Friday, June 22, 2007

WSM on Turkey

Modernization, Authoritarianism and Political Islam
Red and Black Revolution #13
WSM

The following article is to appear soon in "Red & Black Revolution" no.13 (magazine of the WSM, Ireland). It examines the recent evolution of Turkish society, after the 1980 coup, and how it expresses in the current conflict between the military and the Islamist parties that is nothing but the conflict within sectors of the bourgeoisie for hegemony.

Almost ten years after the post-modern coup of 1997, in which the coalition government of Islamist Welfare Party (WP also known as Refah) and right-wing True Path Party (DYP) were forced to step down and later banned, another move by the powerful Turkish military came as a reminder of the role they keep in politics. Following the nomination of Abdullah Gül as president by Prime Minister Erdog(an in April, there was a parliamentary boycott organised by the secularist opposition of the White Turks, lead by the RPP (Republican People’s Party). Although there were past decisions supporting the case of the government, the Council of State favoured the opposition, but not before the military issued a warning on April 27th, resurrecting fears of military intervention and renewed repression that have plagued the last century of Turkish public life -signalling that the political might of the army is well and strong[1].

Two days later a massive demonstration as a part of a series of “Republic Meetings” was held in Istanbul. The concept was created by the pro-army Republic newspaper months before the presidential election and the participants came from secularist moderate or pro-army NGO’s. These urban secularist middle and upper classes were also denoted as White Turks. The demonstrators chanted against an Islamist government, but also, against military intervention. This added a new dimension to the crisis.

The current impasse with the army came to pose blatantly one of the paradoxes of Turkish life: that of secularism as being an authoritarian force, while political Islam is left to play the democratic cards[2]. But to understand the real nature of this apparent paradox it is important to dig a little bit into the history of Turkish society.

Continued...

West Coast Grocery Strike?

UPDATE 3-California supermarket workers to vote on strikeBy Dana Ford
Reuters

LOS ANGELES, June 21 (Reuters) - Unions representing 65,000 workers at three Southern California supermarket chains asked members to authorize a strike after contract talks broke down on Thursday, raising the possibility of a repeat of 2003's crippling stoppage.

Union spokesman Mike Shimpock said members at Safeway Inc.'s (SWY.N: Quote, Profile , Research) Vons and Pavilions units and Kroger Co.'s (KR.N: Quote, Profile , Research) Ralphs chain, will begin voting on Sunday. Workers at Supervalu Inc.'s (SVU.N: Quote, Profile , Research) Albertsons stores authorized a strike in March.

"It authorizes the leadership and the negotiators to call a strike if and when they reach an impasse," Shimpock said in a conference call.

Continue...

Peasants Vs Lula!

Brazil’s Landless Workers Confront Lula
Isabella Kenfield
Canadian Dimension

Last week the Brazilian Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) held its fifth National Congress in Brasília, the country’s capital. The power the MST has garnered throughout its 23 years was palpable, as more than 17,500 delegates from 24 states and almost 200 international guests marched to the Square of the Three Powers, situated between the buildings of the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government. Marchers hung a huge banner in the square that read, “We accuse the three powers of impeding agrarian reform.”

In the minds of most MST members, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Workers’ Party (PT) have failed to implement the radical economic and social reforms that were promised, especially agrarian reform. According to José Maria Tardin, who was elected as the first PT mayor in the state of Paraná in 1989, and now works in the MST, “For the left, Lula is the biggest political tragedy in the history of Brazil.”

Continued...

Thursday, June 21, 2007

An anti-capitalist call to organize against the SPP - the “NAFTA+”

Mexico, An anti-capitalist call to organize against the SPP - the “NAFTA+”
ASSEMBLY OF GROUPS AND INDIVIDUALS WHO ATTENDED THE JUNE 3, 2007 ANTICAPITALIST CONSULTA – MONTREAL

To the companer@s of: La Otra Campaña in Mexico, La Otra Campaña del Otro Lado and in Canada, Anarchist collectives in Mexico, Canada and the US To anyone who shares our rage and indignation, --- On August 21st, the three representatives of Mexico's, Canada's and the United States' transnational interests - the fascist figureheads Calderon, Harper and Bush - will meet in the Montebello Castle in Québec, Canada. Their objective is to follow up on and accelerate the implementation of the North-American Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) – another criminal plan imposed on the peoples of our three countries, yet another antidemocratic initiative deepening the NAFTA, this time on energy and security issues. These illegitimate agreements have nothing to do with the interests of the people. They never had and never will.

Continued...

Precariats of the world, unite!

'Precariat' workers are starting to fight for a little stability
By TOSHIHIKO UENO
Kyodo News

The new rallying cry of nonregular workers may become "Precariats of the world, unite!"

"Precariat" is a new Japanese word combining the English words "precarious," referring to the insecurity of part-time and contract work, and "proletariat."

Part-time workers dubbed "freeters" and nonregular contract employees, who together accounted for about a third of the overall workforce of some 51 million in 2006, are increasingly standing in open rebellion against the wide-spread claim in the "self-responsibility" debate that the youth of today prefer an unsettled life.

Continued...

On the Track of the Molly Maguires

On the Track of the Molly Maguires
The Day of the Croaker*
By PETER LINEBAUGH
CounterPunch

On Black Thursday, June 21, 1877, in eastern Pennsylvania ten coal miners were hanged by the neck until they were dead. They were called Molly Maguires. They were born in Ireland coming over during the Famine, or their parents had, but one hesitates to call them Irish-American, since both terms of the copulative were being debated in relationship to these coal-miners, or Molly Maguires. Over the next two years ten more were hanged, making twenty all in all.

Six hanged at Pottsville (James Carroll, James Roarity, Hugh McGehan, James Boyle, Thomas Munley, Thomas Duffy) and four at Mauch Chunk (Edward Kelly, Michael Doyle, Alexander Campbell, John Donahue) where they all swung at once. In Pottsville the Sheriff hanged them successively two by two rather than build a special gallows. An immense crowd gathered covering the surrounding hills. Screams and sobbing as husbands and fathers were bid goodbye. Boyle carried a blood-red rose and McGehan two roses in his lapel. Carrol and Roarity declared their innocence from the scaffold. In co. Donegal McGehan's relatives met in the kitchen and, it was said, the sky blackened at the moment of hanging.

Continued...

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Wayne "The Hammer" Price vs Bob "The Chairman" Avakian

A Maoist Attack on Anarchism
An Anarchist Response to Bob Avakian, MLM vs. Anarchism
by Wayne Price

In the 60s and 70s, Maoism was a major current on the Left internationally. Today it is much shrunken in influence. To a great extent, its far-left niche has been taken by anarchism. I only know of one theoretical response to this situation, which is the pamphlet MLM [Marxism-Leninism-Maoism] vs. Anarchism, written by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party (U.S.), Bob Avakian. (The pamphlet itself is undated; it is composed of articles which Avakian wrote for the Revolutionary Worker paper in 1997.) The RCP is the largest Maoist group still existing in the U.S. and has international associations. It has a cult around Avakian, who is not merely its Chairman. He is The LEADER, constantly referred to in their press as the man with all the answers, the genius who understands the world and who will lead the downtrodden into the promised land. While he does not speak for all those who consider themselves Maoists, it is worth looking at what he calls, “our fundamental answer to anarchism.”

Continued...

