Call and Response: A conversation on Occupy
By Kristy Keller and Buck Bagot
OCCUPY OAKLAND
Actions and Strategies

Occupy Oakland (OO) has earned a worldwide reputation within the larger Occupy movement, and one that has been characterized by the mainstream media as having a particularly radical and militant angle. Media coverage has focused mainly on clashes between protestors and police, the shooting of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen by the Oakland Police Department (OPD), and excessive repression as seen in the arrest of over 400 protestors during the January 28th Move-In Day action. While these events have been central to activists’ focus on police brutality in Oakland, OO has achieved an array of successes in other areas and is represented by a far more diverse community of committed activists than the media has portrayed.
Successful maneuvers at organizing include city-wide actions such as the November 2nd General Strike that brought thousands of Oakland citizens into the streets, the shutdown of the Oakland port during the December 12th West Coast Port Shutdown, and the subsequent general strike on May Day of 2012. Smaller-scale actions include temporarily shutting down banks, disrupting foreclosure auctions, protesting school closures, and organizing community-based outreach campaigns to educate the public about pressing issues (such as the shooting of unarmed African American teenager Alan Blueford by OPD, or how the rising costs of AC transit bus fare disproportionately affect Oakland’s poorest citizens). OO has had over 20 committees and working groups ranging from Labor Solidarity and Anti-Repression, to Foreclosure Defense and the Tactical Action Committee. Since the encampment, internal conflict, divisiveness, organizing burnout, and successful counter-insurgency, have left many protestors discouraged. Yet those who have turned away from OO have often created parallel projects that more closely represent their values and goals, such as Decolonize Oakland, revealing the enduring commitment of activists who take a variety of approaches to social change.
Unfortunately, one of the most sensationalized aspects of OO, from outside as well as within the movement, has been OO’s embrace of a diversity of tactics, or rather, that it has not passed a resolution to support only “nonviolent” action. While some proponents of nonviolent civil disobedience strongly feel that a failure to shun property destruction will only serve to alienate the general public, the degree of attention that has been paid to this particular issue has distorted the larger picture. The overwhelming majority of Occupiers in Oakland have not engaged in property destruction, some are openly against it, and some support such tactics even if they don’t personally partake in them. The vilification of the black bloc is problematic in that most protestors who cover their faces and brandish shields are not breaking anything, rather, they are the ones who head to the front of a march with shields to protect themselves and their comrades from police projectiles that have been indiscriminately deployed against protestors (peaceful activists, not so peaceful activists, families with children, etc.). What is most significant is that people on both sides of the tactics debate, with many taking a neutral position, continue to participate in OO actions on the basis that the imperative is to address the everyday structural and institutional violence that harms people living in Oakland. This goal is seen by many as more important and realistic than trying to control a handful of protestors who may try to break some bank windows.
Jesse: “If people come and they break things, they are inherently not adherent to anything anyone says, so there’s no point in having the discussion. It’s a criminal matter, and we can approach it. I, myself, and other people who live down here confront the vandals physically. And the people who want to pass condemnation against them…they don’t do that. And, you know, they don’t respect or study why these young people are doing it. And it is a fact, an uncomfortable reality that mass property damage has amounted in the billions of dollars over the course of decades nationwide as a result of high-profile instances of police brutality. LA, for instance, resulted in a change in police protocol without resolving the problems of mental illness, corruption, and racism. So, as far as reform and revolution, vandalism is an effective means of reform. And it might even be counter-revolutionary as reform methods are commonly critiqued, but people aren’t really having an honest discussion about it. I believe this is largely due to a generation gap in activists. There’s young people, and people with grey hair. And people my own age…we’re very obscure. Political activism was un-cool when I was growing up. A lot of that is the fallout of COINTELPRO: destroying the Black Panthers and creating gangs. You know, when I was a kid we didn’t have the internet to talk with everyone, to have the discussion. I had to study Marx on my own and I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. And now they do, and it’s cool again. I don’t think people really respect and appreciate it — that, ok, so maybe they’re doing the most youthful thing, that’s great. That’s the thing, when I talk about people changing, the individuals who do this, they’re very brave, and they’re putting themselves at risk, and they believe that it’s what they need to do to be a good person, and to make the world a better place. That’s what they believe. Whether they’re right or wrong is irrelevant because it’s whether they rise to that challenge, or if they’re cowardly and they just cheer for it.”
