Waking up: freeing ourselves from work

 

Chapter V: The Plan (Part 2)

"Seeing Reality" - i

 

"...perhaps the beginning of 'the reversal' is when we start noticing what we didn't get (...or, rather, what's been systematically stolen...) and grieving..." ***

“Organization Demands Counter-Organization”

Non-freedom can never produce its opposite, and non-freedom is the essence of class society.
It is within a living culture that freedom resides.

 

The crime itself, the manner of the crime – that was the immediately intriguing thing. It was bizarre, undoubtedly…That angle did not bother the inspector. His years on the local force had taught him never to be intimidated by eccentricity. What made him uneasy was the feeling of being confronted by uniquely resourceful and organized cleverness…His seeing through the arrangement of apparent accident…had pleased him at first. But he now realized he had merely chopped down a tree to disclose a forest. (The redoubtable Inspector Purbright in Colin Watson’s Coffin, Scarcely Used)

 

In Mexicali they would pass out leaflets and I would throw ‘em away. I never participated. The grape boycott didn’t affect me much because I was in lettuce. It wasn’t until Chavez came to Salinas, where I was working in the fields, that I saw what a beautiful man he was. I went to this rally; I still intended to stay with the company. But something – I don’t know – I was close to the workers. They couldn’t speak English and wanted me to be their spokesman in favor of going on strike. I don’t know – I just got caught up with it all, the beautiful feeling of solidarity.
You’d see the people on the picket lines at four in the morning, at the campfires, heating up beans and coffee and tortillas. It gave me a sense of belonging. These were my own people and they wanted change. I knew this is what I was looking for. I just didn’t know it before. (Roberto Acuna in Studs Terkel’s Working)

 

No philosophy, no theory can undo the democratic introjection of the masters into their subjects…[Still…] protest will continue because it is a biological necessity…But in the administered society, the biological necessity does not immediately issue in action; organization demands counter-organization. Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight. (Herbert Marcuse, “Political Preface,” Eros and Civilization)

We’re talking about an exorcism – the uprooting of a mindset – and we’re talking about a reclamation, of our whole selves. Both objectives require conscious intention to accomplish.

We began this discussion by looking at the commodity form, peering into the false face, questioning the lies that roll off its many tongues.

“Human intelligence is like water, air, and fire – it cannot be bought or sold,” Robert Crowley told us. But podrunks, across time, space and nation, believe otherwise, and have, over the centuries, systematically, devotionally, applied whatever instruments they could seize to the goal of preventing us from reclaiming our own intelligence – from waking up.

So how do we get back what’s been taken? How do we exorcise, remove from our psyches, passive obedience? How do we confront ‘Power’ successfully? (three ways of asking one question.)

Only a unified consciousness – both as individuals and as cultures (or, initially, as communities) – can confront ‘Power.’ A unified consciousness, which is what a mass movement is, requires a unifying theory. And as the tapestry of our new world, our new lives, is whole cloth – no holes or tatters in the masterwork we weave – it might be helpful to think of our real work as seeking wholeness, and call it wholism.

The first step is to remove our psychic connection, our allegiance to, our unconscious complicity with, this system, and begin shifting our allegiance to the ancestors, the earth, and to each other – especially to our children (if the future is to be free it will happen sooner if our children get a taste of it) – keeping in mind that our goal is a future without bosses, and that “every effort under compulsion demands a sacrifice of life-energy…”

And what Tesla said next is suggestive: “I never paid such a price. On the contrary, I have thrived on my thoughts” – it suggests that the process of reclamation starts with our bodies, and our children’s bodies.

“You can’t fight for what you don’t love, and you can’t love what you don’t know.”

In the course of this book we’ve thought some about this question of who we are, essentially, as human beings. No doubt it’s an issue that’s received your attention before you ventured into these pathways. But now that you have, now that we’re talking the same language, so to speak, perhaps we can envisage a set of strategies that we can work on together, strategies that empower the whole individual simultaneously as they aim outward to building culture. Because as you stop to think about your individual wholeness, necessarily you’ll have to think about everything, the entire can of worms – you’ll have to ponder the packaged poison that this system presents to us as food.

