McFarland | From the War on Poverty to the Revolution in the Garden
 |
| Attributed to Rev. Dr. James Forbes, Jr. |
From ‘Keep on Pushing’ to ‘Pushaman’ & Back Again
ORGANIC
INTELLECTUALS
•
DIRECT ACTION
• FIFTY YEARS PAST CHICAGO’S
‘WAR ON POVERTY’
Pancho McFarland | Chicago. IL | February 16, 2014
Originally prepared for the “50 Anniversary of the
War On Poverty”
Chicago State University
February 11, 2014
I
teach a “Class and Stratification” course for the Sociology Program at Chicago
State University. In the course we
focus on inequality, the global capitalist economic system, critiques of it and
examinations of alternative economic systems. We examine the problems of inequality caused by the
capitalist economy and then focus on our city, Chicago, as a means to
understand our places in the economy as working class people of color. To learn about ourselves in Chicago I
use a text written by the Chicago Grassroots Curriculum Taskforce. The book, Urban Renewal or Urban Removal? is volume one of a planned eight. Authors of the text include activists,
teachers, parents, long-time residents and professors. It is a grassroots bunch of dedicated
organic intellectuals.
Following
on the work of the authors of the Urban
Renewal or Urban Removal?, I like to examine what grassroots
community-focused people have to say about inequality, poverty, violence,
illness, and the other ills of capitalism. Some of my writings on Chicanas/os and hip hop proceed from
the perspective of the working classes and people of color. These were the organic intellectuals of
the urban music subculture of hip hop.
My approach to the classroom and to a discussion of the War on Poverty
similarly looks toward a local organic knowledge base. It is to this knowledge base that we
turn and contribute to in the local food justice and urban sustainability
movements.
1964
So,
I’m thinking: The War on Poverty, 1964, Chicago, inequality, organic
intellectuals; Curtis Mayfield!
The genius Chicago-bred musician, composer, bandleader and lyricist
seemed to have his fingers on the pulse of urban Black Chicago and the Civil
Rights Movement when he released “Keep on Pushing” in 1964; the year that
Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. Filled with hope, Mayfield with his band, The Impressions,
sings:
Keep on pushing
I’ve got to keep on pushing
(mmm-hmm)
I can’t stop now
Move up a little higher
Some way, somehow
‘Cause I’ve got my strength
And it don’t make sense
Not to keep on pushin’
The Impressions describe the emotional and
spiritual strength that many Black Americans had at the beginning of 1964. There was a sense of hopefulness and
resolve that made much of the black community ‘keep on pushing’; there was a
sense to keep up the struggle until their goals were achieved.
 |
The Black Panther. Credit: Scission. |
Black
Revolt and the War with Drugs
By the close of the decade and into the 1970s
poverty in the cities seemed to be getting no better. Resistance was at a high and so was repression. The murder of Fred Hampton by the Chicago
Police Department in 1969 and the subsequent dissolution of the Black Panther Party
by the FBI and other repressive paramilitary organizations were conducted by
the same government claiming to be serving the poor through the so-called War
on Poverty. In 1969 Chicago
organic intellectual, Sam Greenlee, published The Spook Who Sat by The Door – a novel about armed resistance to
government repression and extreme urban inequality. The movie of the same name was released in 1973.
Whilst urban poverty abatement projects
developed from war on poverty legislation, slum conditions persisted in much of
Black Chicago. High levels of
unemployment led many to occupations in the illicit markets. Further, the drug economy played an
important role in inequality during the 1970s. Churchill and Van der Wall argue that the Great Heroin
epidemic of 1971-1972 was a means of undermining the Black Liberation
struggle. They write: “The flood of heroin into U.S. ghettos,
meanwhile, appears to have been calculated to narcotize the country’s
then-burgeoning black liberation movement in much the same way that LSD and
other hallucinogens were employed to undermine the white ‘new left’ movement a
few years earlier” (146). Black
poverty combined with drugs and few employment opportunities was a volatile
mix. The hopefulness and resolve
faded for many.
So, the music, the
images, and the message changed. I
think about the war on poverty, Chicago, resistance, repression, the drug
epidemic, and organic intellectuals.
Curtis Mayfield once again comes to mind. His 1972 hit from Shaft,
“Pusher Man,” approaches the drug problem cautiously from different
perspectives. Mr. Mayfield sings:
Two bags, please.
For a generous fee
Make your world what you want it to
be.
Got a woman I love desperately.
Wanna give her somethin’ better than
me.
Been told I can’t be nuthin’ else
Just a hustler in spite of myself.
I know I can break it.
This life just don’t make it.
Lord, Lord, yeah!
Got to get mellow, now
Gotta be mellow, y’all
Got to get mellow, now
I’m your mama, I’m your daddy
I’m that nigga in the alley.
