Since the Human Species has very little protective hair in our skins,
some forms of body covering was critical for our survival. Certainly
some heavy furs to keep the winter's cold from us, and a heavy woven
garment to protect our skins from the blistering summer sun. But of
course we couldn't let it go at that. We devised certain kinds of
coverings for certain kinds of people. But even that was not enough.
We had to decide that the bodies we entered the world in, were too
embarrassing to look upon. So now, instead of being used just for
protection from the elements, we use clothes to hide our natural
covering...our skin.
I even remember a group that wanted to enact laws demanding that pets
be clothed. We're so accustomed to draping our bodies with garments
that really do nothing in the way of protection, but are used to "show
off" our economic status or to complement our beautiful bodies. Just
imagine people going about our daily business, bare naked. How would
we tell the bosses from the lowly clerical help? For the most part we
could still tell men from women, although some older men do develop
boobs. My once manly chest is now doing just that. It's as if my
chest is trying to keep up with my expanding stomach. Trust me, I'm
not going to trot this sagging body into the Mall in order to protest
clothing. But I do think that we have done some very weird mind games
when it comes to our thinking about "certain body parts". God forbid
that we come to understand that we are just one more species of animal
life on Planet Earth.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/29/17, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx> wrote:
I am sure that there were plenty of guys along the parade route lusting
after the women in the march. After all, there are plenty of men lusting
after the bodies of women who are normally clothed every day. But that
was not in the least the point of the march. The stated purpose was to
normalize women's bodies. More to the point it was to protest the
restrictions put upon women's freedom. It was also to make the point
that whatever is acceptable for men should be acceptable for women too.
That is why I think that it would go a lot further to normalize women's
bodies to just do normal things with their bodies exposed in the same
way it is acceptable for men to expose their bodies. Now frankly, in the
normal course of my day when I could see I did not see many men walking
down the street without shirts. Occasionally I did though. However, at
public pools, on certain work sites, at back yard barbecues, there were
often shirtless men. It seems to me that if women want to normalize
women's bodies then they should be just as prone to go topless in those
situations as men. And now that I found out that in this state it is
perfectly legal for women to go topless in public I think it would go
far toward normalizing their bodies to go topless in situations that men
usually don't. Yes, that would mean going topless just walking down the
street where men usually don't go topless. Prurience is completely
beside the point. And for that matter, if topless women did become the
norm I would expect that it would become no more a prurient experience
for men than looking at a pretty pair of legs in public is now.
On 8/29/2017 12:57 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Back in my "other life", when I could see, I was a commercial
photographer. I did a brisk business shooting photos of babies, took
group photos like bowling teams and Flower Clubs, and accidents. But
what I wanted to be was a photographer of beautiful women. I loved
classy young women dressed for success in their finery. Early on I
decided that I was not going to dabble in nude photography. Not that
I didn't admire(lust after) women's nude bodies. But I observed the
attempts by some of my fellow photographers, and I realized that it
took very well trained eyes to pose a nude so she looked natural, and
at the same time, desirable. I remember opening a drawer in the dark
room of a friend and pulling out a stack of the ugliest looking nudes
I'd ever seen.
Anyway, what I'm driving at is that partially or totally naked people
going about their daily business might have an appeal to many young
Studs, but I'd venture that after a very short time looking at the
baggy, wrinkled bodies, both male and female, they'd be begging folks
to put their clothes back on. But having said all of that, what more
natural act can there be than a mother suckling her baby.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/17, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx> wrote:
A couple of months ago there was a Free the Nipple march in downtown
Charleston. It was organized by some feminist group. I think I caught
their name, but I have now forgotten. The women gathered at a certain
city park where they removed their tops and then marched to another
predetermined place. They chanted phrases like "free the nipple" and
"women's body's are normal" as they marched topless. They stated their
purpose in marching topless was to normalize women's bodies. While
following the news coverage of this event I learned something. I had
thought that if a woman appeared in public exposing her breasts she
would be promptly arrested. But as it turns out in West Virginia the
indecent exposure law only requires that the genitals be covered. No one
mentioned it, but it occurred to me that would leave a lot of body
parts that it would be perfectly legal to expose like the buttocks for
example. It turns out that it is perfectly legal for both men and women
to go topless in public in this state. On one of the local news feeds I
follow on Facebook there were a lot of comments making the most vicious
insults toward the women who marched and, even though in the minority, a
good number of messages of support. I made a comment myself. I mentioned
that I had just learned that it was legal for women to go topless in
public in the state and in that case, I said, if the whole point was to
normalize women's bodies then why not do normal things while topless.