 

We’ve all been given bad information. So one question is: at what point do you make the decision to seek good information? Is it when you stop idealizing your parents and begin seeing how they were unconscious functionaries of an abusive system, who hurt you without meaning to? Is it when you begin to grieve for the child that you were, who never got the absolute and unequivocal love, attention and security you needed? Is it when you begin to be the parent to yourself, or the friend to yourself, that you never had?

*** So, perhaps, for some of us, beginning to claim our wholeness will be about returning, writing and grieving: returning to home base (childhood), noticing what you didn’t get, and grieving. Do not, repeat, do not, make excuses for your mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandparent, cousin, guardian, brother, sister. Simply take your own side, this once. Think about it, write about it, talk about it, visualize it, draw it. Take your own side, this once. Remember every detail of each time, each moment, you felt alone, and grieve for that little girl, that little boy, who wanted so much to be seen, smiled on, praised, held, hugged, loved. Who wanted someone to hold her hand and follow her lead, to be his special friend on a journey to wherever or whatever he wanted them to see; who wanted someone to talk to her unbounded by ‘time’…to be her friend.

Remember it all. The loneliness you felt was wrong. The pain you felt was wrong. Think about it. Write about it. Write it down. Don’t forget. Whoever hurt you was wrong. Whenever you doubt that, read these words again, and your own.

 

Only once you’ve grieved for yourself, can you think about grieving for them (or anyone else) – the father, mother, uncle, brother – who were hurt like you – just like Alice saw.

 

When I decided to go to college, after having worked for a year right out of high school, I studied sociology because I needed answers: why are people so unhappy and alone? Why do some people have so much, while others so little? Why have I been defined by race and gender and income? Where did these categories come from and why do they exert so much power over our lives?

Later, I went to the ancestors with this problem called “work.” But I asked the question dispassionately, “objectively” with an academic air, a rational mind – not with love, passion, and a deep longing, an open willingness to do what was required – not with certainty. But I kept going back. Kept asking. Kept hoping.

I’ve always been a slow learner.

Each of us has spirit guides – ancestors, mentors – out there for us, inviting us into the stream of thought, suffering and struggle in which they flow; waiting for our questions, the questions that define our paths and tribes. *

We honor the ancestors by honoring our questions, the ones they want to help us figure out. Essentially, this means taking ourselves seriously, believing that we, each one of us, are vastly more important than this system of class rule we support every day of our lives with our participation, and by co-signing their illusions. We have to believe in our future without bosses. We have to know that honoring the ancestors, the earth, and each other is our true work. The other is just illusion. These jobs they give us to do aren’t real. They’re somebody else’s wet dream.

We come from the ‘all’ of it, we return to the ‘all’ of it – the Great Commons of Creation – that is true reality.

Keeping in mind our three sources of power: the ancestors, the earth, and each other, wholeness begins by defining your questions, the questions that define you – that reveal to you your path. They are the ancestors speaking.
If they’ve visited you, I hope you’re paying attention, because those of us who understand this communion have a responsibility to create the conditions of general freedom. Because only then can everyone have access to the Great Commons of Creation.

We share a common beginning as we embark down our various paths to wholeness. Like Subcomandante Marcos, in order to begin seeing things as they are we must first admit that things are not what they seem.

