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Posts filed under Smash the State

Government and the pink-collar ghetto

Pretty much every time Wendy McElroy writes a column, you can expect three things.

  1. Insightful and provocative analysis of the ways in which male-dominated, top-down patriarchal government hurts women
  2. Lack of understanding of ways in which non-governmental power and hierarchy hurts women
  3. Uncalled-for swipes at other feminists and failure to differentiate feminism from the male Left

Her column on Unlocking the Potential of America’s Pink Collar Workers is a classic example. Based in part around a response to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, McElroy analyzes how the government works to create and shore up the walls around the pink collar ghetto by preventing women from getting ahead through legally imposed barriers to work and individual initiative. She has a lot of good points.

On the negative side, she also just ignores the degree to which historical power and hierarchy outside of government also constrains low-income women. Her flippant dismissal of sexual harassment law is an obvious example—yes, investing economic resources into creating a workplace more free of sexual harassment does cost money and work that could be otherwise spent. But that doesn’t mean that if you stopped spending that money, women would suddenly flood into the workplace. The new jobs that were created would predominantly be filled by men—since sexual harassment is most prevalent in workplaces where most of the workers are men—and women would be driven out and kept out of these workplaces because of the fact that, well, sexual harassment is rampant in the workplace.

Similarly, although McElroy appreciates that Ehrenreich is in touch with the realities facing working-class women, she accuses her of allowing moral squeamishness to get in the way of seeing real solutions. For example, McElroy writes:

And, yet, after working as a cleaning woman for her book, Ehrenreich, in an article in Harper’s magazine, asked readers not to hire maids. Almost everyone complains about violent video games, but paid housecleaning has the same consequence-abolishing effect. … A servant economy breeds callousness, she wrote.

So to protect the moral sensibilities of the middle class, Ehrenreich wants people to unemploy poor women who are working to feed their children. Instead of honest work she would offer these women a more humane welfare system.

But wait, that’s not what Ehrenreich said. She doesn’t want women who are working in domestic labor to be unemployed and put on welfare. She’s saying that there’s a real, pernicious, political cause and effect in the employment of low-income women as domestic servants, and the callousness and dehumanization of women in poverty that it breeds in the rich (in Nickel and Dimed, she details how bosses made sure to rotate employees at each house and minimize contact between clients and workers, so that individuals never emerge as sympathetic persons in the eyes of clients, and how workers would be on the point of passing out because of company rules that no food or water pass a maid’s mouth while she was in a client’s house).

McElroy should understand that Ehrenreich is calling here for a reinvestment of economic energies: so that the upper-class people do their own cleaning, and invest their money into other enterprises, and open up opportunities to work for lower-income women other than cleaning up after the rich while having most of your labor going to pay the salary of a shitty, exploitative boss.

McElroy also accuses middle-class feminists of pushing for laws which constrain women from entering the workplace as employees or entrepreneurs. She claims that Most feminist policies harm the very women they should be protecting — pink-collar workers — and the solutions they offer to poor women are part of what is creating their poverty. But this just ain’t true. It’s true of the male Left, which has long favored so-called protective labor legislation which simply cuts women out of numerous sectors of the workforce which the male-dominated AFL-line labor movment thought was too dangerous (and too lucrative) for women. But second-wave feminists fought these restrictions, often at great cost to their former alliances with the labor movement. They’ve fought to decriminalize prostitution, so that women are not thrown in prison for doing what they need to do in order to survive. McElroy asserts that feminists never seem to call for less government regulation, especially in the workplace. But in fact, although feminists have fought for many rules on workplace standards, just as often they have fought against sexist legislation which cuts women out of economic opportunities in order to protect them.

Where McElroy’s column is at its best, however, and Ehrenreich’s book is at its weakest, is on the issue of barriers which constrain women’s initiative to the boss-dominated world of the Pink Collar ghetto labor marketplace. Ludicrous government-imposed barriers against so much as starting a hair-braiding business out of your own home (or selling garden vegetables out of your truck) establish a system in which you either rent your labor out to a (usually male) boss, or else you starve. Is it any surprise that when the victims of this economic ghettoization don’t have other options, bosses can afford to pay them so little?

So what must we do? It is way, way past time to get the government out of centralized command-and-control which restricts capital to those who are already economically and politically well-connected.

  • Abolish business licensing fees. $100 makes no difference to Starbucks, but a lot more to someone just starting a new food co-op or taxi service.

  • Ditch the arcane, massive, and hyper-bureaucratic zoning laws which favor sprawled-out cities with big centralized stores, and which criminalize working out of your own home

  • Loosen the government-supported stranglehold of big banks on capital. Loosen the regulatory reins on credit unions and microfinance institutions, so that affordable, worker-friendly banking is available to more people in more communities

  • Finally, drop the current welfare-to-work welfare deform program. We no longer have a welfare system, but rather a government-sponsored temp agency for shitty dead-end labor which won’t pay the rent. Government-controlled welfare should ultimately be abolished in favor of a voluntary system of mutual aid in the community. However, in the meantime, we can give people on welfare some breathing room.