I’m your doctor when in need.
Want some coke? Have some weed.
You know me, I’m your friend,
Your main boy, thick and thin.
I’m your pusherman.
The
song discusses the thoughts and life of a reluctant hustler. The protagonist is trapped in a cycle
of wanting better for himself and his female partner, racist stereotypes of him
as worth little, and the drug epidemic that sends many Black, White and other
addicts to him to fulfill their ‘need.’
We can easily read an indictment of capitalism and its liberal war on
poverty.
The Turn of the Century
The
city and its citizens experienced crack epidemics, a rapid rise in the prison
population and the War on Kids of Color, a.k.a. the War on Drugs, welfare ‘reform,’ and ‘gangsta rap’, the music that
chronicled and critiqued it all in the 1980s and 1990s. In the new millennium we
continue to see high Black poverty, illness and unemployment, few and
diminishing educational opportunities, food deserts, violence and
repression. We have had
environmental devastation and climate chaos, the housing crisis, continued ‘urban
renewal’ (see the demolition of Chicago public housing and dispersion of its residents
to far south and suburban communities and gentrification in neighborhoods such
as the ‘West Loop,’ Pilsen and Englewood), and communities fed up with
violence, drugs and poverty. The
community peace movement, food justice and sustainability movements, grassroots
education projects, the revolutionary left, and the like have continuously
fought the aftermath of the so-called ‘War on Poverty’ and the capitalist
economic system.
 |
| Amable Aristy y la pobreza |Gerard Ellis. Credit: labuenaprensa |
The
situation that many of us are struggling against is chronicled and explained by
Chicago-based musicians. Today, a
musical voice of young Chicago includes Chance the Rapper. This organic intellectual talks about
pushin’ too. His song from 2013 is
“Pusha Man/Paranoia.” Late in the
song he raps
They merking [murdering] kids, they
murder kids here
Why you think they don’t talk about
it? They deserted us here.
Where the fuck is Matt Lauer at?
Somebody get Katie Couric in here.
Probably scared of all the refugees
look like we had a fucking hurricane here.
They be shooting whether it’s dark
or not. I mean the days is pretty
dark a lot.
Down here it’s easier to find a gun
than it is to find a fucking parking spot.
No love for the opposition
specifically a cop position
Cause they’ve never been in our
position.
Getting violations for the nation,
correlating, you dry snitching
I’ve been riding around with my
blunt on my lips
With the sun in my eyes, and my gun
on my hip.
Paranoia on my mind, got my mind on
the fritz
But a lotta niggas dying, so my 9
with the shits.
I know you scared, you should ask us
if we scared, too.
I know you scared. Me too.
I know you scared, you should ask us
if we scared, too.
If you was there, then we just knew
you’d care, too.
[Verse 5:]
It just got warm out. This is the shit I’ve
been warned about.
I hope that it storm in the morning.
I hope that it’s pouring out.
I hate crowded beaches. I hate the sound of fireworks.
And I ponder what’s worse between
knowing it’s over and dying first.
Cause everybody dies in the summer.
Wanna say ya goodbyes? Tell them
while it’s spring.
I heard everybody’s dying in the
summer so pray to God for a little more spring.
Poverty conditions continue 50 years after the war on
poverty began. In many cases, the
continued violence, multi-generational hopelessness, and the availability of
firearms leaves entire communities in worse condition than in 1964. Chance provides us with a thick
description of the conditions many of his peers experience today. It seems little has gotten better since
1964.
However,
one thing is dramatically different than what it was in 1964. The demographic composition of the most
exploited sector of the labor force in Chicago has changed. Today, the system of illegalized
immigration creates a class of worker that is super exploited with few rights
or resources with which to use to resist their circumstances; not unlike the
Black population under the U.S. Apartheid system from sharecropping to Jim
Crow. This illegalized immigration regime creates a sector of the working class
which has the effect of disciplining the rest of the work force and muting
worker dissent. Additionally, the
super exploited labor of illegalized immigrants lowers the price of necessary
goods muting dissent from consumers.
The circumstances of ‘illegalized’ Mexican immigrants – the 1½ generation
in Chicago – are documented by young organic intellectuals such as Juan Zárate.
 |
| Oración a Señor, Según Batalla & Barreto, 2005. |
Zárate’s
most useful examination of living in a poor, Mexican/Mexican American community
in Chicago is the song, “El Santuario” (The Sanctuary). He describes a multi-generational
economic problem in much of Mexican Chicago: A lack of ‘good’ jobs with living
wages, job security, and benefits; and the ubiquitous presence of gangs, drugs,
crumbling infrastructure, few educational or recreational opportunities, and
the like. Despite the condition of
political and social ecological chaos and disturbance, he finds way to
recognize the barrio and the people living there with genuine fondness. He welcomes us to his barrio saying:
Bienvenido, compa
al único lugar que nos entiende
Al veces es el peor, cabrón
pero aquí nos acepta
Welcome,
friend,
to
the only place that understands us.
