It's totally the Pats!

Some other things we talked about during session:

Reproductive Policy According to Capitalist Assimiliation

• How reproductive policies vary by race and productivity level. Poor white women & black slave women were forced to reproduce (i.e. abortion/birth control illegal, pregnancy by rape) because their offspring were easily brought into the capitalist scheme as workers. Native Americans on the other hand, who struggled fiercely to resist assimilating into capitalism - and thus were an economically unproductive" population (for the white ruling class) - they were forcibly sterilized and prevented from reproducing. This is possibly a simplification, but the general idea I think rings true.

Leaving Other Behind in Labor Protection

• We watched a video about domestic worker organizing, led mainly by women of color, and I thought how maddeningly frustrating it is that when all the labor laws were being won in the early part of this century - that farmworkers and domestic workers were explicitly excluded. These areas dominated mainly by people of color and women. And it pointed to how successful the strategies of division have been - labor rights could have been won for all at that time, but people allowed themselves to be divided up by race and sex, and the white men sold everyone out. It also made it clearer how the feminist movement of the latter half of the 20th century sold women of color out - instead of demanding that the work that women of all races/backgrounds did be valued, they settled for a middle/upper class educated women being let into the white male economy. Which also entailed the housework they had been doing falling onto the shoulders of mostly women of color domestic workers, who were then not protected equally by labor laws.

Gay Marriage Reinforcing Racist Insitutions
I read an awesome, though also dense, article by Priya Kandaswarmy called "State austerity and the racial politics of same s⁳ex marriage in the US". The crux of the article was that "the language of marriage [in general] has effectively been used to undermine welfare rights and to depoliticize economic inequality altogether."

• Although welfare gets handed out to people of all classes and races - corporate subsidies and "bailouts," veterans' benefits, tax breaks, food stamps - only the ones used by lower class people, mostly women, get called "welfare" and stigmatized
• that these women are depicted as lazy, immoral, and scheming, and predominantly black even though NONE of those things are statistically true.
• There were official acts, (PRWORA - Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) that pushed women into marriages and low-wage jobs. "the welfare state's new mission was to police women's personal lives and to coerce low-income women to trade reliance on state assistance for the uncertainties of the low wage labor market or dependence on a man." Enforcing heteropatriarchy and that women's key to economic survival is tied to men.
• Gay marriage advocates play into and reinforce the narrative of the US as a place that believes in equality for all, that the our country loves freedom and justice, and that the last group left ot be included are the gays. When the reality is THIS COUNTRY IS BUILT AND DEPENDS ON INJUSTICE. Saying anything otherwises reinforces the racist institutions that rely on economic exploitation of people of color. "These erasures participate in a contemporary, nation building project that casts the US as a multicultural, inclusive, color-blind democracy, while at the same time solidifying the unequal distribution of material resources and rights."
  
• "While advocates of same sex marriage seek access to expanded rights and benefits through marriage, discourses about marriage are simultaneously used in the service of denying rights and resources to and enhancing the regulation of black women."
  

The Middle Ages, a history darker than Monty Python

Two weeks of reading, a regular group session, and a study group session later, and I find it hard to start this because really it's all so overwhelming and takes a while to put all those floating thoughts together. But I will. But also know that a really awesome way to get more on this is listening to an hour long lecture by Silvia Federici, available here.

The grapefruit metaphor
So in the previous session, as our lovely Catalyst leaders were prepping us for the coming readings and session, lovely Clare went into this beautiful extended metaphor about how one of the pieces was so full of sweet and nourishing juicy fruit, but the skin on it was thick as a grapefruit, and we'd really need to sink our teeth in but keep our eye on the prize of that luscious fruit underneath. We all kind of marveled at the metaphor for a while, then someone raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's inaccessible," and Clare said no, and talked more about the thick peel. We all marveled again for a minute. Someone else raised their hand and said, "Do you mean it's boring?" and Clare returned to the grapefruit story. Then another person rose their hand and said, "Is it Marxist?" and we all cracked up because just that day I had been airing my disconnection with Marxist theory. Clare refused to put any labels on it, told us we should read it and judge it for ourselves. Well, it was inaccessible and marxist, but I guess I can't really call it boring.

