Meteor Blades asked some questions in his front page post this morning that we should all be asking:
Is the situation just temporary? Or is the acute pain of unemployment and underemployment afflicting tens of millions of us going to add itself to the list of other chronic problems plaguing the economy? If the latter is the case, do we just continue stumbling along or do we build political forces to create a new paradigm in which economic well-being is not dependent on jobs as we have known them? And if so, how do we go about building those forces in the face of the ultra-concentration of wealth and the political power it confers?
As important as MB's queries are, I've been asking myself a broader and more fundamental question since the collapse of the economy in the fall of '08:
How do we survive in this "New Normal?"
I'm going to do some thinking out loud in this diary and invite you to join in, critique, add ideas, suggest modifications, etc.
If you're coming by to tout the Obama Administration and the Democrats and urge me to GOTV, I'll ignore you. That's no solution for those of us who can't wait a generation or two for the Democratic Party to get its act together.
If you're coming by to complain about the Obama Administration and the Democrats without responding to the issues I'm trying to raise, I'll ignore you. I do plenty of complaining about the Dems myself, but at some point, we have to construct some positive solutions. Pinning all our hopes on politicians and then being disappointed after they fail to produce--over and over and over again--is pretty silly at this point.
So here goes:
Outcasts, Castoffs and DCZs
Roughly 20-25% of our population is now left out of our economy. They are unemployed or underemployed with little prospects of getting a job with decent pay and any "benefits," a word that sounds like it means extra luxuries but in our culture means essentials like health care and pensions. They have no capital. Many have no health care. Their credit is ruined. Public housing is not an option because the waiting lists are years long. Food stamps and Medicaid involve a lengthy and humiliating application and approval process, something that is almost impossible to navigate without a permanent home--a bizarre Catch-22 that is no accident.
I say "they," but I should really say "we" because my family has been in that position for more than two years. We're luckier than many because one son built a free lance computer business that we have all become involved in. It's kept a (frequently changing) roof over our heads, food on our table and paid the costs of getting us back from Europe to the U. S.
Along with this collection of outcasts and castoffs that may grow to 30% or more before this is over, our country has growing sections of space that I call De-Capitalized Zones. In our cities, there are large neighborhoods where most of the houses are vacant or about to be vacant, where there are no businesses or institutions other than churches and day cares, where the streets go un-repaired and other governmental services are being cut. In our rural areas, there are once thriving towns that are now nearly empty, and they're surrounded by deserted farmsteads in the countryside.
Unused people and unused houses, stores, factories and land. Does this "New Normal" contain within its destructive effects the seeds of a new world?
Helping Ourselves and Each Other
What do we do when we lose our income and can longer afford to live on our own? If we're lucky, we move in with family. It's happening across the nation as young people with big educational loans can't find a decent job and move back in with parents, or late middle-aged workers who've been laid off and can't find new employment move in with children.
That's our first line of self-defense, and it helps. Everyone does with a little less and survives off less income while those who don't have income strive to develop other opportunities.
But the family solution only goes so far. Some people don't have the family backup either because they didn't come from a large family or problematic family relations don't permit it. Even for those with family backup, even that may not be enough as conditions worsen and more "breadwinners" lose their income or see it drop.
In the 30s, people did the same thing. Families took in those without income, but eventually that wasn't enough. People began to form new combinations--communes and coops--where they could work together to survive. Howard Zinn describes the phenomenon:
People organized to help themselves, since business and government were not helping them in 1931 and 1932. In Seattle, the fishermen's union caught fish and exchanged them with people who picked fruit and vegetables, and those who cut wood exchanged that. There were twenty-two locals, each with a commissary, where food and firewood were exchanged for other goods and services; barbers, seamstresses, and doctors gave of their skills in return for other things. By the end of 1932, there were 330 self-help organizations in thirty-seven states, with over 300,000 members.
People's History, p 394-5.
Zinn does report that most of these self-help efforts had collapsed by 1933 because the task was just too great. but he notes one that was successful throughout the depression:
Perhaps the most remarkable example of self-help took place in the coal district of Pennsylvania, where teams of unemployed miners dug small mines on company property mined coal, trucked it to cities, and sold it below the commercial rate. By 1934, 5 million tons of this "bootleg' coal were produced by twenty thousand men using four thousand vehicles. When attempts were made to prosecute, local juries would not convict, local jailers would not imprison.
King Vidor, a Left-leaning Hollywood director, produced a movie himself--because MGM wouldn't touch it--about a rural commune called "Our Daily Bread."
The first thing that becomes apparent when recalling these Depression era efforts is how de-skilled many of us have become. Working as a "paper pusher" in a cubicle or a salesperson does little to develop practical "survival" skills. How many of us today know how to perform our own brake job or sweat copper pipe or grow some pinto beans?
