!

Interview on Radioornot.com

2011-11-09T08:43:00.000-08:00

This is an interview I did with Nicole Sandler about Occupy Wall Street. I've never been interviewed before, but think it went pretty well. My interview starts at around 12:30.

http://radioornot.libsyn.com/20111108-nicole-sandler-show-

American Autumn Pt. 3

2011-11-04T20:15:00.000-07:00

American Autumn Part 3

A Chill Descends on Occupy Wall Street

By Fritz Tucker

The Tangled Purse Strings

On Sunday, October 23, a meeting was held at 60 Wall Street. Six leaders discussed what to do with the half-million dollars that had been donated to their organization, since, in their estimation, the organization was incapable of making sound financial decisions. The proposed solution was not to spend the money educating their co-workers or stimulating more active participation by improving the organization’s structures and tactics. Instead, those present discussed how they could commandeer the $500,000 for their new, more exclusive organization. No, this was not the meeting of any traditional influence on Wall Street. These were six of the leaders of Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

Occupy Wall Street’s Structure Working Group (WG) has created a new organization called the Spokes Council. “Teach-ins” were held to workshop and promote the Spokes Council throughout the week of October 22-28. I attended the teach-in on Sunday the 23^rd.

According to Marisa Holmes, one of the most outspoken and influential leaders of OWS, the NYC-GA started receiving donations from around the world when OWS began on September 17. Because the NYC-GA was not an official organization, and therefore could not legally receive thousands of dollars in donations, the nonprofit Alliance for Global Justice helped OWS create Friends of Liberty Plaza, which receives tax-free donations for OWS. Since then, Friends of Liberty Plaza has received over $500,000. Until October 28, anybody who wanted to receive more than $100 from Friends of Liberty Plaza had to go through the often arduous modified consensus process (90% majority) of the NYC-GA—which, despite its well-documented inefficiencies, granted $25,740 to the Media WG for live-stream equipment on October 12, and $1,400 to the Food and Medical WGs for herbal tonics on October 18.

At the teach-in, Ms. Holmes maintained that while the NYC-GA is the “de facto” mechanism for distributing funds, it has no right to do so, even though she acknowledged that most donors were likely under the impression that the NYC-GA was the only organization with access to these funds. Two other leaders of the teach-in, Daniel and Adash, concurred with Holmes.

Ms. Holmes also stated at the teach-in that five people in the Finance WG have access to the $500,000 raised by Friends of Liberty Plaza. When Suresh Fernando, the man taking notes, asked who these people are, the leaders of the Structure WG nervously laughed and said that it was hard to keep track of the “constantly fluctuating” heads of the Finance WG. Mr. Fernando made at least four increasingly explicit requests for the names. Each request was turned down by the giggling, equivocating leaders.

The leaders of the Structure WG eventually regained control of the teach-in. They said that they too were unhappy with the Finance WG’s monopoly over OWS’s funds, which is why they wanted to create the Spokes Council. What upset them more, however, was the inefficient and fickle General Assembly. A major point of the discussion was whether the Spokes Council and the NYC-GA should have access to the funds, or just the Spokes Council.

Daniel, a tall, red-bearded, white twenty-something—one of the six leaders of the teach-in—said that the NYC-GA needed to be completely defunded because those with “no stake” in the Occupy Wall Street movement shouldn’t have a say in how the money was spent. When I asked him whether everybody in the 99% had a stake in the movement, he said that only those occupying or working in Zuccotti Park did. I pointed out that since the General Assembly took place in Zuccotti Park, everybody who participated was an occupier. He responded with a long rant about how Zuccotti Park is filled with “tourists,” “free-loaders” and “crackheads” and suggested a solution that the even NYPD has not yet attempted: Daniel said that he’d like to take a fire-hose and clear out the entire encampment, adding hopefully that only the “real” activists would come back.

The main obstacle to the creation of the Spokes Council was that the NYC-GA had already voted against it four times. One audience member observed that no organization would vote to relinquish its power. Some of the strongest proponents of the Spokes Council responded that they had taken this into account, and were planning on creating the Spokes Council regardless of whether the NYC-GA accepted the proposal. They claimed that, in the interests of non-hierarchy, neither the Spokes Council nor the General Assembly should have power over the other.

In the minutes of the teach-in on Saturday the 22^nd, the leaders recognize that usurping power from the NYC-GA might make people uncomfortable. The Structure WG’s eventual proposal was to keep the General Assembly alive and functioning while the Spokes Council “gets on its feet.” Working Groups could still technically get funding through the NYC-GA, but the “GA may stop making those kinds of decisions because people [will] stop going… To officially take power away isn’t necessary,” especially because the NYC-GA works on the consensus model. A small group of people aiming to delegitimize the NYC-GA could easily attend each session merely to block every proposal. According to a member of the Demands WG, this is already occurring in several Working Groups.

To placate the rest of OWS, the Structure WG amended their original proposal and gave the NYC-GA power to dissolve the Spokes Council. This amendment is irrelevant, however, given the 90% majority requirement in the NYC-GA, and the ability of members of the Spokes Council to vote in the NYC-GA.

The “Spokes Council”

The newly formed Spokes Council claims to adhere to the “statement of principles” adopted by the New York City General Assembly, including “direct-democracy, non-hierarchy, participation, and inclusion.” The Spokes Council differs from the NYC-GA, however, in three main respects: the Spokes Council has the power to exclude new groups that don’t receive a 90% majority vote for admission; in the NYC-GA, everybody technically has the right to speak, whereas in the Spokes Council each Working Group has a spokesperson, who can be recalled only by a 90% majority; and the NYC-GA allows one vote per person, whereas the Spokes Council operates more indirectly, granting each Working Group one vote.

When I pointed out the contradictions these differences present to the Council’s stated principles, the leaders of Sunday’s teach-in insisted that the Spokes Council was the most participatory, democratic organization possible—the same slogan they repeated last month about the General Assembly. I felt like I was watching a local production of Animal Farm.

I’ve attended two mock Spokes Councils in the past month. At the Spokes Council in Washington Square Park on October 15, the unelected facilitators set the agenda: Occupy Washington Square Park. Then they set the terms of debate, breaking the group into three circles: those who wanted to occupy and possibly get arrested, those who wanted there to be an occupation and would assist those being arrested, and those who wanted to build the movement in other ways. I went with the third group.

The facilitators told each group to elect a facilitator, a note-taker, and a spokesperson who would read the notes from each group’s meeting. Almost immediately, one of the members of the OWS inner-circle asked my group if anybody had a problem if she facilitated. Nobody objected, so she was “elected.” Although she was in the one group that opposed occupying Washington Square Park, she lectured us about the need to occupy public parks.

I was vocal in my group, arguing that the fundamental problem in our hierarchical, bureaucratic society is the lack of a truly democratic, dialogic way of relating to one another—not that public parks close at midnight. I repeated the arguments I had raised in previous General Assemblies, concluding that OWS’ main goal should be to develop dialogic, democratic methods in the occupied areas, and to extend this way of life into every home, workplace and school, and in local, regional, national and international bodies.

My advocacy for radical democracy wasn’t particularly popular. Ironically, the predominantly middle-class, white men leading the movement claim that their hostility to democracy is in the interest of “protecting minorities,” referring to oppressed genders, races, classes, ages, and nations. Far from being “minorities,” these people make up the majority of the world’s population; the worldwide outcry for democracy vitiates the paternalistic notion that the oppressed need “protection.”

The discussion turned to which locations the movement should occupy, ignoring the question of whether occupation for the sake of occupation was a good idea. I suggested teaming with evicted tenants and former homeowners to occupy foreclosed homes, abandoned apartments and unsold condos—an act that would strike at the heart of the economic crisis, and endear the movement to the oppressed. This idea generated a lot of support, but was not repeated by my “spokesperson” when the groups reconvened.

At the teach-in on Sunday the 23^rd, one of the leaders’ main gripes—rightfully so—was that the NYC-GA was inefficient and dominated by society’s vocal minorities, particularly middle-class white men. The underlying cause is not eliminated by the Spokes Council, but is in fact exacerbated by it. The major flaw of the General Assembly is the need for a 90% majority to pass proposals. This “modified consensus” ensures the continuation of the dominant culture through the passage of only the most conservative measures. In the Spokes Council, proposals can be blocked by 11% of the members of 11% of the Working Groups, meaning that a minority of 1.2% can stymie the will of 98.8% majority.

Instead of cutting to the structural and psychological core of oppression, the proponents of the Spokes Council merely apply a topical cream by demanding that no WG have the same spokesperson more than once a week. The leaders of OWS seem to understand that a genuinely revolutionary movement would lead to deepening involvement by oppressed communities. The leaders then try to reverse-engineer a revolution by consistently choosing among the few people of color and women involved in OWS to be its spokespeople and facilitators, as if this token involvement will guarantee a genuine revolutionary movement. In fact, tokenism obscures the need for systematic change by misrepresenting the demographics of OWS. Tokenism also gives the leaders of OWS an argument to fall back upon when confronted with the fact that they have thus far been unable to mobilize and involve most of the 99%.

The Spokes Council, in fact, doesn’t have enough regard for working people, students and people with dependents to have one of their three weekly meetings on a weekend afternoon. Instead of ensuring broad participation of traditionally marginalized and oppressed communities, OWS limits participation to individuals from these communities who are privileged enough to be able to spend three workdays a week at Zuccotti Park.

The participation of oppressed people in oppressive organizations is not a step towards liberation, but is the deepening of their complicity in their own domination. The unabated war on women and people of color in America, during Obama’s presidency, with Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, is a testament to the structural and psychological nature of oppression, and the inability for spokespeople to represent the oppressed.

My Address to the General Assembly

After the Structure WG’s teach-in ended, I put together a short summary of what I’d heard. I waited for two hours while the General Assembly slowly got to the announcements--the only part of the NYC-GA open for anyone to participate.

When my turn came to speak, I brought up the plans of “the leaders of the allegedly leaderless movement” to commandeer the half-million dollars sent to the General Assembly for their new, exclusive, undemocratic, representational organization. Before I could finish, the facilitators and other members of the OWS inner circle started shouting over me. Amidst the confusion, the human mic stopped projecting what I, or anybody was saying. Because silence was what they were after, the leaders won.

Eventually one of the facilitators regained control of the crowd and explained that I was speaking “opinions, not facts,” which is why I would not be allowed to continue. He also asserted untruthfully that I had gone over my allotted minute. Notably, the facilitators and members of the OWS inner circle regularly ignore time restrictions.

This reaction shouldn’t surprise anyone. It is reasonable to expect any undemocratic organization to be co-opted eventually by a vocal minority or charismatic individual. On Friday, October 29, the proposal to create the Spokes Council was put to the NYC-GA for a fifth time, and finally received a 90% majority. The facilitators assisted the process by denying two vocal critics of the Spokes Council their allotted time to speak against it.

Sometimes it snows before the leaves have fallen. The ineffective and increasingly symbolic NYC-GA will most likely continue to hang around as long as the people who congregate in Zuccotti Park hold out hope for a more participatory, democratic society. The Spokes Council will only be more effective in its exclusiveness.. Let’s hope the inclusive spirit driving the Occupy movement is not frozen out.

American Autumn Pt. 2

2011-10-16T21:08:00.000-07:00

American Autumn Pt. 2

Occupy Wall Street: Organizing the Movement

By Fritz Tucker

Spectacle and Structure

The people's movement grows every week, the number of participants peaking on the weekends. At the same time, the movement’s largest organization weakens, rendering the movement vulnerable to being co-opted by those who are better organized.

As of October 8, the New York City General Assembly, the purportedly democratic body of Occupy Wall Street, barely functions as a decision-making mechanism. The NYC-GA has been reduced to a “people’s microphone” for public announcements of the decisions made by “working groups,” decisions which are also posted on public bulletin boards and on the internet. So why go through all the verbal strain? The NYC-GA is one of the main attractions of the Occupy Wall Street spectacle.

And what a spectacle it is! Hourly marches; slogan chanting; free food; celebrity cameos; literature tables; the people's microphone; the people’s library; signs and banners trumpeting everything from the end of racism to the second coming of Christ; all to the ceaseless beating of a hundred drums. A tourist unable to read the signs or understand the chants might think that the Occupiers’ main concern is a lack of public festivals, not that our society subjugates the needs of the many to the whims of the few.

As I pointed out in "American Autumn Part One," the New York City General Assembly is structurally incapable of dealing with multitudes of people with myriad political agendas. The consensus method used by Occupy Wall Street circumvents this diversity by atomizing the movement into tiny groups and friendship circles that ostensibly agree on everything—or at least agree to comply with the desires of the most charismatic, well-connected group members. There are few well-known historical examples of an influential organization utilizing the consensus method. Even a relatively small, unified group of people wields more power, in the long run, than a massive, unorganized movement.

A democratic General Assembly would be the most just way to accommodate diversity while maintaining unity. In the absence of this, the competing organizations set to dictate the avowedly leaderless movement’s policies and goals are as follows:

The Working Groups

Because it is virtually impossible for the General Assembly—which consists of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people—to reach a consensus, everything has been delegated from day one to smaller “working groups.” Most of the hardcore occupiers—those who have spent multiple days and nights in the park—belong to one or more working group.

Unfortunately, these working groups also use the consensus model. On Saturday, October 8, I spoke with a member of the Press Working Group. He said that, with twenty to thirty people, the working groups were becoming too big and were finding it difficult to forge consensus. A group that has trouble coordinating the actions of thirty people is unlikely to provide the model for an alternative society, or even influence highly structured institutions like Bank of America—which has over a quarter million employees—and the US government. . The operations of these establishments, however, might be temporarily disrupted by the mobilization of millions of unorganized people performing simple acts in unison, like marching.

This appears to be the dominant rationale of the Direct Action Committee.

The Direct Action Committee

The Direct Action Committee is the major player of Occupy Wall Street. The leaders of the Direct Action Committee are, for the most part, the original organizers of Occupy Wall Street: members of Anonymous, Adbusters and other full-time activists. These people originally led the General Assembly, and used it to mobilize hundreds of people on marches during the movement’s initial weeks. Now that thousands of New Yorkers gather in downtown Manhattan to march daily, the Direct Action Committee no longer spends countless hours in the General Assembly convincing everyone to consent to these daily marches.

The marches are completely symbolic, calculated to garner the most attention possible for the least amount of work and thought afforded. The clearest example of the Direct Action Committee's modus operandi is the fiasco at the Brooklyn Bridge. On October 1, The Direct Action Committee led seven-hundred marchers onto the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Shortly after reaching the roadway, the marchers were stopped by the NYPD. A police officer with a megaphone shouted to the leaders of the march that, “if you refuse to leave, you will be placed under arrest.” His voice was easily audible to the march’s leaders, even over the chants of “Take the bridge! Take the bridge!”

According to a witness who saw the events from the bridge’s walkway—and confirmed by this police video: http://www.youtube.com/nypd#p/a/u/1/BYfti1PeDmA—the leaders of the march did not solicit a group decision on whether or not to continue the march in the face of this threat. In fact, the march’s leaders did not even exercise their human microphone to inform the marchers that their arrest was imminent. Instead, the leaders changed the chant to, “Show me what democracy looks like! This is what democracy looks like!” and led the march onto the bridge’s roadway, allowing the police to carry out what looked like—judging from the dozens of buses from Riker’s Island—a preplanned mass arrest, one of the largest in American history.

This was a poor decision for several reasons. First, this action exposed the marchers to potentially serious physical danger. Although the NYPD exercised uncharacteristic restraint, the safety of the marchers was left to the discretion and caprice of the individual officers—not to mention the additional risks that go with occupying a bridge. Second, it subjected everyone involved, including those who did not self-identify as “arrestable,” to the criminal justice system. Third, it sent a message that Occupy Wall Street’s leaders—predominantly middle-class white men—are not sensitive to the challenges that involuntary arrest poses to a significant portion of the 99%: those with young children, unsympathetic employers, questionable immigration status, arrest warrants, or a reasonable fear of the police. Finally, the strategic occupation of the oppressive forces represented by the Brooklyn Bridge proved mostly to annoy middle-class inter-borough commuters.