 

 ‘Seeing reality’ and ‘claiming wholeness’ are two sides of the same coin. They mutually reinforce. In order to resurrect our wholeness, our freedom, our art, claim our right to name ourselves – in the process restoring the earth to health – we have to begin seeing reality, seeing things as they are, not as they seem. Never forget Machiavelli’s advice to “princes” about how to control us:

…men in general judge rather by the eye than by the hand, for every one can see but few can touch. Every one sees what you seem, but few know what you are, and these few dare not oppose themselves to the opinion of the many who have the majesty of the State to back them up. …Wherefore if a Prince succeeds in establishing and maintaining his authority, the means will always be judged honourable and be approved by every one. For the vulgar are always taken by appearances and by results, and the world is made up of the vulgar…

Machiavelli remains relevant because ‘Power’ hasn’t changed. And if it’s survived the fall of Rome, the end of mercantile capitalism, the drowning of feudalism, and the successive iterations of modern capitalism, it will not meekly dissipate or evolve under the influence of moral injunctions about preserving the planet, or swoon under the celebrity status granted so-called “green economic” models. The coasts will be afloat and we’ll all drown before that happens.

No. This cat has nine lives and will only become past tense after it’s been ruthlessly strangled, boxed in concrete and dropped in the middle of the Atlantic. And even then I’d recommend installing and monitoring some biomed sensors, and checking them regularly, just in case.

I perhaps overstress this matter of “seeing things as they are,” because we are, we wind from below, so good-hearted. We are like Edmund’s “credulous father” and “foolishly honest” brother:

A credulous father, and a brother noble, whose nature is so far from doing harms that he suspects none; on whose foolish honesty my practices ride easy! I see the business. Let me, if not by birth, have lands by wit: all with me’s meet that I can fashion fit. (Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act I, Scene II)

All’s fair to the nefarious.

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; filths savour but themselves. (King Lear, Act IV, Scene II)

So I tend to despair when I hear the good-hearted tell us to emphasize the positive, downsize the negative – go with the festive, forget the restive – just live and let live – your flowers’ll bloom if you whistle that happy tune; because while I think it’s clear to anyone who’s hung in there this far that I believe in spreading joy to the maximum as much as anybody, we’re not gonna eliminate the negative just by accentuating the positive.

‘Power’ is organized. Podrunks flock round and endlessly circle their favorite texts like The Prince as maintenance rituals precisely of that organization. Marcuse was not pulling one out his bee-hind when he said “organization demands counter-organization.”

It does.

Podrunks are organized. So must we be. We have to gently, responsibly, stake this vampire. We have to control the economy, not the other way around. We have to control the polity, not the other way around. We have to issue our own particular version of Tatiana’s reality check.

From my front row seat in the Lecture Hall of the House of Feline, I’ve been educated to a degree in the ways of the cat. And from my studies I can definitively state that cats – and maybe all life – will plot and plan over a period of time when confronted with a problem. The four-year old Siberian tiger who leapt to freedom from her compound in the San Francisco Zoo had been thinking about that leap for a while.

We need to follow her example of pondering, but view the problem from a high enough perch to avoid her fate.

“Self-esteem begins with a workable plan.”

Our allegiance must be to ourselves. Rather than nurture corporations, we must come up with ways to support ourselves through the difficult times of transition – and codify those ways into basic precepts that will be there for us in times of uncertainty. Precepts like:

Live simply,
Help each other,
Don’t buy anything
but the least you have to.
And whatever we use
We get from friends.
We’ll be forming the crew
that builds the NEW.
No more settling
for less than what we want.

If “organization demands counter-organization,” the critical question to keep on the front burner is, “what is the organized ‘Power’ we must counter?” Until we’re clear on what ‘Power’ is, as opposed to what it seems to be, we can’t form ourselves into an effective ‘counter.’

 

For instance…now, I might be talking out those bee hindquarters myself here as I haven’t studied the example I’m about to give, and… if I’m too ready to roll to climb this rock face, I apologize – feel free to prove me wrong, but… Upon hearing some really good stuff about what’s called the “Transition Movement” spreading “virally” across the United Kingdom, I copied and read the following from Wikipedia:

Transition Towns (aka Transition Network, aka Transition Movement) is a movement that was created by Louise Rooney and popularized by Rob Hopkins. It was founded in Kinsale, Ireland and was then spread to Totnes, England by environmentalist Rob Hopkins during 2005 and 2006. The aim of the project is to equip communities for the dual challenges of climate change and peak oil. The movement currently has member communities in a number of countries worldwide. The Transition concept emerged from work permaculture designer Rob Hopkins had done with the students of Kinsale Further Education College in writing an “Energy Descent Action Plan”. This looked at across-the-board creative adaptations in the realms of energy production, health, education, economy and agriculture as a “road map” to a sustainable future for the town. One of his students, Louise Rooney, set about developing the Transition Towns concept and presented it to Kinsale Town Council resulting in the historic decision by Councillors to adopt the plan and work towards energy independence.
The idea was adapted and expanded in September 2006 to Hopkins’ hometown of Totnes where he is now based. The initiative spread quickly, and as of September 2008, there were one hundred communities recognised as official Transition Towns in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Italy, and Chile. While referred to as ‘towns’, the communities involved range from villages (Kinsale), through council districts (Penwith) to cities and city boroughs (Brixton).
In the United States, state sites have been setup using the popular Open Social software, Ning. These states sites, under the umbrella of a Transition US site, were set up to help facilitate, network, inform, monitor, and house regional and organizational Transition Initiatives and ensure the rapid spread of the Transition Movement while networking related organizations, projects, ideas and activities.
The main aim of the project generally, and echoed by the Towns locally, is to raise awareness of sustainable living and build local resilience in the near future. Communities are encouraged to seek out methods for reducing energy usage as well as increasing their own self reliance—a slogan of the movement is “Food feet, not food miles!” Initiatives so far have included creating  community gardens to grow food; business waste exchange, which seeks to match the waste of one industry with another industry that uses this waste; and even simply repairing old items rather than throwing them away.
While the focus and aims remain the same, the methods used to achieve these vary. For example, Totnes has introduced its own local currency, the Totnes pound, which is redeemable in local shops and businesses helping to reduce food miles while also supporting local firms. This idea is also planned to be introduced in three Welsh transition towns.
Central to the Transition Town movement is the idea that a life without oil could in fact be far more enjoyable and fulfulling than the present “by shifting our mind-set we can actually recognise the coming post-cheap oil era as an opportunity rather than a threat, and design the future low carbon age to be thriving, resilient and abundant – somewhere much better to live than our current alienated consumer culture based on greed, war and the myth of perpetualgrowth.”(http: //transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/who_we_are_high.pdf)

The Transition Primer PDF, available free online, adds that:

The purpose of ‘transition’ [is] to support community-led responses to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness. …[The first of its’] seven principles of transition [is that] “power is shifting from institutions that have always been run top-down, hoarding information at the top, telling us how to run our lives, to a new paradigm of power that is democratically distributed and shared by us all.”
…Transition Initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of the community in question beyond its present-day dependence on fossil fuels. Our primary focus is not campaigning against things, but rather on positive, empowering possibilities and opportunities.
…Successful Transition Initiatives need an unprecedented coming together of the broad diversity of society. They dedicate themselves to ensuring that their decision-making processes and their working groups embody principles of openness and inclusion.
This principle also refers to the principle of each initiative reaching the community in its entirety, and endeavouring, from an early stage, to engage their local business community, the diversity of community groups and local authorities. It makes explicit the principle that there is, in the challenge of energy descent, no room for ‘them and us’ thinking. (TransitionPrimer, www.transitionnetwork.org/Primer/TransitionInitiativesPrimer.pdf

The indisputable fact that human beings will have to “power down” or bow out has been lost on no one today. It is to their eternal credit that Louise Rooney and Rob Hopkins have seized the horns of our current ecological crisis and are pushing back for all they’re worth. I would encourage anyone who reads the above quotes, and finds in them the solution they’ve been looking for, to contact Transition Network Ltd., download or copy their Primer, bring in at least ten other good-hearted folks, figure out how to use Ning, start meeting, recruit more, write your own Energy Descent Action Plan, get an article written about you in a community newspaper (or write your own), contact your city council, develop a dynamite presentation, get on the agenda, light a fire under their asses, start doing all the things you wrote about doing, keep high-stepping, and don’t let nobody turn you around. You will have gotten yourself a Plan and you will have linked up. That is so in-the-right-direction I don’t know why I don’t just say “thank you” and quit while I’m ahead.