How about going shopping topless. How about going to the park topless?
How about just hanging out on the street topless? I expected to be
viciously attacked like I usually am when making a comment on that
Facebook page, but to my surprise no one commented on my comment at all.
I only got one like. It later occurred to me that perhaps my comment was
taken as a sarcastic comment from one of the opposition. I hope not
because I was serious. I think that is the way to most quickly normalize
women's bodies. I would only advise keeping most of it indoors and to
use lots of sunscreen when going topless outside. There is too much skin
cancer as it is.
On 8/28/2017 10:39 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Many years ago, in another world, Disney Studio did a nature film in
which a mother Bison gave birth. The studio cut that footage from the
film. It might be offensive to some, they said.
Back in 1962 my wife Judy and I were about to meet our new baby. It
would be delivered by C Section, so we already knew the day. So we
were sitting around my in-law's house and I said, "Judy is going to
see if she can breast feed our baby". My mother-in-law screwed up her
face as if she'd just had a lemon shoved in. "That's nasty", she
said. Judy's sister said, "How would you feed the baby if you came to
my house for dinner?" "I could go into another room", Judy said. But
her sister looked mortified. And so we used formula in a bottle. I
never asked, nor did I ever want to know what my wife's mother and
sister thought breasts were put on their chests for.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/17, Roger Loran Bailey <rogerbailey81@xxxxxxx> wrote:
A few years ago - wait, time keeps creeping up on me, it must be a
matter of decades now - there was an incident in which a brand new
mother was breast feeding her baby in a branch meeting of the
Socialist
Workers Party. Another female comrade took offense at that. Everyone
else seemed to be okay with it and I know that I would have been okay
with it if I had been there, but the particular comrade thought it was
scandalous. The matter escalated to the point that the national
committee had to deal with it and the story ended up being written
about
and published in an Education For Socialists bulletin that was
distributed to the party as a whole. The party did not take a position
on whether public breast feeding and breast feeding inside a party
function was appropriate or not. I would expect that when the issue
comes up external to the party, though, as it often does that the
party
would tend to defend public breast feeding. Nevertheless, the incident
was disruptive within a party branch and there are a lot of other
potential for the presence of children to be disruptive. The final
decision that was made was that children would be banned from internal
meetings and functions of the party. As for public functions, it would
be kind of hard to tell people who might attend that they must leave
the
children at home or else. In fact, after that time I saw women attend
Militant Labor Forums myself with small babies and in relation to this
issue a comrade told me about a Jamaican born woman who attended a
forum
who breast fed her baby while there and who was not especially anxious
to cover up once the baby had finished. In the article there was some
discussion about how the DSA had begun to provide separate child care
services at its functions. I don't remember if they were providing
these
services both internally and for public events. The SWP ultimately
decided that it should not take on child care services. So the
decision
was that parents were responsible for arranging for child care on
there
own when they were attending internal functions and, I suppose, if a
member of the public brought a child to a function and the child
caused
a disruption that the parent would be approached individually and
asked
to deal with it somehow. I don't know of that latter scenario ever
happening though. In the article, though, one very strong reason was
given to not provide child care for public events. That is that if
something unfortunate happened it might leave the party open to
lawsuits
and I think it was mentioned that the DSA was taking that risk. All of
that was a long time ago though. Internal party policies may have
changed and it was not all that common that comrades had small
children
anyway. I am pretty certain, though, that the party still does not and
never has provided child care services for public events. When the
class
struggle strengthens to the point of being able to have large mass
meetings that may have to eventually change too.
On 8/28/2017 10:34 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
Miriam and Brave Souls Everywhere,
Right. I knew that it's not something the American Communist Party
does today, and I suspect that such programs were later than when my
folks were active in the late 30's and early 40's. At least such
expansive thinking never infected the single mindedness of the stern
faced men and sharp no nonsense eyes of the women who gathered each
week in the old store front on Queen Anne Avenue. They had a nation
to take over. I do remember my dad and some of his buddies sitting
around deciding what jobs they would take, when the "Revolution"
came.
