Grey Wool Knickers They breathe

This post actually started as a comment on a friend’s blog, but it turned into a bit of a diatribe that seemed to deserve its own post.  My apologies to those of you for whom the references to day-old bagels, cement boats and opportunivores will make no sense.  And I apologize also for the corny, overblown metaphors.  I’ll hopefully be writing in Arabic soon, which I’m sure will sufficiently alienate what audience I had in the fist place, if that’s any consolation.  Here it goes anyway:

There’s something I’ve always found a bit off-putting about this notion of “economic sustainability”.  It was a phrase I first noticed as it crept into the lexicon of our favorite little worker-owned, worker self-managed collective, PedX, and it was mobilized in the service of all sorts of retrograde policy initiatives (often under the rubric of “day-old-bagel proposals”) introduced by two of my least favorite co-members.  This post has made it more clear to me why I dislike the term.  To be quite blunt, I think that it is a crude admixture of the already-vague enviro-lefty concept of “sustainability” with the just-so, common-sense concept of “viability”—that last refuge of unimaginative econo-wonks.  It is a mixture made all the more annoying by virtue of the fact that “the economy” is—for all intents and purposes—the virtual antithesis of “sustainability”.  The present economic woes of the nation should make this totally, bold-facedly, pension-disolvedly, home-foreclosedly, debt-riddenly obvious.  “Economic sustainability” is up there with “anarcho-capitalism” as one of the most regressive, oxymoronic notions ever conceived.

But, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, I’m not writing this to trash the original post.  It is just that it has reminded me how tragically easy it is for those of us who work in collectives like PedX to allow “the economy” to so limit our ideas and so warp our sensibilities about economics—it was for me anyway.  Many of us started out in collectives with idealistic notions about how the world could be changed for the better through the propagation of a different model of economic relationships.  But then the persistent, wearying need to put food in our mouths and roofs over our heads and well-tuned machines between our legs (in the case of PedX) ground us down and carved us out into cement boats that could miraculously float in the cold, uncaring sea of “the economy”.  And some of us even succumb to that soothing rhetoric about rising tides.  Such is the danger, I think, with incremental approaches to social and economic change.

Speaking now of my own experience, I attempted to combat this tendency by staying involved, to some extent, with union activism.  And I regularly attended and organized meetings of collectives and cooperatives with the goal of building a real alternative to “the economy”.  I was involved with an initiative to establish a Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) in an effort to transform the very fluid that lubricates relationships in “the economy”:  money.  I even went so far as to lobby for a position on the board of the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union, though I quickly realized that they had so richly decorated their cement boats that there was no hope of bringing them back to their original mission of radically altering the terms of “the economy” for the benefit of alternative economic models.  But I grew tired of treading water in a lukewarm jacuzzi filled with an amniotic fluid of “self-management”, “alternative currency”, squatting and an opportunivore diet—a jacuzzi floating in that cold sea of cut-throat capitalism.  So, I traded in my jacuzzi for a spartan cement boat, content for a while to play at being lower-middle-class, pretending—yet fooling no one, including myself—that this was somehow a more “authentic” life.

There was something worthwhile about that jacuzzi, though.  It was the community, the sense of shared lives, shared loves and shared destinies…or at least ones that could be imagined until the reality of living in a transient college town set in.  But, to dispense for the moment with the ridiculous extended metaphors and get to the point:

I think the current economic situation provides an opportunity for us to make use of all these quirky little skills we’ve picked up working in collectives, living in collective households, organizing craft parties, throwing alley-cat races, staffing infoshops, fixing bikes, gardening and canning the produce, making moonshine, climbing trees and keeping the books to fundamentally alter the economy of our everyday lives in a way that surpasses and renders irrelevant the traditional call to arms: “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”.  But, I think to make such a change in the long run, we have to develop strategies consciously antagonistic to “the economy”.  We have to make it evident, by word and by example, that value and wealth are created in and among communities, and at the same time combat the notion that value and wealth come from a set of abstract rules that govern balance sheets, not people.  Of course, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.  And this obviously isn’t an easy struggle to remain focused on, particularly not when you’re running a business, but I think that the heads of capital have done much of our work for us by making it clear how utterly bankrupt, irrational and—yes—unsustainable, the modern notion of “the economy” is.