Transition from feudalism to capitalism
It was actually the most major piece of this week, and pretty groundbreaking. It was the coming together of feminist theory and anti-capitalist theory. A woman named Silvia Federici did some amazing historical research deep into the dank & dark Middle Ages of Europe, and essentially laid bare how the transition from feudalism to capitalism was predicated on totally destroying women's power. Not to say patriarchy began then (we tried to look up on wikipedia "when did patriarchy begin" and we got the date of 3 BC. wow!), but that our economic system was (and therefore) totally built on it, gives us more reason to fight capitalism! (like how in the US it was built on racist slavery & theft of native lands)

How did that happen? Well, read the damn book! Or at least the excerpts. Or listen to this lecture. The Book is called "Caliban & the Witch."

Transition to Wage Economy
But I'll share some of the points I came to understand. The most major illumination for me was around the idea of unpaid labor. I know feminists talk about women's unpaid labor all the time, and we try to enumerate it, but I've always had a bit of a hard time visualizing how that work would ever be paid. Mostly cause capitalism is all I know. But under feudalism, no one was paid wages - work was whatever people did to survive - men did some of those things and women did some of those things, and stuff had equal value in terms of survival. As capitalism was imposed, some people - namely, men - were chosen to receive money for their work, and then people's idea of value changed from "this helps me survive" to "this pays me money."
Things changed from a division of labor to a hierarchy of labor.

How did money even come into play? People had been used to surviving off the common forests and natural resources, and paying taxes (in the form of goods mainly), but the feudal lords decided to seal off the commons - via the Enclosures - and privatize them. So then people had to get "jobs" working for the Lords and get paid - and thus the transition to a wage economy. As the forests/lands were privatized, Silvia Federici says that women themselves became the "commons," the natural resources - places to extract what you needed: housework, children, sex - without having to pay for it.

Oh, and the women resisted. We learned a little about the movement of people and groups that were labeled heretics - (and whose visions and goals were strikingly similar to current social justice/anarchist/liberation movements!!! damn, now that's some history to the movements) that really put out an alternative vision to feudalism and certainly capitalism. And many of those movements were lead by women, who were really locked out of the new economy. And what happened to the heretics - burnt at the stake.

Bodies into Machines
Another course of events was the Black Death, which really decimated the population of Europe. As capitalism began, a new vision of a place's wealth developed - and it was calculated by the number laborers available. So as the population died out, there was a desperation by those with resources to find enough workers to exploit. This is when we see intensification of punishment for things like abortion, birth control, and midwifery - generally women's control of reproduction. The ruling/owning class needed women to be literally producing new workers. And a whole 'nother part about divorcing people from their bodies - that bodies needed to become laboring machines, able to give as much as possible, so religious ideologies spread that made people feel that bodies were disgusting and needed to be controlled. And the joys of the body - dancing, sex, etc - also needed to be judged and squashed - people needed to be working, not fucking all the time! There's a whole lot more to explain about this, but I'm finding it hard to recreate all of the theory and discussion - it really was so dense that article!

Witch Burnings
I'm trying to leading up to the significance of the massive genocide of women via the witchhunts. Take into consideration all the stuff above, then add in a bit about needing to break the solidarity of the new working class - and doing that by pitting the men against the women. The author talked about the rampancy of gang-rape of lower class women, and says that in some towns the rate was as high as half the men of the town having participated in some attack on the women. Then women who were poor, lived outside of the new order being established, or retained knowledge of human bodies (herbalism, etc) were viciously pursued and murdered as witches. I don't know a death toll, but it lays somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000 women killed for these reasons - and that doesn't include the execution of heretics as part of the Great Inquisition, which also targeted women living outside the new economic systems and the ideologies that supported them. That is huge. That is a notable genocide.

A painful thing to look at is that during the witchhunts, there was only one documented case of the men of the town acting together to prevent the wholesale murder of their women.

