Friday, January 18, 2008

The Home Front: Let's End the Individual vs. Political Action Debate

Over at Colin's NoImpactMan site, there's been an interesting spate of posts on the value of individual action vs. political action: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/a-little-more-o.html, http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/a-little-more-o.html, (there more on his site). I think Colin's attempt to assert the value of both is important, but I admit, I don't think this is quite the right way to frame this debate. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this issue lately, because I wrote a whole chapter of _Depletion and Abundance_ about it - mostly about how whenever we enter a time of real crisis, those distinctions disappear - that is, everything we do - what we eat and how we work, how we travel and how we fight - all those things operate in the service of larger societal goals. So I had to ask myself - why is it that it matters whether we waste food and energy during time of war, and not the rest of the time?

But of course, that's the wrong question - it isn't that war or other crisis makes what we do in our kitchens matter as much as what we do in the voting booth, a the protest or in public service - it is that in the heightened awareness of crisis we recognize something that is always true - that the line between "individual" and "public" is very, very fine. It is true there are things done in the dark of night in our own rooms that have no political context whatsoever (at least according to most folks on the left - there are other ways of thinking about it out there), but most of our individual choices involve public, political engagement. The distinction between "individual" and "political" is largely artificial, a remnant of the cultural legacy of older ideas about public and private. Thus, if I make a donation to a political candidate, that's a "political" act. And if I go shopping at a store, and the store uses some of the money I give them to make a donation to a political candidate, that's "individual" - but not because one has political implications and the other does not, but because those are the categories we are accustomed to sorting things into. Virtually all human acts both involve "individual" choice and "political" context.

"Individual" acts are generally quite collective in any given society - and especially so in a media-driven consumer culture. What may look to our habits like private choice is driven by a whole host of public resources, energies and moneys, often with strong political interests - the shape of our economy is a political concern. Thus, for example, our "individual" food choices over the last fifty years have been shaped by "private" corporations operating in public through media, subsidized by public policy. The fact that 'Coke or Pepsi" is a choice, that it is deemed a meaningful one, and that "clean water" isn't one is all in play when we go make our "individual" choice between sodas that taste like highly sugared battery acid.

Any discussions of "individual vs. political" choices ultimately must include gender. Think about how many of the "individual" choices so often demeaned by some environmentalists (among them Monbiot, Schellenberger, Romm, etc...) who say they can't make a difference were traditionally "women's work" - from things that are tied to shopping or not shopping(and since women make or influence 90% of all purchases, including traditionally male-associated things like tools and cars, this remains fairly accurate), cooking rather than buying fast food, domestic life (turning off lights and down heat, gardening), frugality and "making do" etc... It isn't that men don't do these things - they absolutely do - but they are associated culturally with women. And the public realm, and political action, is both dominated by men and associated with them, going back to the 19th century and before. And that absolutely shapes our diminution of their value.

Historically, the distinction between "public" and "private" is strongly gendered - women, and most of the acts above, are associated with the private. In the most extreme versions of this, women had no public existence at all separate from father or husband legally speaking in many cultures. In the 19th century, when the mythos of "the angel in the house" had its maximum currency, it was common to say that women's names should appear in the newspaper 3 times - at birth, marriage and death - that is, that women should have no public or civil existence. Of course, even in the most repressive Victorian times this rule was as much disobeyed as obeyed, but the legacy of the thought that it created lives with us.

Over the last 50 years, since the end of World War II, we have had the greatest movement in history out of the private, domestic "sphere" and into the "public" realm. And it is no accident that this move has coincided with wild growth in the US and other rich world nation's energy consumption. The workforce nearly doubled, creating use for twice as many cars, twice as many jobs. Women, no longer cooking and cleaning hired out for those jobs - expending money and energy creating new low wage work for the poor, who also stopped cooking for their kids as the cost of living rose. Now that women had their own money, the bought stuff.

Do not mistake me - I am a feminist and I do not hold women any more responsible for the environmental destruction our new wealth created than men - there were many feminist voices that advocated not the outsourcing of domestic labor to corporations and poorer, non white people, but shared labor in the home. However, I find the demeaning of women's traditional work, and by implication the women who did it then and the women and men (mostly poor and non-white) who often do it for us now, offensive and destructive.

What I am claiming is this - that the women's movement as it happened, was seized upon by the growth capitalist economy, and perverted into something ecologically destructive. In fact, this is more about feminism's lack of power to overcome the dominant culture than its alliance with it. But the history of personal energy use cannot be separated from the history of feminism, it stands as material proof of the claim that individual actions when taken within a society are enormously powerful *and* the sheer destructiveness of moving 60% of all women into the workforce (without a simultaneous reduction in male workers) was in part a function of the artificial public/private; individual/political distinction. That is, the things that we call "individual" and imagine don't much matter, are the remnants of a culture that demeans "women's work" even after most women stopped doing that work.

