The Anti-Poverty Movement:
Poverty and homelessness are serious problems in America. In the last book I showed you how Capitalism depends on unemployment. You might say that unemployment is an inescapable product of a competitive economic system. But inescapable how, exactly? Is it because the unemployed are the ones who are losing at the competition? Or is it because Capital is competing not for the sake of driving innovation but for the sake of eliminating competition, as usual, by forcing Labor to compete against each other so they can’t compete against Capital? Does our competitive economic system really depend on filthy people pushing shopping carts around town, digging through garbage dumpsters looking for aluminum cans to drive innovation?
But then, finding ever more efficient ways to oppress people is a form of innovation. See what happens when we build an economic system that depends on some abstract side effect that’s produced by individual people’s collective pursuit of tangible goals? Should it come as any surprise that the individual people should succeed at what they set out to do? And should it come as any surprise that the abstract side effect you were hoping for ends up getting overshadowed by the results of the people succeeding at their actual goals? What the f*ck did you expect?
That brings me to the serious problem of poverty and homelessness in America. To say that we have a government of, by, and for the people, where some people are left to wander the streets looking for something to eat and somewhere to sleep implies that anyone ever asked those people if they wanted to participate in a competitive economic system. If you asked any of them, I’m willing to bet they would say no. I’m willing to bet they would say they’d rather have an economic system where they could have a job.
It is true that a competitive economic system drives innovation. Homeless people innovate just like everyone else. They innovate more efficient and productive ways to pick cans out of garbage dumpsters, they innovate more efficient and productive ways to transport their cans and the rest of their belongings, they innovate more efficient and productive ways to pan handle, and they innovate more efficient and productive ways to build shelters or find park benches to sleep on. If you ever take a few moments to watch what a homeless person is doing as a person, to try to survive, be safe, feel safe, make friends, be respected, feel good, and use their abilities to make lives for themselves, considering they have virtually no resources to work with, it’s not hard to see that they work for their livings just like everyone else. I had to leave out having relationships, having sex, having families, and using their abilities as much as possible to make lives for themselves, because when you have barely enough to survive, reproduction and higher levels of survival just fall off your list of priorities.
As for unemployed people who aren’t homeless, they innovate too. A lot of them innovate ever more efficient and productive ways to cheat the welfare system. I know I’ve spent a lot of time innovating ever more efficient and productive ways to collect unemployment. If there aren’t any jobs to apply for that you’d be good at, the unemployment systems in every state I’ve ever had to collect unemployment in basically force you to stay unemployed. If you take a sh*tty job to try to support yourself while you wait for a better job to come along, you can very well get trapped there. First you probably aren’t going to have any time to go apply for other jobs, because at all the jobs I work at anyway, the work hours are the same as the hours other employers take job applications, because all the companies have the same hours. And second, you can only collect unemployment if you get laid off. If you’re collecting unemployment and you take a sh*tty job to try to support yourself, and then you get fired or you quit after a week, you’re unemployed again and now you can’t collect unemployment.
Food sovereignty is a movement that addresses this basic problem on a large scale. Everything I just said about homeless people in America also applied to Native Americans being forced into the reservation system, and applies to entire countries around the world now. Any person, or group of people, who can’t provide enough food for themselves is the slave of whoever they depend on for their food. For Native American nations that means our federal government. For countries it means other countries or whoever else is bringing the food into their countries. For homeless Americans it means the welfare system, the unemployment system, or whoever else they as individuals can get their money from.
Food sovereignty is a challenge and an obstacle to a competitive economic system. People who are food sovereign are independent. People who aren’t food sovereign can be controlled. Food sovereign and independent is exactly what the Mexican subsistence farmers were before they got driven off their land as I’ve told you about in this chapter, and it’s what the farmers in La Parota river valley are, and will cease to be, if their river is dammed, as I told you about in the last book. Food sovereign people have the choice whether or not to participate in your competitive economic system. And if they can already produce everything they need for themselves, don’t expect them to be very interested in competing in your economic system if you already control all the capital. You can call them peasants, you can call them savages, you can call them old fashioned, uncultured, uncivilized, whatever. But the fact remains that they’re Homo sapiens who can provide for themselves now, so why should they give that up just so they can live up to your idea of the right way for people to live?
