Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Just Say “No!”…To Corporations, or…“Boycott the Corpse, and then Bury It!”
(The multiple strands of this action can be interwoven on our Nascence websites.)

As consumption is addictive – a compulsive substitute for real human interactions, and real human lives – we’ll need each other, in more ways than one, to break the habit.

Just saying “no” is critical in many ways, but I’d like to focus on three. We have to say “no” to: support our brothers and sisters around the globe; support our own creativity, wholeness and health; and to allow us to ‘see’ our power when we stake the vampire.

It will be argued that people around the world “need those jobs,” or that we “need those jobs.”

This is like arguing that the women of Afghanistan need American soldiers in combat boots stomping through their homes and streets, shooting their husbands and sons, because they’ve been denied full access to the polity, that only ‘Power’ can bring ‘freedom’ to ‘the people.’ This is, of course, so ludicrous it doesn’t merit discussion.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Corporations could care less whether you or I or a farmer in China has a “job.” This goes without saying. When Sunbeam left Cleveland, do you think it cared how its former “workers” faired?

And when “workers” are tossed into the street left and right when the economy “contracts,” people don’t think, “well, at least we had the corporation for a while. That’s the important thing.”

We’ve been batted about and treated like trash for centuries. Do you really think we can’t weather a storm that will bring us our freedom?

Ask the local community outside the Coca-Cola facility in Plachimada, in the state of Kirala, India how they feel about the “jobs” Coca-Cola so generously offered them. Ask them what they think about Coca-Cola’s contamination of their groundwater with pesticides, or about its’ just plain-old theft of their water – 500,000 gallons a day!

And as for the really, really ‘cheap’ products the super-exploited, usually dark-skinned peoples of other lands bring us, “all of us, or none” means that our solidarity is with them as they battle the corporation and its surrogates. Believe me, they understand communal banding-together far better than we do. If we stake the vampire, they can live.

We can no longer consume teenage girls in China / Indonesia / the Philippines…or an entire population in the Congo…in order to have more cell phones or ultra-thin-whatevers.

Period.

Our comfortable lives cannot be bought with blood. We have to trust the voice of the ancestors in us. Any solution we devise together must embrace everyone – we cannot leave any of our brothers and sisters either hanging by a thread, or standing outside the shiny, glittering chambers of decision-making – meaning, that the handout of a few jobs from some re-tooled newly ‘green’ economy is not sufficient. “All of us, or none,” must be our motto – absolutely.

Whatever we have now that is soaked in the blood of fellow humans is enough.

Rather than consume products soaked in blood, it’s time to smell the blooms grown with love.

Granted, I am far from typical in my consumption pattern as I’ve been sitting in my room reading and typing for what feels like a lifetime, but when I consider the products that sustain me, I find that the more “awake” I become, the more my ‘needs’ shift to those ‘things’ that cannot be priced.
Being “awake,” of course, is a process that occurs in direct proportion to “time freed from wage work,” or life lived unrushed. That’s why I’m writing this.

Unburdened by all the cons, the bounties of the earth have become more aural, aromatic and tactile. I seem to better appreciate the green smell of the germinal earth, the springy feel of it in my hands. I feel a quickening of my senses, a longing for a more rounded stimulation, beyond the oral.

At the same time, I seem to move more slowly through the pulsing sensations of the earth, putting me at odds with those preoccupied with speed.

I consume food, water, warmth, smells, ideas…and a lot of coffee. I tell myself, “it’s free-trade, sustainably grown, organic coffee…” Still.

And then there’s that toilet paper. In the future, bidets and composting toilets await us, but we aren’t there yet. So what do we do for non-corporate toilet paper? …and interim non-corporate financial structures? …and interim non-corporate electronic communication? (I so want to be done with AT&T, there’s no way words can convey how badly I want them gone.)

Take it to the crew. As we figure out our own “withdrawal problems,” our solutions can be posted on our Nascence websites.

The point of inventorying your crew’s skills, services and products is dual. It’s a way to support each other materially, but also creatively.

As we begin to treat our own dreams and the dreams of our crewmates as real, valid, and exciting, they begin to take on a firmer shape and substance – and we begin to feel a little less crazy – because our art is acknowledged.

Within the small sphere of my life there’s a woman who makes soaps, a woman who makes books, filmmakers, musicians, martial-artists, actors, chicken-lovers, carpenters, yoghurt-makers, Chinese-medicine practitioners, visual artists, electricians and gardeners. When I think about the intersecting concentric circles of all our skills, talents, and gifts, it reinforces the ‘knowing’ that all we need to take back our world is the wanting to…enough…

…and, of course, also, the trusting-to.

