MySpace...WTF?!?

So last night, instead of getting my rest (I woke up at 7am to work on the El Kilombo garden/farm), I stayed up till 3am designing the MySpace page I recently signed up for. I have been shunning MySpace for years now but everyone says I need to get on in order to stay connected with people.

Well, I'm gonna try it out for a little longer but if I keep getting friend requests from make-believe women who say they want to share their nude photos with me I'm outta there. I mean, I don't know how people stand the constant ads of women sucking lollie pops or the annoying fake videos of blondes pulling back their hair while pretend typing at a computer and laughing. UGH! The hetero-sexism of MySpace is disgusting. I might stick to self-created blogs and wikis...

Does anyone know if I change my gender and relationship status these stupid ads will stop coming in?

The Worth of Our Work

Recently I've been wrestling with being an unorthodox intellectual. Since moving to Durham I've met all these amazing people who know all these incredible things. Some folks know how to raise animals and grow food. Other people know woodworking and mechanical engineering. Still others are academic intellectuals with impressive command of ideas and language or local history and culture. I've been learning a lot from all these folks.

The trouble is that I often find it hard to see what it is that I have to contribute. For one thing, many of the people I've surrounded myself with focus more on working with their hands and the ideas related to this work. For example, the agrarian people I'm working with do intellectual work around both the technical aspects of farming and the social, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of farming. This is amazing stuff, but it's often hard to find a place where my work-- economics, epistemology, and historical sociology--connects and makes sense.

Writing it down this problem appears superficial and foolish. Obviously the issue are connected. The real difficulty I face is that the "high theory" work that I've been engrossed in for two or more years isn't something that most people feel is relevant to their interests. Why should folks be interested in Hegel's critique of causation and empiricism? Why should people be interested in the conflicts between feminists, Black radicals, anti-imperialists, and marxists over the labor theory of value? In activist and many other spaces I find myself in "abstract" theory is looked down upon or, at the very least, shunned.

Most often the reason is because abstract theory is often alienating and jargon-laden. But then, as I learned from my neighbor how to rebuild a bicycle I realized that there is jargon and technical knowledge associated with those things as well. When he asked me to hand him the crescent-wrench I froze. Which one was the crescent? Which was the allen? If I didn't know what would he think of me? Obviously he expected me to know. I felt stupid, as if something was wrong with me or as if I lacked a proper (male) upbringing which would have taught me which wrench was which. And that was just a bike. Learning to drive, how to use power tools, how to slaughter a chicken. All these things have jargon, skills, and knowledges that must be learned and not knowing them can be frightening and intimidating. Those who command these things have power.

The difference, perhaps, between the knowledge/work of abstract theory and the knowledge/work of so-called "manual labor" is that one is often connected to greater social privilege. The concepts and theories of so-called "mental labor" are often kept away from the vast majority of people and used to organize and govern society hierarchically. I think there is a certain resentment and anti-intellectual sentiment in many activist and anti-authoritarian/communal spaces because intense intellectual work is associated with power over others, privilege (higher income, better standard of living, etc), and leisure time.
But here I am trying to live my life as an intellectual against all of that (which is not to say I do not have privileges, because I have a great many). I believe that the theoretical and philosophical work I'm doing is important and relevant to the people I am working with but they often show very little interest in that work. This often makes me question myself. I sit in my house looking at all the books I've collected and loved and struggled with and I wonder sometimes if all that work was wasted. If I am an abstract theorist drifting in a vacuum of detached ideas and petty scholastic debates. Isn't the value theory debate the modern version of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?

But then something happens that makes me remember why I do this work. The latest experience was talking with a friend, Nathaniel, who's been struggling with his relationship to "the other side of the tracks". Nathaniel is a bi-racial brother who's dating this middle-class white woman and is basically living in the social circles of non-profit, yuppie, white folks as the token person of color and token working-class person. We got coffee the other night and talked about what it's like to live in a city as segregated as Durham (someone once said that capitalism is "class apartheid"). Our conversation ranged all over the place and we touched on tons of subjects.