This action did result in generating more attention and greater interest in the movement. For all its faults, the Direct Action Committee’s mobilization of the populous is more participatory than the progressive movement that elected Obama. In 2008, most progressives seemed to believe that America’s representational democracy could be reformed from the inside, through the election of the right people. Now these same progressives are thoroughly disillusioned by our nation’s politics and strive to control their collective destiny through united action. Every day the Occupy Wall Street movement continues, more people dream of a radically different world and make the social networks necessary—if not sufficient—to create it.

If the Occupy Wall Street movement fails to transform these networks into participatory democratic structures that can challenge the hierarchal institutions that led us into financial crises and endless wars, people will likely settle with voting for the “lesser of two evils” every couple of years, an act that bears a greater resemblance to democracy than much of what goes on at Occupy Wall Street.

Organized Labor

Many people only began to take Occupy Wall Street seriously when the labor unions joined the movement. Labor unions control the machines and tools that are modern society’s vital organs. Every day, labor unions make the City run smoothly; and on any day, they can choose to stop. This power—kinetic and potential—makes labor organized in its current form capable of raising the standard of living for “the 99%.”

Similar to the working groups at Occupy Wall Street, however, the current organization of labor unions is incapable of shifting the paradigm to one in which there is no capital and no class differences. The hierarchal structure of labor unions provides the unity that Occupy Wall Street’s working groups lack.

American labor unions are organized similarly to bourgeois parties and corporations. Laborers elect union officials, who monopolize the organization’s administrative life. Part of this administrative work entails giving orders to the laborers, who do the work that gives the raw material its social value. At the end of the day, the laborers have the fruits of their labor taken from them and divided primarily among the company’s owners, secondly among the union leadership, and lastly back among themselves.

Unions keep in check owners who try to disrupt this division of profits. Union leaders who disrupt this dialectic are kept in check by company owners, or are recalled by union members. Union members who disrupt this dialectic can be fired either by their union leaders or their company’s owners. In short, the hierarchy is entrenched.

If Occupy Wall Street is ever to create a world free from oppression—instead of merely mitigating the pain of the oppressed—radical elements within the labor unions must cooperate with radical elements within Occupy Wall Street and form the democratic organizations that are necessary to bring about an ever more participatory, dialogic, democratic, egalitarian society.

The Democratic Party

The power of the Democratic Party to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement should not be underestimated. The Democrats hold the nation’s executive branch, as well as roughly half the legislative branch. Despite epitomizing the status quo, to millions of Americans the Democratic Party represents progressivism—particularly when compared to the Republicans. Until a viable alternative emerges, the Democratic Party will be the organization most capable of benefiting from the progressive outcry of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Since the Democratic Party is allowing the Occupy Wall Street movement to continue, one might conclude that the Democratic Party does not feel threatened by Occupy Wall Street. It may even bank on the movement’s power to mobilize the masses to counter the Tea Party, gain control of the House of Representatives, and maintain the Presidency.

This theory is bolstered by Mayor Bloomberg’s tacit support of Occupy Wall Street, and President Obama’s recent acknowledgement of the “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.” Rather than proposing a plan to end capitalism, Obama proposed “getting back to old-fashioned American values,” like “put(ting) in place financial rules that protect the American people.” During his speech he offered no criticisms of Occupy Wall Street, but did lambaste the Republicans for halting the progress of the Dodd-Frank Act.

Whatever their rationale, the Democrats will most likely wait to see how winter deals with the American Autumn. If Occupy Wall Street can resolve its structural shortcomings and last through the winter without its core members succumbing to frostbite, the Democrats may realize they’ve been playing with fire.

______

This article appears at just-international.org, countercurrents.org, and democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.com

American Autumn

2011-10-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

(This article appeared in Our Town Downtown)

http://otdowntown.com/2011/09/american-autumn-fritz-tucker’s-critique-occupation-wall-street%E2%80%A8/

American Autumn
A Participant's Critique of the Occupation of Wall Street

by Fritz Tucker

Good News First

New York City’s financial district, notorious for devious deals that crash economies, witnessed a more harmonious transaction last week. Hundreds of people came together with distinct goals in mind, and shared in a more democratic, dialogic, and egalitarian cultural exchange than what is ordinarily experienced in our society. In just twenty-four hours, the hallmarks of a true people's movement began to develop: medical centers, media centers, food delivery, sub-committees, affinity groups, and a General Assembly.

When I first heard that there was going to be a week-long demonstration of people's power in downtown Manhattan, I decided I’d go if it lasted more than one day. On the first day, the demonstrators were blockaded from Wall Street and settled in Liberty Plaza’s Zuccotti Park, where they stayed overnight.

On day two, the organizers of the movement called to order a General Assembly, a forum for participants to propose ideas, set an agenda, and establish demands. The demonstration, which had been advertised online months in advance, had yet to articulate specific demands. I had hoped that the movement would echo what is presently the most popular and credible demand in the world right now: "ash-sha'ab yurid isqat an-nizam” ("the people demand an end to the regime"). Demanding this is not a cry to the oppressors to be kinder to the oppressed, but a call for action from the oppressed to overthrow their oppressors.

The First General Assembly

I arrived on day two, Sunday, September 18—in time for the first General Assembly. The General Assembly mostly consisted of the individuals who felt the movement should take unified action—roughly half of those in the square. Most of the other half had formed smaller “direct-action committees” that marched through the Financial District separately. Had the cops felt that the marches represented a threat, this division would have been extremely dangerous for everyone participating in the movement.

A group of “facilitators,” a dozen or so people who were instrumental in mobilizing protesters in the first place, addressed the assembly through megaphones and wrote down the names of individuals who raised their hands for a chance to speak, on a list known as “the stack.” Through the course of the discussion, it became clear that two goals dominated the General Assembly: one was to create a Tahrir Square-like movement in New York. The other goal—the one espoused by the facilitators—was to disrupt Wall Street for the sake of disrupting Wall Street. The main tactic for achieving this, at the time, was to gain media-acknowledgement of their agitation.

In an effort to push through their agenda, the facilitators used the typical anarchist organizing-tool: forging "consensus." With over a hundred participants in the General Assembly, total agreement on the issues at stake would seem impossible. Here's how they did it:

One of the first items on the agenda was where the movement would go should the police attempt mass arrests in Liberty Plaza. Instead of putting it to a vote, the facilitators concluded that the decision should not be left to the General Assembly, but to an "action committee" that would meet separately. Decision-making authority on most issues was siphoned away from the General Assembly into smaller committees.

This decision led to a debate about whether the action committee should keep the secondary location secret from the rest of the movement in order to avoid tipping off the surrounding police. I pointed out that—as a practical matter—there would be no secrets when it came to mobilizing hundreds of people. Another participant gave an impassioned speech about how our power came from unity and openness, whereas internal divisions and secrets were the tactics of our enemies on Wall Street. Veering somewhat from the topic at hand, he urged those in the crowd wearing bandanas and masks to remove them, saying they scared away potential allies. His speech drew more applause than any other during my four days in Liberty Plaza. Shortly after he finished speaking, however, about a hundred marchers returned from Wall Street, stealing all the momentum.

While everyone was distracted, the facilitators—who evidently disapproved of the direction of the General Assembly—huddled together for a couple minutes, telling eavesdroppers to go away. They subsequently abandoned their attempt to resolve how to prevent the entire movement’s arrest and "switched gears" into a discussion on what the next "direct action" should be.

Within minutes, the discussion turned to who was willing to be arrested and how. Many felt that the quickest way to make the news was to get arrested, and that this alone would make the movement more socially relevant. Most people at the square understood that arrests are a consequence of any significant social movement; some seemed to believe, however, the converse was true: if there are arrests, it will be a significant social movement.

When the facilitators realized that the General Assembly did not approve of this, they tried to disband the General Assembly by asking if everyone needed a break. The participants made it clear that they did not need a break. When the floor reopened, I suggested that the reason for the crowd's unrest was that the leaders of the movement seemed more interested in getting on television than creating an alternative society based on equality, dialog and democracy in the square. I argued that this itself would attract the amount of people needed to remove the institutions that hold together a society based on domination. Shortly afterward, another participant gave an eloquent speech about the foolishness of trying to occupy Wall Street with only three hundred people, and the need to first occupy the hearts and minds of our fellow New Yorkers, fellow Americans, and fellow humans.

After nearly five hours, only one motion had been brought to a vote: that the "consensus" be modified to require a mere ninety percent majority. Spirits, however, remained high.

In the end, there was to be one big vote on whether or not we should march on Wall Street, yet again, the next morning. Most participants seemed to want to stay in Liberty Plaza to develop the culture of a mass movement.

The opposing position was—shockingly—to confront the police on Wall Street. At one point, the lead facilitator pled that we occupy Wall Street because "it's pretty clear everybody wants to." When the suggestion received little support, the facilitator exhorted, "but the name of this movement is 'occupy Wall Street''': a name chosen by the facilitators, not the General Assembly.

To forge a consensus in their favor, the facilitators engaged in creative “synthesizing.” Instead of voting between the two contradictory proposals, a facilitator announced that the General Assembly would vote on a synthesis of the two: those who wanted to hold down Liberty Plaza could stay, while the “majority” (which was actually a minority) would march on Wall Street.

The General Assembly was clear about its hostility to this proposal. Overwhelmingly, the participants demanded unity. Instead of deciding which proposal the entire group should follow, the facilitators came up with a “new synthesis.” The great majority of the movement would stay in Liberty Square, while a small group of direct actioneers would occupy Wall Street. The Facilitators then put this second formulation of their first proposal to a vote.

The "everybody just do what they want" proposal was liberal enough to appeal to the liberals, and anarchical enough to appeal to the anarchists. About fifty-seven people voted in favor. I think I was the only person who bothered voting against. The final decision was so uninspiring that about one-third of the people in the square paid no attention to it, and most of those who were involved didn't bother voting.

Even though those advocating the march were a minority, the procedural coup was complete. I predicted that—in the heat of the moment—everybody would end up marching, simply because it was the only mass action available.

The Direct Action Committee

After the General Assembly, I sat in on the direct-action committee. Like I had done at the General Assembly, I let everyone in the action-committee know that if the point was to get media attention at the cost of dwindling the numbers of the movement through mass arrests, the direct-actioneers should confront the police on Wall Street, one of the most militarized parts of the first world since 9/11. Then I suggested marching north along Broadway. This would get the attention of actual New Yorkers and possibly build the movement.

But the marchers refused to look past Wall Street. I tried convincing them that they weren't going to disrupt the capitalist system, that the police outnumbered us, were heavily armed, and were quite experienced in dealing with marches on Wall Street. I pointed out that most people who worked on Wall Street showed up at five in the morning, so marching at nine was useless. I pointed out that Wall Street is a mere symbol of capitalism, and that the movement was currently occupying one of the most strategic and symbolic locations in Manhattan, and perhaps the world. Whenever I brought up practical matters, the response was that the action was supposed to be symbolic. When I said the symbolism of occupying Liberty Plaza was powerful enough, the response was that it was important to disrupt the capitalist system, if even for a minute.

My last attempt to sway the action committee was by sharing my opinion that it should not be our goal to disrupt the capitalist system with no alternative solution. I argued that Wall Street represented just one group within the global capitalist system, and disrupting it would only benefit America's capitalist enemies. I argued, furthermore, that if they didn't have something better to put in its place, even if they destroyed the capitalist system completely, it would rise violently from its ashes.

There was no way for me to know what most participants thought of my ideas. Shortly after I made my point, the direct action committee's facilitators decided there was enough of a "consensus" made on the strategy of marching to Wall Street, and it was time to talk tactics.

The Facilitation and Process Workshop

Later, I sat in on the first "facilitation and process workshop." This was organized to train individuals to replace the current facilitators of the General Assembly, who wanted a break from their self-imposed duties while ensuring the continuity of the hierarchy.

When I sat down, I learned that the facilitators had obtained a consensus that gave them the power to interject at any moment, whereas everybody else would have to take turns to speak. This procedure was, in theory, starkly different from the prevailing method of the General Assembly—taking turns to raise arguments or proposals through “the stack.” Effectively, there wasn't much difference.

The General Assembly—like every anarchist meeting I've ever attended—left loopholes to avoid taking turns. A person could circumvent the stack’s order by making one of several specified hand gestures to signify either a "point of procedure," a "clarifying question," or a "direct response." The keeper of the stack could choose whether or not to acknowledge the interruption. These rules all but guaranteed that the insiders, those who were least open to a diversity of viewpoints, most impatient, and traditionally empowered would dominate the conversation.

During the hour or so that I participated in the workshop, four non-facilitators addressed the group for about ninety seconds each. The remainder of the hour consisted of the facilitators talking among themselves, extrapolating on how vague procedural rules might apply to hypothetical situations and congratulating themselves by repeating that their process for the General Assembly was the most decentralized, democratic one imaginable.

In fact, the procedure for bringing anything to a vote in the General Assembly was highly centralized and hugely inefficient. First, a “working group” had to be formed to demonstrate that a participant’s proposal had some support. The working group had to reach a consensus on the proposal’s final form, which was then rearticulated before the General Assembly. The facilitator then asked whether there was a consensus from the General Assembly, at which point supporters would raise their hands and wiggle their fingers. The facilitator next asked whether there were any “blocks”—a sort of individual veto, expressed by crossing one’s arms. The blocker could then explain his or her opposition to the proposal. If there was a block, the facilitator was supposed to put the proposal to a vote that required a 90% majority to pass. In practice, however, the facilitators’ affinity for consensus often caused them to give in to the block without further voting, sacrificing the majority’s will in the name of democracy.

Frustrated by this, I proposed to the workshop a democratic, decentralized and more efficient procedure for the General Assembly, free of any designated facilitators:

Instead of someone “in charge” scanning the crowd to see whose hands were raised and writing down the order in which participants would speak, the "stack" would be formed by whoever wanted to talk forming a line. This was the only part of my proposal that was implemented.

My proposal also prohibited “direct responses” and other means of circumventing the stack. Addresses to the General Assembly would be limited to concrete proposals; those who seconded a proposal could speak briefly in its favor; those who opposed could speak against it. Then the proposal would be put to a majority vote. The next person in line would then get a chance to speak. No facilitators. No stack-takers. Equal rights and opportunities for all participants.

As I spoke, several of the facilitators wiggled their hands at me in a way I hadn't seen before: hands down, wiggling fingers toward the ground. This apparently meant they disagreed with my proposal. About sixty seconds into my proposal, the facilitators started rolling their fingers at me, a signal that they wanted me to hurry up, or risk getting cut off. I ignored this and completed my proposal. When the facilitators did this to the woman who spoke after me, another woman chastised them for this demeaning scare tactic.

The facilitators' failure to articulate their objections to my proposal except through sloganeering betrayed their fundamental distrust in a truly democratic process. They accused me of advocating for the "tyranny of the majority," the counter to which is easily the tyranny of the minority. They said that facilitators were needed in case somebody came up with a bad proposal, further proof that they did not trust the General Assembly to vote for themselves.

The workshop ended with plans for a second workshop, after which the participants would be given authority to facilitate the General Assembly. I decided to maintain opposition to the process.

Revolutionary or Bourgeois Democracy?

A revolutionary mass movement needs a set of unifying goals, and a unified body that can carry out the necessary actions to reach these goals. If these conditions are not met, the mass movement is merely a collection of groups that happen to be carrying out somewhat similar actions in the same place, at the same time. This type of mass movement is quite susceptible to harsh suppression by a modern nation-state.

The General Assembly is the natural place for the movement as a whole to decide upon actions to be carried out together. Because of the extreme procedural flaws of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the General Assembly became the main place for public dialog, even though it was the least conducive place for dialog, being that only one person could speak at a time.

The smaller organizations, action committees, informal dialogue circles and duos are the natural place for dialog, where politicking happens, where the mood is set, where the culture is created, where people synthesize their ideas into concrete proposals, where people who are prepared to propose a plan of action to the General Assembly gather enough popular support for it to be passed. The action committees, however, became the primary vehicles for deciding upon and carrying out action, in spite of the fact that their diminished size made them the least effective bodies for carrying out mass action.

The Occupy Wall Street movement was supposed to be a revolt against a hierarchal, dehumanizing oligopoly. In reality, all that was created was a microcosm of the same system, but with new leaders. Like our nation’s leaders, Occupy Wall Street’s leaders listened to everyone’s grievances, then decided upon a pre-determined plan of action that cleverly borrowed the language of their constituency. The leaders then allowed the participants to decide between this plan of action and an even worse proposal: in this case, marching on Wall Street to an unspecified end, or doing nothing. When this failed, less democratic methods were used to mobilize people.