No "Jobs for Comrades"

Union Condemns 'Jobs for Comrades'
The Namibian (Windhoek)
By Christof Maletsky

THE slogan "jobs for comrades", which has even been echoed by some trade unionists, is to blame for the mess some parastatals find themselves in, the Public Service Union of Namibia (PSUN) claims.

The union's President, Awebahe Hoeseb, said liberation struggle credentials, and not corporate gumption and acumen, were the most crucial criteria considered in the appointment of many heads of parastatals.

"This ushered in a new era of nepotism and favouritism, because some Chief Executive Officers managed to get their friends and acquaintances appointed, without them necessarily having the qualities and skills to perform well.

Continued...

Nigerian General Strike

Strike Begins as FG, Workers Talks Collapse
Daily Trust (Abuja)
By Abdullahi M. Gulloma, Abdul-Rahman Abubakar

Last ditch efforts by government to avert a nationwide strike by labour failed last night. The NLC, TUC and JAF after a meeting yesterday rebuffed government's offer that fell short of reversing increase in fuel price.

The workers made their decision known in a letter to government delivered through the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Alhaji Babagana Kingibe. The SGF took the letter to the villa and after a meeting with President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, the government issued a statement declining to accede to labour's demand. The statement signed by Kingibe reads in part:

"The federal government notes with regret the decision by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), Trade Union Congress (TUC) and "JAF" that notwithstanding government's overtures of the last 48 hours, to declare an indefinite general strike and mass protest beginning Wednesday, 20 June, 2007 unless their four-point demands were addressed.

Any well meaning Nigerian in whose name labour purports to speak can see that the tone and content of this press statement (Labour's) clearly indicated a political, rather than an industrial agenda.

"Indeed, in the press statement, the labour leaders widened the scope of their demands to include elements which they never raised in the course of their engagement with government.

"In arriving at these decisions, government took into consideration the overall national interest and they are not, and should not be, misconstrued as a response to the agitation of any group or individuals.

"Government is aware of and sensitive to the plight of the Nigerian people and is resolved to address them squarely. Policy initiatives towards this end are being finalised. This resolve was underscored by President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua in his inaugural address on May 29 this year when he said: "Let us join together to ease the pains of today while working for the gains of tomorrow."

Continued...

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

The Specific Organisation

The Specific Organisation
by Jaime Cubero - Centro de Cultura Social - São Paulo

The specific organisation of the anarchist movement is an instance of how it is implicit in the designation, with peculiarities that define basic principles, on whose practice its existence depends.

The revolutionary project extolling libertarian socialism demands an organisation in which it defines strategies and, similarly, alternatives for all instances, at the same time as its practice is an anticipated exercise of the project. Therefore, freedom, responsibility, ethics, federalism, solidarity, self-management, etc. do not only have to be concepts of a theoretical discourse, but that which defines the practice and behavior of anarchists in the organisation. Thus as the individuals are the cellular unit of the organisation, the groups and collectives are its basic nucleus.

The affinity groups are constituted by militants whose relationship, established on peculiar interests, is so much more intense in the measure in which it is nourished by revolutionary ideas and practices. Each group has a limited number of participants that guarantees a greater degree of intimacy between its members. They are autonomous, where its members can be reorganised both individual and socially. They function as catalysts of the movement providing initiative and conscietisation. The union or seperation of each group is determined by circumstance and interests, and not by any centralised decision. The adhesions or departures are made spontaneously and freely, without pressure of any nature. During periods of political repression the affinity groups are very resistant. Due to the high degree of cohesion that exists between the participants it becomes dificult to penetrate the group, and also under the most difficult conditions, the affinity groups manage to maintain contact. Nothing hinders the groups from working together at whatever level made necessary. They can join with local, regional and national groups, in a permanent or fortuitous form for the formulation of common plans. Each group looks to congregate the resources necessary to function with maximum autonomy.

Continued...

Boss News on Culinary - Harrah's Contract

Tentative labour agreement: Harrah's, union sign deal
18 June 2007
by Howard Stutz
Las Vegas Gaming Wire

LAS VEGAS, Nevada -- After a marathon negotiating session, Harrah's Entertainment early Friday became the first casino operator to reach a tentative accord on a new collective bargaining agreement with the state's largest labor union.

Terms and details of the new contract, which covers some 15,000 workers represented by Culinary Local 226 and Bartenders Local 165 at Harrah's Las Vegas, Caesars Palace, Bally's, Paris Las Vegas, Flamingo and the Rio, were not released by the union or Harrah's.

The tentative agreement was negotiated by representatives of Harrah's and a committee of rank-and-file members of the Culinary and Bartenders unions employed at the different Harrah's properties.

Harrah's employees will hear details of the contract proposal today during two separate meetings at Paris Las Vegas. A vote on ratifying the contract will take place after each meeting. Culinary officials said they expect to have results by early in the evening.

"The tentative agreement was overwhelmingly approved and recommended by our negotiating committee, which had several hundred members," Culinary spokeswoman Pilar Weiss said.

Contiuned...

Gettelfinger's a total cock

Union sees need for Chrysler cost concession

DETROIT, June 18 (Reuters) - United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said on Monday the union needs to find a way to grant health care cost-saving concessions to Chrysler Group (DCXGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) (DCX.N: Quote, Profile, Research).

"We are talking with Chrysler quite frequently," Gettelfinger said in an interview on WJR-AM radio in Detroit. "We do need to find a way to fix the problem there now that Chrysler is in a downward mode."

Chrysler executives had been seeking a concession from the UAW similar to the groundbreaking deals clinched with General Motors Corp. (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Ford Motor Co. (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research) in 2005, under which UAW workers and retirees pay more for health care.

Continued...

Monday, June 18, 2007

RICH Zine and Individual wealth redistribution

RICH Zine
by Tyrone
June 2007

P-CRAC Editor's note: Further discussion by a bunch of asses can be found here.

Hello.

I wrote this zine for a few reasons. When I was growing up, I knew my family had money but I didn’t really get the concept of “privilege.” Then I became an activist and started thinking about systems of power and oppression and how privilege played a role in them. I started thinking about my own privilege, mostly as a white person, and about how I could challenge the racist systems that gave me privilege while others were oppressed. Then I started thinking about class privilege, and about how I was raised with a lot of it, and about what that meant. Then I learned that I had a $400,000 trust fund and became incredibly self-conscious about it. Then I realized, mostly through the urging of smart friends and fellow activists, that it was useless (and counter-productive) to try to hide or otherwise not deal with my class privilege, and I started thinking about how I could take responsibility for it in ways that reflected my values as an activist.

I began talking to other people about class privilege, and about the ways that having it or not having it affects our lives. In 2005 I went to a conference called Making Money Make Change – a gathering of young people with class privilege to talk and strategize about “leveraging” privilege for social change. I left that first MMMC feeling both inspired and critical, but excited enough that I volunteered to join the organizing committee. Organizing MMMC served as my entry into the world “donor organizing,” and I started thinking a lot about how social justice work is funded, how funding can co-opt or damage movements, and how people with access to more financial resources than they need can use those resources to support radical movement work led by people in oppressed communities. Donor organizing can mean different things. It can mean moving wealthy people to give money to social justice organizing rather than traditional forms of philanthropy. It can mean working in established and informal networks of rich people to direct energy, resources, and influence to support the goals of movement work. To me, donor organizing especially means working with other class-privileged folks to challenge oppression, capitalism, and economic injustice.

