our old profs said central excise is his hobby), software maintenance, traffic policeman or even printing invoices day in and day out. For them their job is their passion. Every ounce of their energy they put in their work counts for them as an achievement. I have met people who can rave about the latest flexfield in Oracle apps or those who can look at a new software program and work spellbound until they crack the ultimate details of it. Look around you. There are quite a few of them. This is not to say that they are dull outside work. Usually they are not. They have interests outside of work and they cultivate it too.

There is a second set of people who have a great passion for something. Writing or music or driving or cooking or quizzing. They are the ones who quit their day jobs to be their own boss. Remember it is tough for someone who is passionate about, say, music to work for someone else. Because passion for music is an outlet of ones own creativity, it is difficult to alter some notes because your boss doesn't like it. Likewise, if I write something, I don't want an editor to come and prune my prose to a bonsai - I write it because thats how I want it to be, warts and all. These are the people who take the path less trodden and work on their own, for their passion. They work because they love it - the money is a byproduct and it usually happens. The road can be long or hard or both and many do make it - the gains in satisfaction are immense. Needless to say, this road is not easy and it involves a steep climb till you make it.

The majority of people see their jobs and passion as distinct. Out of these are people who do their jobs sincerely - accept it for what it is and do a sincere job of it. "My job brings me the money and I will do justice to it". If they do work on a passion or an art and craft, it is separate from their work. Some of them continue to work on their passion, while for a lot many it is lost along the way - while some expect their children to work on their own unfulfilled passion!

The last set of people are those who want someone else to infuse passion into their jobs. That, unfortunately, will never happen. Either you are passionate about your job or you seek your passion outside of work or you yourself go out and convert your passion into your work. There is no fourth option. No Robinhood or talent scout is ever going to discover you if you don't do anything. If you are a writer, you better write. If you are a singer, you better keep singing. Out of the mountains of paragraphs (or songs), one (or a few) could be diamonds (out of the mountains of coal) - the rest is just a process of discovery. As in cricket, you gotta keep scoring the boring singles, wait for the chances to hit the sixes and all of it totals to the magic figure of a century. All those boring singles and the big hits create a career.So what is the point of this post? Keep doing what you like, regardless of your job and as Raamdeo Aggarwal once told me, "If you are a star, keep working and you will be discovered" and I must add, if not by someone else, you will surely discover yourself.
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Originally posted by Neelakantan on Interim Thoughts.

Time Without Work Revisited

2007-07-12T15:00:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

For the past four months I have been unemployed. During this time I have intimately revisited the dilemma of time without work in a work-obsessed culture. Part of this obsession is the survival piece--under capitalism we are obligated to sell our labor in order to meet our needs, to "make a living." This makes it difficult and often impossible to live without a job. We need to earn money in order to pay for food, housing, and the less essential items that help us get through each day. Without a wage job one needs to be creative about fulfilling these needs, often relying on the kindness and generosity of others, or by carving out non-capitalist forms of cooperatively sharing resources.

The other dominant aspect of this phenomenon is the way this culture defines people by their jobs. What you do to make money may not be the most important thing in your life but it serves as a reflection of your social status when you inform people "what you do." You are defined by your work. So what does this mean for those of us who are unemployed? Because of the economic challenges of not working it is rare that people can joyously revel in this moment. Even if we are enjoying this time without work it is socially unacceptable to admit this. Rather, we have to defensively explain that this is a transitional period in our life and that we are vigorously looking for work--even if we are not.

Unemployment is also associated with laziness and irresponsibility. Many of us who are not working paid jobs, however, still stay busy with things that we are passionate about. Of course these things are devalued in a culture that emphasizes profit and power over happiness. I could spend a day writing articles, producing a radio show, going for a bike ride, interviewing a friend, cooking food, playing music, and dancing. None of these are contributing much to the GNP, but they make me feel alive.
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Contact Matt Dineen at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Wonders of the World: An Interview with the Missoula Oblongata

2007-06-12T16:54:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

You may not know it yet but the Pioneer Valley is home to a self-sufficient, experimental theater company. It’s called the Missoula Oblongata and it is run by Northampton residents Madeline Ffitch and Donna Sellinger. They proudly declare that their self-sufficiency means that, “the artists who write the scripts also perform, design, build, and light the play themselves.” I had a chance to speak with Madeline and Donna before they left for a nationwide summer tour with their new show, “The Most Mysterious Day of the Year,” a story revolving around a community boxing ring, the imminent demise of the Morse code, and a kaleidoscope convention.

Let’s start with the origin of your name and the route from Montana to Northampton where you’re now based.
Madeline: Well, Donna had been making theater on the East Coast for a long time, but I was living and going to school and writing in Montana. I really loved it there and when we decided to start collaborating, Donna moved there and we made our first show, “Wonders of the World: Recite” in Missoula, Montana.

Do you want to talk about that show?

Donna: Sure. I had just finished a tour that was from September through December [2005] and it ended in Idaho so I was able to move to Montana. We spent about three or four months building the show. We wrote it in about two or three weeks and then rehearsed it in a dark basement, just the two of us. And then we invited our friend Leo Gephardt to write the music and we had our friend Sarah Lowry, who is now the third member of the Missoula Oblongata, come up from Denver to direct it. And then we toured it all summer from May to August and then moved here and got a lot of invites and requests to come perform it again which we had not really anticipated. We did a January tour and some shows in February.

What brought you to Western Massachusetts?

M: We were really happy in Montana and we had a really wonderful community there. It’s a very regionally-specific area of the country where there are some true originals.

D: We miss it very much.

M: Yeah, we’re pretty homesick. But I got into grad school here in the MFA program at UMass for fiction writing. And so I decided to move here and since Donna’s family is from the Northeast it made sense for her to move back and for us to keep making theater based out of Northampton.

Donna, can you talk about what you’re doing in Northampton in addition to this theater group?

D: Actually, this theater group is all I do, and I’m very happy about that. It’s all I really want to do. It’s my ambition so I’m glad to just be living somewhere and having a life where I can spend all my time working on creating theater with my very favorite people and realizing all of our artistic dreams. It’s really fun.

So, has this been a balance for you, Madeline, being in this graduate program and doing the Missoula Oblongata? Has that been challenging for you in terms of time?
M: Well, I’m lucky because the program here is very supportive. So far, the faculty seems to just want and expect that you’ll be doing your own artistic work, and you have some pretty structured goals of your own and they try not to interfere. If they do have to interfere they’re usually pretty apologetic. They expect that you’ll spend most of your time working on your own things and for me that’s really true. Also, it’s all connected. Being in graduate school definitely gives me support, some time, and a little bit of extra money to be able to just work fulltime on creative work and that includes writing and also theater for me. So it’s pretty complimentary…Donna and I write together and the theater company is a fulltime job for us. We work on it everyday, sometimes all day and sometimes have to remind each other to have fun and go dancing, [laughs] and not just talk shop all the time. And actually this semester I’m doing an independent study which is making the new show. So I prioritize the Missoula Oblongata and I find a way to spend almost all of my time doing that.

D: There’s no part of what we do as a little theater company that is peripheral to any of us. We’ve really worked to simultaneously prioritize this and dedicate ourselves to it quite single-mindedly, to the point of pathology, and yet have our own lives where we can do other things.

You’ve mentioned this really great community in Missoula and I’m curious how this area has compared.

D: It’s a really interesting question because we spend a lot of our time here missing Missoula and wondering, “Is there even a niche for us here? What are we doing?” We’ve struggled a little bit to find a community here that we can feel really connected to and to make ourselves feel like an integral part in whatever scene is going on. But at the same time, the shows that we’ve had here were extremely well attended to the point of people having to leave because there wasn’t enough room. We’re really well received and it seems like people want more things to happen. All of the feedback that we’ve gotten from people in this community has been like, “Thank you for making things happen!” So that is a real blessing because though in Missoula we had a great time and people we’re really supportive of experimental performance, I would be lying if I said things were as well attended there. It seemed like people there were happy to have us and excited about it, but so far the reception here has been really warm.

M: Yeah, it was a little slow going at first, especially since I was the pioneer coming out here in September and Donna joined me in October. I really had just met people in my program, but now we’ve met other people in the community who we really admire as performers and seem to be doing some pretty experimental, interdisciplinary things. That’s exciting. So, I think it’s easy to move somewhere and just feel like, “Oh, there’s nothing going on. Remember how it used to be where we lived before?” But I think that just has to do with being on the periphery and then learning how to get involved, and find community and respect the groundwork that other people have been laying to create a scene. There’s some pretty amazing and gutsy experimental work going on here.

For more information and tour dates visit: http://www.themissoulaoblongata.com/

Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Northampton. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Intellectual Work and Economic Survival

2007-05-29T15:43:00.001-04:00

By Ellen Willis

On the crudest level, the lives of American intellectuals and artists are defined by one basic problem: how to reconcile intellectual or creative autonomy with making a living. They must either get someone to support their work--whether by selling it on the open market, or by getting the backing of some public or private institution--or find something to do that somebody is willing to pay for that will still leave them time to do their "real work." How hard it is to accomplish this at any given time, and what kinds of opportunities are available, not only affect the individual person struggling for a workable life, but the state of the culture itself. This tension between intellectual work and economic survival is thoroughly mundane and generally taken for granted by those who negotiate it every day; but to look at the history of the past thirty years or so is to be struck by the degree to which the social, cultural, and political trajectory of American life is bound up with this most ordinary of conflicts.
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Exerpted from "The Writer's Voice: Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity," in Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation (Routledge, 1998).

More for Everybody: An Interview with James Tracy

2007-04-30T13:56:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

It was a warm summer night in Western Massachusetts when I first met anti-poverty activist James Tracy. He was on tour at the time, performing with the Molotov Mouths Outspoken Word Troupe. On the road from San Francisco, Tracy and his poetic comrades filled a kitchen with words of political intensity and inspiring visions. Soon after that night I came across “The Civil Disobedience Handbook” which he edited as tool for “the Politically Disenchanted.” Tracy’s dedicated community organizing work adds yet another dimension to a life deeply committed to the struggle for social change. I spoke with him earlier this year at the Left Forum in New York City where he participated in a panel on “Non-Reformist Reforms,” or what he simply calls “reforms worth fighting for.”

Let’s start with living in San Francisco and the evolution of your time there in the past 10 years or so, in terms of incorporating your politics into everyday life and the challenges of living in that area amidst all the dramatic changes that have taken place.
In San Francisco, really up until about 1993, it used to be a place where people could come and create counter-institutions. The rent was low enough that somebody with a dream about doing an infoshop or alternative health stuff could do it and the jobs were plentiful enough that you could work part-time, for your wages. You didn’t have to be a trust fund kid to get cool projects going. Building counter-institutions goes all the way back to the sixties with the newspapers and things like that. So now because of the sky-rocketing cost of housing it’s a lot harder to do those things. People don’t have the time to just take off. Some people I know do a really good job at working minimally for wage work. But those tend to be people who either have access to highly specialized skills where they can work two or three days out of the week with web design or what not. Or they have a lot of money. Or they’re just really, really good and highly skilled at living in a way that doesn’t consume much.

And I’m not really any of those. I work for a living. I’m an adult-ed teacher, in a way that’s increasingly political. I’ve always had a job and done politics on the side. Part of that is just financial. You know, you just gotta pay your rent. And then part of it is even though the sacrifice of working and doing your politics and following your creative passions is hard, it’s hard to manage your time, I’ve always felt that not divorcing myself from everybody else definitely enriches those things. My politics are enriched by the fact that I’ve driven trucks and wiped butts and bussed tables instead of kind of going the alternative lifestyle route. I’m not dissing the alternative lifestyle people it just hasn’t been my thing.

Can you talk more about how those experiences working jobs that have enriched your politics?
Yeah, like when I was a truck driver, I was already political, but I picked up sofas and delivered sofas all over the place and noticed how the city was laid out. It was right when the dot-com eviction boom was happening and my coworker and I just started noticing that we were doing a lot of pick ups for these landlords. People who they evicted had left some stuff behind so they donated it to the thrift store we were working at. So even though there’s a lot of theory behind the economics of housing and cities that are important to learn, it wasn’t theoretical—we were seeing it everyday, and hearing people’s stories saying, “Hey, that’s my sofa! Can you drive over here instead of donating it?” So it was a school. I’ve always felt that work was a form of the academy. It just helps with staying connected more than a lifestyle approach.

With your community organizing work have you had jobs where you’re a full-time, paid organizer?

Yeah.

Can you talk about that experience more and how it differed from those times in your life when you were working another job and doing politics on the side?
Yeah, my one full-time paid organizing job was at the Coalition on Homelessness and it was fun. I got to help them build their Right to a Roof program and we got a lot of really tangible things done. It was very enriching. I mean, the wages were shit. So it’s not like I was working for a labor union or something where you’re starting at 40 [thousand] and might be pulling down 60 in a few years. We were always laying ourselves off and things like that, but technically it was paid and I got to do it full-time. And I got to really build up a project that I was then able to turn back over to folks that had been homeless and at some point it was healthy. So that was nice because it allowed me the time to build something really quickly and do it well because that’s what I was suppose to do from 9 to 5.

And before that I had been part of a group that I helped found called the Eviction Defense Network where we only got paid stipends. The idea was that everyone that was getting a stipend would still be a worker. But your stipend would either allow you to work a little bit less out in the rest of the world and dedicate a little bit more time to the group, or it would just allow you to make up for the sacrifice of coming to meetings and outreaches and stuff that was really fucking tiring. I think we were getting paid like a 250 bucks stipend.

I actually like that model a lot. The core community organizers should get a little stipend. You shouldn’t necessarily be getting a full-time thing because when you’re a paid organizer full-time, even if you’re getting paid shit wages like we did at the coalition, you forget things like scheduling meetings when people can actually make them and things like that. When you’re scheduling around the 9 to 5 your sensitivity to those things tend to go down over time. It’s around your busy schedule not the busy schedule of people trying to form a tenants union or whatever you’re supposed to be there for. And I’m not against paid, full-time organizing. I’m just against it as a religion, as the only one model of social change. And there’s tons of problems with it, but it’s necessary at times.

In that job organizing tenants how did these questions differ for the people you were organizing compared with your experiences and that of other activists in terms of their survival and trying to identify what they really wanted to be doing with their lives despite the economic realities limiting that. Or did it differ at all?

Oh, it really differed—especially now with the conversation on the Left around the “non-profit industrial complex,” and questioning the coordinator class and who’s in it and who ain’t and all that. You know, we can sit around and talk about this shit forever, and talk in circles, and only on alternative Tuesdays actually get to something that’s productive and useful. But when I was organizing tenants they all had jobs. They didn’t want to be a paid organizer. They wanted to do what they had done. And they were glad that there was somebody who was being paid to be able to help them collectivize their energies, because it’s a big sacrifice to have somebody have to come out to a demo or a meeting after work. They were glad that someone was transcribing the notes and stuff like that.

I’m mainly thinking of these two buildings I helped organize—and I don’t like to think of organizing in terms of “I organize” and “they are organized,” because that sounds too much like colonizer and colonize. But if it’s a healthy situation where it’s transparent and you’re accountable, people definitely liked having a resource. It was almost like being their secretary, to make their self-activity more effective. The ideal model is: you build organizations where folks from whatever base take over all the positions and all the decision-making. But in real life, sometimes people are like, “I’m happy being a teacher. I’m a janitor. I don’t want your job.” It’s just a gray area thing. If you do it well and if you do it in an accountable way many people are glad to have the resource, if you’re actually just being a resource for folks.

Can you talk about the relationship between your politics and the more creative, artistic projects you’re involved with and the struggle to put time and energy into that in addition to political organizing and working to pay the bills?

Art is something I do because it makes my head feel better. You know, I can get really, really stressed out doing this stuff and writing, story telling is a part of mental health for me. I think I would be a really cynical sectarian bastard without it, so it’s something I gotta do. But luckily for the most part, if I’m writing poetry, it’s something I can do on the bus. I have a little notebook that I can scribble things down in. Of course there’s a revision process because I’m very much into craft, but I don’t have to buy a canvass for it. I don’t build fighting robots as my artistic expression. [Laughs] I can write on the back of a napkin, you know, so it fits in really well. But it’s hard.

The creative process is really nice, but everybody wishes they had more time for it. Without really listening to all the people I’m inspired by and getting to know them, my poetry would probably just be some kind of weird Baudelaire type of stuff. Which is fine—I like that stuff too—but it would be a lot less rich if I didn’t have the insights of folks. And hopefully I can amplify their voices and their stuff in a non-exploitative way. It goes up and down. Right now, a project I’m working on that’s nonfiction is a lot harder. Sometimes I get really aggravated and wish that I had all this access to the academy just to write. But if I had that access and fellowships, I’d probably end up being divorced from my real passion. And the real source of creative passion for me is the political work, the community work.

Well, you mentioned the academy. Have you ever thought about going in that direction more as a way to sort of solve these issues on some level? Would you plug into academia so you wouldn’t have to worry as much about financial security?