By this last point, I mean to say that the habit of concealing "private" acts under the notion that they are individual and thus without political context, which growth capitalism does anytime war or other crisis doesn't intercede, is part of the reason we permitted this enormous destruction. Our habits of thinking led us to demean "women's work" as low impact, low importance things that couldn't possibly matter. Maria Mies in _The Subsistence Perspective_ calls this the "housewifization" of women's labor - that is, it is systematically removed, by capitalism, to a "private" and invisible sphere, no longer measured or considered to contribute to the economy as a whole. Such labor is described as drudgery, mindless, numbing (which is just how Betty Friedan described it, for example), unskilled, lower class. This simultaneously presents women who can avoid it a powerful cultural incentive to go do important "public" work, and also essentially erases those "individual acts" from the culture. We come to assume that anything that is so demeaned, dismissed, unmeasured, undervalued, done by people held in contempt by the society as whole couldn't possibly be powerful enough, say, to influence the whole climate or to drive us to an energy peak sooner than expected.

It is not that I deny the influence of larger issues, or the need for political actions in their purest form. Nor am I claiming that women's roles are the origin or whole cause of climate change and peak oil - far from it. What I am arguing instead is that our emphasis on this distinction is not based on any inherently meaningful division, and that our habit of dividing actions into individual and political ones is more destructive than it is productive. We cling to it not because it illuminates some useful truth, but because it is habit leftover from another world, encouraged by precisely the forces that got us into this trouble to begin with.

Instead of wasting time on this artificial distinction, we need to begin recognizing the sheer political and social power of choices we've deemed "individual" and also think about how this distinction has led even many activists to misunderstand power relationships, and how to make an impact. For example, a recent survey of "Green" consumers suggest that many people focus on relatively minor impact actions (cloth bags for example), but drive and fly more than people who do not identify with environmental causes. Such a study is obviously biased by class issues, and yet, the "green consumer" movement already shows deep problems, as people are unable to distinguish between meaningful actions and relatively meaningless ones. An integrated understanding of our actions would, for example, prevent many people hopefully from, for example, publicly supporting new farm policies while sending cash donations to ConAg, Kelloggs and Altria who oppose them, in the form of supermarket groceries.

Moreover, it would spare environmentalists a sparring point, a distracting debate that sets us at each other, trying to undermine each other's proposed solutions, as well as saving us all time. Not to mention, that as more and more men and women take up the demeaned category of domestic, "housewifized" labor out of necessity and desire, it might shake some of the cultural negativity from that work. If we stop sneering at cooking and gardening as just another "individual" choice, utterly separate from our "political" work (which we have to do too), we might make a real dent in all of the parts of the equation.

It is always a lie to say that "individual" choices don't matter, but it is especially a lie to say that during a time of crisis, and we are in one now. In wartime, there are two fronts - the war front and the home front, and both are essential to success. The soldiers cannot fight without sufficient food and other resources, the families cannot continue to grow and cook food, to conserve and live without the soldier's protection (ok, let's just pretend that we're talking about some of the less moronic wars, just for rhetorical purposes ;-). In this conflict, there is no far away enemy - as Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." And there is no divided front - no need to separate husbands and wives, parents and children, loved ones from one another - in fact, we can't afford a two front war when facing the twin difficulties of climate change and peak oil - we need everybody working together on the Home Front.

Nor can we afford to stick to outdated debates about whether "individual" or "political" action are required. Virtually all acts are political, in the sense of collective. Yes, if you hide the fact that you are hanging your laundry in your basement, there is no political context. But if you hang your laundry out in front of your house (or talk about your basement drying rack), you are saying to your neighbors, and those who pass by "this is not ugly or shameful, this is important." The next step is talking to the neighbors, a political act - that, by the way is the next step in politics too - talking. The step after that is the zoning commission and then perhaps a seat on the zoning board. But there is no point at which this is a purely individual act. Nor is there a purely political one - we all know by now that how you get to the protest sends a message as surely as your being there.

What we need is not separate spheres, but INTEGRITY - that is, the *integration* of the multiple parts of our lives. It is, of course, more difficult than advertising that one kind of work is meaningful and the rest isn't, but it is also more effective, more moral, and more likely to lead to success on the new Home Front.

Sharon

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

All politics are local politics...

