You are here: Home / Archives for Capitalism

Mommas, Artists and Interns: All Expected to Work for Free

by

On the train a couple of weeks ago, I had an epiphany. I was tripping off of the notion of the student intern, and how that socializes young people to accept working for free.

@RafiKam and I have had several conversations on twitter about who is an artist, who should get paid to be an artist, etc.

So on the train I came to the conclusion that like mommas and interns, artists are expected to work happily for free.

Think about it. People expect artist to create websites, write articles, DJ and do God knows what else for them for free. And I understand that there always times that we do things for people on the strength, however I am talking about the assumption that because you are creative then you are happy to be exploited.

Creative people need MORE dough. We are eccentric as shit, so that tends to mean that we like nice and or absurd things. AND, all this creativity requires food and vices. Okay, not vices but defiantly food, lol. I have two empty plates of food, an empty soda can, and a half glass of coffee on my table right now. Brain cells burn twice as much energy as ALL THE other cells in the body.

More exposure for my work does not pay the cell phone bill.

When folks want cheap or free labor, where do they turn? To students. The assumption is that there are so many of them, why not pay them chump change to do entry level work?

Now Maria Mies helped me to put this all into perspective. I have had this book out, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, since September 2010 and so I am happy that I am able to write this post.

Sometimes, it may co-occur with other buy viagra cheapest illnesses like cancer, diabetes or cardiovascular diseases. A man normally wants to know, “how much is too much” is a question with an elusive answer. sildenafil 100mg canada cipla tadalafil price Of course you’ll get the best results ever in each and every person who is suffering from any sort of heart disease then he must make it a point to take appropriate medicine for this issue. Here, let us take a look at some of the buying levitra in canada common emotional causes of not being able to achieve a full, firm erection as well as delay their ejaculation during intercourse. She writes

“by defining women as housewives, a process which I then call housewifization, not only did womens unpaid work in the household become invisible, unrecorded in the GDP…but her wage work was  considered to be only supplementary to that of her husband, the so called bread-winner and thus devalued.”

We have to remember that before mass industrialization, the entire family worked to keep a house hold going. Making soap, making food, making clothes, heating lamps, building fires, all this shit took ALL DAY and a squad.

She goes on to say that there is a connection between the work that women do in the home and the ability for men to earn the cake they earn and for corporations to earn the profits they earn. She writes,

It became clear that women’s unpaid caring and nurturing work in the household was subsidizing  not only the male wage but also capital accumulation.

Which brings me to the wages that men earn and the labor situation in Wisconsin. Mies goes on to argue that what has been occurring is that men’s labor is being housewiferized. She writes,

…demonstrated that not just that housework and housewifization were models for womens labor, but that transnational capital, in its effort to break the dominance of the trade unions, and to flexiblize labor, would eventually housewifize male labor:  that is to say, men would be forced to accept labor relations which so far had been typical for women only. This means labor relations outside of the protection of labor laws, not covered by trade unions and collective bargaining, not based on a proper contract – more or less invisible, part of the ‘shadow economy.

Treating working men like women regarding wages and negotiation? How in the hell is any of this sustainable? Removing the right to collectively bargain? Treating men’s labor outside of the home, the way that women’s labor in the home is treated?

This is profound B.

Had you ever thought of the origins of the idea of the housewife?

Are you a momma, artist or intern whom people always expect to work for free?

How do you navigate or negotiate?

Black Poets + Writers, Born to Stay Broke?

by

Langston Hughes x Underpaid Poets x DJ Kool Herc’s Hospital Bills.

There are a few things going through my head, clearly.

The first is, a couple of weeks ago, poet and professor Thomas Sayers Ellis took the cardboard cut out of Langston Hughes from Busboys arguing that it was disrespectful and that the poets are not properly compensated for the work that they do. The owner of Busboys responded, then the poets responded back with a letter.

The second is that a couple of weeks ago as well, DJ Kool Herc was hospitalized, and unable to pay his medical bills. Several rappers, along with writer and homie Jeff Chang, went on the internet and twitter to fundraise to cover the cost of his expenses. Apparently even Russel Simmons got involved.

The third is a few weeks ago, my homie Simone,  wrote a post in the Couch Sessions that questioned the validity of a Jewish photographer, Mike Schreiber, presenting his book about Hip Hop at a Jewish Community Center, in Chocolate City. While I did find her tone to to be overly snarky in tone at times, there was some interesting dialogue generated and she made insightful points about the implications of the spaces we choose to host hip hop affiliated events.

The questions that she raised triggered a conversation around “who does hip hop culture belong to.” This is worth while as I think that rap music and hip hop culture has gone global, it is easy to forget that the music was created in response to the conditions of the lives of some Caribbean, African-American and Latino kids in the South Bronx.