Precursor to White Supremacy
How does all this relate back to white supremacy?

The story of white supremacy we've been learning is that of capitalist motivation, the fabrication of divisions to keep people poor and exploitable, and the vicious and brutal violence to keep people oppressed. I have known about the unfathomable genocide of native peoples, I have known about the brutal violence against Africans through slavery and lynching, yet I never saw it put together so clearly how women too lived through a similar experience of fatal oppression. I have always approached patriarchy as something real, but not as powerful as racism. This week has helped me to see how it was just as integral to the development of economic injustice - in fact, even a precursor: the foundation of the system. For one thing, people had gotten used to the idea of a hierarchy of labor (as opposed to a division of labor) because of how women's work were devalued. Before Europeans were out robbing and devastating other lands and other peoples to gain their wealth - and in fact, in order to be able to do so - they accumulated wealth by violently stealing it from half of the population and testing out the the theories and methods that they would later use on peoples of other continents.

Contemporizing
The parallels to contemporary situations were astounding - it's crazy that centuries later the game plan is so similar. A huge one for me being the story of Mexico. Think of NAFTA as the modern "Enclosures" - the privatization of communal lands. People being forced into a wage economy - and often into cities. Women becoming the target of violence. A few people talked about their personal connections to Cuidad Juarez - where femicide is rampant and hundreds/thousands of women are subjected to rape/murder - the intraclass violence imposed by capitalism.

As a group, we really listed out a lot of ways we could see this information relating to our modern lives. When I get the notes I'm gonna post that up here, as a separate post.

I've always been a Classy Broad *UPDATED 9/16

Oh yeah. Class. I've been to a few. No, man we mean economic class. Oh yeah, no I took an economics class. No, lady, I'm talking about the socioeconomic class structure hidden beneath USAmerican society!

I don't know what the above was, but hey. An interesting to think of: In most countries in the world, class is the most noticeable difference among peoples. Here in the US, we see ourselves way more along racial lines than class lines. This is not an accident.

_______________________________

Well, as I hinted before, we had two weeks to delve into a bunch of readings on class and specifically organizing among white working class people in common struggle/solidarity/coalition with multi-racial working class organizations.

Let's Talk about Class, Baby, let's talk about You and ME
There was definitely this sense in the air that SOMEthing was going to be revealed. Most clearly, we were going to step out of the economic closet and expose to each other our class backgrounds. So far in this program, as well as in most activist circles, we've been unified by our politics, our relationship to white privilege, and for many of us, an anarchist culture. Sure there have been queer/non-queer, trans/non-trans, male/not male distinctions, but those are things that due to awesome gender work over the decades, are usually brought up for recognition and discussion. But, really, how often, do activists in general settings, bring up class divisions?

The readings, along with a written homework from Catalyst, guided us to understanding where we fall on the class spectrum, both within our parent's family and as adults, though mainly we focused on which class(es) we grew up in. The article we primarily used to do this is Paul Kivel's article "Where are you in the class system?" which asks you to evaluate things like the house(s) you grew up in, your access to medical care, what type, if any, of vacations your family had, you/your family's leisure time, and where you shopped for clothes, food, and other householdy things.

For me, and as I found out later for most of the other people in the lower classes (and possibly everyone), this reflection into my family brought to the surface some pain and anguish that I haven't felt in a long time. It was a lot about remembering the drug abuse and violence in my household, which I know isn't exclusively class related, but there is some connection to how it all pans out. What was especially curious was how, despite the fact that my mom was and is often on welfare, social security, and food stamps, that we moved at least 13 times by the time I was 17, that we shopped at thrift stores and Kmart (when Kmart was really a shameful thing!), that we never went on vacations, ate a lot of crappy boxed foods, and often had electricity and water shut off for lack of payment - I still questioned whether it was right for me to say I was poor/lower/working class. This I come to find out, is EXACTLY what the capitalist system WANTS ME TO DO: to believe that I belong to the middle class, that I have nothing in common with the working class, because they are people of color, that again, I have nothing in common with. I fall into the idea that the "working class" is noble and honorable, doing everything they can to succeed. Picture single moms working three jobs to make ends meet. I didn't feel like I could call myself that because maybe my parents could have had money, but they got sucked into "bad choices" like gambling, drugs, alcohol. Of course my father definitely grew up poor and lost his parents young, and even though he at some point had a successful business, he squandered all the money because he never learned to save. So his life story speaks to the culture of poverty that keeps people in it.