The preoccupation over tactics has also detracted from what is seen as the most important and meaningful work to many activists in Oakland (including those who participate in the black bloc): the opportunity to build a self-sustaining and supportive community that can provide for its participants in a way that a government in a capitalist nation simply will not. In discussing the successes of OO, most protestors mention feeding and housing the homeless (as well as each other), providing safe spaces for children and youth, and fostering empathy and education through outreach to Oakland citizens. In addressing local injustice, a great deal of energy has been spent on addressing the ongoing legacy of police violence in Oakland, which has ravaged low-income communities of color, and has been felt to a considerably less degree by Occupier’s who’ve been on the receiving end of police batons, rubber bullets, tear gas, and repeated trips to jail for their participation. The Tactical Action Committee, consisting mainly of young people of color who were born and raised in Oakland, organized the only ongoing weekly event at OO aside from the General Assembly. The weekly Fuck the Police march has been one of the most diverse actions at OO, drawing many participants from among the local citizenry, as well as those newer to the city who are appalled by the extent of violence that occurs on Oakland streets. Those who have witnessed years to decades of police brutality in their communities feel particularly compelled to fight back and demand accountability from a police force that is best known for their failure to “protect and serve.”
This excerpt on Occupy Oakland is taken from the ethnographic pamphlet “Occupying in California: Voices and Contexts.” The pamphlet was written to provide Occupiers and those who would like to know more about the Occupy movement with a juxtaposition of three sites of Occupation in California. The authors explore how the particular context of each location led to site-specific manifestations of strategy, action and narrative as reflected in activist practice. Download the pamphlet here
Kristy Keller, September 2012
IN RESPONSE – Buck Bagot
Occupy Oakland: Actions and Strategies presents a number of difficult issues. Which came first – the chicken or the egg/the history of Oakland Police brutality vs. the city’s African-American community, or OO’s propensity for actions involving property destruction and violence? How important is it to defend “diversity of tactics”? And most importantly, who does OO hope to organize, empower and mobilize, and around what issues?
OO has effectively selected ending police brutality and oppression as its primary issue. I believe that is a mistake. I believe that Occupy organizations should select issues that grow out of the class and racial oppression of the 1%/ruling elite/class. Like the partially successful Occupy Bernal/SF ACCE/Occupy Noe campaign against mortgage foreclosures. Police brutality will never be a majority issue in Oakland. It does not directly impact a broad cross section of the city. Fighting foreclosures does.
Support for “diversity of tactics” is a juvenile, ultra-left canard, and counter to building broad-based organization/s rooted in organizing a cross-class, multi-ethnic movement to address both the immediate and systemic impact of capitalism on the people of the United States. It’s an immature mistake – I know, because me and mine made it repeatedly in the movement vs. the war in Southeast Asia. I trashed the windows of corporations paid to develop the techniques for the “pacification” of the people of SE Asia by carpet-bombing, deforestation, etc. “How can we stand by idly while the US pursues these genocidal tactics?” we moaned. Don’t be idle and make our mistakes – develop a strategy that aspires to building a mass, grass-roots movement rooted in the self-interest of most people. Vandalism and violence don’t work, because they don’t do that.
OO’s vandalism and violence vs. the police – and I would argue much of it was not even “in reaction” to police violence – was and is a self-fulfilling prophecy. They have made their “issue bed”, and as long as they lie in it, they will fail to realize the promise of their and our Occupy movement.
And of course, don’t dare to address the issue in the media – that the cops aren’t the primary issue, the banks are. Or that “diversity of tactics” makes it much more difficult for seniors, the disabled and families to participate in our actions. That would be “feeding into the corporate media’s lies about Occupy”. And of course, no one is permitted to address that or any other issue in the media because “we have no leaders.”
“… participate in OO actions on the basis that the imperative is to address the everyday structural and institutional violence that harms people living in Oakland. This goal is seen by many as more important and realistic than trying to control a handful of protestors who may try to break some bank windows.” I’ll bite – how many folks has OO saved from foreclosure property auction or eviction, and for how many have they helped win a permanent loan modification? If they have, then the “corporate media campaign” to “twist the truth about the Occupy/OO movememtn” has kept me from reading about it. Oh, and that’s another infantile mistake, one that I never made – that the papers conspire to keep misrepresenting our actions. Or that all elected officials are bought and owned by corporate power. Or that delegation or recallable authority necessarily leads to reification of power and replication of the capitalist model. Or that negotiating with power – the only way to win concrete victories – is the road to cooptation. Or that any issue that does not directly and immediately challenge capitalistism is the road to ruin. Life, organizing, building a movement for social change are a lot more complicated. I welcome dialogue on Occupy and these very important issues.