But I’m gonna trudge into the muck anyway.

What they’re doing is awesome. They’ve decided they will get their town to “power down” consciously, with intention and with an alternative value system. My only concern is that it doesn’t go far enough – and in today’s world, what doesn’t go far enough, isn’t good enough; not good enough to turn this Titanic, not good enough to save our most solidly enslaved brothers and sisters in the Global South, and therefore not good enough to settle the podrunks permanently (they are not called vampires for nothing.)

But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t tools in the Transitional Movement toolbox that we can use with our own ‘transition’ project: to build a mass movement to end wage work. There are. And we’ll consider that possibility in the concluding section of this chapter.

 

When I say it doesn’t go far enough I’m looking down several roads (environmental, politics, values) – that merge at the checkpoint ‘Power.’

Its values, though oppositional in many respects, are not essentially, wholly, oppositional to the current system. With the podrunks they say, “Don’t look back – let’s start with where we are now.” (Remember the ‘eternal “Now”?’)

When you don’t look back, you turn your back on the suffering of our ancestors and the suffering of all those who made “the myth of perpetual growth,” the excess, the bombardment of commodities, possible – without so much as a “thank-you.” It doesn’t acknowledge the source of the existing accumulated ‘wealth,’ it doesn’t acknowledge those to whom we owe the built world around us.

When we don’t look back, we don’t see those who’ve gone before, and those who are going under – the many hands making our lives light.

When we don’t look back, we participate in the con that it doesn’t matter how we made this sinkhole, so long as we can build ourselves a plank – never mind the dead bodies footing it, or the living enslaved left to the whim of the demons.

But it’s that kind of tunnel vision that brought us the sinkhole in the first place.

And it’s that kind of tunnel vision that gets directed right back into the avenues of ‘Power.’

We can no longer claim ignorance. It just isn’t good enough. It won’t get us to our future and it won’t save the planet.

 

We have to start with the understanding that things are not as they seem. When we face the reality that this global economic system lies – via its bought-and-paid-for: states, media, military, and academes (obviously incompletely) – then you can begin to conceive of the necessity of de-conditioning ourselves. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

And that means relearning how to organize ourselves apart from the compulsion to categorize and package, rank and control. ‘Hierarchy,’ ‘Ladders,’ and ‘Ascending Levels’ are roads that all lead back to ‘Power.’

The only scale we feels needs more than the “Guidelines” [given in the Primer] is the National scale initiatives starting to emerge in the US, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Japan and other places. The need is arising in countries for functioning replicas of Transition Network Ltd to provide its five functions in a way embedded in the language, culture and context of the host nation and/or culture, and also to provide a strategic national overview. The idea is that the handover is gradual, taking place over four stages, starting with inspiring, supporting and encouraging, then moving on to training, and finally taking on the networking functions as well as the development of adapted principles and offering support to newly emergent initiatives. They would also act as ambassadors for the Transition movement at Governmental and organizational levels. …At the moment, applications for formal status are managed by Transition Network Ltd., but in time, the idea is that this function will most naturally be fulfilled by emerging national groups/networks, and also by regional initiatives. Some people in the Transition movement have suggested that new initiatives should self-assess – or that there shouldn’t be any criteria at all. Others strongly disagree with both these suggestions. On balance, and based on the feedback we have received from across the network, we feel that having clear guidelines which are assessed by supportive third parties creates a positive, meaningful process, but fully agree that they must remain open to debate and to ongoing review. (Transition Primer)

I had a dream once about a ladder that I described in my journal. In it:

…the most greedy, materially-acquisitive of the world were told that there was more free stuff, “wealth,” waiting for them at the top of an endless stairway, and they all got on it and started climbing, climbing, climbing, heading up, up, up, excited to get yet more, more, more, and the earth was rid of them, and they were never heard from again.

