Windows, Doors and Revolution

The occupation of the Republic Doors and Windows factory in Chicago is an exemplary action and it demands thinking about what the next step might be. What to DO with the factory? Though the workers seem intent on mainly getting some compensation, the obvious contradictions of the situation are so glaring that its obvious that a radical education is taking place. Bank of America (or, its executives) gets bailed out, but the company/workers they finance gets the shaft. The workers even discovered that there were more orders on the books than management told them, so its obvious that "cutting losses" means ensuring that the higher-ups get paid before the ship goes down.

So, windows and doors, windows and doors... Unlike with the auto industry, its easier to imagine the building trades being re-tooled or re-converted into producing things that people actually need. Here's a question: If we could encourage another trade or industry to take over THEIR workplace, which one would be most beneficial for the window and door makers in Chicago? In other words, how to organize between real need and production in a way that can be employed immediately, that would directly support the strikers/occupiers, who would be busy producing...SOMEthing for the people. If the local foreclosed-upon and homeless-population were organized enough to take some land, could window and door workers make small "house-kits" for them? Could these be paid for in kind, could the community help sustain the occupation, take a stand when the police eventually come or when the union tries to convince people to take a few hundred bucks and go home?

We know that most often these kinds of arrangements aren't possible, the economy is too severely tooled for the consumption/credit cycle and not to fulfill real needs. But if the alternative to this is to be created, we have to start thinking about the practical steps to take in the moment of crisis. What can we do to create and exchange REAL VALUE in order to rescue ourselves from the fall out of the "declining rate of profit"?


http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1276535/republic_windows_and_doors_workers.html
http://news.lalate.com/celebrity/home.html?task=videodirectlink&id=454
http://news.lalate.com/2008/12/06/republic-windows-and-doors-plant/

Mortgage Bankers, Leninists, and one call to action

At Moscone Center today, to protest the Mortgage Bankers Association Conference, a sad spectacle many of us have seen before: a small group of highly ideological protesters shouting the same, shrill  speech into a microphone, and a few dozen people pretending to be excited.  One particularly shrieky shouter wants to put the bankers in jail, another actually mentions their proper sentence (30 years).  Is this a good reason to salvage our prison-industrial complex, to reserve room for these "bad apples?" (Who would we dare ask to be their jailers?) I ask one party member why all these sectarian socialist groups can't get it together, she mentions something about a split over Palestine.  One independent guy handing out flyers with poetry and Peanuts characters on it is refused the chance to speak.  It's hard to get over the feeling that what's most important for these people (A.N.S.W.E.R. and others) is to build their organization, not to build bridges.  Who else would they put in their gulag? Why are they so often the most visible left opposition?  

Below, a statement:

We Refuse to be Robbed

We all know that, in spite of the claims of politicians, wealth does not “trickle down” from the richest to the poorest. Even during boom times, when the rich might “create” a few jobs, we all end up getting paid less than we are worth – assuming we even get enough to survive. But as we are quickly learning, something big and ugly is “trickling down” to us: a multi-billion dollar “bail-out” of banks and corporations that lost their high-risk bets with our money. Now that the latest speculative bubble has blown (remember the Savings & Loan scandal? The IMF-engineered debt default crisis? The dot com bust?) we are once again hit with the bill, with politicians across the spectrum trying to scare us into accepting this or else “this sucker could go down.”

But the only sucker that’s going down is the latest model of capitalist accumulation – and if we don’t act together to stop it, the next model will be built upon the same hard working backs that are now getting stepped on by the predatory lenders, executive con-men, and modern-day robber barons who lay low in their mansions while their cronies in government absolve them of their class war crimes. We need to fight back the way people did in the 1930s, not by asking for a “New Deal”—which was barely effective compared to the military build-up that really ended the Great Depression—but by strikes, sit-ins and other direct actions to defend our livelihood and our communities.

If the business press is any indication, it is clear that this is just the beginning. Just as Third World people were “structurally adjusted” into accepting lethal austerity measures after the World Bank schemes failed, our new regime—whoever wins the elections—is going to try to make us pay for the failures of a take-the-money-and-run economy that they constructed. Inflation, higher taxes for fewer public services, and the elimination of social security and Medicare are all on their agenda. Foreclosures, evictions and high food prices are ways in which they are already squeezing us in order to save their world of funny-money. And we can expect that, just as the working poor are being blamed for the sub-prime fiasco, the sordid American tradition of racism and nativism will be re-charged,: they will try to get us to blame and compete with each other in order to distract us while they once again loot our future and our planet.

