As we re-visit the Carter-Reagan recession of 1981-1984, and contemplate what a New Great Depression might look like, I believe we’ll see our fastest-growing demographic here in the USA as working poor people: part-time and sporadically employed, homeless people, people without enough to eat, people who can’t pay all their bills each month, the Bagdhadized urban working poor (people whose access to electricity and energy resembles post-invasion Iraq, that is, sporadic and unreliable due to economics-driven shut-offs).
Among the progressive and conscious ranks of people, there is a lot of empathy, compassion and desire to help this quickly-growing segment of the population. You may yourself be one of the fast-growing demographic, or have friends, children, parents, co-workers who are falling down that rabbit hole. Here in the midwest, where winters can kill you, and people try to do the right thing, we have a lot of what I call “stealth homeless” people. Stealth homelessness is that crashing with a friend, the temporary room at your parents’ or childrens’ home, that thing in the inner city where “I stay over at my sister’s”…This is almost impossible to measure, but we have a sense that this is growing.
I think it’s important how we work with these fellow citizens, and how we help people take ownership of a self-help model that gets at the root, underlying cause of the growing poverty, rather than accepting poverty and the results of class warfare as inevitable, part of the “human condition.”
There are a lot of charity organizations that offer help to our fastest-growing demographic, usually at last year’s funding levels. In other words, the funding isn’t as fast-growing. Charity is fine, and we need practice it, but throughout history this model has never gotten at the fundamental causes for why poverty ramps-up to such alarming levels whenever capitalism experiences a pause in its exponential growth-cycle.
I’ll offer a couple examples from my own experience that I think show us a way out–a way to work with our fastest-growing demographic that leads to working poor people actually owning the organizations that we ourselves create. We become invested in them, and will defend them vigorously against attacks by those who are invested in seeing the class warfare continue because, frankly, it profits some classes in our society.
Recession years
I’m calling 1981-1984 the Carter-Reagan Recession (later taken over by the Reagan Administration as a wholly-owned subsidiary) because these things are never created by just one of the two-party system’s players. That disingenous explanation (for example, blaming the recession of 2001 solely on Bush, rather than the unraveling of the Clinton-Gore global economy expansion and dot-com bubble) lets off the hook the Democrats (or Republicans, depending on who’s doing the naming).
In 1984 I was working in Philadelphia as an organizer for a labor union–United Electrical Workers, a non-AFL union. At that time, the homelessness problem had swelled into an enormous nationwide social problem. In Phila. we had something like 30,000-40,000 homeless people living out on the streets in full public view. Some homeless people had organized themselves into the Philadelphia Union of the Homeless, and our labor union’s District Council, under the radical leadership of District 1 Pres. Bob Brown had made working with this union of homeless people a priority for our union.
So we took part in picket lines with the Phila. homeless union, and they sometimes joined our picket lines–but did not cross to become strike-breakers. That was the mutual self-interest in the arrangement. The homeless union’s leadership was far-seeing enough to realize that being used as strike-breakers or in any kind of cheap labor arrangement would do them no good in the long run.
At the same time, South Jersey farmworkers, mostly latinos from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Central America and Mexico were also organizing on the big produce farms in southern New Jersey, not far from Phila.. and in the mushroom farms around Reading, PA. We also worked closely with their Comite Organizador de Trabajadores Agricolas (COTA).
So there was a kind of organizing of the poorest and most hard-pressed workers going on in the region at that time of the Reagan Recession. Interestingly, our District 1 Pres. in the UE also had connections with some of Bruce Springsteen’s publicity and booking people, and were able to arrange some Springsteen benefit concerts to raise money for homeless people’s organizations. One hilarious negotiating session for one of the union shops comes to mind, with the union’s district president on the company’s phone with Springsteen’s people trying to arrange a concert date, while telling the corporation’s negotiating people that their contract offer was a worthless piece of s—.
The reason I’m telling you all this is that with all of this organizing that was going on, it was the poor people themselves who owned the process. They held the meetings, called the votes, decided on a course of action. There were no degreed “poverty pimps” (sorry, that was the derogatory term in use at the time) coming from some quasi-governmental office or well-meaning ecumenical groups laying out their strategies and tactics for them.
Community Organizer is not a dirty name (or is it?)