Class Caucuses
What we did during session was break into caucuses according to class and each get to speak for 3 minutes within the caucus on how we grew up and how white supremacy impacted us in relation to our class. The class divisions were defined as

• Poor/Low Income (Family income between $0 - $24,000, average net worth negative $8,900)
  • Substandard housing or homelessness
  • Long-time use of public benefits, such as welfare
  • Chronic lack of health care, food, or other necessities
  • Frequent involuntary moves, chaos, and disruption of life

• Working Class (Family income between $24,000 and $62,500, primary net worth, if any, is in home)
  • Little or no college education, in particular no BA from a four year college
  • Low or negative net worth (assets minus debt), usually modest income
  • Rental housing, or one non-luxury home long saved for and lived in for decades
  • Occupation involving physical work and/or little control in the workplace

• Middle Class (Family income between $62,500 and $94,000, average net worth $161,000, primarily in home and savings for education and retirement)
  • Two to four years of college, sometimes a degree from a professional school
  • Homeownership
  • More control over the hours and methods of work then working class people have, and/or control over others’ work
  • More economic security than working-class people have, but no way to pay bills without working
  • Social status and social connections to help the next generation remain in the same class

• Managerial Class (Family income between $94,000 and $373,000, average net worth $344,000 )
  • Education at elite private schools and elite colleges, or at public universities without student loans
  • Large inheritances
  • Luxuries, multiple homes and international travel
  • Social connections, status, and financial knowledge to help the next generation remain well-off
  • Depends on salaries, not investments, to pay bills.

• Ruling Class (Family income above $373,000 and net financial wealth at least $2,045,000)
  • Enough income from assets that they don’t have to work to pay basic bills
  • Education at elite private schools and elite colleges without student loans
  • Large inheritances
  • Luxuries, multiple homes and international travel
  • Social connections, status and financial knowledge to help the next generation remain wealthy
  
  

The lower two and upper two were combined to make up three caucuses. I went to the poor/working class caucus and stumbled through my three minutes feeling kind of scattered and emotional, which actually most people did. What did come through were some things common to our class:

• Moving around a lot
• Interactions with state agencies such as Child Protective Services and Police
• Drugs, alcohol, abuse (Our moderator pointed out that those things are highly common in other classes, but other classes have more economic protection from the impacts)
  
• Educational tracking away from non-white poor kids
• Our parents not wanting to admit they were working class, and pushing us to be upwardly mobile
• Young/single moms
  

To everyone's dismay, there wasn't much time to get into any more discussion with each other.
The blow was softened by the fact that local class-based working groups have invited each of the caucuses to a special potluck to continue the discussions. The poor/working class one is going to meet tomorrow. We then shared report backs from each caucus with the larger group, and this was the moment when everyone got to see where people fell. It was pretty evenly divided among the classes, which I guess was a bit surprising to me, as I never really get that people I know really are upper class.

We looked a little bit about how our class background motivates and impacts our social justice work. I got to publicly air my shameful distaste for Marxist theory (I'm sure it's good theory, there's just something about it that's too academic, stuffy, old dead white man for me to swallow.)

Where's the Liberation?
In my opinion, we didn't get too much into the liberatory class strategy as I was expecting. The general format of the sessions has been to delve into the painful histories and constructions of oppressions, then talk about how to counter those huge systems, including lots of examples. This Sunday we steeped in the "Wow, class divisions suck!" part but didn't get enough of the "Now that we understand, this is how we break this shit!" part. Certainly the readings did lay out a lot of examples of awesome white working class organizing, but we didn't hear enough about where middle and upper class activists fit in. Others noticed this, and a lovely person did take on the challenge of organizing a cross-class workshop/discussion event.