Well, it wouldn’t work right now, but in the future who knows? There’s a lot of good models—like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a wonderful model of a down, amazing public intellectual who uses her resources. But the thing that gets me about the academy and organizing and privilege is that a lot of professors are making a shittier salary than a lot of janitors these days, but their privilege comes in different ways other than finance. The people who got in a long time ago are making real good money and they have all these resources. But the people who are being hired now into the academy—it’s not guaranteed that you’re gonna have any resources. You used to be able to get the college to pay for speakers and now you can give them a little 25 bucks, like Roxanne has talked about. So it’s not guaranteed...It’s a possibility but it’s not where I’m going right now.

Is there anything else you want to add about this whole issue of passions and survival?

I just really think, as the great dub reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson said, we need more time. There’s all these great campaigns going on and most of them are completely worthy of our support. Certainly before we start thinking about agitating for the 30 hour week we need to put an end to this murderous fucking war. But we also have to think about, as we’re talking about economic justice and racial justice, reclaiming time so we can develop our capacity to participate more fully in the world and enrich ourselves as human beings that live in communities. We’ve had the 40 hour work week for a hundred and something years. So now it’s time to go for the 30. We need more of just about everything. I mean, I condemn consumerism but I’m really skeptical of the folks that are saying the only solution is this individualistic: “consume less, consume less.” I think we should be talking about more for everybody. Not more mindless consumer shit, but more resources and more money. But most of all more time because that’s where you can create more pleasure and more happiness. And that’s a reform worth working for.
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Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Northampton, MA. Contact him at passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

Beyond Available Alternatives: An Interview with Rob Scott

2007-03-19T11:12:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

"What are you for?" Variations of that question were constantly hurled at the early global justice movement that erupted, in the U.S. at least, in Seattle during the actions which shut down the WTO meetings in 1999. This was often an attempt by the corporate media to discredit the movement as a group of aimless idealists protesting just for the sake of protesting. But in recent years, particularly with the rise of global and regional social forums, activists within the movement have taken that question seriously by prioritizing the need for visions of the kind of worlds that we want to live in.

Nearly a decade before the Seattle uprising, a school opened in Urbana, IL dedicated to making those worlds a reality. The School for Designing a Society invites its students to ask the question: "What would I consider a desirable society?" and spend an entire semester designing projects toward realizing that desire. Recently I had a chance to sit down with Rob Scott who is one of the School's full-time instructor's specializing in cybernetics and ecological design. He came on my radio program "Passions and Survival" where we discussed what it would be like to live in a society beyond the one we have now.

Let’s start with the School for Designing a Society. Can you describe what it is and how you got involved with it?

The School for Designing a Society is a project started by activists and artists, composers, poets, people interested in language, politics, economics, and social change. It is aimed at trying to create a space for people to talk about the world as they would like it to be rather than only talk about it as it currently is. So it was taken as a point of departure that people already have a critique of the current society and that’s well known. Just because one has an articulate critique there’s no evidence, that I’ve seen, that one can go directly from the critique of the existing society to one that they prefer. Some space, some time, some environment has to be set up where people can speak with each other about, “What would we put in the place of the system that we disapprove of?”

So we get students that are interested in living in a different society. And rather than start off commiserating with each other about what we don’t like, we try to put a temporary suspension on the discourse of criticism and complaint and encourage people to make proposals as to how they’d like to see the world be otherwise. And to that, the semester unrolls itself in a set of classes, seminars, often discussions and readings, aimed at generating projects, generating activities, works of art, political campaigns—whatever it is that would meet the desires of the women and men who come to the school hoping that society could be otherwise. And looking to generate evidence, because the society we prefer doesn’t sit before us and ask us to simply just hit a button on it. You actually have to sort of make up the language to talk to about it. So that’s mainly what the discussions are aimed at.

Some people frame this challenge in terms of vision and it seems like this is a very visionary project. At a talk that I saw Michael Albert give about radical visions for radical change he discussed how in the past thirty or forty years, if you piled up the manifestations of the critique of existing structures it would go miles into the sky. But then if you made another pile of visionary work dedicated to productively contributing toward alternatives it wouldn’t go past his knee. So it seems like what you guys are doing is very urgent in that sense.

Yeah, it’s precisely that. And it’s not meant as a slander or negation of those that make life work of trying to simply put language to describing the oppression that occurs in the current society and trying to give a voice to those that have always been oppressed by the structure of society as it currently exists. Rather it’s to say that, we do that too and we want in addition to that—not as a substitution or a deletion—but in addition, we want to have this other type of discussion. We would also like it to be that somewhere in the world there’s a time that we say: No, now critique, we check it at the door with our coat, and maybe along with our ego too, and that we don’t know what society it is that want; and that if somebody has got some idea or some starting point we take it seriously. And I could say, in response to Albert’s thing, I’ve at least got a file cabinet that comes up to my neck. So, we do generate quite a bit of stuff in Urbana.

I’m curious about your response to people who are uncomfortable with this idea in general, in terms of trying to map out alternatives. I think there’s this hesitancy towards it as people are afraid of it becoming a so-called “blueprint” for a new society that is too rigid. How do you respond to people who are hesitant to even engage with this sort of project?

Well, I agree. Certainly there’s a lot of people who are hesitant if somebody uses a word like blueprint because there are so many manifestations of that from the Twentieth Century that have so many awful consequences—social engineering projects that one wouldn’t find so savory to talk about first thing in the morning. I suspect that the main reason people get uncomfortable when they hear about the school is that it comes up in an environment in the current society. And in the current society, often times people are trying to keep their job, are trying to survive. So if one goes into, say, an academic department that’s basically making its living off of running a discourse of critique of the current system it can be pretty uncomfortable to hear someone come in and say: “Okay, but if we all already agree that we don’t want the current society when are we going to have a discussion about what would we prefer instead?” And that’s, to a large extent, why we wish to have a school that is separate because it’s not fair to our comrades who work in academia who are trying to have a critique of the current system to bring that discussion there. In a way, it’s already in the job description. It’s already built into the structure of the buildings that are there. You have libraries filled with books about the current system. If you’re talking about a system that doesn’t yet exist you’re in this little part called fiction or maybe somewhere in the English department, I don’t know.

But yeah, defenses against it—there are two types. There are people who really do want the current system. That’s another issue. There are people that, even miserable, will defend the current system, it won’t defend them. And they’ll sit there and they’ll get in your way and they’ll get upset. It might not make any sense in language, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make bodily sense to the person. And no insult against people who think and have adjusted their bodies to the current society because I suspect a lot of it comes from childhood conditioning, the necessity of safety. And most people on the planet Earth are brought up with the threat of violence if they challenge the status quo from a very early age. So it’s really, really weird that you could have a school for designing a society and not be burned at the stake. Go back a hundred years ago—this would not be in existence. A full-fledged, year-long school aimed at nothing else but proposing that society could be otherwise and doing whatever we can to bring that into existence. That’s not every era of history that you could get away with that. It’s a pretty unique moment right now. And so, people are shocked by it. They don’t know how to respond to it. This has never existed before. So no malice against people for being scandalized—in fact it’s probably invited.

Well, maybe we can get into more of the details about this project. The way we’ve been discussing it so far is rather vague. A “new society” could mean something potentially worse, to some people’s perceptions, than what we have now. What are some of the guiding values that are leading this project?

Well, that’s a good question. I’m not sure that I would wish to give a prescription. One of the main issues is that we are not sectarian, [believing] we already know which society we want. We’re mainly taking a departure from the arts and inviting people, especially people who haven’t had time in the arts. If you haven’t been in a performance department or studied performance you don’t know that people ask you to change your behavior, change your language, change the way you speak on the stage in front of a room full of people and say, “Just act differently.” And you have to act differently on the spot right then. It’s basically instant social change. And the people who are interested in fighting poverty or racism or any of the other oppressions that we live in our daily lives, whether it be on the bus or in our schools, families and so forth, that you can simply change the way you talk on the spot and the whole social environment changes on the spot. That’s mainly what we wish to get across—that that already is a step in the direction of freedom and not some specific program of, “Here’s how it should be…”

We want to illicit desire. I mean, the only extent to which I would say we have some values that we could put upon as a sort of requirement of being in the School is nonviolence: You’re not welcome to come to the school and use violence or oppress anyone. Beyond that, if you say you want it, if you’ve got desires—and by desire I mean something that’s not available in the current society that you’d like to see tried—if it’s nonviolent, non-oppressive and other people in the room feel that way; if you’ve got something you’d like to try in terms of a new social relationship, or just, “I’ve got this new word I’d like to try out,” or “I want to try a project, I think the way eat dinner together is fascist and I’d like to reorganize that,” go ahead. If Matt came to the School for Designing a Society, the invitation would be, “Let’s find out what Matt wants that would not be in the social world if not for Matt.” And not so much the very old fashioned image of school where you sort of pour knowledge into the heads of students and therefore they have it and that presumably helps things. I would say instead that, contrary to all the evidence, we’re hoping that discussion and human intelligence could be useful humans. And that’s not really a program.
Let’s get more into the issue of desire. I know that part of the goal of the School is to work toward creating a more desirable society. Can you make the distinction between desires versus wants or needs?

That’s a good way of putting it. I think of want as very general word. We use it in our daily lives in a colloquial way, which means casually, and we can say everything from, “I want a sip of water,” to “I want a different society.” And they’re two different things because having a sip of water isn’t hard. That’s an available alternative in the current society—for me at least, maybe not for everyone. Even if I say I want everyone to have access to water I’m starting to break the boundary of what’s possible in the current society because it’s structurally set up to make it not so. So I use the word desire when looking at available alternatives within the current society and [seeing] this is not on the plate of alternatives I already got. Or you could think of it as a range almost: To what extent would it be possible that the thing I’m asking for could be satisfied in the current society? And the extent to which it couldn’t be satisfied, that’s the extent to which I would say that’s a desirer taking place and not just a preferer. I think of it in terms of preference versus desire. Meaning, if you are just selectively agreeing with what the world already gives you, you have a preference and you aren’t actually calling anything into question or pushing for change.

Maybe to be a little more provocative, a lot of things that people say when they come to the School for Designing a Society initially, I would say, are preferences. Including: “I want a low-power FM radio station in town, I want community, I want a potluck every night, I want…” These are basic things. And again, no slander or critique against available alternatives, especially those ones. I mean I do those things—I’m on low-power radio right now! But the point is that in addition to that we can have this discussion of: Let’s see where that beginning of preference that we sort of get from our current society…where it starts to become desire is the extent to which it starts to challenge the structure of what already exists. “I want a low-power radio station in every single town.” Alright, that’s actually not available and the whole society might tremble a little bit if that became true. If I actually had that desire satisfied we might already be inching toward a different system. “I want everyone to have all their basic needs met.” That’s actually structurally out of wack with a planet in which 2 billion people have to spend most of their day walking to retrieve water. And you’re right to say, “How is it different than needs?” because needs are just about as far opposite as you can get from desires. Not only do they already exist in the current society but they’re proper to your body and…at least the way I talk about it.

When I use the word needs I’m talking about biological, body will break down and die if these conditions are not met. And that’s, I would argue, something that has to be considered if you’re interested in designing a society and doing it in a nonviolent and non-oppressive way.

The issue of needs is the survival piece of the passions and survival dilemma. What basic human needs do we have to fulfill and at what costs in the current society? I’ve been talking with a lot of people about how those needs affect their situations in terms of having to sell their hours at wage jobs and how that conflicts with the true passions that they want to be able to follow and the challenges of doing that. Maybe you could address this dilemma.

Yeah, I think I could. I would add though one term to what you’re bringing up. When I speak of needs I’m actually speaking of something proper to my body. And when I speak of, for instance jobs and money and quote-unquote, “I need a car” and all of that way of talking, I actually want to say that’s a property of the system we’re in but not a property of my body and therefore I’m going to use the word necessity. In the current system it’s a necessity that I have a car to get to work. When someone says that I’ll say, “Okay, I agree with that sentence.” But, “I need a car” is…I would claim that it is an undesirable way of speaking and we become victims of capitalism when we speak in terms of, “I need money to eat.” It’s actually grammatically absurd if you think about it. You don’t need money to eat. No one eats money. But in the current society I agree with you if you say that, “It’s of the utmost necessity that I have money in order to meet my need for nourishment.” I could steal, I could try to do other things, try finding fruit on trees or something. In the current system it will catch up with me and stop me from doing that at some point. So for me necessity is something where there’s usually a trace of some past system. Someone in the past desired something. There’s no need or requirement that society go in the direction of capitalism where all the necessities are owned. But it’s gone there. So now we’re left living in the traces of paradigms past and we speak with a language that’s supported institutional oppression and systemic violence. When we say these things we’re either aware of it or not aware of it. And what I want is that we begin to have a conversation to try to use that distinction: You’ve got desires and that’s something that’s not already on the menu of available alternatives. And then you’ve got needs and those never go away—I’m talking about nourishment, water, shelter from the elements, and I want to add things like touch. I almost want to add language and interaction—and those are proper to my body.

And in between those two zones, the zone of completely constructed stuff, just made up, you can have a society without radios. You can have a society without stop signs. All this stuff is traces of the fact that people decided to add something to the world that wasn’t already an alternative at some time in the past. In between there’s the necessities, the things that were wanted and somehow directly meet our needs for survival. I would like to live in a world in which the variety of ways in which the needs are met is an expanding variety, that there’s actually more alternatives there, that there would be more alternative necessities if you will. And it wouldn’t be that it all comes through the one channel. If you wanted to design a system—social engineering or controlling people—making it so there’s one way is an excellent control mechanism because every need gets met through the same chute and if you want to interfere with the whole society and how their needs are met you can interfere with that one chute. Especially if you speak of countries that import most of their food, they’re really just completely at the whims of the international market structures. And we might not experience it so much in our daily lives in this country but I would argue that in the next 50 years we probably will with respect to water and even certain other things because it’s inconceivable that any Americans I’ve met, U.S. citizens, would have access to the basic necessities that they meet their needs with without the petroleum economy and that’s going to be an issue. So the needs sort of clash in contradistinction to the desires, but they also have plenty of edge space in which you can make those kinds of connections.
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Matt Dineen is a writer and activist based in Northampton, MA. He is currently on tour with Ben Dangl, the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007).

For more information about the School for Designing a Society visit their website: designingasociety.org

Who Stole My Time?

2007-03-07T08:39:00.001-05:00

By Lilly Moss

Never enough time.

I spend two hours commuting each day and eight and a half hours daily at work. Consider how much additional time most people spend on shopping, watching television, and other passive entertainments. It's no wonder that life seems to pass us quickly by.

In prehistoric times, it's estimated that the daily chores, including food acquisition and preparation and other necessities, used about four hours daily, and those four hours were also social time.

When I was a kid in the late 50s and 60s, there was talk of the coming era of leisure time, of four day work weeks and extended vacations, of hobbies and do it yourselfing.

Our contemporary spiritually-ill culture demands that we move faster all the time, valuing speed for its own sake; that we spend the best hours of our day working for others for pay, often in personally meaningless tasks; that we see time doing nothing as lazy time and that we fill every unworking moment with passive entertainments.

In despair for time, I carefully apportion my weekends: this much time for art. This much time for loving play. This much for baking a cake or wandering along the frozen creek.

Who stole my time? I worked and drove my car and shopped and worried and did what I had to what I had to what I had to for 53 years and now I look back and mourn for the book I didn't write and the sunny days I was stuck inside at a job and the art school I never attended and the sledding expeditions with the kids I put off until the free time that never came.

Who stole my life?

Every day's pay I put away for the time when I will have enough to buy back my life from the Dominators.

Love,
Lilly
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Reposted from Lilly's blog The Good Earth.

The Risk of Change Revisited: Housing and Resistance in a Capitalist Society

2006-12-13T10:04:00.001-05:00

By Matt Dineen

"Honest hope derives from a belief that positive change is possible in the world. And we will only believe this if we experience ourselves changing. The key is risk, doing that which we thought we could not do."
-Frances Moore Lappe

Hope and risk. For those of us committed to transformative change it is this combination that fuels our actions—-the belief that change truly is possible and that we are willing to take risks to create a better society. But sometimes the risk is too great. All too often those actions which would accurately reflect our values are compromised or avoided simply to maintain survival. This is particularly common in situations that directly affect our lives. Campaigns to improve working and living conditions may not be as celebrated or significant as protesting war and corporate globalization but they tend to always involve more personal risk. This is because and despite of the fact that there is more potential for change in our immediate circumstances. I want to address the complexities of these risks and also connect the politics of everyday life with dominant global structures to illustrate how they are part of a common struggle.

I have already explored this dilemma in comparing my personal involvement in the movement against the war on Iraq with a failed campaign at my workplace three years later. Because of the economic power that our boss wielded over us the risk of fighting for change at my job was higher than the relatively low risk of protesting in the streets against the Bush administration. What about affecting change in our living conditions? Is the risk too great to improve our housing arrangements?

Along with work, housing is one of the primary institutions of capitalist society. The two are deeply connected. Much of the money that we earn selling our labor to bosses goes directly to the landlords that own the buildings we live in. Housing and work are both integral to the economic imperatives of survival. Everybody needs a roof over their head but must work to afford this basic human necessity. Although conditions differ immensely depending on geographical location and the nature of the workplace and apartment complex or house, both are inherently undemocratic spheres.