Sometimes
it’s the worst, cabrón*
but
here we are accepted.
*Ed.: Literally a ‘goat-head’ – conveying
the sense of a person characterized by stubborn determination.
The
barrio as a vibrant, living community is often a difficult place to live but at
least there he feels a part of a community. The people of the barrio are essentially good. The circumstance of living in poverty
in a racially segregated postindustrial city is the principal force leading to
violent experiences like the too common acts of gun violence and murder. He raps:
Nacimos con el santo de la espalda,
morimos con balazo en la espalda
We
were born with a saint on our back
we
died with a gunshot in the back
“Born
with a saint on our back” signifies the tattoo that comes to adorn the backs of
many members of gangs. The death by gunshot signifies Zárate’s critique of this
violence, a call to remember that – like the many poor and marginalized social
groups throughout Chicago’s history – people in his community fight back in a struggle
to live with dignity. Zárate
claims that his peers in the barrio are born with a resistant spirit: “alma de
Zapata” [Ed.: The soul of Emiliano Zapata]
 |
Chicago urban garden. Credit: Wikipedia. |
Revolution in the Urban Garden
Economic
statistics show that poverty is as common today as in 1964, the wealth gap has
grown not decreased, and almost all socioeconomic indicators show what organic
intellectuals in Chicago already know; little, if anything, is better.
It
is obvious that this economic system cannot be reformed but rather needs to be
replaced with something much more humane.
This is the true lesson of the ‘War on Poverty’. We need to destroy this corporate-controlled
top-down political system and replace it with a truly democratic locally
focused and nonhierarchical coupling of ecological and social systems. This
revolution in the urban garden is already apparent in the spaces of the urban
food justice struggle.
The
future is being organized in worker and consumer cooperatives with distribution
of the goods of our society to those who need them the most. Capitalist consumerist values of
accumulation, excessive consumption, competition, material worship, greed, must
be broadly challenged and rejected, especially in everyday acts of resistance
and autonomy and the formation of alternative networks of working-class
self-valuing, free of the prison tethers of the commodity form. These will be
replaced by cooperation, shared labor, conviviality and hospitality – in lak
ech, ubuntu, mitakuye oyasin –respect for diversity and difference.
I
argue that we can circulate and grow this type of social organization by fusing
two approaches to autonomous struggles.
First, is the wisdom of our indigenous, place-based ancestors who organized
themselves communally with an understanding of themselves as one people amongst
many interdependent peoples and other beings; the spirit embodied in mitakuye
oyasin/all my relations. Those
indigenous traditions and relationships to nature that provide ecological democratic
means of living should be passed on to our children and future generations as
active forms of “knowing and being in the world”.
In
addition, the insights of contemporary communists and anarchists can be helpful
in developing a more just world. A
great deal has been learned from centuries of struggle against capitalism and
its efforts to rule through the imposition of hierarchy and domination. The
numerous communes, revolutions, temporary autonomous zones and experiments in
libertarian communist living have taught us much about human potential and the
difficulties of organizing freely associated self-reliant and resilient
small-scale societies in the midst of capitalist domination.
Lessons
from our ancestors and anarchists influence organizing against poverty in
Chicago. Autonomous zones pop up
and endure all over the city. Our
work with economic and racial justice-focused people in the local food movement
illustrates this well. Freedom,
democracy and anti-capitalist living are amongst the many pleasures of working
in urban community gardens.
In
the gardens in which I work we democratically decide how to use our plot and
the resources therein. We tend the
garden using the communalist values of our placed-based ancestors. We remember and re-invent their
worldviews in our garden and mini-farm work. Together, we decide what is best for our community, what to
grow and how. With shared,
cooperative labor we increase our community wealth of good food, good soil and
good seed. We use only organic,
ecological growing methods on our land because we know that ‘all our relations’
must be present and thriving in the mini-ecosystems we create. We reject private property or the
private ownership of the means of production; namely, the land, tools and seeds
required to feed us. We reject
hierarchies and –isms. Our gardens
are acts of direct action against the capitalist system and for an autonomous,
free and well-ordered network of communities.
The
gardens and the ethos sowed and harvested therein illustrate the possibility
for a more just and equitable future for us. They represent viable alternatives to the violence, greed
and ecological catastrophe that are capitalism and its State backers. The community garden and the need for
them shows us the wrongheadedness of the war on poverty and similar cynical
liberal reform attempts to say that our government is doing something about
poverty. Only through direct
action emerging from our own alternative community institutions can we generate
the means to biopolitical self-determination required to end poverty and the
many maladies of capitalist structural violence in Chicago and the rest of the world.
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