The Morning March

I didn't sleep in Liberty Plaza Sunday night. I was confident I could make it back for the 9 AM General Assembly, before the 9:30 march on Wall Street. A friend of mine texted me at 7:09 AM, letting me know that the General Assembly was starting surprisingly early. By the time I got there—before 8 AM—it looked like ninety percent of the people had already left Liberty Plaza.

From what I was able to gather from the disheartened people left in the square, the leaders woke everybody up at around 6:30 AM with the promise of a General Assembly. After everybody was assembled, a couple announcements were made. At one point, somebody got up in front of the General Assembly and shouted that they should march on Wall Street immediately. Instead of voting on this proposal, those in favor started marching. As I predicted, almost everybody followed.

Forgetting, for a moment, the movement’s complete ineffectiveness, I tried imagining what would happen if it succeeded in shutting down Wall Street. I couldn't help looking north, to Ground Zero, where ten years ago a small group of people carried out a highly successful operation that disrupted Wall Street for an entire week. What good came of that? The destroyed buildings are still being rebuilt. The families are broken forever. The culprits were not just vilified by the American public, but by those they considered their allies—the international Muslim community, including Islamic nation-states in militant opposition to the US.

I was wrong in my prediction that the police would use the movement’s internal division to commence mass arrests. The marchers were so non-threatening to the police and to the capitalist system that instead of blockading Wall Street, the police spent the night organizing a maze of barricades for the march to proceed through. A convergence of interests took place whereby the protestors got to prove to the world that the USA is not entirely comprised of war-and-financial-criminals; whereas our nation’s rulers got to prove to the rest of the world, as a backdrop to the General Assembly of the United Nations, that the United States is still the one place in the world which allows its citizens to protest: as long as they're predominantly white, middle-class, male citizens.

The police’s facilitation of the protest didn’t stop the marchers from claiming, upon their triumphant, yet exhausted return, that the cops were scared of them—these two-hundred unarmed, untrained, unorganized, somewhat disenfranchised youths. One marcher gave a speech about how nobody could tell them that six of their comrades had been arrested for nothing; for they had disrupted trading, if only for a minute. The bell on the stock exchange, after all, had rung at 9:31.

With the current state of the people’s movement, America is in for a long winter.

Umbrellas

2011-06-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

(This is the last notebook snippet from the writing workshop I took. The prompt was to write something that takes place under an umbrella.)

There's a public garden in downtown Kolkata, by Queen Victoria's old palace, where it's cool to make out, as long as you do it under an umbrella. That may not sound very racy, but it is.

When I started dating O, and gong around the city with her, I started to notice how outrageously patriarchal India was. We'd be walking down the street, usually not even holding hands, just together, and all of a sudden she'd be in a really bad mood. I'd ask her what the matter was; but she'd be too angry to talk about it. Later I'd find out that some guy'd shouted at her in Bengali, something along the lines of, "oh, so you're gunna give it up to the Gora? What's wrong with me?" That would be one of the more polite things said. One time a bunch of guys threw an apple at us while we walked down the street at night.

Once, when we were walking through Dum Dum Park, the neighborhood I was living in, she let me put my arm around her. That was a mistake. I was just used to doing so; so sometimes when we'd be holding hands, I'd instinctively start to put my arm around her, at which pont she'd slap my hand and tell me to "stop being cheeky." She knew I liked to push the envelope; and as a revolutionary, she did too. She just had a much better idea than I did about where and when to push, and how far. I was oblivious. LIke when I wore shorts to the Sufi mosque in Delhi.

I was so happy and proud of us when she let me put my arm around her. I got this big smile on my face, and wanted to do something to show her my appreciation. But how do you do that when you're too awkward for words, and you can't escalate the public affection?

So I reached down and squeezed her elbow.

Correction: I reached down and squeezed what I thought was her elbow.

At first I was like, damn! O's got the softest elbows in the world! Then I was like, oh shit! I just squeezed her breast!

She was too shocked to react at first. Then she threw my arm off and started scolding my alleged cheekiness. She thought the entire thing was some elaborate trick of mine to squeeze her tit in public. I didn't feel nearly as endangered as she did, and so couldn't stop laughing while defending myself, which didn't exactly make me seem sincere.

I think, by the end, she knew it had been an accident. But for the rest of our time together, she pretended as though I'd planned the entire thing out, and would laugh with her friends about it, which would always lead to a lecture about how this wasn't America or Europe, and you can get killed for that kinda thing.

But the weird thing was, was that there was this little pocket of Europe, right in downtown Kolkata, in the old queen's garden. Well, there was more than one. There were the European hotels, and the European banks, and the European embassies, and European churches, and European movie theaters, and European ports, all of them bringing and disseminating the cultural and capital of this young, brash hegemonic power, hell-bent on world domination.

But the one good thing they brought with them was---well, I guess umbrellas are clever---but the best thing they brought was the attitude that it's okay for two---or more---people who aren't married, and who may have no intention of getting married, to play kissy-face, and even squeeze a ball or tit or two, in the semi-public park, under a semi-private umbrella.

Obama, Malcolm, Martin, Mandela, Marley

2011-06-05T21:05:00.000-07:00

(This is another snippet from my notebook, that I wrote for my writer's workshop last fall. The prompt was to write about something you'd find in your drawer.)

A framed picture was left behind, in a drawer in the apartment I just moved into. Maybe, had the change that she believed in actually happened, the person who rented the apartment before me might not've so carelessly left her picture behind.

In the center of the picture is a large photo of Barack Obama. In each of the four corners are Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Bob Marley. Some of the only things these four men have in common is that they are men of African descent. 4 of them had their ancestors kidnapped and brought to the Americas. The only one who was lucky enough to remain in Africa was forced to live through apartheid. He (Mandela) and Malcolm were both personally kidnapped and locked in cages for many years: experiences that the both hated, yet cherished in ways.

3 of them were Christians, one a semi-Christian Rasta, and one a Muslim (no, not Obama). 2 of them were famous for their struggles against the US government; one made songs about the struggle; one struggled against a US backed government; and 1 is the figurehead for the US government. All five of these men are thought of as success stories; but all of them ultimately failed. 2 were shot to death; 1 died of cancer; 1 had his legislation filibustered; and 1 was tricked into signing dirty deals with the World Bank and IMF.

What did the woman---herself descended from Africans---whose picture this was think when she saw it? Did it give her hope that she could be more than the hedonistic, petty criminal that MTV and BET want her to be? Or did it make her upset that there aren't enough figures of female black power? Did the big Obama and little Mandela make her want to work from within the system? Or did the other three faces make her want to overthrow the system?

Did she picture them all holding hands, listening to Marley's "One Love," or jammin to "Jamming." Or did she picture Obama looking out the White House window, listening to Marley's "Revolution," while Martin brought millions to the monument, and Malcolm peeked from around the corner with his AK?

Infestation

2011-05-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

(This is a snippet from my notebook. We were tasked to write something starting with a random line in a book. The line I ended up with was, "The house has exploded..." This story is about what my apartment was like before I moved into it.)

The house has exploded... with roaches. Every time you want to toast a piece of bread, you have to unplug the toaster and turn it upside down and shake it, to make sure you don't cook a roach. They're in the sink, and in the fridge; apparently these fuckers don't need oxygen.

Somehow they've found their way into the freezer, and keep finding their way in there, assuming they're not breeding in there. So every time you open it up, there's a little cockroach frozen in place, with one leg up, trying to walk, and one antenna off to the side, trying to find warmth, and frost on its moustache and on the hair on its back. If you're not careful when you remove them, if you remove them, they fall apart like a Jenga tower, leaving little roach legs everywhere, which are honestly the least of everybody's worries.

Trying to find the source of the infestation is of no use now. This is the infestation. If the neighbors could analyze the crumbs in the mouths of the roaches they find crawling through the hole in the wall under the sink, they'd find bits of the whole wheat bread you bought last week and forgot to put away, then realized you forgot to put away and just didn't put away because you were already in bed, and then forgot about in the morning.

The electric pulse machine you bought doesn't seem to work, which doesn't surprise you; if radioactivity won't kill roaches, why should electricity? You've used so much roach spray now that they seem to've evolved a taste for it. And you're so tired of bending down and cleaning up mashed roach from your kitchen floor that you've justified just letting them run around at this point on the grounds that it's more sanitary than pulverizing them with your shoe.

So now the name of the game is staking out territory in the house to put things you don't want them to get to. You keep your bread in a box and hang your bananas from a candle-holder on top of the fridge; you know the roaches will eventually get there; but bananas've got thick skin right? Apart from that though, anything that doesn't need to be refrigerated -- garlic, onions, carrots, tomatoes, rice, dry beans -- you keep in your room. You know this is a bad idea, that you're just luring them into the place you sleep. But alas, you can't call the landlord cuz you still haven't paid the rent.

Love Hesitates

2011-05-21T18:40:00.000-07:00

(This is another notebook snippet of mine, from the workshop I was in, in the fall. I think the assignment was to write something using, "love hesitates," as the first two lines.)

Love hesitates, if thought of as a quality: caring as much about someone else as you do yourself. In that case, love hesitates because it takes time to think 'what would I do?' or 'how would I feel, if I was in his or her shoes?' 'How is this going to effect this person, and how will it effect me, and how will these effects effect our relationship?'

Love is impulsive, on the other hand, if thought of as a quantity. 'I love this person thiiiiiiiiiis much.' 'I love you more than anything. I'd do anything for you.'

There's no better way to describe it than that commercial for some 'smart phone' where this guy sees this lady on the other side of the train platform. Going purely on how attractive she is, and I guess on the information taken from how she's dressed, he decides to change his train ticket on his (quote unquote) smart phone, which is, in this case, really a stupid-impulse enabling device. But then, to save the day, the commercial is actually so bold as to claim that these two people will fall in love on the train, and their progeny one day become president, implying that the hopes of progressive America rests on men ditching their responsibilities to try to get with really attractive women.

Now, first of all, that shit is super creepy. Men clearly already think they have the right to be super aggressive towards women in public places. But now we're saying that the fate of Western civilization rests on sexually aggressive, impulsive, irresponsible, patriarchal behavior? Well, I guess those have been some of the most defining characteristics of Western civilization thus far. So maybe I shouldn't be surprised that that is what people use their smartphones for.

Forging the Monogamous, Nuclear Family Through Myth

2011-05-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

(This is another notebook snippet that I wrote during a workshop.)

Forging the Monogamous, Nuclear Family Through Myth

My dad always used to tell me this story about visiting my mom's family in Nebraska when they were dating. He and Alex, my mom's littlest brother, would always be put in charge of collecting all the trash from the house, every few days, and burning it. Something would always go wrong, and they'd have to go back to the house and report to my Grandpa, who would pretend to knock their heads together and call them the Katzenjammer Twins. The Katzenjammer Twins were the main characters in a strip-comic, back in the day, about two young mischievous kids who always messed everything up and would then be beaten by their parents.

A few months ago though, I went to live with my Uncle Alex on his farm outside Memphis. And one day, while we were talking, I mentioned this legend to him. He had a much different take on the whole thing. He said that they only took the garbage out together two or three times, and that what was more bizarre was that my grandfather would've referred to he and my dad as the Katzenjammer Twins in the first place, being that they were not twins at all; my dad was 37 at the time, and Alex was a young teenager. Calling them the Katzenjammer Twins was my grandfather's way of trying to develop family ties, just like making them take out the garbage together. Once the initial act was done, it was much easier to make it into a legend, then to actually make them take the garbage out together on a consistant basis.

R's First Memory

2011-05-09T22:28:00.001-07:00

(This is a short bit of my second novel that I wrote in a workshop recently.)

R's first memory was of his mother crying. He knew he'd been the one to upset her, but never could quite remember. He hadn't even known then. He was so young that his mother didn't try to hide it from him, nor did she accuse him of anything. She just cried, while tending o the meat in the frying pan, the beans in the microwave, the greens in the steamer. When it became hard to see, she wiped her eyes on the back of the towel that she wiped her hands on when they got too greasy.

Her upsetness upset R. He didn't know why. He didn't understand how to make it better. He didn't understand that better was possible. He was simply overcome by a sense of grief and powerlessness, and began to cry too. He cried so hard, his mother thought there was something wrong with him and immediately stopped crying, contemplated calling 911 for a while, at which point R stopped crying too.

Later, whenever R would come into the kitchen and see his mom there crying, even if it was just from onions, or even if she was just minorly upset, that same feeling of powerlessness would shoot through R's gut; he'd have to hold his breath to keep himself from crying, which is what he'd learned to do when he felt sad.

Once R developed the capacity to think critically and creatively, he wouldn't stop asking questions, making suggestions, until his mom was worry free, which was a hard task. His mom had much to worry about. And she worried about him most of all. When her worries worried him, she stopped worrying about whatever she'd just been worrying about and worried about him, which more often than not stopped R from being able to help her with her problems.

Usually, when she was worried about something, and heard R coming, she'd try to put on a straight face, and point this false straight face at anything but him. But it's impossible to hide emotions from somebody you live with. The emotions come out in your posture, your expressions, or even your cooking, if they don't make their way out in words. Pretty soon, R's way of telling if his mother was upset was if she was evasive. If she was, he'd become worried, and wouldn't stop questioning her until she either told him what was worrying her, or changed the subject somehow.

And when he did find out what was bothering her, 9 times out of 10, the only solution to the problem was more money. Being that young R had even less money than his mother, he could do nothing but tell her, and himself, that one day he'd be a famous baseball player, would take care of everything, making her, and him, never have to worry again.

On the field, it was the compliments from his coaches and the comments of his teammates that kept him going. But R, unlike most of his peers, practiced hard even when nobody was around to encourage him. What kept him going was worry.

Best bin Laden Story Ever

2011-05-02T08:43:00.000-07:00

(THIS IS NOT FICTION! It is, however, the...)

Best Bin Laden Story Ever!

So I was in Kolkata, India, a place that’s on the brink of nuclear war with Pakistan every second of every day. It was mid-March. It had been 10 years since Pakistani General Pervez Musharraf, with US backing, led a coup against Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. The great majority of Pakistani people were fed up with the military dictatorship, the corruption-economy, and the Bush-then-Obama led drone strikes. So naturally they revolted, Cairo style, before Cairo.

A massive demonstration of lawyers and judges was set to take place in Islamabad, the capital, with the aim pressuring Musharraf to reinstate Chief Justice Chaudhry. But the day before this demonstration took place, the people of Lahore – Pakistan’s second largest city – took to the streets. Lahore is the capital of Punjab Province, where Nawaz Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz, was the Chief Minister before the coup. The state police force, once loyal to the Sharif family, refused to fire on the demonstrators, and put down their weapons. Hours later, the police picked back up their weapons and joined the demonstrators, who now numbered in their millions.

The Sharif family was in the position that all political leaders dream of; they were leading a massive popular demonstration that now was armed. Nawaz Sharif made a public statement that it was no longer a protest, but a revolution. He announced a “Long March” from Lahore to Islamabad. The March would take three days, and upon reaching Islamabad, join forces with the rebel lawyers there. The Pakistani government was so desperate, they took a bunch of steel shipping crates and started surrounding the capital with them.

As the Long March started, people in every village along the way lined the streets to welcome the revolutionaries. Presumably every young man in every village along the way would join the demonstrators. This, by the way, is a lot of people. In area, Pakistan is a bit larger than Texas. By population, Pakistan, with 170 million people, is larger than the US’s ten largest states (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina) combined.

The United States obviously didn’t want to see a revolution take place in a Muslim country three times the size of Iran, especially one which already had nuclear weapons. I knew something was going to happen, though I knew not what. The US was already on the brink of war with Iran, and was bombing Pakistan on a daily basis. I’d’ve been riveted to the TV, even had I not been in India, a place that could potentially become suddenly embroiled in the next world war. And then this happened.

The Indian newscaster cut away from the footage of the Long March with a breaking news announcement. She said, and I quote from memory, “this just in. US President Barack Obama has just declared that he has found Osama bin Laden, he’s in Pakistan, and they’re getting ready to move in.” I shit you not.

