Whole Earth Summit. I’ll be talking with Nikki Silvestri about Love, Purpose, & the Food Movement, 5:15-6:15pm EDT. Click here to register for FREE.
People & Land Magazine, vols 1 and 2
I mentioned yesterday that Pete Seeger’s views appeared in People & Land. I’m not sure that it’s as easy to find land reform magazines as it used to be. Were it not for a friend, DBS, I’d not have come across them either.
Pete Seeger Presente!
Pete Seeger had a thing or two to say about private property, which is why his thoughts were included in the US land reform magazine (yes, there used to be such a thing) People & Land . You’ll find the page below in Volume 1 Number 2 – Winter 1974.
MLK’s Radicalism Muted By MLK Archives (sponsors: JP Morgan Chase & Co.)
Photo:Jim Hinton, courtesy of Norma Rogers/ Carnegie Hall Archives
This Martin Luther King day, why not celebrate by reading one of MLK’s last speeches, the one delivered at Carnegie Hall on 23 February 1968 to fête the 100th Anniversary of the birth of W. E. B. DuBois?
Well, you can’t.
Not, at least, if you go to the MLK archive (sponsors: JPMorgan Chase & Co.). I wrote to them earlier this week, pointing out that in their million document collection of speeches, letters and pamphlets, they had omitted Dr King’s encomium to the great W. E. B. DuBois. Carnegie Hall recorded the event, and posts a picture (above) celebrating the then-Nobel Laureate’s oratory. The archives have yet to reply.
MLK’s Du Bois speech is the source of one his more famous quotes:
“it is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist”,
which comes in the context of a less famous quote:
We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English- speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.
Even less circulated on the anniversary of his birthday will be MLK’s observation that DuBois had to “battle with the army of white propagandists – the myth-makers of Negro history.”
This, incidentally, is what you get when you search for ‘propagandists’ on the MLK Archives (sponsors: JP Morgan Chase & Co.).
Dr King ended his speech with this call to action:
We have to go to Washington because they have declared an armistice in the war on poverty while squandering billions to expand a senseless, cruel, unjust war in Vietnam. We will go there, we will demand to be heard, and we will stay until the administration responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we will embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination…
Dr. Du Bois’ greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice. Today we are still challenged to be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every man can have food and material necessities for his body, culture and education for his mind, freedom and until rat-infested, vermin-filled slums will be a thing of a dark past and every family will have a decent, sanitary house in which to live. Let us be dissatisfied until the empty stomachs of Mississippi are filled and the idle industries of Appalachia are revitalized. Let us be dissatisfied until brotherhood is no longer a meaningless word at the end of a prayer but the first order of business on every legislative agenda. Let us be dissatisfied until our brother of the Third World- Asia, Africa, and Latin America-will no longer be the victim of imperialist exploitation, but will be lifted from the long night of poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Let us be dissatisfied until this pending cosmic elegy will be transformed into a creative psalm of peace and “justice will roll down like waters from a mighty stream.”
Search for “justice will roll down like waters from a mighty stream” and this is what you get from the MLK archives (sponsors: JPMorgan Chase & Co.).
On the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, pointing out that he was increasingly interested in the causes of poverty is the right thing to do. His memory is ill served by an archive (sponsors: JP Morgan Chase & Co.) that mutes him.
Luckily, this speech explains the importance of writing history against power, points to those for whom such writing is so very uncomfortable, and demands – demands – that criticism come with organizing for justice. It’s a speech that deserves to be far better known. So here it is, in its entirety.*
Continue reading “MLK’s Radicalism Muted By MLK Archives (sponsors: JP Morgan Chase & Co.)”
Beyond Foodworkers’ Karmic Tip Jar This Thanksgiving
Via the Huffington Post
Thanksgiving is an odd holiday for those of us born outside the U.S. I studied it for the citizenship test, where it’s an answer to the question “Name two national U.S. holidays.” But I never managed to shake the feeling that I was doing it wrong. This year, though, I’ll be getting the hang of it thanks to a lot of people who won’t be at my table.
Continue reading “Beyond Foodworkers’ Karmic Tip Jar This Thanksgiving”
Food Sovereignty: A Breviary
I was very pleased to write this piece for The Financial Times and very pressed to condense the idea of ‘food sovereignty’ down to 600 words. If you’d like to know more, here’s a slightly lengthier treatment.
This Land Is Our Land?
Bob St Peter, a man about whom you’ll be hearing a great deal over the next few years, co-wrote this piece with me for the good people at Civil Eats. Thanks to them, and everyone who donated to support their Kickstarter project.
Kent, OH
Ithaca, NY
A History of Good & Bad Ideas to Feed the World
160 Mann, Cornell University
7pm, Wednesday, October 16th
Sponsored by the Food Collective
Going against Duflo
In the past, I’ve linked to pieces that challenge the ethically untroubled, and systemically timid work of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, of Poor Economics fame. If you’re unfamiliar with their work, the quick summary is this: they start with the idea that poor people aren’t as dumb as development theories have tended to make them out. This is laudable, though not particularly original. Poor people have, for quite some time, been telling people that they are professors of their own poverty. Banerjee and Duflo suggest that perhaps the ideas that poor people come up with to survive poverty are better than the policies crafted for them in Washington. So far, so good.
The trouble is that when it comes to fixing poverty, the theories of poor people don’t seem to matter much. What is most important is What Works. Banerjee and Duflo’s rigorously clinical approach – they use randomized controlled trials to test What Works – transcends ideology to reveal that bed nets and deworming are good ideas.
Again, nothing terribly objectionable here. Except that this approach limits the extent to which poor people are allowed to be clever. The extent of their intelligence is reduced to rats in a maze, figuring out what works under the benign and compassionate supervision of ‘practical visionaries‘at MIT. If there are ways that poor people want to change their relation to power, we’ll never know. These are not subject to randomized controlled trials.
Let’s call this fixation with What Works “Millennial Economics”. To be obsessed with What Works is always to exclude consideration of how the context of what works might be different. What works when you’re being beaten is to move away from the dude with the baton. It’s a rational solution that many poor people have arrived at using their own faculties of reason.
But surely the police shouldn’t have been beating you in the first place. Protesting against the police, demanding that the police be held accountable, this too can work. But it requires politics, not technocracy. It means ideology, not expertise. For a generation – for a society – that looks to Washington and sees politics hopelessly divided, who wouldn’t want to stick with What Works? Except, of course, that Washington isn’t terribly interested in much beyond a tiny spectrum of difference between plutocrats whose bickering has brought the very idea of politics into disrepute. It’s a context in which Banerjee and Duflo’s reasonableness is refreshing. Even if their own politics crushes those of poor people. And even if what you’re left with is a few splats of policy ideas, because the theory that might have connected and made sense of them has been erased, because methodologically suspect and politically polluted.
If you want to read a general critique, have a look at Sanjay Reddy’s piece, one of the best in the genre. And if you want to see how Banerjee and Duflo get it wrong on food, here’s something hot off the presses. An old friend and teacher – Porus Olpadwala – has just published a fine analysis in Social Scientist. He takes Banerjee and Duflo to task for their 2011 Foreign Policy piece. The PDF’s below the fold. Continue reading “Going against Duflo”