Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Workers Defense Project Re-Claims the Oikos

Oikos-small-Logo-copy






This week the Workers Defense Project published what it called a “Supporter Spotlight.”


Here’s the abstract version:

Elvia Mendoza, a supporter of Workers Defense Project, recently hosted a House Party to raise money for 5604 Manor and Workers Defense Project. We asked her to share some feedback about hosting the party. Here is what she had to say. If you are interested in hosting a House Party, please contact Candace at 512-391-2305.




The post went on to romantically narrate the house party as a scene of solidarity. 


For example: 

We not only shared food and drink; they shared memories, desires, and visions.

A house party turned into an affirmation of critical historical consciousness:

[S]omehow a way of understanding and affirming their histories of migration as well. While the party was a success, some people did not come, and I wondered why and if something could have been done differently to have them. The struggle is critical and we can’t afford to leave anyone behind. Perhaps there were conversations that needed to happen; perhaps we needed to think of other strategies to spread the word. The event itself was a force of nature–from the phone call it took to spark it; to Café Rebelde feeding us; to Jaime Cano weaving music for us; to the trabajadores giving purpose to the event, to the gathering of people in the space of home, so that even if just for a moment in a series of many, cada quien ponga su granito de arena.



The post reclaims the home, the ancient oikos, as a sacred space for struggle: 

With all the attacks and impositions made on our homes, our communities, our bodies, our spirits, our minds–our histories, we are told our homes don’t matter. We are told that we can’t rely on our neighbors, our families and friends, our memories, or ourselves. We are taught to leave our communities and seek remedies elsewhere—that what we know with our own flesh has no significance. Me niego a tragarme estas mentiras, and opening our home to not only support PDL, but to recognize and honor the history that brought about its existence, was a deliberate act of refusal. It is an act of going home, coming home, being at home, (re)claiming home, and haciendo hogar. And in the name of keeping it real, I recognize that home is often fraught with struggles, tensions and violations that closed doors and windows cannot keep out. Home is not always a place of safety and the things we fight against outside of our homes find a way of seeping into our homes and into our desires. It is in recognizing and naming the volatile origins of these unsafe spaces and divesting ourselves of them that becomes all the more crucial.

 

Demos as Media Ecology

wants
‘… unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their  motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power:  that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the  same thing. … However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes that do  fall apart.’ 
        —Philip K. Dick (1995: 262)

Ontotheology of the Democracy of Objects

dali-object-oriented-philosophy







Don’t ask: what must Mind be like in order for the world to appear as it does? Ask: what must objects be like in order for our engagement with the world to make sense?


The Other Journal – Church and Postmodernism

Work and Play in Social Activism

Museu do Futebol2
This poster is for the Workers’ Defense Project 1st Annual Soccer Tournament. The WDP is engaging in an innovative medium for raising awareness, funds and fun. Instead of merely asking for money or just hosting a rally the WDP has decided to bring both into a single event. This event is a stroke of tactical genius for a few reasons:
First, Soccer Sells. Soccer is not only the most popular sport worldwide but has a large following here in Austin, especially among the most direly affected populations the organization seeks to assist. The Justicia Copa Laboral indicates the WDP is attuned to its target population on a cultural level.
All of the proceeds of the event benefit the WDP’s computer literacy course which; an initiative aimed at helping to teach workers a vital vocational skill set within Austin’s technical industries. Many of the workers the WDP benefits are of a Latino background and thus need help with not just learning English, but translating English Language Training into marketable skill sets.
Using Soccer to spread the WDP’s cause reconnects abstract worker’s rights issues to an Ethos of Community. It shifts the terrain of the debate about Labor policy from a technical economic issue to concrete histories, communities and cultures. Soccer is an international sport thus invokes ideas about the transnational flows migrants, capital and knowledge.
When one aids the WDP you are not simply helping a lobbying firm but participating within a collectivity; an assemblage of people with real families, dreams, and desires. Instead of simply challenging stereotypes on the level of rational deliberation, the event publicly constitutes a site of performance, pride, and promise. One cannot simply persuade and tell the public that a job is more than a number on a spreadsheet, an opportunity cost, a liability – you have re-present the invisible, marginalized populations in a positive light. Furthermore, these public events express these laboring bodies as more than a charity case, a victim subjected to the whims of the business cycle. These bodies beat with hope beyond being a statistic of servitude.
An event is a Gathering – showing solidarity means more than checking a box on a political questionnaire.  Witnessing the mixture of bodies laughing, sweating and toiling together shows that the relations between those trying to help and those in need does not have to mirror the segregation experienced in the market. Playing soccer together evinces publics that competition need not be conflated with a brutish interpretation of human nature. Rather, an ethos of collectivity can be forged despite the inevitability of competitive practices.

Workers Defense Project: Occult Expertism

The other day I was speaking with Joao Costa Vargas, a professor and ally of the Workers Defense Project and I realized something interesting about the structural dynamics of the social advocacy group. I told Joao about how I was researching the group this semester and he asked me if I knew Cristina very well. I had to pause for a second; I knew the name, I recalled she was on the board of directors, but I couldn’t say that I knew her very well or that I could say much about her as a person.

I think this, albeit anecdotal, encounter says something about the nature of the way that the Workers Defense Project handles its business. First, there is a large separation between the on-the-ground operations of the group and the directers of the organization. There exists a significant gap, both perceptually and empirically, between those the organization’s leadership and its body of workers. While it is practically impossible, and perhaps unwise, to completely abolish this fissure between the visionaries and the implementers of social change; this structural fact potentiates some more significant consequences for the group’s future.

