"Living Poor With Style"

(Note: I've been working on this post for some time now. Let's see if I can finish it! 🤪)

I recently got out my ancient copy of "Living Poor With Style" (1972) by Ernest Callenbach and I was shocked to realize how strongly this book and the ideas in it influenced my life, and how strongly it still does all these many years later.

Re-reading it, I'm also intrigued at how much and how little has changed since publication. The United States is still a cancer on the Earth, sucking up and squandering resources to no discernible object, devastating people and societies at will, enforcing consumerism on a largely pliant population, and pretending to hold the moral high ground while Americans still have no universal health care -- among so many other deficiencies. Yet in 1972, it was possible to live reasonably well off the fat of the land if you knew how and were willing to take the risk of failing. 

Now? I'm not so sure that one can live well. One can survive, perhaps. Though it is getting harder and harder. Much of what Callenbach suggests a poor person can do to live better is as useful today as it was 50 years ago -- and more -- but many of the public support programs he advises taking advantage of either don't exist any more or have been so transformed and bureaucratized that they might as well not exist for the vast majority of people. 

In 1972 it was possible to live poor and reasonably well if you were clever, skilled, and adaptable. In 2022? Maybe not. 

The ideas Callenbach presents, however, have formed the foundation for many movements we see today, from ecology to minimalism. 

The title of his book changed through many reprints and revisions from "Living Poor..." to "Living Cheaply..." in part, I think, because of the negative connotations of "poor" among his largely white middle class readers. Even in the early edition I have (it's like the third printing of the original 1972 Bantam edition), he acknowledges that the offspring of white middle class families are the primary drivers of the search for "alternative lifestyles," and living poor or living cheaply is one of them or is actually a constellation of them.

You don't need so much stuff, for one thing. Let go of it. You don't have to eat out, you don't have to have a car (if you're in the city), you don't need a lot of living space. You can do without a lot of what you've been conditioned to believe you must have for a happy life. You can disconnect from all of that and still live well -- though your friends and family may think you're crazy, especially if they're still immersed in consumerism. 

The one thing I'd say about his approach is that though he calls on community, he's addressing individuals. This is what you, personally, can do to live well without a lot of things and money. 

I look around and realize that, yes, I've lived very much that way for most of my life and am doing so now. The only caveat is that we have a LOT of things, most of them accumulated and not disposed of over a lifetime (or several lifetimes as our things include many of the things of others who have passed on.) Some would consider us hoarders because we've kept so much stuff over the years. I brought the final bits of stuff we'd been keeping in California out here to New Mexico last month, and we're slowly sorting through it, disposing of some but keeping much. Keeping for what, though?

Most of what we have is old. Older than us. Our house is over 100 years old, and much of the stuff in it is nearly as old or older. Many things we've had for decades. But much of it was old when we got it. What's newish is almost entirely a few appliances, electronics, minimal clothes -- and some books and art. 

We have a 14 year old Subaru that we bought used and a 25 year old Chevy van also bought used. They're "new" in our view. We don't drive nearly as much as we used to, and the van really is superfluous, but we keep it and I sometimes drive it. It's a convenience in a pinch, for example when the car is in the shop or when we need to transport something large/bulky that won't fit in the car.

I've bought some tools/equipment necessary or helpful to growing things and taking care of our little patch of ground. But I also do without. For example, we don't have a wheelbarrow. Seems strange, but I make do with a wheeled garbage can that serves the purpose just as well if not better.

Many other examples of making do could be given, but the point is that much of what needs to be done can be done without things you simply have to have in order to do them. And very often, things that can't be done without this or that tool or equipment don't really need to be done.

"Living poor..." is a lifestyle of survival if you will. Callenbach was adept at it, but he didn't need to live poor because he lacked money or any other benefit of and upper middle class white male life during his lifetime. He wasn't forced into and kept in poverty the way so many Americans have been. He recognized the truth of their plight even in the early '70s, though, and in seeing that truth, he offered what he could of solutions; advice and ideas he thought would be helpful.

At least for me, and I suspect many others, they were. 