Somewhere in the middle of the conversation (before talking about Queer politics and after talking about Frantz Fanon, gentrification, and yuppie settler colonies), I realized that my very ability to think and respond to his questions and struggles was a product of my theoretical work. My ability to connect issues, to provide advice, to listen and to re-present issues in ways that helped people see the world differently, and to offer critical yet affirming analyses is a direct result of my work.

It's like learning dance. When you are learning a complicated step and you are counting the beats and repeating the motions it seems so different from dancing. When you are doing your conditioning exercises and your stretches it seems so abstract. The "moment" of dancing, when your body "spontaneously" responds to the music and feels as if it's moving almost by itself, however, is not a "natural" or purely "instinctual" phenomenon (no matter how much the white hippie exoticists might want you to be a native more in touch with nature). Muscle memory and spontaneity are the result of a learning process. We teach ourselves to be natural.

My friend Justyna says that re-wiring our minds is hard work, and it's the truth. The work I'm doing, learning to re-wire the ways that I think about knowledge, about spirituality, about economics and social life--all of this is expressed by the way that I live and speak. And that has real worth. It can be as much about living as anything else. The fact that it is abstract needs to stop being a reason to discount it.

We need to stop being so utilitarian about knowledge and intellectual work and recognize that all of our work is an expression of questions we are working out; questions about how to live. We need to learn to pay attention to all the ways that people ask these questions and support the ways that they go about living their way into the solutions.

For my part I'm glad I'm learning new questions and new solutions to living from new folks. What I'm no longer interested in is proving to others why my ideas are relevant or valid, trying to make my life and questions meaningful on someone else's terms. Rather, I want to demonstrate, through living the contradiction and synthesis of intellectual and manual work, the ways that our various ways of living are connected, how they are limited and set into antagonisms by the system we live under, and how we can begin living our way into some new ways of living...together.

pondering the far side of the moon because it means something to me and my soul mate,
Don Petro
Southern Liberation Front

After Urbanism: Comprehensive Land Reform

Something like ten years ago I started growing plants in my room. It started with a devil's ivy clipping from my aunt and became a room full of tropical plants complete with a vaporizor machine (for humidity), hanging lights, a fan, and a tub of 108 gold fish (one for each name of Shiva). Eventually my family built a small house and I got a yard. I quickly went to work planting a small orchard and a vegetable garden. I tried to grow some grains, but it didn't work out.

I never felt so good as I did when I was working that garden. It was hard work, but it was also calming. Not only that, I was continuously amazed by the things I saw in my own backyard. The white snails with their enormous shells, the flambouyant red fungi that exploded in the nooks of trenches, even the hedgehog that always ate my blackberries the day before I planned to pick them. I didn't know it then, but something in me germinated during those early times of gardening: a desire for a less urban life.

But it was difficult to know this, since many of us city folks are raised without a concept of anything but an urban life. No one encourages us to grow up and move into the country. Of course, the big reason for this is economic. There is little money invested in non-urban areas. Jobs are scarce, infrastructure (water, electricity, paved roads) is often shitty , and poverty is much more common. Folks have become urban because that's what most people have had to do in order to survive.

What has forced this migration? The mechanization of agriculture, the concentration of land ownership into fewer and fewer hands, corporate monopolies over agricultural products, and the sheer brutality and violence used to enforce the 'order' of rural social hierarchies (e.g. slavery, latifundas, sharecropping, debt peonage, para/military terror, etc). At the same time cities have become places where more and more capital has been invested, generating jobs.

Thus, 2008 is the year when, for the first time, more than half of the world's population is living in urban areas. This is a huge change from the beginning of the 20th century (the 1900's) when only about 14% lived in cities.