About 20 seconds later, more breaking news. “Nawaz Sharif and President Zardari are now on the phone with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

A couple minutes later, the whole thing was over. Zardari agreed to reinstate Chief Justice Choudhry, who would presumably drop the false charges against the Sharif family; and Nawaz Sharif would wait until the next election, at which point he’ll probably be voted into office, at which point he’ll have to be the person to make excuses to the people of Pakistan for why they’re being bombed by their US-American overlords.

So, to wrap up, a couple questions concerning the alleged capture and kill of Osama bin Laden...

What happened Obama? I thought you conveniently found bin Laden during a political crisis in 2009?

Is this going to be the new doctrine? Going deep into Pakistan, miles from the capital, with US forces?

And more importantly, now that Osama bin Laden, America’s boogeyman, is finally “officially dead,” who’s going to be America’s next boogeyman? I have a feeling this one will be slightly more Persian. Maybe somebody who’s name rhymes with, “jock dude, I’m a big ol bad.”

Manufacturing Incarceration

2011-03-04T21:34:00.000-08:00

(This is my first ever full-blooded research paper. Back when I wanted to go to grad-school, I was told I'd have to provide a sample research paper. I was saddened by the fact that I'd gotten through college without ever having written a research paper. Not that I didn't have fun writing this one. I was already plotting a novel that took place in a prison, and was prepared to go to prison, to get an idea of what it was like, if I had to. And although the research I did for this paper does not quite count as going to prison, it made me really not want to go to prison.)

Manufacturing Incarceration

By Fritz Tucker

Spring 2009

Intro

The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution is commonly thought of as the amendment that abolished slavery: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude… shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Actually, the 13^th Amendment left one highly exploitable loophole: “…except as a punishment for crime, where of the party shall have been duly convicted…” At the time (1865) this would’ve seemed an acceptable compromise. Over 4 million slaves would gain their freedom, while less than 40,000[i] would become slaves of the government.

Slaves are always good for capital gains. In the United States, slavery is also a way to keep people from unionizing and voting. This multifaceted economic interest in manufacturing incarceration has had a multifaceted affect on American society. The government and certain businesses benefit from high incarceration rates, high crime rates, high poverty rates, more laws, less court cases, and less expenses altogether.

The purpose of this paper is to disprove the myths that a) incarceration is society’s answer to violent crime, b) “correctional facilities” are designed for rehabilitation, and c) when it comes to deciding people’s involvement in the incarceration process – who gets targeted by legislation, who gets arrested, who benefits from the prisoners’ labor, who gets to build prisons – the government is a neutral arbitrator between society’s opposing classes. This paper will try to prove that a) the incarceration rate is most greatly affected by how easy it is to profit from incarceration, b) incarceration is a complex method of corporeal punishment, designed to terrorize the property-less into respecting the property-rights of the propertied, and c) when it comes to deciding people’s involvement in the incarceration process – who gets targeted by legislation, who gets arrested, who benefits from the prisoners’ labor, who gets to build the prisons – the government acts in the interests of whichever class is the strongest.

Pre 1865

“…a silent and insulated working machine…”

– Elam Lynds, Warden of Auburn Prison[ii]

Before 1865, incarceration was mostly in the North. In the South, traditional corporeal punishment, particularly whipping, was still accepted, and expected to keep slaves in order. Even after prison labor was found to be a viable way of mimicking slavery, several Southern states – South and North Carolina in particular – did not bother building penitentiaries: until incarceration was the only form of slavery left, at which point penitentiaries were built as soon as possible (1868 and 1870, respectively).

The North’s first experiences with incarceration are often seen as being dichotomized by whether the prisons were being run to rehabilitate people, or torture them. One thing remained constant though: labor.

Soon after winning independence, America began experimenting with convict labor. Combining the theories of ‘labor as therapy,’ and ‘public punishment as a way to terrorize the population into obeying the law,’ Pennsylvania passed a law requiring public labor – maintenance of infrastructure – to be carried out by prisoners, in broad daylight. But with a still revolutionary population and a relatively weak government, this backfired; the public was not scared, but outraged, and demonstrated this. The law was quickly repealed.[iii] Punishment was moved indoors, away from prying eyes, with the erection of the world’s first modern penitentiary, Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Penitentiary, in 1790.

The ‘penitentiary’ differed from ‘prisons’ of the past in that it was organized on the principle of solitary confinement, to avoid prisoners making dangerous ties with one another, and to reduce costs. It was also thought of as being a better way to manipulate people’s minds.[iv]

The Pennsylvania system is commonly portrayed as being more compassionate and intellectual than the early New York system, which had resorted to whipping again, by 1819.[v] But Eastern State Penitentiary’s practice of solitary confinement was called, by Charles Dickens, when visiting the prison, “immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”[vi] More recently, during the War on Terror, an extended bout of solitary confinement may have caused physical trauma to Jose Padilla’s brain.[vii] The Pennsylvania system also experimented with various forms of physical torture that wouldn’t leave marks, like stress positions, which – like crucifixion – can be deadly and waterboarding, which also can be deadly.[viii] One reason the torture tactics at Eastern State Penitentiary are often thought of as less harsh – and even, by some, an intellectual endeavor into the budding realm of sociological and psychological experimentation – is the use of three methods of torture generally thought of as less taboo;[ix] the guards (1) avoided direct, physical contact with prisoners via solitary confinement, stress positions and waterboarding, (2) omitted things from their environment – such as food[x] and blankets – instead of adding things, like electricity, whips or hot metals, and (3) were often not aware of the degree to which they were torturing their victims.

In 1796, New York built Newgate Prison in what is now known as Greenwich Village. Warden Thomas Eddy believed rehabilitation of prisoners was the most important thing, then terror,[xi] then profit. Labor was used to meet all three goals. Labor was thought of as rehabilitative, in that it gave prisoners a productive way to while away the hours, and would give them skills they had not yet possessed. Hard labor was also the chief method of terror, being that corporeal punishment was illegal.[xii] And labor led first to a self-sustaining prison system, then profit.

Warden Thomas Eddy equipped each prison apartment with a bucket of bathing water, a lamp, and a Holy Bible, to help the prisoners make use of the lamp.[xiii],[xiv] His program failed. Crime rates stayed high and prisoners came back to serve second and third terms. Eddy was either failing to rehabilitate or terrorize properly.

Eddy blamed the fact that there were, at first, 8 prisoners to an apartment, and later as many as 20. He also complained that there were no spatial divisions between violators of human rights and violators of property rights, like there were at Walnut Street, creating an atmosphere where the violent corrupted the others.[xv]

I blame the overcrowding and recidivism on three things. (1) High property crime rates. In the first 4 years of Newgate’s existence, it received 2 prisoners convicted of manslaughter, 1 for rape, 20 for assault and battery, 4 for arson – which may or may not have violated somebody’s human rights – and 509 for various violations of property rights.[xvi] (2) Even taking into consideration the possibility of being arrested, violating someone else’s property rights – through robbery or theft – to secure your human rights – food, shelter, healthcare – is a completely rational decision. It is difficult to terrorize somebody suffering from starvation or homelessness, with threats of hard labor, especially when you throw three hot meals and a roof to sleep under into the bargain. And (3) the only way to rehabilitate impoverished people – within the confines of capitalism – is to give them more money, or a means to earn it: a remedy the government was not offering.

Although Eddy’s first two goals were not achieved, he ran the prison profitably for the first 6 years. Then, from 1802 to 1803, the prison lost money; in 1804 a new Board of Inspectors was elected, presumably to reform Eddy’s emphasis on reform. Eddy resigned.[xvii]

In the 1820s, New York and Pennsylvania built three new prisons. The one in New York was built, not near New York City, but in Auburn, Cayuga County, the hometown and site of real estate holdings of John Beach, the head of the New York Legislature’s State Prison Committee.[xviii] Like Newgate, Auburn was built apartment style,[xix] but had industrial labor shops. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania started building Western State Penitentiary and Eastern State Penitentiary according to the not very profitable theory that even more strict solitary confinement – sans labor, Guantanamo style – was needed to cure criminals of their criminal nature.[xx]

In 1821, an experiment on human subjects was done at Auburn to determine if extreme solitary confinement was a good idea. A wing was reconstructed to contain a block of cells built for solitary confinement. Eighty prisoners were holed up. In less than a year, living conditions had deteriorated to the point where 5 prisoners had killed themselves and more were showing signs of insanity. When New York’s governor visited the prison, he was appalled at the mental state of the prisoners, immediately pardoned 26 of them and ordered the rest to be taken out of solitary confinement.[xxi]

In 1829, the State of Pennsylvania passed Act 23,[xxii] which called for solitary confinement and hard labor, thinking labor would stop the prisoners from going crazy, even make them into model citizens. At great cost to the state, every cell in Western was demolished and rebuilt to allow for more room and better light for labor.[xxiii]

Regardless of whether the New York or Pennsylvania system was best for the rehabilitation of prisoners, Auburn’s industrial labor – barrel coopering, tool making[xxiv] – was way more profitable than Eastern’s emphasis on skilled, artisan labor: shoemaking, spinning and weaving.[xxv] Prisons without industrial workshops soon became a part of history; you can visit Eastern State Penitentiary’s museum/historical site on a weekday tour, or take its nightly haunted house tour.[xxvi]

Even Auburn Prison was barely breaking even. One problem was that the whole of Auburn hadn’t been built on the solitary cell principle, which greatly reduces costs, due to the lack of necessity for guards. The other problem was that the labor camps were being run by the prison staff, whose occupation was running prisons, not labor camps. In 1828, both of these problems were solved.

In 1825, prisoners at Auburn were taken up the Hudson River to Mount Pleasant, to build the penitentiary known as, “Sing Sing,” which combined Eastern’s solitary cells and Auburn’s industrial shops. By the time Sing Sing was finished in 1828, New York State passed legislation which set up the position of a ‘prison agent,’ whose job it was to put the prisoners to work by signing contracts with whatever private interest would bring the most revenue to the state.[xxvii] Within five years, under the contract system, Auburn was making more than $5,000 dollars profit; Sing Sing was making $20,000.[xxviii]

With a profitable penitentiary system finally in place, one of the first things nearly every state did – once admitted to the United States – was build a penitentiary. Before the contract system, states sometimes waited decades to build penitentiaries. But after the success at profiting from unpaid, forced labor in New York, every northern state had a penitentiary built within three years of statehood; states like Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota and Oregon built penitentiaries long before they even became states. On the other hand, some states where poor people were already slaves – like Florida and the Carolinas – waited until after the Civil War and the passing of the 13th Amendment to build their first penitentiaries.

1865-1925

“Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to keep him… But these convicts, we don’t own ’em. One dies, get another.”

– Unknown Southerner[xxix]

After the emancipation of African-Americans, many southern states passed laws known as “Black Codes” to keep the existing social relations in place. Black Codes were designed to make the former slaves free in nothing but name. The following laws, from South Carolina, reintroduced forced labor – without guaranteeing employment – and revoked freedom of movement:

“All persons who have not some… lawful and reputable employment… shall be deemed vagrants, and be liable to the punishment hereinafter provided.”

“Servants shall not be absent from the premises without the permission of the master.”

Other Black Codes were just racist versions of laws the North had too: the combination of laws that kept people poor, then punished them for being poor.

“No person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic or shop-keeper, or any other trade, employment or business (besides that of husbandry, or that of a servant under a contract for services of labor) on his own account and for his own benefits, or in partnership with a white person, or as agent or servant of any person, until he shall have obtained a license … from the Judge of the District Court, which … shall be good for one year only. This license the Judge may grant upon petition of the applicant, and upon being satisfied of his skill and fitness, and of his good moral character, and upon payment, by the applicant, to the Clerk of the District Court of one hundred dollars, if a shop-keeper or peddler… and ten dollars if a mechanic, artisan, or to engage in any other trade…”

“All persons who have not some fixed and known place of abode… those who are found wandering from place to place, vending, bartering, or peddling any articles or commodities, without a license from the District Judge, or other proper authorities; all… persons who lead idle or disorderly lives, or keep or frequent disorderly or disreputable houses or places; those who, not having sufficient means of support, are able to work and do not work… shall be deemed vagrants, and be liable to the punishment hereinafter provided.”[xxx]

To be fair, the law should’ve also deemed vagrants those members of the owning class who had sufficient means of support, were able to work, but did not; they also should not have discriminated against African-Americans. Finally there was the infamous “Pig Law” of Mississippi, passed in 1876, which declared grand larceny out of all thefts valued at more than $10.[xxxi]

The Black Codes were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was backed by the passing of the 14^th Amendment in 1868. However, the ideas behind the Black Codes continued to be enforced by the subsequent Jim Crow laws, by racist police, by judges that wouldn’t give work permits to African-Americans, by unions that wouldn’t accept African-American workers, and lynch mobs that terrorized African-American labor organizers and entrepreneurs.

Laws and institutions that help dictate who is impoverished can only exist in a society where poverty is a given. Chronic rates of homelessness, unemployment and poverty – though fluctuating, like the stock market – have existed unabated through every period of US-American history, an indication of something wrong with the economic system, not the individuals who experience these conditions.

In order for capitalism to work, there needs to be a labor surplus, an unemployed class.[xxxii] A government that respects human rights would at least write legislation that either creates enough jobs for everybody, or provides basic necessities to those without jobs. Instead, in the post-Civil-War South – and on until now – these people were left to starve, or be kidnapped, imprisoned, and forced into hard labor.

Once prison labor is profitable, and poor people legally vulnerable, it is perfectly logical for the government to pass laws that create, not alleviate, poverty. From the beginning of the U.S. prison system until now, the vast majority of prisoners have been poor people incarcerated for violating property rights, not violators of human rights, such as rapists, child-abusers, or war criminals.

Since the U.S. didn’t keep accurate or detailed poverty statistics until recently, the number of people in debt – i.e., those spending more than they legally make – should give a good idea of how many people were forced to choose between starvation – which is rare in the U.S. – and committing crime, either by robbing and stealing, or entering the ‘black market.’

In 1935 to 1936, over 7 million individuals and 16 million families – representing more than half of all income earning civilians – lived on less than $1,250 a year and spent, on average, 115.3% of their income.[xxxiii] 1935 and 1936 were not average years for the U.S. economy. But while the average wages were down from where they had been in 1928, they were several times greater than they had been in the 19th century, due to the successes of the labor movement. The average agriculture worker earned $288 a year in 1935, yet only $178 in 1900, while the average employee in manufacturing earned $1,216 in 1935, but only $487 in 1900 (inflation always accounted for).

Clearly, there have always more than enough poor people to arrest and use for cheap labor. Even with the incarceration rate at an unprecedented high in 2006, (0.5% of the population), the poverty rate was still more than twenty times that, at 12.3%. This ability for the government to replace a prisoner by arresting another poor person almost at will would have deadly repercussions when the Southern convict-lease system was implemented.

Because of the working class’ opposition to convict leasing, the government used many legal terms for the practice of renting its prisoners to the private sector. In 1890, the Mississippi legislature agreed to outlaw the practice known as “Convict Leasing,” but continued leasing convicts for decades. As long as the government supplied the lessee with guards, it didn’t meet the legal definition of Convict Leasing. I, however, will use the term “convict lease” to mean any system in which prisoners are sent outside the prison to work for a private interest.

The convict lease system was way more profitable than the contract system, where companies set up shop inside the prisons. Under the lease system, the government didn’t even need to build prisons, the most expensive part of the prison industry.

State slavery is different from ordinary slavery in two profitable ways. One difference is, the vast majority of convicts are able-bodied men, whereas traditional slave owners had to keep alive an entire class of children, pregnant women and old people. And, unlike chattel slavery, plantation owners who lease convicts – like factory owners who hire proletariat – have a strong monetary incentive to not spend the funds needed to keep their workers healthy. Instead, they can let their workers’ health degrade until they have either died, or are not fit for labor, then hire another worker in his place.

In Arkansas, in 1881, and in the swamps of Texas, there were reports of convict mortality rates as high as 25%:[xxxiv] 41% in Alabama, in 1870.[xxxv] A fairly moderate number for the South is this: in Mississippi, between 1881 and 1885, the convict mortality rate fluctuated between 8.5 and 15.4%, compared with the 1.5% death rate in New Hampshire’s penitentiary, and 0.76% in Iowa’s penitentiary.[xxxvi] The mortality rate of the general population – for people who lived past the age of 5 – was 1.1% in 1880.

