wages for housework…
File this under “betcha didn’t see that coming” - Hugo Chavez, in a recent speech, essentially instituted a modest wages for housework program:
The role that housewives play in the economy and the nation also needs to be rewarded said Chavez. Beginning this summer, 200,000 poor homemakers will each receive roughly $200 (372,000 Bs) a month.
Chavez said, “These mothers work a lot, ironing, washing, preparing food, cleaning and bringing up kids.� More money has been set aside for the project and the number of beneficiaries could quickly rise above half a million.
Which women would receive the money would depend on several conditions. These include marital status, how many children they have, their living conditions and already existing levels of family support.
The measure is an outgrowth of Venezuela’s 1999 constitution, whose article 88 specifies that the constitution recognizes household work is economic activity that produces wealth and well being. Also, according to this article, since it is economic activity, homemakers have the right to a pension.
It should be noted that this amount is fairly significant, equivalent to about minimum wage. Perhaps autonomists might be convinced to abandon their dogmatic anti-Third-Worldism (read: Eurocentrism)?
strangely Lacanian
someone i know has bought a gift for a friend’s baby toddler: “toe-tappers rocket-star booties.” these, apparently, are shoes for a kid, but no ordinary shoes. besides being shaped like rockets, these are moreover lacanian shoes.
evidently, “the crinkle paper encourages self-discovery.” is this some sort of warped lacanian mirror-stage, where the child identifies itself in the crinkle paper? what kind of kid identifies with crinkle-paper, rather than a statue, standing tall, which belies her own lack of motor skills? the crinkle paper says little about the child’s capacities, and i fail to see where the identification comes in.
incidentally, a web site sheds some light on the question, though not in a particularly encouraging way: it apparently has something to do with babies “discovering their feet.”
can a vegan…
… enter, in good conscience, into a “touch and see mammals” room? if so, are they permitted to “touch” or only to “see”? if they, say, ride a huge stuffed bear, or play with a buffalo skull, is this a sin?
this and other difficult questions (see below) await us on the way to the communist future.
a question of timing…
revolutionary temporality has always been a difficult issue. great thinkers have devoted a great number of pages to the subject. here at the wrong side of capitalism, we do our best to tackle these and other difficult questions, so in the spirit of this monumental task, we pose the central question of revolutionary time:
do we round up the capitalists first, and then cut the guts out of the bureaucrats? or, alternatively, are the guts prepared before we catch the capitalists to string them up?
a new slogan for the movement?
it’s just come to my attention that there was an obscure pulp fiction novel from the 50s/60s entitled “no wings on a cop.” feel free to fill that with whatever referential content you wish. it’s a shame i can’t find a picture of the cover, because it has a picture of a presumed cop wearing a cast on his arm…
this makes me think we could learn a lot from such novels. perhaps the black bloc central committee can put a working group on it asap.
kanye west just keeps getting better…
i’ve been planning a post on k. west’s new album “late registration” for a while, and now i couldn’t have a better reason. briefly, i heard an advance version about 6 months ago, and it was terrible. it sounded like kanye had given all of his best beats to common for the “be” album. but i recently got an updated advance copy, and it’s pretty spectacular. he’s added some of the released singles, as espected: “gold digger” is excellent, as is “diamonds from sierra leone.” but there are also some unexpected gems, and a visible increase in political consciousness: on “heard em say,” he notes “i know that the government administers aids,” and on the excellent “crack music” - “how do you stop the black panthers? ronald reagan cooked up an answer”. so things are generally looking up, and the beats are good too.
on to the present subject: on a telethon broadcast for new orleans on msnbc (possibly viewed by millions), kanye appeared with mike meyers. while meyers dutifully read the teleprompter, kanye substituted his own text, including the following:
“I hate the way they portray us in the media … If you see a black family it says they are looting if you see a white family it says they are looking for food.”
“We already realize a lot of the people that could help are at war now fighting another way and they’ve given them permission to go down and shoot us.”
and then, after letting meyers return to his teleprompting, kanye looked directly into the camera and said: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
mike meyers just looked at him dumbfoundedly, and the broadcasters cut away immediately. it’s pretty difficult to overstate the importance of this (though it appears that msnbc cut the clip out of its west coast broadcast). fucking sweet. i will try to upload the video here so you all can se it.
