Recently a new magazine has been showing up at my parent's home, which my brother and I have a morbid fascination with. It's called "Make It Better," and its full of bouji women of a certain age trying to make their eyes sparkle and their smiles gleam, but instead just look like they're about to rip your face off. I assume everyone knows the look I'm talking about and the class of women who adopt this look.
Anyway, the latest issue has a section on "adventurous women." Women who have not only seen suffering and starvation on television, but in real life, while on vacation in the Third World. Women whose sense of pity and arms-length tolerance opens their hearts to many "humbling" experiences. For example:
"On their way home from Greece, Jodi shared a plane ride with a group of Ethiopian refugees. Seeing their reality made her want to help, and since then she and Chad have been tutoring an Iranian family in Skokie."
Ethiopia = Iran. Helping = Indoctrination.
Each adventurous woman is given an honorific, such as "The Activator," "The Intuitive," and "The Witness." The title that struck me as most egregiously out of whack was "The Liberator." I always thought Simon Bolivar was the liberator, but apparently it's this lady from Goldman Sachs named Connie Duckworth. She had one of these humbling moments too, while a member of a State Department commission in Afghanistan. Seeing the plight of Afghan women "at the bottom of the bottom of the social pyramid" made her uncomfortable, much like that other great liberator, Siddhartha Gautama. The Buddha was a research and development type guy, but Connie was a partner in sales and trading, so of course they suggest different paths to enlightenment for the poor sentient beings in their charge.
Some background: in the years following the US invasion of Afghanistan, there were rumors that the renowned Afghan rugs, which women have been weaving there for centuries, would no longer be available because of, you know, all the bombing and stuff. This wasn't the case, there were still plenty of rugs and women to weave them, but you know how rumors function in capitalism - they matter way more than the truth, and have real consequences, in this case driving up the cost of Afghan rugs. The way the rug industry worked is that Pakistani middle men would buy rugs, which take three months to make, from a woman or family for 40,000 rupees. So, forty dollars. Then these middle men would sell to distributors in the United States, which is the biggest global market for rugs. These rugs would sell for up to 10,000 dollars. Standard, straight ahead, exploitation stuff.
The Buddha, if he saw this, as an "outside the box" thinker, would see that this situation is unjust, and say something about non-attachment.
The Liberator saw this and also thought how unjust it was. Why should all this profit go to some Borat-looking misogynist who don't even fully appreciate the niceties of posthistorical rhizomatic neoliberalism? The real commodity of value is the suffering and scarcity of the weavers themselves. In other words, when a tasteful American couple of means buys a rug from the Pakistani dealer, all they get is a rug. Connie's maneuver was to weave into each rug strands of reified pity.
In 2004, she started Arzu Studio Hope. Arzu means "hope" in Pashto, so it's kind of a hope sandwich. Weavers get paid the market rate for their product, which is...a dollar a day. But there's more: if you agree to the "social contract" (they actually use that term) you get an extra 50%, or 50 cents a day. But there's still more! If you agree to the social contract, you also are provided a loom on a "rent to own" basis, and it's the kind that, even though you are bent over it all day, it doesn't hurt your back as much as some other looms. Of course your children can work alongside you, but if they are under 15 they also have to go to school full time...that's part of the contract, and Arzu checks the attendance sheets and will discuss with you any absences that your child laborer has accrued. Also, if your village does really well and weaves a bunch of rugs, then you may get a community center complete with...wait for it...FLUSH TOILETS! All this while the bombs keep falling...
Arzu is a not for profit company. This means that they don't have shareholders to be theoretically accountable to and get all kinds of tax breaks, as long as they use their profits to "pursue their goals." What are their goals? Clearly, to open up markets and produce consumers in a part of the world that would never decide on their own to get flush toilets. (Afghans have long used "dry vault" toilets which don't waste water and provide fertilizer, an idea that sounds pretty good to me). The desire for flush toilets, as well as the desire for Western style education/indocrination has to be instilled in these communities, because global capital is running out of frontiers to expand into. And Arzu is expanding, from 30 weavers at the outset to 900 now.
As Arzu pursue these goals, which are supremely ideological and self-gratifying, they get all sorts of awards for their understanding of "sustainable development." What's really troubling for me is how close it comes, in a distorted echo, to the pre-capitalist world of weavers in England who owned their own looms and created fine textiles in their own homes at their own pace which they sold to middle men for a fair price. With the onset of the industrial revolution, the site of production was moved to mills where workers were chained to mechanized looms and paid starvation wages. This led to the Luddite movement, skilled weavers who smashed the machines because they saw exactly how mechanization turned them into humanoid cogs.
Now, when there is no outside to capital, we are all born within it and have no conception of owning the means of production or the full fruits of our labor, the looms are returned to the home with a catch: it is not that the factory has disappeared and there is a return to the logic of pre-capitalist production, but rather the logic of the factory has expanded to include all of social space.