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Notes on Labor, Maternity, and the Institution


Mierle Laderman-Ukeles, Wadsworth-Atheneum (1973)

I.

Pro labor activism will not begin to overcome the injustices and indignities it purports to redress until it addresses an irreducibly (for now) gendered form of labor: labor, as in, going into labor, giving birth (or adopting). While much recent discourse attempts to account for the industrial or “fordist” to post-industrial shift in forms of labor, patterns into which workers are set, employment, and unemployment (I am thinking of the Italian Autonomist Marxists and Virno, Negri and Hardt in particular), and while so many statistics tell us that more women are in the workforce than men (in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 2008 to the present), maternity is scotomized. Is this just another not-so-subtle form of gynophobia? A fear on the part of feminists of essentialism? A critique of the emphasis French Feminists of the 70s placed on maternity? An innocent oversight in recent iterations of Marxist analyses?

Artistic practices of the last decade highlight the remunerative system of a global service industry, one in which “art” takes its place fully embedded in–rather than at an interval of either autonomy or imminence–the fluid, continuous circulation of goods and services: Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2002) in which Fraser had her gallery, Friedrich Petzel, arrange to have a collector purchase her sexual services for one night, Santiago Sierra’s 250 cm Line Tattooed on Six Paid People (1999) in which the artist paid six unemployed men in Old Havana, Cuba thirty dollars each to have a line tattooed across their back. Fraser’s work was characteristically “controversial” in the most rehearsed ways, and Sierra’s drew criticism for having permanently disfigured six human beings. The misprision and naivete of the critics spectacularized both, of course. Sierra’s retort involved a set of references to global economic conditions that the critics may not have liked to hear: “The tattoo is not the problem. The problem is the existence of social conditions that allow me to make this work. You could make this tattooed line a kilometer long, using thousands and thousands of willing people.”1 Both Fraser and Sierra point to the quasi-universality of what autonomist Marxist theorist Paolo Virno calls a “post-fordist” regime of “intellectual labor” to describe the shift from the assembly line to a wide range of labor in which traditional boundaries and borders no longer apply. Virno says, “by post-Fordism, I mean instead a set of characteristics that are related to the entire contemporary workforce, including fruit pickers and the poorest of immigrants.” This post-fordist regime is characterized by flexibility, deracination, and the shift from habituated work to contingency. Concomitantly, the post-fordist laborer does not take his or her place in the ranks of he masses, but flows into a multitude, differentiated by numerous factors, among them, post-coloniality, endless permutations at the level of gender, ethnicity, race.

For Virno and the autonomists, art and culture are no longer instantiations of exemplarity and exceptionality, as for Adorno, but rather “are the place in which praxis reflects on itself and results in self-representation.” In other words, the cultural work operates as a supplement, a parergonal addition to an already existing logic. It neither passively reflects nor openly resists. There is no vantage or “outside” from which art could dialectically reflect and resists, as Adorno would have it. Long since the work came off its pedestal and out of its frame, from the gallery to the street, the ostensibly non-site to the site as Robert Smithson put it, cultural production is too embedded in social and economic circulation to reflect let alone critique. Virno sees this limitation—the absence of an outside—as one shared with that of activism and other forms of tactical resistance: “The impasse that seizes the global movement comes from its inherent implication in the modes of production. Not from its estrangement or marginality, as some people think.”3Ironically, the luxury of estrangement and marginalization enjoyed by the avant-garde and neo avant-garde is no longer available. And yet, it is “precisely because, rather than in spite, of this fact that it presents itself on the public scene as an ethical movement.”4 For if work puts life itself to work, dissolving boundaries between labor and leisure, rest and work, any action against it occupies the same fabric.

Among others, a problem that surfaces [too quietly and too politely, with a kind of ashamed and embarrassed reserve] is that of gender. The issue is not merely that Fraser puts her body at risk while Sierra remunerates others to place at risk, and in pain, their bodies, that corpus on which habeus corpus is founded. Needless to say, Sierra has organized projects around male prostitutes, such as that of 160 cm Line Tattooed on Four People, executed for the contemporary art museum in Salamanca, Spain, in 1999.

The problem is that the category of disembodied labor, or intellectual labor as Virno alternately calls it to describe its reliance on abstraction, scotomizes a form of irreducibly gendered embodied labor: labor. Now let the cries of essentialism! ring. Where is Julia Kristeva when you need her? Hélène Cixous telling us to allegorically write with our breast milk?5

Many feminist artists of the 1970s—in a historical moment that has both formed and been occluded by the artistic pratices of the last decade which I mention above–explicitly addressed the category of unremunerated labor: Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen(1973-4), for instance; Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman which explicitly draws an analogy between house-work and prostitution. Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document (1979) elevates maternity to the level of analytical research, part of the putative archival impulse. Merle Laderman Ukeles tacitly situates domestic work in a category with the service industry understood historically, before all labor became maintenance labor, as “maintenance.”6 Ukeles’s differentiation of production and maintenance almost seems romantic in hindsight. As though there were creation/production rather than reproduction. And yet…..

Radical Marxist and feminist activist Silvia Federici, author of Genoa and the Anti Globalization Movement (2001) and Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint (2008) argues against the gender neutrality of precarious labor theory, that of the Marxist autonomists Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri.7 Federici situates the commonality of rape and prostitution as well as violence against women within a systematized appropriation of female labor that operates as accumulation, much as accumulation did atavistically, long before the formation of commodity economies, or the development of general equivalence. Atavism as a repressed matrix for putative modernity—a modernity in which gender determination describes one of the greatest forms of uneven development—supports Ariella Azoulay’s claim, in The Civil Contract of Photography, that modernity did little to alter women’s positions in relation to discourse, the institution, and civil rights greater than the vote. Just as for Foucault the modern biopolitical regime compounds the old to achieve a more thorough penetration of everyday life, modernity permutes previous hegemonies “shaped and institutionalized over thousands of years.” In twentieth-century battles for the right to corporeal self-determination, to reproductive rights, for instance, “the body itself underwent a process of secularization, …this body came into the world without any of the normative defenses of citizenship to regulate it.”8 Under “Universal” rights, the contingencies of the body, deemed particular, did not become part of the discourse around citizenship, thus abandoning it to a renaturalized precariousness. Premised on a set of Enlightenment Universalist claims purportedly neutral to the particularities of corporeality, modernity failed to account for the specificities of women’s lives. Instead, the body, or “bare life” tacitly continues to be the way women are viewed, here commodified and sexually fetishized (neo-liberal “Western” democracies), there regulated within disciplinary, and often violent, parameters, as in Islamist cultures.9 These differences in hegemonic models of femininity may be theorized;10 the process of biological labor, however, slips the grasp of discourse, and, with it, policy. This last term would include international policies in which Enlightened self-interest are legitimated by the roles of women, of women’s bodies to be more precise.