Buck Bagot, September 2012
KRISTY RESPONDS
My initial reaction to Buck Bagot’s response to a brief section of my writing on Occupy Oakland (OO) was twofold: 1) I would like to refer Mr. Bagot back to the pamphlet to read a bit more, as our intention was to address many of the questions he posed about OO; and 2) Mr. Bagot’s uninformed response reveals the degree to which the work of OO has been highly eschewed by a mainstream media that prefers to sensationalize infrequent instances of property destruction, while utterly ignoring the diverse array of OO actions (the majority of which have been 100% void of any violence and vandalism). The media issue is not terribly surprising given that the largely anti-capitalist vibe at OO may not be particularly attractive to journalists who rely on that system for survival. While I could address Mr. Bagot’s piece line-for-line, and begin a long list of the accomplishments of OO committees, I will not. My anthropological tendency is to take a couple steps back and attempt to show why the response from Mr. Bagot fails to address Occupy Oakland.
It’s problematic to speak of OO, or any Occupy iteration, as if “it” is a unified and bounded mass of activists who share the same political perspective, strategies or tactical persuasions. While some support property destruction as a tactic, many are openly against it (see Occupy Oakland: Actions and Strategies for more info). So, the question for many is: should this difference in opinion and belief lead people to walk away from activism in Oakland because folks from the other side of the debate might participate? This has not been a simple question for people to grapple with, as a sense of moral duty is often the very reason we participate in activism in the first place. The reality is that actions organized by Occupiers in large cities are bound to attract a diversity of participants and tactics. Individuals, who had no part in organizing the action, as well as those who may not identify themselves as Occupiers, may participate. In the area of outreach and movement building, attracting as many participants as possible is often desired, and Occupy has a stake in being inclusive. Given this diversity and the lack of borders when it comes to participation, any broad assumption about “Occupy Oakland” is likely to be inherently unfounded from the outset.
Tactics have been an ongoing debate for activists within Oakland and at many points this has led to inaction. As a result, many people at opposing ends of the tactics continuum have distanced themselves from the Occupy moniker, but continue to organize actions based on the strategies and tactics they believe are right. Others, such as the Nonviolent Caucus of Occupy Oakland, have chosen to situate themselves within the movement based on a more nuanced understanding of the local activist scene and the limits of control over other people’s tactics: The Nonviolent Caucus is “a network of individuals and affinity groups (including study groups, work groups, committees, and organizations) who self identify as being part of the Occupy/Decolonize movement, and who seek to engage with others in “nonviolent”* education, training, support, and direct actions.” The goal of this group at the outset was to organize “nonviolent” actions with the understanding that not all activists will embrace “nonviolence” but that the Caucus can specifically ask activists who participate in their actions to use only nonviolent civil disobedience. For many, it is more advantageous to create the spaces for strategy and tactics that they prefer to practice than to walk away from the local movement entirely.
It is unrealistic to assume that even if Occupy Oakland’s General Assembly did decide to support only “nonviolent” civil disobedience that property destruction, as a tactic, would simply end in Oakland. It wouldn’t. To be clear, there was never any decision that Occupy Oakland supports property destruction, but unfortunately many refer to the movement as if it has. Additionally, as has been evidenced by several recent “Fuck the Police” actions that were organized outside of Occupy Oakland, the mainstream media will continue to refer to any action or group of activists as “Occupy Oakland.”
The Occupy movement, organized initially by those who have a deep understanding of individual autonomy in activism, cannot be seen as a movement that panders to one tactical position because we cannot control what individual activists do, nor do I think most people want to. As May Day 2012 approached in Oakland, the Coalition for Dignity and Resistance came to the Occupy Oakland General Assembly and asked for distance in “time and space” between any confrontational actions that might ignite heavy police repression, and their march, which welcomed the attendance of undocumented workers who are particularly vulnerable to arrest and incarceration. While the GA overwhelmingly voted to honor this request, one Occupier took the stage simply to remind those organizing the march that while those in attendance would gladly stand by this agreement, the reality of public action is that many participate from outside the organizing group and we cannot guarantee they won’t employ more confrontational tactics (i.e. we have no literal control over other protestors).