My mother was a bit more practical. "Who do they think is going to
start this revolution while they sit on their backsides blowing hot
air?" She could not tell the difference between Dad and his Buddies,
and the guys already in power. What she saw were men sitting about
ordering their flunkies out to do the work. In Dad's case, it was
the
women and children who did the leg work. I can't begin to count the
number of envelopes I stuffed, sitting at the back table in that
hall,
or the hundreds of flyers I tucked in doors around the North end of
Seattle. But of course while these young men were dreaming of the
day
they took charge, those already in the top dog slot were not idle.
Harry Truman and Joe McCarthy with his legal counsel Richard Nixon,
along with the FBI and their many stoolies, came crashing in the
front
door and hauled many of those dreamers in front of the UnAmerican
Activities Committee and painted them as Commie Infiltrators Trained
in Moscow by the KGB. The American Communist Party never had a large
following, and those young men sitting around dreaming young men's
dreams, were not ever going to mount an army of protesters. But the
Ruling Class took no chances. J. Edgar Hoover turned most of his
forces loose on hunting down those Commies and Fellow Travelers and
the Pinkos.
Later it was obvious, like Monday morning quarterbacks, it was
obvious
that this was all part of a push against the "socialism" brought down
on honest Capitalists by that turncoat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
It
wasn't until Ronald Reagan ascended to the Oval Office that some of
the Working Class began to awaken to the fact that they were under
attack. Until that time Unions were doing okay, wages were drifting
upward, almost keeping up with rising cost of living, credit was
becoming easier, so many families now were moving into the suburbs
and
taking on 30 year bank loans. Since Ronald Reagan's 8 years, the
unraveling of our social services teeters on the brink of
annihilation. And the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover expands into a
monster, no longer content to ferret out the Pinkos, but now hunting
down the "Illegals", the Muslim Terrorists, and all who fail to kiss
the hem of our new leader's royal garment.
The Ruling Class full well knows that it is Fear that is their
greatest weapon. They use it to turn one group against another, and
to keep each individual worker fearful that his job will be the next
one sent off to...wherever. We, the working class, are held in the
grip of many Fears. Some are real, but many, many of them have been
manufactured to keep us trembling in our heavily mortgaged homes.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/28/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't think the article says that the Communist Party does all
those
activities now. I think it says they once did it. Apparently, it
depended
on
where you lived and which faction of the party you were involved
with.
I'd
love to see an objective comparison of the current Green Party and
the
SDA.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl
Jarvis
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2017 12:46 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Socialist Horizon: Building a New
Party
I can live with the DSA. But can Corporate Capitalism? I am
prepared
to
change my vote from the Green Party to the DSA. And for the moment,
I
might
consider joining as a member. If the old American Communist Party
in
Seattle had organized family and Party activities, like this article
says
they do now, and had they put my mother in charge of organizing
concerts,
lectures, child and elder care support groups, I most likely would
be
a
Marxist today. But these stern, no nonsense Party leaders of the
1940's,
ordered mother to put Party before Family. All they saw was her
backside
as
she herded her three children out of the Hall.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/27/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Socialist Horizon: Building a New Party Saturday, August 26,
2017
By Benjamin Balthaser, Truthout | Op-Ed
mix of centralization and decentralization, its democratic ethos
within a larger structure, its flexibility and yet its consistency
speak to both the needs as well as the disaggregated shape and
culture
of today's millennial working class.
The Democratic Socialists of America is a mix of centralization and
decentralization, its democratic ethos within a larger structure,
its
flexibility and yet its consistency speak to both the needs as well
as
the disaggregated shape and culture of today's millennial working
class.
(Photo:
Northside Chicago DSA)
As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention wound to
its
close at the beginning of August, I was struck with the historical
strangeness of what I witnessed. Decades after proclamations of the
"end of history" and critiques of institutional hierarchies and
vertical structures of power, here were nearly 1,000 mostly young
activists gathered in a giant lecture hall doing the work of
building
a radical political party: taking votes, making motions, electing a
national leadership, making speeches for and against, observing the
strange Anglo-Saxon strictures of Robert's Rules of Order.
