Civil Eats on Fair Food Program: “Meet the Farmworkers Leading the #MeToo Fight For Workers Everywhere"

Coalition of Immokalee Workers

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Civil Eats on Fair Food Program: “Meet the Farmworkers Leading the #MeToo Fight For Workers Everywhere”… “By rectifying long-standing power imbalances, Worker-driven Social Responsibility drills into the foundation of the problem…” “No gender-based violence programs have achieved the same amount of leverage in fostering change…” Earlier this week, Civil Eats published an excellent, feature-length piece based on interviews conducted during the Freedom Fast in New York City that lends critical insight into the endemic, generations-old problem of gender-based violence in the agricultural industry – and the promise that the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model, fulfilled in the Fair Food Program, holds for eradicating such violence in low-wage workplaces around the globe. UC Berkeley PhD student Vera Chang’s piece, entitled “Meet the Farmworkers Leading the #MeToo Fight For Workers Everywhere,” is one you won’t want to miss. The article, which lucidly weaves through the problem and the proven solution, was picked up by Change.org and blasted out to the whopping 117,000+ that have pledged to boycott Wendy’s. (If you haven’t already signed, take a moment to do so and then share with your networks!). Today, we are pasting key excerpts from the article, beginning with an exposition of the problem: … An estimated 500,000 women labor in U.S. fields. On many of the farms where Raquel’s parents worked up and down the East Coast, farmworkers describe coercion, catcalls, groping, and assault from crew leaders, supervisors, and even fellow workers as their “daily bread” in the fields. A study found that four out of five female farmworkers experience sexual violence at work. Women are often dependent on male supervisors for employment, housing, and transportation. Claims against harassers are largely processed by male managers, police officers, and judges, and retaliation for complaints is the norm. Isolating physically and socially, the informal work environment of commercial agriculture on many farms creates a “hustle culture” that threatens workers’ immediate safety and long-term health. In crop work, for example, portable toilets are often placed far from the fields, a tactic that keeps them from taking breaks, said Nely Rodriguez, a CIW leader. Workers must obtain permission to use the bathroom, which creates uncomfortable situations as women find themselves alone with crew leaders. “It’s easy for unwanted things to happen between the rows. You’re in their territory, so it’s easy for them to find and entrap you. I saw this in my own case,” Rodriguez says, who felt corralled because her former boss carried a pistol. The advent of CIW’s Fair Food Program has changed that culture significantly; alongside the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, the Fair Food Program is sparking change for workers and women in many industries… Read the full post over at the CIW website! Coalition of Immokalee Workers (239) 657 8311 | workers@ciw-online.org | www.ciw-online.org Connect with us  ‌  ‌  ‌  ‌

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The Bolshevik Revolution and Women’s Liberation

Workers Vanguard No. 1107 10 March 2017 TROTSKY LENIN The Bolshevik Revolution and Women’s Liberation (Quote of the Week) On International Women’s Day in Petrograd in March 1917, a mass outpouring of working women sparked the revolutionary upheaval that culminated in the Russian October Revolution. The smashing of capitalist class rule brought unheard-of gains for women in all areas of public and private life. Despite economic backwardness and poverty, the young Soviet workers government sought to undermine the material foundations of women’s oppression, which is rooted in the institution of the family. The Bolsheviks understood that complete social equality could only be attained with the abolition of classes in a world socialist society. In a 1920 commemoration of International Working Women’s Day, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin underscored the fact that the fight for women’s liberation is inseparable from the fight for international socialist revolution. Capitalism combines formal equality with economic and, consequently, social inequality. That is one of the principal features of capitalism, one that is deliberately obscured by the supporters of the bourgeoisie, the liberals, and is not understood by petty-bourgeois democrats. This feature of capitalism, incidentally, renders it necessary for us in our resolute fight for economic equality openly to admit capitalist inequality, and even, under certain conditions, to make this open admission of inequality the basis of the proletarian statehood (the Soviet Constitution). But even in the matter of formal equality (equality before the law, the “equality” of the well-fed and the hungry, of the man of property and the propertyless), capitalism cannot be consistent. And one of the most glaring manifestations of this inconsistency is the inequality of women. Complete equality has not been granted even by the most progressive republican, and democratic bourgeois states. The Soviet Republic of Russia, on the other hand, at once swept away all legislative traces of the inequality of women without exception, and immediately ensured their complete equality before the law. It is said that the best criterion of the cultural level is the legal status of women. This aphorism contains a grain of profound truth. From this standpoint only the dictatorship of the proletariat, only the socialist state could attain, as it has attained, the highest cultural level. The new, mighty and unparalleled stimulus given to the working women’s movement is therefore inevitably associated with the foundation (and consolidation) of the first Soviet Republic—and, in addition to and in connection with this, with the Communist International. Since mention has been made of those who were oppressed by capitalism, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, it must be said that the Soviet system, and only the Soviet system, guarantees democracy. This is clearly shown by the position of the working class and the poor peasants. It is clearly shown by the position of women. But the Soviet system is the last decisive struggle for the abolition of classes, for economic and social equality. Democracy, even democracy for those who were oppressed by capitalism, including the oppressed sex, is not enough for us. It is the chief task of the working women’s movement to fight for economic and social equality, and not only formal equality, for women. The chief thing is to get women to take part in socially productive labour, to liberate them from “domestic slavery,” to free them from their stupefying and humiliating subjugation to the eternal drudgery of the kitchen and the nursery. This struggle will be a long one, and it demands a radical reconstruction both of social technique and of morals. But it will end in the complete triumph of communism. —V.I. Lenin, “International Working Women’s Day” (4 March 1920)

*Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check - In The Time Of "Gonzo" Journalism- Tom Wolfe's "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby"

Tom Wolfe-Fashionista Of His Own Kind-And A Hell Of A Writer When The Deal Went Down Has Cashed His Check

By Bart Webber

I had been, strangely enough, in La Jolla out in California attending yet another writers’ conference which seems to be the makings of my days these days when I heard Tom Wolfe (not Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angels, etc.) the writer of tons of interesting stuff from acid trips in the 1960s to space flights in the 1970 to Wall Street in the reckless 1980 and back had cashed his check. The strange part of the “strangely enough” was that on Monday May 14^th 2018, the day he died,  I was walking along La Jolla Cove and commenting to my companion that Tom Wolfe had made the La Jolla surfing scene in the early 1960s come alive with his tale of the Pump House Gang and related stories without knowing he had passed.

I don’t know how he did at the end as a writer, or toward the end although I note he did an interesting take on the cultural life at the Army base at Fort Bragg down in North Carolina but pound for pound in his prime he could write the sociology of the land with simple flair and kept this guy flipping the pages in the wee hours of the morning. RIP, Tom Wolfe, RIP.   

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for Tom Wolfe's "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby."

Book Review

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, Tom Wolfe, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1965

The subject of “Gonzo journalism”, a journalistic literary trend started in the 1960s, and its most well-known practitioner, the late Doctor Hunter S. Thompson, has received much ink in this space over the past several years. The gist of this journalistic literary trend is that the writer gets “down and dirty” with whatever he or she is writing about and becomes an aspect of the story, one way or another. Now this notion set the traditionalists who worked under the so-called objectivist theory, “nothing but the facts, Jack” back on their heels. Of course, we all knew, and know, that this traditional approach was honored in the breech more than the observance and that old Hunter was merely rubbing everyone’s face in it. However, Hunter Thompson was not the only one trying to go to “edge city” in his writing in what now has become, academically translated, the “new journalism”. The writer under review, Tom Wolfe, also tried in a less zany way to break out of the traditional mold as well.

While Thompson was more than happy to tweak “edge city” Brother Wolfe, by his whole social existence, and by something deep down in his training never really got all the way there. He never really pressed the issue of his own involvement in the story, nor would it perhaps have worked for him, but surely off of this early work he is on to something different from the run of the mill “straight” journalism of those days. Heck, even Hunter Thompson, argued, and argued strenuously, that most of his attempts at ‘gonzo” didn’t work either. Here some of Wolfe’s entries are brilliant, some much less so but that seems par for the course when one is experimenting with new forms.

For today’s reader of this material it may be very, very hard to judge what Brother Wolfe was up to since, with few exceptions, most of the subject matter is very time-sensitive. Except maybe that “good old boy” piece he did on the legendary stock car racer Junior Johnson, “The Last American Hero.” On that one he “kicked out the jams” to get the flavor of the social milieu that supported, and today still forms the core support, of those stock car races. Another beauty of a story is the title one, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”, about the “hot rod" and customizing car craze and its culture among male teenagers that emerged after World War II. That sub-culture is still there, buried in the bushes, but in an age of computer-controlled cars that “mystique” has lost its edge. Still a nice read though.

The Mad Monks Of The Pre-War (World War I If Anybody Is Asking) Germanic Art- Klimt And Schiele At The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts

The Mad Monks Of The Pre-War (World War I If Anybody Is Asking) Germanic Art- Klimt And Schiele At The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts    

Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele’s Twisted Fates in Paint

Cardinal and Nun (Caress), 1912, Egon Schiele.

Kneeling forms against an indeterminate background, two figures interlocked as one… perhaps this painting looks familiar? The work is a tongue-in-cheek play by Egon Schiele and a slightly sacrilegious homage to his master, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Rather than love and passion, these religious figures are caught in the act, stiff against religious vow.

The Kiss (Lovers), 1907-1908, Gustav Klimt.