In both cases the property-owners possess a virtual monopoly over decision-making—decisions that affect the lives of those that work and live on the property. Decisions such as how much one is paid and how much one must pay and ultimately the destiny of one’s job and place to live. Workers and tenants are controlled and pacified by the lingering threat of termination or eviction. After all, in “today’s economy” there is always someone else to replace you. We get paid a week or two after we work, but we must pay before we live in our homes each month.

Yet most of us accept this state of affairs. It is only when our living conditions become even more egregiously unjust that we begin to think to do anything about it. Earlier this year such a situation occurred where I live which inspired me to revisit this dilemma of the risk of change. This story runs deeper than a landlord raising the rent in my building. It speaks to how change occurs in our society, how people react to injustice, and the potential risks involved in struggling to improve our everyday lives. That is why I think it is worth sharing...
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To read this article in its entirety visit Toward Freedom.

The Soundtrack to Protest: An interview with David Rovics

2006-10-05T11:56:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

I was in high school the first time I saw David Rovics play. His politcal folk anthems helped contribute to my growing consciousness of global justice issues, radical history and social change. Several years have past and David has gone on to travel the globe on countless tours supplying a rousing soundtrack to protests and activist conferences wherever they pop up. He has also written hundreds of new songs as there is no shortage of material lately for politcal musicians. Now David has a new album out and is beginning to tour once again. Before he took off we had a chance to discuss the recent changes in his life, Middle East politics, and the state of activism today.

When we last spoke, you discussed how working as a full-time musician--booking your own tours and playing internationally--was the equivalent of running a small business. How has that operation changed this past year now that you are not booking your own shows? Has it given you more time for other pursuits?

It's been wonderful working with Jen Angel (from Clamor), who is doing booking for me, for sure. Given that she has no background in the business, it's not changing the kinds of gigs I'm doing or anything, but it is giving me more free time which has pretty much all been taken up by my baby daughter, Leila, who was born last January 28th. I thought I might find more time to read books and that sort of thing, but that hasn't worked out so far. I'm still touring as much as ever, and I find I just have a bit more time to be human on the road rather than being constantly glued to my laptop doing booking-related email.

What other changes have happened in your life this past year?

Well, I've written some new songs, done a lot of work on the new CD and DVD, done lots more touring in North America and Europe, spent several weeks touring in Lebanon, Jordan and the occupied West Bank last September, and various other things, but certainly the birth of my daughter has been the most exciting development. Especially now that she's a little older: big difference between 4 months and 7 months, you know, they're much more interactive and they don't spend all their time sleeping anymore.

There seems to be a debate within activist communities around the efficacy of building community through travelling vs. "laying roots" by staying in one place. What is your take on this as an activist musician who is constantly travelling? How do you reconcile being essentially placeless?

I guess the debate also goes on to some extent among musicians, too. It seems to me generally that we need a lot more of both community organizing and laying roots as well as the traveling rabble-rousing kind of thing, big national and international demonstrations, etc. Lots more of all that would be very good. To me it seems like the idea that one is more effective than the other is a bit like saying broccoli is more effective than spinach. For people in my line of work, though, I'd say that the decision is largely made for us. You can't really make a living doing original music, whether political music or not, and stay in one place. You have to travel. It goes with the job. So basically if I thought staying in one place were more effective then I'd have to get a day job, or play background music in bars, and I have zero interest in either of those things, so I'll keep traveling.

You're a political folksinger in an increasingly politicized era. How have the global events of the past 5 years affected your work? More specifically, how do you deal with the dilemma of tragic world events being, in a sense, "good for business" in terms of creating and performing the music you do and building a fanbase?

I'm not entirely sure how good for business it is. I suppose among my niche market it's good for business, but generally, the vast majority of musicians are really marginalized by the music industry, especially political ones. As far as I can tell the folk music scene is pretty terrified of overtly political musicians these days, and so we're even marginalized within our own musical genre. Basically, I don't think any of us are doing it for the money!

In theory, if a large segment of the population were to wake up and smell the coffee, people like me could really do well, and I'd welcome that, and I'd deal with the contradiction: "The more bombs they drop, the more CDs I sell" kind of thing. But as it is, this is not happening. My audiences are not growing. In fact, they may be shrinking, but it's hard to tell, since they've always been small. Especially since February, 2003, people have just been retreating more and more, aside from a brief period during the presidential election when some people with Kerry buttons were coming to some of my shows.

In terms of my writing, the past 5 years have led to me writing even more songs about U.S. foreign policy, and fewer songs about IMF/World Bank protests, 'cause they have virtually ceased to exist in the U.S. since 9/11. But I was writing a lot of songs about Iraq, Palestine, etc. before 9/11, not because it was fashionable in the mainstream or even on the Left, but because it seemed important to me. Inexplicably, so many of my friends in the late 90's who were organizing against the IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc., didn't seem to know where Iraq was or what the sanctions were. Now everybody knows where Iraq is and most people have forgotten about the IMF. It's really pretty depressing.
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This interview was originally published on ZNet. Matt Dineen is a writer and activist living and working in Northampton, MA. For more information about David Rovics visit http://www.davidrovics.com/

Passions and Survival Radio is Back!

2006-08-19T14:28:00.001-04:00

After a two month hiatus, the Passions and Survival radio program on Valley Free Radio, WXOJ-LP Northampton, 103.3 FM has returned to its regular weekly slot. You can tune in every Monday morning from 9:00 to 10:00 AM. You can also listen online at http://www.valleyfreeradio.org/

Continuing this project's mission of exploring the dilemma of following our passions while surviving in a capitalist society, the radio program features analysis of many of the complexities of modern life along with potential solutions to creating a new society. Topics explored include: work, leisure, consumerism, education, the politics of food and housing, the so-called "quarter-life crisis", alienation, happiness, success, economic alternatives, class mobility, and a plethora of related topics that tend to intersect with each other.

The show often features people from the Pioneer Valley discussing their jobs and the struggle to follow their passions. Drop a line if you are interested in being a guest on the program.

Thanks,
Matt Dineen, host

Survival vs. The Fullness of Life

2006-08-19T14:24:00.001-04:00

"Strategies for continually overturning the dominance of survival over our lives, for making our projects and desires determine how we deal with survival to the greatest extent possible--for example, when one needs to take a job, using it against the institution of work and the economy through theft, giving things away, sabotage, using it as a free school to pick up skills for one's own projects, always seeing it as a temporary means to ends of one's own and being prepared to quit as soon as one's desire requires it."

-Wolfi Landstreicher, from Play Fiercely! Our Lives Are At Stake!

Adult Liberation: Unschooling Meets the Workforce

2006-07-13T16:57:00.001-04:00

A conversation with Michael Fogler

By Peter Kowalke

As a lifelong unschooler, I've grown up with the luxury of studying what interests me. Supposedly I should be able to make a living by following my interests, too. But what if my passion is writing well-researched stories about everyday people, something that isn't very lucrative? To answer my question, I visited Michael Fogler in his Lexington, Kentucky, home. Michael is a homeschooling father and author of the book, Un-jobbing: The Adult Liberation Handbook, which asserts that it isn't necessary to give up an interest in order to make a living without a job. His secret, it seems, is just using common sense.

Unschooling is to learn without going to school. Is un-jobbing to earn without having a job? Could you explain what it means to "un-job"?
In a sense, Yes, if we define job as an activity we do for money which we really wouldn't be doing if it weren't for the money. That is what I see as so wasteful in our society: millions of people spending the bulk of their able-bodied lives in activities that they wouldn't be doing if they didn't need the money attached to it. Can we not do only activities which are in alignment with our values and sense of purpose, with some of these activities also bringing in income? I say yes.

So, I see a life of un-jobbing as a life in which all of the activities that a person does are activities that the person really wants to do, whether they are income-producing or not. This person is doing what he/she truly wants to do, period. "Work" and "play" become blurred, virtually one and the same. They blend together into, simply, Life. John Holt once proclaimed that learning is not the product of teaching (something I have come to agree with). Similarly, living is not the product of "making a living" (i.e. the job) in our culture. So, my thing is to encourage (conscious) living in every moment and to change "making a living" (which should be more accurately called "making a dying") into "making a life."

The recent advertising campaign for the job site, Monster.com, points out that no one grows up wanting a bad job; we all want to earn money by doing what we love. But even career guides admit that we can't always do what we love without some sacrifice. Besides having a marketable interest, such as computers, how does one "make a life" by doing what he or she enjoys?

First, we might not grow up wanting a bad job, but we do grow up with the "realistic" expectation that you have described. So it doesn't matter what we want , we're "realistic." I believe that it's helpful to step out of the box of "realism" and into a more intangible world view. This takes faith and trust (ultimately, those things may be all that are truly real).

One of my major recommendations is to do a thorough self-inventory. This means answering , completely honestly , such questions as: Why am I here on Earth? What do I value? What do I find to be essential in my life? What are my talents and gifts? What activities do I find to be truly joyful (ones that I literally en-joy)? Getting clear about the answers to those questions is very important. This is a constant process that is not done just once, but continually , or at least periodically. It's important to note that there are no "right" or "wrong" answers to these questions , just personal truth. A good way to do this is to do it with a group of people who are also interested in moving in the direction of un-jobbing , to have a meeting and then, one by one, go around the circle and answer those questions out loud to the others. The people, besides the speaker, merely listen and do not judge; they just give their ears and hearts as receptors.

I have done this in workshops and found that amazing things happen when people get together in groups and speak their heart-felt answers out loud to others who respectfully listen to them. People are often surprised by what they say when said in a more public way than just silently thinking to themselves. The latter can often keep a personal truth buried. If a person speaks his/her truth in public, then there is a stronger likelihood that this person will begin to act upon it.

Once questions like that are answered, the next step is to answer the question: What is my ideal life , without regard to money? Again, answering this question out loud in front of a group of respectful, listening others will have more empowerment. Along with doing a program of what I call "conscious personal economics," working on the above questions can move a person in the direction of his/her ideal life. (One may never get there. Life is a journey, not a destination.)

There are ways of earning money that I have done since un-jobbing that I never would have predicted before I started. The major one is, of course, my book Un-jobbing! I didn't un-job with the idea of writing a book about un-jobbing. One day the book Un-jobbing will fade away and I will continue to be an un-jobber who is making ends meet. Don't ask me how , I have no idea! The point here is that we can't know how everything is going to work out. Do some good "homework"; keep taking some baby steps which feel good and make sense, and see what happens and where things lead.

You can read this interview in its entirety at Home Education Magazine. Read more about Michael Fogler's book Unjobbing: The Adult Liberation Handbook at Why Work?
© Peter Kowalke

Navigating the System of Class Privilege in Higher Education: An Interview with the Smith College Association of Class Activists

2006-06-01T11:32:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

In the United States, access to a college education is still a privilege not available to everyone. As the tuition rates continue to climb through the roof and competition for financial aid increases, more and more people are shut out of this system. What about those who do make it in? How does their class background affect the quality of education that they receive from local community colleges to the most elite university?

Recently I spoke with Cara Sharpes and Katie Zanetta, Smith College students active in a campus organization that addresses issues around class and privilege, about their experiences as low income students at an elite educational institution.
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Katie: I’m Katie Zanetta and I’m about to start my senior year at Smith College as a non-traditionally-aged student.

Cara: My name’s Cara Sharpes and I’m also a non-traditional age student at Smith. I’m also the leader of the Smith Association of Class Activists (SACA). We started off last Spring with a small group of seniors who basically wanted to make sure that something was started since they had such a hard road at Smith as low income students and first generation students. They wanted to just bring a group of students together. This Fall, myself and another student formed officially through the SGA (Student Government Association) and started having events and meetings. So we’re pretty new.

What was the initial inspiration for forming this organization?

C: I think we realized what a powerful experience it was to get together and just talk about our similar experiences as people who are navigating the system with no one coming before us in most cases. And just trying to figure out where we belong and being the minority certainly as low income students. From there realizing that there just really needed to be a dialogue on campus about class and how there was such a blindness to that. How every other socially conscious issue had been spoken about at length except for class and just showing the campus how it had to come to the forefront.

So the group was started by low income students. Has it broadened its base since then?

C: Yeah, we started off being defined primarily as a low income, first generation alliance and then from there quickly broadened to allow allies because we realized that we weren’t just interested in having a support group. We were really interested in bringing people together over issues of class and making a difference on campus. And there were so many allies that wanted to come and help us on class issues. So many activists who were willing to get involved and we didn’t want to narrowly define our group that way.

Katie, do you want to talk about how you got involved in the group?

K: Yeah. I was brand-spanking new at Smith in the Fall and I was walking around campus one day and I saw a flier, one of these great, wonderful, snarky little fliers that they put up that said something to effect of: “Have you heard? Why don’t you just ask your parents for the money? We have.” And I thought, I don’t know who those people are but they are clearly my people. So I sought the group out and I was really happy I did because I think that class ends up being very invisible at Smith. I wasn’t used to that. I had come from a state school—actually UMass-Boston was where I transferred from. It’s not only a state institution but an urban-focused institution where class is not invisible because we were all of a similar class background at UMass-Boston. So it was really hard for me to go into an environment where I felt out of sorts but there was no way to articulate that within the institution.

In what other ways did it differ when you started at Smith?

K: A lot of things are wonderful. Just the resources that are available are…

C: Mind-boggling.

K: Mind-boggling, yeah. It’s incredible what you have available to you but if you’re not used to that I also think that you don’t really know how to go about accessing them or to understand that you’re entitled to them. This is something that a lot of students don’t have a problem with—of course they’re entitled to the resources there. Even now, just learning how that process works and learning that they are actually there for me to take advantage of is still something that I can’t totally integrate with my past or my perspective on the world.

C: Or even knowing to ask. I think a lot of students come in just struggling by themselves and not knowing that they are so many people that they can ask and that it’s an institution that set up to help their students once they’re there. It’s a really hard thing to learn coming from most places where you’re just left to sink or swim.

Can you talk about how you both came to arrive at Smith College given your class backgrounds? How did that happen and what goals to you have now that you have entered into this more elite institution?

K: I had sort of a long winding path. I’ve done everything from factory work to just really low-level, pink collar, ghetto administrative work. And that’s what I was doing before I decided to go back to school. I was actually an ‘executive administrative assistant,’ which was great because it was the best paying job I had ever had but it couldn’t take me any further than that. I was 24 and I had maxed out. I knew that I had to go back to school, not only for the learning potential but because I needed to have that degree. It was a matter of validation and it was something that had always eluded me because of my financial circumstances. I couldn’t go right out of high school because there was no money for that and so I spent years just trying to work and become an independent student. So I ended up quitting my job and going back to school at UMass fulltime and then came to Smith actually sort of on a dare. A friend of mine was applying and said, “You have to apply. We’ll go together.” And in the end I decided that I wouldn’t be able to tell her that I hadn’t applied and I was actually going to lie to her and say that I didn’t get accepted and I realized that I couldn’t do that. So I did apply and I got in and she didn’t. Even that process was difficult—I had to call the admissions office at one point and ask them to pull my application because it occurred to me that if they processed my application check I would bounce. And so even to that point I almost didn’t get there because I was like, “No you can’t! I’m not gonna have enough money to cover that.” But who knows. I really don’t want to continue to work. That’s my impetus for being at a great school. (Laughs)

What do you mean by work?

K: I know what a real job is like and it’s not very fun. I don’t want to do that anymore. I think it’s great but it’s not what I want to do right now.

So where do you see yourself after Smith?

K: Grad school. And then hopefully academia.

How about you Cara?

C: I think I had a somewhat similar experience as Katie. My path to school took a long time. When I was in high school I had this image of school that was very much like Smith. I was really gunning for little, private, quiet colleges that I had really glossy, pretty brochures not realizing that that was highly unattainable. And my mom let me know at some point that this just wasn’t realistic for us, which is ironic now knowing they probably could’ve offered me a lot more financial aid than a lot of the places she was pushing me to apply. But we didn’t know that, we had not navigated the system before. So I ended up going to the local community college and dropping out and going back and dropping out because I was working fulltime and I was really burnt and it really wasn’t where I wanted to be. So it took me a while to just plod through that and get the half way point, the Associate’s Degree, and all the time working a string of fairly demeaning jobs: factory work, selling vacuums at some point, mainly restaurant work and getting really, really burnt on that. And from there, after I got my Associate’s and I felt free to figure out what my options were I took my time and really tried to figure out what school fit me best and Smith just kept coming up. And I didn’t even realize the weight of Smith’s name at the time, but I just went for it anyway and it worked out more than state schools that couldn’t offer me as much money. So that’s why I ended up here.

So where do you see yourself after Smith?

C: Ugh…That’s a really good question. I don’t feel like I have a vision yet. When I think about my family, my grandmother’s best vision for my mom was to be a secretary and to not have to work in the plant, and for my mom it was for us to go to college and I don’t know what it looks like after college. Just getting here was hard enough, I have no idea what is on the other side.