Federici links her notion of atavistic forms of reserve—the accumulation of women’s labor—to colonial expropriation. She argues that the IMF, World Bank and other proxy institutions as engaging in a renewed cycle of primitive accumulation, by which everything held in common from water to seeds, to our genetic code become privatized in what amounts to a new round of enclosures.

Pop culture, as always a place where cultural articulations happen within normative parameters that may differ from “discourse,” presents the most direct expression of this that I have yet to come across. The high/low binary was a false product of fordism, one that no longer operates. When a famous male rapper says, “gonna get a child outta her,” he is speaking hegemony, not “marginalization.”

II.

Labor: If Virno is “correct,” in his analysis, there can be no “perspective” from which to think labor. From what fold within labor might I think it? I’ve worked as an hourly wage earner, a mother, and a salaried “professional.” One of these three terms is incongruous; discourse has hit a false note. My description of something about which I should know a great deal, my own history as a laborer, has already committed a rather egregious crime according to the law of discourse. As De Man has famously said, “abuse of language is, of course, itself the name of a trope: catachresis. …something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of a table or the face of a mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopeia and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters.” What thwarted terms, or monsters, are barred from an account of my accounts? Discourse be damned, or in this case, personified; I am using “I.”

At 13, 22 years ago, I was what Siegfred Kracauer might have referred to as “a little shop girl,” working at a T shirt store for 3.75 an hour, selling 20 dollar Joy Division T-shirts and 5 dollar Grateful Dead stickers to other, older, teenagers [with allowances or their own jobs]. My mom had to accompany me to the first day to make good on PA labor laws. 7 hours of my labor/boredom would have bought me one of the T-shirts I sold. I’ve worked, like so many artists and academics, as a museum guard, 17 years ago, for 7/hr, or 10.50/hr for working past the 8-hour shift. Needless to say, none of these jobs had benefits. I’ve written articles for prominent scholarly journals where the pay may roughly be calculated at 3 cents/word, 1 percent of what a glossy magazine would pay for non-scholarly work. Let’s not get distracted by the amount of time that scholarship requires: travel; archives; dozens if not hundreds of books read; writing; and editing. But that “let’s not” is a sliding glass door of sorts: it articulates the injustice of unremunerated work, but it also stands as a reminder that the pleasure [and/or displeasure] of some work is irreducible to money, acts as an irreducible quality. But isn’t everything held in the matrix of currency [fiction]? All process, a term inclusive of work, skilled or unskilled, is irreducible to the monetary value assigned it. A bibliography supportive of that last statement alone would entail a foray into a discursive terrain bordered by Vico, Marx, Weber, The Frankfurt School, Foucault, Post Structuralism and practically every title in Verso, Stanford’s Crossing the Meridian and the University of Minnesota press, and the work of countless others. Irreducible labor. Or as Thomas Keenan has recently put it, the irreducible “jelly” of work that remains after the abstractions of exchange value is “accounted.”11

I’ve worked for 19 thousand a year as a gallery receptionist 14 years ago; for nothing, in monetary terms, writing a proto-book as a PhD candidate to produce a dissertation, partially about labor and art in reconstruction era Italy; for a stipend of 18 thousand per annum teaching college students courses that full [celebrity] professors were also teaching; for one glorious year at 55+ thousand a year as a “term” assistant professor at a prominent women’s college affiliated with an ivy league university; and some ten k (+) less a year as a tenure track assistant professor at a state institution. The latter ostensibly includes compensation for teaching Art History to undergraduates and studio practitioners, directing advises toward theirs MAs or MFAs, and coming to countless faculty meetings. I can retain that salaried position if I produce enough of those journal articles, at 3 cents a word, so let us include the latter, now that I HAVE a tenure track position, in that before-taxes salary. And I get benefits. I am by all [ac]counts VERY lucky and yet the contradictions in the remunerative system are too many to count. I am not compensated in any way—including in University evaluations and other assorted forms of self-regulative beaurocracy—for the 5 or so, sometimes more, hour (+)-long studio visits I conduct every week. An aside on the studio visit: it is by far more intense than an equal measure of time, the hour, of teaching, advising, or any other form of labor but one. And that latter, around which I skirt, is a term from which I steal to work. “Robbing peter to pay Paul.” Wait, I thought I was the one getting paid?

And I “speak” from a vantage of extreme privilege, of multiple privileges, of all privileges but one, to which I stand in a relation of excess and lack. That excess and lack revolves a particular embodied form of labor, a production that is a non productive labor unlike the non accumulative labor of which the autonomists speak…

The discursively impossible: I have given birth through the labor process to a child. “Let’s not,” in the interest of not getting caught in the sliding glass door, “count” pregnancy, or post pardum recovery or breast-feeding. Let’s try to isolate labor in order to attempt to, tautologically, quantify it, as the issue of labor conventionally requires us to do. That labor was 32 hours long. Not one of those 32 hours was commensurable with any other hour. Time contracted, not necessarily in rhythm with those of my womb (hystery in Greek), time dilated, not necessarily in tandem with my cervix. It was working parallel to me; no, those organs were working in tension against me. Dissonance. I have never been capable of thinking my body’s labor in what I will call, despite the need to shore it up by the labor of discursive legitimation, my experiential time. This time shrank and stretched like hot taffy. I would need the proper name “Deleuze” here, and The Logic of Sense, to get the discursive sanction I need to support this last claim. That would take a little labor, labor time I could punch in as academics will no doubt do some time soon, or rather do now however elliptically in requisite annual self reports. But those 32 child labor hours defy break down into 32 units of 60 minutes, 1920 units of 60 seconds, etc. This form of labor slips the grip of discourse; even metaphor.