    The system should not penalize people for choosing to spend time going to college or University (currently, this is not counted as work and so it counts against you).

    Also, it needs to stop monomaniacally focusing on shipping unemployed women off into available low-income jobs, After they are dumped into a minimum wage job and taken off the rolls, the state gets a fat credit from the federal government, but the woman still can’t pay the rent. Instead, it should provide help with finding jobs and also provide help and resources for starting your own small individual or co-operative businesses and wisely choosing how to invest your money, avoid debt, and generally provide resources for women to make themselves self-sufficient, rather than job-dependent.

For further reading:

More Police Brutality in Montgomery

Montgomery, Alabama has a long history of racist police brutality. And they’re at it again. Most recently, five Montgomery police officers resigned and three have been put on suspension amidst charges of police brutality [Nando], as well as abuse of authority, mistreatment of citizens, and false reporting of incidents. One officer, Michael Clark, is being charged with criminal use of mace in the brutality against a 17 year old prisoner. As usual, seven of the eight cops were white, and all of the victims were Black.

Just about every year or couple years, there’s another big high-profile incident with the Montgomery PD, and everyone acts all shocked, like this isn’t shit that goes on every day. Should it surprise anyone that police officers end up acting like jackbooted thugs when we send them on a war, constantly train them that their first job is to take down criminals (rather than, say, assisting the community), jack them up into militarized units, and run them through what amount to little more than paramilitary raids on low-income neighborhoods? There are housing projects in Montgomery which are raided regularly, whether there is any report of a crime or not, by heavily armored police in black SUVs. Poor people of color in Montgomery are basically living under military occupation. Holding these officers accountable is a necessary first step, but we also have to deal with the militarized culture and practice of policing, as well as end the insane and racist War on Drugs, and address the class disparities trapping people of color in high-crime ghettoes in the first place, if we are ever going to see a real solution to police brutality.

For further reading:

The War on Dissent Continues

In West Virginia, a fifteen year old young woman, Katie Sierra was suspended from her high school for promoting an anarchist club and for wearing t-shirts with anti-war slogans. The Circuit Court upheld the suspension, but Sierra promises she will pursue the dispute [Salon]. I don’t know that this story needs to be commented on so much as just pointed to; we cannot tolerate this kind of silencing of dissent in the name of wartime security or unity — indeed, in times of war, dissent must be guarded and held sacred more than ever, since the moral debate is no longer about laws but rather about profound moral crises, about tanks and dropping bombs, about the lives of women and men, both civilians and military. You’re damn right that anarchism and anti-war protest is a disruption — and that is precisely why we must defend to the death the right to express it.

For further reading:

Fears of Domestic Fascism

I am scared, honest-to-God scared, about what is happening in this country.

There are no words for the terror, grief, sadness, rage, and pain of the attack on Tuesday. Perhaps 5,000 people dead. Thousands more wounded. All of us paralyzed by the carnage, the gut-wrenching horror, the crime against humanity that unfolded before us on live television, the Internet, the radio, the choking words between friends and strangers.

And now we have begun to react predictably, tragically, terrifyingly, like a beast stung. It had begun already on Tuesday when pols stood on state house and capitol steps all across the country and belted out God Bless America — as if the motherfucking abstract nation-state identity of America were brutally attacked by three exploding jets, rather than 5,000 innocent people. The flags and the yellow ribbons are appearing everywhere. In an unprecedented act of hatred, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell used the 700 Club as a pulpit to blame gays, lesbians, feminists, and secularists for the attacks. I can’t count the number of hateful anti-Muslim or anti-Arab statements I’ve heard person-to-person, or through the mass media. And now the violence has begun. Amateur brownshirts in Chicago had to be turned back by police with machine guns when a mob chanting U-S-A, U-S-A had to be stopped from setting fire to a mosque. A Muslim community center was firebombed. In Detroit, with the largest Arab population in the United States, Muslim centers were subjected to bomb threats and death threats; two young men were arrested after saying they were going down to kill all the Arabs in Dearborn. In Arizona, a Sikh gas station owner was murdered because his turban and beard made him resemble the media portrayal of Arabs.

On the radio I hear Sen. Zell Miller (GA) saying that when we find who is responsible for the attack we should Bomb the hell out of them. If that means collateral damage, so be it. What he doesn’t say is that collateral damage is a polite way of saying mass murder of civilians, and when he tries to justify it by saying that They obviously don’t care about our civilians he forgets that the innocents he is so eager to murder had nothing to do with the atrocity of 9/11/2001. NATO has already invoked the World War III clause of their charter. The hawks of the Right and Left have cried Havoc, and authorized President Bush with a blank check for military force and billions in new defense spending. They are already preparing us for permanent war against an unspecifiable, unlocatable enemy (a war against terrorism), which they have promised to fight through covert means (over 6,000,000 people worldwide have been killed by United States covert operations since World War II) and have made it explicit that no particular tactic is off the table (for those keeping count, that includes: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, carpet-bombing, etc.). At home, Tim Russert is saying on national Teevee that the line between security and freedom will have to be redefined — meaning less freedom. Already motions are being made to strengthen the police state through imposing new bans on Internet security software, increasing invasive searches and racial profiling of Arabs at airports, and extending the FBI’s wiretap powers. Nobody in the government feels they can afford to stand up to the railroading tactics of the Defense Department and the FBI, and what’s worse, perhaps nobody even wants to.