What can we do about it? If we want to survive this crisis, mutual aid will be crucial. Eviction/foreclosure defense networks, concerted demands for affordable healthy food, and workplace organizing for a living wage will all be urgent tasks – and this must be done across the racial and cultural divides that impede our human solidarity and only help the rich exploit us more easily. This kind of activity is already happening in U.S. cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland (e.g. www.esop-cleveland.org). Here in the Bay Area, the Eviction Defense Collaborative (www.evictiondefense.org) is a promising start.

However, if we want to do more than survive, if we want to take this crisis as the opportunity to re-create our world in a way that exploits no-one, we are going to have to establish this mutual aid society on a wider scale. Through organizations like neighborhood and workers councils, we will have to demand representation and foster popular participation in a way most of us have never seen. Are we up to the task, brothers and sisters? If we’re prepared for the worst, if we give reign to our most intelligent and generous instincts and stand together against the coming ruling class attacks, we just may achieve the society for which many of us have only dared to dream.

It's all funny money anyway...

Discussing the origins of this escalating financial crisis is a great opportunity to put into question the notion of "value."  How could houses be worth a lot one day and very little a year later?  What is the re-sale value of a debt?  What is the "good name" of "Lehman Brothers" or "Morgan Stanley" worth?  What is money worth if it buys fewer and fewer things we need to survive?  What is our labor worth when it is used to produce these things?  When it is used to produce things that end up as garbage, or to provide services such as insurance that depend on our vulnerability?

Borders after the revolution

These places will still be there.  What do we do with them?  In a larger sense, what would a positive, world-scale approach to migration and  security/"community policing" look like?  How do we accommodate and reward migrants (not only from "foreign countries," an idea that will lose its political, divisive meaning) who offer socially necessary labor and cooperation, and guard against (and attempt to heal) actually dangerous people who remain alienated from the emerging society?  We are going to have to all be intimately aware of what work needs to be done and where.  We are going to have to be willing to help inspire people to find this work.  And,  established populations must develop a sense of trust and hospitality based on a common interest in making the experiment (or revolution) work.  No problem, right?!

Is it protected speech if you start a bank panic?

Just wondering, after reading today's NYT article: "Anxious Depositors withdraw cash from Asian Bank."  Started with a rumor, but hardly an unbelievable one.  Can't you shout "fire!" in a crowded theater if there really is a fire?

Reality or Catastrophism

These days it seems it would be so easy to start a panic that would accelerate the failing global financial system.  Why don't we?  Because we don't know what's going to happen afterward.  It is naive to think that this current crisis will remain confined to Wall Street.  If it spreads and hits everyday people hard, as it did in the 1930s, will everyday people be ready?  Everyone has their own dystopian nightmare, but how many of us have thought about what we would actually do amidst an accelerating breakdown of "the economy"?  If money loses value, if people lose jobs, if neighbors get hostile?  We can only hope that desperation leads to organization and humanism - but this is the United States, where individualism has long reigned and racial antagonism seems to be more the rule than the exception.  Not to mention how many fools are armed, including the police.  Today I imagined myself in front of Rainbow Grocery as the mobs approached...but before the whole place is looted, someone finds the produce buyer, who is persuaded to contact food producers to arrange distribution...the food producers are simultaneously faced with the demands of their own recently-fired workers, who offer to continue running operations as a collective in exchange for enough food to live on, and meanwhile, some organized truckers have sent a representative to the markets to arrange transport...gas station owners are persuaded to fill up tanks for the transport of basic needs until the gas runs out, but luckily refinery workers are thinking ahead and arranging fuel delivery for cooperating gas stations...bike store owners offer bicycles in exchange for promised deliveries of food and medicine to hospitals...urban emigration committees are organized to arrange an exodus to surrounding farmland, emigrants bring building materials for local housing needs....

Anyway, you get the drift.   If conditions get urgent, and ideas and energy and diplomacy are needed, where will you be? What will you do?