When I volunteered to help organize MMMC for the second year in a row, I decided to simultaneously embark on a self-education project. I wanted to learn more about my own financial situation; the details of my trust fund and the history of where it came from. I wanted to learn more about how my family came to be wealthy (a new thing for my parents, who both grew up working-class). I wanted to learn about the political and economic processes that create wealth disparity and economic injustice. I wanted to learn about the landscape of “social change philanthropy” and of philanthropy in general – a world that was unfamiliar to me when I first arrived at MMMC, but which I soon learned is totally connected to both the existence of economic injustice and some attempts to remedy it. I wanted to develop strategies for leveraging privilege, and to connect my work with other class-privileged folks to my other activism and to a greater social justice movement. And I wanted to figure out how to give away my trust fund in a way that reflected my values and supported radical social movements.

So I read a ton of books. I talked to a million different people about movement building, privilege, activism, class, and every related topic. I had lots of conversations with my dad about his and my class history and financial resources, and about how we fit into a bigger picture. I looked at my trust documents and started learning about how the money was held, who controlled it, and how to give it away. I pushed myself to work hard on organizing MMMC and to challenge the aspects of it I was critical of. I got involved in more projects that pushed me to start conversations in my communities about money and class. I started trying to leverage my own privilege by raising funds for social justice organizing from people I know.

This is one of the results of that self-education project. It’s the product of my own perspective as a white queer person with inherited wealth. I made this zine because I wanted to challenge myself to articulate some of my thinking by writing it down. And I wanted to challenge other class-privileged folks to think about this stuff too, or think about it more, and to keep thinking about it and keep pushing ourselves to be more accountable, honest, and critical.

I also wrote this as a way to explain to friends and fellow activists outside of this donor-organizing/challenging-class-privilege/social-justice-funding world what the hell I’m doing; and to connect this work to other forms of organizing. The whole point of working in class-privileged communities to “leverage” privilege is to support a greater social justice movement. We need to be having these conversations in all the work we do, not just in insular circles of lefty rich people.

Every thought in this zine was developed and processed through conversations with genius people like Laura, Rogue, Anna Elspeth, Kriti, Sam, Holmes, Karen, Vanessa, Tanya, my dad (David), my mom (Annie), Jamie, Killer, Socket, Drew Christopher, and many others. I hope to continue to have as many amazing, inspiring, lengthy conversations in the future.

Please write to me and tell me what you think.

Tyrone
June 2007


Money Stories

“Storytelling often represents the most ideological moments; when we tell stories we tell them as if there was only one way of telling them, as the ‘of course’ way of understanding what is happening in the world. These are moments when we are ‘least aware that [we] are using a particular framework, and that if [we] used another framework the things we are talking about would have different meaning.’”

-Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists1

When I was growing up, I never thought of my family as rich. Even when I became involved in donor organizing work, I resisted identifying my background as owning class – I knew I had class privilege, but I thought of myself as “upper-middle class” for a long time. After doing some probing about my family’s wealth and doing plenty of reading about class in the U.S., I finally realized that this perception of my family’s class status had more to do with dominant ideology around wealth and my own resistance to identifying as “really” rich than with actual reality.

The more I’ve learned about wealth and class privilege, the more I see my incorrect interpretation of my own class status as symptomatic of a bigger problem. An important first step in taking responsibility for class privilege is to begin looking at our personal stories as part of a larger system. Or actually, multiple intersecting systems that work together; systems of institutionalized oppression like racism and patriarchy, the economic system of capitalism, and systems of ideology that keep all the other systems in place.

I’ve had anti-capitalist politics since before I became involved in donor organizing and began to look closely at my own class position. When I finally did start to examine my personal privilege, I began trying to figure out where I, as a person with inherited wealth, fit into my anti-capitalist analysis.

In the process of thinking about this, I called my dad to ask him some specific questions about our class status as a family and his interpretation of it. I’m trying to create an ongoing dialogue between my dad and I about class and privilege, and part of it focuses on learning more about how – as a first-generation owning-class individual (he grew up upwardly-mobile working class) – my dad came to accumulate wealth and power. He’s always had a very simplistic story about how he “made it”, basically centering on a combination of luck and hard work. He started a company around the time that I was born that produced some kind of software publishing product; the company ended up taking off and the stock value skyrocketed; hence, new owning-class status for my family.

I respect my dad a lot; he’s thoughtful and kind, and doesn’t at all fit stereotypes of greedy corporate CEOs. The point isn’t to dis my dad and call him out as being oppressive, but to look at our position as wealthy people within a greater structure of capitalism and oppression. If we don’t step back and challenge the broader framework that we’re situated in, it’s easy to play a complicit role in oppressive systems; that’s how privilege works. Sociologist Allan Johnson describes this at the “path of least resistance.” He writes: “Good people with good intentions make systems happen in ways that produce all kinds of injustice and suffering for people in culturally devalued and excluded groups…If we participate in systems the trouble [of oppression] comes out of, and if those systems exist only though our participation, than this is enough to involve us in the trouble itself.”2

My dad’s story of wealth accumulation – the way he tells it – is straightforward, honest, and true to his experience. It also could have been ripped verbatim from the pages of the Resource Generation book Classified (check out the bibliography in the back of this zine); specifically the chapter on money stories, which describes some of the myths and archetypes that go into creating ruling-class ideology. Karen Pittelman, the author of Classified, writes,

…the majority of the money stories begin to take on a strange similarity to each other. They focus on one person, often a man, and they center on how his hard work, intelligence, ingenuity, willingness to take risks and temerity lead to eventual financial good fortune. While the details of each story vary, the same plotlines – even the same phrases – occur again and again: “pulled himself up by the bootstraps,” “wise investor,” “rags to riches,” “worked day and night,” “never took a handout,” and “self-made man.”3

My dad’s story is a lot like this. It can be hard to talk about the oppression that is linked to wealth accumulation for him personally; because of course he doesn’t see himself as an oppressor. He’s a liberal. He sees his wealth as having been acquired basically in a vacuum, without negatively affecting others in any way. He spent his work life in offices and board meetings, not cracking the whip in a factory or overseeing the plantation. He isn’t making policy decisions and he doesn’t support the Bush administration. He isn’t an active participant in outsourcing jobs overseas, privatizing public services, breaking up unions, deregulating trade laws, exploiting immigrants, or most of the other obvious methods by which power is concentrated in the hands of a few.

But his ability to accumulate wealth was influenced by more than just his hard work and blind luck – although both of these played a part. As an entrepreneurial white man, he was well positioned to benefit from capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. He was able to make business connections, leverage influence, wield power in the worlds of business and technology, and be taken seriously to an extent that wouldn’t likely be available to a man of color or to any woman, thirty years ago or today.

In the book You Call This a Democracy?, Paul Kivel gives a good analysis of how wealthy people in the U.S. benefit from and support oppressive systems, even if we don’t directly make the decisions that create and enforce them. He draws a distinction between the owning class (which he defines as the wealthiest 20% of the population) and the “power elite” – a much smaller group within the owning class who are leaders in business, politics, philanthropy, and culture, and who are directly involved in high levels of society-shaping decision making. Though most rich people aren’t members of the power elite, we benefit in various ways from their decisions. Even if we have leftist politics and a scathing critique of neoliberalism, colonialism, global corporate takeover, militarism, and the rest of the U.S. power elite’s evil agenda; if we are in a position to benefit from the systems that support this agenda (like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy) we are implicated in it. It’s very easy for wealthy people to maintain an individualistic perspective on our lives when the realities of most people in the world are invisible to us. So we end up with stories like those that Classified describes – ideological narratives that keep the focus off the owning class and shield us from blame or responsibility for oppression.