Our widespread lack of practical skills makes it even more important for us to band together beyond the level of family units. Very few of us are capable of "self-sufficiency." Carpenters need mechanics. Farmers need electricians. Lawyers need everybody, though even lawyers might come in handy in some circumstances.
It's not just for the short term, either. The de-skilling process makes all of us ever more dependent on corporate sources for the essentials of life. Preserving food, for example, is a skill that had been passed down within families for generations. It does require training to do it right. Do it wrong, and at the least, valuable food is ruined. At the worst, somebody ends up with botulin poisoning. These kinds of critical skills must be preserved (sorry for the pun).
So self-help involves:
- Banding together beyond the level of family units, making sure to
- include people with a broad range of essential skills in order to
- utilize assets whose value has sunk to or close to zero.
Organizing Self-Help Efforts
Such self-help efforts cannot be organized along Capitalist lines. The people involved have no capital. If they acquired something in their names, there's a good chance it would be seized by their old creditors.
Instead, alternative forms of ownership and organization, like cooperatives, would have to be utilized. Housing, land and major capital items like autos, trucks, tractors and tools would have to be owned by the coop. Their use would be governed by the coop members using whatever management methods they chose. For example, in smaller coops, everyone might be involved in making all decisions based upon majority vote or consensus. In larger coops, there might be a need to elect leadership or management that would be changed on a rotating basis.
Coops would need to reach out to other coops. For example, an urban coop might be able to grow some of its own food, but there will be limitations on what can be done in an urban area. Acting as a consumer coop, that neighborhood group could contract with a supplier or supplier coop in a rural area for everything from meat to grain.
Coops can also reach out to local government to provide services that local government can no longer afford. This might range from simple things like park maintenance and street repair to more complex tasks like garbage collection and maintaining water and sewer lines. Similar arrangements might be worked out with public utilities.
Broadening the Community
These gathered outcasts and castoffs cannot enter their new neighborhoods as invaders. They must respect those already residing there and seek to build solidarity with them. The goal is not "gentrification" because the new residents are struggling economically just as the old. It is not to inflate real estate values because the form of ownership will eliminate any personal benefit from improving then "flipping."
It is a sad fact that the new residents will be occupying homes that someone else has lost. There's nothing that can be done to reverse that process, and occupying and improving those foreclosed vacant homes does benefit those still living there. But it necessary to do more than that. The new residents should be involved in joining with current residents to prevent further foreclosures through legal means and direct action. They should also reach out to those who lost their homes and bring them into the new cooperative and newly rehabbed homes. Any cooperative enterprises begun by the new residents should involve long-time residents.
A Sidecar Economy
These cooperatives and communes would comprise a "sidecar economy" that would exist alongside the existing capitalist economy. For some things, the coops in association with other coops would be able to provide for many needs without interaction with the primary economy, but for many things, it will be necessary to raise cash.
Cash can be raised through coop enterprises, assets brought into the coop by new coop members or grants and donations.
What kind of coop enterprises? Some coop members may be like my family and have some kind of business income that can be expanded so that work and income can be shared with other coop members. Others may bring skills like electricians and plumbers who can lead coop businesses that sell services to the "outside" with a portion of the income going to the workers and the rest going to the coop and the general welfare. The coop may be able to produce goods, for example, food, most of which will be consumed by coop members but the excess of which can be sold for coop income.
What would the coop pay for? Utilities for the houses it owns. Coop-owned transportation that is made available to coop members on a sign-out basis. Further down the line, maybe even basic medical and dental services arranged through professional volunteers or even large institutions that benefit from the stability brought to their neighborhood by the coop.
Over time, the coop could strive to produce more and more of its needs without having to depend upon the primary capitalist economy. It could strive for greater energy and communication independence using--or even manufacturing--wind generators and community wireless.
The Seeds of New World
I'm convinced that the convulsions experienced by Capitalism around the world during the past few years are themselves part of a New Normal. Greater concentration of wealth will bring ever greater booms and especially busts in the primary economy with the same fallout we're experiencing now: rising unemployment and declining public services. Those of us who find ways to cope with this new world will be welcoming new outcasts and castoffs on a regular basis.
What we may discover is that this new life, even with its greatly reduced material luxuries, is more fulfilling than our old consumerist, wage slave, dog-eat-dog existence. Human beings are, after all, social animals. If our ancestors had practiced a social Darwinist, to the winner goes all the spoils kind of society, they would never have been able to bring down a mammoth for food nor prepared the soil, planted the seed and harvested a crop.
I'll close with an excerpt from George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, written about his experiences in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. He is describing a society wrought in revolution, not the kind of voluntary, fill-in-the-gaps proposal I'm presenting, but his description does remind us that there is another way for human beings to live together:
I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.
The first step in this process is to admit that things are not going back to the way they were, either for us individually nor for our society as a whole. Once we face that, we're free to honestly confront the truth that when you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose. We are liberated to try new ways of doing things with the possibility that those new ways may lead us to something better.