Catachresis is not monstrous enough to operate as a medium for the articulation of this [non] event. There was, however, a quantifyable cost for the hospital ante-chamber, the delivery room, the “recovery” room, and the first examination of the infant. And there were more complex “costs;” I was “let go” of the second year of my position as a term assistant professor at a prominent women’s college associated with an ivy-league university. The Chair responsible for my firing, I mean, liberation, is a “feminist,” and a mother of two. She thought it would be “for the best,” for me to have time off. I never asked for time off. This did allow her to win a point or two for her annual docket; I was hired back on the adjunct salary of 3 thousand per class the next semester. This allowed the department to save 50 thousand dollars in 2007-2008, and the cost of benefits. Did I mention that the semester after giving birth, after having been “let go,” I still made it to campus to attend all advising sessions? 50K in savings that the institution no doubt never even registered, my loss. But who cares, I had a healthy beautiful bright baby!….. to love AND support. BTW, diapers are 20/box. Currently, I calculate that I make about 12 dollars and fifty cents an hour given that I work at least sixty hours a week. Ergo, a box of diapers is equal to over an hour and a half of work. I go through many of these per month still. At the time of being fired/demoted/whatever, I lived in NYC, where diapers cost more than 20/box. And I made, about 4.16 and hour. A box of diapers cost 5 hours of work. But like many women, and unlike many others, I had assistance, that of a partner and that of a parent. Let’s not address the emotional and psychological cost of the latter; let’s please not address the price dignity paid. Oops, prosopopeia. Does dignity have agency? I hope the reader knows by now that I find calculations to be absurd. “How do I love Thee, [dear child, dear student, dear reader,] Let me count the ways….” I am, however, serious in the following query: how do others less lucky than I make it in the global service industry (in which education and so called higher education now takes it place, now that Professors at State schools are classified as mid level managers?) How do women who have babies and work make it? They pay to work; they pay with their children. Sacrificial economies.

Now again, let’s not get caught in that door by even discussing the 24/7 labor of parenting. The pleasures of this last, and the agonies, are irreducible. But, again, isn’t everything? So: Suspended. Bracketed, a priori. A discursive delimitation or repression? It is in such poor taste to discuss this: bad form. Just a note, daycare is 10 thousand dollars per anum. A baby sitter charges 10-15 an hour. I over identify with the sitter and guiltily–as though I even had the luxury of being a fat cat liberal riddled with guilt–pay said sitter 20. But no worries: I don’t believe in baby-sitting. I have no life outside of the working and the parenting, no leisure. I mistrust the latter. I dislike being appeased. No compensatory blah blah for me. I do, however, want the hours taken away from my child by studio visits and the like to be remunerated HER. She keeps track of when I am missing. I can’t keep count. Guilty interstitial pleasure: Facebook, whom (uh oh) I can credit for the honor [snarkery free] of labor on the present piece.

III.

Like most institutions of its kind, the University at which I have a tenure track position, for which I am reminded to be eternally thankful—and I AM—does not have maternity leave. Were I to choose to have a second child (this statement requires an exegesis into the word “choice”), I would take sick-leave, as though giving-birth were an illness; as though [biological] labor were a subtraction from the forward march of time, of production and productivity, of progress. Sick-leave, time taken while ill ad ostensibly unproductive. Sick leave, the concept if not the necessary practice, is sick. More perverse still is the idea that populating the next generation, however selfish this may or may not be in many way, however narcissistic or not, is not a form of non-productivity. The double negative in this last should raise some flags in the space of textual analysis, labor analysis, gender analysis. An aside: I never felt less ill than during pregnancy, childbirth, and so called recovery. The use of the word biology will deliver the present text, again, to the accusation of essentialism. I will add that it goes without saying that maternity need not be biological. But it is still labor. A colleague recently adopted a child. Said colleague travelled to a distant continent to retrieve the child with whom she had spent a year establishing an intimate, if painfully digitally mediated, long term relationship. She took family medical (sick) leave. It, apparently, is against an ethics of work to be preoccupied with a new baby.

Moreover, were I to have a second child, my tenure clock would stop if I took that odiously named family/sick leave. My opportunity to make a case for my own worth via tenure review would be deferred. Of course, were we unionized, there may be a fighting chance, were our esteemed male colleagues to support us, for maternity leave, or, more unthinkably, paid maternity leave and no punitive tenure clock [beyond the normative punitive parameters]. “We” are our worst obstacle. As a prominent political science academic and feminist recently pointed out to me, one of the greatest obstacles to unionization or any form of collectivization, for artists and academics, is that they think of themselves as “professionals” and associate unions with blue color workers. Were they to peek around, they would note that these workers are practically extinct. We are all in an endless lateral plane of service. As one student told me, “my parents pay your salary,” to which I responded, “like the cleaning lady.” Note that there is no “liberal elitism” lurking here. We are all, to some extent, unless we work for JPMorgan Chase or some hedge fund, the cleaning lady (many nannies, like many cabbies, have a string of PhDs. My republican aunt once told me with delight that her cleaning lady had worked with my dissertation adviser when she, “the cleaning lady” was in grad school). Anyway, the student just nodded. I told him he should work to get his parents’ money’s worth.