It’s important to note the way these stories play out not just in our own lives as people with wealth, but in the greater society. As members of a dominant class, wealthy people hold systemic power – which allows us to frame everything from our perspective. This framing takes place not just on a personal level, but in all upper-class-controlled institutions (media, government, philanthropy, etc.). Classist ideology creeps into nearly all of the institutions that exert power over our lives. Reagan’s racist characterization of “welfare queens” created the climate for deeply harmful welfare “reform.” Invisibility of poor people (except as criminals) in media and popular culture erases the realities of the majority of U.S. citizens and encourages a blame-the-victim mentality that helps corporations and the government get away with deeply oppressive policies and practices. Philanthropic rhetoric that deems rich people to be the ones best equipped to fund social services allows for increasing erosion of the federal safety net. The myth that racism is over takes the responsibility off the government and private institutions (corporations, universities, foundations) to respond to the movement for reparations.

I think it’s crucial to draw connections between media storytelling and the stories we tell in our families; between the racism of politicians and legislators and the racism that those of us who are white learned in our homes growing up; between the paternalism of philanthropy and the privilege that we as individuals unconsciously enact; between the oppression by obvious perpetrators like police, military, and sweatshop-owning, union-busting multinational corporations and the oppression underlying our personal family fortunes.

Anti-capitalist social justice movements continually inspire me to challenge myself as a rich person and to challenge other rich people, because they situate us as players in systems that deeply harm the majority of people on the planet. It’s crucial to me to incorporate a radical critique of capitalism into both my understanding of my own wealth and privilege and into the donor organizing work I do. The “progressive philanthropy” world tends to take a stance that resists truly challenging capitalism and oppression in order to accommodate more moderate wealthy donors. Much of the landscape of social change philanthropy seems designed to make rich people feel better about ourselves and to channel some funds to progressive (or even radical) organizing without actually challenging the roots of inequality.

You don’t have to look hard to find a clear explanation of how capitalism is inextricably linked to multiple oppressions; racism, though (for example) slavery, imperialist acquisition of land and raw materials, and dividing white and POC workers to keep them from organizing; sexism, though exploiting the labor of women (who are already culturally devalued) and relying on women’s unpaid and unrecognized labor; ableism, through laws allowing companies to hire people with disabilities at less than minimum wages; and so on.

We should talk about these things when we talk about having class privilege, because as the beneficiaries of capitalism we are implicated whether we like it or not. For white folks with class privilege, the history that gets erased when we tell our simplistic “pulled-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps” money stories is the (continuing) history of explicit and institutionalized racism in the U.S. Some of us can trace our inherited wealth to slavery or other systems in which white people directly profited off of the stolen labor or land of people of color. Even for those of us with “new” money, previous generations of our families are more than likely to have benefited from racist policies and institutions that helped white people and discriminated against people of color (Homestead Act, G.I. Bill, land grants, New Deal, loans, jobs, contracts, unions…). Throughout U.S. history, people of color have been explicitly prohibited by racist government policy from building assets; and since the most important indicator of wealth is how much money your parents had, cultural myths about a “level playing field” start to look pretty empty.

For class-privileged people to be allies in social justice movements, we have to take responsibility for the bigger picture behind our own wealth. Our personal decisions about money and the stories we tell (to ourselves and others) have reflections and repercussions connected to our place in the larger class system; challenging these decisions and narratives, and challenging ourselves to look deeper, is a good way to start shifting our participation in oppressive systems.

Accountability and our Feelings

“I feel really scared when a working-class person challenges me, but I feel fine if another wealthy person does.”

-Donor at the Haymarket People’s Fund4

Working on organizing Making Money Make Change has made me think a lot about what it means to do donor organizing work accountably, and how emotions that wealthy people have around money and privilege play a role in preventing us from being accountable. “Accountability” is kind of a cliché and overused word, but I think it’s a crucial concept in any situation in which privileged people are doing social justice work. Without accountability to a larger movement and to people who experience the forms of oppression that our privilege shields us from, we aren’t really challenging systems of inequality.

There’s lots of history in social justice organizing of women, people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, disabled people, and other communities directly targeted by injustice challenging fellow activists to confront internal oppression within our movements. Activists with various forms of privilege – even if we have the best intentions – have a marked tendency to overlook the impact of institutionalized oppression in our own lives and in our organizing. Although it’s our responsibility to challenge oppression in our own communities, our work is not accountable to anyone if it is always done behind closed doors.

When I first came to MMMC, I was struck by language in the program about “safe space.” In the context of the retreat, “safe space” was being used to describe space where wealthy people could come together with other wealthy people to talk about the experience of having wealth. It was also used, directly and indirectly, to justify a policy in which non-wealthy activists who were invited to MMMC to lead workshops were asked to stay at the retreat only for their workshop and not to participate in any other programming.5

The “safe space” language was clearly meant as an attempt to alleviate the fear that comes up for MMMC’s attendees (many of whom have never before talked publicly about having wealth) when sharing openly about experiences of privilege. The quote at the beginning of this section echoes the sentiments of many MMMC participants, and describes a feeling that is common for people confronting personal privilege.

While I agree that it’s important – in fact, crucial – for privileged people to have the space to do the deep emotional work that comes with challenging our own privilege, the concept of “safety” in this context has a lot of problematic implications. Previous to MMMC, I had generally thought of “safe space” as a way for people who directly deal with a specific type of oppression to create a temporary space in which that form of oppression would be alleviated as much as possible (i.e. space for queer people, space for survivors, space for people of color, etc.). I think it’s also possible to conceptualize “safe space” as an intentional space where everyone present has consensed on a specific set of agreements around respect, listening, confidentiality, etc. But the implication underlying the “safe space” at MMMC was that the retreat was a space in which rich people could talk about the specific experience of having class privilege without the fear of being heard or challenged by people with whom that privilege was not shared.

I think it’s a misuse of the concept of safety to use the term “safe space” to describe a space that is exclusive to people with privilege, no matter what the purpose. We live in an unjust society that creates innumerable circumstances in which safety (in various forms) is available to privileged people at the expense of people who are oppressed. Using “safety” to justify or describe spaces that exclude people who lack a certain type of privilege not only implies that people who aren’t as privileged as we are somehow make us “unsafe,” it ignores the reality of power dynamics and the meaning of safety in the general world. As members of a dominant class, we feel “safe” within oppressive structures. Institutionalized oppression is designed to make us feel safe.

So then, what do we do with the intense emotions that arise when we talk about our own privilege? We certainly have a right to our feelings; and when we take steps to understand the roles we play in institutionalized oppression and begin to confront our own internalized supremacy, the level of emotion is bound to be high. Also, the experience of growing up with wealth and privilege can come with a whole host of connected issues related to family, self-worth, intimacy, community, and so on. This stuff is deep, and it is inevitable that when we delve into it we encounter anger, tears, frustration, and other forms of intense emotion.

But I think it is both possible and necessary to work through our feelings in a way that is intentionally anti-oppressive. Our feelings are contextual – they don’t arise in a vacuum, and we don’t express them in a vacuum. If, for example, we experience fear, shame, or anger as a response to being challenged (personally or politically) by folks who aren’t wealthy, we can respond to that by both acknowledging the validity of our emotions, and interrogating the emotions for the hidden meaning behind them; how they might be connected to classism, how they might scare us out of challenging our privilege.

