movement politics

By Jay Burney - Climate Connections, August 25, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

System Change is needed. Without that, positive impacts on climate change will be a pipe dream.

The United Nations is gearing up for the COP 20 Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru in December of this year, and the  UN Climate Change Conference/COP21, to be held in Paris, France in late 2015. A primary goal of the Paris Climate Summit is to ratify a new legal agreement aimed at stemming climate change.

Many people across the earth are concerned UN efforts and these summits will come up far short of any meaningful goals.  This Inside Climate News article, MIT Study: Climate Talks on Path to Fall Far Short of Goals details some of the concerns.

In preparation for the Paris Summit, on 23 September of this year, the United Nations will hold a one day session on Climate Change.  This will garner significant press attention as world leaders including business and political mouthpieces continue to posture for “business as usual” solutions geared toward the potential 2015 legal agreement.

Preceding the one day UN session are two significant events in New York City that you can participate directly in. The Peoples Climate March will be held on Sunday Sept 21, 2014. Organizers are predicting that this will be the largest Climate March in history. Although organizers have not created any demands per se for the goals of the March they feel that press and media attention will go a long way toward establishing public support for change.

By Alexander Reid Ross - Earth First! Newswire, August 26, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Force of Gentrification

Unfortunately, when talking about Ferguson, few people are really talking about gentrification. And if we can’t say gentrification and Ferguson in the same breath, we can’t look at the bigger problems. The murder of an unarmed black teenager? How about the racialized murder of civil society by the police state and the ongoing destruction of the world that it is bringing about?

These things may seem fragmented, but they are all connected. It’s necessary to look at them separately before they start to make sense together. Through the tear gas, pepper spray, and smoke, the home invasions, church trespassing, and illegal arrests, the police state is creating a toxic breeding ground that could happen anywhere. It is becoming a model for domestic military response to fast-growing insurrection.

Ferguson was a small town on the outskirts of St. Louis until the 1950s. When the US industry boom occurred after World War II, rapid urbanization ensued. Towns like Ferguson would double in population size between 1950 and 1960, and then double again between 1960 and 1970. But then something happened. We call it neoliberalism, but might as well call it good old fashioned colonialism.

The industrial economy was kneecapped by the State, and nothing was put up in its place to break the fall, except the prison industry and “urban renewal.” Towns like Furgeson started declining in population, but another phenomenon emerged: the racial switch. As gentrification slammed communities of color in St. Louis during the 1990s and 2000s, Furgeson went from 73 percent white to 67 percent African American. One of the hardest hit areas in the whole country, the Washington Ave “Historic District” designation saw the white share of the population of Zip Code 63101 in St. Louis rocket from 28 percent to nearly 50 percent between 2000 and 2010.

Today, Ferguson is the 19th most rapidly gentrifying city in the US—after being the “shatter zone” for people of color being pushed out of other urban areas, the population of Ferguson is being pushed out again. Police practices of persecuting the poor—such as convicting people in closed-session court, giving them large fines, and then locking them up when they can’t pay—are plentiful in Ferguson, and the police openly discriminate on the basis of color.

The police force in Ferguson has become notorious for its outlandishly racist policies, such that some might say that the racism of the Ferguson police we have seen over the past two weeks is worthy of the Third Reich. But this is Missouri, the state that the St. Louis coordinator of the NAACP calls “the most racist state” in the US. We have our own history to contend with here in the US of Amerikkka.

By John Tieu - Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, August 21, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The Our Power National Convening kicked off on August 6th, 2014 in Richmond CA, a diverse city that houses the Chevron Richmond refinery. This refinery is also one of the larger greenhouse gas emitting factories in the nation. The city itself is an example of what happens when capitalism’s method of exploiting the working class, extracting their profit, and commodifying our environment reaches a peak. An alarming number of people in Richmond have suffered, and are currently suffering from breathing issues such as asthma due to the city’s harmful air. Crime has been consistently high, and disinvestment in the city is affecting urban space. The refinery itself, which provides jobs to a sizeable amount of the population in Richmond, is also a highly unstable and dangerous work environment.

At a community vigil on August 6th, participants of the convening learned about and paid tribute to the victims of an explosion that happened at the refinery two years ago in 2012, sending 15,000 to seek treatment.

The city’s population itself is constantly being reminded of their struggles with bombardments of smoke plumes and advertisements from Chevron citing modernization and expansion as positive changes. I’ve never seen or experienced any neighborhood like it on the east coast. A resident in the city of Richmond seems to have almost every aspect of their life permeated by the Chevron corporation, as it seems to always and constantly be in the collective conscience of the neighborhood. As an intern who did not have any background in environmental studies, did not focus on issues in my own neighborhood that dealt with clean air and energy issues, and did not ever have to live in the shadow of a massive refinery, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I became involved with CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities this past summer, and had dealt with multiple issues ranging from organizing tenants in Chinatown, to doorknocking in NYCHA owned complexes, to putting on a screening of Delano Manongs, a film about the Filipino Farm Workers movement. While all somewhat varied in its subject, the projects had no readily apparent connections to the themes of the convening, which were mostly based on environmental and climate justice. Throughout the event I struggled to understand my place, as well as CAAAV’s place in the fight for a just transition into a new economic system, when there hasn’t been a direct connection of organization’s work focused on these issues. It had taken the majority of the conference to understand why Grassroots Global Justice would want to send Jeff (a fellow member) and I here to Richmond…

