Untitled

OUR BODY
proposes
an algebra
which has
no solution

-Paul Nouge, from "Sketches of the Human Body"

Where I Stand

"everything for everyone; nothing for ourselves!"

today the new supervisor announced that hours were being cut in order to compensate for low revenue. this while he himself had accepted the position only on the condition that the hotel beat the salary of his previous employer. my blood roared and i've been on the war path all day. but what i want to talk to you about are not the particulars of that struggle (at least not in this post), but about something that makes struggle necessary: dignity. this word has gained new life because the zapatistas have become its champions. dignidad. and i want to talk about it because it was the most important thing that i have won in my life and which the exploiters wish to take away from all of us.

when i came in to work today the new supervisor (who can't even pronounce the names of the people whose hours he is cutting) asked me why i was upset. against my calculating judgment, i gave him a piece of my mind. i told him that what was wrong was to make workers suffer for the incompetence of management and the corporate office; that it was unjust to pull the rug out from under people trying to pay bills and support families.

"that's just business," he said. "if i had a car and i put $20,000 into it and i sold it, i'd want to get at least that much back. the point is to profit or at least break even."

"but people are not cars," i said "our value isn't the same."

"value?" he asked dumbfounded. "we're all different, you can't assign everyone the same value. you want everyone to be the same, but they aren't. so there are different values and when money is short, they cut the bottom of the food chain. what do you expect, a cut in corporate salaries?"

"i don't expect a cut at corporate levels, but that is what would be right. and no, people aren't completely the same, but we are all human. i don't want people to be the same, but i do want the same justice for everyone. and it's disgusting to cover your own ass and mistakes by pushing people weaker than you into the mud."

"justice?" he said the word as if i had said i wanted everyone to have a unicorn. "you've got some crazy ideas. look, this is the corporate world. values and justice don't matter. it's about the money."

"no," i replied, "values and justice do matter. the point of values isn't that they will always match the structure of society or profit. the point is holding ourselves to a standard. "

"look," he said "there are only two options. one, you take the cut in hours or two you quit. but things aren't going to change, so why argue about it?"

"because justice and values aren't about winning," i replied with more rage than i've ever felt before. "if i don't stand up for what i know is right, then it doesn't matter what happens because i am no longer a human being." i aimed straight for his heart "if you go along or participate in an unjust system, abandoning any sense of principles, than who are you? trampling on others and making the excuse that it's just the way of things, that's disgusting."

"well, the owners are in their rights..."

"no," i interrupted "they are within their power. but they have no right to something like this. and fuck some legal shit. you know what i mean but we aren't going to agree. let's just see what happens."

that's how the conversation went. but he still wanted to be my friend. he tried talking to me about how when he was driving trucks for the marines in iraq he had bought up iraqi currency on the speculation that it would turn out to be valuable in a few years. he recommended that i go to the airport and exchange some dollars for the dinar. i fired off another round of artillery: "i don't speculate on american imperialism's colonial currencies. i hope the iraqis throw the gov't."

"but why? you could make some money."

"because i'm not going to support the occupation of someone else's country."

"see, there you go again. you're always worried about someone else instead of yourself."

"no," i said, "i'm interested about everybody, which includes me, but i don't put myself before other people."

"what?!? you've got some crazy philosophies!"

i shook my head. so this was the crux of it. a world in whcih to live by justice, to stand for everyone, and to struggle for what is right is considered insane. it is 'rational' to drink blood, to oppress the weak, to 'get over.' well, i may not be able to beat the supervisor and the corporate office, but i know that i have not kept silent. that i have not gone along. that i have made him confront the reality of his immoral greed.

i intend to organize to fight with power. but i do not think it is a small thing to take a principled and dignified stand. whether or not we win, we will keep our dignity and we will present a different possibility for how human beings can live. and i realized, more clearly than ever, that this is why i have chosen NOT to pursue 'upward mobility'. i don't want a mgmt position or the responsibility for enforcing profit interests through firing or cutting hours because i think it endangers one's dignity and commitment to justice. and it is simply not worth the trade. as subcomandante marcos says

"dignity is the only thing that must never be lost, ever."