‘Hierarchy,’ ‘levels’ – those roads all lead back to ‘Power.’ So we have to stay off those roads – and trust. The linear thinking we’ve been schooled in is propaganda masquerading as “civilization,” “Reason,” “The Only Way.”

The challenge, given our conditioning, is to name ourselves without packaging ourselves.

So, for instance, once we’re living our wholeness, cooperating across cultures, those of us in colder climes who want, say, bananas or mangoes or coffee, will have to figure out creative exchanges – high-tech, organized, cooperative projects – with those folks blessed in the sun, water and warmth department. This doesn’t mean that a small Bay Area village will have to venture into discussions all on its lonesome with the climatically-blessed when there’s no big, powerful state, with its big, powerful bosses, to figure out this ‘problem’ for it. All it means – this fact that there are differential bounties, distributed variously around the globe – is that we will – we free, independent villages of free, independent folks – we will have to clump together in perhaps ungainly groups. But, recall, we have all the time in the world – no deadlines, no bosses, no pressure. If we want to plan a “Coffee-Cruise” of folks willing, so their villages will receive the blessings of the coffee bean, to help with the harvest – that’s what we’ll do. (Of course we may also settle on other cooperative and individual ways to grow our own bananas.)

We have been ‘enjoying’ the benefits of the underpaid, soul-crushing toil of the working peoples of the global South (and our own low-income urban and rural communities) for centuries, without acknowledging the suffering and the sacrifice. Enough, already. Enough.

Coffee anyone?
During the massacre of East Timor’s civilians in September 1999 by Indonesian armed forces and militias, the conversations at coffee klatches at Starbucks around the country were predictable, considering the trendy clientele. Pointing to front-page stories in the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post, politically-correct Starbucks patrons voiced their angst du jour. "Isn’t it awful what the Indonesians are doing to those poor people in East Timor?” they groaned, as they sipped their tall latte made from organically-grown coffee beans. Little did they realize that the aromatic East Timorese coffee blend they were savoring may have actually prolonged the long-suffering of the same people whose fate they were bemoaning.
It turns out that Starbucks enjoyed a very cozy relationship with the Indonesian military-backed coffee-growing colonists who ran East Timor’s large plantations…
Behind every American foreign policy tilt you can usually find a bevy of political contributors. East Timor is no exception. The chief beneficiary of those delectable East Timor organic coffee beans that flow through the U.S. government-sponsored supply line was Howard Schultz, the Seattle-based Chief Executive Officer of Starbucks…Ironically, Schultz fancied himself as a progressive Democrat…he has championed health care reform, liberal employee benefits, and the environment by banning the doubling of coffee cups in his stores, [but] Schultz was much less concerned about the East Timorese, who have weathered one of the world’s most brutal military occupations while providing his corporate brew pots with the much desired East Timor coffee beans…
 Starbucks’ support for unsavory regimes did not end with the Indonesian military occupiers of East Timor. After Rwandan President Paul Kagame transformed his country into a virtual one-party state, Starbucks announced it was interested in buying Rwandan coffee… (Wayne Madsen, Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, and Big Oil, p. 77, 81-2, 83)

It’s hard for the well-padded middle classes who’ve never suffered the kind of hardship experienced in the global South and in the low-income and rural communities of the North – suffering imposed by faceless functionaries of an impersonal system – to see reality – which is why essentially good-hearted people can tell us to just look forward, never back.

 

And this is also why those who have experienced that kind of hardship rightly view the good-hearted plans of good-hearted middle-class people with skepticism. Because they know that, come the wet-ass hour, those happy faces will turn on them so fast they’re gonna need an exorcist, on top of their other troubles.

 

 

Continue to "The Plan" - Part 3

 

 

© Pamela Satterwhite for Nas2EndWork (the NEW)