Let’s get back to SACA. Can you talk about the work that you have done on campus?
C: Sure. We’ve done a couple of forums where we’ve tried to kind of break the ice about class. Some of them have been a little disappointing. We’ve done them in conjunction with the SGA and have been a little bit out of our control as far as programming goes and we weren’t sure how we felt about the results. We started off being called Association of Class Awareness, but after these discussions we realized that maybe awareness isn’t exactly where it’s at. Maybe we need to get beyond awareness and get to action because there’s a lot of awareness of class privilege and there was just a lot of discussion about guilt. One of our buttons for fundraising now is: “Guilt is not an Action.” We aren’t interested in guilt. You have to push past that. We’re trying to get a little further into that. We’ve also been working on some other projects. We wanted to create a resource guide for students to teach them to navigate the system in a way that most of the seniors had once they had gotten to the end and learned the hard way. We’re working on a documentary on class experiences at Smith. There’s so much. We’re working on a zine right now. We’re working with the administration and the Dean’s office trying to make resources more readily available. There are just pockets of funding all over campus that you can apply to but it’s a really bureaucratic, red tape-laden system so you really have to jump through hoops for it. We’re trying to teach students that they’re there and how to access them and make it easier for everybody.

K: And a lot of important work around helping the administration be aware of the way in which the language they use to talk about low income and working class or first generation students is really tokenizing and difficult for a lot of the students to deal with. They’ll sort of throw around statistics about financial aid or about first generation or low income students and it’s almost like someone talking to you as if you aren’t there. And in a way to bolster a certain aspect of the college’s reputation but there’s a big problem about how those students are supported once they get there. And I think that that’s been really helpful, just pointing things out that I don’t think that many people who we’ve talked to about it before would’ve considered about how the language is really difficult.
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You can contact the Smith Association of Class Activists at saca@email.smith.edu. To read this interview in its entirety check out Toward Freedom.

Matt Dineen is a writer and activist living Northampton, MA. His Passions and Survival project explores the collective dilemma of following our passions while surviving in a capitalist society. This interview was conducted on his radio program of the same name and theme on Valley Free Radio . You can contact him at passionsandsurvival@gmail.com

The Risk of Change: Thinking and Acting Globally and Locally

2006-04-16T12:34:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

“Think Globally—Act Locally,” read the fading bumper stickers on thousands of cars and guitar cases across the United States. This influential statement has defined a popular activist strategy that politically connects our local movements with those in other countries. But what does this idea really mean and where has it gotten those of us working toward social change in our communities and across the world? How does the challenge to think globally and act locally play out in our everyday lives?

These questions have been plaguing me lately. Three years after the start of the Iraq War, I’m trying to reconcile the gap between my antiwar activism as a student before the bombing began and my current reality as a twentysomething worker struggling to survive. Three years ago I was part of a vibrant global movement working to obstruct the US invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It was powerful to know that we were in the streets protesting simultaneously with millions of other people in solidarity around the world. Despite our numbers and sustained efforts against the war “the other superpower,” as the New York Times called us, was defeated and the brutal occupation continues to this day. The antiwar movement is still active but the urgency that fueled us in 2003 has been largely extinguished as we attempt to figure out what went wrong and what we can do now.

Recently, now nearly three years out of college, I found myself trying to remain politically active while working an alienating service job. After speaking with a number of my coworkers off the clock it was clear that we all had issues with our boss and the way things were run. If we could get together and organize then we could collectively address these issues and improve our working conditions. The primary demand, beyond more dignity and freedom, was an increase in the length of our lunch breaks to match the legal standard. I saw it as an opportunity to put my politics into action. It didn’t work out that way though. Without a union we were vulnerable to the economic control our boss exerted over us. After all, we were all working there because we needed jobs so we could pay the bills and feed ourselves. It became too risky.

What is the connection between these failed global and local struggles? I want to dissect both of them in terms of how they are intertwined in a larger system and to try to learn from our failures as we forge ahead toward creating a better society—locally and globally.

In these two campaigns, one to prevent a war and the other to democratize a workplace, the targets of power were very different. On the one hand we had Bush as the personification of the empire that was waging war. On the other was the owner of a small, local business. The former wielded vast political power on a global scale, while the latter possessed power that only affected her small staff. How did our relationship to this power, in both cases, affect our strategies for affecting change as activists?

It seems obvious that the potential for the successful reform of a workplace would be greater than that of the ambitious task of stopping a war. This is clearly true but it becomes more complex when we factor in the dilemma of risk involved in each campaign. In my personal experience the risks associated with protesting the war was less than organizing my workplace. This may appear counterintuitive but the reality is that the cost of dissent is higher when we are able to directly confront our oppressors. The possibility of change is better but the act of initiating such a confrontation can be downright terrifying.

I think back to World War I and the Vietnam War and the passionate struggles against both of those horrific episodes in our history. During World War I, antiwar agitators were imprisoned and sometimes even deported for merely speaking out against it. Decades later, the young people drafted into the unjust war in Southeast Asia faced immense risk, until the movement reached a critical mass, when they burned their draft cards or demonstrated in the streets. Some were jailed or denied the right to an education while others were forced to flee the country.

My experience as a student antiwar activist was dramatically different. In my work mobilizing groups to represent our school at national actions or local protests, reporting back from these events, and speaking publicly against the war I never felt that what I was doing involved any serious personal risk. In fact, my activism was inspired by the belief that to not take action, to remain complicit in my government’s policies was more dangerous. I also went to a liberal college where there was a virtual consensus for peace and against Bush. And even though it was surrounded by a conservative population in rural New York State, our local activity was supported by other activists in the area. The day after the invasion began we marched into the center of the small neighboring town where tension between the college and the locals was present but complex. Despite a prevailing pro-war sentiment we never faced the threat of violence or repression.

The week before the war started we held a campus-wide student strike in conjunction with hundreds of schools across the country. Most of our professors worked with us as classes were transformed into antiwar teach-ins. Even the president of the college participated in the evening panel discussion on the responsibility of educational institutions in opposing war. This further strengthened us as we felt part of a global movement working against the proposed military action. The month before that we marched with over one million others in New York City in solidarity with dozens of other protests around the world. February 15th saw the largest worldwide demonstration in history as millions of people in every single continent (even Antarctica) sent a powerful message to Bush to rethink his plans.

This is all to say that to speak out and take action against the onslaught of war was simultaneously empowering and risk-free. I vehemently argued against the notion that the war was inevitable and sincerely believed that we could prevent it from happening. Coming out of the global justice movement that successfully shut down the World Trade Organization in Seattle just a few years before I felt that if our numbers were big enough and we were persistent in our actions and our persuasive case for peace and justice then we were destined to win. But this is not how things turned out. Even though we had the entire world on our side the targets of power in this campaign were too untouchable to directly confront. Or maybe we just did not try hard enough.

The situation at my workplace differed immensely from the daunting landscape of this effort to slow down empire. Unlike Bush or Rumsfeld we would see our boss virtually everyday that we worked. She had opened the business just a couple years before and would often put in 90 hour work weeks—in other words, she was always around. Her micro-managerial psychosis created a stressful environment for all of her staff. Many of my coworkers were on friendly terms with her despite the underlying tension and discontent. Some even attended her wedding. The first two months I worked there I felt isolated and alone with my issues about the workplace conditions. The fast food-like pace seemed inhuman to me and after working a 9 hour shift with only a 15 minute break from being on my feet I knew that something was wrong. My analysis ran deeper as I resented the hierarchical and undemocratic decision-making structure that is the standard of capitalist workplaces. We had little or no say over things that seriously impacted our lives. Bi-monthly “staff meetings” involved our boss telling us what we were not doing well enough followed by a brief discussion of what we could do to improve our communication. Nobody dared to bring up any grievances primarily out of fear of prolonging these tiresome meetings.

With another staff meeting looming less than two weeks away some of us began to talk about getting together outside of work beforehand to discuss issues that we wanted to address to our boss. Without going into the unnecessary details we failed to gather before the meeting as we had planned. This caused us to be unprepared when it arrived and instead of putting her on the defense about her illegal business practices we were subjected to a lecture about improving customer service. When the floor was opened for discussion nobody said anything critical and we just walked out of there in shock. I left the job later that week for reasons unrelated to these issues. It was frustrating because I was sick of merely complaining about how bad things were and wanted to actually stand up and do something about it. It made me realize that people will often passively endure unhealthy conditions in order to maintain financial and personal stability. We compromise our desire to survive under capitalism. We could’ve tried taking the place over but none of us wanted that kind of responsibility for something in which we were so alienated. Even politely asking our boss to change things seemed scary, too risky.

This makes me wonder how bad things have to get before we have no choice but to do something. How can we expect to improve things on a global scale when we can’t even successfully improve our immediate conditions locally? I think of my universe of obligation and how much it has expanded since I became politically active as a student activist. I was no longer just concerned with the wellbeing of myself, my family and friends. Working for peace and justice is about also improving the lives of those in our communities and doing something about how our government’s actions influence and often destroy other communities around the world.

In terms of connecting these issues together I think back to one of the most compelling arguments the antiwar movement presented to the supporters and logicians of the “war on terror.” In response to their claim that invading Iraq was essential to avenge the 9-11 attacks and to prevent further terrorism we responded that the war will have the opposite effect making us less safe. Here we prophetically connected the global and local while turning the case for war on its head. As the occupation continues and the number of casualties on both sides mount we begin to see who is most directly affected by this war. This explains why the most outspoken and most active segment of our movement, despite the very serious risks involved, are veterans and their families.

But how can we prevent other wars from beginning in the first place while also working toward improving our local communities and the schools and workplaces that shape our lives? One month before the war began, Michael Albert of Z Net provided some constructive insight for this struggle. He wrote, “Success is not a single ‘all or nothing’ affair…Whether this war occurs or not, our on-going task is unchanged. We must grow larger, more conscious, more militant, more organized—to try to prevent this war and the next one, to reverse globalization, and to continually challenge and eventually replace basic defining institutions.” Albert continues, “None of this will happen overnight. But we are on a path toward all of it, and we need to realize that's our trajectory, to take it seriously, and to work tirelessly toward it.”

As I write this I find myself back at my old workplace drinking coffee that one of my former coworkers served me. I overhear some of the regular customers, oblivious to the issues of worker discontent here, conversing about Iraq and Bush’s plummeting approval rating. I think about the potential for change here, in this space where I sold so many of my labor hours, and about change on a global scale. Despite the challenges we face I remain hopeful that a new world is on the horizon. I think it will be worth the risk.
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This article was written for Toward Freedom, a progressive perspective on world events.

Do You Wanna Work or Do You Wanna Job?

2006-03-16T15:46:00.001-05:00

By Patrick McGaugh

The story, of unknown origin, goes something like this: An American investment banker, visiting a small village in Mexico, encounters a Mexican fisherman. The fisherman describes his life: "I sleep late, fish a little, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life."

The American scoffs at the fisherman’s lack of ambition and goes into great detail about how he could expand his small business and make millions. "Then what?" asks the fisherman.

"Then you would retire," replies the American. "Move to a small village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos."

Increasingly, the American ideal of success is being questioned, propelling at least two streams of thought about jobs and work. One is a critique of "busyness" itself — summed up most succinctly by Bertrand Russell’s 1931 essay "In Praise of Idleness" and given some cachet by the growing voluntary simplicity movement.

It’s a point of view starkly portrayed by Mike Judge’s screen satire "Office Space." In a workplace where his bosses clothe cynical micromanagement in phony politeness and "teamwork," antihero Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) makes a decision to drop out of the rat race — on the job, that is. As he assumes a surprisingly invulnerable chutzpah, a friend asks him what he would prefer to do with his time. "I would do nothing," he asserts.

Yet not everyone who hates jobs also hates work. A second emerging trend is one in which some would say, "I would do everything." These are folks who demand work they can genuinely get excited about and doesn’t conflict with their values. Broadly speaking, this might be called the "right livelihood" movement, although the social import of individual choices is open to different interpretations. "Erin Brockovich" is one example of following one’s activist passions; "Billy Elliot" — the story of a boy pursuing his dream of dancing — quite another. One’s right livelihood may also be a product of time freed up for nonpaying pursuits, as opposed to jobs per se.

I swim in the streams of both "nothing" and "everything." For the past 18-years I’ve had one of those Rodney Dangerfield jobs, substitute teaching ("I get no respect..."). I’ve spent many years beating myself up over my failure to get and keep a "real" job. However, lately my research and reflection have led me to turn common conceptions of "success" and "failure" on their heads. I’ve come to see that time often means more to me than money, as a low-pressure work situation has allowed me to pursue political activism, spiritual practice, a healthier lifestyle (knock on wood), and the life of an insane media junkie (I must know everything). Another part of me is a real romantic about work, provided it’s something I genuinely want to do. Still, money wouldn’t hurt.

These tensions are hardly unique to me. And as technology alters the pace and face of work in the infancy of this new century, "love work" and "hate work" each bid to remake labor — and by extension, remaking society — as each point of view both competes with and informs the other.
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To read this article in its entirety check out: Conscious Choice.

Redefining Success Beyond the "Quarterlife Crisis"

2006-03-09T21:25:00.001-05:00

By Matt Dineen

“A bomb-maker or a comedian.” When I was 8 years old, this is what I would respond when grownups or peers asked me the question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’m not really sure where this came from. I wasn’t particularly funny and I was much more interested in geography and baseball than weapons manufacturing. Back then, I didn’t even know what that meant. This response was arbitrary, random and served only to shock and confuse the people asking this seemingly soul-searching inquiry.

Fast forward 16 years...“What do you want to be when you grow up?” has (d)evolved into: “What do you do?” I am grown up now so what have I become? What am I doing? The prevalence of these questions reveals a lot about our culture. Its obsession with work and jobs begins to shape us from the moment we are able to speak these words. From the very beginning we are conditioned to base our (future) identities around our jobs. This is a cultural assumption that we are discouraged from ever questioning. It is taken for granted throughout our lives.

So what have I become? What am I doing? After high school I attended a small liberal arts college for four years and received a bachelor’s degree nearly 3 years ago. During this time out of school my paid work has more closely resembled that of a teenage wage-slave seeking parental independence than that of a skilled college graduate. In a work-obsessed culture this situation creates a disconnect between “what we do” and what we enjoy and are capable of doing. It affects those of us in our twentysomething years more dramatically than others because this is when we start to confront the complexities of the so-called real world. But the collective dilemma of living in a capitalist society is the ongoing struggle to follow our passions while surviving.

The quarterlife crisis is unique because it is when we begin to viscerally understand that our cultural conditioning around work and success is nothing but mythology and functions only to preserve the status quo. It is when we learn that a college degree does not guarantee you anything close to job security. We start to grapple with the dilemma of passions and survival as we search for a semblance of meaning in a society that is based on an empty construction of material success and power.

In my experience with the quarterlife crisis it has been essential to personally reject these constructions and expectations in an attempt to redefine success and wellbeing. My life goal does not involve getting a powerful job and making more money than I really need at the expense of others. It is not centered around acquiring and consuming lots of things and turning toward these material possessions for happiness. I have tried to live a simple lifestyle that does not require a 40 hour a week wage job. By cutting back on reckless consumerism and by living in places where I don’t need a car I have been able to have more “free time” to pursue my true interests.

This is not to suggest that I haven’t struggled as much as other twentysomethings or that I have somehow transcended this crisis. I have been riddled with financial debt for over a year now and that’s not even counting the massive student loans that I have been nervously deferring. In between periods of unemployment I have worked a number of jobs that have been unfulfilling and have interfered with sustaining inspiration to follow my passions.

The most recent example was at a café where I took drink orders, made sandwiches, washed dishes, and cleaned the bathrooms. This particular café happened to be in the same building as a national media literacy organization that I had respected for years. It was so frustrating for me to be downstairs working a job that I hated when all I wanted was to be upstairs working with them. Occasionally, I fantasized about what it looked like up there and how much happier I would be doing research about issues around race, class and gender in the media than I was cleaning off tables and mopping the floor. Instead I just tried to carve out time for my own writing and research and for playing music and staying politically active.

In my quest to redefine success it has also been important for me to be connected to a network of independent, underground culture. This world has provided me with mentors and models of what uncompromised success can look like. From indie musicians and artists to community organizers and radical school teachers, there are people out there that have made it through this quarterlife struggle and are able to fully incorporate their passions into their daily lives. It has been really inspiring for me to speak with people who have actualized this dream, completely on their terms and in line with their values. This gives me hope as I continue to work a wage job that is separate from what I really want to be doing with my life.

I think back to the question: What do you want to be when you grow up? In a sense, what I am doing now seems just as strange and implausible as being a bomb-making comedian. When I was 8 years old I didn’t have a full understanding of how complex life under capitalism can be. Although we are molded to conform to a rigid occupation-based identity the reality of growing up is much more complicated. In order to thrive during this transitional moment we need to embrace the fact that our lives are multidimensional and from there do everything we can to follow our passions and redefine the recipe for happiness.
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Matt Dineen is a freelance writer living and working in Northampton, MA. This piece has been submitted to an anthology about the "quarterlife crisis." Go to Quarter-Life-Crisis to learn more about the project. Submissions are due March 31st.

