That Seventies Struggle: Jefferson Cowie's Stayin Alive

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1970s have come to be seen as a pivotal time in the transformation of American society. In Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, the 1970s were “the last days of the working class” because the social compact that had brought unprecedented affluence to American workers since World War II was demolished to clear a path for more cutthroat forms of neo-liberal capitalism. Cowie also presents a superb class analysis of the music, movies, and popular culture of the 1970s, and thus Stayin’ Alive stands among the most innovative books to have developed from the intersection of cultural studies and labor history, exemplified by the scholarship of Stanley Aronowitz, Lizabeth Cohen, Robin D.G. Kelley, and George Lipsitz.

The early 1970s was a time of great promise for the American labor movement, particularly as younger workers had been influenced by the counterculture and the movements for peace and racial justice. Cowie discusses a series of strikes and upsurges of the rank and file led by younger, more anti-authoritarian workers, like the Lordstown autoworkers strike of 1972 that was called an “industrial Woodstock.” The movements for racial and sexual equality presented an especially significant opportunity to connect identity politics with social class, and Cowie identifies several moments when these possibilities could be glimpsed in the insurgencies of farm workers, textile workers, and office workers.

However, these political alliances based on the interrelations of class, race, and gender would not endure. As chronicled in the second chapter, their failure was encapsulated in the McGovern campaign of 1972, which never received the full support of organized labor, with many union leaders taking umbrage at the delegation’s racial and sexual diversity and countercultural spirit. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon had been courting white working class voters by emphasizing cultural values in place of economic interests, employing the “new southern strategy” to attract George Wallace supporters along with those besieged by anti-war protests and social deviance. Nixon further exploited working class populism by representing himself in opposition to the stereotypical image of Northeastern liberal elites, as the champion of hard-working taxpayers who are victimized by a coalition of parasitic underclasses and privileged know-it-alls.   

            A key strength of Stayin’ Alive is Cowie’s discussion of how popular music and Hollywood films did not simply reflect the social changes of the 1970s but became objects of struggle in their own right. Country music, for example, moved to the center of political struggle as forces from both the Left and the Right sought to be aligned with the authenticity conferred by the white working class. Countercultural musicians including Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and the Grateful Dead had begun recording country-themed albums in the late 1960s, and the hybrid of “country rock” was a key component of the record industry’s expansion during the 1970s.  Just as some New Left radicals had been trying to infiltrate factories and proletarian neighborhoods, musicians like Jackson Browne and The Band romanticized the historical struggles of working class America in song.

            Nonetheless, these progressive, countercultural sentiments did not stick as signifiers of working class authenticity, which would be more effectively pulled in the rightward direction of nationalism and patriarchy. Cowie begins his fourth chapter with the story of Merle Haggard’s performance at the White House for Pat Nixon’s birthday in 1973, a somewhat awkward cultural collision between the administration and an ex-felon turned country star, but one where Haggard performed his reactionary anti-hippie anthem “Okie from Muskogee” to the great enthusiasm of the Republican elite. In turn, if some progressives did symbolically align themselves with white working class culture, many others on the Left have accepted these reactionary images of intolerant hardhats and ignorant Joe Six-packs, whose ideological development is traced by Cowie from the anti-hippie killing spree in the 1970 film Joe to the definitive symbol of working class bigotry in the character of Archie Bunker.    

            Scholars of public policy often remark that the Nixon Administration now looks surprisingly liberal, as new legislation and federal agencies like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were created for the protection of workers, consumers, and the environment. In the later years of the 1970s, however, labor would be knocked into a defensive position with the beginning of a protracted campaign to undo the economic democracy established during the New Deal and after World War II. This reversal of fortunes in the class struggle is covered in the fifth and sixth chapters in great, if sometimes tedious, detail.

            Cowie is at his best in the seventh chapter, which returns to the analysis of music and popular culture. Here we find Bruce Springsteen singing about racing in the rustbelt’s de-industrializing streets at the same time that emerging punk bands like the Ramones and Devo were personifying delinquency and social decline from the blue-collar environs of Queens and Akron. Meanwhile, on screen we see a disgruntled cabdriver scowling at the signs of social decay surrounding him in Times Square, an Italian-American boxer who miraculously arises from the mean streets of Philadelphia to stand toe-to-toe with the cocky African-American champion, and a disco dancer who flees the confines of his ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge for the glamorous Saturday nights of Manhattan. In the last of these, whose signature soundtrack gives Cowie’s book its title, the lead character’s escape was a prophetic microcosm of the direction that American society would take as factories closed, finance capitalism grew, and working-class urban neighborhoods were remade into post-industrial playgrounds of commercial leisure.