Whether poor people today need or want them, I can't say. Much of the practical advice he gives is second nature to someone who's been living poor for a while. A good deal of it no longer applies because of cultural, social and economic changes since the '70s. And the number of abjectly poor people living unhoused on the streets has grown exponentially. His advice won't and can't help most of them, because "Living poor..." in the Callenbach style requires shelter and access to so much of what someone on the streets doesn't have.

We've seen one failed attempt after another to rectify forced impoverishment over the decades; "nothing seems to help" for long or in many cases, at all. In my view, most of these activities aren't meant to seriously address the problem. They are meant as job creation for surplus sons and daughters of the higher classes. They cannot solve a problem they seek to perpetuate to ensure their own well-being. This is not unlike the situation of the monasteries of yore. Yes, some did good works, but that wasn't the point of them. 

Meanwhile, I can and do recommend Living Poor With Style  (if you can find the original publication not one of the later revisions) as a window on the history of poverty in this country. It's not a complete picture by any means, but it serves to illuminate what people could and did do to alleviate poverty themselves. It became something of a guidebook for disgruntled middle class folks who sought to simplify their lives by "living poor" without necessarily being poor (which I suspect was Callenbach's own position.) And it proved inspirational to any number of alternative lifestyle and ecological/utopian ideals we see in operation today.

About This May Day Thing

Well.

It's General Strike Day.

I've been parsing the supposed "disbanding" of the New York City GA and Spokes Council. I first came across this notion the other day in a blog post I can't find right now -- and it really doesn't matter all that much -- having to do with something else, and I thought, "That's odd." I was aware of dozens of actions and activities in New York City alone planned for May 1, and the notion that somehow the NYCGA and Spokes Council, the heartbeat as it were of Occupy Wall Street, had disbanded during the preparations for the General Strike seemed daft, indeed bizarre.

But as I checked around on the various OWS and NYCGA websites I though maybe it was true as there was very little updating. Online discussions were limited or truncated. Obviously something had happened early in April to start shuttering things down but just what it was difficult to say.

Then I found the statement from Facilitation that they would no longer be providing facilitation services to either the GA or the Spokes Council... due to... something... that was not entirely clear. "Yer on yer own, folks!"

Hmm.

Well.

The primary issue, as far as I could make it out, was that participation had fallen to the point where only a few (say 25-40) diehards were left attending the GAs in New York, and the Spokes Councils had never really taken hold. They'd been contentious from the outset, and their constant squabbling led to lack of participation with SC as well. On a number of occasions facilitation was either verbally or physically assaulted, and as a Working Group, Facilitation decided it wasn't going to put up with this shit anymore. 'MmBye!' Meanwhile, no one was taking notes and livestreamers were refusing to attend and stream the meetings of either group; sometimes they were specifically disinvited in any case, there being a good deal of tension between the streamers and Occupy participants due to a perception that some of the streamers were most interested in promoting themselves regardless of any needs of OWS for Solidarity.

To say that the Revolution has been going through a rough patch is to put it mildly. Very mildly indeed.

Of course OWS itself is not the Movement; it is one of a number of independent and autonomous Occupys in New York City, one of hundreds around the country and the world. The notion that OWS is the HQ or Revolution Central is widespread but erroneous. Occupys do their own thing. What OWS began may have been the trigger for the Movement/Revolution, but OWS is not the HQ for any of the plethora of autonomous Occupys.

Because of the brutal police overreaction and occasional rioting against Occupy encampments, and the apparently very intense surveillance and disruption of various Occupys in the United States and elsewhere, it has been very difficult if not impossible for more than a few Occupys to maintain a continuous presence let alone continuous activism. As an organic and evolutionary Movement, however, Occupy has broadly responded to the state suppression unleashed with such fury against it by dispersal, somewhat like spores on the wind, wafting far more widely than I think anybody anticipated -- certainly this development wasn't anticipated in much of the internal workings I was aware of.

For example, I had seen Occupy more as a concentration of Revolutionary activism and as a basis for the development of intentional communities that would be able to survive any sort of repression, but that isn't quite how it worked out. Instead, most Occupys yielded to repression and allowed their encampments to be destroyed without (much of) a struggle. The intentional communities that spontaneously arose at Occupy encampments seemed to disappear, or, as in New York, they struggled mightily to hang on to their encampment spirit and largely failed.

This didn't mean that the spirit was gone; it meant that in many cases it had spread more widely than a concentration in a single site would have allowed.