Professors and academics like to think that they transcend as they were believed to do in a previous disciplinary socio-cultural regime. Jackson Pollock thought that too. He was an easy puppet in Cold War politics.  Teaching undergrads in a core curriculum of an ivy league university that shores its superiority and identity around said core curriculum of old master literature, art and music—in other words, utterly dependent on a labor pool of graduate students—I participated in the effort to unionize. The threats were not subtle. The University’s counter argument was that students study; they don’t labor.

And women work, they don’t labor. There is no language.

1 Marc Spiegler. “When Human Beings are the Canvas.” Art News. June, 2003.
2 Interview with Paolo Virno. Branden W. Joseph, , Alessia Ricciardi trans. Grey Room No. 21 (Fall 2005): 26-37.
3 Ibid. P. 35.
4 Ibid.
5 The Laugh of Medusa.
6 For an excellent panoramic overview of these practices, see Helen Molesworth. “House Work and Art Work.” October No. 92 (Spring 2000).
8 Ariella Azoulay. The Civil Contract Of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. P. 226.
9 Ibid. For a discussion of the blind spot of sexuality and embodiment in Enlightenment thinking, see Jacques Lacan’s “seminal” “Kant with Sade.” Critique (April, 1963).
10 “Nothing, we are told by Western Hegemonic discourse, so differentiates “us” from “them” as the lack of freedom for women in Islamist societies. It needs to be noted, however, that far from silencing the power of women, Islamist regimes highlight it, acknowledging through severe and violent restrictions that what women do is crucial to political and social order. The argument justifying the strict codes of conduct, based on respect for women (in contrast to the Western commodification of women and their disparagement as sex objects), has a dialectical dynamic that can lead to its own undoing.” Susan Buck-Morss. Thinking Past Terror. P. 12. London: Verso, 2003. P. 12.
11 Thomas Keenan. “The Point is to (Ex) Change It: Reading ‘Capital’ Rhetorically.” Fables of Responsibility. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007.
Categories
Communiqués

Notes on Childcare at the Wisconsin Occupation

by China Martens

http://indyreader.org/content/notes-childcare-wisconsin-occupation

Working to create support for parents and children is one of my main forms of political activism (see http://dontleaveyourfriendsbehind.blogspot.com/), so after reading reports of how the protesters had settled into a camp within the Capitol Building that included childcare, I wanted to find out more. I asked Ryan Harvey (who had written about the childcare station in his “Dispatches from the Madison Fight #3, also here on indyreader.org) to put me in touch with an organizer. Mary Jo, a mother of three active in the protests, responded to my query.

Caretakers of young children will appreciate this: When I finally got voice- to-voice phone contact with Mary Jo she said that, ironically enough, she was having childcare issues at the moment. She couldn’t get to the Capitol to get her press pass on time this morning (she’s with radio), and now the kids are throwing flour all over the kitchen floor because she is on the phone with me. “Gotta go, China, call me back!” In a bit she called back and rushed out this informal interview over the telephone. Day-by- day the situation is changing. These are the typed notes from our chat on Thursday March 3, 2011:

Mary Jo said that people/families are already in crisis in their daily life. Being at the Capitol and holding space like this puts them in further crisis. Camping out in the Capitol building for almost 20 days is creating stress.   Authorities only let one person go in and out of the building at a time – it’s not clear to families if they can get back in, but they can. But it’s okay, since people need to rest. It’s been three weeks and they are regrouping: this is going to be a long battle.

Childcare is important space and (she designates it as) stress-free space!

They were asked to move yesterday  (March 2nd) and the childcare space had been targeted since they were the only ones on the second floor. It was started by mothers looking for a quiet space to relax and recoup away from the main action. The police told them they must leave for the building to be cleaned. When I asked if they were still in the building, Mary Jo replied, “OH YES – we are still there and we are not moving. If you move – you’re done!” Mary Jo is holding space for children who will also be affected by this bill and for their parents who have come to protest. Her vision is to lobby for families.

How did (what Mary Jo has dubbed) “The North Wing Family Center” start? First a friend R. started by getting meals for youth and putting their art and other flyers on the wall. That helped change the space and set the tone. Others started hanging murals and banners and stuff. L. had a baby. Put up signs for childcare. Two moms, S. and L. just sat with each other, and then L. spent the night. The next day Mary Jo came. She asked what the mothers wanted and together they made a list.

She tells me that lots of power plays go on within the Capitol – some try dictating what they should do, and how others should do things. Some of the people said, “We should compromise, they want us to leave–we should”. However, Mary Jo is part of those who say “No.”

The mothers had started it by needing a space to rest, and they found it. But by the next day, there were already some (without children) that were trying to kick them out of their space – which is a really good space. “Stake your ground,” her friend recommended. Half the moms decided they would leave like they were asked to. Mary Jo says, “I’m not leaving, I’m going to sit here and hold space.” The moms left, but a half an hour later they came back because they had been shooed out of the first floor when the hearings started and there was nowhere else to go. There were three moms. Then I. and E. with her two-year-old made five moms.

I ask if anyone who’s not a mom is helping out now? Yes, Mary Jo says. C. (a male without children of his own) is holding the space now. She tells me that conceptually the idea came from M.G. (another male) who said “Everyone is not here,” and then they had a long conversation about what they could do for families. The Children’s Museum is a block away and has offered some support with a discount on admission. They are strategizing about what to do next.

 These are Mary Jo’s key points about the family space they have created:

-We are holding space for the people who aren’t here yet

-Not everyone is at the table

-Everyone is affected.

-If we don’t put family first and foremost in the movement, the movement will fail!

Mary Jo tells me a little more about her struggles with holding space. “I held that ground [where we had set up the families’ area] at least 3 times where it became very unsure and I had to be very strong and clear. And people aren’t used to that in this day and age. I’m uncompromising. I call it the battle of the north wing.” The most recent incident had happened the day before. Five police officers came in, very forcefully, with their shoes on (You couldn’t ask them to take off their shoes. She had instituted a “no shoes” rule at the door because snow was tracking in and getting very dirty, and she wanted to keep the space clean for babies crawling on the ground). They pushed away the rocking chair she had brought from home at the door. “Excuse me!” she said. A policeman said, “I’ve worked here for 21 years and I can do what I want, I have immunity.” “What does that mean?” she asked. He answered that it means you can come and go, as you like. Mary Jo replied that she has immunity too! “The police told us that we needed to get our stuff out! But we ignored them and they didn’t come back. You just don’t leave when they say!”