Karl Marx's Theory of Alienation

Do you remember the scene in Alien where that guy’s chest explodes, blood splatters everywhere, and then a little creature raises its head out of his chest, looks around, and then scampers away to plot its attack on the entire crew of the spaceship?



For Marx, alienation is what happens when a force that is intrinsic to humanity, or a power that resides within our species, transforms into something monstrous which threatens to destroy our lives. If you haven’t Alien, or if you have seen Alien but the thought of that scene makes you so sick that you might not be able to continue reading this chapter, then maybe you could think of Goethe’s Faust or Shelley’s Frankenstein—two literary works closer to Marx’s time, and to which he sometimes alludes—to grasp the horrors of a world that was created by human beings yet has taken on an objective power that seems unstoppable and even uncontrollable in its quest to destroy humanity.



Marx’s notion of alienation was developed in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which engaged Hegel’s philosophy to conceptualize how human powers and social creations appear to take an objective form that enchains and seems to rule over the people who have collectively produced them. Marx advanced long lines of philosophical and theological inquiry and applied them to the burgeoning capitalism of his time, and he concluded that alienation severed the individual from society, unjustly appropriated the products of human labor, and put people at the mercy of social forces they could not change, control, or even understand.





Marx argued that under capitalism people are alienated in four relationships that he deemed fundamental to human existence: in relation to the products of their labor and social activity; in relation to productive activity itself; in relation to their essential humanity or “species being”; and in their social relations with other people. Marx contended that in each of these four relations, people living under capitalism are stripped of their essential human needs and capacities for creative work and social connection. All labor involves objectification, but in a capitalist society,

[T]he object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. Under these economic conditions this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.

Labor necessarily entails objectification, as it involves people transforming nature into useful things, but in an alienated state, workers do not own, and cannot make use of, the objects they produce. On the larger scale of society as a whole, alienation pervades in the sense that humanity appears to be dominated by a system of things that have been socially created but maintain an objective sense of immutability. Thus, the worker becomes “a slave of the object” (e.g., the “invisible hand” of the market) and is made dependent on a seemingly objective system that “enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical subject.”
As the products of labor are expropriated and assume an alien objectivity that confronts and enslaves humanity, people also become alienated from their creative power for productive activity, which Marx believed was essential to human nature. In the form of wage labor, work becomes merely a means of survival:

First, the fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.

For Marx, the appropriation and transformation of nature through labor is essential, and our capacity to thoughtfully design and produce is not simply necessary for survival but also a vital means for developing and expressing the creative powers of our species. People lose touch with the abilities that distinguish humanity from the other animals, and are thus alienated from what Marx called “species being.”

For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to man in the first place merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life.

In arguing that people are alienated from their species-being, Marx is saying that people lose touch with their humanity and the abilities that differentiate us from animals; people are therefore alienated from nature in general. Finally, people become alienated from one another in the relationships that comprise the social world, as the relations between humanity, nature, and labor are replicated in the competitive rather than cooperative relations between people in society. It is necessary to recall that for Marx these are all thoroughly social relationships, and so in some sense the fourth vector of alienation, alienation from society, is a cumulative effect of alienation from the products of humanlabor, productive activity, and the humanity of our species-being:

An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

Alienated not only from their own labor but the labor of everyone else in society, people living under capitalism are awash in things that have been socially created but appear to possess a mysterious and supernatural aura that Marx likens to religious delusion. As he put it,

Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where Marx developed the concept of alienation, were not published until 1932. Shortly before then, however, Georg Lukács was able to excavate the centrality of alienation in Marx’s thought by reading Capital through the prism of Hegelian philosophy. Lukács’ reinterpretation of Marx and the publication of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts allowed subsequent Marxist theorists to further utilize the concept of alienation in their critiques of capitalist societies during the twentieth century.



For many years the orthodox Marxists of the Communist Party denied the significance of alienation in Marx’s thought, and they were supported by scholars of structuralist, analytic, and positivist persuasions who noted that Marx dropped alienation from most of his writings after 1844. But as Lukacs and many others noted, the conceptual traces of alienation are evident throughout Marx’s later works, particularly in the discussion of commodity fetishism in volume one of Capital. Alienation was an especially important concept for the “Western Marxists” so called because of their concentration in Western Europe and North America, and because of their opposition to the “orthodox” Marxism of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, who undertook many efforts to censor and diminish the role of alienation in Marxist thought.