There are few encampments left, but the encampments themselves were symbols, much like the iconic and symbolic tents have become. The encampments were demonstrations that Another World Is Possible, and they showed ways to do it.

The Alternative Spirit, if you will, is now just about everywhere, whereas there is very little focus on the concentrations of effort that the encampments represented.

I certainly find that's been true in my own approach to revolutionary (and Occupy) affairs. My focus and activities have changed significantly as the reduction in my blogging output and choice of topics shows. My attendance -- online or in person -- at local Occupy events is spotty at best, and my participation is very limited. Right now, I'm mostly interested in study and reconnection with some of the Alternatives of the past as well as an intensified preparation for a very uncertain future.

In that study, I have become convinced that pretty much all of the elements for Another World, putatively Better, already exist, and most of them are working pretty well. Hooking up with them means gradually -- or in many cases, suddenly -- decoupling from The World As We Know It. As I decouple, something that has been under way for the last few years, I find that the necessity to need and to have and to want and to do have diminished substantially. It's a surprising form of liberation. At first, I attributed it just to getting old, but I think there is something else going on as well. When you see that needing and having and wanting and doing are all tied in to our materialist culture and lifestyles and there are many appealing alternatives, every one of which is essentially an open door to Another World, it becomes easier and easier to Let Go.

And Letting Go, in these times, is the individual's revolutionary act.

"Letting Go" is the key element of today's General Strike; whether that is really clear or not to its participants remains to be seen. It's a start on letting go of the ties that bind so many Americans.

Whither the Revolution?

I can't say. I have no idea. It's all a muddle. Maybe last fall and winter's Occupy was a misfire, like that of the Decembrists. Maybe so. But even the failed Decembrist uprising laid the groundwork for things to come...

http://maydaynyc.tumblr.com/

Strategery

As for Occupy affairs...

I've been involved in something called "Occupy Strategy National Dialogue" through InterOccupy for over a month now -- practically a whole era in Occupy Time -- that started as a national Occupy dialogue on the issue of "nonviolence vs diversity of tactics" that was triggered by Chris Hedges infamous polemic: "Black Bloc: The Cancer on Occupy."

I'm not going to rehash all that, partly because it is deeply hurtful to many people who have dedicated much more than I have to the Movement/Revolution, but also because it's an irresolvable and basically false issue. Nonviolence IS part of the diversity of tactics that are used throughout Occupy, so the notion that there is any "versus" at all is stupid. The question, to the extent there is one, is whether a nonviolent strategy a la Gandhi and King (or my man, Cesar Chavez) is the right one for Occupy. That question is still open. Many Occupy activists are certain that it is not just the right one, it is the only one that has a chance of success. I -- and many others -- are not so sure. In fact, the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the Gandhi/King nonviolent strategy is bound to fail, and those who advocate it as the "only way" forward are wittingly or unwittingly trying to ensure that failure is the only option.

I categorize most of them as the same people or the same sorts of people who from the outset have been trying to corral Occupy into a standard format of some kind, preferably a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a 501(c)(4) political wing. This is what people are used to and comfortable with; I'm used to it and comfortable with it, having worked in that environment on one side of it or the other all my adult life. It is the means by which and through which "the people" in groups -- that is to say the organizational boards and staffs -- interact with government agencies and officials.

It's an OK model if the system is working, but the system isn't working in our country at this time, nor has the system functioned on behalf of the People more than haltingly and occasionally for many years. I argue that we are well past the point where we can replicate the efforts of the past and expect reasonably similar results. It's not going to work. Our Rulers are way, way ahead of us on that plane.

If they can easily thwart and subvert the NPO/advocacy group model -- and they can and do -- they can easily do the same to the nonviolent resistance strategies of Gandhi and King (and Chavez), which they have been doing for many a long year, though it doesn't dawn on many people that the reason why their NPOs and advocacy groups don't seem to be getting any where but have bogged down in permanent wheel spinning mode is because the Overclass has been strategizing the thwartage and subversion of these efforts for decades. They know how to do it.