Passions & Survival Radio

2006-03-04T13:18:00.001-05:00

Passions and Survival is now a radio show! Every Monday morning between 9:00 and 10:00 am, Matt Dineen will be hosting this new show on WXOJ-LP, Valley Free Radio 103.3 FM in Northampton, MA. It will further explore the collective dilemma of following our passions while surviving in a capitalist society. Guests from the local community will be interviewed about their personal struggles within a larger context of transforming society. Essays, relevant news topics and socially conscious, independent music will be mixed in as well.

Currently, Valley Free Radio is not webcasting but it will be soon. People outside of the Pioneer Valley can stay updated and learn more about the station by visiting its website.

Talk hard.

Double Lives Commentary

2006-03-04T13:10:00.001-05:00

Double Lives: The Dilemma of Education and Work under Capitalism was published last month on TowardFreedom.com and has received some feedback and criticism. Some of the comments were posted below the article. You can read them here: Double Lives.

Double Lives: The Dilemma of Education and Work under Capitalism

2006-01-27T16:57:00.001-05:00

By Matt Dineen

“Whatever you do, just don’t get stuck in a dead-end job.” These words had a powerful effect on me and have occupied my consciousness over the past seven years. It was the summer after my high school graduation and this advice was given to me while I was working in the mechanized bakery of a large grocery store chain. My coworker had been there for over 20 years and now, in the midst of back problems and middle-age, she was unhappy with her life and urged me not to make the same mistake.

I escaped that dead-end job in August to attend an increasingly respectable liberal arts college. Graduating four years later with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, I returned to the workforce with an education that provided me the opportunity to avoid getting “stuck.” But in the past two and a half years I have not succeeded in transcending wage-slavery. Rather, I have struggled with the collective dilemma of life under capitalism: How do we follow our passions while simultaneously survive? It is the challenge of life in the “real world,” in which we often have to neglect the things that are important to us in order to feed ourselves. It’s the reality of the artist who waits tables and the activist working for a big corporation. We are forced to compromise our true interests, what keeps us going, simply to make ends meet. We are resigned to the economic imperatives of survival.

Education is supposed to remedy this dilemma. The mythology of American class mobility is epitomized by the cliché, “I was the first in my family to go to college.” What function does education serve in a capitalist society? Does it really provide people with a chance to freely pursue their passions?

Unlike many of my friends growing up I had the privilege, thanks to financial aid and student loans, to attend college. Perhaps because of this I also experienced social pressure upon graduation to “do something with my education” and “find something in my field.” Being in this position has been difficult for me on two levels: First, like every other college graduate with no connection to the economic-political elite, it is not that simple to land an empowering and lucrative job right after school. Secondly, I have no desire to conform to a social construction of success that values wealth and power over personal wellbeing.

In his autobiography of his early years as writer, Hand to Mouth, Paul Auster articulates this dilemma describing the “double lives” that writers and artists must lead to survive in a capitalist society. “They earn good money at legitimate professions and carve out time for their writing as best they can: early in the morning, late at night, weekends, vacations.” In his personal rejection of this compromise he explains, “My problem was that I had no interest in leading a double life. It’s not that I wasn’t willing to work, but the idea of punching a clock at some nine-to-five job left me cold, utterly devoid of enthusiasm.” Auster continues: “I was in my early twenties, and I felt too young to settle down, too full of other plans to waste my time earning more money than I either wanted or needed. As far as finances went, I just wanted to get by.”

For me, this dilemma has translated into a string of alienating and menial jobs. While leading a “double life” I have been forced to segregate my passions from my work, my means for survival. I have carved out time for writing, music and activism but the sub-living wage jobs have drained my energy and inspiration. Last year I worked at a natural grocery cooperative stocking frozen foods and dairy products. One day I found myself on my knees in the walk-in storage refrigerator cleaning up a jar of pickles that I had dropped right before my shift ended. In that moment I knew that there had to be something more than this. I had to find something more meaningful to do with my life. But I have been unsuccessful in my applications to jobs that are “in my field.” From collectively-run bookstores to independent media organizations there are always a plethora of educated and qualified applicants in the same position as me desperately searching for something better.

This is not simply a “quarter-life crisis.” It is an issue that many people in our society deal with all their lives. My coworker in the bakery who warned me about getting stuck in a dead-end job has spent three decades separating her passions from a stifling 40 hour work week. Unlike me, she did not have the same access to resources that a college education provides. This has been a common story amongst working people throughout US history. So many people spend the majority of their lives at jobs they hate. Some carve out time to pursue higher education deep into middle-age in hope of creating a more rewarding life.

In response to a recent interview on Toward Freedom that I conducted with Pittsburgh activist Andalusia Knoll on “Redefining Work,” an inspired reader described this exact situation:

“I have been in the workforce since 1966, without any wealth to show for it. More importantly, the last few years (advertising encouraging people to buy more of what they don’t need) have been totally unfulfilling. At 55 years old, I went back to school to get a quick degree. I found out what I really missed was learning. So, I am going to grad school next year and will work part-time as necessary and perhaps seek a Ph.D. I also volunteer with Greater Philadelphia Cares and am much happier than I was getting and spending.”

The last job I had was at a coffeehouse in the small New England college town where I currently live. I found the work, ownership, and most of the clientele of the café oppressive and spiritually nauseating but I stuck with it because I needed a job. The other thing that kept me there were my amazing coworkers. They were all in similar places with their lives as I was—mostly college grads struggling to go somewhere bigger in this moment of personal transition. We were not simply baristas, dishwashers or counter help. When we weren’t making sandwiches, steaming lattes or cleaning toilets we were pursuing photography, massage therapy, poetry, radio production, journalism, and music—our true passions. Despite our boss’ contrived efforts to convince us otherwise, these were the things that were most important in our lives and the café was a mere stepping stone to something more.

In her book, The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work, Joanne B. Ciulla describes her similar experience with this transitional moment as she was advancing her education in pursuit of what she loved to do. She worked part-time in a restaurant when she wasn’t studying or teaching undergraduate courses in philosophy:

“I worked alongside a ballet dancer and a model. We all had great ambitions. The manager took sadistic delight in making fun of our aspirations and verbally abusing us. I don’t know what happened to the manager, but the dancer eventually went on to become a prima ballerina, the model ended up on the cover of Italian Vogue, and I landed a fellowship at the Harvard Business School.” Ciulla continues, “This experience helped me understand the relationship between hope and work. We can endure the worst of jobs, if it is reasonable to hope that the job will get us where we want to go or at least feed us along the way.”

This passage resonates so deeply with our collective experience of working at the aforementioned café. One day, one of my coworkers stood next to me as I washed dishes at the industrial sink in the back. She looked at me and stated, in a tone of disbelief and wonderment, “This is our life, Matt. This is what we are doing.” This seemingly simple statement contained enough meaning for me to fill volumes and volumes of books on the human condition.

This is our life. This is what we are doing.

Her relationship with work and hope was shaped by her passion for photography. In her double life outside of baking pastries she was creating a portfolio from photos developed in the dark room she built in her apartment. Along with another coworker, she was applying to graduate school for photography in hopes of escaping this job that was slowing us all down. This is an example of how education has the potential to liberate us from “dead-end” situations in which we are forced to compromise the pursuit of our passions.

Despite all of this, it is important to reiterate that it is still a privilege in this society to acquire such an education. Throughout history the power of the ruling, educated classes has depended on depriving the majority of the population such an education; hence the phrase: “Knowledge is power.” The social movements of the 20th Century were integral in democratizing education in the United States but this structural inequality is still in place today. Furthermore, we need to recognize and criticize the limitations and failures of existing educational institutions and their role in perpetuating these unequal power structures.

In my personal struggle to follow my passions in this complex society, I will forever remember the advice of my coworker that summer before I began my college education. I want to be conscious of my opportunities and privileges of which she was denied. In this struggle I will also be inspired by the words of Boris Pasternak:

“The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.”
--
Matt Dineen is a freelance writer living in Northampton, MA.

The Psychopathology of Work

2005-12-12T10:12:00.001-05:00

by Penelope Rosemont

"Work, now? Never, never. I'm on strike."
-Arthur Rimbaud

Depersonalization and alienation from our deepest desires is implanted during childhood via school, church, movies, and TV, and soon reaches the point where an individual's desire is not only a net of contradictions, but also a commodity like all the others. "True life" always seems to be just a bit beyond what a weekly paycheck and credit card can afford, and is thus indefinitely postponed. And each postponement contributes to the reproduction of a social system that practically everyone who is not a multimillionaire or a masochist has come to loathe.

That is the problem facing us all: How to break the pattern of work - of week-to-week slavery, that habit of habits, that addiction of addictions; how to detach ourselves from the grip of Self-Defeating Illusions For Sale, Inc., a.k.a, the corporate consumer State.

Especially ingrained is that pattern of working for someone else: making someone else's "goods", producing the wealth that someone else enjoys, thinking someone else's thoughts (sometimes actually believing them one's own), and even dreaming someone else's dreams - in short, living someone else's life, for one's own life, and one's own dream of life, have long since been lost in the shuffle.

The systematic suppression of a person's real desires - and that is largely what work consists of - is exacerbated by capitalism's incessant manipulation of artificial desires, "as advertised." This gives daily life the character of mass neurosis, with increasingly frequent psychotic episodes. To relieve the all-embracing boredom of daily life, society offers an endless array of distractions and stupefactions, most of them "available at a store near you". The trouble is, these distractions and stupefactions, legal or illegal, soon become part of the boredom, for they satisfy no authentic desire.

When the news reports horrible crimes committed by children or teenagers trying to be satanists, or superheroes, or terrorists, or just "bad guys", we can be sure that these kids lived lives of intolerable dullness, that they were so isolated from their own desires and from the larger society that they didn't even know how or where to look for something different, or how to rebel in such a way that it might actually make a difference. Instead, they picked up some trashy notions from bible school, Hollywood and TV which promised a few minutes of meaningless "excitement" followed by lots of publicity - also meaningless. Each time something like this happens we hear cries to "monitor" films more closely, and to ban "violence" on TV. Rarely, however, does anyone criticize the Bible or the Christian churches, despite the fact that Christianity - by far the bloodiest of the "world's great religions" - is far more to be blamed. Similarly, one rarely hears criticism of the armed forces - a gang of professional killers whose influence on children cannot be anything other than baleful.

And even less often does one encounter criticism of another intrinsically violent institution: the nuclear family. Indeed, at this late date in human history, this relic of patriarchy is still held up as some sort of ideal. Replacing the extended family as we know it today is an invention of the nineteenth century. Constructed by white bourgeois Europeans to meet the needs of expanding industrialization, it reflects capitalism's model of the "chain of command". It continues the sanction of male supremacy as a time-honored tradition dating back to a mandate of God, no less. In the nuclear family, he works at a job, and she works in the home (and increasingly also at a job). As for the children, they are the family's private property, and remain so for years after they reach bilogical maturity.

Children too learn to work, or at least how to suffer boredom. From the earliest age they are taught to obey orders. School and church teach them the necessity of going to and staying at a particular place for a prolonged period, even when they would rather be anywhere else. All the classic parental admonitions - "Sit still!", "Do what I tell you!", "Don't talk back!", "Stop behaving like a bunch of wild Indians!" - are part of the education of the well-behaved, uncomplaining wage-slave...

The world today is confronted by greater, more earth-shaking, more life-threatening problems than ever before: wars all over, massive pollution, global warming, the return of slavery, white supremacy, oppression of women, ecological disaster, neocolonialism, state terrorism, the prison industry, genocide, cancer, AIDS, the traffic death-toll, xenophobia, pesticides, genetic engineering - the list goes on and on. Ceaselessly bombarded by news reports and sound bytes of one catastrophe after another, most people have no idea what to do, and laps into paralysis. On the ideological front, this widespread passivity, itself a major social problem, is maintained by Andre Breton called miserabilism, the cynical rationalization of misery, suffering and corruption - the dominant ideology of Power in our time.

Every hour, moreover, countless billions are spent on propaganda, advertising and other mystifications to sustain the delusion that the crisis-strewn society we live in today is the best and only one possible.

What is most important to grasp is that work is at the center of all these problems. It is work that keeps the whole miserabilist system going. Without work, the death-dealing juggernaut that proclaims itself the "free market" would grind to a halt. "Free market" means freedom for Capital, and unfreedom for those who work. Until the problem of work is solved - that is, until work is abolished - all other problems will not only remain, but will keep getting worse...In a world too busy to live, work itself has become toxic, a form of "digging your own grave".

Renewed scarcities and engineered economic crises notwithstanding, society today ahs the capacity to reduce work to a tiny fraction of what it is now, while continuing to meet all human needs. It is obvious that if people really want paradise on Earth, they can have it - practically overnight. Of course, they will have to overcome the immense and multinational "false consciousness" industry, which works very hard to make sure that very few working people know what they really want...

Work kills the spirit, damages the body, insults the mind, keeps everyone confused and demoralized, distracts its victims from all the things that really matter in life...Our struggle calls for labor organizers of a new kind...To bring about the meltdown of miserabilism, we need awakeners of latent desires, fomentors of marvelous humour, stimulators of ardent dreams, provokers of the deepest possible yearning for a life of poetic adventure.

(From "A Brief Rant Against Work", in Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights (2000))

Free Time! Ludicity and the Anti-work Ethic

2005-11-10T12:58:00.001-05:00

By Laura Martz

To sustain itself, consumer capitalism relies on (1) the maintenance of an outdated survival imperative and work ethic, and (2) a totalizing commodification and consumerism, which necessitates work beyond perceived survival needs. Play has been diametrically opposed to work (defined as wage labor), coded as decadent within the sphere of rationality and radically excised. One's time off the clock is allegedly the proper realm of play. Yet under consumer capitalism this time is cleverly commandeered for other means as intrinsic to keeping the machine running as the activities engaged in under the watchful eye of the clock.

Play will be defined here only loosely, as all that which is diametrically opposed to and excluded by work (its elements of delight, surprise and affect will be preserved). Bataille conceives of a general economy of global energy flows which inevitably generates a surplus of energy which must be expended. Under capitalism, excess (human energy not necessary to survival) is diverted into accumulation and endlessly-climbing profits for the ruling class. Yet for Bataille the proper object of the expenditure of this energy is dissipation, "nonproductive expenditure": "into the effervescence of life." Play is a fitting expediture; put another way, this nonproductive expenditure defines another aspect of play crucial to the following argument. Play is the refusal of regimentation, supervision and clocks. In this sense, play is a precondition for resistance, which demands time and energy for spontaneity, contemplation, communication, and unity. Play must be recovered.

Reintroducing play into adult life would necessitate the rupture of what Debord called the spectacle (so as to open the way for other species of meaning besides exchange value) and the recovery of some unity for life against the separateness of present conditions, especially the effacement of the boundary between art and life (in order to despecialize and render accessible more forms of activity). Both of these aims were part of the project of the Situationist International. I will attempt to reexamine the ideology which keeps time divided between producing and consuming in a situationist light, chipping away at it in the process, and begin to suggest some possibilities for reclaiming time from work.

"Never Work!"

The survival imperative in the technologized world as a rationale for wage labor is an alibi used to legitimate capitalist profit and thus domination and alienation. That the worker does excess work (more than demanded by her own, or anyone's, necessity, and more than she is paid for) is a law of capitalism. Capitalist profit is the reification of this excess labor, which is either channelled into the reinforcement of the status of the ruling class or redirected into capital accumulation. The worker will never be paid more than she or he needs to survive and remain fit to work. This axiom was altered slightly with the need to metamorphose the worker-producer into a consumer when off the clock. Henry Ford introduced the five-dollar day in the recognition that with the surplus being produced as a result of increased efficiency under industrialization and Taylorization, the consumer market needed to be "vertically expanded": workers, most of the population and thus putatively the predominant buyers of products, needed excess income with which to absorb the system's waste output. (Workers also needed incentive to stick with Ford at first, when other employers did not yet enforce his scientific management principles, which the workers found demeaning and tiresome. They were forced into step, nevertheless, as scientific management rapidly took hold everywhere.) The purpose of the "consumer wage" is thus to keep the machinery of capitalist overproduction in motion.

The consumer must be conditioned from birth to hand over the "excess" wage in exchange for the excesses of capitalist production. In the early twentieth century the new requirement of capitalism became the total cultural control of workers outside the workplace (when their role changed to that of consumers), through the new advertising industry, as well as in it. Advertising is perhaps the most obvious mode of spectacular ideology. The spectacle holds workers in thrall, teaching them in what is called their "free" time that their desires can be satisfied through consumption. The upkeep of the capitalist economic system thus finally encroaches on all our waking hours.

Half a century after the development of advertising and consumerist ideology, the situationists held that the "society of the spectacle" (commodities, art-as-commodity, the mass media, the entertainment industry) alienates its "spectators," who are condemned to do nothing more than watch themselves, experiencing satisfaction (but not really) only through the mediation of the commodity. The spectacle steals every experience and sells it back to us, but only symbolically, so that we are never satisfied: via this mechanism we support the machine of endless consumption over and over.

