The email was snappy: "Judging by your Whole Foods CEO's public comments about how unnecessary universal health coverage is, my wife and I, who up to now have been loyal customers of your store, have decided that it is equally unnecessary for us to support your business." My father and stepmother were joining the growing boycott of Whole Foods, in retaliation for a Wall Street Journal op-ed by its CEO John Mackey.

In an August 11th piece entitled "The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare," Mackey criticized the Obama administration's already-watered-down national health care plan, and proceeded to attack idea of universal healthcare in general. His words were truly obscene, especially in a time when millions in the U.S. can’t afford to see a doctor, and economic crisis is pushing thousands more out of reach of healthcare. His op-ed is chock full of inane tripe about needing "less government control and more individual empowerment" in U.S. healthcare, but I don't want to get into it here. The cliff notes could read:

1. We should buy and sell peoples' health care like a commodity, and prioritize making a profit from it;
2. The kinds of health care our system provides should be determined by "consumer choice"--meaning, our health care should primarily serve the needs of those who have lots of money;
3. Any time someone doesn't get adequate healthcare, we should pretend it’s a product of their personal failings and bad lifestyle decisions, instead of enforced poverty, systemic racism, or anything implicating the jerks who own and run society.
   

Mackey’s whole argument is underscored by this glowing quote:

Health care is a service that we all need, but just like food and shelter it is best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges. A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This "right" has never existed in America.

For someone who claims to want to reform healthcare, it sure sounds like Mackey wants to abolish it for everyone but the rich. Many who identified with Whole Food’s image as a progressive, sustainable alternative to industrial agriculture and corporate greed felt betrayed by his words. Here was a characteristically conservative (and capitalist) take on health care, coming from a corporation frequented and respected by many liberals. My dad wrote "Your company evidently is not as progressive and democratic as you make yourself out to be. Shame on you!"

While breaking up may be hard to do, disillusionment over Mackey’s op-ed can prove very instructive for people seeking social and environmental justice. In particular, Mackey’s exposure as a market fundamentalist tells us something about the shortcomings of what radicals call "green capitalism."

Painting it Green to Make a Buck

Green capitalism generally refers to new forms of capitalist accumulation, which global elites are developing right now in order to avoid the ecological catastrophe brought on by centuries of unchecked growth. Selling carbon offsets to polluting corporations, inventing and marketing new “sustainable” products and services, and genetically engineering high-yield plants are all green capitalist projects. The idea is: if people want a sustainable world, corporations will be driven by the profit motive to make their production more environmentally friendly, greening themselves and making money in the process. Corporate greed can be harnessed for human need.

In reality, green capitalist projects always fall short of the utopian dreams off of which they feed. Take Whole Foods: people want access to organic, healthy, local food, and Whole Foods provides it. But instead of transforming our food system so that organic food is freely available to everyone, Whole Foods tries to profit by keeping it scarce, commodifying organic tomatoes and free-range eggs as luxury goods that only yuppies can afford. Green capitalism tends to create niche markets, in which organic products are only accessible to the few, rather than decentralized food sovereignty. Healthy food will never be made available to everyone under this system, because it’s impossible for people like John Mackey to get rich selling stuff that's freely available.

Whether it's Whole Foods marketing organic produce, oil cartels gobbling up the planet's arable land to fuel its car culture with ethanol, or any other green get-rich-quick scheme, the problem is the same. When corporate greed is harnessed for human need, greed will always take precedence. Green capitalist institutions like Whole Foods are ultimately driven by the search for profit, and in its pursuit they tend to exploit workers and communities just as much as their industrial predecessors did (by trying to deny them healthcare, for instance.) At the same time, they tend to overproduce "sustainable" goods to the point where they aren't sustainable at all. Radicals call this process of masking exploitation behind an environmentalist image "greenwashing." I call it stupid.

Green capitalism offers no real solutions to our social and ecological crisis, because it ultimately leaves all the inequalities of contemporary society intact, and makes only cosmetic changes to their surface. In a green capitalist future, the poor and oppressed will still be excluded from healthy, organic foods that are their birthright. Ecological devastation will continue, even though “sustainable” goods, services and gated communities may shield the wealthy from its worst effects. And the global proletariat will still be exploited to produce goods for corporate profit.