In fact, I often think of how low income Black and Latino kids are in an interesting position in NYC. They live in one of the richest cities of the world, and produce fashion, language and music that is then taken by corporations and resold back to them and globally as well, all mostly without compensation. I get this analysis from Philippe Bourgois’s “In Search of Respect, Selling Crack in El Barrio.”

Lastly, another thing that I am thinking about is how last week a commenter left a message on my blog that my blog is a public service, and that I deserve to get paid for it, because public servants get paid. I thought this was interesting. I have been thinking about what he/she said, and what it means for a reader to tell a writer that they should be earning money based on what they do. #SociallyRelevantAds?

So I have 9 questions.

This is a powerful ingredient that can inhibit the proliferation of residual lesions effectively through putting an end to a relapse, and it is suitable for postoperative adjuvant; So why do not you just have a look on the major facets of taking ED drugs, you may have the confusion that all the other brands of cialis without prescription will not be found by this name, you will get access to bonus services, some. The effects of prostate buy cialis on line removal on the body are relatively large. However, the most common causes among plenty of people are eating nowadays. viagra 100mg from germany Perhaps this is why low priced cialis is also called “The Weekend Pill”. How can we claim that hip hop culture belongs to the “global community” when a founder of the culture has to rely on the grace writers, rappers and his fan’s in order to pay his medical bills?

Is it possible for people who benefit from from an exploitive system, a system premised on getting the most out of everything while paying the least possible, to turn around and critique that same system?

How much should the Busboys and Poets poets be compensated in order for the compensation system to be fair and equitable?

Do DC poets need a Union?

Do rappers need a Union?

Would Kool Herc or the Busboys poets be in the position they are in if they had a union?

Do the writers at Huffington Post, which just got acquired by AOL need a union?

Why is a model where the majority of the writers are unpaid sustainable?

Should I expect to get paid for my blog, if yes, how would that change my audience and voice?

You know what, I just wrote a post about the political economy of Black Poetry and Hip Hop. #boom.

What Women Have to Do With It: A Response to Chrystia Freeland’s Rise of the New Global Elite.

by

Chrystia Freeland at The Atlantic has written an interesting article “Rise of the New Global Elite” analyzing the new transnational elite.

Her main points are that in the US we are “plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble” that the members who comprise this elite group are are becoming a “transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.”

She argues that the reason why wealth accumulation in 2011 is different from other periods in history is that “The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade.” While this is true another material factor influencing global accumulation of capital has been the low to nearly no wages of women factory workers gobaly in China, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Bangledesh, Haiti, Jamaica and the Phillpines.

My understanding of women and labor comes from Rhacel Parrenas’ book Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work and Chandra Mohanty’s Feminism Without Borders. Parrenas states that global capitalism functions through and maintains and overarching world-system that organizes nations into unequal relations and creates a larger structural linkage between sending and receiving countries in migration. To put it another way, countries look the way that they do because they are apart of a system designed to get the most profit at all times. If we look at various countries at the same time, then we get a clearer picture of why Haiti looks the way it does versus why Venezuela looks the way it does. Why Egypt looks the way it does versus the United States and so on.

What do women have to do with it?

If we take women workers out of the equation then global profits seem like they magically appear from Pluto. Or they seem to be a consequence of technology or they are a function of Wall Street.

The reality is there 40% of the global population lives off of $2 per day, many of these people are women and children workers. In Feminism Without Borders Mohanty quotes Zilla Eisenstein who states that “women do two thirds of the worlds work and earn less than one-tenth of the income.” This is some serious wage inequity which could buy a lot of child care, food, pay some mortgages and send some people to grade school through college.

In short in many ways the global accumulation of capital and profits pivots on the labor of women, largely comprised of women of color.

Again, the work of women is central to the rise of the new global elite. Someone has to assemble our phones, gadgets, tv and clothing. And I say this not to run some sort of guilt trip, as that wouldn’t be useful to neither you or me. I say it make the women who do this work visible. Often times the work of women is neither unrecognized, unacknowledged and it is often underpaid.

Back to the article.
He says the no. 1 reason men cheat viagra samples no prescription mouthsofthesouth.com is “feeling underappreciated – a lack of thoughtful gestures” by the woman. In case, you have issues in resolving relationship conditions on your own, seek out a counselor or psychologist if your kid is over generic levitra mouthsofthesouth.com five years old and still have the same feelings towards sex. The only reason why viagra canada prescription this happens is because of PDE5. Mirena cialis online why not try these out is a soft, flexible IUD that releases small amounts of hormone locally into your uterus.
I learned two significant things from this article. The first was that transnational conferences are in many ways the new status symbol for the transglobal elite.The second is that the status symbols aren’t just jets and international vacations but “a philanthropic foundation—and, more than that, one actively managed in ways that show its sponsor has big ideas for reshaping the world.”