It's the Economy, Stupid!...Right?

i'm no expert in economics, but here's what i've been able to gather about the economic trouble we're all in right now. in the fall of last year one sector of the economy fell apart. basically a huge amount of loans were made to people who couldn't possibly pay them back (remember all those "refinancing" and "debt consolidation" commercials on TV?). the loan companies that made these sales then turned around and sold the debt to investors all over the world. apparently these "subprime" mortgage loans sold like hotcakes. the problem? well, remember how in those commercials they talked about "adjustable interest rates"? at the time the loans were made interest rates were incredibly low and so lots of people thought they could afford the loans (and the loan sharks did their best to rake in the cash). but the interest rates actually began to rise and people realized that they couldn't afford their payments.

terror struck "the market". billions of dollars were riding on these loans and if people couldn't pay them back then companies who held their debts would lose a lot of money. what this translates into is a loss in profits. see, companies predict what their earnings are going to be and then investors buy shares in order to get a cut of the profits. but when a company announces that it will be making considerably less money than it predicted, the investors start to jump ship, which lowers the price of the stock, which in turn makes it difficult for the company to make money through stock sales. now the company that is holding bad debts has not only lost money on those debts, but has also lost the ability to recover that money through stock sales, a double loss. now multiply this across thousands of companies and you can see why there's economic trouble.

now, the neoliberal economists would have us believe that this is simply the result of greedy lenders and ignorant borrowers. they want us to think that this crisis is the product of bad investments. their solution is to "let the market work it out," meaning let wome folks go broke. meanwhile those with lots of money can buy up the destroyed companies and, when the good times return, sell them high. depressions and recessions, after all, are a GOOD thing for the superrich, because they eliminate small businesses and competitors, leaving only the major corporations who can weather the storm.

"that's economics," they say. "what we need are smarter investors and for people to stop spending more than they earn." meanwhile politicians are promising tax cuts (for who?) to "put money back in Americans' pockets." financial responsibility and cuts in government taxes (and therefore government services) are the remedy. sound familiar? it should, it's the classic economic conservative line. "small government" (that is when it comes to controlling markets) and placing responsibility for economic conditions on individuals.

but the problem isn't that people are living luxuriously beyond their means. the problem is that while income has remained the same or declined for most folks, the cost of essential commodities has steadily risen. this has been especially true in the last year when food and energy prices have skyrocketed along with unemployment and wage freezes (or cuts). a decline in "real wages" means a decline in the buying power of one's wages. for example, if, like me, you make $8.75/hr this will buy a certain amount of food and pay a certain number of bills. but if gas and food prices increase, along with the costs of healthcare, education, and housing that same $8.75 will not buy as much. needless to say, when prices go up it is a rare company that gives workers a proportional raise to match the cost of living. the result is that wages buy less and less with every passing year. real wages have been on the decline since 1964.

no wonder, then, that people live more and more on credit. and credit that they can't possibly repay. in order to go through college you gotta dish out money many people don't have. not going to school may be more affordable in the short run, but it will mean steadily declining earning power as the economy slumps. or maybe you want to buy a car or a house. i mean, just buying the most basic long-term goods for the "middle-class" lifestyle is unreachable for so many people who are used to that life. so what the economists are telling them is that they need to accept the fact of their decline in social and economic position. "living within one's means" translates into downward class mobility, not "responsible spending".

for those of us already at the bottom, we will increasingly find out that the well goes still deeper. those who think food shortages caused by lack of money rather than scarce food supplies were something restricted to Mexico should check rising food prices. your food might make more profit for agribusiness in donald trumps cars than in your stomach. they're calling it "biofuel". unemployment is eating up more people. we can expect to work more hours and more jobs just to stay afloat. we can expect employers to take advantage and crack down on any resistance or "insubordination."

but is this all economics? yes and no. economics is nothing but social relations of power represented through objects and money exchange. the cause of this economic crisis is not foolish spending, it's the insoluble contradiction of capitalism: workers cannot buy back what they themselves produce. the less you pay workers, the less they can afford to buy. and, in the end, workers are consumers. if capitalists can't sell their products, they can't realize their profits. so capitalism is increasingly wracked by economic credit crises in which, periodically, huge purchases will turn out to be unpayable and we will fall into a recession or depression.