Organizing Poor White Folks
The readings also looked more into the strategies used during and immediately after slavery to fracture the unity of the lower classes by convincing the whites that they had more to gain by unifying with the white upper classes (but without actually gaining significant wealth). Then several articles went into the work of modern movements of white working class people - such as JOIN, The Young Patriots, the IWW, and the Piedmont Peace Project. I won't talk much about these groups, since you are on the internet and could look into them yourselves. Just know that they're radical and inspiring. Picture the Confederate Flag flying alongside the Black Panther flag - they really did that!

Dual Welfare
One of the readings also brought up the reality of dual welfare. That when you hear welfare, you think of food stamps and WIC checks for single moms. But what about corporate/agricultural subsidies (not to even mention the bailouts) or other tax deductions? The corporate rich get the government handouts without any of the stigma passed on to welfare for the working class. Same thing - veterans can be proud to claim their veteran's benefits for doing the often racist, imperialist work of war, yet it is a shameful matter for the women raising our future generations to get food assistance. It's all about the spin

Challenging Male Supremacy

This weekend, after a weekend of skipped session, I got to not only fight white supremacy (at least in my mind), but fight MALE supremacy (again, in my mind.) Catalyst organized a special workshop designed for the male socialized men in the group, but open to all genders, including li'l ol' me.

The analysis of male supremacy went along the lines of the increasingly clear analysis of white supremacy: male supremacy was invented and enforced as a capitalist strategy - to break apart the solidarity of the working class and consolidate power in fewer hands. I won't get too much into this as we are also studying Patriarchy & Capitalism for next session. These histories were just briefly mentioned in the workshop, article, and radio program (click to access.

The crux of the work on Saturday was helping men to clarify the socialization they have received
recognize the pain inherent in that socialization and primarily the privileges and ways they reproduce that form of oppression. Basic huh?

Male Socialization
Paul Kivel, our fab facilitator who makes a lot of his resources available freely online, started out by doing a dad-son role play which led us to develop "the box." First we looked at all the feelings that any human, including boys, have in certain situations, like being yelled at by your dad - anxiety, frustration, fear, sadness, anger, confusion. Then the next layer of what you're told to be as a "man" - emotionless, physically strong, disconnected and degrading to women, able to do anything, etc - all those things disguising the emotion inside. Then the walls of the box (sexism, homophobia, etc) being what holds together that identity of a man. That stepping outside of those expectations, that box, leads someone to be called a homo or sissy or cunt or anything associated with femininity (and therefore negative). And all the threats of violence which encourage people to stay inside the box.



The Price of Oppressor Status
The next exercise was a series of statements that men were asked to stand if they had experienced. Statements like "I have engaged in exercise because I felt like my body wasn't manly enough," "I have felt that I was unfit to care for children even though I wanted to." "I have not connected with other men because I didn't want to be seen as gay" "I have wanted to blow myself away." It was certainly momentous that almost every man stood up for almost every statement.

I, and the few other women in the session, were struck with grief at watching so many people admit to so many painful, formative experiences in their life. That is the hard part - recognizing at how all these strategies (usually attributable to capitalism) - in their basest form sought to dehumanize EVERYONE - not just the oppressed so they could be made into (wage) slaves, but even the oppressors, so they could carry out the oppression. These systems rely on everyone being indoctrinated out of their humanity, their natural love of others, their natural belief in common good, their natural desire to connect with other people.

Paycheck of Oppressor Status
Paul continued with a similar stand-up-if-this-applies exercise, this time looking at the privileges that men gained by this situation, and how they perpetuate disadvantage or outright violence onto others. Things like "I have hit someone younger than me," "I have gotten jobs because of my connections with other men" (i.e. the good old boys club), "In my family women do more of the housecleaning, cooking, childcare, washing or other caretaking than me or other men do." "I know where Ivcan have access to sex from women for money in the city or region where I live.