How will an organization whose stated aim is to work on behalf of workers be perceived if it models the corporate structure in all aspects except the profit motive? Do the inequalities of work relations end when incentive structures and monetary systems are equalized? Or do other power relations persist beyond the numbers on the spreadsheet? Although the Board of Directors is quite exceptionally qualified according to neoliberal standards; most of the executives have multiple higher education degrees, some even from Ivy League institutions such as Brown, could they still be guilty of perpetuating the unequal power relations they aim to subvert?

If the organizations maintains in the division of labor between skilled and unskilled labor, between experts and docile laborers, between those capable of adapting to an immaterialized, flexible and adaptive work environment and those that are more suited for basic manual labor how can our cultural ethos change from its current preoccupation with conflating skills with life value? How can our current systems of economic production break out of its rigid regimentation of people that has existed sinces The Republic or Aristotle’s Politics, dividing the polis into Philosopher Kings and Workers, full humans and those naturally disposed to slavery?

The cult of expertism through which the organization perpetuates an ideology of paternalism damages its ability to cultivate a new sensibility of labour relations. If the oppressors view themselves solely as the bearer of Enlightenment knowledge that rides into the slums on a white horse of liberation they will be perceived in terms which are negligibly different from that of the original exploiters. Only when liberation becomes a mutual and reciprocal process, rather than a one-way street can a truly emancipatory politics arise anew.

Working for Workers

The Workers’ Defense Project engaged in capacity building measures this week in order to reach out to a larger audience of activists. The social advocacy group utilized new media and web based methods of knowledge dissemination.

The website made a post in its “What’s Happening” section; which can also be followed via subscribing through an rss feed, email or social networking sites (SNS). It’s title reads, “Become an Intern at Workers’ Defense Project,” the title is rather lack luster, I guess if you’re always studying about businesses firing and laying people off you lose sight of how to hire.

The post itself indicates that the group needs interns, itself written by an intern it lacks color, depth, and proper grammar:
i.e. “Come and work with us looking how the world change before your eyes”


One of the potential internships is to be a community garden intern, it seems like you’re more likely to watch the grass grow than the earth change before your eyes. The application reads like a typical classified ad for job hirings, the only difference is the fluffy line at the beginning and the motto “And Remember: In Unity, There Is Strength!” in the penultimate moment. 


This ad could just as easily be for a corporation marketing itself as socially conscientious, although I think businesses might have a better handle on how to appeal to potential recruits. But how can an advocacy group change the consciousness of workers if they simply mimic their practices? 

Workers Defense Project

For the next month I will writing a series of posts documenting and critically analyzing the works of the Workers Defense Project; here’s an intro. This group provides a backbone to an otherwise vulnerable, and thus expendable workforce in Austin, as well as the state of Texas at large. The WDP adopts a hybrid approach, engaging in both advocacy and the provision of services.

 Some of the past and current activities the WDP has engaged in include providing legal services (either providing counsel in individual compensation cases or mobilizing and organizing for class action lawsuits), vocational training (from teaching basic job skills to providing ESL courses for free to new immigrants), labor movement and union organization, mobilization and advocacy (helping to create a network of interested parties to raise issue awareness surrounding work conditions, business malpractice, inequality in compensation and/or benefits, discrimination, and corporate irresponsibility), lobbying efforts at the local, county and state level, information and knowledge production documenting the conditions of the status quo, and both traditional and novel acts of protest (from picketing to rallies and even flash mobs).

 The WDP offers a promising object of research for communication studies scholars for reasons three-fold:

 1) Timing: Out of the historical and material conditions of our present moment have emerged new publics specifically targeting the totality of the economic system. While labor organizations have always existed the decreased participation rate among workers has paralleled but also exceeded the rate of decline in manufacturing and production based jobs. Labor ought to be of utmost interest for communication studies scholars because discourses are derived from and in our media saturated environment often become part of the material conditions of society itself.
 2) Communicative Labor: Investigating the intersections of labor and communication opens up the constitutive grounds upon which both communication and labor are possible. As the determining principle of society, the transformations in material conditions of labor demonstrate the importance of placing specific communicative acts, structures and situations firmly within their ideological and historical contexts. The flesh and blood relations of bondage, alienation and exploitation determine the coordinates and limits of who can speak, the conditions of possibility for varying means of communication and the currency of different discourses in relation to larger structures of knowledge production. All too often one’s material location is conflated with the worth or value of their discourse when seen under the guise of economic rationality; but the question of whose voice matters is being reopened in response to three simultaneous trends; the rise of flexible labor, the increasing resonance and intensity of the productive yet disenfranchised multitude and the proliferation of increasingly interconnected forms of new media. Understanding communication as an immaterial yet concrete form of labor has the potential to inaugurate new paradigms for thinking about the stuff of what social movements are doing; and how social movements might appeal to potential participants beyond means of guilt, despair or the politics of pity.
 3) Contradiction: The Worker’s Defense Project is a local organization but upon reflection quickly realized its tactics, goals and ends could not be limited to its immediate environment. While Austin does have a sizeable labor force being a metropolitan area, its economic conditions are relatively well off in comparison to many parts of the nation and drastically so in relation to the global south. Yet at the same time Austin’s cultural dispositions make it relatively open, encouraging even, to movements surrounding economic justice. Yet at the same time that Austin is a politically motivated city and at the heart of Texas politics the legislators under the dome are for most part unreceptive to its demands. Yet even if actions locally or on a state level were taken, complicity in the totality of the system is all but impossible to escape. Even if meaningful reforms were enacted it would simply represent a paving over of a still fundamentally unfair system; yet this should not lead to despair but a continual sense of urgency for action at all potential points of power traversal.