Bringing the children to the occupation is good for the kids, Mary Jo tells me – and its good for the community! People recharge and ground themselves watching children.

Mary Jo is good at showing how an action is built from the conversations and actions of many. She tells me another kernel of wisdom to ponder. C. (who works as a “mama’s little helper” and helped Mary after the birth of the last of her three young children) said “Families need backup at home. The GOP wants to affect us in our communities and homes.”

Mary Jo expands: “There is a whole tier of people who cannot get to the Capitol. It’s too intense there. But they are supporting the occupation from the outside. We need to figure out how to increase the support there.”

Mary Jo wants to emphasize how parents are organizers and that many parents who are organizing this action at the Capitol have children at home. Parent organizers first seek support from their own families but even their extended support systems are not enough during this time. She asks other organizers that she knows are parents how they are doing; and how they are keeping things sane at home. What has been happening is there are a lot of typical gender divisions: many of the mother activists are staying home with the children while the father activists continue more visibly working on these issues. She and her husband are currently hiring a nanny to stay home with the children as she continues to organize but she is well aware of the fact that not everyone can afford this. What Mary Jo would like to express to the reader is that the struggle in Madison is going to come to us all. We need to reach out and ask for help. The reason Mary Jo and others continue working to keep a Family space at the Capitol occupation is to work towards collectively supporting children and parents, primarily mothers–those most affected by the new state government’s policies.

Note: As of Monday, March 7 the “North Wing Family Center” is no more. All their stuff has been removed. Concerned participants are planning what to do next and how to rebuild in a new setting or format to support families at the protest. I will post up more information when I receive it.

For more background on the larger protest in Madison, Wisconsin:

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained#

Inspired by “Did You Know There Was a Pop-Up Kindergarten in Tahrir Square?” :

www.good.is/post/a-moving-letter-from-egypt-about-the-role-of-children-in-tahrir-square/

And with thanks to Ryan Harvey for his reports and putting me in touch with  the North Wing Family Center:

http://voiceshakes.wordpress.com

Categories
Communiqués

OCCUPY EVERYTHING: Public Schools_Special Needs

I spoke recently with friends Holly Unruh (UCSB) and Aimee Harlib (UCSD) two amazing women who are currently in the University of California system while navigating CA Public Education and Services for their children. My desire was to link their struggles across these institutions visibly with their day to day life.

They’re used to being admired or treated as other in decidedly less supportive ways. But what do our public educational systems provide in the way of inclusion and reliability?

So my question to them now is: as student parents with special needs kids in public school how do you work with others? Thinking concretely here. How many hours, with whom and in what role?

HOLLY:
Short answer: 1 social worker, 1 specialist from the First 5 CATCH program, 1 therapist from a private non-profit, CALM through their HOPE program, 2 separate sets of teachers at the children’s center our boys attend, and the center’s educational specialist, when there is funding to fill that position.

We get about 2 hours a week of special services in the classroom and at home and the center assigns an additional aide to our older boy’s classroom (for him and other high needs kids in that class).

We recap weekly with the therapist and daily with teachers. To date most compensation for these services has come through medi-cal. There seems to be some confusion as to how health insurers might pay for/offer any of these services.

AIMEE:
Current Services (weekly):
Compensated  through San Diego Regional Center:

-We receive in home Applied Behavioral Therapy (parent lead) two days a week/two hours a session (we just dropped from five days a week this month), we also receive four hours a month of one-on-one consultation with a supervisor from the same ABA provider (A.C.E.S.).

-Respite Care: (4hour increments), 16 hours/month-we use the same nanny but have access to a database (college nannies and tutors).

Compensated through San Diego Unified School District:
Jackson is in the SEEK Program (special education) he attends 4 days a week/4hours.  In this program, on the same campus as his typical pre-school program, he receives: Speech therapy (2 hours/week); Adaptive PE (1hour/week); Occupational Therapy (2 hours/week) as well as an academic program all based on the goals in his IEP. His primary teacher makes a home visit once a month with updates, etc.

Provided/compensated State Services:

Head-Start State Pre-school (Mon-Fri), this typical pre-school is actually better than the UCSD private pre-school, The UCSD Early Childcare Education Center let us go after they were unable to accommodate Jackson in August of 2010 (illegally).

Healthy Families: medical/dental services, provided through the state of California

Jackson will turn five in June of this year, he was diagnosed on the
Autism spectrum a few months before his third birthday (March, 2009) but I attempted to find resources and some sort of diagnosis for approximately eight months prior to that date.  We began with a referral to CP3 (not sure what the acronym stands for but it is an under three program), which I believe is a division of California’s First Five program.

We had an in home assessment and met with an occupational therapist (this was November, 2008).  After his diagnosis we were referred to San Diego Regional Center and had difficulties receiving services due to a horrible coordinator but, after we switched to our current coordinator, it has been easy to find services within our access (Regional Center has had numerous and devastating budget cuts over the last couple of years).

I am highly involved in Jackson’s care, as most parents of children with special needs are. Outside of his pre-school environment and respite care, most of his services are parent lead:meaning – I am present and running the program. I am updated on a daily basis by his pre-school teachers both in his inclusion program and special education class.

It is difficult to breakdown Jackson’s services because most areas of his care are provided in teams (other than the Respite Nanny). Although I regard the individuals of the team as part of our family,
as Jackson grows older the services decrease.

We are in the process of paring back all of our services in preparation for this. We are low-income, so all of our services are provided through either State Programs or our school district. Many services are provided for children under five in California, after five I believe it is difficult to find access.

I am sure that I am leaving a great amount of information out, but at least this is a start.