High profits provide a stimulus for the government to lock more people in its penitentiaries. In its first five years of leasing prisoners, Mississippi – which had been a state since 1817 – saw its convict population triple: from 331 in 1872, to 1,003 by 1877.[xxxvii] North Carolina, which had existed without a penitentiary for almost a century, saw its convict population rise more than tenfold in twenty years: from 121 in 1870 to 1,302 in 1890. Florida, another state that did not have a penitentiary before the Civil War, saw its convict population rise from 125 to 1,071 in the years 1881to 1904.[xxxviii]

Georgia built its first prison in 1816 and had only incarcerated 1,600 prisoners by 1860,[xxxix] but by 1880 had close to that number (1,527) incarcerated and leased. In Georgia, even though European-Americans outnumbered African-Americans at a ratio of 53 to 47, there were 9 African-American prisoners for every European-American prisoner.[xl]

Much of this can be credited to the government’s Jim Crow laws, as well as the Ku Klux Klan. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and terror caused Mississippi’s African-American voter registration to fall over 95% in 2 years: from over 190,000 in 1890, to 8,600 in 1892.[xli] Even as late as 1964, African-American voter registration in Mississippi was only 7%.[xlii]

During this prison boom in the South, New York’s incarceration rate began to decline. In the early part of the century, organized labor’s opposition to the contract system had been opportunistic and shortsighted. When Sing Sing was built on a quarry, New York’s stonecutters protested. When Sing Sing began to manufacture goods, New York’s master coopers and mechanics protested, struck, and lobbied.[xliii] In the 1860’s, when Sing Sing started smelting iron, various iron molders unions striked.[xliv] It wasn’t until the 1880s – when the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor began to unite workers of several occupations – that the working class began to make significant gains.

In 1883, even though Sing Sing recorded its highest profit ever, opposition to the contract system from the working class was so strong, New York State actually let its citizens participate in a democratic process. Sixty percent of New Yorkers voted for the abolition of the contract system.[xlv] In 1884, legislation was passed accordingly. The government was unable to skirt the rules and had to resort to running their own shops; nor could they sell the prison-made goods on the open market, but had to buy it themselves. New York’s incarceration rate consequently declined in the period from 1890 to1920.[xlvi]

Opposition to the convict lease system in the South was not as successful. It was hard enough for the Northern, European-American, urban proletariat to compete with the bourgeoisie and the government; but the newly freed class of Southern African-American peasants had a much harder time. Space issues made it difficult for anybody in rural areas in the 19^th century to organize; and the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws made it nearly impossible. Furthermore, every time African-Americans tried to go north, they were met with resistance from the European-American, urban proletariat, whose unions often barred African-Americans.

While it is true that European-American workers were still living in what we think of as third world conditions (the average manufacturing laborer in 1890 earned 2 cents an hour and worked 60 hours a week) – and while it is true that a great migration of African-Americans lowered the bargaining capabilities of European-Americans – the segregation of unions is both morally and economically, wrong. Before the Civil War, many unions – not wanting to have to compete with slave labor – called for the abolition of slavery; but after the war, unions were faced with the even more threatening situation of some African-Americans remaining in the South as highly exploited sharecroppers and convicts, and some African-Americans migrating to the North and replacing European-American workers. Unable to will African-Americans out of existence, European-Americans tried to keep them out of the work force. African-Americans – desperate for work, and not very sympathetic to the plight of their slightly richer, very racist fellow proletariat – helped the bourgeoisie combat European-American unions in ways similar to the use of convicts: by working for less money and breaking strikes. By 1910, the less unionized, lower-paid African-Americans had become employed at a higher rate than European-Americans.[xlvii]

Using prisoners to break strikes, and pitting different strata of the working class against each other, were tactics the government and the bourgeoisie used to subjugate the working class. The government, so preoccupied with serving the bourgeoisie, sometimes failed to look after its own interests. This was due to the fact that all political campaigns are funded by corporations; oftentimes the same people go back and forth between representing corporations and the government. In the 1870s, Tennessee had two governors in a row who went on to become directors of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company.[xlviii] Tennessee’s next governor, Albert S. Marks, was a relative of – and attorney for – Arthur S. Colyar, who in 1884 brokered the deal that leased Tennessee’s entire convict population to the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company.

The relationship between Jones S. Hamilton and the State of Mississippi was even more dubious. In 1881, Hamilton received a contract for putting Mississippi prisoners to work. In 1882, he convinced Mississippi to subsidize his operation so heavily, Mississippi ended up owing him $6,000.[xlix] By the end of the four years, he had to pay only $58,122, compared to the TCI, which paid $101,000 to lease Tennessee’s entire convict population for one year.[l]

In 1877, Roderick Gambrell, editor for The Clinton Sword and Shield, and known for his criticism of the convict lease system, was shot dead in the middle of the street: by Jones S. Hamilton.[li] Although Hamilton was arrested, he was found not guilty. This was not due to an inefficient judicial system. Mississippi State was convicting poor people by the thousands and leasing them for about a dollar a month to men like Jones S. Hamilton. This failure to convict a well witnessed murderer was due to a judicial system organized around the protection of property rights, not human rights.

Regrettably, I cannot give an overall view of the fluctuating incarceration rates from these years. The United States only kept precise records of imports and exports during the 19^th century: not incarceration rates, poverty rates, or wage rates.

1925-1979

“While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

– Eugene Debs, former inmate and Presidential candidate for the Socialist Party (at the same time)

It was during this period that the government ostensibly began to act in the interests of the working class. And while the government – under the presidency of F. D. Roosevelt – did give much to the working class in terms of human rights, it left the ownership of the means of production in the hands of itself and the bourgeoisie, and the power of the army in the hands of itself.

The 1930’s was a remarkable decade. The proletariat – which heretofore had lacked coordination between its many limbs – finally learned how to tussle, and showed its brute strength. Labor union membership, which had risen to over 5 million workers in 1920, had gradually fallen to under 3 million in 1933. But from 1933 to 1939, the labor union population grew every year, with its most remarkable jump from 1936 to 1937, when it grew from 4 million to 7 million due to the passing of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which legalized unions. By the end of the decade, almost 9 million American workers belonged to labor unions.

1937 was a year that would’ve made Karl Marx proud. A record 4,740 strikes occurred in the U.S, involving an unprecedented 1.8 million workers, one of the greatest – if not the greatest – mobilizations in human history of a population not affiliated with a government. They didn’t stop there though; that number was surpassed in every year of the 1940s, except for 1941. Yearly manufacturing wages doubled from 1940 to 1949 and again from 1949 to 1964.

1940 saw the passing of the Sumner-Ashurst Act, which finally outlawed interstate trade of prison-made goods for private companies. That year, the incarceration rate dropped from 0.137% of the population to 0.131%, the largest drop on record. The next year it fell 0.007% more; and in 1942 it fell 0.012%. These were the three largest drops it would ever have, to date (2009). Overall, from 1940 to 1945, the incarceration rate fell from 0.137 to 0.098%.

However, the number of federal prisoners increased from 1943 to 1945. Federal prisoners, which made up 8% of the U.S. convict population in 1933, made up 14% by 1945. This was due to the creation of the Federal Prison Industries (FPI) in 1934. After the passing of the Sumner-Ashurst Act, the federal government was the only viable consumer of prison products left. The federal government put prisoners to work making military gear. FPI sold over $3.4 million worth of goods in 1937, then close to $5.4 in 1940. In December of 1941, the U.S. entered WWII; FPI sales jumped to $18.4 million by 1943; 95% of this was sold to the military.[lii] This made for the ironic situation of the U.S. Armed Forces liberating Nazi concentration camps – filled with Poles, POWs, Jews, Communists, and Gypsies – using weapons and clothing produced by the United States’ poor and ethnic minorities, who’d been captured by US’s domestic armed forces and forced to work in concentrated labor camps.

Other successes of the labor movement in the 1930’s included the Social Security Act of 1935, overtime pay, and minimum wage. Just as important though, is what was not won by workers: minimum wage that took inflation into account, collective ownership of industry, and democracy in the workplace.

The fall of the US labor movement is complex. The most obvious reason is the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. If the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 can be thought of as the law that lured the working class into the government’s legal lair, the Taft Act would be the bear in the cave, protecting its bourgeois cubs. Together, these laws made legal the powerful, illegal labor movement, and then made illegal almost every tactic that had once made the unions so powerful. Section 8 of the National Labor Relations Act outlawed organizational-strikes (striking to get an employer to hire from a union), sympathy-strikes (members of a union not involved in a labor dispute striking in solidarity), secondary-boycotts (the boycotting of stores that carry the products of – or products of companies who do business with – the company involved in the primary boycott), and jurisdictional-strikes (an attempt to force an employer to assign particular work to a particular labor organization). Section 101 of the Taft-Hartley Act called for the investigation of any union member who was a member of the Communist Party, or advocated the violent overthrow of the government in writing or with speech; this part of the bill was later found to be unconstitutional. The number of workers involved in strikes went down from 4.6 million in 1946, to 2.2 million in 1947. But union membership did not peak percentagewise until 1956, when 25.2% of the workforce was unionized. And over 3 million workers struck in 1949, 1952, 1970 and 1971; so the Taft-Hartley Act could not have been the only reason for the fall of the labor movement.

Another reason could be that, the more money the workers got, the more they had to lose, and the more reluctant they were to fight for more. This is pure speculation though, for no statistical analysis exists of the average worker’s psyche.

A major reason for the fall of the labor movement is the slow transformation of the U.S. economy. If unions could not foresee their exclusion of African-Americans leading to African-Americans being used to undermine them, or the unionization of railroad workers – and the necessary control over that form of transportation by the workers – leading to the abandonment of railroads and the transformation of the U.S. into a land of cars and roads, the unions could not have been expected to foresee the AFL and CIO’s relative exclusion of service workers and domestic workers leading to the abandonment of manufacturing and the transformation of the U.S. economy into a service economy; there is no better way to commit economic suicide than to stop making things, while aiding consumption.

At the beginning of the 20th century, labor was split quite evenly, with 31% of the U.S. workforce in manufacturing, mining and construction, 31% in the service sector, and 38% of the workforce in agriculture. By the end of the century, manufacturing, mining and construction had fallen to 19%, agriculture had fallen to 3%, and service had risen to 78%.[liii]

Ironically, it could be argued that the success of the labor movement led to the bizarre turn in the U.S. economy, from a manufacturing giant to a country that ran a deficit of more than a half trillion dollars in one year. The manufacturing based unions were able to make the corporations pay them more, but could not prevent the corporations from leaving the country to find cheaper labor. Thus, the great monopolies of the U.S. turned into the even greater multi-national corporations of today.

In 1900, there was a $570 million merchandise trade surplus. The U.S. hadn’t run a merchandise deficit since 1872, and wouldn’t run one until the Great Depression. In the best of times – during the two most destructive wars in the history of the world – the U.S. ran record surpluses. Right before WWI started, the U.S’s trade surplus was +$0.54 billion. By the end of the war, it was +$4.57 billion. In 1940 the U.S. ran a $3.4 billion deficit; by 1945 the economy was running at an all time high of +$11.27 billion.

The economy would not run a deficit again until 1971, decades after the passing of the Taft-Hartley Act. The 1970s saw an increasing foreign trade deficit. It saw union membership not only decline in percentage of the workforce unionized, but the beginning of a decline in actual workers unionized. Subsequently, the incarceration rate started to rise again. All three of these trends – percentage of the US population incarcerated rising, percentage of the workforce unionized, and percent of the workforce involved in manufacturing falling – would continue until at least 2004. In 2004 alone, the U.S. had a trade deficit of 650 billion dollars: enough to wipe out every trade surplus in the history of the country, combined, twice over.

The incarceration rate went up to 0.119% of the population in 1961, the highest it had been since 1941, but not quite as high as it had been (0.137%) before the Sumner-Ashurst Act was passed. From 1961 to 1973 violent crime rose; in spite of this, the incarceration rate fell to 0.093% of the population, and fell in real numbers by over 20,000 prisoners.

In 1971, President Nixon declared the War on Drugs, and said drugs – not rape, murder, government corruption, or illegal wars in Southeast Asia – were, “public enemy number one.” In 1973 he authorized the creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The incarceration rate rose from 0.093% in 1973, to 0.133% in 1979, the greatest 7 year difference on record at that point. This seven-year rate of growth would almost be matched in 1994 alone, when the incarceration rate rose from .359% to .389%.

1979-Present

“So they come and lock a nigga up. / Meanwhile some corrupt politician nigga’s makin bigger bucks... Niggaz ain’t tryin’a live in poverty. / But a black man’s lottery’s a motherfuckin robbery... Because they came up with a law / to keep the rich motherfuckers rich and the poor motherfuckers poor.”

– Kool G Rap, Crime Pays

In 1979, the U.S. Congress passed The Justice System Improvement Act, which authorized, once again, the interstate trade of prison made goods. The subsequent rise in incarceration is almost inconceivable.

The incarceration rate went from .133% in 1979 to .501% in 2006, making the U.S. the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world and most likely human history. From 1979 to 2006 the convict population quintupled, from 301,470 to 1,502,179, leaving the U.S. with more prisoners than China, whose civilian population exceeds the US’s by 1.03 billion. The incarceration rate had never gone up by 0.01% in a single year, since statistics started being kept in 1925; during the post-1979 prison boom, it averaged more than 0.01% a year for 27 years. The crime rate went down during this period.

From 1981 to 1983, the murder, larceny, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, forcible rape and motor theft rates all went down. However, the incarceration rate went up by 0.025%; and the convict population went up by 66,000: nearly twice as much as it went up from 1783 to 1865. Marijuana convictions nearly tripled.

The crime rate did go up from 1985 to 1992; but with the crime rate and incarceration rate correlating oppositely before and after those years – from 1967 to 1972, and for the rest of the 90s – there is no reason to believe that the rise in incarceration was caused by this rise in crime. Some argue that it may be the incarceration rate having an effect on the crime rate, that all these children growing up without fathers are more likely to commit crime. This argument makes some sense, if not because of the lack of father – which has never been proved to cause crime – but because of the increased poverty caused by having one or both parents in jail. A rise in incarceration could also be said to effect the crime rate, in that a greater police presence raises the stakes for dealing drugs, causing an increase in drug related crime, and a rise in the price of drugs: causing a greater monetary incentive to deal drugs.

However, the fluctuating crime rate, and the near exponential growth of incarceration suggests that they have very little to do with one another. Because 1979 was both the beginning of the prison boom and the year private interests were once again able to profit from prison labor, it can be concluded that profit and lack of class struggle are the major causes.

Private interests profiting from convict labor cannot explain it all. 1979 brought the creation of the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP), which puts inmates to work for private industry. Under PIECP, the government can deduct as much as 80% of an inmate’s wages: for room and board, taxes, and compensation to the families of the victims.[liv] However, the private companies that employ convicts are required to pay minimum wage, which makes it not much better than employing anyone else. As of 2005, only 6,555 inmates (less than 0.01% of the convict population) were working for PIECP programs.[lv]

If the programs that came out of the Justice System Improvement Act (JSIA) are not the reason for the unprecedented prison boom, JSIA may have merely served as the catalyst that ignited the prison boom. Once the prison boom was under way, it turned into something else.

Over the course of the 20th century, perpetual warfare turned foreign invasions from a guarantor of profits for corporations that operated on foreign soil – United Fruit Company, Standard Oil – into a guarantor of profits for the companies that manufacture the means to go to war: General Electric, Boeing, Blackwater. War profits even spawned the reconstruction and humanitarian aid industries: capitalized upon by Halliburton and NGOs that collect money aide refugees, yet pay themselves comfortable salaries. Similarly, perpetual incarceration started out as a way of exploiting slave labor, but eventually spawned the rise of the prison and security industries. Companies like Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) have even gone so far as to run their own completely private – though heavily government subsidized – prisons.

CCA manages state and federal prisons, as well as their own. CCA’s profits have grown even faster than the incarceration rate. Created in 1983, CCA brought in a revenue of $14 million in 1986; by 1994, this had jumped to $120 million. CCA’s enormous subsidization (78% of its facilities received government subsidies)[lvi] and tax breaks do not just result from their campaign contributions and lobbying. There is also the uncomfortable fact that at least 5 of the 13 people currently sitting on CCA’s Board of Directors have worked in the government, including the positions of Senator, Directors of Legislative Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and staff member to the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control.[lvii]

In the past, both CCA’s Director of Business Development and one of its Vice Presidents served simultaneously on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)’s Criminal Justice Task Force. ALEC is an independent organization devoted to federalism, hailing membership from over 40% of state legislators. ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force is responsible for developing policies and seeing them get carried out by the government.[lviii] ALEC claims responsibility for the “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” law, as well as 15 drug laws,[lix] including the “Drug Free Housing Project Act,” which allows the eviction from public housing of entire families for drug convictions of any member of the unit.