With the inventory, over time, we begin to realize how truly gifted we are. If I really love organic rice-meal brownies, I can be certain that there’s a ‘you’ out there who really loves to make them. And then perhaps I’ll go to ‘you’ rather than to some big-box chain for some anonymous crap passing itself off as food. And in exchange for you servicing my chocolate fix, there might be an electrical problem you want some advice on. Ka-boom, done, dollar-nexus makes an exit…little by little.

A product and services exchange is what we want.

To the degree that we can free ourselves from dependence on corporations now, for the products we need to live, to that degree will the podrunks be less able to turn us against each other; and, to that degree, we’ll be able to sail our self-sufficiency ark…to the NEW world.

And, while we’re on the subject of those oh-so-toxic big-box stores, we can merge our spiritual and political commitments, and begin to feel our power, by starting our wholesale withdrawal with targeted boycotts of really horrendous corporations, or ones doing really horrendous things.

For example, the news on our local Pacifica station recently has been reporting that Starbucks, Costco and Whole Foods are joining forces to sink by overloading with water the Employee Free Choice Act. These corporations have a certain pseudo happy-face feel about them for reasons opaque to me, all three being viciously anti-Union. But for some reason they enjoy a better reputation than those other die-hard corporate misanthropes, WalMart and Home Depot. Why not start our boycotts with these five? And if we throw in Coca-Cola for good measure, in solidarity with our Kirala brothers and sisters, I’d say we have the fixings for a fine flexing of the communal muscle. Watch Our Communal Force Flex!

All together now!
One, Two, Three, Four,
We don’t buy from you no more!
Buy from the people,
Buy from the source
Buy from each other
And bury the corpse!

One, Two, Three, Four,
Show the vampires to the door!
Buy from the people,
Buy from the source
Buy from each other
And bury the corpse!
Don’t buy from the big-box!
Don’t buy from the big-box!

Make it fun. Make it real. But make it happen. Put the word out: “we don’t buy from you no more.” Say why, and keep spreading the good news. It has an effect whether we see it or not, but, sooner or later…we’ll see it.

Not only are fun and work not mutually exclusive, but fun is what realizes the potential of whatever we do, it’s the quickening of life, the sperm fertilizing the egg.

So, it’s not – “’the Idea’ realizing itself.” In our ‘system,’ the point of ‘History,’ if it must have a point, is Fun realizing itself. Fun is what makes every fucking thing worth doing. That is what will seal the deal, one day – once we’ve congealed (again).

The Electronic FLEA (Free Linkages, Exchanges and Assistance) Festival and Street Fair:
So what might a Product and Services Exchange look like? And can it significantly reduce the buying we do from corporations? Of course that depends on many unknowns, the most important one being, perhaps, “how badly do you want good fellowship?”

I remember when my son was in his tens he had the experience, a few summers in a row, of going away to a music camp. Each time after he came home he would be depressed for a while. Making art communally, hearing the sound of your instrument harmonizing with others’ – living music reverberating through the trees – is so intoxicating.

It’s what our bodies want.

There were few comforts at the camp of the sort the corporate world tries to make us believe we need. But oh how he missed that making of music communally, the sharing of food and art, once it was gone.

Obviously there’s nothing remotely comparable electronically. The Internet is a tool, not an experience – critical though it is for expanding the power of the people. But as people damaged by an abusive system, we’re susceptible to substitutes for the holes in our souls, especially those not only addictive, but almost coercively available. I hope you never let this tool get away from you – or take anonymous voices that present themselves to you, posing as whatever, at face value. Not a good idea. The podrunks are devoting a lot of resources right now to the manipulation of opinion over the – what should we call it? – the Virtual Opium? There are false-faces galore.

That said, the power to disseminate the people’s ideas today? …Wow.

In order to build a mass movement the social networking tools like “Ning” will be indispensable.

An article about one of its founders, Gina Bianchini, makes this argument:

Unlike general social networking sites, which create a common river of profiles in which everyone swims (think of our individual networks of social connections as groups of rafters floating on the current), Ning has built a platform on which anyone can build a defined online community of people interacting around any issue or interest. A MyBarackObama.com in every garage! Of course, as with blogs and so much else online, many of these erstwhile communities will fade for every one that thrives.
…Why set up a custom social network? For political or advocacy communicators, Gina sees it as a chance to start and facilitate a conversation among supporters or advocates…
What makes a Ning-based social network “custom” is that it’s functionally yours, since you generate the members and you control the community features. You can also control the appearance and branding of the site — it’ll be hosted on Ning, but it can appear to be a part of your normal advocacy or membership site… (http://www.epolitics.com/2009/01/15/nings-gina-bianchini-on-using-custom-online-social-networks-for-politics-advocacy/)

Building our social-networking sites, sharing our skills and art, working hard to jump-start intangibles, with no guarantees of success, will be doubly challenging because of our mutual-suspicion-and-individualism training.