Mackey’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal is one of those rare moments in which we are able to see the system for what it is: a corporate sham capitalizing on our dream of a sustainable, egalitarian world. To avoid the crises that this system will continue to inflict on the people and the planet for years to come, it will be necessary to hit back. But we’re going to need more than boycotts.

What’s Better Than a Boycott?

The boycott against Whole Foods that has sprung up on the internet is a good first step, but it also has drawbacks. On its own, a boycott leaves the corporate structure intact. When I boycott Whole Foods, only to buy greenwashed goods somewhere else, I'm still looking for solutions from the corporate system: either Whole Foods will change its ways or other corporations will fill the gap.

But looking for solutions from capitalist entities is a losing game, because capitalists will always have an incentive to betray reforms in the future, or develop new kinds of social and environmental exploitation to raise profits. Worse yet, the costs of boycotts are inevitably passed down from CEOs to precarious workers at the bottom of the corporate chain in the form of wage cuts and layoffs, just as dictatorships pass the costs of trade sanctions on to their subjects. A better solution is to get rid of dictators altogether.

In addition to boycotts, which force corporate entities to reform themselves according to their own interests, it would be good to abolish corporate entities and build something far more egalitarian in their place. Strategies like this often involve more outright conflict with the ruling class and the state than consumer activism, because these formations manage the system of laws, bureaucracy and police that enshrine stuff like corporate property over the needs of communities. But they can also create pockets of truly sustainable resistance to green capitalist exploitation, and ultimately, they aim at a far more sustainable, long-term solution to our problems. Struggles like these are being waged as we speak by social movements across the globe.

In Argentina, workers often seize factories abandoned by their bosses (much like the window-workers did in Chicago) and run them themselves as worker collectives. These “recuperated” factories tend to produce according to the needs and desires of the people who work there and the communities they serve, rather than capitalists who seek to profit from them. In U.S. cities, movement groups sometimes seize urban farms and gardens from absentee slumlords or do-nothing banks, and produce healthy, organic food to distribute among local communities. These projects are far more democratic and sustainable than corporations, and they undermine the very notions of profit and private property that undergird capitalism.

It’s entirely possible to wage a struggle like this against Whole Foods, or any other corporation that tries to paint itself as “sustainable” while exploiting people and the environment for profit. Just as the U.S. should provide universal healthcare to everyone living in it, Whole Foods should provide universal healthcare to all its employees. In fact, it should give them the stores in which they work too! We want it all! Food, clothing, shelter and healthcare can be turned into a commons, freely accessible to everyone, and cultivated in opposition to exploitation and ecocide. Let’s make it happen.

I first heard Duanna Johnson's name from a friend in the Anarchist People of Color network, in passing conversation during a busy political meeting. The next day, I could only remember the stand-out details: Black trans person. Memphis. Police brutality. From a distance it seemed like any other story of police abuse, in which the state uses racist violence, hetero-sexist violence, or both to divide and control our communities.

But my APOC friend urged me to look closer, and I'm glad I did. I explored some news archives, and then, thanks to a comprehensive article in the most recent issue of Left Turn Magazine, I learned a lot more about the case. I'm now convinced Duanna Johnson's experience carries important lessons for liberation movements in the U.S. On the one hand, it exemplifies how radicals have failed to respond to violence aimed at oppressed people--particularly transgender people of color. At the same time, it points to the courage and resistance we can, and must, build to defeat this violence.

Repression and Resistance

Duanna Johnson was raised as a black boy in impoverished North Memphis, and moved to Chicago at age 12. When she turned 18, Duanna told her family she wasn't a man, and began a transition into living as a woman. She took steps to alter her appearance, including breast implants, but could never afford the expensive surgery that some transgender people desire to alter their sex organs. In 2007, Duanna returned to North Memphis as a transgender woman, to live in the home of her deceased grandmother.

Walking down the street in February of 2008, Duanna was stopped and arrested by Memphis police on prostitution charges. There was no evidence involved in her arrest--no alleged client, no money exchanged--and in this respect it was pretty typical. An excellent toolkit from INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence explains that police tend to profile women of color as "drug users and couriers, as sex workers, and as bad mothers" with little or no justification. The same systemic racism that pushes cops to periodically murder young, unarmed black men fuels police harassment, unjust arrests and sexual assault against black women.