In the context of this blog post, Tip O'Neil's comment takes on a different meaning. It goes beyond the "purely" political idea that local politics influences national (or even global) politics. It becomes a statement that says to me, at least, that what is done locally has effect beyond the local (or, perhaps, what is done individually has effect beyond the individual). If that's the case, then individual action IS political action; there's no division of one from the other.

It begins with one or two, then more and then many. For instance, say one person starts recycling their office's recyclables. Talks about it with coworkers. That could lead to coworkers assisting at work or recycling at home. Then the office staff when they are at other offices see that recycling could be done and the next thing you know, there's a push at the city council for a business recycling program. One individual began it but eventually it made its way to city government. I can't see, given this example, that there were ever acts that could be called simply "individual" or "political."

My question is, why would we want to?

Kerri

Iaato said...

Sharon, as a woman, I really appreciate your woman's voice and perspective, which is much lacking in the peak oil debate. The dominant technological culture will not be the answer to the peak oil problem. I greatly enjoyed your post on bottom-up action in your post on "The Church Model for Environmental Action," and I see that this is really a continuation of that theme.

The diminution of the value of traditional women's work can be connected to the energetics of fossil fuel abundance. When society received all of those energy slaves to heat the houses and cook the food and wash the clothes, women's roles changed. There was much less need for a full time stay at home mother. So that's a partial reason for why we went elsewhere, increasingly, in the 60s.

As we lose those energy slaves, that traditional women's work of cooking and gardening will need to be reacquired and revalued. That is why your emphasis on the individual and local will become so important. The energetics of the peak oil world will dictate that top-down political and economic solutions that are business-as-usual are simply not going to work, as we shift scales and rebuild a new world. It will remain to be seen which gender assumes those roles, or if it will be shared. I suspect that we will participate mutually, maybe with a male hunter/female gatherer flavor.

I've been asking myself why I really don't care much about political action during this cycle. Up to now, I've been engaged and involved, and in the past year, I have stopped wanting to have anything to do with political debate. I attribute it in part to your idea that the political top down solution simply will not answer here. Especially since I have not seen anything except business as usual. Mentally and emotionally, I have already disconnected myself from these jokers.

I love your idea of starting a "community preparedness" group, and plan to start one as soon as it warms up a bit here in Anchorage. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

Pray do tell, when was this time without war to which you allude?

jewishfarmer said...

Sorry if I confused you, Anonymous - I meant "times when we are not formally engaged in war." That is, most of American history, because, after all, it doesn't "count" if it is police action, of course ;-).

Sharon

Anonymous said...

iaato,

You mentioned Anchorage. There are several but I live in the one in Alaska. If that's where you are located, I'd be very interested in your "community preparedness" idea. It's something I've been kicking around with a friend for a while with no clear idea where to begin. More heads on this would be terrific, particularly in Alaska!

Kerri

Anonymous said...

Appreciate the desire to go beyond the individual vs political argument.

One thing that makes sense to me is the idea of developing a counter-culture, with institutions and ideas that provide an alternative to mainstream industrial-consumerist culture.

The idea of counter-culture has been around for a long time, arguably since Judaism and early Christianity challenged the "Might is Right" culture of the Roman Empire.

In the last century, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci tried to explain why working class movements had foundered. He came up with the concept of cultural hegemony, seeing that "a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination." He proposed a struggle to develop and control media, education and civil organizations.

In the 60s and 70s, many of us believed in a Counter-Culture (though very few had probably read Gramsci), in which we would build alternative institutions such as underground newspapers, different food systems (the beginning of organic agriculture), etc.

Ironically, one of the most successful attempts to apply Gramsci has been on the part of far-right conservatives. After the stinging defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, they methodically built news organizations (Fox News, talk radio), think tanks, political networks...

Donella Meadows in here seminal work, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (PDF) lists 10 strategic points for changing a system. She considers the most effective to be: "The mindset or paradigm out of which the system - its goals, power structure, rules, its culture - arises.

What may be most important may not be the particular content of a discussion, but the new networks and organizations that grow up around the discussions.

Bart
Energy Bulletin

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this post, Sharon.

I see too many calls for political change on the order of get women back in the kitchen, detain more immigrants, build more fences...it's really demoralizing.

Bart, I think the counterculture is alive and well. It's just that because it's mostly anti-consumerist, anti-consumption, anti-corporate, the left counterculture doesn't own media outlets or big retailers.