The Mentor and His Star Pupil

With a nearly 30 year age difference, Schiele and Klimt had a mentor-student relationship that lasted throughout their artistic careers. From copycat styling to love triangle rumors, this twisted story is told in their paintings.

In 1907 a then-teenaged Schiele saw Klimt as an idol and sought him out. The two fostered an artistic friendship and elements of Klimt’s avant-garde style can be found in many of Schiele’s early works and drawings, including these:

Left: Portrait of Gerti Schiele. Right: Standing Girl in a Plaid Garment. Both by Egon Schiele, 1909.

The Love Triangle with Wally Neuzil

Klimt’s influence was never far away. He introduced Schiele to many gallerists, fellow artists, and models, including the perhaps infamous Valerie (Wally) Neuzil. Neuzil had previously modeled for Klimt, and is rumored to have been his mistress. In 1911 she moved with Schiele to Krumau in the Czech Republic and thus began a four-year affair with him. In 1916 she returned to her old lover, posing again for Klimt.

The Hermits, Egon Schiele, 1912.

Left: Portrait of Wally, Gustav Klimt, 1916. Right: Woman in black stockings (Valerie Neuzil), Egon Schiele, 1913.

In fact, Schiele slyly alludes to this shared love in his 1912 painting The Hermits. The artist depicts two male figures in a Klimt-esque embrace, who on second take appear to be the mentor (on the left) and student (on the right) themselves. Dressed in all black, these two “hermits” are one mass but two thin white lines in the background connect the couple to a wilting rose, red like the color of Neuzil’s fiery hair.

Muse Shared, Again?

Klimt and Schiele portraits also reveal another shared subject: Viennese society woman Friederike Maria Beer-Monti. She rang Klimt’s doorbell in 1915 and asked if she could pose for his artworks. The process took six months and, in that time, she is rumored to have been one of his many flames. Just one year earlier, she had been the subject of a work by Klimt’s mentee.

Left: Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer-Monti, Egon Schiele, 1914; Right: Portrait of Friederike Maria Beer-Monti, Gustav Klimt, 1916

Both artists were notorious for their affairs with women. Klimt, who never married, is said to have fathered 17 children with his muses. Schiele often found himself in hot water with the authorities for his choice of studio visitors, children and adult, who posed nude.

Breaking Conventions in Art, Too

As personal relationships grew more interconnected so did their artistic styles. The bright colors and elongated bodies in Klimt’s unfinished The Bride and the more jagged lines and gestural coloring in Schiele’s Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff would lead their contemporaries to a new – and more personal – way of thinking about color and form in art.

Left: The Bride, Klimt, 1917; Right: Portrait of Dr. Erwin von Graff, Schiele, 1910.

With a relationship based on mutual respect, Klimt and Schiele continued to support and guide each other through the art world. There was an obvious amount of humor between the two; only a prized pupil could have gotten away with such sheer parodies of his mentor.

And, by the way, here’s a more banal portrait of Wally that her artists’ paintings didn’t show:

Schiele and Neuzil in Krumau, Czech Republic, 1913. Image via Leopold Museum.

Gustav Klimt is currently abuzz in the pop culture world. Actress Dame Helen Mirren is starring in The Woman in Gold, a movie about Klimt’s painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geJeX6iIlO0

Learn more about Klimt’s life and career here: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-klimt-gustav.htm

For more on Egon Schiele’s romantic muses: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8507783/A-legend-laid-bare-Egon-Schiele-exhibition.html

Learn more about Schiele’s life and career here: http://www.theartstory.org/artist-schiele-egon.htm

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In Cambridge-Movie Night at the CME - Selma | Sunday, May 27, 6PM

Movie Night at the CME - Selma | Sunday, May 27, 6PM

Center for Marxist Education

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*Selma *
*Sunday, May 27 | 6:00 PM*

Selma is the story of a movement. The film chronicles the tumultuous
three-month period in 1965, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a
dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent
opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President
Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the
most significant victories for the civil rights movement. Director Ava
DuVernays Selma tells the real story of how the revered leader and
visionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) and his brothers and
sisters in the movement prompted change that forever altered history. Watch
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6t7vVTxaic>the trailer.
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6t7vVTxaic>

*Free hot dogs, popcorn, and cokes while they last!*

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 The Influence of the Russian Revolution on Struggles in Mexico | Saturday, May 26, 7PM @ the CME

Center for Marxist Education

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*Saturday, May 26 | 7:00 PMThe Influence of the Russian Revolution on
Struggles in Mexico.*
John Womack, Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard
The Mexican Revolution(s), 1910-1920, and the Russian Revolution,
1917-1922; Their Fundamental Differences, Their Main Consequences, and
Their Legacies.
Hope to see you at the CME this weekend.
Center for Marxist Education | 550 Massachusetts Avenue, 2nd Floor
Cambridge, MA, 02139
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