Play is thought of as the opposite of "work." Yet under the existing order play is officially allowed only children and the workers of play-as-spectacle, which is not play. It is reified through the professionalization of select people as "athletes," "artists" or "entertainers." These physical, creative activities are reserved for "professionals," who must sell the product of their "play" as spectacle. As observed by the Bureau of Control (pamphleteers from Houston, Texas), in the realm of "art" behavior is tolerated that would not be in the "real world." Play in the "working world" is diverted, channeled off as "art," contained as decadent behavior in the mainstream of life. Children are punished in school for playing except at scheduled break time, as training for the radical split between what one is ordered to do and what one might like to do.

Furthermore, to play professionally today and live off it, one must be able to command a mass audience and license the spectacle-commodity to a hierarchy of managers and owners, each of whom creams off an ascending percentage of profit from the "work" (for that is what this "play" has been converted or inverted into). "Performance" is now also always subject to endless monitoring and control by the professional judges and censors.

According to the situationists, the desire for experience is "continually commodified and in turn wrenched free from spectacular relations in a perpetual struggle for its realisation." This axiom is beautifully manifest in the US in 1993 in a Nike commercial. A young, white actor boasts, "My name is Fletcher and I work as little as possible." The company slogan "Just Do It" appears on the screen in wavy acid-green letters on a hot-pink background. We have here the co-option and price-tagging by the spectacle of the anti-work, pro-play ethic of the situationists' American brethren, the hippies; presented simultaneously with the suggestive phrase: just do it! (Just try LSD! Just blow up that military installation!) But in this case, "just do it" is only supposed to mean "just buy this hundred-dollar pair of shoes."

The supreme irony of capitalism might be that an anti-production and anti-capitalist ethic can be used to promote capitalist interests, by inducing people to consume through teasing them with oppositional desires. In the operation of the Nike ad, giving in to anticapitalist desires ("working as little as possible") is OK, and what's more, it's achievable through consumption (which is to say, not at all, except through a commodity fantasy). But someone who understands how advertising works will be able to separate the commodity from the impulse the ad attempts to link with it and examine that impulse for the symptom it is.

Only those who do work can afford to buy products like this. Nike obviously perceives a grain of dissatisfaction with the capitalist system and channels it into support of that system. But we can be sure dissatisfaction with the status quo is alive and well when the status quo has to commandeer it. I see this ad as targeting that US media-generated grouping called "Generation X" or "slackers." They are constructed as an un- or under-employed, downwardly-mobile group of recent college graduates. As the mass media have it, the state of the economy, US politics in the 1980s, the condition of the ecosystem, and growing up in suburbia have made them skeptical of capitalism's lures and promises, its ideology of bourgeois ambition. Made aware of their status as a demographic category through advertising and its supporting media, they have been co-opted by the spectacle and used to sell upscale goods like cars, though it is unclear to whom--those more ambivalent "cynics" of the same age and class grouping, one suspects.

These people are would-have-been-desirable consumers (and employees) gone bad. They're not suitably ambitious (sometimes they almost resemble their European counterparts, the "unemployed generation"--who, because they could, founded autonomist scenes) to make capitalism comfortable, and allegedly cannot get and/or do not want the lucrative jobs that are their inheritance. They are interesting because they seem so skeptical about capitalism as the promised road to happiness, so uninvested in the ideology that keeps it going.
--

Laura Martz is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University in Literary and Cultural Theory. You can read this article in its entirety at Cultronix.

How Ethical Is The Work 'Ethic'?

2005-11-02T11:59:00.001-05:00

Reconsidering work and 'leisure time'

Did you ever wonder why your parents act so disoriented when it comes to 'leisure' activities? Why they start one little hobby, and either fail to follow through with it or become pathologically obsessed with it...even though it doesn't seem to have anything to do with their lives? Maybe they seek to lose themselves in gardening or following the exploits of some basketball team. Maybe your father buys all sorts of fancy tools (the kind of tools many men his age have), but only uses them for a few days before setting them aside--and then buys a lot of skiing equipment the next month. Or perhaps they just spend their time trying figure out how to pay off the debt they owe for that wide screen television they spend the rest of their time watching.

And--have they ever been honest with you about their jobs? Do they enjoy them? Is their work the most fulfilling thing they could be doing, are they able to achieve every goal they always wanted to? Do they feel heroic or proud every day as they return home--or are they exhausted? Do they turn that wide screen television on as soon as they come in the door? Do they have the energy to do anything else?

Did you ever wonder if there might be a better way for them, for you?

WHAT IS 'WORK' LIKE?

Because of the 'division of labor', most jobs today consist of doing very specific tasks, over and over, with very little variety. If you are a dishwasher, you wash dishes: you don't get to interact with people or solve complicated problems very often, and you never get to leave the dishroom to run around in the sunlight. If you are a real estate agent, you never use your hands to make anything, and you spend most of your time thinking about market value and selling points. Even jobs that include a certain amount of variety can only remain interesting and challenging up to a point: for we work forty hours a week on average, and at least five out of the seven days. That's a lot of our lives to spend working. Work is the first thing we do on most of the days of our lives, and we don't get to do anything else until we've been at work for quite a while. When we spend most of our time and energy working on one task, or even ten different tasks, eventually we will feel bored and desperate for variety... even if we are conditioned not to realize this.

On top of this, because of the spread of large businesses and the consequent decrease in self-employment and small businesses, most of us do not have much voice in what our responsibilities at work will be. It is hard to start your own business or even find a friend or neighbor to work for. We often must get a job to survive in which we follow the instructions of a manager who probably doesn't have much more control over his job than we have over ours. Since we don't get to decide what we are doing, chances are that we will feel alienated from our work, disinterested in the quality of our labor; we may even feel that the projects we are working upon are unimportant.

Indeed it is easy to feel that most of the jobs available today are unimportant--for in a certain sense, many of them are. In a purely capitalist economy, the jobs that are available will be determined by which products are in the most demand; and often the products that are in demand (military technology, fast food, Pepsi, fashionable clothes) are not products that really make people happy. It's easy to feel like all your labor is wasted when the products you work so hard to sell just to survive seem to do nothing for the people you sell them to. How many people really are cheered up by the soggy french fries at McDonalds? Would they perhaps be happier eating a meal prepared by a friend of theirs or a chef they knew who owned his own cafe?

In short, 'work' as we know it tends to make us unhappy because we do so much of it, because it is so repetitive, because we don't get to choose what we do, and because what we are doing is often not in the best interest of our fellow human beings.

WHAT IS 'LEISURE TIME' LIKE?

We come home from these jobs exhausted from having invested all our time and energy in a project we may not have even been free to choose, and what we need most is to recover. We are emotionally and physically worn out, and nothing seems more natural than to sit down quietly for a while and watch television or read the daily paper, while we try to gather our strength for the next day's labor. Perhaps we try to leave behind our exhaustion and frustration by concentrating on some hobby or another; but as we are not very used to directing ourselves in the workplace during the day, we often don't know what we really want to do when we are free at home.

Certainly some company or another will have some suggestions for us, whether we receive them from advertising or watching our neighbors; but chances are that this company has their profits in mind at least as much as our satisfaction, and we may discover that playing miniature golf is strangely unfulfilling.

Similarly, of course, we don't have much time or energy left over from work to consider our situation or participate in any rewarding activity which requires much time and energy. We don't like to think too much about whether we enjoy our jobs or our lives--besides, that might be depressing, and what can we do if we don't enjoy them, anyway? We don't have the energy left to enjoy art or music or books that are really challenging; we need our music to be soothing, our art nonthreatening, our books merely entertaining.

In fact, we come to associate having to expend effort and do things with our work, and associate relaxing and not doing anything with leisure time. So, because many of us don't like our jobs, we tend to associate having to do things with being unhappy, while happiness, as far as we ever know it, means... not doing anything. We never act for ourselves, because we spend our whole days acting for other people, and we think that acting and working hard always leads to unhappiness; our idea of happiness is not having to act, being on permanent vacation.

And this is ultimately why so many of us are so unhappy: because happiness is not doing nothing, happiness is acting creatively, doing things, working hard on things you care about. Happiness is becoming an excellent long-distance runner, falling in love, cooking an original recipe for people you care about, building a bookshelf, writing a song. There is no happiness to be found in merely lying on a couch--happiness is something that we must pursue. We are not unhappy because we have to do things, we are unhappy because all the things we do are things we don't care about. And because our jobs exhaust us and mislead us about what we want, they are the source of much of our unhappiness.

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

You don't have to work at those jobs, you know. It is possible to get by without all the Pepsi, all the expensive clothes, the wide screen television and the expensive interior decorating that all those paychecks go to pay for. You can try to start your own business doing something you care about (although this still involves the danger of having too little variety in your work), or you can try to find a job in today's marketplace (good luck!) that you actually enjoy... and that leaves you enough time and energy to do other things in your life that you also enjoy. The most important thing is to arrange your life so that you are doing things because you want to do them, not because they are profitable--otherwise, no matter how much money you make, you will be selling your happiness for money. Remember that the less money you spend, the less you will have to worry about getting money in the first place... and the less you will have to work at those dehumanizing jobs. Learn to use all your 'free' time, not to vegetate or spend money on entertainment, but to create things and accomplish things--things that no one would pay you to make or do, but that make your life (and perhaps the lives of others) better anyway.

Some will argue that the system we live within would break down if we all were to walk away from our jobs--so much the better. Haven't we built enough automobiles, enough shopping malls, enough televisions and golf clubs, enough fucking nuclear weapons already? Wouldn't we all be better off if there was a shortage of fast food and a surplus of unique home-cooked meals? If playing music is more rewarding than working in an assembly line, why do we have so few good bands and so many transistor radios? Of course a 'work-free' world is a dream we will probably never see come true; but as always, the challenge is to make this dream a part of your world, as much as you can--to liberate yourself from the chains of mindless consumerism and mind-melting employment and live a more meaningful life.
---
This piece originally appeared in the book "Days of War Nights of Love," published by CrimethInc.

The Decline and Fall of Work

2005-10-27T13:42:00.001-04:00

"The obligation to produce alienates the passion for creation...In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create...The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on people want to live, not just survive."

-Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution of Everyday Life"

D.C. Superhero: An Interview with Katy Otto

2005-10-04T16:41:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

How do people pursue their passions, the things that keep us going, while simultaneously surviving in a capitalist society? Katy Otto is one of those modern day superheroes that is truly following her dreams and getting by pretty well in this crazy world. Not only does she run a DIY record label and play drums in the fantastic rock band Del Cielo, but she is also the Director of Grants and Community Outreach for the DC-area Empower Program. She’s also been known to help organize, among many other things, the annual Visions in Feminism Conference and Lady Fest. Katy is an inspiration to all of us, and a living example of what a better society could look like. I had the chance to speak to her at this year’s National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR) at American University.

When people ask you, “What do you do?” how do you usually respond to them?

Well, professionally I work as a grant writer at a non-profit that’s a gender violence prevention program that works with youth. But I have a lot of other projects that take up a lot of time too. I play drums in a band, Del Cielo, that I love a lot, and I run a little record label with my friend Sara called Exotic Fever. I like to do projects and organizing. I think who I am as a person has been shaped by the community I grew up in—the punk community in DC. It has been very important to my organizing and has been my source of energy. And I like writing.

Tell me more about this grant-writing job. Do you enjoy that work? Is it a full time thing?

Mhm. I’ve been there for 6 and half years, two as an intern in college. I like it because I was a journalism major and it’s a way to combine some of my writing skills with interest I have in social justice work and particularly work around youth development and violence prevention, gender socialization. So, I like it.

Nice.

It can be stressful. Being a fund-raiser isn’t always a laugh riot. Especially in the current economy, and because we are not an abstinence-only organization. And under the Bush administration those kinds of organizations are experiencing a much better situation [than us] in terms of funding available and tax cushions because of certain laws. So that sucks.

Yeah. Well, do you think you would continue to do this kind of work even if you weren’t getting paid for it? It obviously incorporates some of your interests but is the main function just the income that it provides, so you can support yourself?

Well, no. I don’t think that’s the main function although I certainly wouldn’t be able to devote the same amount of time to it if I wasn’t getting paid because I have to pay rent and bills. But part of my work is helping to co-facilitate a teen girls group and help mentor them and that’s the most rewarding part of the job. They organize a teen girl conference. They do public speaking, and community organizing and education. They’re just 10 amazing young women. That’s such a rewarding piece of the work. For the amount of money that people in non-profits get paid it’s usually other things fueling you to be there. But grant writing is not a stroll in the park.

Can you talk about living in the DC-area and how that affects your lifestyle? How did you choose to live here and make this your community?

I really love living in DC for a number of reasons. Because we’re in such a politically volatile world climate it’s very energizing to live in a place where a lot of really atrocious policies and decisions are being made. It makes it so that you do not escape. Politics and international relations are very much at the forefront of people’s minds here. And I think that’s important for people who are interested in social justice because it keeps you alert and active and responsive as long as that’s where your heart is. There’s also a really large resistance community here and a pretty diverse one. So that’s nice because growing up it was easy for me to learn about these kinds of issues. Also, there’s a lot of non-profits that do youth development work. There are hundreds in DC. And the punk and independent music community is really thriving and there are people who are older than me who helped mentor me when I wanted to do things like start a label. There’s just a lot of infrastructure for projects. It’s also interesting to live in a place that’s essentially a colony, with DC not being a state. It’s a very embattled place in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of spirit here.

Can you talk more about the dilemmas you’ve faced trying to work on all these projects that you’re passionate about while being able to pay rent and getting by?

Well, the nice thing about the label is that it’s successful enough now that a lot of the expenses of running a label are covered because we have a catalog of releases that does fairly well. I think I still lose some money each year on it, but it is able to be an active project because of the exciting attention people have paid to the releases. So that’s helpful. And also having the label in partnership with my best friend Sara. That’s helpful because we share the burden of the work, the financial burden, and we also share the excitement and the interest. With the band it’s been cool because we’re a very, very intentional DIY band but we’re also very active and we work really hard on our band and have been a band for 4 years. So when we travel we don’t lose money because we work really hard. When we’re on tour we try not to have days off. We go to the record stores in town and try to sell our cds. We’re very diligent about it. We plan things very far in advance to try to make sure they’re done really solidly and really well. So that’s nice because it’s definitely not making money or anything, but it’s not costing us money to do. So that’s nice. Although I’d love some equipment. I’ve got the same drum set I’ve had since I was a very little lady. (laughs)

I don’t know…coffee is a really good fuel for your projects. I drink a little too much of it. And I live in a group house with 3 very supportive men. I think living in a group house can be really awesome especially when people share interests. It just makes it a lot easier to do things like shows in DC because there is a network of people. I did a show for NCOR Friday night and literally an hour before I was like, “Man, this is gonna be a tiring night.” But then people called and were like, “How can I help? Can I do the door?” I don’t think that happens everywhere. A lot of times if I’m organizing something like a show I’ll be in a pretty visible role, but I’m not the only person that’s worked on it. So I try to make sure people get credit where credit’s due.

Does the group house arrangement cut down on your cost of living?

Greatly. Especially for this area because we live in a house that’s cheaper than most houses and we’ve also converted a 3 bedroom into a 4 bedroom. Otherwise, this area is brutal. But my rent is $300 a month, which in this area is pretty unheard of. That’s really the only way to live that cheaply here. Oh, and we eat together a lot too. Not all the time but we just share things in general. It cuts down on bills. We’re able to get things like cable that if we lived on our own none of us would be able to get. That’s kind of cool. At first I was like, “No! No cable.” But it’s kind of nice because then we don’t go to Blockbuster anymore. We can just watch Direct TV movies.

It seems like that’s part of this lifestyle where you can be able to have more time to pursue projects if you don’t have to work as much.

Yeah. My work has been really supportive of my touring too. The summer before last, because I had been at my job so long, I was able to take a sabbatical. So I had a 6-week tour and I was paid for all 6 weeks of work even though I wasn’t there. But that’s only a once every 5 years thing. I think at non-profits because you’re working so many long hours there are things people will do to make sure that the morale is high.

If you had the opportunity to live off your label and your band would you do that? Would you quit the job you have now?

I do have a dream of one day to be able to just do the label. The band is a little harder to think about. It would be amazing if we could do that, but what’s most important for me about our band is that all 3 people in the band always feel that they’re in positions they’re totally comfortable with. To me, that’s a pretty radical thing as a band of all women that the most valuable thing about the band is all three members’ opinions and nobody outside of that has any more say in what that looks like. So that makes it really hard because you think about some of the things that need to happen in order to get to that point. I know some people don’t believe that it’s possible for anyone to ever survive off their band without booking agents or really high profile, somewhat corporate-influenced record labels and things like that. Or people say, “Only if you’re Fugazi.” Well, I think there are other ways of people making that a reality. But it’s not a part of my ambition with my band because I feel like the process and the things that I gain from it are so much richer than that could ever be. I mean, if it just happened—sure. (laughs) I’m a very process-oriented person.

This interview originally appeared in the September/October 2005 (#34) issue of Clamor Magazine. To learn more about Katy Otto's projects check out The Empowered Program, Exotic Fever Records and Del Cielo.