So bringing this back to the streets of America now, during the Great Depression the government funded the Hoover Dam, created the California Conservation Corp and the National Park Service and a lot of other things like that, and created a lot of work for people to get people off unemployment. Well we still have unemployed people, so obviously that job isn’t finished yet. I’ve heard a lot of different stories of people making the transition from being unemployed to being employed, but they all end pretty much the same way: That having somewhere to sleep, decent food, and a job to do gave them not just their basic physiological necessities, but also a sense of self-worth.
Now, I had to live at a homeless shelter briefly, so I know there is a minimum standard of living that people can expect here in America; that if they sink that low they can expect that someone will help them out. And having lived through it, I also know that if you forced a dog to live that way, it would probably qualify as animal cruelty.
The problem we always had at the homeless shelter was getting all the things we needed together in one place at the same time. We could sleep there, get two meals a day, or three if we had a job to go to, take showers, get our laundry done, get new clothes if we needed them, look through newspapers, and use the phone to call for job openings. But you could never sleep well, the food was never enough, there were only four showers, and there was only one phone. So the amount of sleep you could get there was never enough, the amount of food you could get there was never enough, you had to stand in line for f*cking ever to use the phone or take a shower, and they served the last meal of the day at about 3 in the afternoon. So we constantly had to make choices about whether to spend our time walking to another homeless services place to get more food there, or going somewhere else where we could sleep some more, or standing in line to take a shower, or standing in line to use the phone, or going somewhere to look for a job. On the surface it appeared that the people who ran the homeless shelter were making all the things we needed available to us, but in practice they weren’t, because there was not enough time in the day for us to get to them all. The economy we had there at the homeless shelter didn’t work for sh*t because it was managed by people who had homes.
It wouldn’t be that difficult for a government organization to set up the same basic thing except in a way that could actually help get people off the streets. All you’d need would be a barracks with bunks where people could sleep, shower, brush their teeth, get three decent meals a day, do their laundry, get bus passes, and use phones, that also had a day labor service attached to it, so employers could come there looking for temporary help, and people could get temporary government-sponsored employment helping to pick up litter at city parks or whatever other simple jobs needed to be done. The living conditions there wouldn’t be great, in fact they shouldn’t be great, because you do still need an incentive for people to get jobs to support themselves and get themselves out of there—otherwise lots of people would abuse the system. On the other hand, if your homeless support system only provides for people’s basic needs if they devote all their time to trying to navigate their way through it, they won’t have time to get jobs.
The most important part of making this program work would be treating the people who were in it like men and women who were just down on their luck, not like criminals or prison inmates. If you don’t respect the people you’re trying to help, they aren’t going to trust you. That’s going to create conflict. And that’s going to divert their energy away from trying to help themselves and toward trying to keep themselves safe from you.
It is true that if we provided a stronger social safety net to help keep everyone employed, it would directly undermine the economic competition that Capitalism depends on. The less severe the consequences for losing at the economic competition, the less motivated people would be to compete. That means the less hard they would be willing to work. That means the less people would care about finding more efficient ways of doing things. But we are quickly approaching the physical limitations of the Earth—if we haven’t passed them already—so that fundamental change in our relationship to the environment is going to bring with it fundamental changes in our economic system anyway.
The problem with using the threat of homelessness as the driving force for your economic system is that in order to get people to take the threat seriously, you have to deliver on it. That means you need to keep some people unemployed all the time in order to motivate everyone else to compete. But if you have to sacrifice their sense of self-worth to make your economic system function, you can plan on them doing whatever they have to do to maintain their sense of self worth. And if they realize what you’re doing, then you can plan on them propping up their sense of self worth by hating you. I’ve heard the same thing plenty of times from plenty of different people. Older people who have spent their whole lives struggling to make it in the world, only to realize finally that the deck was stacked against them from the very beginning, trying to help younger people maintain their sense of self worth, when they’re falling into the same trap. So what do the older people tell them? Something like, “It’s not your fault you’re having so much trouble getting along in life. It’s the White man trying to keep you down.” Or whatever.