There is a role for having caucus spaces around privilege, but not because we are afraid of being open with or confronted by people who don’t share our privileged experiences. It’s important for wealthy people (white people, men, or whoever) to support and challenge each other to fight oppression, to dive into the emotion and pathos specific to the experience of having class privilege, and to do some general working-out of our shit. Non-wealthy people don’t always have to be present for this – in fact they may prefer not to be.

But if we are attempting to truly leverage our privilege to support social justice (the ostensible goal of MMMC), wealthy people can’t remain the only participants in the conversation. When we create exclusive caucus spaces, we should be thinking about how to also create spaces for broader community conversation. When we give ourselves the space to cry/vent/rant about our privilege among a group of similarly privileged people, we should also be challenging ourselves to move towards increasing transparency in our personal lives and communities about our lives and our class backgrounds.

I think there’s a tendency to over-focus on the personal when talking about privilege. It’s easy to get sucked into dissecting our own privilege and the way that it affects all our life experiences, but doing this work is minimally useful if we don’t bring it into more public, institutional arenas. If the goal of the work becomes personal growth, we risk losing the broader analysis – and with it, the possibility for working within and outside of our privileged communities to challenge the roots of oppression. In an essay called “The Filth on Philanthropy: Progressive Philanthropy’s Agenda to Misdirect Social Justice Movements”, writers Tiffany Lethabo King and Ewuare Osayande describe Women With Money (WWM), a support group in Philadelphia for women with financial wealth:

According to their website, WWM “creates a welcoming, stimulating environment where women who have wealth, whether earned or inherited, can gain new perspectives on their lives and their money.” The group also provides “a place to explore issues of wealth with safety and confidentiality.” A wealthy person talking confidentially with other wealthy people about her money does not put her in a position of accountability to people who are not wealthy. Rather, it simply makes them comfortable about having more money than they know what to do with. Some of the issues explored by WWM include guilt management, accountability, personal relationships [and] political giving…The primary function seems to be to help (by and large, white) women deal with the guilt of having money and how to manage it (not give it up). Although they claim to discuss accountability, the question that begs to be asked is: accountability to whom? Nowhere on the site is there any acknowledgement or articulated participation of people of color or the poor. Within this controlled set-up, accountability exists only between white people with money and the white Left social justice groups that want access to it. This further substantiates our claim that by not openly demanding wealth redistribution, reparations, or justice for exploited workers, white social justice non-profits function as brokers for the wealthy. They simply help them manage their money and assuage their guilt for having wealth accrued from the stolen and exploited labor of people of color. 6

I want to acknowledge that dealing with/challenging privilege is nuanced and complex; but I also want to talk about how exclusive spaces created so that we can feel comfortable as wealthy people don’t push us in the direction of accountability. I think it’s important that we don’t feel comfortable – discomfort is the inevitable result of challenging class power and money taboos and the lies we are told (and tell) about wealth and the economy.

Philanthropy vs. Wealth Redistribution

“These rich young people do not give their wealth away; it is not redistributed. They give away their income and keep their capital. And, as embarrassed as it might make them feel, they symbolically carry this capital – and privilege – with them in all their endeavors. As donors they do not fully relinquish their power, although they try to share it. Sometimes they resent the fact that they are not more appreciated, that their opinions are sometimes discounted. It is difficult for them to escape the attitude of noblesse oblige with which they have grown up.”

-Teresa Odendahl, Charity Begins at Home7

That quote comes from a book about the practices, motivation, and ideology of elite philanthropy; specifically, it is from a chapter about “alternative” or “social change” philanthropy. Although social change philanthropy seeks to change the power dynamics endemic to traditional philanthropy, Teresa Odendahl’s observations point out the importance of continuing to challenge philanthropy in all its forms.

The practice that we in the U.S. refer to as philanthropy is almost always a tool for the ruling class to maintain itself. Foundations, the most common vehicle of philanthropy, were created by the wealthy elite as a way to shield their fortunes from taxation. The great majority of philanthropic giving goes to elitist institutions that largely serve and benefit the rich – private universities, ballet, opera, museums, etc. Even when philanthropic money goes to institutions that serve marginalized communities, it is within a paternalistic framework of “charity” – providing basic services without challenging the roots of inequality.

There are lots of great books critically analyzing traditional philanthropy – some of them are listed in the back of this zine. But most people in the leftist donor movement are already critical of traditional philanthropy – that’s why we’re creating new forms of giving that challenge injustice and support grassroots community organizing.

But the more I learn about/observe/participate in the world of social change philanthropy, the more I feel really dissatisfied with where we’re at. I’ve been thinking about how social change philanthropy is subject to many of the same oppressive symptoms as traditional philanthropy. Ostensibly, an aim of social change philanthropy is to redistribute not only money, but also the decision-making power that determines how the money is used. But I think that as progressive donors, we often fall short of redistributing both money and power.

A simple question that I think is important to ask in trying to understand all of this is: Why do we give? The history of philanthropy in the U.S. is a history of wealthy, ruling class people using various forms of monetary giving to maintain and hoard power, class status, and wealth. The culture of traditional philanthropy provides its own motivations for giving – membership in elite networks; influence over politics, media, and culture; participation in upper-class institutions; and so on. Since our goal as progressive donors is to challenge this dynamic, I think it’s useful to take a close look at what inspires and motivates us to give.

The concept of “incentive” comes up a lot in fundraising and philanthropy. Incentive to give money takes many forms in different situations, from tax deductions to public recognition to a feeling of satisfaction and self-worth. But I think that often, “incentive” can be translated to mean “power and control.” In Charity Begins at Home, a businessman with inherited wealth told the author: “Entrepreneurs have a great need to control. If you give them a controlling reason to give philanthropic money, you have all of the sudden got a philanthropist that might not otherwise be there.”8

Shifting Power

Philanthropy is such a horrifying institution that I feel dubious about attempts to reform it into something that is capable of supporting radical social movements. At the same time, we live in a capitalist society in which foundations play an increasingly influential role. Wealthy people, depending on our situations, have varying levels of involvement and influence in the world of philanthropy. For wealthy people with radical politics, it’s important to have a critique of these institutions whether we choose to work within them or not. It’s been useful to me to learn more about philanthropy (both “traditional” and “alternative”), because it helps me to understand the forces at play in any work that wealthy people do to “leverage” privilege for social change.

There are lots of (well, at least a few) community-based foundations throughout the country with the goal of funding social justice organizing. One thing that’s been really interesting for me to learn about is the different ways that these foundations distribute money; i.e., how they set up their grantmaking boards. I think looking at these grantmaking boards gets at the roots of some of my questions about how the ways that we give money can support or challenge class power dynamics.

The simplest model of shifting power within these types of foundations is to place grantmaking decisions in the hands of a board made up of activists and community organizers, with the majority coming from the communities that are most affected by oppression and inequality (people of color, women, queers, poor and working-class people, etc.). The idea is that these are the folks best equipped to disperse funds to social justice organizing – not only are they affected by issues of injustice in a more direct way than elite funders, but they’re experienced activists with expertise and grounding in grantee communities.