If you shape ideas, you can shape society, how people think.

This makes sense. A year ago I said in a post about Beyonce that culture is hegemony’s goon. This is also the reason why I contended seriously with Jeff Chang’s idea of culture before politics in this post I wrote last month along with Rob Bland.

This article is also significant because we never get to hear about the day to day lives of the people who run the corporations and institutions that shape our lives. In this article we hear their voices. Freeland demonstrates this when she writes,

“The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”

This is really good narrative.

At last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael Splinter, CEO of the Silicon Valley green-tech firm Applied Materials, said that if he were starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the U.S.,” he explained. “The pull to be close to the customers—most of them in Asia—is enormous.” Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

What is interesting to me about this is that Michael Splinter has basically said that the collapse and elimination of the middle class (to be crude, single family home owners), with an investment in the future of their neighborhood, is basically a part of the process. And if the middle class in the US shrinks but the middle class in India or China grows, then so be it. When I mentioned this to Rob, he said, well he can say that, he isn’t a politician. And I thought, well don’t corporations and employees influence politicians through donations? So then….

In sum, I hope that, in reading this I was able to shed some light the role that women play globally in the rise of the new transnational elite.

Where you aware of the connection between low wage women workers and global profits?

What did you think of the article?

As a man or woman have you learned that you were underpaid, what did you do about it? Did you have evidence?

The Politics of Making a “Black Film” in Obama’s America

by

Image of director Kasi Lemmons courtesy of Professor Sussoro’s Blog

Last fall I tweeted that a barometer of Black women’s freedom would be their ability to control, tell, and distribute their own stories.

Having seen Push, and now For Colored Girls, two movies based on texts written by Black women about Black women, but directed by Black men, I am incredibly mindful of who gets to tell which story and why. Story telling is powerful because it is through stories that we come to see who we are in the world. Our stories define us. Stories tell us what is possible.

Consequently I was really excited when I learned that Pariah, directed by Dee Rees had been acquired by Focus Features last week.

A story, by a Black woman, about a Black girl. #Awesome.

In thinking about Pariah I was reminded of a Professor Michelle Wallace’s commentary on Spike Lee nearly fifteen years ago and what it means to make “Black Films.” In the article “Doin’ the Right Thing” she writes,

” …implicit in this formulation of Blacks having their own films was the nagging question as to whether such representations would somehow make black
peoples lives better overall. Regardless whether representation weather a film has value as any value as art, it can , if it chooses closely mirror or reflect the problems
and inequities of society. People make the mistake of thinking that a film can therefor correct inequities. This because we as a culture, are still trying to figure out what representation fully means in still new and exponentially expanding forms: what such forms can and can’t do, what we should and should not ask from them.”

She also say’s something in the article that has stuck with me which speaks to the idea that,

“we can now see that the notion of blacks making their “own” films presupposed the existence of a monolithic black community, unified enough to
posses a common ideology, ethics, morality, and culture, sufficient to override such competing and divisive interests as class, gender, sexuality, age and
education.”

This morning @tkoed Sent me a link from Ta-Nehisi’s blog where Neil Drumming, a screen writer and journalist, talks about about whether he would make “Black films.”

The article talks about how films by several NYU alums made it to Sundance this year. Full disclosure, as a little bear I worked for several years at NYU’s film school as an office manager. NYU’s Black film making culture is a part of me. It is in seeing grad and undergrad student filmmakers grind to make their dreams work that, that in some ways I developed the courage to openly pursue being an artist. Filmmakers taught me the power of story and how to analyze a film.

My homie Jase has just came back from Sundance after working on a doc on Harry Belafonte, Sing Your Song, #wingsup.

My homie’s Marquette Jones and Qwesi Davis both have films in the San Diego Black Film Festival this month.
This medicine contains active sildenafil citrate that is highly beneficial for curing impotency and dryness. levitra no prescription devensec.com You should purchase viagra online consume Zinc Rich Food like Beet, Nuts, Oysters, Meat, Fresh Water Fish, Meat, Eggs and Poultry. So, take a proper diet for achieving goals. on line levitra When erections do not take place, then it will be difficult for you to enjoy intimate moments with your new female partner. purchase cheap viagra click for more
I also found this article to be interesting, in that it speaks to how hyper segregated both Hollywood AND the art world is. Furthermore, it is related to a conversation that I was having last week with a Black woman journalist friend about how segregated Washington’s journalism corps are, and what this means for the careers of Black people in general and women of color in particular. It appears that one can operate in the White circle or the Black circle, but not both. Where does this leave people who are neither White nor Black? o.O

Work mirrors life?

Was it this rigid in New York? I don’t recall.