Labor Network for Sustainability - August 22, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Sean Sweeney of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy and Jeremy Brecher of the Labor Network for Sustainability discuss the significant labor ferment around the climate crisis. Climate change changes everything: everything about how we organize society, how we conduct politics, and how we envision the role of an organized labor movement in society. Sean explains that the transition to an equitable, sustainable energy system can only occur if there is decisive shift in power towards workers, communities and the public. Trade Unions for Energy Democracy is a global initiative to advance democratic direction and control of energy in a way that promotes solutions to the climate crisis, energy poverty, the degradation of both land and people, and responds to the attacks on workers’ rights and protections. Jeremy, author of Unions backing historical Peoples Climate March, argues that a just transition is a matter of elementary justice—it is unfair that workers who through no fault of their own happen to work in jobs that need to be eliminated to achieve a social good should bear the burden of that change by losing their jobs. The environmental movement should have a jobs program of its own, and should not leave the jobs piece up to labor. Likewise, the labor movement should have a climate program of its own, rather than leaving climate protection up to the environmental movement. Both movements need to begin to internalize how their missions are intertwined. The September 21st Peoples Climate March is demanding a world with an economy that works for people and the planet; a world safe from the ravages of climate change; a world with good jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities. Listen at: http://www.equaltimeradio.com/2014/unions-confronting-the-climate-crisis

Suggestions on how to chip away at the empire in the Empire State this September:

By Panagioti - Earth First! Newswire, August 22, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

As the days of action surrounding the UN climate talks in NYC get closer, the internal sparks are already starting to fly with debates over who is annoyingly liberal, who is fronting with empty militant rhetoric, who is affiliated with Zionism and who is pro-Palestinian, which unions might be down and which are most likely to sell out the planet for promise of a few jobs, etc…

This is a call to resist the temptation of spending long nights trolling the internet on the above topics in the following month. Rather than scroll through endless posts, tweets and comments, wracking your brain to aim your limited characters with precision*, why not occupy your thoughts with questions such as these:

• Where can I sign up to resist the Rockaway gas pipeline under construction right now in NYC?
• How can I get to Albany to join growing opposition to increasing oil train traffic through communities there?
• Who do I talk to about planning an action against a proposed gas plant in Orange County?
• When’s a good time to take action in solidarity with small farmers against the monster power lines proposed across the Hudson Valley?
• Is there a community garden in Manhattan that I can help defend, and maybe pitch a tent in?
• What about organizing in response to tar sands barges on the Hudson River?
• And, why the f**k haven’t they shut down the Indian Point Nuke plant yet?

With a month to go, now is the time to start figuring out meaningful participation that can build momentum beyond of a march-and-go-home scenario.

By Josie Foreman - Red Pepper Blog, June 9, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Something strange is taking place in my world. My friends are employing servants. These are not rich people by any means, but lower-middle class teachers, NGO types, trade union organisers and cultural workers. They are liberals and lefties. Often they are people living in a rented room in shared houses, since living alone in London nowadays is beyond most people’s means. But they can afford to employ cleaners.

I have to admit that I have a strong reaction to this – a mixture of self-righteous moralism and class rage which is not necessarily very politically useful and certainly rather unattractive. Yet I have two kinds of vested interest in this issue: firstly my mum worked as a cleaner, my dad still does, and I used to in my early twenties; secondly, I now write about and research the history of domestic servants, focusing on the nineteenth century when 1 in 3 women cleaned other people’s houses for a living. So I’m writing this article to try to dissect the overwhelming feelings that rise up in me when I hear about my friends employing cleaners – to trace the historical roots of this revulsion and to find out whether it can illuminate the political issues or whether I should just dismiss it as a self-indulgent persecution complex.

What I am sure of, however, is that this is not a trivial question. I do not think that wanting to scrutinise why people employ cleaners is an act of middle-class self-loathing akin to worrying that your friends spend too much money on their organic veg boxes. Because the global market in migrant domestic labour touches on an even wider problem – the problem of reproductive labour. As our sisters in the Wages for Housework and Women’s Liberation Movement pointed out, reproductive labour (cooking, cleaning, caring) ‘reproduces’ labour power and therefore capital by ensuring that people are well-fed, clean and emotionally stable enough to work each day for a wage. Many commentators have suggested that the present historical moment is one of a crisis in care, whereby much of the reproductive labour previously provided by the state (free school meals, old people’s home, childcare centres) are being cut and pushed back into the private sphere of the home.

What all this amounts to, therefore, is that we should not assume that people employ cleaners because they are lazy. The burden of reproductive labour placed on the individual household with all adults in full-time waged work is now immense. This is coupled with the fact that anyone lucky enough to be employed right now is expected to work excessively long hours and to bring work home with them. Many of my friends quite understandably claim that they don’t want to spend their one day off a week doing more work cleaning their house. For people who have children, the problem is intensified – domestic labour is boring and exhausting and takes up far too much of our precious free time.

So does this mean that employing a cleaner is a sensible solution to the crisis in reproduction? Someone gets a job and someone else gets a break? This is the justification given by many of my cleaned-for friends. Yet I believe the dilemmas and emotions awakened by the employment of cleaners extend far beyond this simple calculation, and have powerful material and historical implications for our ability to build solidarity with other human beings and create a different kind of world.