That’s a simplistic explanation, and of course there are a million ways that things get complicated. But what’s been interesting to me in learning about these types of foundations is how rarely that model is actually implemented. More often some compromise is struck that allows for greater donor control: the grantmaking board is made up of a combination of donors and activists; or there are two grantmaking boards – one for activists and one for donors, dividing up the funds and making grants independently; or the board is made up only of donors, with an expressed commitment to fund social justice work.9

I think looking at these different types of funding boards sheds some light on how deeply we don’t want to give up power. Community foundations that strictly limit donor involvement in funding decisions have a much harder time attracting wealthy contributors. And within the broader world of social justice philanthropy, activist-led re-granting institutions are just a small part of the way that wealthy people give money. Instead, we’re starting our own foundations, participating in elite donor networks with other lefty rich people, creating our own projects or nonprofits, or just giving directly to organizations doing work that we find interesting.

What are the costs when rich people are the ones making the decisions about how to fund social movements? At its most insidious, this funding dynamic can take the form of elite individuals and foundations using money as a way of manipulating movements and steering them away from forms of organizing that pose a true threat to elite power. This dynamic is elaborated on in many of the phenomenal essays in the book The Revolution Will Not be Funded, listed in the bibliography. A good example is the way that the Ford Foundation used funding to exert its influence in the Black power movement, supporting a focus of Black capitalism over Black liberation and directing movement energy away from radical organizing.10

Of course, as individual progressive donors, we don’t always set out to harm, co-opt, control, or de-radicalize movements – but unless we consciously and intentionally try not to, we may end up enacting these dynamics anyway. It’s a function of the way privilege works that systemic oppression usually manifests not through conspiracy, but as a natural reproduction of power and privilege.

Here’s an example: in the early years of the San Francisco-based Vanguard Foundation, grantmaking was done by two boards, one made up of (wealthy, white) donors and one made up of members drawn from the (activist, mostly people of color) “community”. Both had access to equal amounts of money, and would make grants separately. In a quote I found in Teresa Odendahl’s book Charity Begins at Home, a Vanguard donor board member explains:

The donor board would fund certain kinds of issues that perhaps were mainly organizations of white people – maybe more middle-class white people – doing certain, what we would consider essential work. The community board would sometimes fund the project of a community that might not be the most incisive, but nonetheless the community had been underrepresented in our funding.

A glaring problem in this statement – and one that I think is representative of a way larger problem – is the assumption by the donor board that the organizations doing the most “incisive” work are white middle-class organizations. Later, Odendahl indicates further what seems to be a prevailing belief of the wealthy donors – that the community board funded projects because of a desire to “see that the constituencies they represented were funded,” while donors, free from the obligation to fulfill such quotas, possessed a purer motivation to simply reflect “their politics and their sense of which groups were effective.”11 Somehow, the groups they deemed most “effective” strongly tended to be white and middle-class.

Taking Responsibility

In yet another totally awesome and useful book – Money for Change: Social Movement Philanthropy at Haymarket People’s Fund – author Susan Ostrander writes about internal processes at Haymarket, a community foundation whose grantmaking model (at least at the time this book was published) was especially strict in terms of not allowing participation of it’s wealthy donors on the grantmaking board. One of the ways that Haymarket raised money, despite its limitations on donor control, was by holding “wealth conferences” for progressive rich people.

It was kind of fascinating for me to read about these conferences, because a lot of the dynamics that came up within them were so similar to issues that I think about around MMMC. Haymarket’s wealth conferences served as a major fundraising tool, even though there was an explicit policy disallowing direct solicitation of participants. MMMC has a similar non-solicitation policy, but also succeeds (to varying degrees) in moving its wealthy attendees to give money. I think that the success of these types of “passive fundraising” brings up some important questions about why we give (i.e., what is our incentive), and what we ask in return.

Susan Ostrander describes the Haymarket conferences as spaces that focused heavily on personal growth work and relationship-building. Haymarket staff played a role in the conferences, but not to champion Haymarket or to necessarily present a case for its model of grantmaking. In fact, Ostrander indicates at one point that many of the conference participants didn’t even really know exactly what Haymarket was, even though they may have been Haymarket donors.

Although Haymarket staff might directly solicit participants at some point after the conference, during the conference their role was to hold a space for the personal development of wealthy conference attendees – and to build relationships with folks who might later become major donors to Haymarket. This required staff to do a lot of emotional labor and sociability work; Ostrander writes: “Building and maintaining these relations seemed time consuming, sometimes rewarding, and sometimes emotionally draining. A large portion of the work seemed to consist of informal ‘schmoozing’ and caretaking and what looked like, but really wasn’t, relaxed ‘hanging out.’”12

It seems a little disingenuous to attempt to build authentic cross-class relationships when funding is directly at stake. But there are tons of models in social change philanthropy that have community activists and wealthy donors working together, either to directly make funding decisions or to build a progressive donor community that will presumably eventually lead to increased funding for social change organizations; cross-class donor circles, grantmaking boards within community foundations, the Haymarket wealth conferences of yore (i.e. the 90s) and MMMC, their contemporary counterpart. While it’s safe to say that these models are a major improvement on traditional philanthropy, I think it’s important to think about how power is exercised, outwardly or covertly, in these situations in ways that mimic and enforce dominant power structures. For wealthy people, I think it is our responsibility to interrogate our role in these dynamics, and think about the ways that we resist redistributing power and resist removing the (obvious or subtle) strings attached to our money.

There’s a great article by Ira Silver called “Buying an Activist Identity” that further elaborates on the dynamic I’m getting at, although in a different context. In the article, Silver describes the grantmaking board at the Chicago-based Crossroads Fund, whose model has community activists and wealthy donors making funding decisions together. The logic behind this has to do with integrating donors more deeply into social movement work by putting them in working relationships with community organizers, which seems like a worthy goal; but the article is about the ways that relationships between the donors and the activists on the board end up reproducing class power dynamics.

A vastly oversimplified nutshell version of Ira Silver’s findings: a) wealthy donors care about social movements, want to identify as activists, and want to be down. b) They look to the community organizers on the board to validate their activist identities and assure them that they are down. c) Community organizers are committed to moving money and don’t want to alienate donors who are a major source of funding. They therefore yield to the unspoken pressure to reassure the donors that they are, in fact, down. d) Donors, secure in the belief that their participation on the grantmaking board is sufficient evidence that they are down, continue about their business as rich people reassured that there is no need for them to deeply challenge their class position or greater economic inequality. Ira Silver sums it up better: “[In] order to ensure that they get their small piece of the pie, community organizers willfully legitimate the class hierarchy that creates the very need for philanthropy in the first place.” 13

So to relate this discussion back to the question about why we give, and what we get in return: We get to feel like we are down. We get to feel less guilty about having wealth. We get to feel like we are good. We get to feel like giving some money gets us off the hook of really challenging our position of power and privilege in society.

This is the tension that I feel so often in donor organizing; we want donors to feel good so that they continue to be donors, but really challenging power doesn’t feel good. It’s been coming up in the context of MMMC, where the goals of the retreat are somewhat in dispute: is our aim to simply move money to social justice organizing, even if in doing so we risk perpetuating oppressive class power dynamics? Or is the goal for us to do real anti-oppression work that asks us to examine and challenge our privilege in a deeper way – even if we risk losing some people who aren’t interested in doing this deeper work but might otherwise have given money?