Wackenhut Corrections Corporation – now owned by Denmark’s Group 4 Falck, the second largest security corporation in the world as of January 2009 – provides services as diverse as security at nuclear facilities in 15 states,[lx] to the security right here at Columbia College Chicago. Wackenhut runs private prisons all over the world, from South Africa, to Australia, to Puerto Rico. Wackenhut’ revenues jumped from $19 million in 1989, to $84 million in 1994,[lxi] to $423 million in the first 9 months of 2002.[lxii] Current and former members of Wackenhut’s Board of Directors include several former FBI agents and the Under Secretary of the U.S. Air Force.[lxiii]

The current prison boom could never have happened without help from the legislative branch. The government once again responded to an opportunity to obtain more slaves with the one-two punch of keeping people poor, then punishing them for being poor. And although the laws that were passed are not necessarily racist, when carried out by racist police and racist judges, outcomes are racist.

Like the Black Codes of 1865, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 essentially brings back forced labor. The PR&WOR Act stipulates that recipients of welfare are to be cut off if they do not land a job within two years. The PR&WOR Act also mandates that those without jobs must – within two months – volunteer their labor in community service projects, making – just like slavery – this practically forced labor devoid of reimbursement. The PR&WOR Act cuts off welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a drug related felony, though allows states to pass legislation to amend this. Finally, the law cuts off welfare for everyone after receiving aid for 60 months, and allows states to pass legislation to do so sooner.[lxiv]

On the other hand, the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 created the Welfare To Work Tax Credit program which gives tax breaks to businesses that hire welfare recipients, giving the bourgeoisie just one more incentive to keep people poor.[lxv]

On the punishment side, California’s “Three Strikes and You’re Out” law puts poor people who commit property and drug related crimes away for 25 years to life, a sentence that used to be reserved for manslaughter. Its mandatory minimums also help cut down on administrative costs.

Starting with New York in 1973 and expanding to 49 states and the federal government by 1986,[lxvi] mandatory minimums that mimic sentences for violent crimes have been given to drug users and dealers. For instance, for second time offenders, a first-tier crime – like possession of 5 grams of crack, or one gram of sugar with one drop of LSD – is equivalent to one charge of manslaughter, with a minimum sentence of 10 years to life. A second-tier offence, like possession of 4 – or sale of 2 – ounces of cocaine, is equivalent to murder, with a mandatory minimum of 15 to life. If it is a third strike, a second-tier crime requires a mandatory life sentence.[lxvii]

In the 21st century, drugs have become the most common reason for incarceration. In 2002, although property crimes outweighed violent crimes at a ratio of 5:1, drug crimes were twice as common as property crimes.

In 2006, the arrest of people for drug related offenses was accelerated with the help of the New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk policy,” designed exclusively to catch people for drug possession, and that odd fellow carrying around murder evidence. From 2006 to 2007, the NYPD stopped and frisked at least million people: more than a tenth of the city’s population. Even though European-Americans make up the greatest percentage of New York City’s population, and even though these “random” searches were more successful when applied to European-Americans, African-Americans were searched 4.8 times more often than European-Americans.[lxviii]

The judicial system is just as racist. In 2003, European-Americans – who outnumbered African-Americans in the general population at a ratio of 4.8 to 1 – were arrested at a ratio of 2.5 to 1, and were incarcerated less often altogether. However, another reason for the disparities in convictions is that the average European-American household owns ten times more wealth than the average African-American one,[lxix] allowing them to hire much more competent lawyers.

The incarceration rate has continued to rise in the 21^st century, but has done so at a considerably slower pace than in the 1980s and 1990s. The convict population did rise by 170,000 in the 6 years from 2000 to 2006, more than it rose in the 155 years from 1783 to 1938; but as a percentage of the population, it only rose by 0.023%: less than it rose in 1993 (0.03%) or 1992 (0.027%). Sadly, this may be because, in the age of the War on Terror, the prison industry is busy building secret prisons all around the world, for which no reliable statistics exist: yet.

Conclusion

Because there is no method of quantification to show that being in prison is worse than being unincarcerated and living in poverty, I will refrain from making a moral claim. In chapter 27 of The Jungle, Jurgis, just out of jail – nothing but sweat inside his hand, lint in his pockets – looks through the window of a store he can’t afford to enter. Upton Sinclair uses this opportunity to talk about the two types of prisons. “There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything he desires is outside; and there is another kind of prison where the things are behind the bars, and the man is on the outside.”

Prisoners are guaranteed more rights than citizens: food, shelter and medical care. Freedom’s clear advantage is the ability to choose – to a certain degree – who to spend the days of your life with: friends and family. When the fabric of society breaks down, even these social relations may no longer serve as a prison deterrent. While vacationing in Wyoming, when I was a child, I heard a teacher on a Native American reservation tell of how he begs his students to not purposely get arrested. With close to 50% of the Native American Reservation population living in poverty,[lxx] and a way of life that existed for thousands of years – based on cooperating with large groups of people – suddenly uprooted and replaced by a system that whittles economic cooperation down to a nuclear family with clear hierarchical divisions, sometimes even demanding competition for jobs within the family itself, I can see how “three hots and a cot” and some alone time would seem enticing.

But the low incarceration rate amongst the people who make the laws, as well as for white collar crime, is a pretty good indicator that it is better to live comfortably and free, than to live in a cage, no matter how nice the cage.

The factors that go into the incarceration rate are too complex to make any predictions as to how high it will rise, when it will start to fall. I do fear, however, the present convict population of 1.5 million-plus – as well as the more than 4 million people on probation, more than 700,000 in jail and 800,000 on parole – distracts us from the more important questions: the questions that were just as pertinent when the convict population was 150,000 during the WWII weapon-making days, or 15,000, before the Southern states started their re-enslavement and convict-leasing campaign, all the way back to the building of the first penitentiaries in Greenwich Village and Walnut Street.

These questions are: is it okay to hold even one poor person prisoner for violating property rights in an attempt to fulfill her or his human rights? Is it okay to terrorize all poor people into not fulfilling their human rights by threatening them with even grosser violations of their human rights? Until private property develops a nervous system, I’ll say no.

The rise of the incarceration rate according to the ability of specific interests to profit from incarceration shows that private property – useful to society only insofar is it fulfills human rights – has taken a life of its own and is now expanding at the expense of human rights. This is why Thomas Eddy did not last as the warden of Newgate Prison; he had his priorities mixed up. Profit was supposed to be at the top of his list, not rehabilitation.

The government’s lack of legislation addressing human rights clearly indicates that, as an entity, it does not serve the interests of the vast majority of the people who live under its reign. The government’s targeting of society’s most vulnerable members – and its protection of property at the expense of human rights – shows that the people who make, judge, and execute these laws are either sadistic, or worse; they are part of a system that selects those who are most willing to compromise their principles.

And while I won’t go so far as to say, “while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” I will say, “while there is a lower class…” there will be crime; and anybody who wants to abolish crime should start at the root of the problem, and focus on abolishing class, to borrow a term from another former inmate, Malcolm X, “by any means necessary.”

[i] Cesare Lombroso, The Female Offender, vi

[ii] Lynn Meskell, An American Resolution: The History of Prisons in the United States from 1777-1877, 856

[iii] Roger Panetta, Up The River: A History of Sing Sing Prison in the 19^th Century, 54

[iv] Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, The Life of Thomas Eddy, 69

[v] Panetta, 97

[vi] Charles Dickens American Notes for General Circulation, 111

[vii] Democracy Now!, EXCLUSIVE: An Inside Look at How U.S. Interrogators Destroyed the Mind of Jose Padilla, http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/16/exclusive_an_inside_look_at_how 3/9/9

[viii] Francis X. Dolan, Eastern State Penitentiary, 49

[ix] Marc Hauser, The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgements: Testing Three Principles of Harm, Introduction

[x] Knapp, 69

[xi] Thomas Eddy, An Account of the State Prison or Penitentiary House in the City of New York, 50

[xii] Eddy, 14

[xiii] Panetta, 75

[xiv] Eddy, 37, 38

[xv] Panetta, 87

[xvi] Eddy, 73-76

[xvii] Panetta, 86

[xviii] Panetta, 91-2

[xix] Panetta, 93

[xx] Lynn Meskell, An American Resolution: The History of Prisons in the United States from 1777-1877, 853

[xxi] Meskell, 855

[xxii] Harry Elmer Barnes, The Historical Origin of the Prison System in America, 49

[xxiii] Meskell, 854

[xxiv] Orlando F. Lewis, The Development of American Prisons and Prison Customs 1776 to 1845, 104

[xxv] Harry Elmer Barnes, The Economics of American Penology as Illustrated by the Experience of the State of Pennsylvania, 622

[xxvi] Eastern State Penitentiary Website, Homepage, http://www.easternstate.org/ 3/10/9

[xxvii] Lewis, 106

[xxviii] Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York: 1833, 21

[xxix] Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies Get Another, 2-3

[xxx] Albert P. Blaustein, Civil Rights and African Americans, 221-4

[xxxi] Neil Websdale, Policing The Poor: From Slave Plantation to Public Housing, 208

[xxxii] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 25. Sect. 3

[xxxiii] Unless otherwise noted, all statistics are taken from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Statistical Abstract of the United States,” particularly from the years 1925, 1940, 1960, 1979, 1994, 2006 and The Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970.

[xxxiv] Christopher Brian Booker, I Will Wear No Chain!, 94

[xxxv] Cyndi Banks, Punishment in America, 61

[xxxvi] Mancini, 139

[xxxvii] Mancini, 134-5

[xxxviii] Mancini, 31

[xxxix] Henry Calvin Mohler, Convict Labor Policies, 562

[xl] Mancini, 92

[xli] Mancini, 140

[xlii] Ronald W. Walters, Freedom Is Not Enough, 9

[xliii] Panetta 262-3

[xliv] Panetta 293

[xlv] Panetta 301

[xlvi] Ernest Drucker, Population Impact of Mass Incarceration Under New York’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, 2

[xlvii] Carole Marks, Split Labor Markets and Black-White Relations, 1865-1920, 297

[xlviii] John C. Incose, Appalachians and Race, 267

[xlix] Mancini, 137

[l] Christopher Adamson, Punishment After Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 563

[li] Mancini, 138

[lii] UNICOR Online, FPI Through Depression and War, 1935-1945, http://www.unicor.gov/about/organization/history/fpi_through_depression.cfm 3/9/9

[liii] Donald M. Fisk, American Labor in the 20^th Century: Compensation and Working Conditions, Fall 2001, 3 http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/archive/fall2001art1.pdf

[liv] National Institute of Justice, Private Industry Inside Prisons: More Than Just Re-entry Preparedness, 2

[lv] Bureau of Justice Assistance, Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/grant/piecp.html 3/9/9

[lvi] Philip Mattera, Jail Break: Economic Development Subsidies Given to Private Prisons, v

[lvii] Corrections Corporation of America, HomepageàAbout CCAàManagement Team http://www.correctionscorp.com/about/management-team/board-directors/ 3/9/9

[lviii] Amy Cheung of The Sentencing Project, Prison Privatization and the Use of Incarceration, 5-6 http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin/Documents/publications/inc_prisonprivatization.pdf 3/9/9

[lix] American Legislative Exchange Council, HomepageàModel LegislationàPublic Safety and Elections http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=PublicSafetyandElectionsModelLegislation&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=3&ContentID=91463/9/9

[lx] G4S/Wackenhut, HomepageàWackenhut Nuclear ServicesàNuclear Facilities http://www.g4s.com/usw/usw-services-nuclear/usw-services-nuclear_facilities.htm 3/9/9

[lxi] Mattera, v

[lxii] The GEO Group, Inc. Wackenhut Corrections Reports, http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=91331&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=565772&highlight 3/9/9

[lxiii] The GEO Group, Inc. Wackenhut Corrections Elects New Chairman and Board Members, http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=91331&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=565763&highlight 3/9/9

[lxiv] FindLaw, HomepageàLibrary, Major Provisions of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, http://library.findlaw.com/1997/Apr/28/130301.html 3/9/9

[lxv] State of Washington, Work Opportunity and Welfare-to-Work Tax Credit Programs, http://www.wa.gov/esd/policies/documents/4081.htm 3/9/9

[lxvi] Adriaan Lanni, Jury Sentencing in Noncapital Cases, 1779

[lxvii] U.S. Sentencing Commission, Report to Congress – Chapter 6 – Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy http://www.ussc.gov/crack/CHAP6.HTM 3/9/9

[lxviii] American Civil Liberties Union, Analysis of NYPD Stop-and-Frisk Data Reveals Dramatic Impact on Black New Yorkers, http://www.aclu.org/racialjustice/racialprofiling/33095prs20071126.html 3/9/9

[lxix] SmartMoney Magazine, Peter Keating, Retirement, Race and the Next President, http://www.smartmony.com/personal-finance/retirement/retirement-and-race-and-the-next-president/?print= 1 3/9/9

[lxx] Gary D. Sandefur, American Indian Reservations: The First Underclass Areas?, 39 http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/focus/pdfs/foc121f.pdf 3/9/9

Domesticating People

2011-03-01T23:24:00.000-08:00

(Although the reader may not notice, and although my impression might change, over time, I consider this to be my first "modern" piece of writing, both stylistically and thematically. This mostly comes from the fact that I had just read Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which inspired this piece. Because, primarily, of this book (though my own thoughts played a part, for not everyone will read it and come to the same conclusions as I did. But mostly because of this book) I no longer believe in the communist notion of the vanguard party, nor its bourgeois counterpart (representational politics) or its Christian counterpart (Messiah-ism). I now believe that the oppressed will be the authors of their own emancipation, and that anybody who wants to help them must work and live with them, not from afar.

Because of these conclusions, the my writing style has become much more suited to the average English speaking person, instead of the literary world. And the content of my writing has is not only less vanguardist, but is finally able to be critical of vanguardism, in all its forms. This was also my hardest piece, as a writer, being that I had to not only confront my own oppression, but my own oppressiveness. I hope you enjoy it, and can see the difference as much as I do. I probably wouldn't have bothered posting any of my writing if I hadn't started writing stuff that I consider as good as this.)

Domesticating People

By Fritz Tucker

Spring 2009

Domestic Violence

A boxing match: a struggle between two active participants: a bad metaphor for most violence. Violence is usually lopsided. Not boy-doing-experiments-on-his-pet-turtle lopsided though. Most violence resembles this: a man striking his dog.

A person can train a dog to do things, by giving it treats. If he stops here though, he’s merely feeding a wild animal and making suggestions, like you would dollars and titles to the singing pianist in your hotel’s restaurant. Domestication – when man becomes dog’s master – occurs when the man suggests the dog roll over; the dog refuses to perform; and man strikes it, commands the dog to roll over; and the dog obeys.

Violence in popular art and entertainment is usually portrayed as sadistic, masochistic, crazily random, or vengefully deserved.

The people who wrote Scream and Saw may’ve only been trying to create characters that were sadists; but by depicting violence unrealistically, by making it seem less harmful, fun, or just more watchable, using the ol, “it’s what you don’t see,” trick, they created sadists out of many viewers. Every time you create a piece of art and portray your bad guys in an at all good light (making them complex: it’s a good thing, if done right) but don’t successfully show why the bad things they’re doing are bad, you’re setting yourself up for people making misassociations. That’s why, if an artist is to deal with a topic as delicate as violence, just to be safe, he or she should always make violence as emotionally traumatic – and not just physically traumatic – as possible.

The latest incarnationof Batman versus The Joker is the most enjoyable misrepresentation of violence I’ve ever seen. Remember, in the original Batman movie, in the 60’s, every act of violence was carefully censored with WHAM!s, and SOCK!s. In the 21^st century, the crazy – yet lovable – Joker terrorizes Gotham; and even more loveable Batman tortures and spies his way to victory. Artistically, I can hardly think of a movie more rare, more well done, than The Dark Knight. But taken metaphorically, what lessons does it teach?