People talked a bunch about how the constant social message that were leaders, more intelligent, better equipped, and generally superior, starts to make them believe that.

From there people discussed, and did role plays, on how to be better allies to women (lessons which are applicable to be better allies to anyone in an oppressed group). I don't remember too many notable things from this section, mainly I think because I was really drowsy that day. Or maybe because they were things similar to what I've learned before.

Emotional Spewing onto Women
I thought back upon thoughts on how men's socialization to never show emotions or have deep connections with other men leads the heterosexual ones to believe that they can only open up with women, and thus they confuse emotional healing with romance and sex. Like the phenomenon of men kind of non consensually blabbing out all their pain, loneliness, and confusion on any female friend they get close with - and then often trying to manipulate that into a sexual relationship. It is a despicable sexual strategy. Even when it doesn't go the sexual route it's still another form of unpaid caretaking labor that unfairly falls on women's shoulders.

I very specifically remember coming to this analysis when I was 20 and trying to volunteer in an orphanage in Guatemala. As night would fall, this one guy (not an orphan, a worker there) would come find me and then pretty instantly start spewing all his emotional baggage. It was so clear the way he was trying to draw me into him with his tales of woe and loneliness so that i would make out and presumably have sex with him. It feels pretty annoying in the moment, but it's also angering that the system of patriarchy forms men to feel emotionally isolated and think they need a woman to be able to address their emotions.

Reconnecting with One's Own Humanity
We spoke about that, if we reject the current social paradigm of maleness and gender, what is a better model? Someone shared their dislike of the attempts to simply come up with a better image of maleness - i.e. a REAL man is sensitive, kind, etc... That that only creates a new box that people have to fit in. Paul Kivel laid out a beautiful alternative - that what we're striving for is for men, and all people, including oppressors and oppressed, to be reconnected with their humanity. A humanity that comes before gender, sexuality, race, religion, physical ability, etc. This to me was one of those light bulb popping moments - yeah!

A couple other questions/notes:

• It is endearing to be a daddy's girl, but insulting to be a mama's boy
• Is some amount of violence normal/required in human society?

No session last Sunday

Lest you think I am stalling on posting...we did not have session last week. So I get two weeks to luxuriously delve through the readings - this week on CLASS. There is kind of a buzz in the Braden air - people are eager to talk about class, now armed with some language and guidelines and analyses in a system that doesn't want you to think about class differences. Each time Bradeners run into each other, an otherwise awkward question is popped smooth as butter popcorn: So, what's your class background....

I will delve into my findings later.

Intro to Capitalism & Black Liberation Struggle

My Mindset
Just for context: I came into this session feeling super hectic. I had spent the morning in a harm reduction/conflict resolution training at my house, which I hadn't exactly known about or planned for. But it was fun & useful (although it also, totally surprisingly to me, spark an emotional journey over the next few days into looking at the violence in my childhood.) Then I needed to make food for the session, and figure out how to transport it, and squeeze in a phone date that I had been looking forward to being long and leisurely, but in the end I just felt rushed. So that's how I walked into session. I only had a brief moment of that Sunday afternoon emotional vulnerability that has characterized my entering of the Braden program room.

Black Liberation
Anyways, this week we were looking into slavery, capitalism, and the struggle for black liberation. I, for one, when I hear of the "Black Liberation Struggle" tend to think narrowly just of the 60s' civil rights and black power movements. The readings, and the workshop with guest presenter Akua Jackson, really reminded me that the struggle started the day Africans began being taken as slaves, and continues today. It's all been about black liberation.

Slave Resistance
The readings illustrated the continuous acts of individual and group rebellion during slave times, often remembered only for a couple of revolts and runaways. It specifically talked of maroon communities, which often included native and poor whites alongside runaway slaves - communities which not only served their own needs for freedom, but acted as beacons of hopes, inspiration, and encouragement for slaves (and thus threatening to the slave-based economic system and white supremacy), as well as actively working to free other slaves and destroy oppressors.