Alienation, and its related concepts of reification and commodity fetishism, was vital to the critical theory that developed from the Frankfurt School in the decades before and after World War II. Thus, Horkheimer’s critical theory and philosophy developed as a critique of intellectual fragmentation and objectification, Adorno’s condemnation of popular music and the culture industry exposed the extension of alienation from work to leisure time, and Marcuse lambasted a one-dimensional society where alienation is evident in everything from the creation of false needs to the instrumental reason of technocratic thinking.



The Marxist theorists Erich Fromm and Henri Lefebvre further developed the concept of alienation by applying it to the consumer culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Fromm was a practicing psychoanalyst who was associated with the Institute for Social Research, relocating with them from Frankfurt to New York after the Nazi takeover, until the Institute parted ways with Fromm in late 1939. Fromm mixed Marx’s concept of alienation with Freudian psychoanalysis and even Zen Buddhism in developing a trenchant critique of the “social character” shaped by post-war capitalism and the consumer culture. Unfortunately, Fromm’s work has since been forgotten and is rarely included in contemporary discussions of the Frankfurt School. Henri Lefebvre was a Marxist sociologist and philosopher who is best known for his theorizing of geography and urban space, but his three-volume Critique of Everyday Life also dissects capitalism’s colonization of leisure time and private life from the perspective of alienation. Lefebvre used the concept of alienation in a thoroughly dialectical manner that presupposed a struggle for dis-alienation, thus establishing a theoretical foundation for the study of productive activity and resistance among consumers.



For Fromm, alienation is evident in consumer culture through forms of living that are based on having rather than being. Fromm conceptualized being and having as opposing “modes of existence,” so that the more one has the less one is, and vice versa. The most basic form of the having mode is to define the self through the commodities that one does or does not possess, and this range of commodities includes not only physical objects but also services, experiences, ideas, and people. Of course Fromm recognized that people must have things to survive, but the simple fact of possession is not what defines “the having mode of existence,” where “what matters is not the various objects of having, but our whole human attitude. Everything and anything can become an object of craving: things we use in daily life, property, rituals, good deeds, knowledge, and thoughts.” For instance, the ascetic who repudiates the pleasures of consumption and leisure is still behaving within the having mode of existence, for Fromm notes that “in the very attempt to suppress having and consuming, the person may be equally preoccupied with having and consuming.” Those who live in the having mode are preoccupied with the possession of things, or the possession of experiences and relationships that become objectified into commodities. Fromm cited a number of non-materialist examples of the having mode, like how people enslave themselves to religious or ideological dogma, or how tourists attempt to “capture” a moment by taking a picture or video recording of it. His bestselling book, The Art of Loving, argued that love is debased when it becomes a commodity, an object exchanged through the personality market that concludes when two people take possession of each other, instead of being understood as a verb that involves an active, continuous process of loving that is most intense between two people but also extends beyond to further social and natural relationships.



Fromm conceptualized the being mode, on the other hand, in terms of experience, activity, development, and relatedness. Fromm’s notion of being is closely linked to the capacity for productive activity that Marx associates with species-being. Such forms of productive activity realize human faculties and talents in the process of growing and renewing oneself and giving up one’s egocentricity and selfishness. “Nonalienated activity,” Fromm wrote, “is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something and remaining related to what I produce.” Fromm went to great lengths to distinguish this kind of productive activity from what he called mere “busyness,” where a person appears active but is actually being acted upon by external or internalized forces and is therefore in a condition of alienation. Conversely, a person can be active while appearing to do nothing (e.g., daydreaming, reading, meditating) as long as they are the subject of their action. The extent of alienation in consumption can therefore be measured by the amount of passivity among consumers. Generally speaking, Fromm concluded,"We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal; we live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate and consume them."



Concomitant with the triumph of consumer capitalism after World War II, Fromm developed Freud’s notion of character—the forces which underlie and motivate a person’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior—into a sociological concept of “social character.” Among these forms of social character, Fromm distinguished between productive and non-productive orientations that correspond to modes of being and having. The productive orientation allows individuals to overcome alienation to the extent that they are loving and creative in everyday life, developing their intellectual, physical, emotional, and sensory powers in ways that relate them with society and nature while preserving their unique individuality.