Later, I found myself working not as a labor organizer, but a community organizer, on Milwaukee’s east side (Riverwest) where the opposite situation obtained. We had an organization that was busy building programs in which the local community felt little or no ownership. Home rehab work, first-time buyers’ workshops, a food pantry–all these programs were decided for the community by a well-intentioned community organization full of degreed people who did not represent this neighborhood well.
I came to detest food pantry work, because it was obvious that despite one’s best efforts, the mostly minority neighborhood did not feel this was their pantry; it was a program set up by white folks who they didn’t know nor trust. Food pantries do not advance people toward self-sufficiency, self-reliance, nor the means to produce their own food in the future. They may be a good cause, but are not a source for social change.
Working people must own the organizing
The lesson I learned from those sorts of organizing drives, good and bad, was a simple one: to have real “grassroots democracy” you have to be in a situation where the people most heavily impacted by the decisions being made have a voice in the decisions. They must own the organizations negotiating on their behalf. Their leadership must be, on the whole, up from the ranks and fully accountable and transparent to the members of each organization, whether it’s one made up of highly-paid skilled workers or the most poor and destitute people you can imagine.
If we fast-forward to now, all I’m suggesting is to apply the sort of lessons I gleaned from these experiences in well-led rank-and-file organizing efforts toward working with our fastest-growing demographic groups in the years just ahead.
Resources and class issues
The food-entitlement space is going to be painfully shrinking and there will not immediately be something to replace entitlements; more people will be going hungry. Merely gathering up donated food and giving it away will only get us so far, and that is not very far, in alleviating hunger.
Some poverty-targeted resources will need to be diverted toward community gardens, and some means of actually motivating people to do the hard work of growing.The State of Wisconsin has the room for 100 of Will Allen’s “Growing Power” operations–do we have the resources, or more to the point, the “will”, to create these? A city the size of Stevens Point needs probably a dozen food co-ops, co-op restaurants, co-op food processors, etc. Just scale up to imagine the need in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay.
Beyond these efforts, some groups are going to have to learn to work politically, and begin to address the root causes of poverty, at a very deep level. The forbidden topic of class division and what classes–what people, individuals–benefit from poverty via the mechanism of low wages and a large “reserve army of the unemployed” as the activists used to say back in the Great Depression, the mother of all laboratories on the study of class warfare.
Speaking bluntly, some groups are going to have to find the courage to explore why the “charity model” is fundamentally flawed, and how it can be redesigned and retooled for the post-peak oil era of perma-recession. The question: how it is that poverty-directed charity groups have been working inside of capitalism since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, yet poverty remains persistent, and profitable? must be raised by some. Are resources directed toward poverty groups because these groups do not challenge the status quo, but help provide a social pressure-relief valve, as Piven & Cloward suggested?
Getting local
Here in Central Wisconsin we are fortunate to have a developing sustainability movement based in a number of groups focusing on local food, environmental health, efforts to build local economies, and renewable energy. I don’t know what you may have in your region, but if you search such groups out, you should be able to find some activity with which you can “meet up” or hook up, or link up, whatever.
Local food in particular is a key issue area where you can focus, and possibly see results. The need for good, unadulterated, healthy and most importantly, affordable, locally-sourced food is there right now. It’s not going away as an issue. Hunger in the homeland, the business headquarters, of the genetically-modified seed-plantin’, monocrop-raisin’, pesticide, herbicide, fungicide-sprayin’, synthetic fertilizer dumpin’, horizon-to-horizon corn growin’, mechanized animal imprisonment machines AKA The Meatrix, is simply the most glaring and gross contradiction capitalism ever put on display as a global model for emulation by the “primitive” and “under-developed” societies.
And I don’t buy the story that the coming depression is somehow going to pass Central Wisconsin by because we are so diversified in our economy. The opposite of complexity-thinking is independence-thinking, and our local economy is no more independent of the global economy at this point than is the local economy in Ho Chi Minh City. I understand why local political and business leaders choose to avoid complexity-thinking, because it leads to a more painful view of the future. I suppose it is just human nature to remain in a comfortable place as long as you can, until finally dislodged by the avalanche of events.
But just waiting around for something to come cascading down the hill, in the meantime “doing what always worked before” just isn’t going to cut it in a New Great Depression.
I’ve just suggested a handful of small organizational ideas that will be needed if it turns out that we are in fact part of the complex larger system called the “global economy” that is now failing and swelling the ranks of our fastest-growing demographic, working poor people without enough to eat.
Peas on Earth this holiday season,
Bobby G