Where I live, at least, I can shop at an anarchist or socialist book store, dumpster dive as a social activity, go to concerts by independent musicians or plays or puppet shows, be a part of any one of a number of living or action collectives, belong to the anarchist mom's group, play in the anarchist soccer league...and there's continuity between this counterculture and the old counterculture, in that a lot of these people had hippie parents, and do participate in the institutions (food coops, coop restaurants, child care coops, churches) that the old counterculture set up.

People travel all over the country from little countercultural pocket to little countercultural pocket - all over the world, if you include WWOOFers and squat culture.

HRDeane said...

Thanks Sharon, as someone who has been trying to approach these problems on these two fronts, the individual and political, I have seen how the two now converge almost a year later.I think there has to be a different approach in the organisation of these groups as you discussed in previous blogs. My biggest frustration in trying to mobilise and inspire my local community is the power plays that inevitably emerge. Almost as if some people really don't grasp the issues, they just want to shout the loudest (or gain the most kudos) and it is often left to less than a handful of people doing all the work and getting completely burned out and demoralised. Crisis will create chaos if people don't understand what is coming and the few in the community who have set up sustainable houses, with food supplies and off the grid energy may very well get targeted by desperate neighbours who did not prepare. Without community awareness and preparation we have a real potential for a violent and frightening future. Without knowledge and belief that this is really happening and that our government will not save us, I think a lot of people are in for a very bad reality check. I just don't know how to get past the 'personalities' sometimes and down to business without becoming tyrannical myself. Women have certainly been the most responsive to the issue in my community, although there are some great men involved, many of them seem to go to either extreme of helplessness or denial. They are often the most outspoken, but the least effective. It is a really time consuming problem in small groups and it is tempting to just focus on my own house and family and leave the rest to their squabbles. But I can't help thinking there must be another way,...thankyou for providing examples every bit helps when trying to nut out issues I, and most anyone else involved in these issues, never thought they would have to negotiate.

Hanley Tucks said...

Isn't it an old feminist saying that "the personal is political"? :)

Chiming in with agreement, I note that numerous attempts at "bottom-up" solutions to Third World poverty have shown it's better to focus on the women than the men.

For the Third World:
- The single biggest determinant of the number of children had per woman and the childrens' survival past infancy is a woman's education.
- When a woman earns income it raises family income; when a man earns it, it gets blown on... well, booze and women.
- Women have a lower rate of failing to pay back microloans
- and so on.

When you influence women's behaviour and lifestyle, you change that of all society much more effectively than by trying to influence men's behaviour.

I remember hearing a story of a group of women who realised that most of the personal and household cleaning agents in their supermarket were combinations of just four or five different things with some colour and perfume. They asked the supermarket to stock them, the manager said it was impossible. So they stopped buying the multitude of cleaning things and just bought those four or five in bulk by mail order... lo and behold, suddenly it became possible for the supermarket to get these things.

I believe they extended this approach to many other household products, utterly changing their local stores.

I don't know of any cases where a group of men did something like that. Men would probably just try to get the local council to pass a law against all the products they disliked. :)

In terms of male and female areas of life, things are changing in the West. Men are to some extent taking up the "women's" areas of life, but to a much greater extent both men and women are abandoning them. So between a husband and wife, who cooks and cleans? Well, they go out to restaurants most of the time and they hire someone to come in once a week and clean... Who looks after the children? Well, they don't have children, so...

That to me seems a bad trend, since people are becoming alienated from their household lives. This doesn't help us with the future of the world, with people seeing connections between their personal actions and the world in general. And if you don't have children it's harder to care what happens fifty years from now...

Susan M.B. Sullivan said...

Lately, I've been mulling over this statement, seen on multiple blogs: "It won't stop global warming if you change a few lightbulbs". Extending it to other cases shows how ludicrous it is to discount small actions. "It won't stop global warming to stop one coal-fired power plant", "it won't stop global warming if one teeny town goes green". How many of the people making noise about coal and those speaking at council meetings didn't first change a few light bulbs?

Anonymous said...

Rosa writes: "I think the counterculture is alive and well."

Good point. Some segments of the counterculture are flourishing within their particular enclaves. Local and organic food, for example, has exploded in popularity. Concern about peak oil and resource depletion has generated dozens of websites and hundreds of local groups. Some cities provide the happy counter-culture smorgasbord, as in your area.

What's missing is a sense of connection, of unity. As a result, we remain marginal, hidden. We often aren't even aware of each other.

Why is it that we remain so powerless? I agree with you, Rosa, that lack of media control is a key factor.

I also think that we've imbibed a set of dysfunctional habits from our culture that keep us apart. Caroline Casey says that we need to learn how to be good allies with each other. It takes skill!

How can we work with people who have different beliefs than we do ... some of which we may find abhorrent?