What is most important to recognize is that equating property destruction with Occupy Oakland sensationalizes the actions of a few individuals, while erasing the efforts of the many. It undermines the extraordinary actions that have been organized by Occupiers and/or supported by Occupy Oakland participants in collaboration with other entities and individuals within local communities. In recent months these include Occupy the Farm, the People’s School at Lakeview Elementary, and Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez. These direct actions have been extremely effective in garnering community support and participation, and have inspired similar actions in other cities. While such actions do not confront the big banks outright, they provide opportunities for building community support and self-sufficiency outside the control of banks and the government by feeding and educating the people for free.
While we can debate the “nonviolence” versus “diversity of tactics” issue until our faces turn blue, we also have to understand that what Occupy has become in many areas is heavily local — actions address local injustices, and many feel that until we can spark local awareness of those injustices, mobilizing the community to tackle the big banks is difficult — this is particularly true in Oakland where many people are more concerned with safety and security on a daily basis than which bank holds their money. At the same time, Occupy Oakland activists HAVE been fighting the big banks: the Oakland Coalition to Stop Goldman Saks has won over the City Council in the fight against predatory rate-swap service payments; bank actions are ongoing; and the Foreclosure Defense Group, like Occupy Bernal, has had success with stopping foreclosure auctions and evictions, winning loan modifications and they too have collaborated with a coalition of organizations such as ACCE. In fact, some Occupy Oaklanders have even housed the homeless. But, this is really only a fraction of what OO has achieved and worked towards.
Occupy Oakland has also been visited by Occupiers from around the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe, who want to learn about why and how Occupy Oakland has been so effective while other Occupies have been derailed due to harsh divisions over tactics, resulting in activist impotence. Not to say that Occupy Oakland hasn’t experienced this to some degree, however, the reality of everyday poverty and violence in Oakland really does evoke urgency among activists to keep addressing everyday violence despite tactical differences. In a city with a deep history of police brutality, the police are a concern to many residents. The Oakland Police Department remains under threat of Federal Receivership from the Oakland Riders scandal of 2000, and will spend nearly a million dollars on outside consultants to assess their more recent misconduct, while the family of Alan Blueford is still left waiting for answers regarding the death of their son.
While Mr. Bagot may be correct in asserting that many Oakland citizens are not affected personally by police brutality, we cannot simply assume that Oakland residents don’t see the issue as something to fight against. To overlook the most egregious offenses experienced by Oakland’s citizens in order to develop a platform that panders to the middle class (who have a lot less to fight for) would be an immoral disservice to those who are most disproportionately affected by economic, social and political violence in Oakland. While many in OO see this oppression stemming from capitalism, patriarchy, the increasingly privatized government, and corporate banks, many citizens most immediately experience these power dynamics at the hands of the local police that regulate low-income people-of-color communities.
It could be argued that the preoccupation over tactics trivializes the extent of structural violence waged against those most oppressed in our society, and it certainly blurs the efforts of Oakland activists to confront those gross injustices and spread awareness to middle and upper class citizens who also now have reason participate in the struggle. Thinking globally and acting locally has been a successful strategy for the Occupy movement, and this is evidenced by the use of localized actions in different parts of the world alongside efforts of global solidarity that link local struggles.
The real issue here is not that property destruction or the emphasis on Kpolice in Oakland is misguided; it is that some want to create a movement that mobilizes masses of Americans based on a unified grievance, such as Big Banks, that will lead to reform for the middle class, while others feel the immediate need lies in confronting and undermining local systems of oppression through community support and capacity building. These do not have to be mutually exclusive goals, and they will coexist whether people want them to or not. If this debate reveals anything, it is that “Occupy” is not a tactic or strategy: it is an idea that activists evoke in myriad ways to achieve very diverse and sometimes oppositional goals.
*I use quotes around “nonviolence” because in these conversations “nonviolence” is essentially equated with “lack-of-property-destruction,” and I do not personally see the concepts as congruent. To suggest that Occupy Oakland is not “nonviolent” is to argue that it is violent and this is a dangerous dichotomy that serves to vilify diverse movements in a public arena where people are unaware that “violence” in this respect refers to property destruction. Vandalism is not necessarily violence in the sense most people imagine it. When I hear someone refer to “violence” it certainly does not evoke images or thoughts of property destruction. I see “violence” as a serious term that should not be used lightly because it suggests intentional bodily injury, and I have yet to meet an activist who supports anything I would call “violence.”