Categories
Communiqués

WI: Report Back 3

by Dan S. Wang

This third report from Madison is difficult to write. Since at least the middle of last week there are too many lines of development for one person to follow, much less explain. In that sense, the Wisconsin uprising has truly become a broad movement, complete with sub-fronts, fissures, and rumors swirling daily. Ten days ago I still had the security of knowing that I had a privileged view of the struggle by virtue of living here. Now, I get the feeling that I’m only seeing the close-up action, while larger forces with national reach, perhaps imperceptible to us inside the city limits, are somehow shaping the contest.

This feeling of disconnect, of the local movement having lost its monopoly on the narrative, was confirmed when I started receiving email blasts last week from MoveOn, Democracy for America, TrueMajority, and other national progressive groups. After about the third one (and there have been countless since) I cringed to see the creativity, humor, and outrage of a citizen and worker-driven, organically developing movement that has no central leadership, and variable demands, be reduced to a branded online petition and donation button. I’ll take the sectarian newspaper hawkers over the dumbness of a professionally marketed email cause (of the week, or until donations crest) any day. At least the sectarian leftists entertain with their inadvertant goofiness. 

Let’s talk about three fronts to this battle: the space of the Capitol, the April 5 election, and the possibility of a strike. Each one is a complicated tale in its own right.

Up until about last Sunday night, Feb 27, the Capitol building could be accurately described as occupied. Up until late this past Thursday there were still protestors inside. For their last four days they dwindled in number and were basically cut off from the outside. The attrition—once a person exited, they were not allowed back in—guaranteed that the authorities would retake the Capitol sooner or later.

The Capitol police had been boxing demonstrators out of various corridors and corners of the building all week long. The occupied space shrunk continuously through the simple tactic of clearing people out of a section “for cleaning” and then marking that section off with police tape and posting police to guard it. The order to vacate the building in whole was finally delivered on Sunday, but with several hundred demonstrators inside, the police chose to let people stay but locked newcomers out. And so the attrition began. Looking back, it was a very smart non-confrontational move on the part of the Capitol police.

This Wisconsin constitution specifies that the Capitol is to remain open to the public during all daytime hours. Scott Walker flouted this constitutional guarantee, thereby inviting a lawsuit. A Dane County judge quickly granted the demonstrators a temporary restraining order on Monday, preventing the governor from locking out the public. But he flouted that, too, and kept only one door unlocked and guarded, and set rules for who could come in—some vague requirement that it be “on official business.” The situation became so ridiculous that the Dane County sheriff, Jim Mahoney, took the extraordinary step of relieving his deputies of having to guard the entrances. Walker doesn’t control the sheriff, and Mahoney let him know it by quipping that the sheriff’s deputies “are not palace guards.” Thus continued the sub-plot of Scott Walker antagonizing even law enforcement. (Word from unnamed sources is, the Madison police—one of the best educated forces in the country—are resentful. He’s transferred into Madison a bunch of outstate cops to help, but their loyalty is questionable, too. Only the Capitol police are under his strict control.)

The Teaching Assistants Association ran the occupation—coordinated cleaning, managed the food, kept in contact with the police, etc—and they had the option on Sunday to end the occupation on their terms, in consultation with the police. They chose not to, and the lockout is what happened; after a few days of legal wrangling, the building was opened to the public again, but with shifting and possibly illegal conditions placed by the governor. No matter. Even with this setback and miscalculation, the occupation was a success. In America there have been only a handful of occupations of state capitol buildings historically, and all the rest were only for a day or part of day. The occupation in Madison went on day and night for thirteen days. Already it is widely acknowledged as an historic event. The longer term ramifications are unsettled, but clearly there will be some. As far as the governor bringing in the heavies goes, here again, as with this whole sorry tale to begin with, he overreached. The video of a Democrat lawmaker getting thrown to the ground while trying to enter the building has further hurt the standing of the governor. 

Equally important has been the nature of the occupation, what it proved to the demonstrators, and what the space became. During the day the rotunda was a cauldron of shared anger, the drumming and unison shouting so loud it made your ears ring, and kept the lawmakers hidden deep in their chambers and offices on edge all day long. By the second week, the occupied areas would turn into a social forum in the late evenings and nighttime, with people coming to read the hundreds of signs, to talk politics with strangers, to eat free food, and to perform music or speechify from the open mike center. It was quite a sight, and for anybody who entered during those days, one’s sense of possibility could not help but be enlarged—this was a co-op, a commune, a punk house (where everybody cleaned up after themselves, imagine that), a labor temple, a free speech zone…in the freakin’ state Capitol building! When does that ever happen?! This will not be erased from memory anytime soon. Also worth reiterating here is the way the occupation started. That first Tuesday night/early Wed morning, Feb 15-16, when debate was cut off by the Republicans, those waiting to testify against Walker’s bill were so many and so livid with anger that the police couldn’t do anything. The cops were too scared. Those who weren’t scared were sympathetic.

Here is very good take on the occupation, how it evolved, what it served, what it meant. Sorry, you have to read it on Facebook.

Next: The April 5th election. The reality is, should Scott Walker ram through his bill—and all indications are that he still believes that he can—many of the provisions will be decided in the courts. The Wisconsin Supreme Court now has a 4-3 conservative majority, but a sitting conservative judge is up for election on April 5, facing a liberal challenger, an environmental law attorney from lefty Madison. (In Wisconsin judges are an elected position. As in all other parts of American political life, what used to be a rather sedate, non-partisan affair has in recent years become yet another polarized fight zone.) This election will be treated as a referendum on the Walker agenda. One question is, then, how will the movement make the transition from street demonstrations to taking a side in an electoral campaign? Are there enough people with enough energy to keep Scott Walker embattled with large demonstrations at the Capitol for the next four weeks while also ramping up work on what is normally a low-key, low turnout, spring election? As well, there are now recall campaigns underway, targeting the eight eligible Republican state senators, ie who have been in office for at least a year already. The recall process is by design extremely demanding, and no matter how energized an electorate, requires a great deal of effort for even a chance of success. The movement only needs to recall and replace three senators to gain control of the Wisconsin Senate, but even this will require the dedicated attention of many activists, not to mention money, legal counsel, media work, etc.