Lifelong Semi-Retirement: A Hot "Career" Opportunity

2005-10-01T14:24:00.001-04:00

By John O. Andersen

This is my proposal for a new entry to be added to career reference books which young people use when trying to decide what they want to be when they grow up.

Nature of the Work

Lifelong semi-retirement is an exciting career especially suited for people with wide interests, a preference for living deliberately, and an uncontrollable passion for learning. It's available to nearly everyone, not just the wealthy.

Semi-retirement refers specifically to a person's relationship to paid work. The semi-retirees work for pay only enough hours to meet their monetary needs. After that they spend much of their time in non-paid work like strengthening relationships, pursuing hobbies or performing community service. Semi-retirees arrange their lives so that they can afford the "luxury" of not having to work for pay from sun up to sun down.

They operate on the idea that people should enjoy life to the fullest throughout life. They feel that not giving ample time to dreams, hobbies, or close friendships until after the traditional retirement age is unwise. Although they make provision for their declining years, they unapologetically enjoy many of the fruits of retirement in the present. Life to them isn't a big meal followed by a big nap, but rather a nibble here, a catnap there.

There is no typical day for a semi-retiree. On a few days they may work for pay for six to eight hours. Other days, not at all. They might spend three weeks caring for an aging parent, followed by three months of paid work. They may choose to participate in a project at the local library, volunteer for a community awareness campaign, or raise funds for a non-profit organization. Unattached to one specific full-time career, they are free to pursue a variety of interests, and maintain or develop expertise in several fields. The possibilities are endless.

For instance, a semi-retired young husband and father could run a small handyman business for his primary income. Occasionally he might tutor struggling algebra students. He could also be a soup kitchen volunteer, and perhaps a member of a search and rescue team.

Another semi-retiree with specialized engineering skills may earn money through a string of freelance consulting contracts. After a well-paid assignment, she may choose to spend six months as a volunteer consultant in another country. During that stint, she could pursue other interests such as becoming fluent in a foreign language, developing expertise in that country's cultural history, or even taking a cooking course.

Such varied "careers" are within reach of many people whether married or single. Those with meager financial means, often discover that voluntary frugality enables them to pursue a career in semi-retirement. They decide that not waiting until traditional retirement age to control how they spend their time is a high priority. Hence, they structure their lives to safeguard that prerogative. They happily exchange a lot of small and immediate pleasures for a few grand ones.

Suppose, for instance, that our semi-retired engineer decides to buy a house. She has a flawless credit record, and is pre-approved for a loan large enough to purchase a home in a swanky suburb. Although she can afford this financially, she decides she cannot afford it in terms of her top priorities. Consequently, she opts for a considerably smaller, and less expensive home. She thus retains the freedom to not have to spend most of her day working for money. She sees frugality as a small price to pay for the flexibility to fill her life with all sorts of interesting experiences: to travel, pursue a hobby or self-educate to her heart's content.

The Real Arts of Survival

2005-09-15T12:40:00.001-04:00

"Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But real difficulties, the real arts of survival seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next."

-Rebecca Solnit, "A Field Guide to Getting Lost"

What I Do For A Living: A Rant

2005-09-11T12:26:00.001-04:00

by D. JoAnne Swanson

"So, what do you do for a living?"

Ah, the dreaded question. I hear it at parties, family gatherings, even from store clerks. I never quite know how to answer this one. My knee-jerk, unspoken response is often "Why? Who wants to know? Are you going to use it to deem me worthy or unworthy of some kind of privilege when you find out? Are you trying to determine where I fall on some kind of social acceptability or class scale? And does it matter, really, in the larger scheme of things, whether I clean floors or crunch numbers or herd cows?" But that kind of response would lead into a much longer conversation than I want to have, in most cases.

Think about it, though. Can you blame me for being a bit on the defensive side? I get weary of having whatever it is I'm doing (or, as the case may be, NOT doing) treated as such an important part of my identity. If it's true that, as the old saying goes, no one ever said on their deathbed "I wish I'd spent more time at the office", then why do we act as though what we do "for a living" is so crucial for most of our lifetimes?

C'mon, folks…are our identities really so tied up in our jobs that this is the first thing we want to know about someone we've just met? It makes me want to spout off about my character, spirit, values, interests, family, community…things that are much more important than "what I do for a living", by which people usually mean "what I do for money". But the well-intentioned questioner is mostly just being polite, fishing for conversation. I don't just take the question at face value; I look at it as an opportunity to encourage people to question the commonly accepted link between "making a living" and "having a job". So sometimes I set aside my desire to rant, reasoning that I have a better chance of opening minds if I lighten up a bit. I then smile and try to play along with a one-liner response, as if I were somehow oblivious to the commonly accepted meaning of that loaded question:

"What do I do for a living? Well...I live."

That one doesn't always go over well. The person asking will often look at me askance, and chuckle as though my response was a feeble attempt at humor. Sometimes they even get a little irritated. But they keep asking:

(sarcastically) "Ha ha. What I mean is, where do you work?"

"At home" is my answer.

My lifestyle and choices are based on a worldview that's very different from the mainstream idea of "work". To most people, work means "having a job", and strong financial pressure makes having a job little more than wage slavery. So an answer like this is likely to be misinterpreted, I've found. It's almost as if most people can't even conceive of a kind of orientation toward productive activity that has nothing to do with a job or a paycheck.

"Oh, you work at home? Do you telecommute?"

Telecommute. Another buzzword of the 1990's, reflecting the reality that more people have computers at home, but also indicating that we think of work mainly in terms of "commuting to a job" and far less often in terms of simply engaging in enjoyable activity that is productive.

"No, not exactly."

"So you don't have a regular job, I gather."

"If by 'regular job', you mean do I go to an office or worksite where I spend five days and forty-some hours a week performing tasks in return for a paycheck, no."

(nodding suspiciously, but interest obviously piqued) "Ah, I see. Well, what do you do to support yourself?"

Kind of a nosy question to ask a stranger or a new acquaintance, isn't it? I sure think so. By this time I'm often ready to launch into a long rant about how silly it is to use phrases like "making a living" and "supporting yourself" to denote "getting money and maintaining your middle-class lifestyle". These phrases are social niceties designed to cover up the harsher reality that many of us are wage slaves who feel trapped in jobs they don't like and are looking for a way out. But most folks who ask the kind of questions above haven't really given much thought to how they use those terms. Besides, that's not what they want to talk about; to them, such distinctions can seem like nothing more than splitting semantic hairs. Most often, what they're really saying is "Wow, you mean you manage to live a comfortable life without a job? I hate my job and I'd love to quit. How can I do it, though, with bills to pay and mouths to feed? It's just not practical."

If I'm in a slightly less defensive mood when I'm asked what I do for a living, I reply simply that I am happily job-free. I use that term, "job-free", in an attempt to differentiate me from the involuntarily unemployed. If I refer to myself as simply "unemployed", it feels inauthentic. If I say that, the questioners often assume that I am, or believe I should be, looking for another job--and that I am completely idle or doing nothing worthwhile (read: nothing that brings in a steady paycheck). And that is far from the truth.

I love my life. I do plenty that's worthwhile outside the confines of a "job". Work and play are not two separate things for me. I love the way I spend my days and the work I choose to do, and I do a lot of different things to meet my financial needs. Even if I were completely idle, I take issue with the implication that idleness is somehow morally corrupt. And if "worthwhile" automatically equals "making money", I wonder how these folks would classify raising children, for example? Is that a worthwhile pursuit?

Frankly, I refuse to evaluate the worthiness of my daily pursuits mainly by whether or not they occur in an office or on a worksite (a "job"), could garner me a paycheck, or could net me some commodity that can be sold in the marketplace. I find that such thinking saps my internal motivation to get things done. When I follow the callings in my heart, it feels very worthy to me; and ultimately, that's the litmus test by which I evaluate my activities. THAT is what making a real living means to me, whether money is involved or not.

Working solely for a paycheck is wage slavery, and I want nothing to do with it. If that makes me a "slacker", then I claim the title with pride. And while we're at it, I don't think the whole answer to freeing people from wage slavery is to encourage them to do what they love for a living. That's all well and good, and it's a start…but I want to encourage people to re-think the nature of making a living entirely. When we live under a system that coerces us into taking some kind of job in order to meet our needs, it's much harder to envision any satisfying reason for working besides "well, it's good money, and I have to pay the bills." Industrial capitalism has perverted the idea of work, and equated it with "jobs" working for someone else higher up in the food chain who profits from your labor.

Let me call attention to the enormous amount of fear that must be operating in our collective psyche (behind the veneer of civility and liberty), in our supposedly "free" society, to make us concerned enough to focus so single-mindedly on questions like "what do you do for a living" in the first place. It really saddens me that there are so many of us who live under the psychological shackles created by equating jobs with money and survival. If we keep our focus on fear of how we'll survive without a job, we feel much more driven to put up with deplorable conditions in the workplace…and what's more, we can end up spending our entire lives waiting for the day when we can finally be free to do what we want, instead of what garners a profit for our employers.

I'd like to suggest that we all start thinking about exactly what it is we're asking when we inquire about what someone does for a living. That's a simple question with a not-so-simple answer. At least not when you ask me, that is.

D. JoAnne Swanson is a freelance writer living in North Vancouver, BC, Canada. She has managed to remain job-free since 1997 with the help of her friends and family, though she does plenty of joyful work. She is the founder of Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery (CLAWS). This essay is taken from her unpublished manuscript On The Leisure Track. Comments are welcomed (bibliophile at dangerous-minds dot com).

(c) Copyright 2004, D. JoAnne Swanson, Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery. All rights reserved.

Folk Music and Survival: An Interview with David Rovics

2005-08-31T17:36:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

Having just started a deadening temp job alphabetizing books that students had returned at the semester’s end, there was something comforting about hearing the triumphant chorus: "When all the minimum wage workers went on strike!" bouncing off the University of Wisconsin’s buildings. It was early May and rabble-rousing folk musician David Rovics was in Madison to celebrate the centennial of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). I had first heard him play "Minimum Wage Strike" six years before at a student activism conference in Boston. I’ve been drawn to David’s music ever since. He continues to leave his own unique mark on the radical folk tradition. I had the chance to sit down with him on a lovely spring day inside the Orton Park gazebo where we discussed his passion for playing music for the revolution as an antidote to crippling wage slavery.

When you’re in a social situation and people ask you: "What do you do?" how do you usually respond?

I just say I play music. It’s my sole source of income so it’s an easy answer. Presumably they’re asking, "What do you do for a living?" or "What do you do with most of your time?" Of course with most of my time I don’t play music—I stare at computer screen or drive a car or sit in a plane. [Laughs]

So what kind of follow up questions do you usually get to that response? Are people surprised that you can survive off your music and that that’s what you actually do for a living?

Yeah, sometimes they’re surprised. I guess it depends whether they already know me from shows or whether they’re just meeting me. I think when most people meet a musician and the musician says that he or she makes a living at it, usually the reaction would be one of at least mild surprise.

How long have you been able to do this as a full-time thing? And could you talk about what you were doing before this and how you used to get by? How did you make that transition? How did things change?

When I was younger—late teens, early twenties—I mostly worked doing word processing. Really horrible, mindless, menial shit: typing novels and resumes. Just looking at something that somebody had hand-written and then transcribing it essentially. And sometimes typing stuff that had already been typed because it wasn’t typed onto a computer. It was the age of typewriters where people would write shit on their typewriter and then give it to me to type again. It just always struck me as the most mindless task that I knew would be ultimately replaced, imminently replaced by computers and then eventually by voice recognition. An activity that would be one of these automatically antiquated things that you’re doing that you know is stupid and horribly boring. And then I got carpel tunnel syndrome. I always stuck to word processing because at the time—late ‘80s, early ‘90s—I could get paid like 12 bucks and hour, which for me was good money. The alternative was 6 bucks an hour in some café which seemed like a lot more fun kind of work to me, but I would get by just working 20 hours a week doing word processing. So I could spend the rest of the time doing stuff that was meaningful to me like playing music and doing drugs, going backpacking and whatever.

But then I got carpel tunnel so I had to stop typing. Then I got on worker’s comp and Etna Insurance Company accidentally sent me checks for a year and a half. They were only supposed to do it for 6 weeks. So they were sending me $160 bucks a week for a year and a half, which for me was like a gold mine. It wasn’t the lump sum settlement that I thought I would get before the law changed during the course of my case. They changed the law so that employers had to give permission to allow the insurance company to give the settlement, which is ridiculous. Of course they’re not going to admit that they caused you to get carpel tunnel even though it’s obviously true. So I didn’t get that, but the worker’s comp thing allowed me to really…I mean even working 20 hours a week I was always struck by somehow or other it was always the most energetic and creative time of the day—even though it was only four hours—that I was really squandering. I still had time for other stuff but not as much as I would have liked even back with that part-time schedule.

Getting worker’s comp was a real opportunity for me to do a lot of wood shedding, which I had never really done before: just practicing and learning songs. I went out about it very systematically, like learning songs that other people wrote for four hours a day. And I knew that I wanted to do music for some sort of living and I knew that I was not really that good at it. I felt strongly that advice of Utah Phillips and Pete Seeger and others that you really have to immerse yourself in the tradition as a way to move forward. So rather than trying to write bad songs and spending too much energy on that I just learned other songs and played in the Pike Place Market and stuff.

To read the interview in its entirety check out Toward Freedom...

Dumpsters and Roadkill: Dissecting the Food Politics of Evasion and Feral Visions

2005-08-15T18:15:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

How can we meet our basic human needs while simultaneously doing what keeps us going? It is the dilemma of our day: finding a way to follow our true passions while surviving in a capitalist society. Some attempt to incorporate their interests and values into their jobs. Others choose to separate work from their passions, holding down often mind-numbing occupations just to pay the bills.

Regardless, we all have to work to pay rent and food. Or is there another way? Is it possible to eat and live outside of the system?

In fact, there are already people out there attempting to do just that. They are living a completely different way—trying to follow their passions with reckless abandon while subverting the traditional strategies of survival.

But is this way of life as simple and romantic as it sounds?

Two different examples of this "third way" recently swept through Madison, WI. The first was a presentation by the author of the infamous book Evasion, now a cult classic within the punk-traveller subculture. Later, a group of North Carolinian primitivists stopped by on their Feral Visions tour.

Both presentations offered radical critiques of traditional American society but focused on putting these ideas into practice through alternative lifestyles. Although the critiques were fairly similar, these two events offered very different approaches to acquiring and consuming food...
~
Check out Sustainable Eating to read the article in its entirety.

On the Leisure Track

2005-08-08T15:42:00.001-04:00

The Cult of the Job

By D. JoAnne Swanson

I am job-free. Out of the rat race. Unemployed, as they say, but definitely by choice. My self-esteem is intact, thank you, I'm not "in transition", and I have no intention of getting a job again.
That's right--I'm on the leisure track permanently. I don't have a cushy nine-to-five job with profit-sharing, "security", stock options, health insurance, advancement opportunities, or free parking. I also don't have to deal with office politics, attending motivation seminars, climbing the corporate ladder, employee evaluations, increasing productivity, the absurd "team player" mentality, brown-nosing, mandatory overtime, stressful commutes in rush-hour traffic, being trapped in a cubicle, or the threat of being pink-slipped. Oh, and let's not forget--I don't have the expense of a "professional" wardrobe, strong coffee to wake me up every morning, or "power lunches".

I wouldn't have it any other way.

If you ask me what seems to have become the first question new acquaintances ask each other nowadays-namely, "What do you do for a living?" I'm likely to say that I'm job-free by choice or quip that I'm an "occupational tourist", as a friend likes to say. Sometimes I'll tell 'em I'm a freelancer or self-employed, specializing in leisure. Most people, when they hear this, say something like "You mean you don't have a regular job? Wow, that's great--I'll bet more people would do that if they thought they could swing it."

I'm willing to bet that more of them could swing it if they'd just find within themselves the wherewithal to question a few of the assumptions that are often taken for granted in America, particularly by the middle class and those who aspire to wealth. So what assumptions am I talking about? Well, let's start with the cult of jobs and work.

We need to re-evaluate the role of jobs in our lives. For far too many of us, getting a job amounts to securing a means of paying for our living expenses, and not much more. At best, this attitude leads to years of "paying one's dues" in exchange for the dubious "security" of a (hopefully) steady paycheck and the promise of finally enjoying leisure when one retires. At worst, it leads to a way of life where we devote 40 or more hours of our precious time a week to doing something we don't care about mainly for the sake of having a roof over our heads and food on the table. I know I'm not the only one who thinks this is ludicrous. It took me years of trying to fit myself into some kind of job title, of devoting myself to figuring out "what I wanted to be when I grew up", before I realized that I don't want a job, nor do I feel guilty about not wanting one.