The convention in Chicago has rightly garnered an enormous amount
of
attention, both for the unprecedented size of the organization, as
well as for its increasingly red hue. The surge in membership makes
DSA the largest socialist organization in the US since World War
II,
and its growth in strength and popularity is equally marked by its
radical
turn to the left:
delegates voted to endorse the boycott, sanction and divest (BDS)
movement against Israeli violations of human rights; they voted to
embrace the creation of an Afro-Socialism Caucus that includes a
platform for abolishing prisons and police; and they reaffirmed
their
distance from the Democratic Party and their role in creating an
independent socialist movement. They did all this while
strengthening
the centralization and structure of the DSA by introducing monthly
dues payments for members.
As Chilean activist and writer Marta Harnecker notes, the rise of
globalization, neoliberalism and the end of the Cold War has also
led
to what she refers to as the "social disorientation" of both the
working class and the left. The organization of workers into giant
Fordist factories in urban centers, the growth of social and
cultural
institutions, such as massive schools and state colleges, also did
the
work of organizing the people into shared sites of social
production
and
reproduction.
While on the one hand this modernist reorganization of life
produced
greater social alienation, it also produced the physical
infrastructure for mass-based, centralized social movements. One
can
think of the rise of early-mid 20th century radical parties such as
the Socialist and later Communist Party USA, which exercised wide
influence through six-figure membership bases, affiliated labor and
civil rights groups, and high-profile political campaigns as a kind
of
structural analogy to the mass production/mass consumption
modernist
society Fordism produced. Perhaps the largest mass-based
working-class
organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), was a
direct outgrowth of the giant factories that comprised the major
sites
of its organization.
An increasingly shared mass culture also helped produce new
political
movements at mid-century. Small ethnic enclaves and segregated
neighborhoods could join in a dominant, increasingly plebeian mass
culture industry that featured, for the first time, ethnic accents
and
working-class, urban heroes, such as James Cagney, Duke Ellington
and
Barbara Stanwyck. During CIO drives, one organizer recounted white
and
Black members listening to a Joe Louis fight on the radio before
going
to recruit members for its integrated locals, and Richard Wright
famously wrote of the Louis-Baer match as leading to a jubilant,
spontaneous uprising among working class African Americans on
Chicago's South Side.
Within the mid-century cultural and material matrix of Fordism, the
Communist Party, unlike the Democrats or Republicans, built an
entire
way of life, vertically and horizontally integrated, with softball
leagues, newspapers, dances and activity groups like the Friends of
the Earth
(camping) and the John Reed Clubs (writing) that provided not only
for
the political needs of its members, but also for their social and
even
romantic needs. "You could live an entire life within that world,"
one former Communist related in Vivian Gornick's oral history of
the
movement. The Communist Party, like the centralized and Taylorized
mass culture of the period, was constituted by a sense of totality
and
organization that marked both work and leisure. As capitalism's
"other," Communism organized much like Fordist corporations it
opposed.
Flash forward a half decade, and the landscape of both capitalism
and
left radically changed. Globalization and neoliberalism have not
only
widened the gap between the rich and the poor within and between
nations, they have dramatically reorganized the economy away from
large-scale urban manufacturing to decentralized and increasingly
mobile just-in-time production. While this shattered what was left
of
the large AFL-CIO unions, it also disrupted the material basis for
social, even socialist organizing.
White flight, suburban sprawl, strip malls, the spread of
automobile
culture and online micro-communities have not only changed the way
social life is organized, they have also disrupted the forms of
organization on which the "old left" was built. If the culture of
modernism was based on the chance encounter on the city street and
collective anonymity of the factory and rail car, suburban sprawl
and
the post-modern cubicle entered a new form of fragmented
alienation,
one that is isolated as it is as often subcultural.
Theorists of left-wing social organization, such as Michael Hardt
and
Toni Negri, as well as journalists, such as Naomi Klein, celebrated
these forms of disaggregation heterogeneity. Hardt and Negri
described
the
"multitude"
as the shape of the new working class. Decentralized and
unorganized,
this new class of knowledge and service workers would meet together
in
loose networks and horizontal associations, giving up neither their
autonomy as subjects nor their heterotopian forms of difference.
Klein
described in The New Left Review the revival of "the commons," both
a
public and social space held by all, as well as a vision of radical
democracy without ideological or political center. Narrating the
first
uprising against neoliberalism after the end of the Cold War, Klein
remarked that the affinity groups and spokescouncils of the "Battle
of
Seattle" resembled nothing more than the internet, as well as the
new
forms of capitalist organization in Silicon Valley. Flexible and
just-in-time production had met its match with flexible and
just-in-time organizing.