Fromm clearly believed that a socialist society would enable more people to develop a productive orientation of being, but also that individuals living in the being mode could be found in the capitalist society of his time, although he did not attempt to explain how this form of social character could survive under capitalism. He did, however, analyze the various forms of social character with a non-productive orientation that are facilitated by capitalism, including a shift in social character that accompanied the transition from older forms of industrial capitalism to the consumer culture of his time. The capitalism of the nineteenth century, Fromm observed, favored a “hoarding orientation” that stressed saving rather than spending and an “exploitative orientation” driven to acquire or steal without giving or sharing. Freud, as Fromm noted, originally identified these traits in the “anal character” of bourgeois society. The consumerism of capitalist societies in the twentieth century, on the other hand, gave rise to a “receptive orientation” and an accompanying “marketing orientation.” In the receptive orientation, “the aim is to receive, to ‘drink in,’ to have something new all the time, to live with a continuously open mouth, as it were.” In the marketing orientation, people become “a thing to be employed successfully on the market,” such that “qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of ‘the personality package,’ conducive to a higher price on the personality market.” The hoarding, exploitative, receptive, and marketing orientations are all variations on modes of having rather than being. The shift from hoarding and exploitative to receptive and marketing orientations also parallel the transition described by David Riesman, Fromm’s friend and colleague, from an “inner-directed” to “other-directed” social character. For Fromm, the “craving for acceptance” that defines the other-directed person “is indeed a very characteristic feeling in the alienated person…due to the fact that they cannot accept themselves—because they are not themselves.”



As a therapist who practiced psychoanalysis for more than 50 years, Fromm was especially concerned with the consequences of alienation and consumerism for mental health. “The average man today may have a good deal of fun and pleasure,” he observed in the middle of the 1950s, “but in spite of this, he is fundamentally depressed.” For Fromm, depression was synonymous with the boredom resulting from an inability to develop one’s creative potential, and therefore with a general state of alienation. The alienated individual then turns to entertainment and consumption to compensate for this inner sense of emptiness and powerlessness, but Fromm notes that “covering up a symptom does not do away with the conditions which produce it.” In the most extreme cases, the quest to quell the anxiety and fill this inner void leads to pathological forms of consumption like eating disorders, alcoholism, and drug addiction. As with social character, Fromm recognized that multiple forms of mental illness could arise from an underlying condition of alienation. He observed that many individuals experienced “a pervasive sense of guilt,” which he found surprising given the generally secular thrust of the culture, because people found themselves caught between the demands of the social system and their own humanity, “for being a person and for being a thing.” In other cases, he diagnosed the growing sense of narcissism among people whose capacity for love could only be only turned inward, so as to disconnect them from relationships with other people, society at large, and nature.



For the most part, Fromm drew pessimistic conclusions that were similar to those of other German émigrés associated with Frankfurt School. But even in the 1950s, he did note that “there are signs that people are increasingly dissatisfied and disappointed with their way of life and trying to regain some of their lost selfhood and productivity.” He then began to write about the millions of people he observed who “indulge in any number of ‘do-it-yourself’ activities” and here Fromm included a range of practices that mix production and consumption to varying degrees—painting, gardening, adult education, listening to good music, building houses or boats. But Fromm then concluded by insisting that although these trends might be promising, they should not delude people into accepting the mythologies of post-war America that “we have already passed the peak of alienation and are now on our way to a better world.” Likewise, Fromm saw only limited signs of hope in the aftermath of the social movements and cultural revolts of the late 1960s. Writing during the 1970s in his final book, To Have or To Be?, Fromm observed that the counterculture had reoriented the consumptive practices of many young people to a mode of being:"Among these young people we find patterns of consumption that are not hidden forms of acquisition and having, but expressions of genuine joy in doing what one likes to do without expecting anything ‘lasting’ in return."



Alienation also figured prominently in Henri Lefebvre’s three volumes of The Critique of Everyday Life, published between 1947 and 1981. However, while Fromm and other German intellectuals linked to the Frankfurt School expressed a deep pessimism about post-war society and the consumer culture, Lefebvre used alienation in dialectical movement with “disalienation,” which presented new possibilities for revolution in everyday life. Over the course of the twentieth century, Lefebvre was at the center of many pivotal cultural, political, and intellectual movements, including the avant-garde of Dada and Surrealism, the uprisings of May 1968, and the development of postmodernism. As Lefebvre wrote in the second volume, “absolute alienation and absolute disalienation are equally inconceivable. Real alienation can be thought of and determined only in terms of a possible disalienation.”