Letting Go

Obviously, I have a biased position; as a class-privileged person, I want to challenge my fellow class-privileged people to confront our privilege and support social justice movements however we can. I’m not a fundraiser at an organization that relies on the contributions of wealthy donors – if I were I might have a different perspective. But since I have the luxury of reflecting on idyllic scenarios in which wealthy people step up and use our privilege to challenge capitalism and the ruling class (and since I’m trying to figure out how to do that myself), I spend a lot of time thinking about what that would look like.

The donors described in Money for Change talked about a tension that they referred to as “living the contradiction;” meaning, being rich and also being committed to social change. This is an important tension to talk about, but it kind of glosses over the fact that having exorbitant wealth is usually voluntary.14 Divesting oneself of class privilege is often impossible depending on the circumstances – if you grew up with money like I did, it’s sure to have affected every aspect of your life, and it’s impossible to give away experiences gained by the privilege of having wealth. But often we have a choice about whether or not to hold on to our actual money.

I’d like to talk more about what it really means to “align our resources with our values” as wealthy people when our values are about economic justice. What does it mean to talk about wealth redistribution if we aren’t taking the steps to equitably redistribute our own wealth? How do we justify making the conscious choice to stay rich when that position puts us in the role of wielding influence and class power whether we intend to or not? Are we really challenging inequality and class supremacy when we continue to inhabit the role of “funders?” What does it mean to never give away our principal, or only give a little of it? What does it mean to pass that wealth down to our children?

The thing about class privilege is that it skews your perspective. My dad is always trying to convince me that our family isn’t as wealthy as I think we are, and that if I met some of the people he knows who are really rich, I would see how modest our lifestyle has been in comparison. Class privilege often means we don’t see the bigger picture – that we compare ourselves to the miniscule portion of the population who are even richer than we are, instead of to the vast majority of people on the planet who are prevented by oppressive systems (racism, capitalism, colonialism…) from being able to meet even their basic needs. This takes the pressure off of us to really examine our place in these systems as people with (often multiple forms of) privilege.

Ultimately, wealth redistribution won’t happen by rich people suddenly deciding to voluntarily give away all our money. An important way to leverage privilege is to use the power bestowed on us by our class position to advocate for involuntary wealth redistribution, and to support anti-poverty organizing and organizing that challenges the systemic oppression that creates wealth inequality.

But meanwhile let’s talk about what we can do, as individual wealthy folks who care about in social justice, to model the values we believe in. Capitalism means that anyone who has inordinate wealth has it at the expense of people who are poor. Holding on to more money than we need puts us in a position of wielding power in unjust ways. Let’s keep doing the deep, hard personal work of processing how wealth has affected our lives, let’s keep leveraging our influence in the world of philanthropy; but let’s do it with an acknowledgement that in a just world, no individual would be in the position of controlling exorbitant wealth.

The End…

Thinking about this stuff so much has left me with a lot more questions than answers. I want to keep figuring out how to work with other class-privileged people to not only move money, but to also challenge the systems that create wealth inequality in the first place. I want to find more ways of giving that shift funding decisions into the hands of a community rather than keep the decisions in the hands of individual wealthy donors. I want to continually challenge myself to leverage my own privilege in donor networks and funding institutions while also challenging the power and dominance of foundations and the 501(c)3. I want to be part of a critical dialogue about money, about need vs. luxury, and about security vs. hoarding. I want to keep these conversations going and resist the temptation to settle into privilege without challenging it. I want to push myself to go further, go deeper, and do the work I need to do to be an effective activist and organizer. I want us to push each other.

Tyrone


Bibliography

INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, South End Press, 2007: This book should be required reading for anyone involved in funding, anyone involved in social justice organizing, and anyone, ever.

Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles, Betsey Leondar-Wright, Rose Brewer, and Rebecca Adamson, with United for a Fair Economy, The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide, The New Press, 2006: Incredibly useful for understanding connections between racism and economic injustice. The five different authors give examples (backed up with lots of facts, history, citations, and analysis) of ways that institutionalized racism and (especially) explicitly racist government policy prevented and continue to prevent people of color from accumulating wealth and assets while helping and supporting wealth-building for white people.

Karen Pittelman and Resource Generation, Illustrated by Molly Hein, Classified: How To Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use it For Social Change, Soft Skull Press, 2005: Funny, incisive, and good. And the illustrations rule.

bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Routledge, 2000: bell hooks being brilliant about class. Also has a few chapters that specifically address wealth and challenge wealthy people to be more transparent/generous/honest/conscious.

Tiny, a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia, Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, City Lights, 2006: Tiny is a founder of POOR magazine, a media project in the bay area dedicated to advancing the voices of poor and otherwise marginalized people. This memoir is about how Tiny and her mother Dee came to be homeless and poor, the experiences they had trying to become not homeless and poor (using extremely creative and artistic means), and a great and accessible critique of how the system is set up to keep people homeless and poor.

Linda Stout, Bridging the Class Divide and Other Lessons for Grassroots Organizing, Beacon Press, 1999: Linda Stout founded the Piedmont Peace Project, a community organization, led by poor and working-class people, with a really awesome class analysis. She writes about how social movements have failed to create real, large-scale change in this country because they have failed to unify folks from different class backgrounds. She describes ways that middle- and upper- class people consciously and unconsciously exclude, silence and oppress lower-income people within social movement organizing.

Paul Kivel, You Call This a Democracy? Who Benefits, Who Pays, and Who Really Decides, Apex Press, 2004: Doesn’t beat around the bush in calling out the ruling class. Also lots of useful diagrams.

Anne Slepian & Christopher Mogil, with Peter Woodrow, We Gave Away a Fortune: Stories of People Who Have Devoted Themselves and Their Wealth to Peace, Justice, and a Healthy Environment, New Society Publishers, 1992: Good book profiling wealthy people who gave away lots of money, plus analysis about economics, privilege, guilt, and other important things for rich people to think about. The folks in this book go way further in their giving than most people in philanthropy; but I think the book also illustrates how much further we have to go.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006: A really good book about the subtle, insidious racism typical of the post Civil Rights era, and the rhetoric and ideology that holds it up. Helpful in thinking about the ways that privilege can make our own racism (or, by extension, classism, sexism, etc.) invisible to us. Bonilla-Silva interviews a bunch of mostly white people about race, transcribes portions of the interviews verbatim (with the verbal tics and rhetorical incoherence of casual speech intact), and then rips them apart using critical analysis.

Susan Ostrander, Money for Change: Social Movement Philanthropy at Haymarket People’s Fund, Temple University Press, 1995: If you are obsessively researching social change philanthropy like me (and maybe even if you aren’t), you might find this book incredibly interesting.

Ira Silver, “Buying an Activist Identity: Reproducing Class Through Social Movement Philanthropy,” Sociological Perspectives, 1998: If you don’t have access to those article databases that only students and academic types are allowed to use, feel free to email me and I’ll send you a copy of this.

Teresa Odendahl, Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self-Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite, Basic Books, 1990: Another book in the genre of “sociologist studies rich people in philanthropy.” Reading this made me hate philanthropy, but in the best way.

Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference, McGraw-Hill, 2006: A very clear, simple, concise explanation of the ways privilege and power function. Especially useful for conversations with your family.

Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of Hope, Continuum, 2006: Paulo Freire was a class-privileged educator and theorist who used radical education to challenge oppression. This book, published 20 years after his seminal Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is kind of a reflection on his life and work. He has lots of interesting things to say about privilege, class, and liberation if you can handle the dense, rambling theory.