In sum, since my last report, battles on the terrain of conventional electoral politics have emerged as another true front of the struggle. Here, too, as with the contest over control of the Capitol, there is a politics of space in play, but at the comparatively neglected scale of the state senate districts, typically encompassing an average population of 160k, some more and some less, and a ground area of about two or more counties. One by-product of all this mess is, thousands more state residents will learn for the first time what the size and shape of their senate district is, and, moreover, what it means to act politically at that scale of space. For nearly a generation now, the US left has permitted the right to act at this and other mid-level scales of governance with hardly any challenge. This newly sparked engagement cannot be a bad thing, especially in the long term—unless it drains movement attention and substantial bodies from the still-important demonstration spectacles on the Capitol square. To spell out the dilemma: the fourteen awol Democrat senators are the only thing standing between Scott Walker and his agenda being legally realized, but they can only stay away for as long as there are large daily and occasionally massive demonstrations of support, and realistically, can only stay away until the April 5 election. So the demonstrations must not dilute the campaign messaging, and ideally, need to echo it, but at the same time not be reduced to it. To lose the April 5th election and to fail on the most achieveable recall efforts would, unquestionably, be major defeats.

Finally, there is the spectre of a strike. The truism of labor’s ulimate power being that of withholding its work activity, which in the US context sounded practically meaningless only a month ago, rings with revitalized freshness, given the threats of force and firings being leveled by this governor. But how and when? Who and where? Teachers? Students? Those who are legally granted the right strike, or those who instantly run the risk of being fired? What is the strike supposed to communicate? How does it get organized, and what kinds of practicalities would be involved? Would it be a symbolic one-day strike or a true shut-down of business as usual? The South Central Federation Labor has already endorsed a general strike, so the language is getting out there and these questions coming into play.

Already there are two points of reference, generated by the movement itself. One, during the first week we saw the Madison Public School teachers essentially call a strike without using strike language, shutting down the schools for three days through a massive sick-out. It was a bet that paid off, but only because the message was not primarily about leaving work to protest the budget cuts and attacks on unions; rather, the message was one of love, as in, the teachers love their jobs, schools, and students so much, that they are walking out, and the students love their teachers so much, that they are joining them, and the parents love their children’s teachers so much, that they are supporting them. The message of love is what a proper and possibly general strike must convey—the conservatives have found it impossible to argue against it, and even have professed the same love, to the jeers of the public. And then two, to return to the occupied Capitol, there now exists an actual model of a self-organized society, an example of something that worked. Over the two weeks of occupation, food stations, childcare, clean-up crews, first aid and internal communication structures inside the Capitol were set up as needed. In contemporary America the term mutual aid is tossed around by radicals as a vague, dreamy concept, or else made real through slowly growing limited projects around a given focus of cooperative energy. Here mutual aid became real in a way that was entirely outside of our American experience, as a process of change, spontaneous giving, and practical adjustment, focused on meeting immediate and concrete needs that arose in new situations daily. What happened at the Capitol shows us that the many kinds of support that a strike beyond three days would require *will* materialize, even if in the end it’s neither perfect nor sustainable. Strikers will not be left high and dry by their fellow workers, their neighbors, their friends.

The who and when of a strike is the biggest question. If Scott Walker follows through on his threatened firings of state workers, 1500 or a thousand at a time, for no other reason than to pressure the absent Dem senators into returning from out of state for a vote, then the mood for striking will go up. I suspect the teachers’ union would be the first to declare; if and how other unions respond will be most important. If AFSCME turns scared in that moment and publicly dissociates itself from strike tactics, the battle may be lost. If they merely hold their cards, refusing to say one way or other, then I think the momentum towards a strike will build, especially if there are massive student strikes, too. If any other union joins the teachers with a sympathy strike that goes beyond a short symbolic gesture, then the general strike may indeed be on, especially if the governor reacts with aggression.

Other points:

1)   As expected, national media coverage has been atrocious. While utterly oblivious in some significant and surprising respects, Scott Walker has proven himself a skillful handler of journalists, and nearly impossible to shake from the script. While he’s managed to skew the national media discussion toward the smokescreen of budgetary matters by repeating the same script with each and every appearance, the non-corporate media (just one example: rotundaville) has been disseminated so widely, and the numerous media lies of Walker are so quickly debunked, that Walker’s single and well-practiced strategy is not enough to drive the narrative.

2)   After Walker unveiled his bi-annual state budget last Tuesday, new outrage arose from heretofore quiescent parts of the state—particularly in the rural areas and in the urban core. The massive cuts to schools and healthcare he had planned for the budget were based on the first bill passing, which would have freed up county and town governments to do away with their public sector union employee contracts as a way to make up the shortfall in state funding. The governor put off announcing his budget for two weeks, hoping the demonstrations over the “budget repair bill” would die down. They haven’t, and now he’s had to show the whole state exactly what he has in mind for them, thereby digging himself a deeper hole, politically. After three weeks, we can say definitively: Scott Walker has been the greatest gift to the American left since Richard Nixon, and maybe even since Bull Connor. 3)   The rural and urban expressions of discontent arrive in Madison this coming weekend. A farmer-organized convoy of tractors is scheduled to demonstrate on the square on the same day that a march of high school students from Milwaukee arrives. These actions come just in time. Even though the past three Saturday demonstrations have turned out massive numbers of protestors, the energy that comes out of a new and unexpected movement is dissipating. The protracted struggle has begun and the anti-Walker constituencies must adjust to the reality of political work without the advantage of novelty. As with the convoy and march, coming up with new storylines is a necessity if we are to maintain visibility as proof of commitment.