Kristy Keller, September 2012
Break out the beer; the blood sport is about to begin. Or Are you ready for some…?
By Peter Olney and Peter Hall
For safety sakes let’s play Rugby!!
The National Football League kicks off another season on September 5. The meaningless pre-season games are over and it’s time to get serious about my New England Patriots and their mercurial coach Bill Belichick. I am a big fan, and I have become a bigger fan since the once woeful Patsies have become perennial contenders. I am also an ex- college player who suffered two concussions on the gridiron. My third and last concussion was suffered playing rugby in Livorno Italy on a cold winter Sunday in 1972. My team Frontisterion Firenze was in a tight match with some big dockworkers from Rugby Livorno. I made the mistake of using my American football training and running full speed headfirst into a solid Italian rugger. I woke up lying on my back under a cold shower in the locker room not knowing where I was nor speaking Italian. Monday morning I visited a “medico” in Florence. He told me that I had just played my last rugby game. If thousands of NFLers and footballers at all levels had been subjected to the decisive diagnosis of that Florentine doctor, we would be dealing with a lot less cases of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).
Used to be that a “bell ringer” was an accepted part of the game. Now scientific evidence has mounted in linking the concussive activity that takes place during every play on the football field to the debilitating and ultimately deadly CTE. A remarkable article in the NY Times on June 20, 2012 by Ben Shpigel quoted iconic Hall of Famer and ex Pittsburgh Steelers QB Terry Bradshaw as saying that concern over head injuries would cause football to be eclipsed in popularity by soccer and other sports within 10 years. Wow, what a difference a few years and a few dramatic suicides make: Dave Duerson, an All Pro Chicago bear defensive player rigged up a shotgun to shoot himself in the chest so that his brain would be preserved for scientific research on CTE. The link between football and severe brain damage is now established as tight as smoking and cancer! I say football in ten years may become a marginal blood sport like boxing! The human health toll, even over the average pro career of three years, is too much even for this macho celebration of American manhood to bear. Tom Brady’s father said in the NYT piece that if he knew then what he knows today Tom Terrific would have never been allowed to put on the pads as a youngster!
Having played both American football and rugby, I enjoy provoking an argument by proclaiming how much safer a game rugby is! The uninitiated react with derision by saying, “You are nuts, those ruggers wear no protective equipment!” I point out always that it is exactly the equipment and unfortunately the helmet that makes football so deadly. First of all with a helmet on, you are constantly putting your head in concussive contact with other hard objects: pads, other helmets and forearms. The helmet itself is a deadly weapon, and in my day we were taught to lead with your head to disable the opposing player. So while rugby is a rough sport there is not the concussive activity on every play from scrimmage particularly for interior linemen. Furthermore because rugby is a game of constant motion and running that requires that everyone be capable of handling the ball, there is not the possibility of specialization that exists in football. There are no wholesale substitutions on offense and defense, no TV timeouts, and no huddles to call plays. All players run all the time up a down a field longer than a football pitch and have to handle the ball and even be capable of using their feet to kick it. There is no room for quasi-obese 350-pound sumo wrestlers who make their living in short bursts of activity in the offensive line and then trundle to the sidelines for rest.
American football evolved from the British imported rugby in the latter part of the 19th century. Probably for the health and safety of America’s young people it is time for a sports retro evolution! For safety’s sake let’s play rugby!
Peter Olney
September 2012
Of Rugby, Race and Rands
Rugby is a beautiful, free-flowing game. It combines the best of the individual initiative and brilliance displayed in soccer with the best of the structure and coordination found in American football. It is a physical game in which players do not wear the helmets and padding that we now understand to cause rather than protect from injury, but it is also a game which brooks none of the thuggery that ruins professional ice hockey.
I grew up with the game of rugby, and it is hard to overstate what it meant to me and my contemporaries. But it was the rugby of Apartheid that we grew up with, and it was only through the efforts of Cheeky Watson and others who defied segregated sport at home, and protests such as those against the 1980 South African tour of New Zealand, that we could come to understand the deeper relationship between the sport and its social context. Rugby isolation was one of the factors that played a role in the ending of Apartheid. But it is too much to say that white South Africans traded any of the privileges of apartheid for the ability to watch and play international rugby.