1) Violence is too random to ever be stopped, so don’t worry about what’s going on in the rest of the world, just concentrate on living your life to the fullest, while the bourgeoisie’s new, even more shadowy and unaccountable paramilitary force takes good care of you.

2) It’s wrong to target a single civilian, but fine to kill 100 civilians while targeting the bad guy.

3) Bad guys objectify women violently; good guys objectify women sexually.

4) The team with the best technology always wins.

A more accurate metaphor would’ve been:

The Joker resorts to terrorism in a miscalculated bid to nationalize Gotham’s natural resources; he’s immensely popular amongst the city’s impoverished, who make up the majority of the population; Batman, with the help of the police, crushes The Joker and everyone he knows, and demoralizes the public by violently quelling the following civil unrest.

Violence as a tool of domestication is completely rational. To me, that’s a lot more worrisome. It means, it’s not the crazies you should be scared of, but the sane.

Domestication implies economic dependency. Women, children and dogs wouldn’t put up with violence if they could simply run away from home and survive. American citizens wouldn’t pay their taxes if there were utopian colonies in the Atlantic Ocean begging for immigrants. Again, the implications of this are much more disturbing than the plot of the most horrifying scary movies; it’s not strangers you should watch out for, but the people closest to you; it’s not foreign armies you should fear, but your own government.

Economic dependency goes the other way too. The oppressed may be dependent on the oppressor, but the oppressor is even more dependent on those he or she oppresses. This dependency isn’t a side effect; it’s the whole reason behind the violence: to establish an unfair division of labor, an unequal distribution of wealth.

Social hierarchy: the power relations between adults and children, men and women, whites and the ethnically oppressed, teachers and students, employers and employees, the state and the civilian, the 1st and 3rd world, the haves and have-nots: a topic so rich in its psychological implications, one often forgets just how much violence – kinetic and potential – it takes to hold these hierarchies in place.

Violence: so awfully captivating, we often fail to notice where it’s going, see where it’s been, understand who or what it serves.

Labor: our individual jobs so repetitive and specialized, we often don’t understand they’re part of a labor process involving billions of people performing myriad tasks, and how fundamental this labor process is to everything we do find interesting.

If only our brains could simultaneously handle these three topics as readily as the coexistence of ice-cream, cones, and chocolate fudge.

Adult/Child

It all starts here. You can’t embody/represent violence without breakin some eggs.

There may not be a single person in the last 10,000 years to make it through childhood without being dominated by the hand that feeds them. Even the most liberal American parents I’ve met say things like, “I’d never hit my kid! They may need a spanking every once in a while, but…” That’s no less ludicrous than me saying, “I’m barely even squeezin it though!” while holding a mosquito, and qualitatively more fucked up, due to the psychological implications, and the purpose: to teach children to submit to authority.

Violence has a way of changing the subject – whatever it is – to the subject of pain, how to make it stop. This is one reason why violence is a poor educational tool. It provides fast results, but not just any result you’d like. If your child is about to touch a hot stove – and you’d like to prevent this – your best bet may be to hit (if you’re immobile: and only have one arm; otherwise, you should grab the child and remove it from the flaming confrontation); but hitting doesn’t get the point across. Hitting a child, no matter how many times, will never teach the child what fire feels like, or the merits of satisfactory, excellent grades. Violence stops the child from touching the stove because it makes the child concentrate on something far more important than the child’s curiosity over flames; it makes the child think: who the fuck is this big person standing over me? Why the hell did he hurt me? How can I make him realize, first hand, how much pain hurts? Why must I be so tiny, in a world full of such powerful people? What must I do to never be hit again?

Throughout my childhood, in the presence of my parents, I often lived in fear. I don’t know how many times they actually hit me. It was a countable amount. But the few times they did carry through with violence enabled them to constantly threaten me with it.

My parents were the physical embodiment of violence, as were they the economic guarantors of my survival. I did what I had to do to keep them from becoming angry. Even when they weren’t trying to coerce me into doing their bidding, even if they completely accepted the fact that my desires were different from theirs and encouraged me to ignore them and do what I wanted – even in the best case scenario – I always took into consideration not just their suggestions, but the fact that I might anger them, which might lead to pain. In the same way you lose your status as a neutral source of relationship advice once you have sex with your friend, you lose your ability to give harmless suggestions to the people you dominate.

Not every act of domination contains a violent outburst; in fact, the less violence, the smoother runs the operations of oppression. Domination often looks, to an outsider, peaceful: a family sitting around a dinner table, having conversations, passing the salt. But domination is not peaceful; it’s polite. At every dinner table in America, there’s actually a whole circuitry of different strands of violent thoughts and economic oppression connecting each family member to one another’s hands and backs and belts and wallets and bellies and brains and names. Every movement, every comment, every unrevealed thought, tugs a different tension; anything that isn’t neutral – and nothing’s completely neutral – is either a reaffirmation of an existing power relation, a rebellion, or an attempt to call it even, whether we’re aware of it or not. Often, we are.

Even now, in my 20’s, I constantly have dreams of my dad becoming violent. This is, sadly, not the worst part. Recently, Dreamfritz has started to fight back, and usually wins the ensuing battles. These dreams, where I violently dominate someone I love, are some of the happiest, most exhilarating dreams I’ve ever had: rivaled only by those in which I hook up with someone – I’ve crushed on for a decade – in a helicopter.

Some say violence is cathartic; sadly, this is sometimes true. Violence is also depressing and degrading; but I can see how these aspects can be overlooked and overpowered by the feeling people get when they find themselves suddenly free from domination, or in a position of dominion over someone else.

Violence take its toll though, even on the oppressor. One of the most blatant examples of this is that parent who, while hitting his or her child, says, “this hurts me more than it hurts you.” This is an admission of the psychological impact of violence, even on the oppressor; but it’s also an admission that the parent believes the psychological damage done to the more-human oppressor matters more than the combined psychological and physical damage done to the dehumanized, oppressed child. When taken to its logical conclusion, this way of thinking manifests itself in the form of the mainstream Western media counting casualties from amongst the Israelis who suffer from shock after a missile attack, yet not counting all 11 million Palestinians, or 60 million Iraqis and Afghanis, as casualties of war and occupation.

Man/Woman

Here, I stand accused. I come at this from the position of the oppressor; but I also come as someone who has not just tried to lay his weapon down, but has since picked up other weapons and is trying to learn how to fight alongside the oppressed.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. For a large portion of my life, I did everything I could to convince certain females to let me have sex with them. I was usually extremely polite about it; I’d be their friends, or at least nice: which, on the surface, seems like a good thing, right?

Imagine though, finding out the main reason your best friend comes to your crib is to use your X-box. Not only would this upset you, it would ruin most of your interactions with that person, and put a stain all your social relations; you’d suspect the worst of anybody who asked you for anything. And this – a manipulative effort to use their O-boxes – is how I treated girls I liked. Girls I didn’t like – ones I wanted to fuck and who made it clear to me I had no chance at being with – I slandered, both to their faces, and to others’. I also stopped being their friend.

Girls I wasn’t attracted to didn’t get acknowledged so much. I’d talk to them, if I had to, but they’d get treated like guys who I thought were beneath me; I made jokes at their expense; I was such a funny guy.

Another thing I’d do was interr – and this went for girls I liked and disliked – upt them: way more often than I did men. I am – and have been for longer than I’ve been aware of women’s oppression – acutely aware of conversation dynamics. I hate it when people –usually older men, but also cheeky younger white people – treat me as if I matter less than them. But this attention to detail didn’t carry over when it came to realizing me and most guys don’t really respect women’s right to speak. I had to read about this phenomena in a book, The Whole Woman, by Germaine Greer, then confirm her claim by observing people talking in groups.

The fact that women often don’t get to say what’s on their minds isn’t the worst part. Interruptions are a lot like saying, “oh wait a second, I forgot. I don’t give a fuck,” to the speaker (at least until you explain why you’ve interrupted); but on a deeper level, men are – to women – the embodiment of violence, in the same way that adults are the embodiment of violence to children. When I interrupt a woman, she needs to take into consideration how well she knows me, how likely I am to turn violent if she tries to interrupt me back. For any guy who doesn’t quite understand what this feels like, imagine if you spent your leisure time in a police station; and whenever you tried to speak, you were interrupted by cops.

Most violence goes undocumented: unreported and unconvicted. This is most evident – yet least obvious – in violence against women, who are taught to suffer politely. Child abuse goes unconvicted; but it’s so obvious – and children so helpless – that it’s celebrated quite openly. This may have to do with the fact that it’s also a temporary state of oppression; nobody stays a child forever. It’s seen as inevitable, but as a right of passage, with a clear solution: grow up. Women though, are women forever.

The domestication of women is so locked into our culture, even in the face of overwhelming statistical evidence, of blatant daily violence, of gross social norms and double standards, most men – and many women – aren’t aware that women are oppressed; some men even complain about feeling obligated to do things, like hold doors open slightly longer, and raise toilet seats: or help take care of children.

Violence against women upholds the domination of a minority over a majority: however slight. It also started as a relatively equal battle. Thus, the domination of man over woman has been a long, well matched struggle that continues to be fought – physically here, psychologically there – to this very day, more brutally than ever, and will continue to be fought for as long as women are disproportionally impoverished, sexually objectified, politically sidelined, and privy to much less leisure time, on average, than men.

Teacher/Student & Employer/Employed

The adult/child and man/woman relationships may have been the original oppressive relationships; but it was most likely because they were also the original divisions of labor: the adult/child relationship representing the division between mental and physical labor: the man/woman relationship representing ownership of the means of production by one group: the first class difference. True, in hunter/gatherer societies, it is easy to imagine some people acting unfairly towards others; and it is even plausible that this would more often than not take the form of men, often the strongest members of society, acting unfairly towards women and children. But the oppression of women and children only seems to be normalized and codified in societies with class differences.

School started off as a way of introducing people into trades. It was only recently that public school became universal (in the 1st world), replacing the church as the main method of teaching young people to obey authorities other than their parents.

With successfully violent parent figures in place, the teacher/student relationship doesn’t necessarily have to be violent. It certainly started off violent, and still is in some places. But the fact that teachers in America are no longer able to strike their students should not be taken as a sign of enlightenment. Instead, it indicates a more nuanced relationship in a complex web of domination. The teacher is a violent figure, in that he or she is a representation of the parent, who embodies the concept of violence through memories, imaginings and physical beating.

Back when I was a shorty, I gave my teachers an extremely hard time. I was a very social child, and am quite proud of my former self for not letting my teachers put an end to my socializing during class; I learned much more important things from my relationships with my friends than I did from my formal education in elementary, junior, and high-school.

It’s not that I hadn’t been domesticated properly. Nor was my behavior due to an inability to abstract my parents onto my teachers. Whenever my teachers threatened to tell my parents I was acting up, I quickly submitted to their authority. And whenever my parents did find out, I was submissive, in class, for days on end. What enabled me to act up, was the fact that I grew up in Brooklyn, one of the densest places in America, and was chaperoned, for most of the day, by members of the New York City Teachers Union, who tried to get the job done with a ratio of 1 teacher for every 30+ students, making it impossible for the teacher to actually inform every parent every time every kid talked during class. If I’d been educated by private tutors, I would’ve developed a very different way of life.

There was also usually one or two kids in and out of each of my classes who didn’t respect their parents’ violent authority, and so had no respect for the teacher; their behavior paved the way for my relatively disruptive, diplomatically handled shenanigans; as long as I was the third most disruptive kid in class, I could do what I wanted most of the time. Sometimes there were even undomesticated “special-ed” kids, who were physically unable to abstract their parents onto their teachers, or violence onto their parents.

In the same way that teachers are representations of the violent parent, in modern-day capitalist society, employers are representations of the police. This ostensibly non-violent relationship – between employer and employed – is also a relatively recent development. Domination was much more obvious during slavery, when there was no police force, but a concrete, violent relationship between slave and master; but domination still exists, even in the “fair and consensual” contract between the wage laborer and capitalist.

Like the relationship between teachers and parents, the connection between the police and employers took a long time to develop. In the interim period, employers carried out the violence themselves.

By the 20th century, it was illegal – in America – to abuse your employee even if he was a convicted prisoner. The labor force started to get cheeky. During the U.S. labor movement, the working class was so well organized, not even the local police could handle them; the national army had to be called on, several times, to dominate them. The average contemporary American may think of this violent conflict between employer and employee as a historical anomaly; but in fact, receiving a comfortable, living wage is the anomaly. The privileges of our parents were won with the blood of our grand- and great grandparents. These privileges exist in only a few places in the world, and for a limited time only. Go to any 3rd world country – or stay right where you are and wait a few decades – and you’ll see just how much violence it takes to maintain the relationship between those who own more wealth than they could ever spend, and those who provide all the labor, yet have nothing, at the end of the day, but unhealthy food, inadequate medical care, and rented shelters: if that.

State/Civilian

I think most Americans would be frightened, if they found themselves alone, in their grandma’s kitchen, with George W. Bush. There aren’t many people who’ve been portrayed as the embodiment of violence more often than that guy.

You’d probly be scared too, if you ran into Obama on the street; but only because of the invisible sweater of SWAT team members he wears. (I’ve actually had several Obama and several Bush dreams; and I have to say, me and Barak get along fine; we even have intelligent debates about why we think each other wrong. But all my Bush dreams’re fraught with frightening exchanges, like the time we were talking about 9/11 on the couch in my living room and he asked me, “then who do you think planned it?” and I got all frozeneyed and pointed at him and screeched like a zombie from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and then ran up to my room before he could get mad at me.)

But who’s afraid of their congressman? Well, I guess everybody who’s afraid of grown white men (so pretty much everyone except for some white men). But they’re not any scarier than your average white male. We shouldn’t, but we need to abstract the executive branch’s armed forces – the embodiment of violence – onto our politicians, instead of seeing them for who they are: the leaders of the most notorious and violent gang the world’s ever seen.

The dominance of the state over its civilians may take many levels of abstraction to realize. COPS, the original reality TV show, has done much to remedy that, while obfuscating the role of the other branches of the government. But not even COPS, or all the movies I saw as a child, made me fear the police for who they were.

For a long time, I had to abstract my parents onto cops to make them scary. When I first started smoking weed, I was terrified of getting caught by the police; cuz I knew they’d tell my parents; not cuz I was afraid of being brutalized or arrested. (When I was high though, I’d get so paranoid, I’d think my parents were gunna randomly show up in the middle of the woods, in Queens, and scold me.)

That’s one reason why the government’s so adamant about keeping intact the family structure. Without the establishment of the violent parent, it’d be up to cops to domesticate people. The police force would have to be several times larger than it currently is, and much more blatant with their violence.

I just watched a video of the recent student rebellions at New York University. The article attached to the video made it seem like the cops were the aggressors; but when I saw it for myself, it was clearly the protestors that were the aggressive ones. I didn’t fret though, at all, over the well being of the policemen; even when the crowd was pushing the gates into the police’s forces, I watched with intense worry for the health of the protestors. I can never forget, the police are armed with sophisticated weaponry, and have proved, repeatedly, their willingness to use it.

For many, it takes real accounts of real deaths, or videotapes of brutal beatings, to understand that police are far scarier than representations of your parents. But how to scare everybody without making direct threats to everyone?

People would panic if a broadcast stated, “100,000 American citizens will be abducted at random tomorrow and executed.” However, if the broadcast said, “100,000 people are gunna be abducted and shot tomorrow, and here’re their names...” everyone else would still be terrified, but they’d just stay home, or at least stay away from those 100,000 people until it was over.

Persecuting a distinct minority is one of the most basic and common forms of terrorizing the majority. This form of terrorism is the only reasonable explanation for why the police in America are killing about two civilians a day now. Last summer (2008) 12 people were shot by the police in under a month, just in Chicago; they were all ethnic minorities. It would actually be a relief if it turned out there were a few racist cops who were getting together, getting drunk, and saying, “hey Jif. Let’s go shoot us some mino’s.” But even more terrifying is the fact that cops commit these cold-blooded, premeditated murders to strike fear into the general population. When the police successfully embody violence to everybody everywhere, they can do their jobs without even leaving their cars.

It’s no exaggeration to say that, in the same way the U.S. Army occupies Iraq, Afghanistan – and over a hundred other countries – with tanks and bombers, the local police forces occupy American communities, using cruisers and shotguns.