4)   As the struggle has take a turn for the local, with thousands of activists diving into the minutiae of recall campaigns, dealing with the legalities concerning the fourteen absent Dem senators, and countless other details of hard-slog politicking, the international dimensions are fading from front-line consciousness. As it happens, the main battle from the other side of the globe is no longer a peaceful occupation of Tahrir Square, but a shooting civil war in Libya, complete with hundreds of gruesome deaths, displaced peoples, and a paralysis in international response. Thus, the comparisons no longer suit. But even without convenient parallels that insist on connection, I hope it is not lost to people both inside and outside of Wisconsin, inside and outside of the US—what’s happening in Wisconsin matters to the world, for the following reason. The election last November of Scott Walker along with Ron Johnson’s defeat of Russ Feingold for a Wisconsin US Senate seat were taken by the national GOP as a model and pathway to their future power, so much so that Wisconsin GOP head Reince Priebus was elected to lead the Republican National Committee shortly after, and then Janesville, Wisc., congressman Paul Ryan was granted the slot to respond to Obama’s State of the Union address. Walker is seen as the operations guy, Priebus the strategist, and Ryan the policy brains—the rising star triumvirate of the GOP. Because of their national prominence, if they manage to win the day in Wisconsin, the rest of the world will feel no doubt feel the effects. If we win, we will have struck a blow against all three. How to reinstall the internationalism of the movement’s first week under these changed conditions is the challenge.3)   The rural and urban expressions of discontent arrive in Madison this coming weekend. A farmer-organized convoy of tractors is scheduled to demonstrate on the square on the same day that a march of high school students from Milwaukee arrives. These actions come just in time. Even though the past three Saturday demonstrations have turned out massive numbers of protestors, the energy that comes out of a new and unexpected movement is dissipating. The protracted struggle has begun and the anti-Walker constituencies must adjust to the reality of political work without the advantage of novelty. As with the convoy and march, coming up with new storylines is a necessity if we are to maintain visibility as proof of commitment.

4)   As the struggle has take a turn for the local, with thousands of activists diving into the minutiae of recall campaigns, dealing with the legalities concerning the fourteen absent Dem senators, and countless other details of hard-slog politicking, the international dimensions are fading from front-line consciousness. As it happens, the main battle from the other side of the globe is no longer a peaceful occupation of Tahrir Square, but a shooting civil war in Libya, complete with hundreds of gruesome deaths, displaced peoples, and a paralysis in international response. Thus, the comparisons no longer suit. But even without convenient parallels that insist on connection, I hope it is not lost to people both inside and outside of Wisconsin, inside and outside of the US—what’s happening in Wisconsin matters to the world, for the following reason. The election last November of Scott Walker along with Ron Johnson’s defeat of Russ Feingold for a Wisconsin US Senate seat were taken by the national GOP as a model and pathway to their future power, so much so that Wisconsin GOP head Reince Priebus was elected to lead the Republican National Committee shortly after, and then Janesville, Wisc., congressman Paul Ryan was granted the slot to respond to Obama’s State of the Union address. Walker is seen as the operations guy, Priebus the strategist, and Ryan the policy brains—the rising star triumvirate of the GOP. Because of their national prominence, if they manage to win the day in Wisconsin, the rest of the world will feel no doubt feel the effects. If we win, we will have struck a blow against all three. How to reinstall the internationalism of the movement’s first week under these changed conditions is the challenge.

Categories
Communiqués

BIFO: Brera a call to teach in European banks

by FRANCO BIFO BERARDI

The Italian government, in perfect agreement with the European central Bank is destroying the school, particularly the Brera Academy where I am precariously teaching media sociology.

The following lines are my contribution to the discussion among the teacher of this school. As I’m expected to start my course in Brera on March 14th, I want to understand if I should prepare my lectures. My answer is: no. I’ll go to the Brera Academy, on March 14th at 11.30, but I’ll not talk about cybercultures, as scheduled. I’ll talk about a different subject: how to organize a insurrection, because this is the only intersting subject at the moment.
The “riforma Gelmini” is cutting 8 billions euros in the Italian school system. The effect is easy to see, and in the next years the definancing of the school is going to produce misery ignorance and violence.
It’s not an Italian problem: in the UK thousands and thousands of students are leaving their schools as the taxes have become impossible to pay, while five hundred thousand public workers are waiting to be fired, and the british society is falling in a nightmare of devastation.
Therefore we should forget that the Milano Academy of Brera can be saved through some negotiations. The only way now is to fight against the financial dictatorship that is oppressing  European society as Gheddafi and Mubarak have been oppressing Arab people.
Is this a task too difficult for the teachers of Brera? Yes, it is, but we are not alone. Millions of worker, all over Europe, – in the school, in the factories, in the hospitals and inn the social services – are facing a choice between misery and revolt, between radical struggle and depression. This is the moment to prepare insurrection. It’s better to be frank on this point: our future is over, as the future of our students, unless we forget fear and dare to fight for the right to teaching, and the right to studying, and the right to a decent salary, and for our dignity.
Discussing with the bureaucrats of the Brera school is useless, as they are only the tool of a devastating projects they cannot change at all. Useful is to occupy a square, a station, a parliament, and stay there as long as the government of mafia will be chased away, as long as the  Trichet-Sarkozy-Merkel directorate will have been defeated. Is this prospect too much?
May be, but we have to be radical, as the situation has become extreme.
The Knowledge liberation front gathered in Paris Saint Denis on February 12th and called to a day of teach in in the banks of many European cities on March 25th. In London they are already doing this: groups of students and researchers go into the bank, and they occupy the place and read poems, and discuss molecular biology, and talk about their problems, and eat something, and sleep.

Occupying banks has to  become a daily practice. Is it  dangerous? It is, but it is more dangerous to wait for somebody to come and help us to have jobs and money and schools and house, when financial capitalism is destroying our lives. Financial capitalism has declared war against society.

We cannot avoid this war, but we can win.

I beg your pardon if my language may seem emphatically tragic. Unfortunately the tragedy is not an effect of my imagination.