There was an awesome poem, "a raging of tears" by ewuare osayande that really put the post-katrina disaster side by side with slavery. I know this connection has often been made, but this poem helped me identify just how closely the lived experience was.


Ideology of Inferiority
One of the hardest things to wrap my mind around, was really how did people ACTUALLY BELIEVE that a certain group of people, in this case Africans or Native Americans, were truly designed to be treated as animals and held violently as slaves. This is key. People really believed that blacks were created to be exploited. That is how "good" people could do such brutal things to another group of people. Blacks had to write manifestos, using the language of the American Revolution, saying that they had the same faculties as white men and the Creator, that there was no reason to believe they were morally destined to be slaves. Whites were shocked and confused about why Africans were rebelling, why they were fighting so hard for their freedom. Where did this ideology come from???

We also looked at different leaders of black liberation and evaluated their approaches and historical contexts: from integrationism, cultural nationalism, militant separatism, and Back-to-Africa-ism.

Capitalism
The readings on capitalism felt blaise to me, I guess because I know a lot of this theory, and also somehow that I kind of turn off whenever Marxist theory is discussed. Communism/Marxism/Leninism seems so stuffy and male and white, so academic, I can't take it. I don't know if that's fair of me, but that's how it is. Even Marx himself said he is "no Marxist." Anyways, I would to like to hear about Marx's theories from a woman of color, maybe she'd be able to spin it in a more palatable light. Curious as to how communities of color see those theories/theorists.

In session, our talks were more productive. I realized that for USAmerikans, capitalism is so normalized, I can't even really conceive of another economic system. One friend, who recently visited Cuba, said that it was the first time that she was able to see capitalism, how it infected every way we relate to ourselves and each other. Maybe I've had that experience, but I feel pretty infected by capitalism and unable to see another way (other than some airy theory). Like one thought, when we spoke briefly of people fighting for the Americans with Disabilities Act, about how I think, of course, if someone physically can't work, it makes sense that they can't get a job. But how do I envision them supporting themselves/being supported? Do I think that disabled people don't deserve to live? No, but capitalism doesn't really leave a plan for incorporating people who can't work a job, including elderly, diabled, and homeless. Another way of thinking would have a plan (or so I'd like to think). State violence (e.g. police) often gets used to extract work and wealth out of unwilling/unable people (turning homeless/jobless folks into prisoners, who either work in the prison labor system, or provide jobs to guards and prison staff.)

Connections
General things that stood out for me in session:

• Whites had to learn how to become slaveowners. Willie Lynch (where the term "lynching" came from), came over and gave workshops on how to "break" a slave using the same strategies as "breaking in" a horse.
• When slavery was abolished, it specifically excepted convict labor. I knew this, and I knew prisons were the mutation of the slavery system, but I really didn't think about how explicitly this was legally created. I really want to learn more about prison labor within Florida. For my jail zine, I tried to do some research on that, but it was hard to find (and I wasn't that dedicated at the time.)
  
• That the May Day immigrant marches of 2006, which was an amazing day in Lake Worth, saw the largest number of people take to the streets in protest across the United States ever. The numbers of people in Lake Worth were certainly unbelievable, but I didn't know how special it was nationwide.
• That housework is so often depicted (in actual visual imagery as well as theoretically) as the realm of white women, (certainly visioned as so by middle class white feminists in their struggle), but the reality is that women of color do the majority of housework in this country.
• That at some point of time, there was an idea of a "family wage" which took into account that an entire family needed income, not just the individual worker. This didn't necessarily seek to pay women for their work, but somehow backhandedly it acknowledges that women were doing necessary work in support of the male worker, and the wage needed to cover everyone's financial needs.
• The idea of the underclass as a necessary element of society - that capitalism wouldn't function without an underclass of desperate workers keeping wages low- yes, i've known that part. But that industry wouldn't be able to pollute and destroy the earth without that same underclass, was a new spin. It is only because there are oppressed people whose land can be stolen, abused, dumped on, and polluted without political repercussion, that we have been able to enter ecological crisis.
  

Well, I think that gets at a lot of what I took.