Privileged Races/Ethnically Oppressed

I now know – not just understand – a little bit about how ethnic minorities feel, living in America.

Living in India – where I’m ethnically minimal – isn’t that bad; I just get stared at a lot. At first this was only slightly bothering; but over time, it’s begun to have deeper psychological impacts. For starters, I’ve begun to resent people for making me the object of their attention. The paranoid beast inside me thinks – whenever I walk by a laughing clique of Indians – they’re laughing at me because of some character defect. I wish to be invisible in public. I wear my hoodie on too-hot days. I have brief desires, every time I see taxis, to get inside, even though the metro is faster and cheaper; I used to love public transportation so much.

Another thing – I’ve realized – that bothers me is, there’s nothing I can do to make it seem like I’m of the lower classes here. Growing up, back in America, I used to try to use the way I dressed to fit in with crowds of oppressed peoples I wasn’t a part of, so they’d know I was at least on their side. I’d get a little thrill, it’s true, leaning against the doors closing on the left at Wall Street, grilling the white businessmen, with my baggy jeans and rapping headphones on. When I’d get to my friends’ houses in the ghetto, I’d be paranoid – not that I’d be robbed – but that the blacks and Latinos around me would see me as a poser and not as someone who was willing to sweat, bleed and die to help bring an end to their oppression.

In India, though, there aren’t any upper class white people to piss off; and baggy jeans and rap music aren’t signs of oppression; they smell like American imperialism, look like American imperialism, and well.. are two important aspects of American imperialism; blue jeans and good music are two of America’s most important exports.

But word, boo-hoo, poor me, right? No; because I can only imagine – and actually, I can’t even imagine – what racism is like for minorities in America. Cuz here’s the thing: the racism I experience in India isn’t the racism of an oppressed ethnicity, but the racism of privilege. I got onto the subway the other day (this is not at all unusual) and an old woman got up and offered me her seat.

Before I left Chicago, a tornado happened. My friend Marck and I walked – barefoot, topless – through the downpour, to the store, to get ice-cream. He was drinking a beer and being pretty rowdy. When I saw him (an Argentine immigrant) almost run into a moving cop car, my amygdala responded with a frightening dose of fear. His did too, but not as much as usual. Then, not only did he not hide the beer, he was actually quite cheeky with the police. He later told me that he knew the cops weren’t gunna leave the car because they didn’t wanna get wet. But he also told me something that really fucked with my head. He felt safer, because he was with me, than he would’ve, had he been alone, or with another minority.

Both the fact that Marck saw me as a representation of the police, and the speed at which he did so, made me realize how deeply ingrained these social hierarchies are. It also made me realize, I can try to be a little thug all I want – and it’ll work even, on the suited bankers in downtown Manhattan – but to blacks and Latinos in Harlem and the South Bronx, I look like undercover cop: or at least a guy who’ll have the full backing of the violent, racist police force, if they do decide to rob me: or even if they don’t rob me: even if I just cry wolf.

Over the course of my college years, my friends Marck and Samantha consistently called me out for being racist and sexist. Although I think they were wrong a good deal of the time, they were right way more often than I was originally prepared to believe. And most importantly, because of their constant criticism, I now have a little Marck and a little Samantha on each of my shoulders, who keep me from saying things like this...

A true, embarrassing story: to help illustrate the insanely complex subtleties of racism: and show how racism can rear is ugly head, even in a non-malicious situation. When I was getting my Indian Visa, the my-aged-lady at the desk was black and pregnant. She said “hi,” to me in a way more friendly way that I expected someone in a service/customer relationship to do. So I wanted to say something super-friendly back.

I guess I was trying to reference the fetus in her uterus, which is usually a pretty cool thing to do; but I was subtly aware that if I said, “so you’re havin a baby,” it’d only tug her emotions in a minor way. I was trying to be super-friendly; I had to come up with something original. All these thoughts were thought in under a second. So was this one: the first thing my brain came up with was, ‘so you know who the father’s gunna be?’

Thanks to Marck’s conditioning, my next thought was, ‘that’d be one of the whackest thing you could possibly say Fritz.’ Or maybe I just got a mental visual of Marck’s disappointed face. Either way, instead of using words to make her feel better, I just thought about how happy I was that didn’t happen, and laughed out loud, which made her laugh too: and think I was a weirdo.

1st World/3st World

The terms 1st and 3rd world describe, not relationships between individuals, families, or classes, but nations and continents, which contain oppressed races, classes, genders and ages; it is, therefore, the most extreme form of social hierarchy: where a small group of seven or eight nations dominates and lives off the spoils of everybody else. The achieval of world dominance involves sudden and exact movements by coordinated millions, resulting in the disabling of hundreds of millions: war.

War is the culmination of everything that is wrong with humanity. True, violence, poverty and epidemic diseases occur in times of peace; if you want to see the statistics, you look them up. Wanna know how many people died due to war in the last decade? I do too. War accelerates these phenomena to the point where nobody even bothers to keep count (&).

War (as the worst thing in the world) is the one thing that can consistently keep people’s minds off their poverty and sexual exploitation (the second worst things). Keep that in mind, if ever you need to stop a bunch of impoverished civilians from starting a revolution: just enter a state of perpetual warfare with foreign nations.

Usually though, war is a means to an end: a way of dominating a nation, opening its markets to exports, plundering its natural resources almost freely, exploiting its labor cheaply.

One popular misconception is that 3rd world conditions have always existed, that they’re leftovers from our hunting/gathering days. In fact, hunter gatherers in most locations today consume more calories, have more diverse, nutritious diets, and enjoy more leisure time than the civilized world’s oppressed, which make up the majority of the population. Primitive human skeletons are larger, show less signs of disease and malnutrition, and have far less cavities than do the average skeleton in the age of farming and industrialization (according to Jared Diamond, in “The Worst Mistake”). Modern oppression is far worse than living in Neanderthal huts in the forest and having absolutely no long term food security; modern oppression means not even having food today, and living in a shack designed to be adequately durable, while using the least amount of room, so that as many poor people can be can be crowded into as small a space as possible.

Another popular misconception is that the creation of 3rd world conditions leads to the creation of 1st world conditions. Actually, it used to be the imperialist nations who had the poorest working classes. Capitalism is the first mode of production that demands the creation of an entire class of idle, unemployed paupers/vagabonds/homeless people (%). As bad as life is for society’s outcasts, life is often worse for the employed, who’re overworked and often put in dangerous environments ($). At one point during the 19th century, the average lifespan of wage laborers in Manchester and Liverpool fell to 17 and 15 years, respectively (Karl Marx, Capital, ch. 25). The American working class lived in 3rd world conditions until WWII (US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States) until the labor movement fought, successfully, for the right to share in the spoils of the imperialist plunder of the bourgeoisie (#). The creation of 1st world, “middle class” conditions is the result of class struggle, not imperialism.

A last misconception is that the existence of 1st world conditions necessitates the existence of 3rd world conditions. Once upon a time, there existed a 2nd world: the socialist/communist camp. The working class of the 2nd world lived in conditions similar to the working classes of the 1st world. The people of the 2nd world, however, were not relatively well off due to greater shares in the exploitation of the 3rd world. Their wealth came from organizing production around social benefit (instead of profit chasing) and a distribution of wealth that prevented the formation of an elite class of multi-billionaires. The people of the 2nd world also didn’t have to fight their governments for every right and privilege. They had revolutions, then voluntarily, purposely, and consciously instituted these policies from the top down. They were all eventually sold out by their governments (though the Communist Party of Cuba hasn’t quite sold its people out just yet).

Sibling Violence

So far, I’ve mostly depicted children as being entirely innocent and oppressed, when really, for the most part, nowadays at least, they’re pretty damn evil too. They’re not as destructive as adults, but a lot of that has to do with the fact they’re not allowed near the weapons.

You’ve gotta catch them in their habitat to see what they’re really like. One of the only times I recall being caught unawares by a non-security-video-camera came when I was a wee lad; completely unprovoked, I ran, screaming, up to my little brother and hit him over the head with a rubber chicken, completely unprovoked. I wish my cousin Danny still had that video. Once again, sorry Dylan. Sadly, I was not discouraged from this act of violence. Almost everybody who saw the video laughed.

It shouldn’t be surprising that it was during my time as a dominated child that I did most of my dominating of other children. By the time I was 16, I’d committed thousands of violent acts; since then, none that I know of. However, I only hit a few people: some fights in school, here and there: and my little brother, over and over again, for 13 long years: 4,775 violent days.

I distinctly remember feeling morally justified (not guiltfully pleasured) when I’d stand outside the door to me and my brother’s bedroom, and go back and forth between yelling at him that it wasn’t fair for him to lock me out of my room so if he’d just open the door and let me in I’d promise not to hit him again, and then screaming even louder and terrorizing him into thinking that if he didn’t open the door now and let me punch him one last time I’d just have to punch him harder in the future. My brother spent a lot of time behind that locked door; for that, I am so sorry.

I often felt my dad favored my little brother, unjustly took his side in every argument. Now I know that, whether or not he agreed with my brother’s side of the story, he never, “took my little brother’s side,” and stood up with the oppressed. The way you do that is: make it clear that committing violent acts of aggression against weaker people is unacceptable: help them defend themselves if necessary. My dad may’ve discouraged specific violent actions, but never violence as a concept, as a tool of domestication. Only the government is politically savvy enough to claim things like a monopoly on violence, even while encouraging and funding it all over the place.

Submission to violence isn’t just a Pavlovian, conditioned reaction; it’s the awareness of the possibility of a drastic escalation of your current levels of pain, due in part to the lack of retribution you’ll incur because of a well established social hierarchy that you’re both falling victim to and helping perpetuate by playing your part.

Because individual members of specific groups can drift in and out oppressive relationships, or can trade roles with the cock of a trigger, some people say, “what’s with all that social hierarchy nonsense. You can’t categorize oppression like that.” But that’s like saying you can’t talk about the relationship between pitcher and batter, because (at least in the National League) the individuals eventually switch places; or because they can be substituted for. Rather, it’s this ability to change roles, or play multiple roles – sometimes simultaneously, within complex groups, like when you’re a middle brother – that makes human domestication work so well.

Also, I’m not saying there are no instances of relationships existing between blacks and whites, or men and women, where the stereotypically dominant race or sex is dominated; for the last 8 years, I was dominated big time by a black woman: Condoleeza Rice. Right now, pretty much everybody’s being dominated by a black man. Categories – men and women, black and white, adult and child – do exist though; and if you had to say who was winning, well it’s clear, a white American male has the ball, is on the mound, and is striking everyone else out with screwballs.

Domesticating People

Cows are one of humanity’s most important achievements. Cows aren’t so domesticable because they’re slow and have dull fangs and hoofy claws. Plenty of large animals are relatively harmless (pandas, elephants), but have proven undomesticable. The key to the domestication of cows is, they already had a social hierarchy. This is important in two distinct ways.

1) Cows already know how to submit to authority. They’ve been taught to do it their whole lives. All they have to do is submit to a new authority. This may be the biggest reason the empires of the Native South and Central Americans were incorporated into the Spanish Empire, but Native North Americans were murdered, tribe by tribe, from sea to salty sea. The Native North Americans hadn’t been domesticated, and knew it was better to die fighting than to be somebody else’s slave.

2) A cowboy can focus mostly on guiding the lead cow; the rest will follow it. The State is too small to handle all it’s civilians. It banks on a certain amount of people falling for their propaganda, a certain amount fighting with them, and certain groups keeping each other in check. It needs the men to dominate the women, the adults to dominate the children, the whites to dominate every other race; a lot of people refrain from taking public action against the government because they don’t wanna lose their jobs, fail their classes.

One time, I was in a fiction writing class. A female read a story about her grandfather, who had a very characteristic way of using violence to dominate his grandchildren. He’d flick them. ‘But it’s only a flick,’ the reader would inevitably think. So the author made sure to describe her grandfather’s big manfingers, his abnormal digital strength: the welts he’d leave on your brow. The story was terrifying.

The author though, came close to glamorizing the violence. Not quite, for it was a true story; she was writing about violence she’d experienced first hand. But she did glamorize her grandfather when he wasn’t thumping his grandkids, and never talked about his thumps in any other way than saying, “this is what happened after Soandso did such and naughty such,” which served to justify it.

Later, when it came time for us story workshoppers to make comments, I deviated from the usual structural critique and asked her if she didn’t think it’d be fitting to extrapolate a bit about the oppressive power relations involved, or the psychological damage it did to her and her cousins. I could’ve used more neutral words; but back then, I thought it was a given that hitting children was fucked up. Silly me.

I swear, you would’ve thought I’d said something more along the lines of, “why didn’t your gramps have sex with you guys? Having sex with children’s amazing!” I was literally shouted down by every single person in the class, for saying it was bad to beat children. The teacher was the only one on my side, but stayed neutral and only opened his mouth to steer the discussion back to more literary matters.

Now if I can remember correctly, I’ve said plenty controversial things in classroom settings before; but never in my life have I been shouted at by a classmate, in class: let alone by a group of classmates.

I had angered a racially, sexually, and agedly diverse group of highly introspective, emotional writers. They weren’t yelling at me because they thought my argument was full of holes and built on rotten logic; it wasn’t that they couldn’t believe I didn’t hear about that study that just came out that proved that it turns out hitting babies is a surefire technique for teaching them lessons: or that it’s important to make sure children know that sometimes it’s necessary to oppress people because they’re worth less than you: or even that, like it or not, our entire society hinges on domesticating children.

They were angry at me for infringing upon their rights: their parental right to dominate the frail, impressionable creatures that’d ended up in their hands because they’d passed the look-Ma-no-condom! test. The woman who wrote the story was a parent herself, and told me she was offended I was telling her what to do, which hold some justification considering she was a black woman, and I, a white, male representation of violence. All the rest of the students though, all white, some men, were quite adamant about the fact that, when they had kids, nobody was gunna tell them what to do. Someone even used this logic: “my parents used to beat the shit out of me, and I turned out fine,” not seeing that he was self-complimenting someone who advocated committing violent acts against defenseless babies in order to ensure the perpetuation of – and unquestioned obedience to – oppressive, hierarchal social structures.

They had lived through their rights of passage and were excited to do their societal duty to pass the oppression down to the next generation.

I was surrounded by a pride, a gaggle, of domesticated people.

Footnotes

& This lack of accountability makes matters worse. Only during a war can a band of a hundred men enter a community, kill all the men, children and post-menapausal women, then rape all the potential baby making women and abduct them into slavery, and that shit won’t even be in the news. Just imagine how much coverage that would get if it happened right now in America, or France, or Indonesia.

The mainstream media is only designed to dedicate a certain amount of time to wars; they usually only have just enough space to tell you who’s involved, who’s winning, what the politicians have to say (it was his fault, he’s violating human rights) what the human rights organizations have to say (they’re both at fault, they’re both violating human rights) and then give a token casualty estimate: rounded off after 2 numerals.

This, like violence, sounds crazy; but it’s not, at all. Like all violence, war takes your mind off whatever else is going on around you and makes you focus on only one thing: how to make the violence stop. Thus, it’s perfectly logical that we focus more on the politics than the suffering. The politicians are the people who started it (or merely accelerated it); and they’re the ones who usually make it slow down. The oppressed, however, are the ones who will make it stop.

% Without a supply of unemployed, surplus laborers, you couldn’t fire people and replace them as easily, or respond to sudden increases in the demand of labor as easily. This is why the capitalist world considers 5-8% employment “full employment.” This labor surplus also has the effect (negative for the proletariat, positive for the bourgeoisie) of driving wages down past their natural level, which is bare subsistence.

$ Since the hidden hand of the market keeps wages at bare subsistence levels, and surplus labor brings them down further, if all goes according to capitalist plan, most people will be starving: just a little. They’ll also have to work many more hours than their hunting/gathering ancestors; because if they refuse to work for however long the employee asks them to, they can be fired and replaced by a member of the unemployed class.

Somebody needs to oppress the unemployed class though; cuz if they’re not slightly worse off than the slightly starving working class, people’d start to refuse to work, would fight for their right to be paupers. This is why homelessness is illegalized and torture is normal in prisons.

# The working class also benefitted from the New Deal, which provided full employment by building massive amounts of public infrastructure, which further benefitted the working class (and the capitalists too) by lowering the cost of living.