Result? A lot of people fighting to maintain their sense of self worth by dreaming that some day they’re going to get the chance to kill you. Hey, you’re the one who wanted a competitive economy so badly. Violence is competition. Be careful what you wish for.
Oh, and by the way, what the f*ck else do you think a street gang is, besides a self-worth support group for young men who live in impoverished neighborhoods and who have realized they can get make better lives for themselves by breaking the law than they can by obeying it?
Here in the Phoenix area a couple dozen homeless people die from the heat every summer. When you’re homeless, there’s nowhere for you to go to get out of the heat. A couple years ago, some city planning commission thing had a big new homeless shelter built, and supposedly that’s going to solve all our homeless problems now. Or is it?
Around that same time we passed a bunch of new laws here that basically outlaw homelessness. Laws against loitering, sitting on the sidewalk, and urban camping. That sounds harmless enough, until you consider those are all the main things homeless people do to stay out of the sun. Urban camping means lying down to sleep anywhere. In most parts of the country that mainly refers to sleeping in a park overnight. But here in the desert that also means lying down in a city park to sleep in the shade in the middle of the day. And here in the desert, people have been lying down to sleep in the shade in the middle of the day for as long as people have lived here. The Mexicans call it a siesta. And you know why? Because when it’s 120º outside, taking a nap in the shade is the best way to stay cool. You can be sure those laws were dreamed up by people who work in air-conditioned offices.
So when these anti-homeless laws were being passed, a bunch of reporters interviewed people on both sides of the argument. And you know what the people who favored the new laws said? A whole bunch of stuff like, “Well, there’s a park near my house, and I don’t want my kids to be exposed to homeless people, because I don’t think it’s healthy for them to have to see things like that.”
What can I say? Capitalist pigs preying on other people and then expecting someone else to clean up their mess. What did you expect?
One friend of mine helps run a local Anarchist magazine called Upheaval. So he decided to start asking some questions and do a little poking around of his own. He reviewed the minutes of the city council meeting in which the anti-homeless laws were voted on, and then he went to city hall and looked up some property tax records. And you know what he discovered? All the city council members who voted in favor of the laws that govern what homeless people should and shouldn’t be allowed to do, own their own houses! Does that tell you anything?
That brings me to Food Not Bombs. Food Not Bombs is a homeless support network that’s trying to do all the things I’ve outlined, but doesn’t have the resources a governmental agency would have at its disposal, because they’re Anarchists.
As I told you in the Inefficiency of Capitalism section of the Economics chapter, for business owners to throw away unsold food is more profitable than for them to give it away, because giving it away would cut into the demand that they depend on to keep their prices up. So the entire food service industry in America is horrifically wasteful of food. They’re so wasteful of food in fact, that all the food that gets thrown away in America would be enough to end hunger in America. The one problem with that is that our economic system is driven by profits, not by human needs. Having enough food for everyone in America is not the problem, but it’s not sufficient to solve the problem either. The food also needs to be distributed according to who needs it, not according to who can pay the most for it.
So the people in the Food Not Bombs movement collect donations of unsold food from business owners who work in food services. Some business owners throw their unsold food away intentionally, like the Capitalist pigs I accuse them of being. But some food services business owners are basically Labor who own their own business. (I use the terms Capital and Labor mainly in relation to people’s attitudes about who should control resources, not in relation to who actually does control the resources, as most people use the terms.) They don’t have a problem with giving away the food they don’t sell, because they’re in business to make a living, not to prevent people from getting enough to eat. There are probably a lot more business owners who would donate their unsold food, if only they had an effective way to get it to the people who need it. Something like a governmental anti-poverty program, that could come around and pick up unsold food from stores and restaurants at the end of the day. But we don’t have one of those, so these food service business owners donate it to the Anarchist anti-poverty program instead.
Food Not Bombs volunteers collect books and clothes and things like that too—anything that’s useful to people and easy to carry. Some groups also collect bigger things, like used furniture or other household goods. So they’re basically the Anarchist version of the Salvation Army.