We cannot ever, ever forget that the warfare State and the spectre of terrorism have been the greatest instruments of fascist tyranny, and the demonic influence of tyranny is hard to exorcise once it makes its way through. The Cheka (Lenin and Stalin’s murderous secret police) grew to power in the USSR through playing on the threat of counter-revolutionary terrorism in the early 1920s. Woodrow Wilson used WWI to force through tyrannical Sedition and Espionage Acts — which somehow failed to be revoked after World War I ended, and were continually used to suppress dissent during Wilson’s term. The supposed threat of Communist conspiracy was used to justify innumerable police state tactics (sometimes illegal, sometimes not) by the FBI, including their surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. (who they attempted to blackmail) and Malcolm X (who they may have aided the Nation of Islam in murdering) and their murderous COINTELPRO program which they used to hunt down and kill members of the Black Panther Party and to destroy both above-ground and underground antiwar / radical Left activist groups. And already activists have been given notice to watch their backs, by Rep. Don Young (R-AK):

Young warned against rushing to the conclusion that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible. There’s some possibility, he said that the attacks are linked to the protests against the World Trade Organization, another of which [actually, a protest against the World Bank/IMF –CWJ] is scheduled for later this month in Washington D.C.

If you watched what happened (at past protests) in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there’s some expertise in that field, Young said. I’m not sure they’re that dedicated, but ecoterrorists — which are really based in Seattle — there’s a strong possibility that could be one of the groups.

Never mind that this is a vicious slander against Left-wing activists on the part of Rep. Young. It’s not any attempt to convey information at all. It’s an outright threat: *We are calling for new powers. And we are coming after you, all of you, the Lefties, the Muslim fanatics, the greenies, the anarchists, the militias… it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are opposed to this government and this American form of life, you will be targeted.

I don’t know what to say or what to do. I am physically, mentally, spiritually exhausted by what happened last Tuesday. I am horrified, I am sick, I still need more time to deal with this. But I am also scared, because I know that a lot of people — a lot of innocent Muslims, a lot of innocent people who look like Muslims, people who will be slaughtered in the bombing and covert operations pushed through by the same Reagan-Bush-Bush cabinet that brought you Iran/Contra and the death squads of El Salvador, people who will die in the terrorist retaliation, 18-24 year olds like me who will be sent to fight and die, dissidents like me who will be targeted by a growing, many-tentacled police state. Today I am honestly frightened about the prospect of domestic fascism in the United States of America.

The Problems of Black Block Militancy: Milksop Liberalism is Not the Answer

A column by Clay Risen [IMC] begins with some interesting suggestions to the effect that the debate over the security fence marking off a no-free-speech zone for the upcoming IMF/World Bank protests in DC is probably something of a red herring: debate over the fence and security vs. the rights of demonstrators will eclipse the discussion of the actual meeting, individuals, and issues that they are demonstrating against. All this is very true. On the other hand, Risen quickly descends into feel-good liberal blather as he suggests that black-masked anarchists who will take direct action against the fence or other private property will cast a pall on the entire effort that peaceful, thoughtful people labored for. Predictably, he invokes the well-worn liberal platitudes about Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to justify his sweeping dismissal of militant tactics and assumes that anyone who pursues them is simply an unthinking brute.

Well, look. A critique of Black Bloc-style militant tactics is in order. I know way too many would-be revolutionary white boys who have the time and the luxury to go to DC and throw things at police, but not everyone has the time, money, or legal protections and privileges that let them indulge in antagonism of police. But strategic use of direct action, including forceful direct action, can be a valid and important tactic. Police have proven in Genoa, DC, Philadelphia, etc. that they don’t give a shit whether you are violent or non-violent: they will beat the shit out of you and arrest you either way, and if they can’t figure out a reason they will make one up. Here, for example, the Black Bloc’s tactic of using force to un-arrest people from the police is a hell of a lot better than the passive acceptence of police state tactics urged by the liberals. Similarly, smashing barriers that keep demonstrators away from areas of wide public spectacle and media attention can accomplish the major goal of getting presence in the media (and directly in front of thousands of people) in a way that merely holding press conferences and peaceful marches will not do. Here a good example was the Black Bloc’s smashing of barriers between demonstrators and the motorcade route during the inauguration protests in DC.

We have, have, have to drop this one-dimensional mania for non-violent demonstrations and civil disobedience, along with its insipid, uncritical canonization of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Strategic use of violence — violence in self-defense, violence against barriers which have no right to exist in the first place and which it serves a goal to destroy — is a hell of a lot more effective than marching around in a pathetic little circle with clever slogans on signs that the DC police have ensured no-one will see. Both violent and non-violent action are needed. India’s liberation was not accomplished by Gandhi’s march to the sea, but by both Gandhi and militants such as Communist workers. Black liberation in the United States, insofar as it has occurred, was not the invention of Martin Luther King Jr.; it was both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, etc.

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