this will not go away. the more wealth is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, the more we will see these crises, and the US will not at all be immune to them. say good bye to the "first world", my fellow americans!

but there's hope: organizing for power. revolutionary organizing is the only way out of this mess. tax cuts won't work, they only weaken government programs, which really means cutting out service for the most poor. corporate taxes definitely won't work. personal savings can't help if your money is worth less and less because companies are raising prices. the choice is between increasingly vicious struggles between the have-nots over the crumbs or radical organizing, popular and revolutionary democracy, and the expropriation of the wealthy.

it's not the economy, it's power, compañer@s!

Poetry & the Age of Transition

money remakes the world in its own image; marxists write chic (and expensive) books on the globalization of the capitalist economy; Obama and Clinton battle over who will be the best at restoring the facade of the State as the representative of the common interest; avant-garde radicals denounce US imperialism and proclaim the end of the nation-state at the same time; the "sanctity of marriage" is lifted up as a banner around which US reactionaries rally, in the proud tradition of "law and order" and the "purity of white womanhood"; the murderers at citibank/citigroup realized yesterday that there are indeed economic consequences to sucking blood too quickly, and perhaps all the accumulation since the 1980's might mean a depression unprecedented since the 30's; CNN concerns itself with the most crucial questions: "did Hillary cry and is that why women in New Hampshire voted for her?" and "when will the screen writer's union stop ruining the award show season with their strike?" meanwhile i write post after post about moments in the day and my love affair with a state suffering the longest drought in its recorded history.

for three days i have been trying to come up with some good topics to write about "politics." maybe i could write about why a lot of Black folks get excited (some of us despite ourselves) when Obama wins something and also why some of us want him to lose or to get killed to "prove" that racism still exists. or maybe i could write about how CNN has more conservative propaganda shows than anything these days and how shameless the spin is really getting. or about the rise in hate crimes and hate groups, the largest loss of housing since the great depression, or...you get the picture. i wanted to write something about each or any of these things, but whenever i got started my heart just couldn't get into it.

"oh no!" i thought "will my blog turn into a dictation of my navel-gazing adventures?" i mean, here before us is probably one of the greatest times of change in the structure of US society and the world, and all i can write about is poetry? but then, why not poetry?

we are living in an age of transition. the social structures as we have known them are nearing the breaking point as social contradictions clash with increasing velocity. but if you think that this is just about the "crisis of the nation-state" and the "restructuring of the global economy" you are mistaken. you cannot separate major social change from lived experience. we are feeling the blistering pace of change, not only in oil prices and wage cuts, but also in a growing sense of helplessness and desperation. change, after all, means uncertainty.

i do not think that it is a coincidence that the past year has been one of the hardest in my life and in the lives of so many of the people that i know. that sense of being alone, of not knowing where we are heading, that feeling that forces beyond our control seem to head us off at every pass--these intuitions are not isolated perceptions, they are the experience of a changing society measured through the emotional barometers of 6.5 billion people.

i mentioned earlier the pop-marxists who are writing about economic changes in fancy books with trendy covers and catchy PoMo (post-modern) titles. if my contempt for these texts hasn't saturated the page already then let me express myself directly: i do not think that these books offer us the necessary tools for intervening in this age of transition. instead of giving us a view of the world from the perspective of the oppressed, they give us a view of the changing world from the point of view of capital. they give us endless details about stock market liquidity, structural adjustment, interest rates, petro dollars, and free trade agreements, but in all of this the human being is nowhere to be found, except as a statistic, a casualty of war.

i have been accused of being an anti-intellectual for saying this before, so let me be clear: i am not against structural analysis. i am, however, opposed to violent abstractions, to theoretical processes that suggest that we can only understand the world if we abandon the oppressed and human point of view and assume the perspective of the elites. i think that a structural analysis, if it is to be of use for revolution, must connect to a people who are confident in their ability to re-conceptualize the world, to re-think it and re-make it from the bottom up.