Then the Food Not Bombs volunteers cook up a meal in someone’s kitchen (or multiple kitchens) and take it out to city parks or other public places to serve it. So they are simultaneously saving food that would otherwise go to waste, feeding the homeless, publicly protesting the fact that throwing food away is more profitable than giving it to people who need it, and taking direct action to solve the problem themselves instead of complaining and waiting around for someone else to solve it.
There’s a saying among activists that the best measurement of your success is what your enemies do to try to stop you. In numerous cities around the U.S., citizens, business people, and politicians have passed a lot of laws and arrested a lot of volunteers to try to make the problem go away. A lot of FNB volunteers have been arrested for things like violating food codes and serving food to the public without a food service license—as though government officials are really that concerned about the health of people who don’t have enough to eat. A lot of other volunteers have been bullied by the police. In some cities, laws have been passed banning feeding the homeless in public.
Recently, feeding the homeless in Las Vegas was outlawed. I used to hang out near the park where the FNB volunteers served food when I lived in Vegas, but they only served on Sunday afternoons. When I first got into town, I asked a homeless guy at the park if he knew of anywhere I could get something to eat. He told me about a group that just been feeding people right there in the park but they’d just packed up and left a few minutes ago. I’d never heard of Food Not Bombs before then, and I never crossed paths with them again. But when I heard the Las Vegas chapter had just been outlawed, well, that was personal.
The people who pass these laws give a lot of different reasons for them, but it’s pretty obvious that there are just a few main reasons. Homeless people make neighborhoods and business districts look bad, and everyone says they want to help the homeless, just not in their neighborhoods. Another is that bringing that many homeless people together increases crime rates and causes health hazards.
Basically, the Capitalists are trying to fix the problems their inequitable economic system is creating by outlawing homelessness. That is, punishing people for being defeated by the Capitalists. Punishing people for losing at the Capitalists’ competition. If you try to ban homeless people from congregating in public parks, you’re controlling who is and isn’t allowed to use public parks based on how much money they make, or how they dress, or whatever.
And that’s exactly what FNB volunteers go to public parks to protest.
I must say, that recently I heard that FNB in Prescott, Arizona (just up the road from here) has been using a tactic that’s proven to be an effective political aikido technique. They don’t “serve food to the homeless”; they just have a picnic in the park across the street from city hall three times a week, which is open to the public, which includes homeless people. So three times a week, lots of homeless people show up and eat salvaged food that was prepared by Anarchists, right across the street from city hall. That might seem to be a form of resistance that’s more passive than actively drawing attention to the fact that they’re doing a job the government is failing to do, but turning your opponent’s own force against him—not winning a head-on collision against him—is exactly how aikido works. I’m sure anyone who wanted to could go to FNB’s public picnic, whether they’re homeless or not. But if you do, you’re still going to eat salvaged vegetarian food that was prepared by Anarchists, and you’re going to eat it in the company of homeless people that nobody is going to treat any differently than they treat you. Then on election day you’re going to vote for whoever you feel is best suited to work in the big impressive-looking building across the street from the park where the Anarchists and the homeless people have their free public picnics three times a week.
Here’s the story of the Food Not Bombs movement that they post on their website. They also have a book you can order to find out how to set up an FNB chapter in your area. It includes everything from how to organize the group, how to get food donations, legal advice, and vegetarian recipes.
The Story of the Food Not Bombs
The first twenty-six years of the Food Not Bombs movement.
Food Not Bombs is one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements and is gaining momentum throughout the world. There are hundreds of autonomous chapters sharing free vegetarian food with hungry people and protesting war and poverty. Food Not Bombs is not a charity. This energetic grassroots movement is active throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. Food Not Bombs is organizing for peace and an end to the occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. For over 25 years the movement has worked to end hunger and has supported actions to stop the globalization of the economy, restrictions to the movements of people, end exploitation and the destruction of the earth.