Why, then, am I talking about life after ubanism if now is the most urban period in human history? The first and most obvious reason is that such cancerous urbanism is unsustainable. On a basic level the growth of cities, which has been mostly in the global South, has meant the growth of slums with little access to basic services and needs like jobs, water, housing, and safety. Ecologically as well cities on the scale that we are seeing them today are not practical. They simply suck up too much energy and belch out too much pollution.

If that isn't enough then consider the fact that even though the main motivation for moving from the rural to the urban areas is economic, urban areas are not structured to provide all these folks with employment. Rural to urban migration has always been something that urban industrial capitalists have encouraged because it put more people in competition for the same jobs, thus lowering wages. Landlords and real estate capitalists have also profited from the shifts in the uses of urban land, whether by building labor camp housing (i.e. slums, projects, etc) or luxury, leisure and business properties. Meanwhile the rural land owners, from families to megacorporations, have snatched up more and more land for themselves.

One of the greatests losses that many of us urban folks have endured is the fading away of our rurally based cultural heritages. Often that has meant losing our autonomy--our capacity to do things for ourselves--as well as our ability to form healthy communities. Land is the basis for community and for autonomy. Forced into becoming renters and wage-slaves we have lost many of the skills, knowledge, and cultural folkways that grew from sharing land.

I moved to NC to reconnect to my rural heritage. (The South not only has the largest concentration of Black folks in the u.s., it also has the most rural folks of all the u.s. regions). Up North Black culture is an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. No doubt we have developed strong and powerful traditions, but we have lost a part of ourselves. The South is also increasingly urban, but there still exists a rural tradition amongst Black folks and other folks too. This is what I'm immersing myself in. Learning about raising animals and also killing them. Learning about fixing things and making them. Learning about families and geneaologies and the overlapping histories of Black folks and white folks and indigenous peoples and brown folks of all kinds.

The other day I went out to a dairy farm and listened to a man talk about cows. I saw the calves and pondered over the fact that conception rates for cattle have gone from 80% to 40% in the last 50 years. Why? How? We don't know yet, he says. I rode out and sat with a six-year-old girl named Eden and watched the bald eagles circle their nest in the pine tree over the corn field. The corn field where the corn is a foot shorter than it should be because we are still in a drought. And I thought how much work has to be done in our generation. How many questions of an urgent nature, such as "What's happening to the life-systems that are the foundation of our foodways?", that need to be addressed.

A few weeks ago my brother's girlfriend came to visit from Baltimore. That city that so many know through The Wire HBO show. A city of poverty, drug dependence, violence, and desperate hope (often called despair). She stayed for a few days on the farm where my brother works and by the end she was agreeing with my brother and I that our people need to get beyond urbanism because that culture, that way of just-barely-living (i.e. hustling) is killing us.

But I am not advocating simple flight from the cities. We can't run from the city looking for a utopia in the rural areas. It didn't work when we came to the cities, so why would it work in reverse? The problem isn't the idea of living it cities by itself. The problem is that the cities that now exist are capitalist cities. They are cities where all the contradictions and hierarchies of the system are concentrated into a tiny area. If we learn anything from our combined rural and urban experiences of migration, wage-slavery, debt peonage, gentrification, and ecological disaster, it should be that what we need is comprehensive land reform.

By comprehensive I mean land reform that restructures both urban and rural ways of dealing with land. These days there is exciting work being done on the "right to the city" fights against gentrification. But there are also rural or non-metropolitan struggles going on outside cities by small towns and rural areas against hog farming that poisons the water and the air; against resorts and tourist industries that monopolize, exclusivize, and destroy beaches and other ecological areas; against highways and wal-marts. We need to connect these struggles.

But we need to go further. We need to begin envisioning and fighting for a world beyond urbanism. That means a world where resources are invested outside the big cities as well as inside them. The right to the city is important but we also need a right to the country. Our people need to have access to land to grow food, raise animals, care for the earth that is the basis for the communities and life-ways of both cities and non-urban areas. According to the Right to the City Alliance, 85% of people in the u.s. live in urban areas and these areas account for 85% of jobs. But then, who owns and controls the use of the vast majority of non-metropolitan land in the u.s.? And how does that effect those in the city, who are dependent upon their jobs (for which there is increasing competition and decreasing wages) for food and everything else? And what about the quality and price of our foods? The inflation on food products should be a wake-up call y'all!!