this isn't simply a process of preaching radical political-economic theory. there is a genuine need for us to "educate our feelings". we must find a way to dispel fear and despair. we must learn courage. we must teach ourselves to see the world as possibility. we must learn not to be afraid of power and we must learn how to turn love into the strength to fight for what we believe in.

poetry gathers up our fears and our uncertainties and draws them near so that we need no longer be crippled by them. it speaks up honestly about our rage and our powerlessness. poetry opens our eyes and quickens our blood. poetry acknowledges the everyday struggle of the god-damn grind and rebukes the politician who would enlist our hope without knowing the lines in the face of a true depression. it goads our companions who sit by while injustice continues. poetry remembers, oh my friends, poetry is memory.

the rich people of our times gather in their hands the greatest accumulation of weapons, traitors, wealth, propaganda, and hopelessness that we have ever seen. what do we have? we have, among other things, words--true words, radical words--we have words that can and MUST move us. words that can change us because they were born in our change; words that can hold us together. words which organize. words which show our comrades that we are in the struggle for the duration and words which recreate the contours of their dreams, showing them why they should join us.

i can go on endlessly analyzing politicians and the economy, and it is true that this takes serious study and rigor. but there is nothing which compares to finding the words that will touch others in a way that draws our lives together into a strength that reorganizes the structure of our world. the struggle to live in a way that gives birth to true words, the struggle to live in a way that inspires trust and makes others strive to be a little better everyday, the struggle to cultivate the words that help the defeated stand, once more and stand together--finding these words is what poetry is about.

trust me, i know it takes more than poetry to change the world. it takes organized movements. it takes a grasp of the social forces at work. but most importantly, it takes the ability to name the world, to name our pain and our fear and our hope, to name the changes in our lives, and it takes the ability to inspire us to commit to something greater. so, i say again, why not poetry?

Life & Poetry pt.2

oh man! i re-read the last post and saw a bunch of typos so i went back and fixed them. alright, and now my reply to Neruda:

It's winter now and the sun hasn't risen when it is time for me to leave work. Working at night acquaints me with three kinds of blindness: blindness from too much light, blindness from too much darkness, and blindness from too much grey. I walk out into a world whose grey is thick and uniform. This grey always robs me of energy. It makes me feel as if it doesn't matter if I try or not because pain and joy are, in the end, the same.

But I have been rescued every morning since winter began by a flock of more than one thousand birds whose wings and song break the monotony in the air. They fly like a great airborne undertoe, carrying the air forward with such force that I can feel eddies from where I stand on the ground.

One hundred upon one hundred black pestels pound the grey expanses as if it were the husk of an atmospheric spice. Out rolls the pungent sun, exuding his aromatic light and I am saturated with the heavy musk of another morning. Such weight! My lungs can hardly bear the sunrise. The birds gather in the air and pulse like a magnificent black heart. And then, stretching out they surge forward, cracking like a whip and driving the grey before them.

How can I repay these black winter birds for saving me from oblivion?

Join Us: Life & Poetry pt.1

about a month ago now i bought "Confieso Que He Vivido" (I Confesss That I Have Lived). they are the memoirs of a man who became a poet against his parents' wishes and who sold everything he had in order to publish his first book of poetry under the pen name we have come to adore: Pablo Neruda. now, i didn't read that in the memoirs, i found it on the internet. maybe it's a myth, but it's the reason i bought the memoirs. i need more inspiration for the bold decisions that revolutionaries need to make. my first inspiration was Cesar Chavez, who left his well-paying job to organize a farmworker's union, something folks said could never work. thanks Angel for introducing Cesar and I!

anyhow, i would like to share with you all the conversations me and Pablo have been having through his memoirs. i hope to have installments as long as we're conversating. here is what he said to me yesterday. i dedicate it to Justyna, who loves flowers:

"...only poppies grew there. The other plants had disappeared from this gloomy corner. Some were huge and white like doves, some scarlet like drops of blood, some purple or black, like widows forgotten there. I had never seen such a wilderness of poppies, and I have never seen another like it. And though I had a deep respect for them, and a superstitious dread only they, of all flowers, inspire in me, that did not stop me from snapping one off, now and again, the broken stem leaving sticky milk on my hands and a whiff of unearthly perfume. Then I would stroke its sumptuous petals lovingly and put them into a book to keep. To me they were the wings of huge butterflies that couldn't fly."

next installment: my reply.

ps: me and Adam watched "Il Postino" (the postman), a great film about Neruda. sad, human, beautiful. watch it!

