For The Alma Mater

You know I'm way pressed when I drop back to posting once or twice a week. How busy is too busy? This is too busy. So, here's something I wrote today for the University of Massachusetts Amherst program in Social Thought and Political Economy newsletter, because the program director, who I adore, asked me to. I'm sure they won't mind being scooped.

How does one meet the immediate survival needs of those who are have nothing while building institutional power to fight the root causes of homelessness and poverty? This is the question that fifteen years ago led Tim Harris to found what would become North America’s premiere street newspaper.

Seattle’s Real Change now employs more than 350 homeless and very low-income people each month in street sales of their weekly publication. Last year, street vendors sold 722,571 copies of the progressive community newspaper that offers “opportunity and a voice to low-income people while taking action to end homelessness and poverty. “ Vendors buy their papers for thirty-five cents to resell for a dollar plus tips. In the process, homeless people find that they are not without friends.

“Over the years I’ve come to understand Real Change as an enormous web of human relationships,” said Harris. “People stop being afraid and find that they care for each other. That’s where the personal and social transformation really begins.

Soon after Harris graduated from the STPEC program in 1987, he became involved in alternative newspapers and direct-action style empowerment organizing with homeless people in Boston.

“I discovered that the formulas for community organizing just didn’t translate. Leaders came and went very fast, and were up against too many demons to be real effective. Meanwhile homelessness just kept increasing. The Boston years were about getting my butt kicked and organizing without a roadmap.” By the time Harris left for Seattle in 1994, he understood that homeless people couldn’t win without allies, and that street newspapers could bring people together.

Real Change is presently leading a multi-racial, cross-class coalition in a ballot initiative organizing drive to create alternatives to a new Seattle municipal jail. “People get that cutting school budgets while building new jails doesn’t make sense, and ever-increasing incarceration rates just deepen poverty and wastes limited public resources,” said Harris. The initiative has lured activists out of their single-issue ghettos to find a new, more unified, way forward.

“Taking risks only strengthens our support,” said Harris. “Our funding comes mostly from reader donations and paper sales, and this gives us huge freedom to tell the uncompromised truth. It’s a powerful position from which to organize.”

For more information, visit realchangenews.org, and nonewjail.org.

This Is Not Repressive Desublimation

For the last month or so, I've been a little bit obsessed with thinking about the federal goverment's insistence that they are out to end homelessness by encouraging municipalities to adopt Ten Year Plans to End Homelessness. This while they systematically create poverty and increased inequality in all other arenas. This obsession has recently shaded into an obsession with capitalism itself, and how it works as an organized system of power and control.

When I was in college, I read Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man about five times. This was a text that describes capitalism is Freudian-Marxist terms as a system of social control, and sees America as the highest expression of that system. Being a Social Thought and Political Economy major who gravitated to the most radical professors I could find, I had numerous instructors who apparently felt this was an essential text to master. It occurs to me that the Ten Year Plan could be understood in Marcusian terms. A summary of One Dimensional Man I found online contained the following:

"Language, Marcuse thought, was becoming one-dimensional and was contrived to manipulate thinking, indeed, to limit thinking. Questions are posed only in ways that permit specific ways of searching for answers; political choices are constrained to arenas in which no really thoughtful choice is empowered; and standard vocabularies (in the military, for instance) are designed to inhibit any thought about value or morality.

The second means of insidious domination was what Marcuse called "repressive desublimation," again an amalgamation of Freud and Marx. Sublimation, recall, is where instinctual energy gets deflected from its natural expression and appears, instead, in some other form of expression or satisfaction. "Desublimation," then, is a system that permits some degree of natural expression or satisfaction of instinctual energy. Desublimation is obviously so powerful that even a small dose can succeed in capturing us. We will return repetitively to satisfy ourselves even in small ways. As an example, something like Playboy magazine could be allowed to feed men a measure of unusual --- that is, formerly tabooed --- sexual satisfaction, but this would happen only by becoming a regular buying customer. When one turned to look at American society of the 60s, it was clear that sexuality was being desublimated in a variety of ways so long as people were ready to consume the right things. Thus, people were actually being repressed anew to the specific advantages of capitalist producers."

I've always thought of repressive desublimation in broader terms than this. It's not just the commodification of desire. It is also the commodification of dissent.

This is why everyone in the New York Times fashion section manages to look like some version of a revolutionary or a junky while they wear clothing ensembles that cost more than my car. Every cultural form of rebellion is eventually co-opted and commodified. Form trumps content pretty much every time. Repressive desublimation, then, acts as a safety valve of sorts by providing the form of taking political action without offering the content. One campaign, for example, asks people to wear a wristband to end global poverty.

Yeah. That'll work.