Trust is always a problem in a non-culture, in an abusive system based on force. This problem underscores the importance of devoting however much time is required to the initial task of “seeing reality.” This discussion-time will hopefully air and resolve whatever reservations might exist in your small group about the relevance and practicality of embracing a commitment to “shared reverence for life” – to that which leads away from a death-defined cultural-absence.

It’s important for a crew to have three-phase power too.

It also underscores the importance of beginning to break down the mutual-suspicion-and-individualism conditioning with affirmative moves out-of-doors – taking our art to the streets in such a way that carnivals, colors, sounds, costumes, busting out unexpectedly on the streets of one’s town, over time communicates the messages that its time for all of us to take our art seriously, and that we can, and should, interact with each other spontaneously. This will make all of us safer from police harassment, as festive gathering is normalized, but will especially make it safer for targeted low-income youth of color.

As a place to begin, consider where your money goes, what products you use, and whether they could be locally replaced, either by someone in your group, or near enough. And if, at the same time, we’re unearthing and disseminating the truth about how hazardous the products the corpse-designed products brought into our homes are, our personal efforts to honor our art take on an even broader significance. It really doesn’t make sense to prop up corpses with our consumer dollars so that they can continue to harm us. Why shouldn’t we make our own soaps, detergents, and other products used every day, and share them with the broader community?

What might naturally follow after that assessment is a website design that has pages for “products needed,” “products produced,” “assistance needed,” “assistance available” – listings that are regularly viewed by your crew, with linkages made attended to.

And although the temptation at this point is to launch into some perky, feel-good list (PowerPoint-capable) – “Buy local! Grow your own food! Think happy thoughts!” – typical in final chapters following grim news, Baldwin hovers at our shoulder and counsels against the ingenuous simplicity of pap. Writing about the shameful McCarthy era in this country, he said:

For, intellectual activity, according to me, is, and must be, disinterested – the truth is a two-edged sword – and if one is not willing to be pierced by that sword, even to the extreme of dying on it, then all of one’s intellectual activity is a masturbatory delusion and a wicked and dangerous fraud. (James Baldwin, No Name In the Street, p. 31)

So – a little rugged truth: if I’ve made this sound like a PowerPoint presentation – it so is not. We will have to work our asses off, and take enormous psychic risks in reaching out to others unlike ourselves, to move the mountain of narcissism in this country, the me-first-ness, the you-last-ness, the I’m-better-than-you-ness.

And, believe me, I know from bitter personal experience that our exorcism-maintenance chores will have to be devoutly performed when it comes to the “Narcissism-Blossoms-Out-Of-Time-Issues” training. No matter how ‘awake’ I think I am, the least bit of ‘rush’ and the old pattern floods back. We’ll have to practice being consciously slow, practice recognizing the ‘rush demon’ when it rises, practice an immediate response of slowing ourselves down.

The price of an oppositional consciousness is eternal vigilance.

Reverence requires time – time to notice, to pay attention, to feel gratitude.

Notice how all our other animal friends give thanks: the cat’s long, languid stretches; the dog’s snuffling appreciation of the density of smell; the squirrel’s everyday heroics in their diving acrobatics and their flipping aerobatics through the trees; by comparison our everyday obliviousness looks crude indeed.

*
But there’s a deeper, catalytic truth beneath the rugged one: we have no choice but to take up this challenge, and figure it out, whatever the problems – our children and theirs need a future based on freedom.

Over the long haul, the amount of time it takes to get to our future will depend on the amount of total commitment that a few “workers” and students and street-folks and youth together devote to it.

Most challenges to ‘Power’ throughout the history of class society have involved this alliance in some way or another. Students, youth and street-folks bring idealism, energy, time, and the fact of being so freshly from that river of freedom. And working people bring practical knowledge, skills, patience, and material resources. These are broad-stroke generalizations, of course. There are plenty of really powerful people of all ages and backgrounds who will bring all of these things…and more.

And when I say “material resources,” I don’t just mean, a house, say, that provides shelter to students or youth who commit for the long haul. I also mean chickens that lay eggs, a vegetable garden, a sewing machine, a loom, a compost pile, computer programs, vehicles, and power tools.

If electronic connections are continually reinforced by physical ones, using the physical resources offered by your immediate environment, there will be an energy generated that is utterly compelling, that logically extends to the streets. And when you spill into the public commons, presenting visible displays of working together with the hand, showing the products made with the hand, augmented by the universal force of harmonizing instruments, people are drawn, and the ideas embodied by these acts disseminated and discussed. Little by little…

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 10

Nascence to End Work

Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 9)

Waking Up: Freeing Ourselves From Work