We are a class society, riven by fault lines of race, colonial
status
and gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from view, and neither
is
its opposition.
Yet Klein made another comment after the exuberant fin-de-siecle
explosion against the World Trade Organization and an increasingly
bleak
millennium.
Speaking in 2001 in front of a roomful of activists at UCLA, she
asked
if the uprising in Seattle was a "movement" or a "collective
hallucination."
This question is perhaps more telling than its answer. In the years
following Seattle, the left witnessed uprising after uprising, the
massive shutdown of the International Monetary Fund in 2001, the
half-million protesters in New York City against the invasion of
Iraq,
the many millions that hit the streets in the immigrant rights
movement, the protest camps of the Occupy movement, and most
recently,
the rebellions against racist state violence in Ferguson and
Baltimore. These movements, much like contingent, unstable, rapid
flows of financial capital around the globe, surge and then
diminish,
explode into the streets and then go quiet. Our movements are our
collective hallucinations, in a global system that seems to be
spinning from crisis to crisis.
So, what does it mean that young people, the children of
neoliberalism, seem to be abandoning the horizontalism, disavowal
and
decentralization of my own generation X? As Jodi Dean suggests in
her
manifesto, The Communist Horizon, radicals have never taken the
claims
of horizontal democracy as seriously as they proclaim. All
movements,
she argues, are vanguard acts; they make claims of representation:
"We
are the 99%." "The Movement for Black Lives."
They claim to represent "the people," however they are defined,
against an elite or a class or an institution. Yet the question
Dean
poses is not so much whether we will commit acts of representation,
but rather whether we will build organizations that can contain
difference and the multiple gaps, omissions and divisions within
capitalism. Shall we have the vanguardism of the subculture, or the
organization of the Party?
Young radicals are voting with their feet. After a generation of
uprisings that have left us hanging in the air, it is safe to say
activists are tired of phantasmagorical movements, of collective
hallucinations. The crises of capitalism, from racialized state
violence, to the "gig economy," to environmental catastrophe, to
rape
culture, to privatization of our public schools and our privatized
imaginaries cannot be solved within the same affective structures
that
produce them. Richard Wright wrote after witnessing that
spontaneous
uprising on Chicago's South Side, "say comrade here's the wild
river
that's got to be harnessed and directed." When I read that 20 years
ago, I winced at what I thought was Wright's incipient Stalinism.
Two
decades later, it now reads like common sense.
Or perhaps rather, we are returning merely to certain 19th-century
verities
-- that we are a class society, riven by fault lines of race,
colonial
status and gender. Capitalism is no longer hidden from view, and
neither is its opposition. Which is not to say DSA is a Stalinist
or
even Communist "cadre" organization. Its mix of centralization and
decentralization, its democratic ethos within a larger structure,
its
flexibility and yet its consistency speak to both the needs as well
as
the disaggregated shape and culture of today's millennial working
class.
A party is more than just a collection of individuals; it is a
claim
on the future, a vision of another horizon.
As the convention wound down last week, one of the older comrades,
someone I know from an earlier socialist formation, slowly led the
delegates through the tune and phrases of "The Internationale,"
before
and after the crowd spontaneously erupted into the
White-Stripes-turned-political-football-chant, "Oh Jeremy Corbyn"
and
then "Viva el Day-Ess-Eh" ("DSA, DSA, DSA" it was decided, sounded
too
much like "USA, USA, USA"). This mixing of political cultures -- of
spontaneity and tradition, of a polyglot US with a long tradition
of
democratic organizing
-- marks an epochal shift, away from spokescouncils and affinity
groups, and toward the political party. We should not be shy about
what a change this is. A party is more than just a collection of
individuals; it is a claim on the future, a vision of another
horizon.
And it is one that we cannot wait another generation to witness.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Benjamin Balthaser
Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multi-ethnic US
literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and the author of
Anti-Imperialist Modernism. His writings have also appeared in
Jacobin, In These Times, Boston Review, American Quarterly,
Truthout,
Criticism, Cultural Logic, Tablet and elsewhere. Benjamin is a
member
of the South Side Chicago Democratic Socialists of America Steering
Committee.
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