Lefebvre’s intellectual roots were formed between the two world wars as he mixed Marxism with the insights of Dada and Surrealism. The interwar avant-gardes explored how art, performance, and spontaneous action could disorient the dominant ideology in which social conventions appear as natural and inevitable. They also allowed Lefebvre to imagine a new type of society where life itself would be a work of art, constituted by desire and creativity. Along with Andre Breton and many of the other Surrealists, Lefebvre joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1928. But while the Surrealists’ relationship to the Party was volatile and short-lived, Lefebvre stayed on and served as one of its most prominent intellectual spokesman throughout the next three decades, despite the fact that his ideas often conflicted with their interpretations of Marxism that favored “scientific” notions of objective determination. Like Georg Lukács, Lefebvre argued for a more philosophical and humanist reading of Marx that extracted the Hegelian residue in the concepts of alienation, reification, and class consciousness.



Beginning with the first volume of The Critique of Everyday Life, written in 1947, Lefebvre suggested that capitalism was commoditizing not only labor but leisure, family, sexuality, the body, and the imagination. He emphasized that, “there can be alienation in leisure just as in work. . . So we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work.” Like the Frankfurt School, Lefebvre observed that Western societies were becoming increasingly oriented around consumption and commercial entertainment, but while these apparatuses of the culture industry promised relief from the workplace, in reality they represented an extension of alienation in everyday life. Lefebvre sought to theorize the junction of instrumental rationality and mass culture through the term “the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.”



His dialectical method also allowed him to theorize the struggle and resistance that occurs within the processes of consumption, as consumers may seek to overcome alienation by turning consumption into creative activity and/or a basis for social relationships. But Lefebvre recognized that the consumer’s quest for disalienation could also create “an even greater alienation”: “Leisure activities ‘disalienate’ from the effects of fragmented labour; however, when they are entertainments and distractions, they contain their own alienations.” Theorizing in this dialectical and “relativized” fashion, Lefebvre comprehends alienation and disalienation as contradictions that “characterize concrete situations, taken in movement and not considered in a motionless way along fixed structural lines.”



Nonetheless, Lefebvre refused to succumb to the pessimism and despair which engulfed so other Marxists in the decades after World War II. From Lefebvre’s perspective, the consumer culture did not represent the triumph of “false needs” because leisure, pleasure, and self-expression are all essential human faculties. What are false are not the needs which capital promises to fulfill, but the commodities and signs which are supposed to realize them. Lefebvre wrote, “They can thus hold a real content, correspond to a real need, yet still retain an illusory form and a deceptive appearance.” Although their diagnoses of post-war society were otherwise quite similar, Lefebvre thus felt compelled to differentiate himself from Herbert Marcuse: “Can terrorist pressures and repression reinforce individual self-repression to the point of closing all issues? Against Marcuse we continue to assert that they cannot.” As early as 1962, Lefebvre had identified young people as a potentially revolutionary agent of social change: “Everywhere we see them showing signs of dissatisfaction and rebellion…It is they who continue the uninterrupted dialogue between ideal and experiment.” In May 1968, the speculations of Lefebvre and the like-minded Situationist International momentarily came to fruition as young people seized the streets of Paris while general strikes and mass demonstrations involving millions nearly toppled the French government.



After 1968, Lefebvre pursued his study of social space and cities, including his most renowned work, The Production of Space. Otherwise, however, Lefebvre’s influence was negligible once post-structuralism and postmodernism came to dominate the French intellectual scene. He did maintain an indirect presence through his student Jean Baudrillard, whose earliest works on the semiotics of consumer culture bear traces of Lefebvre’s thought. But unlike Baudrillard and so many other post-1968 French intellectuals, Lefebvre never renounced Marxism or his utopian hopes for revolution once postmodern ideas became fashionable.

The concept of alienation depends on a certain view of human nature and, as Lefebvre reminds us, the prospect that humanity can become “disalienated.” After a wave of intellectual interest in the humanism of the young Marx that accompanied the New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s, the concept of alienation has largely been abandoned in cultural theory. But as an array of psychological disorders continue to increase as the consumer culture becomes more entrenched and pervasive, it is conceivable that the critique of alienation may prove useful once again.