Nomadic Letters pt.2: Durham, NC

well, it looks like i spoke too soon about where i'm off to next. i was really fixed on Philadelphia and doing union organizing there, but i had a number of experiences that changed my mind. basically over the past year i have become increasingly radicalized about queer politics. one of the results was that i began rethinking my relationships (personal and organizational) and challenging folks on these issues. the response, in most cases, was...well, let's just say it was less than i had expected from radical folks and groups. i encountered liberal apologetics and tokenism, outright bigotry, and a shitload of silence. and despite the fact that i had read about these things in histories of social movements, i never thought that my friends and associations were going to let things go down like that. well, a few folks confirmed this belief, but most proved it at least over idealistic.

i had hoped that a general commitment to social change and to friendship would be enough to motivate people and organizations to take queer struggles seriously. what i learned, the hard way, was that it is not enough. and so i've come to the conclusion that i need to make my primary political and personal relationships to other people who have made radical political commitments to class, race, queer, and gender struggles equally. i can be part of organizations and relate to folks who have yet to take these steps, but i can't make them my community or my political home.

now, i've been looking for a radical queer organization for my entire life because i've been looking for a community where i wasn't "the only one". but i began making this a serious priority of mine back in 2005 (around the time i was coming out to my family). alas, alas, i never found anything that fit. but about a month ago now i found this group in Durham, NC called Southerners on New Ground (SONG).

as they describe themselves on their website:

Southerners On New Ground (SONG) was founded in order to advance Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer multi-racial, multi-issued education and organizing capable of combating the Right’s strategies of fragmentation and division. SONG’s vision of a broad social and economic justice movement across the South, its mission to help build and strengthen that movement, and its strategy of multi-issue organizing remain as relevant, if not more relevant, today as when SONG was founded. SONG came out of conversations of Black and white southern lesbian leaders in 1993, each a long time activist on a broad range of issues, addressed deep concerns about the gains of the far right based on vicious divide and conquer tactics, particularly along fault lines of race, class and sexuality. They also expressed their hopes for helping build a broad social justice and civil rights movement where people and issues were connected and activists could bring their full selves to the organizing work.

when i read this i was ecstatic! for the past year or so i've been convinced of the centrality of political organizing in the US South, but i've had trouble moving from the northern organizing community to the southern one. and here was this group both queer AND southern!! so i started to think seriously about moving to Durham. after all, the union work, while offering exciting labor organizing opportunities, didn't have a strong position on queer issues or a Southern organizing strategy.

i had been looking at Durham for awhile now. i had been attending seminars at this community org called El Kilombo Intergaláctica and it seemed that all the cool folks i met either lived there or were trying to move there. (example: i met this gorgeous guy when i was working concessions at a concert. he was wearing a subcomandante Marcos shirt and we hung out a few times. unfortunately he's str8 & spoken for, but he was moving to Durham because of the racism in Chapel Hill).

the area of NC that i live in is called the Triangle. it's composed of Raleigh, Durham, & Chapel Hill. each city has it's own major university and its own culture. Chapel Hill is a city that is organized around the University of NC, a rather elite public university, giving the town the sense of being a giant college campus (i.e. white, liberal, with the feeling that it's somewhat suspended outside reality). Raleigh is the state capital, with government and businesses being the central aspects of the city's culture. finally, Durham is home to Duke University, a private elite college. the unique thing about Durham is that the actual city is majority Black and working-class. it's a bit like Harlem, with Columbia privelege smack in the middle of POC poverty.

down here folks talk about Durham as if just walking outside will get you shot. but the city is vibrant with a POC queer culture, a community organizing tradition, and is a hell of a lot more attractive to me than Raleigh. i've even found a Black cultural organization that teaches African dance.

so i've decided to move to the local get-down spot: Durham, NC.