Web Resources

www.resourcegeneration.org: Resource Generation works with young people with class privilege who are trying to figure all this stuff out.

www.boldergiving.org: Profiles people who gave away significant portions of their assets.

www.millionsforreparations.com: Essential reading about reparations.

www.cwsworkshop.org: Challenging White Supremacy. Tons of really good articles about privilege and anti-oppression work.

www.classactionnet.org: Challenging classism.

www.faireconomy.org: United for a Fair Economy “raises awareness that concentrated wealth and power undermine the economy, corrupt democracy, deepen the racial divide, and tear communities apart.”

www.poormagazine.org: POOR Magazine’s awesome website. Lots of good articles.

www.racialwealthdivide.org: More about the racial wealth gap.

SEIU in Cuba

US Unionists Impressed by Cuban Achievements
Mathaba News Network

Havana, June 13 (acn) Representatives of the health division 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in the United States showed their admiration for Cuba's achievements on health care services and biotechnology.

During a visit to the headquarters of the Cuban Workers Federation (CTC), the US unionists, nurses, and social workers got acquainted with teaching and training methods, the medical industry and other aspects of welfare work.

The visitors agreed that Cuba not only provides free and easy access to medical attention for its people but also shares its medical achievements with its solidarity contribution to the rest of the world.

Continued...

Dear Oliver,

EL LIBERTARIO, # 49, 2007 - on the dark side of the moon.

From the editorial group of El Libertario, newspaper of CRA, Comision de Relaciones Anarquistas from Venezuela, we reflect on the prospects for this country after the seemingly undisputable electoral victory of Hugo Chavez. --- Venezuela has landed on the dark side of the moon. The recently opened 21st century seems to be escaping us for good. We will not have a chance to face it with any prospect of success. Eight years of speeches drawn from a time past, eight years of inefficiency in the management of public funds, of unstoppable corruption, of the waste of immense riches, of awful public services, of leaving the most basic necessities unsatisfied, of unemployment, of the breaking down of the industrial infrastructure, including the oil industry, of no social security, of charity as a way of survival, of lies and debasement as pervading attitudes...eight years of totalitarian control over the social and political system by the faction in power, of lack of ideas and of any initiative which could mark the way, of deprivation of the educational establishment.....yet eight years of all this have not been enough to make it clear to a substantial fraction of the people that a change was needed. And they voted to keep Chavez in power.

Continued...

And so it begins...

Jyrki Raina writes about the project to create the first trans-Atlantic union
Trade Union News from Finland

Helsinki (18.06.2007 – Juhani Artto) Two months ago the United Steelworkers (USW) from the USA and two unions from the United Kingdom, Amicus and T&GWU, announced their intention to merge into the first trans-Atlantic trade union.

Certainly, the first reaction of numerous union activists around the world, when reading the news, was to think about how the merger project relates to the efforts to strengthen the global unions, such as IMF, UNI, ITF, PSI and a handful of others.

Recently Jyrki Raina, one of the most visible Finns in the international trade union movement, approached the same question in his column in Ahjo, the magazine of the Finnish Metalworkers’ union.

“The reasons (of the project), presented by Amicus and USW leaders, are interesting. They want to create an international trade union that really would be able to negotiate about working conditions, by force of their 3.4 million rank and file members, on equal footing with the multinationals.”

Continued...

Chinese "Communist" Liberation

China detains 168 after brick kiln slavery scandal

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police have detained 168 people accused of holding workers in virtual slavery under appalling conditions at brick kilns in north-central provinces of the country, a state newspaper reported on Monday.

Of those, 48 were caught in Shanxi province and the rest in neighbouring Henan, the official China Daily said.

The scandal has undermined the ruling Communist Party's promises to build a "harmonious" society with improved rights and income for the nation's hundreds of millions of poor farmers.

The State Council, or Cabinet, has sent a team to investigate the abuses, which have shocked the country and provoked public outrage.

The government has given each of the freed workers -- more than 500 so far -- 1,000 yuan ($131.2) as "sympathy" money, the Beijing News added.

In recent days, Chinese media have exposed brutal conditions for mostly migrant workers at kilns and privately run mines across resource-rich central China.

Continued...

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Anarchists Throw Poop

Anarchists promise blood bath for Homowo
myjoyonline.com

As if the nasty incident of smearing human excreta, an obnoxious practice referred to as shit bombing on a scared shrine house of the Ga state and a street leading to the shrine and the violence of last Wednesday are not enough, sections of the Ga youth are already promising a blood bath, come the Homowo festival.


The nasty incidence of shit bombing and violence characterized the lifting of the month long ban on drumming and noise making by the Ga Mantse, King Tackie Tawiah II, last Wednesday when several people were hurt and a strong police presence was required to see the ceremony through.


Barely a week after those nasty incidents, some individuals and youth groups in Ga Mashie are promising mayhem until issues surrounding the disputed enstoolment of the Ga King are resolved.


According to The Independent, its investigations have revealed that the youth promising chaos are those against the recent enstoolment and coronation of the current Ga king, Mantse Tackie Tawiah II.

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Unions on the global gaming industry

Union networks for Asia Pacific Gaming
Labour news from UNI global union - for trade unions in a global services economy.

Union networks across the growing giants of the gaming industry in Asia Pacific were launched at the first ever workshop held by UNI in Macau - the world’s biggest gambling city that is building a new Las Vegas on the South China Sea.

Gaming accounts for about half of the wealth of this former Portuguese colony that, like nearby Hong Kong, is now a Special Administrative Region of Communist China and is fast growing its casinos, hotels and entertainment resorts.

Gaming is in rapid growth regionally - with GGR (gross gaming revenue) rising 20% last year - and globally at 8.8% annually with countries from the UK to Singapore relaxing restrictions or removing bans on casinos that are increasingly seen as part of leisure and tourism.

UNITE HERE from the USA, which has a large membership and collective agreements in Las Vegas and other American cities, joined unions from eleven countries in the region in Macau.

The aim is to develop closer working between Gaming affiliates and exchange information on organising and bargaining - and to begin to build a dialogue with the gaming giants who increasingly dominate the industry.

A follow-up seminar on organising is planned for next year and UNITE HERE has offered assistance to UNI-Asia Pacific and UNI Gaming in training and to share their knowledge from organising successes in the US.

A meeting for Gaming unions in the Americas is planned for September.

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Tarpinian on CtW's trip to China

The Question Isn't Why We Went to China -- It's Why Wouldn't We?

There’s no question as to why the modern labor movement would need to pay attention to China. Every major U.S. and foreign transnational corporation has growing operations there, meaning Chinese workers are one of the main hammers that global capital uses to drive down wages and conditions for workers in advanced capitalist countries like the United States.

That’s why a leadership delegation from Change to Win went to China to see if we could expand the front in our mission to Restore the American Dream, to follow the jobs and to find out for ourselves whether we there is a realistic prospect of uniting with Chinese workers that face the same challenges, working for the same global corporations that employ workers in the U.S.

I’m going to be discussing what we learned and observed in other posts, but let me start with why we went, because all the buzz in both the Chinese and American press was not that Change to Win went overseas. Rather, our visit was historic for two interrelated reasons: First, it marked the first time that a U.S. labor federation met with the Chinese labor federation on equal footing. Second, it generated new thinking on how to tackle the challenges of globalization and the downward pressure on wages and living conditions in the United States.

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