The first group was formed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980 by anti-nuclear activists. Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to nonviolent social change. Food Not Bombs has no formal leaders and strives to include everyone in its decision-making process. Each group recovers food that would otherwise be thrown out and makes fresh hot vegetarian meals that are served in outside in public spaces to anyone without restriction. Each independent group also serves free vegetarian meals at protests and other events. The San Francisco chapter has been arrested over 1,000 times in government’s effort to silence its protest against the city’s anti- homeless policies. Amnesty International states it will adopt those Food Not Bombs volunteers that are convicted as “Prisoners of Conscience” and will work for their unconditional release. Even though we are dedicated to nonviolence Food Not Bombs activists in the United States have been under investigation by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, Pentagon and other intelligence agencies. A number of Food Not Bombs volunteers have been arrested on terrorism charges but there has never been a conviction.
Food Not Bombs is often the first to provide food and supplies to the survivors of natural disasters and terrorist attacks. During the first three days after the 1989 Earthquake, Food Not Bombs was the only organization in San Francisco providing hot meals to the survivors and the Long Beach chapter provided food after the North Ridge Earthquake. Food Not Bombs was also the first to provide hot meals to the rescue workers responding to September 11th World Trade Center attacks. Food Not Bombs volunteers were among the first to provide food and help to the survivors of the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Our volunteers organized a national collection program and delivered bus and truckloads of food and supplies to the gulf region. We have been one of the only organizations sharing daily meals in New Orleans since Katrina. You can rely on Food Not Bombs in a disaster and we are ready to help in the future.
Food Not Bombs works in coalition with groups like Earth First!, The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Anarchist Black Cross, the IWW, Homes Not Jails, Anti Racist Action, In Defense of Animals, the Free Radio Movement and other organizations on the cutting edge of positive social change and resistance to the new global austerity program. One collective publishes a movement wide newsletter called A Food Not Bombs Menu. Another hosts FNB News where you can learn more about the Food Not Bombs community. Food Not Bombs Publishing in Takoma Park, Maryland publishes books like On Conflict and Consensus, which has been an important guide for group democracy. We hope you will join us in taking direct action towards creating a world free from domination, coercion and violence. Food is a right, not a privilege.
Now here’s a news article from their website about legal challenges they face:
Another U.S. City Outlaws Feeding Homeless People
Mayor Buddy Dyer supported the ordinance.
Last week, Las Vegas outlawed feeding homeless people at city parks. Now, Orlando is following suit. Orlando is trying to keep charitable groups from feeding the homeless in downtown parks. Officials said transients gathering for weekly meals create safety and sanitary problems for businesses. The City Council voted to prohibit serving meals to groups of 25 or more people in parks and other public property within two miles of City Hall without a special permit. A group called Food Not Bombs, which has served weekly vegetarian meals for the homeless for more than a year, said it will continue illegally. The American Civil Liberties Union vows to sue, saying it’s a superficial fix that ignores the city’s homeless problem. Two of the city’s five commissioners voted against the ordinance, including Commissioners Robert Stuart, who runs the homeless shelter Christian Service Center, and Sam Ings, a retired police officer. Stuart told The Orlando Sentinel that Orlando is taking a step to ‘criminalize good-hearted people’ who he says are trying to help. He went on to tell the paper that group feedings in the parks had not become unwieldy to the city, as some had claimed. He said the ordinance says, ‘Orlando doesn’t care,’ the Sentinel reported. Ings said that although the commissioners are casting the ordinance as a public-safety issue, it is really an issue of the city wanting to ‘cover up’ the homeless problem. “We’re putting a Band-Aid on a critical problem,” he said. The commissioner who pushed for the ordinance, Patty Sheehan, said it was not an ‘easy day’ for her at all. She said the new ordinance against feeding homeless people has been ‘wrongly cast’ as anti-homeless. ‘I’ve been an advocate [for the homeless],’ she said. ‘Even though you’ll call me an enemy, I’ll still be your friend.” The Sentinel reported that about a dozen downtown residents and business owners spoke in favor of the rule. But more than three times that amount of people spoke against it. There were 45 speakers from various groups, including a formal declaration from the University of Central Florida’s student senate, who opposed outlawing feeding homeless people. Mayor Buddy Dyer supported the ordinance. Food Not Bombs said on its Web site that chapters in Venice, Calif.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Orlando, and Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada have been told that their programs should stop or move out of sight.
This might sound like a dumb question, but how are we supposed to put an end to poverty without putting an end to the economic system that depends on it?