Gandhian/King-like nonviolent efforts don't work any more. I realize that I've been flogging the UC Berkeley/Davis issue for quite a while, and if it's become boring, oh well! But the thing is that UC and other students have been using the Gandhi/King nonviolent resistance tactics for decades, and here we are. Those tactics have not "worked" for positive change at the University since about 1969, and the People's Park imbroglio. Nevertheless, they keep getting done, as was the case at Cal on November 9, and at Davis on November 18 last year.

And in both cases, the students and their faculty allies wound up on the losing end of the stick -- at Berkeley, the literal end of the nightstick, at Davis, the figurative "stick" of pepper spray, though they won the moral high ground.

But there's more to it than that. The students and their faculty allies at both Cal and Davis (and elsewhere in the system, these are the two closest UC campuses to me, but there have been tiny revolutions throughout the entire higher education system in California for years and years) gave up their moral advantage almost as soon as they had won the high ground. I witnessed this happening at Davis especially and my jaw dropped to the ground.

Almost immediately after the Chancellor's Walk of Shame at Davis, she called a "town hall" with students and administrators to discuss the matter. There was a subsequent one between her administration and the Davis faculty. At both of them, the moral victors in the struggle gave up their advantage almost too willingly, and wound up expressing their gratitude toward and trust in the administrators who had been fucking them over and fucking them up for years. Initially, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was a brilliant move on the part of the oppressors. I'm not sure the oppressed understand what happened to this day -- as we await release of the sanitized and long-delayed report on the pepper spray incident.

This is not how you do nonviolent resistance, people! Not if you want to... win. But then it occurred to me, maybe that's not what they want... I'll get to that anon.

The way these things used to be done, once you gain a moral victory, you consolidate it immediately and press your demands/interests even harder; you do not back down. But that's what happened at the UC get-togethers. [Added thought: The victors backed away from their victory.] And I've seen it happen in other Occupy contexts as well.

The more I talked to people about it and paid attention to what was going, the more I realized that many people actually do think that's how a nonviolent resistance campaign is supposed to go. If you "win" in a confrontation such as that at Cal and at Davis, you're supposed to "yield," or at least re-evaluate, and not press your advantage -- because apparently they believe that's what King and Gandhi would have done so as to show good will toward the oppressors. But good will is a separate issue. Ideally, it's something you are showing all the time -- while simultaneously pressing your advantage. But they didn't do that. They gave up.

That was an example (to me at any rate) of how very easy it is for the Overclass to subvert and thwart old-fashioned kinds of nonviolent resistance; they have been strategizing how to do this for decades, and they've go it down. The People are almost powerless against it.

Now in the strategy sessions I've been attending through InterOccupy, the Gene Sharp strategy of nonviolent revolutionary "change" is being heavily promoted as the right one for Occupy to adopt, and I question it.

The Gene Sharp strategy is found in "From Dictatorship to Democracy" which is an exploration of how to do a nonviolent revolution such as we saw in Eastern Europe, the Philippines, China, and parts of Latin America in the 80's and 90's. That model has been adapted and adopted in Arab states and Iran, with varying -- in many cases, tragic -- results.

Having had some time to evaluate the results of the Arab Spring and the ongoing revolts against various entrenched powers in the Arab world and Iran, we'd do well to understand the Gene Sharp model doesn't work any more, either.

The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions -- which were patterned on Gene Sharp's revolutionary model -- were so exciting, but the let down after "victory" has been severe; the result is nothing like what the People had in mind, and in Egypt, especially, there is a feeling that they may have to do it all over again.

The results in Bahrain, the Yemen, Libya and Syria are simply appalling. Gawd Awful horrors that just don't stop. In Iran, the Green Revolution was rather quickly subverted and shut down -- with relatively little bloodshed but with much repression. Gene Sharp's model was adopted in those places as well, and the result was monstrous destruction and bloodshed, civil war, and/or worse repression. Wait. That's not how this model is supposed to work. Only that's how it works now because the Arab and Iranian Overclasses have learned how to thwart the masses when they rise. It's messy but they manage somehow to do it.

Meanwhile, in the United States the nonviolent course that Sharp lays out has never been tried, but the idea that it would work here or in Europe or in any more-or-less "civil democracy" society (no matter how managed the "democracy" might be) has no evidence to support it. It doesn't mean that it can't, it means there's no evidence to show that it does -- primarily, I would say, because in a "civil democracy," it is always theoretically possible to achieve significant social and political change through legal channels and elections. It may not be practically possible, but in theory it is.