“natural” disasters as bad faith
according to sartre, bad faith manifests in either the flight from freedom or the exaggeration of the same. so-called natural disasters are, clearly, moments at which the forces of “nature” interact with the forces of social organization. last year, a massive hurricane slammed cuba, but thanks to their collectively-organized evacuations and sheltering, no one died. forces of nature + cuban communism = no natural disaster.
christian parenti has recently demonstrated that the so-called evacuation of new orleans was classical laissez-faire free-marketeering, in which an announcement was made and all were expected to flee individually. forces of nature + free market = death of poor (black). this shouldn’t really be surprising to anyone, since it is precisely the sort of outcome predicted by all neoclassical economic formulae (i.e. unemployment, provision of social goods like health care, etc.). parenti certainly misses the point in a lot of ways, as this “invisible hand” was, in effect, overdetermined by race: race helped to determine to whom the free market applied (note the images of heroic airlifting of elderly whites from a retirement home, while already-evacuated elderly blacks die on the floor of the football stadium). moreover, the characterization of “looting” is fairly explicitly color-coded (see image below). but parenti’s point holds regarding social organization, and we can add sartre to the equation. the claim that such events are purely “natural” is a fucking joke, and patently bad faith, since it is an attempt to hide the extent of human freedom (in this case, human responsibility/guilt). and this is a powerful tool of reaction. “natural”-ness, in terms of disasters, thereby sits comfortably alongside genetics in masking human agency in the present era.
as a side note, thucydides has some interesting insights into the non-naturalness of disasters like drought and plague in the pelopponesian war.
Live 8…
i saw some of that shit last night, and frankly it made me want to hang myself. i don’t know if it was madonna dancing with a token ethiopian who had been “saved” 20 years earlier by live aid, or sir bob’s montage of starving children. this latter display was particularly sick, both in its racism and its disempowerment, but mostly in the fact that it isolated the african situation from its political and historical context. i was hoping that the images of starving africans would be interspersed with images of americans overeating, or of offshore oil drilling platforms in nigeria, but no luck… the colonial mindset was also present in spades: in, e.g., the assertion that one million deaths in somalia rendered it “hopeless.” the supreme irony of Eurocentrism in the post-WWII context is, of course, that thirty million dead did not result declarations of the “hopelessness” of Europe (Fanon and Cesaire excepted).
evidently, by the incomprehensible standards of longtime zapatista translator irlandesa, this makes me a cynical naysayer. too bad. but her attempts to justify the bono phenomenon (based strangely on the gendered character of irish nationality) are utterly nauseating. perhaps this says something about the perpetuation of naivete in zapatista solidarity circles.
while you’re at irlandesa’s site, check out the recently-released Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. it’s apparently a big announcement, preceded as it was by a red alert and an internal consulta, but i’m probably not the only one who wonders what exactly is new about it. it was good to see some outreach to both chicanos and cubans, though.
anarchists thinking about venezuela?
what’s gotten into them? seriously, this is good news, though they are a “red” and anarchist network so i don’t know how much this represents a significant development, especially since Chuck0’s response was predictably shite:
“I think that American anarchists (or Yankee anarchists if that’s more specific) have been following the situation in Venezuela. The fact that another leftist is in power in some country isn’t an excuse for us anarchists to soften our criticism of the Chavez government. There are enough signs already that the Chavez government is drifting towards being just another authoritarian government.”
venezuela has become quite rightly a focal point for determining who are serious allies. it’s also putting some necessary pressure on holloway, et al, who will probably end up on the right side in the end. after all, it’s pretty difficult to maintain the old claim that the state cannot function as a viable instrument for change in the face of glaring evidence to the contrary. (interestingly, and evidence of the importance of chavismo is the fact that indigenous activists in bolivia are calling for a constituent assembly, as you can see in this spectacular photo. this is the new vehicle for radical transformation, and it has nothing to do with european theories of “constituent power.”)
without the claim of impossibility, anarchists are forced to either come to grips with reality, or to fall back on the much weaker claim that given historical evidence, chavismo will turn out badly in the end. the problem, of course, is that this means nothing to those who need change in the present.
also: mos def on assata shakur.
also: i second tim’s reaction to the new common album, especially excellent is “corners,” which features last poets. see the video.
boondocks…
has an excellent series of comic strips going on now, about a self-hating black santa, who shows all of the symptoms of Duboisian “double consciousness,” and who moreover exemplifies the sort of racial “climbing” described by Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks.