It's time for us to make a crucial distinction between "jobs" and "work". Work--particularly the kind that is motivated by interest, social welfare, connection, curiosity, learning, beauty--can be satisfying, fulfilling, fun, and honorable. However, it's exceedingly hard to see this when we are blinded by the compulsion to "get a job" or face the poorhouse, or when we're terrified by the social and financial consequences of being job-free. In addition, we've internalized a puritan work ethic which holds that laziness is a sign of moral weakness. We sense deep in our guts that even if we were to arrange our financial affairs such that we could quit our jobs for good, it would mean we are lazy. We know we'd still face guilt, social disapproval, maybe even an identity crisis once we were unemployed--especially if we were to tell everyone we meet that we're not "in transition", not hunting for a new job, that in fact we are happy this way. I maintain that a complex web of unquestioned assumptions are what keep such fears in place, and that we need to delve into those places we fear to tread if we're ever going to make lasting changes for the better.

A job, nowadays, is used as a shorthand term for whatever it is you do that occupies a large portion of your time and provides a paycheck. In a work-obsessed culture that elevates jobs and money-making capacity to crucial components of our identities, having a job and money often provides a sense of social acceptability that cannot be found any other way, or so we believe. But there are lots of (legal) ways of getting money besides jobs, and what's more, we are increasingly becoming aware that we've paid a very high price for our myopic job-centered focus.

On a personal level, many of us find ourselves disillusioned, depressed and frustrated when, day after day, we force ourselves to get out of bed and put in another eight hours at our jobs, then come home exhausted--only to get up the next day and do it all over again. The future doesn't hold out much hope for us when we consider that we're expected to continue this way indefinitely. When do we get to enjoy life, we think as we watch the clock and count the days until the weekend?

On a societal level, we hear about corporate "downsizing" as well as environmental and human rights violations, rising rents in choice areas, the growing wage gap between executives and "worker bees", the rising cost of a college education and the lack of "marketability" of liberal arts degrees, and many other factors which contribute to a widespread sense of disillusionment. This certainly isn't the way we thought it would be, is it? It's not what were promised when we were told that getting an education and a "good" job would be our ticket into the promised land.

This concept we have of jobs as the way we make a name for ourselves, "get ahead", create an identity, and earn money is ripe for re-evaluation. It's high time for us to take a hard look at the personal and environmental devastation such thinking has wrought, and to conceptualize and create alternatives to the cult of jobs and work in our lives.

Such alternatives could take many forms: self-employment, cooperative living arrangements, simplifying our lives, changes in economic policy, and so forth. Envisioning a new way of working is certainly not a new idea, but those of us who question the conventional wisdom about jobs are still considered heretics, radicals and pariahs in many circles.

Heretic or not, I'd like to see us re-define success as having more to do with people and their values, and less to do with profits or climbing the corporate ladder. I'd like to see a world where we are less relentlessly driven by the pursuit of job growth, impressive stock portfolios, the "bottom line" and material acquisition--and more motivated by active mindful learning, joyful work, and creating a web of relationships that will sustain us in our more meager times. I'm holding out for a new way of thinking, one in which we recognize that leisure is essential to our mental health rather than cause for guilt, and that we don't have to spend our lives struggling, striving to make ends meet through working at a job.

I think we all know, at some level, that we weren't meant to live this way, and that there are better, more fulfilling, and more socially responsible ways to work than by sacrificing ourselves on the altar of jobs and money. There are the stirrings of a new social movement underway as we speak--a diverse collection of people from all walks of life who are re-examining the way we've been indoctrinated into thinking our jobs are our ticket to respectability and freedom. They are re-defining success, learning how to appreciate what they have instead of endlessly questing for more growth, and discovering their passions without worrying about trying to fit them into the form of a job.

I'm happy to count myself among the proponents of that movement away from the cult of jobs and toward a new way of envisioning work--a way that gives us hope for the future. I invite you to join us.

D. JoAnne Swanson is a freelance writer living in North Vancouver, BC, Canada. She has managed to remain job-free since 1997, though she does plenty of joyful work. She is the founder of Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery (CLAWS). This essay is taken from her manuscript On The Leisure Track: Creating Radical Alternatives to Traditional Employment. Comments are welcomed (bibliophile@dangerous-minds.com).

(c) Copyright 2004, D. JoAnne Swanson, Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery. All rights reserved.

Collective and Intergenerational: An Interview with Chris Crass

2005-07-26T11:02:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

In his book A Language Older Than Words, Derrick Jensen articulates the dilemma of following one’s passions while surviving in a capitalist society: “Wishing away the wage economy did not make it cease to exist, and my determination to stop selling my hours did not lessen my need for food, nor for a place to stay. In other words, despite my highfalutin philosophy, I still had to find a way to earn some cash.” Chris Crass is a political organizer who has grappled with this dilemma for years.

I had read Chris’s articles in Clamor and HeartattaCk before, but I didn’t meet him until the summer of 2003, while participating in a workshop that Chris led on the role of leadership within progressive and radical movements. His writings and activist work continue to inspire other activists to develop strategies of dismantling structural oppression and creating new models of organizing. He currently serves as the coordinator of the Catalyst Project, a center for political education and movement building.
I met up with Chris again during the week after the 2005 San Francisco Anarchist Book Fair in a raucous coffee shop right across the street from the Catalyst Project office.

When people ask you, “What do you do?” how do you usually respond to that?

It kind of depends on who’s asking me. My general response is that I work with an organization that does anti-racist education with other white people to stand against racism and stand up for social justice. If it’s people who are already connected to left/radical politics then my general response is that I primarily do political education work and alliance-building work. Trying to help mostly white sectors of the global justice/anti-war movement develop a stronger analysis and commitment to anti-racist politics, with the goal of building multi-racial movements against capitalism and for collective liberation. And then if people who ask me are just sort of, maybe they’re progressive or kind of interested in some different issues or just starting to get into activism, if they say, “Oh, what do you do?” Then I’ll say, I mostly try to deal with issues around: How does institutional racism play out in society? What are ways that we can be trying to, for myself as a white person, really look at how racism impacts my life and impacts the world around me, and how to be trying to take action to transform the situation. And really looking at how racism is both historical and institutional and is a primary way that the society is organized. So for people who believe in justice, who believe in democracy, who believe in equality: we really need to do organizing in our communities to change and transform the ways that systems of oppression play out in our lives. And then if people who ask me are conservatives then I make an assessment about how useful it is to actually engage or not. What I do say is something more broad to clearly indicate that I am a left anti-racist through a comment against the war or for immigrant rights or something like that.

So, what kinds of responses to you usually get to that? Is there usually a follow-up to that where people ask if that’s really your job or assume that you couldn’t possibly be doing that for a living?

In terms of how work is understood in society, like with my extended family, that’s a different thing: I do education work. I’m a teacher. There’s certain things that you can say where there’s an image that comes to mind of what that kind of job or work looks like. If you say, “Oh yeah, I’m a left organizer trying to build power to overthrow capitalism and trying to build a free society for all people…” There’s not too many positive images of what that looks like for white middle class people, you know? They’re usually negative images, like somebody who’s crazy, out of their mind, advocating violence against random individuals. For different families and different communities - working class, queer, of color, then there may be different images. People who are like, “Oh yeah, the labor movement, union organizer” where there’s some connotation. But for a lot of people that I talk to, I try to just connect a word or a concept that I think they will be able to understand—like educator—and then from there start attaching radical politics to that concept, something that people can grasp onto. But usually if I say I’m an organizer people are like, “Oh, does that mean that you make a grocery list everyday? Do you try to make sure your refrigerator is full? Does that mean that you throw a lot of parties?” (Laughs)

There are all different kinds of organizers so just in general conversation I think it’s difficult because these kinds of labels also carry a lot of meaning. So if you tell somebody, “I’m an investment banker.” It’s like, “Oh wow!” That must mean that you’re fairly successful, meaning that you have access to a lot resources, meaning you have money. You probably went to some business school and have a good degree, meaning that it’s profitable in this society and you can get a really good house and that you have access to health care. And if you want to have kids they’d be able to get a better future than you did because you’ll be able to send them to the best schools. But if I say—even a concept that people know like educator—it’s like: public schools, teachers, people who are really busting their ass and getting paid very little. My housemate is an art teacher in high school—almost an endangered species in the state of California—and that means working long hours, getting paid not very well, and having the governor and people in power blaming teachers for the conditions of the schools. So even though you might have a concept that means something, there’s all kinds of other stuff that gets associated with it.

Also, in conversations with people when you talk about what you do, there’s just all kinds of status, all kinds of stuff about power and access to resources. And it plays out depending on the person that you’re talking to, what kind of language you use, what kinds of words you use, and the assumptions built into that. So yeah, it’s really difficult particularly for folks who are radical/left people doing all kinds of different jobs. If you’re doing this work there’s generally not a lot of access to resources, to being able to have health care and to develop a savings and things like that. So there’s also a certain level of reality to these different assumptions. But the assumptions are also: What are the real values that you have and what values really have meaning? So that question of, “What do you do?” is basically asking: “Who are you? What does that mean? What contribution are you making to the world?” And it’s usually not “contribution to the world” in terms of, “How are you trying to help communities be healthier?” but: “What are you doing? What do you have to prove that you’re a valuable person, a worthy person?”

“What is your status?”

A status, exactly. So yeah, the question of “What do you do?” is a pretty loaded one. And I think for a lot of us on the Left, we have a lot of hesitation and a lot of ambiguity around answering that, particularly for someone like myself who’s younger. I’m 31, at this point I should have some sort of mid-level management job somewhere, but I don’t. Particularly, I think, also for someone like myself raised a middle-class white guy there’s a certain sense of where you’re suppose to be in this society at this point in your life. So for me, there’s also a lot of connotations about, “What do you do?” There’s also a lot of class and race and gender stuff very much embedded within that of, “Well, where are you? Where are you going?” Those kinds of things. So yeah, that question—it can be anything from a very simple question that you talk about at a party to a soul-searching question. My thinking these days is that most people want to get to know you, for left political people it's really important to normalize anti-imperialism, anti-racism and so on, meaning that you talk about it from a place of confidence that most people are anti-war, believe in justice and so on...

Check out Toward Freedom to read the interview in its entirety.

My Idea of Fun: An Interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore

2005-07-08T11:32:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

Is it possible to follow your passions, to do what you truly love to do, without compromising your values? What about meeting basic human needs? Can it be done? Some people struggle most of their lives to obtain this dream, but eventually submit to a job that goes against their beliefs or end up starving to death in the street. But others have proved to us that it is possible. You really can live a life that is consistent with your values, pursue the things you love, and still afford food and rent.
Anne Elizabeth Moore is one of those rare people. She has been involved with independent publishing her entire adult life and recently published her own book, Hey Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People, with Soft Skull Press. Last year, she became the associate publisher for Punk Planet and Punk Planet Books, and has continued to write for a number of other independent publications.
In a recent appearance in Madison, WI, she read her first hand account of the consequences for attempting to radicalize the clientele of the American Girl Place in Chicago. The following morning we met for breakfast at Bennett’s Smut n’ Eggs, before migrating to a coffee shop where we discussed the dilemma of following one’s passions while surviving in this world.

When you are faced with the question, “What do you do?” how do you usually respond?

Yeah—I respond by giggling, turning away nervously, and changing the subject. However, I assume you want an actual response...

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Check out Toward Freedom to read the interview in full and to read about Anne's "Spazzes With Glasses Tour."

Interview with 1905

2005-06-29T18:49:00.001-04:00

By Matt Dineen

This interview with Jess (vocals) and Brian (bass) of the DC political punk band 1905 was conducted after a show they played in Madison, WI on the Fourth of July, 2004. The following exerpt addresses the primary theme of this project: following one's passions while surviving in a capitalist society. This interview provided inspiration for subsequent interviews which will appear on this site. The full transcript can be found at Upside Down World.

What about the challenges of operating as DIY band, despite this strong network, within the larger capitalist system? You can’t just survive off your music. Can you talk about making ends meet while still having the time and energy for your true passions?

Brian: This is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Going on tour and booking shows you meet the kids who are so unbelievably positive and optimistic about stuff but don’t necessarily know what goes into doing a show. They’re just psyched to have your band playing. You’re at the show and having an amazing time but you play and then realize that there was no one collecting money at the door or something.

Jess: And you need gas money.

B: Yeah, you need to get to the next place and gas prices aren’t getting any lower. It’s a situation where, we’re an anti-capitalist band and punk rock in itself is very anti-capitalist, but there’s sort of a vacuum on what that means. If we’re anti-capitalist then what are we? What is this? Some people think, “Oh it’s DIY. We just get together and it’s free!”

J: But that’s not sustainable.

B: It’s a big challenge that people are facing. Because right now there is so much stuff going on and so many bands getting out there, so many people that want to go on tour and who want to see shows. But in terms of sustainability, like a space that has trouble staying open because they’re having problems at shows, we need to think about it. It needs to be thought about as a community. We’re not capitalists but we live in this system where there’s money exchanged and we need to go do these things. I’ve been reading a lot about Participatory Economics and trying to work on viable solutions to this.

J: Yeah, we might be an anti-capitalist band but we live in a capitalist society. You can fight for change. You can try to support your local supermarkets or whatever. You can do the small things and they’re really important small things to do, but you can’t expect to operate outside of capitalism. And especially in DIY—to think that you can maintain some sort of network without money, when everything involves money, would be ridiculous and unsustainable. Not only do you need gas money but you need to eat. Eating and gas are very important when you’re on tour. I think a lot of people don’t think about that or don’t want to pay at shows and say, “If you’re anti-capitalist then why do you want money?” Well, it’s not like I’m taking the money and buying a Mercedes with it. I’m trying to get from Point A to Point B.

B: And going on a DIY tour where you’re just making gas money if you’re lucky, you’re still gonna go home and have bills to pay and rent to pay. It gets a lot harder to tour when you know you’re coming back and you know you have to do all this stuff and bust your ass at your job. You have to make money that you didn’t have when you left. Keeping that in mind when we talk about changing the face of punk rock and trying to make it more inclusive to other people. We need to build this community where it’s possible for people of less privileged backgrounds who are talented and have amazing ideas to also come in and play a part in this and have them be able to go on tour too. Touring is a huge financial strain. I know that when I go home I’m gonna have rent and bills and I’ll open all those and be like, I haven’t been working the past 7 weeks because I’ve been on tour but I’ve had an amazing time. There’s a lot of sacrifices you have to make to do that and I come from a background where I’m privileged enough to be able to make those choices to do that. And a lot of other people aren’t and in building a community we have to keep that in mind.

J: As far as when we’re at home is concerned—we all have to work. Somehow you have to make money. I think the band just sucks away our social life more than anything else because that’s the only thing you can really give up…and it’s worth it.

B: It’s like being in a relationship with everyone in your band.

J: And I love you! (laughs and hugs)

So, are the jobs that you have totally separate from your true interests and just to pay the bills?

B: It depends. I’ve had other jobs that are very related to my interests, except those jobs were also 9-5, 40 hours a week and didn’t give me enough time to do touring. I ended up getting laid off from the last one that I had which opened up a lot of doors of thinking about how to do things. I also went to graduate school and worked on that stuff. I walk dogs for a living now. It’s amazingly flexible, it’s a great time but I have my parents being like, “You went to grad school and you walk dogs.” (laughs) So I make enough money to get by but at the same time there are other financial stresses. I’m basically going back and looking for other jobs to do. It’s just a matter of trying to find a balance between doing the band I love that takes a lot of time to do and being able to pay my bills and having some sort of comfort zone in life.

J: My ultimate goal is to be a teacher. Right now I’m not anywhere close to being a teacher and don’t really know what I’m gonna be doing for a job when I get back. I think I’m gonna be cleaning houses, but right now the band is more of a priority. We think about jobs in terms of: Can we tour? How is this gonna work? Does this enable us to have band practice when we want to practice? And of course we’re not gonna just get the shittiest job ever and hate life. But it’s just a job. Jobs don’t mean anything. You work and you do what you can and it would be nice to have a job where you could do something that is also important to you but a job is such a small, tiny little portion of what’s important in life. You’ve got this whole other world that’s not between 9-5 that is equally as important. And when people ask the question, “What do you do?”—everybody answers with their job. Whereas for me I answer with the band. Because what’s more important to me? Clearly it’s the band.

That brings up the question of whether you guys have thought about surviving off the band. Could you make 1905 your job or would that compromise your values?

J: We speculate and think about it but everybody’s drastically different on that. No one has a clear-cut idea of how to do it. Ideally we’d all love to play music and have that be it and have that sustain us, but then it gets tricky. How do you do that? Can DIY do that? For me it’s, do I want to put that sort of money pressure on the one thing that I know is just gonna be okay in my life no matter what. But we’d all love that to be our lives.

B: It would be amazing if we could do this band at the rate we’re comfortable with and make a living off it. That would be great, but you have to keep in mind that when the thing you love becomes your bread and butter and it’s what you do to pay your bills then you have to start doing it a lot more. It can become really stressful and cause a lot strains

J: And you don’t want to strain your passion.

B: If there was a way that we could all be happy and all meet our needs and find a way of doing this band on our terms then I don’t think we’d have a problem. But as long as we can keep it a hobby and be fulfilled in a lot of other ways we’ll be fine.

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For more information:

The1905 Collective
PO Box 15116
Washington, DC 20003
1905@mutualaid.org