So using the Sharp template in "civil democracies" doesn't strike me as particularly useful, and the horrifying results in parts of the Arab world and Iran should be a caution. The fact that it isn't being used as a template in Europe or much of anywhere else should be recognized as well.

Occupy provides its own strategic template, as balky and faulty as it is, an from my way of looking at it, this is the one the Movement needs to stick with. It's not going to be easy, in part because there are so many efforts to undermine and subvert it from every direction, internally and externally.

Occupations are themselves (sometimes) strategic. The actions of Occupy have a surprisingly strategic resonance -- they are mostly intended to shake the foundations of a rotting "civil democracy" system. As I've put it in other posts, the overall strategy is to accomplish fundamental systemic change by de-legitimizing the authority of current establishments, and by demonstrating alternatives to current establishments and institutions and showing how they can and do work.

Some of those involved with Occupy are getting into a long-term frame of mind, on the premise that this struggle will have to go on for many years, and once again they are pressing to institutionalize Occupy and standardize and regularize it.

Back in October of last year, Malcolm Harris had some tactical/strategic advice for Occupy Wall Street, some of which might have been heard in the interim, I don't know. But he was looking at the encampment at Liberty/Zuccotti Park from the perspective of effectiveness, and he, I think, got that part wrong. No, the encampment wasn't accomplishing what he thought it should, but then what does? It's hard to say. These were his parting thoughts, though, and we're still hearing echoes...

- The GA/consensus model doesn’t exactly encourage creativity and is particularly susceptible to police co-optation. In one of the most heavily policed places in the world, where the NYPD is bragging about its ability to shoot down planes, we should assume they have a Che t-shirt and a Chrome messenger bag in a prop room somewhere. If anyone can lead the group, that means anyone can lead the group. A switch to a model based on smaller bands of people (5-10) who know and trust each other and have found common ground and operate in (naturally) overlapping ways would have the dual benefits of enabling creative rather than agreeable actions and reducing the risk of police infiltration, without forfeiting the benefits of a large group. The technical term for these crews is “affinity groups,” but I prefer “friends.”

- If the population of the park can grow past its boundaries and start threatening the normal functioning of Wall Street, then it could open up space for smaller groups to operate without too much police attention and change the balance of power in the park. I heard unconfirmed reports that Radiohead is planning a concert at the occupation this week, which if true could make it uncontrollable and attract more folks to a relatively uninhabited part of the city. I’m disinclined to believe the rumors, but you never know, and it’s not like they can’t afford to bail themselves out of jail. Maybe they could be cajoled over Twitter to show up and play a few acoustic songs. Either way, it doesn’t make sense to me to try and protect the occupation from this kind of influx of people, even if that would make it untenable in its current form.

- This is a marathon, not a sprint or a hamster wheel. The next year is going to be explosive: the two Parties will spend a billion each reminding Americans how terrible everything is, and hoping they can get away with blaming each other for a permanent unemployment crisis. The social ills that brought people out aren’t getting better any time soon. Occupy Wall Street is part of a sequence, not the sequence itself, and we should be thinking about its role in a revolutionary campaign of a longer but bound duration.

- If corporations are people, what would it mean to wrap our hands around one’s neck and choke it to death?

These are admittedly preliminary thoughts, and I want to discuss what to do with other folks, but I don’t want to address an assembly, and not just for security reasons. When I’ve found people and groups of people at the occupation who are ready to move beyond its current bounds, it’s on the edges of the large circles. Maybe it’s time the whole thing got edgier. That is, sharper.

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FURTHERMORE: (I see I inadvertently truncated the post because I was futilely trying to multitask.)

The problem with trying to overthink and overstrategize the Occupy Movement, or with trying to apply a pre-existing template to it at this point, is that Occupy is itself its own strategy and provides its own template. Activists instinctively respond to or recoil from it. Those who want it to be something different, more like Gene Sharp's recipe for nonviolent revolution, for example, actually want a different movement than this one. The way I look at it, that's OK, but Occupy isn't the vehicle for that kind of movement. Occupy is doing something else, pioneering in many ways, and if it's not your preferred form of activism, then Occupy is probably not where you should be.