We need rural development. Not capitalist accumulation in rural areas, but services and resources to (re)build social life in our non-metro areas, to repair soils and waterways, to exchange skills and develop just and democratic (self)government. We need farm co-operatives and resources for small farmers. This is crucial if we are going to topple the corporate agricultural armies who are destroying rural life in the global South and are the top dogs in the neoliberal juntas. It is the genocide of NAFTA and other "free trade" deals that is at the root of the uprooting of so many folks who migrate to the u.s. from México. It is the ecocide of factory farming, mountain top removal, strip mining, and deforestation that is killing the planet and driving the weather crazy.

We need new maroons who are willing to build new types of rural/semi-urban communities for re-building the land, uniting rural and urban traditions and struggles, and teaching skills from food production to herbal medicine to construction trades and converting engines to biodiesel. That's how I see myself: a contemporary maroon, connecting the urban and the rural, finding new ways to carve out autonomous spaces outside the metropolis as both a liberated territory and as a staging ground for struggle in/against/for the metropolis.

We need cooperative ownership of land in cities and outside of cities. In fact, I would propose that every land cooperative should own land in the city and in the surrounding rural area. In Cuba there was a program slogan that called for the "urbanization of the country and the ruralization of the city".

An increase of resource investment in rural areas must be ON TOP OF social investment in cities. That is we cannot allow them to be played off one another. WE WANT EVERYTHING, DAMMIT! And how we gonna get these resources? We gotta learn from our comrades in the South: occupy, protest, organize, cooperate!

In this moment when the struggle over housing and gentrification is setting its sights on the question of land, we need to seize the opportunity to broaden our vision. Land is not something that ends at the city limits. It is an interconnected eco-social system. Our food and water and air depend on rural areas. The city and the country are one organic unit. The separation of the two has been no less damaging to our peoples than the separation and antagonisms around race, gender, nationalities, etc that have been set into hierarchies to the benefit of those who rule.

By connecting the rural to the urban we will begin to regain the land and the social relations (for land is an eco-social relation) that are the foundations of autonomy and community.

Down with the tyranny of landlords, urban and rural!
End landlessness/homelessness!
Comprehensive Land Reform in the u.s.!

from the mountains of desire,
Don Petro

Doin the Damn Thang!

Comrades and compañer@s, friends and enemies,

Good news: as of today, 1100 hours, I've got internet at home! I've been cut off from communications with all you other guerilla units for way too long. From now forward expect regular updates from the Durham, NC fight against yuppies, nihilism, apathy, capitalism, michelle obama (that's right, i said it), and multi-culti hippie la la la. Now's the time for the radical imagination, anarchist eroticism, and home baked bread (down with Aunt Millie and Sara Lee!). Now's the time to rise up against jedi liberalism and luxury condominiums. Keep ya eyes open and your heart full of passion cause there's beauty in this here struggle. I know cause I've been living it.

This and the previous entry have been short, but expect some substantial material soon!

Affirmations

“I imagine a flower in bloom, except the petals endlessly unfold and grow until everything outside has been embraced by the flower itself, and ‘outside’ is ‘in’ and there are no barriers between.”
--Sean Connelley

My mama called to tell me that my trees are bearing fruit. The two black cherries, the granny smith apple, and the pear in the front yard and the two red delicious apples in the back yard—all of them have fruit. This on top of the grape vine that’s been producing fragrant fruit for two years now. And how appropriate this is as I come of age, as I become the me that I wanted to be for so long, as I bear my own fruit. It affirms, participates in, bears witness to, and confirms all that I’ve been through and all that I’ve become. And inside the fruit of affirmation is the seed of the world of which we dream and for which we struggle.