How can we move on from repetitive arguments, such individual vs political action?

Bart

Anonymous said...

It seems that the U.S. Treasury is going to start printing money and taxpayers will get rebate checks in order to jumpstart the economy. The poor will spend the money because they need to, and the rich will sock it away because they can. The TV news shows are already exhorting people to use the money to shop - "buy a new computer" is a suggestion I saw this morning from a reporter at a Best Buy. The unsubtle message is that it's our duty as Americans to go shopping to prop up the U.S. economy, and if the strategy fails, it's all our fault. (I don't *buy* the message - but I recognize that's what it is. Also, I believe we're headed for a recession with or without this rebate gimmick - but the American people will be blamed anyway for not shopping.)

Anyway, I'm musing about whether there's a small item that every individual receiving a rebate check could purchase that would send a political message. Not sure what that might be. A packet of seeds? A low-energy light bulb? A hoe? I think if it were something quite small and obscure - a thimble? - suddenly there's a run on thimbles? - it could signal that we want something different from craptastic consumer goods.

What will (or should) you do with your rebate check (assuming there is one)?

Anonymous said...

The other two times this administratation has done these tax "rebate" checks, I did the same thing each time -- didn't even deposit the check, just signed it over to the Center for Biological Diversity and mailed it to them. It seemed appropriate to send it to someone who would use it to overturn at least some of the harms being done by those who sent the check to me in the first place.

I hope to do the same with any forthcoming check (though my financial situation is a lot different than it was at those earlier opportunities, and I'll have to think carefully about it).

Unknown said...

If there is a rebate, half of it will go to our local community gardening organization; the other half will pay for a permaculture course at the university.

Anonymous said...

The distinction between public and private acts and the fact that one is seen as more useful, lucrative, beneficial, than the other can be directly linked to the environmental crisis in multiple ways. However, one connection that I did not make until reading this blog entry was the fact that, while traditional work ("women's work") is seen as having no value (no monetary value, that is), so also the jobs that the environment does for us free of charge (water purification, storm buffering, carbon sequestering, etc.) are not considered in economics.

Cost-benefit analyses do not take into account the damage done to the environment when creating a product and thus overestimate the value of that product. I am told that recently the environmental sciences have come up with a more accurate manner of looking at economics, but I have my doubts about how widespread its use is.

Being a feminist and an environmentalist I find it very difficult sometimes to balance the two. For example, I find myself doing more and more of what a feminist might label traditional, menial work (cooking, cleaning in more painstaking, natural ways, considering natural childbirth, etc.), but I see this work as essential to the environmental movement, and apart from that I do not feel oppressed by this work but merely glad to be doing something proactive. In this instance, however, I think feminism and environmentalism have a similar plaint--traditional work is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, one of the most useful types of work on this planet so long as you don't look at it from a corporate point of view. So also is the "traditional work" of the environment necessary and, goddammit, more efficient than our high-falutin' human systems.

Hanley Tucks said...

susan, my answer to "but what difference does it make?" is, "it makes a difference to me."

If I refrain from screwing around on my woman, will it stop infidelity in the whole world? If I refrain from swiping money from the till at work, will it stop theft in the whole world? If I give up my seat to a pregnant woman on the train, will it make the world courteous? If I pay my taxes, will everyone?

My individual actions will not make the world much better or worse. But some things are just the right or wrong thing to do, whether they affect the world much at all.

Using less energy and stuff, refraining from waste, reducing how much pollution you create, these are just plain the right thing to do, whether anyone else does them or not.

"Come on, all the other guys are having fun at this brothel... all the other cops take bribes... what's wrong with you?"

No.

What difference do my actions make? They make a difference to me.

Anonymous said...

sentientbeing, it's not necesarily true that "a feminist" would think the day to day work is menial (though some might).

Even in second-wave feminism there were big campaigns to put more value on "women's work". Wages for housework, stipends for stay at home moms (lots of Western European countries have these), ethnologists arguing that in most of the world it's the women's work that keeps everything going. In fact, one of the big victories of feminist thought in US culture is that the *rewards* of parenthood and homemaking were articulated enough that men have increasingly embraced them - a time study from 2006 showed married fathers spending twice as much time with their kids every week than men did in 1965.

Of course, cooking and cleaning (and gardening and hauling water, where that is women's work) is still undervalued and under-rewarded. But there's solid argument that it's that attitude that is anti-feminist.

Anonymous said...

I think I would buy a 50# bag of wheat to stock, to plant or to grind, to make my own flour in the future, when the trucks ain't hauling 1500 miles!

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