The fact that there is no Gene Sharp style revolutionary movement (not even Occupy) in the United States is telling us something. The fact that Occupy is doing as well as it is, despite more and more violent repression, is also telling us something.

Harris's criticisms came very early, and we're still hearing the same ones as well as many others that were voiced even before there was an Occupy Wall Street. From a serious strategic and tactical standpoint, Occupy shouldn't be working at all. But strangely it does. Its very looseness and ad hoc-ness, its seemingly incomprehensible (or in some cases, nonexistent!) strategic planning, even its stark failures and its odd obsessions with process, as well as the constant carping and complaining about it(!), all seem to have some sort of value to the Movement.

I have no idea how this works -- except that it is organic and evolutionary and it is working.

Let it be.

The Argentina Model?

[Changed to a YouTube version because it is complete; the Google version wasn't. But warning: the last ten minutes or so has very garbled sound.]

Documentary on the events that led to the economic collapse of Argentina in 2001 which wiped out the middle class and raised the level of poverty to 57.5%. Central to the collapse was the implementation of neo-liberal policies which enabled the swindle of billions of dollars by foreign banks and corporations. Many of Argentina's assets and resources were shamefully plundered. Its financial system was even used for money laundering by Citibank, Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan. The net result was massive wealth transfers and the impoverishment of society which culminated in many deaths due to oppression and malnutrition. If you want to stop the same thing from happening here, and it is happening here, right now, please join the revolution at the Kick Them All Out Projet http://www.KickThemAllOut.com and the Fire Congress Campaign.

Pot and pans are good.

Note: the video was posted to Google 3 years ago, it has been on YouTube as long. In the interim, the parallels between the situation in Argentina and in the United States -- not to mention Europe -- have become even starker.

Note: the Census Bureau has recently released figures showing that about half of Americans are now officially poor or low income.

Note: the parallels... many of the same individuals and banking institutions are involved in the current global exploitation regime. Even if they don't always get away with it, they don't care. They get away with it often enough to ensure they will always be counting profits at everyone else's expense.

Repurpose, Reuse, Recycle

Basic, right?

Repurpose, reuse, recycle is a fundamental mantra, or at least I thought it was. Now with all the accelerating horrors of overconsumption once again coming to the fore, I wonder.

Doesn't everybody already repurpose, reuse, recycle? Doesn't everybody make things last, make do, make the best of what they've got? I guess not.

I'm typing this on a ten year old laptop in a 110 year old house in rural New Mexico. I'm on a dial up connection. The phone/answering machine on the desk is one of the few "new" things in this house. The other phones are old. They have dials for cripes sake.

I'm listening to a live broadcast of a folk music festival in Albuquerque on a "new" radio/CD player sitting on top of a stack of old books in this room. Other "new" things in this house include a teevee in the living room (no reception though, because we're not connected to cable or satellite, and there is no broadcast teevee in this area, so we use it to watch videotapes -- yes, we have many of them, old, old, old -- and DVDs). A new heater was installed when the house was renovated. New double pane windows were installed then, too, for energy savings. A new stove was installed in the kitchen. I bought a new microwave when we moved in. The ceiling fans were installed when the house was renovated. I bought a futon new before we brought any beds here. Apart from food and supplies and some utensils, that's about all there is in this house that is "new."

Every other stick of furniture is old, some very old, and none of it was purchased new by us. All the rugs are old, none purchased new by us. The lawnmower is old. I did buy a new cord for it.

We reuse or recycle all our paper/cardboard, cans, bottles, plastics. Kitchen waste is composted into the -- eventual -- garden. It's just what you do. We do what laundry we need to do by hand because we don't have laundry appliances here. Not yet. I've found old doors and other old items on the property and I've reinstalled them or reused them where I can rather than buying new, or even buying used.

The van in the driveway is creeping up on fifteen years old, creeping up on 250,000 miles. Of course it does take some maintenance to keep it going, and it isn't the most thrifty possible vehicle I could drive, but it gets better mileage than the cash for clunkers program required for a trade in rebate.

It just seems perfectly normal to make things last as long as possible and to buy new only what is necessary.

Repurpose, reuse, recycle.

But apparently Americans are still somewhat leery of such basic formulae.