Boy, it's been a while since I've had a chance to write on this blog, mostly because of the Bronx Anarchist Fair. There's a long-overdue post or two coming, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a quote that's featured in the latest issue of Left Turn Magazine.

It's from Subcomandante Marcos, iconic spokesperson for the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. El Sup (as he's affectionately referred to) wrote these words in a public invitation to the Zapatistas' First World Festival of Dignified Rage, hosted in multiple cities in Mexico a few months ago:

We think...that a rage exists against everything that's happening, in our country as well as the world. This rage is not simply anger or bitterness, but rather has two essential elements: it's a rage that is consequence of an injured dignity, and it's a creative rage, that is, it aims at the transformation of the situation.

We also see that there are many differences between these dignified rages that we see, hear and feel. Not only the obvious (geography), but also their manner, and the path, destination, velocity, and rhythm of their gaits. Nevertheless, we think they have something in common; the aggressor who provokes this rage is the same: a system, capitalism, which destroys, above all, dignities.

With the help of a hand-me-down iPod shuffle from my partner's boss, I've been bumping several tracks this February in the long subway rides between my apartment and the rest of NYC. Here are five songs I've been seriously digging lately--in no particular order--that you should try out for yourself!

The Roots - Can't Stop This

I almost cry each time I listen to this tribute track to unsung Detroit producer J Dilla. It's placed at the end of the 2006 release Game Theory, an album of dark political meditations on the state of the world and blackness. But amid a set of apocalyptic grinds, "Can't Stop This" boasts a lush bed of soulful samples that stretch for 8 minutes plus, while Black Thought's rhyme paints a portrait of a generation of hip hop heads.

Last of the red hot (red hot) loving MCs
Who came up on grits and government cheese.
The only thing I ever really loved in my life was a mic
Some of my niggas fell in love with MPs. Come on
Work the bass, nigga, juggle them keys
I'm tryin'a get a piece of this government green
And smack 'em in the melon with another LP
Come on, help a couple people in the struggle get free.
...
Can't stop this. I want my peoples to rock this
Bang this music in your speakers and boxes.
Langston Hughes about as a deep as my thoughts is,
Sit back and I'ma paint you a portrait.
...
It's the last of the hip hop loving MCs
In front of an audience that's never been pleased.
I'm coming from all the streets that never been cleaned
And speaking for every face that's never been seen.

Everybody Wants A New Old Left

With the election of Obama and a widening economic crisis, it seems immense changes are sweeping national and global politics every week or so. Radicals, along with everybody else, are struggling to comprehend the nature of the changes around us, and the directions we can head in the future. The good news: pretty much everybody thinks the next few years are going to offer the greatest opportunity to remake our world in decades. The bad news: there are as many opinions about how to do it as there are letters in this paragraph.

Amid the flurry of forums, panel discussions, listserv back-and-forths and spirited bar talk animating lefty circles right now, socialist groups are putting forth proposals for new directions in the capital-L Left. Two notable proposals appeared recently in pamphlets distributed online and in bookstores. The first, Which Way Is Left, was produced by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, a nationwide post-Maoist group formed in 1985. The second, Manifesto For A Left Turn, was put together by a collection of professors from the east coast including Stanley Aronowitz and Rick Wolff. Both pamphlets call for cohesion and organization-building in the U.S. left, and both fill me with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, the manner in which these pamphlets talk about the purpose of organizations, and methods of building them, tell me the party-building left is headed in interesting new directions. On the other hand, I’m critical of each pamphlet along pretty predictable lines. Which Way and Manifesto both fall within Marxist traditions that generally aim at taking state power through hierarchical organizations, while I identify with horizontalist, anti-authoritarian or anarchist struggles that have eschewed both. I’m inspired by Zapatista communities, Italian autonomia, and the counter-globalization movements, to name a few.

What Do The Pamphlets Say?

Each proposal claims the main stumbling block for movements here in the settler state is the fractured nature of our resistance, and both provide a laundry list of contemporary problems. For the Which Way authors, there’s a dearth of analyses that provide frameworks for effective action, a lack of trust between radical groups, and a failure to appreciate the immense scale of movement necessary to challenge U.S. power. Manifesto laments how progressives focus myopically on single issues, or limit themselves to acting as reformist hangers-on to the Democratic Party. Both pamphlets claim a national political formation and/or socialist party should be formed to address these problems.