Straight Outta Immokalee: The Coalition of Immokalee Workers

Last spring we organized a trip out to Immokalee, a patch of swampland in the center of southern Florida where great numbers of tomatoes are picked by immigrant workers who toil under the most horrifying conditions of exploitation. Our tour would be guided by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (www.ciw-online.org), a community-based worker organization that has been working since 1993 to increase wages, improve working conditions, and put an end to modern-day slavery (yes, slavery, see below) in Immokalee. In 2001 the CIW launched a national boycott of Taco Bell that called on the fast food giant to take responsibility for the human rights abuses that occur as tomatoes are being picked for its “restaurants” (a generous term for Taco Bell, I know). They were eventually victorious in their “Boot the Bell” campaign when students at 25 colleges and high schools—including Duke, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, UCLA, and the University of Michigan—successfully pressured their administrations to kick Taco Bell off campus. In 2005 Taco Bell finally capitulated and agreed to meet all of the CIW’s demands to raise wages and improve working conditions. Since then the CIW has also won a two-year battle with McDonald’s and entered into comparable agreements with Burger King, Subway, and Whole Foods.

Needless to say, I find the CIW’s example tremendously inspiring in this time of global capitalism when it seems like corporations have absolute power over both workers and consumers and we are always being told that organized labor is a thing of the past. On Saturday our group was joined by a number of students from the University of South Florida and Outward Bound, totaling about 50 in all, at the CIW community center. The CIW is planning to launch a new campaign that targets the food service corporations (Aramark, Sodexo, and Compass) which are awarded contracts to feed students on college and high school campuses across America. Toward this end they have created the Student/Farmworker Alliance (www.sfalliance.org) which seeks to educate students who can then pressure their administrations in the manner that was so successful in the “Boot the Bell” campaign. A similar movement arose in the late 1990s calling itself Students Against Sweatshops, where students exposed the brutal conditions typically involved in making the clothing and apparel that display their school’s logo. These movements have proven successful because students are such a coveted demographic of consumers, and today’s corporations and universities are especially sensitive about protecting their image and brand names.

After a short presentation the CIW organizers took us out on a tour of Immokalee. Of course everything had a Third World feel to it, but it was also a bit like stepping back into the 19th century. Immokalee isn’t a “community” so much as it is an old-fashioned labor camp. After a trip to the parking lot where masses of prospective workers come every morning before 5 AM hoping to be picked up for work in the fields, we are taken on a walking tour of the residential area where some 20,000 people live in a 9 block area of rusted mobile homes and dilapidated shacks. The great majority of workers do not own cars, so they must live close to the parking lots where the buses pick them up for work. Our guide points to one of these decrepit trailers and informs us that between 10 and 15 people are typically living in one at any particular time. Most only have 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom, so people usually just throw down a mattress wherever they can, and if you need to cook something or take a shit then you’ll probably need to get in line. They rent for about 400 dollars per month because all of the trailers are owned by two families who can take advantage of their monopoly to jack up the rents. It’s the same story at the grocery store, where price gouging is routine because people don’t have the option to shop around when they’re on foot or riding a bicycle. With this in mind the CIW has recently established a little cooperative store that sells staples like tortillas and corn oil at wholesale prices, thus forcing the grocery store to lower their prices a bit.

Relatively speaking, the people living in the trailers are probably the lucky ones in Immokalee. Over the past several years the CIW has exposed 7 cases of slavery involving about 1,000 workers. The most recent case decided in December 2008 involved a family who would lock their workers in shacks and box trucks at night and tie, chain, and beat them if they tried to leave. The members of this Navarette family were convicted and are due to be sentenced in federal court. The CIW says that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that slavery is in fact rampant. It’s not hard to see how it happens: workers can be taken miles away from civilization into the Everglades, without a phone or a car, and so if you do escape, where are you going to run? Most of the workers are immigrants from Guatemala, southern Mexico, or Haiti, they don’t know anything about what little rights they do possess, they don’t speak English and frequently can’t even communicate with each other because they speak regional dialects, and of course the fear of deportation can be used against them in almost any situation.

Walking through Immokalee was depressing, to say the least. Far removed from either coast, it had already gotten oppressively hot in March, and periodically a dry wind would sweep through and smack our faces with dust and dirt. I tried to imagine what it would be like working in the fields in this baking sun, getting paid 40 fucking cents for every 32 pound bucket of tomatoes I could gather, meaning that I would need to pick 125 buckets of tomatoes—that’s two and a half tons—just to make 50 bucks. But when we got back to the CIW community center I felt a renewed sense of energy and hope. I reminded myself that these people had taken on some of the most powerful corporations in the world and actually won a little something for themselves. The CIW had created a community radio station and a couple of little kids were running around and playing like they were on the air. The CIW told us about how they had started hosted meetings for women’s groups and how the center would be packed every Saturday night when they showed movies on their projector. In other words, this isn’t just a labor movement, it’s a culture in the making. They don’t have any illusions about what they’re up against, but the collective sense of courage and