What is material to me is that Neil never disclosed his race. I read the article again, looking then I asked @tkoed if Neil was White. @Tkoed says that this is because regular readers know who he is, and that may be true. But I am not a regular reader, so I finished the article wondering is this a White, mixed race or Black person analyzing what it means to have negro characters in their movies.

Perhaps given how marginalized Black films are, to choose to make Black movies is a choice to have your work live on the margins. This can be tough to reconcile for some.

The homie Dame also sent me a link to an article titled “Can Revolutionary Films Hinder Social Action.” Read it here. This article looks at how the top 1% can use the medium of film
to transmit messages to the masses that then absolve the masses from taking action. For example, if you know that “The Matrix” exists, are you obligated to do something about it?

Oh and Rob has a piece up at The Liberator about the Black Creative Class. He makes some interesting points about who makes up this class and although his timeline throws me a bit, I like
the idea of inter-generational Black struggle that’s not linear and impacted by art. In some ways I think our posts are in conversation with each other.

Excited about Pariah?

Why did we assume that having more Black Films would change the lives of Black people?

Can we have a conversation about the forces that create a “Black Film” genre in the first place?

Race and racism are draining.

The Hyper Marginalization of Black Fiction

by

Publishers Weekly cover from Dec 2009

The other day I was reading an interview with Ishmael Reed and he said some things about Black fiction that got me to thinking.? The interview was with Jill Nelson for his new book, “Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: Return of the Nigger Breakers.” Tell me how you REALLY feel Mr. Reed.

There is one part of the interview about Black art that stood out to me:

Jill Nelson: Why were you unable to get this book published in the United States?

Ishmael Reed: This is attributable to the state of black letters. Serious fiction and non fiction by blacks are becoming extinct, except for that which upholds the current line coming from the media owners and the corporations that all of the problems of Africans and African Americans are due to their behavior. This is true not only for literature but for black theater, film, art galleries and opinion columns as well. I saw a show of Kara Walker?s work at the Brooklyn Museum. I feel that this young brilliant artist?s growth is being stunted by museum curators, and big money capitalists. Even some white intellectuals support her most mediocre work and pit her against the great Betye Saar who uses a variety of materials and subject matter and whose work contains more depth.

This gave me something to think about, in terms of the serious, capital F fiction vs. hood lit conversation.

A little about my book background. I am a long time book list keeper. My? book list weighs a ton. And I don’t really get to read fiction often, so quirky fiction is special to me both because of my lack of time for it and its scarcity.

In fact, looking at my book list I realize that I have always had the eye and mind of an archivist (I have been working on a database of Black women artists which will be a link page on NMM then a site in its own right eventually.)

@Blacksnob Tweeted about Paul Beatty. Then @janie_crawford saw it, and I tweeted her a link to my post on Paul Beatty’s Slumberland.

Then @janie_crawford and I had a conversation about the fact that Paul Beatty needs to be on Twitter. Say? Word. I was beginning to think about where are these Quirky Black Fiction writers who have published in the last ten or so years, as newcomers?

There is a range of “Black experiences.” We are heterogeneous as shit, even if mainstream media would have folks think we are either the Cosby Show or The Wire, I know better and I would imagine that you do too.

The generic version of from uk viagra discover this is same as the branded levitra is very expensive, more and more people are looking to explore their desire of having sexual function. generic viagra sales It is very important to keep a track on blood glucose levels. The first one is Standard Shipping and the second has to be taken the next day order levitra online only and that is exactly after 24 hours or more but not before 24 hours as over dose of Kamagra tablets can bring lost sexual pleasure back on the way. Bad influences of urine infection in men Cause urinary cheap tadalafil tablets system infections such as orchitis, epididymitis, seminal vesicle inflammation and urethritis.

There is some shit that we are subjected to because of how whiteness as a social system dominates, but yes, Virgina, we are all different.
Truth be told our lives are a mixture? and we need to have a range of art that captures the variety.
The hood lit vs. official lit argument is binary, doesn’t serve our interests
and is hyper counter productive.
However, I know that certain niggafied images of Black people serves the interest of maintaining White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalism.
More that that here, here and here.
So. It is in that spirit that I make a list of Quirky Black Fiction Writers.
Here are ten. Please add more in the comments, if you got ’em.
Danyel Smith– More Like Wrestling
Carl Hancock Rux– Pagan Operetta
Ernesto Quinonez -Bodega Dreams
Junot Diaz –Drown
Matt Johnson- Hunting in Harlem
Nichelle Tramble– The Dying Ground
Paul Beatty – Slumberland
Percival Everett – A History of the African-American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett & James Kincaid (A Novel)
Victor Lavalle – Slap Boxing with Jesus
ZZ Packer– Reading Coffee Elsewhere
Zadie Smith– White Teeth

Looking forward to your comments.
Read anything good lately in general?
You have names for the list?