The first round of the new Rugby Championship was played on August 18th, 2012. The tournament, which included Argentina for the first time, is an expansion of the Tri-Nations tournament, played annually since 1996 between the southern hemisphere rugby powerhouses, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Although billed as international ‘test’ matches, the Rugby Championship and the Tri-Nations tournament before it are really product offerings of a successful commercial enterprise, SANZAR, a corporation jointly owned by the South African Rugby Union, the New Zealand Rugby Union and the Australian Rugby Union. SANZAR was formed in 1995, at the same time that the International Rugby Board (IRB), facing pressure from commercial interests (a proposed rival league), agreed to the professionalization of the game at all levels. Professionalization represented both a threat and an opportunity for the national rugby administrators. And if market expansion is a feature of a successful corporation, then SANZAR has done rather well. When the Tri-Nations Tournament began in 1996, each team played each other at home and away for a total of six matches. This was increased to nine matches in 2005; in 2012 there will be twelve matches. Scheduling the tournament across multiple continents and time zones involves careful coordination of travel plans, local crowds and TV audiences.
While most of the players in the newly admitted Argentinian team ply their craft in club rugby in Europe during the southern hemisphere summer, the other players in this competition know each other well. Almost all of them play in SANZAR’s other product, the highly competitive tri-national Super Rugby tournament. Teams in this tournament are regional, faintly echoing the Provincial structure of pre-professional rugby.
South Africa defeated Argentina with relative ease, while half a world away the New Zealand All Blacks made short work of the even weaker than usual Australian Wallabies. But with tougher games to come, the South Africa hooker suffered an injury that has probably ended his season. Hooker? Most skills in rugby are interchangeable; everyone is expected to pass, carry the ball, tackle and wrestle for the ball, but the position of hooker at the centre of the scrum entails a highly specialised set of skills and a special kind of toughness. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Bismarck du Plessis was injured in the opening match of the tournament. He is also hooker for the Sharks franchise, the Durban-based team which plays in the Super Rugby competition. In 2012, the Sharks went on a surprising run all the way to final. To get there, they played 16 regular season games. Then they travelled to Brisbane to defeat the Queensland Reds in the quarterfinals, to Cape Town to defeat the Stormers in the semi-final, and then to Waikato to lose to the Chiefs in the final – on 3 successive Saturdays. Back in Cape Town two weeks later, against Argentina, Bismarck was led off the field.
Increasingly, this is what the modern international game of rugby looks like: a global elite of well-compensated players are expected to perform at the very highest levels for more than half the weeks of the year. Even the rules of the game have changed with professionalization. Many changes have been designed to avoid career-ending injuries: for example, the notoriously dangerous ‘spear tackle’ in which the tackler lifts another player and dumps them upside down into the ground was outlawed in 2010. Rules to protect players from the neck injuries that can arise in collapsed scrums were changed in 2007. However, rugby authorities have only recently begun to study the problem of concussions and other head injuries. And in professional sport, the ethnographer P David Howe reminds us, while injury is a problem for the bottom line, pain is expected.
Others rule changes were simply about making the game more of a crowd pleaser; for example, most league competitions now award bonus-points to teams which score above a certain number of tries (the equivalent of a touch-down) in a game, regardless of the result. Other rule changes have been designed to ensure a more free-flowing game. And thankfully, the regulators of rugby union have not yet found a way to interrupt the flow of play for television advertising breaks.
All of these changes have rather more to do with commercialization and globalization than the ending of Apartheid and the re-establishment of a much-loved sporting rivalry amongst the nations of the “white Commonwealth”. The trade-off was never as simple as racial compromise for more rugby.
Still, to this day, you can’t really talk about rugby – especially not South African rugby – without considering race. Little has changed since 1995 when Francois Pienaar led the Springboks to victory over the All Blacks in the epic final of the 1995 World Cup tournament, and when Nelson Mandela embraced the game and its supporters into the newly democratic nation. As memorialized so well in the movie, Invictus, the winning Springbok team included only one black player – Chester Williams. [The only thing that disappointed me about the movie was the slow-motion (!) re-enactment of the play, and the accompanying grunt-filled sound-track]
The South African team which took the field in August 2012 included three black players, including Zimbabwe-born Tendai Mtawarira and South African all-time leading try-scorer and 2007 IRB player of the year, Bryan Habana. Still, that leaves twelve white players out of fifteen on the national team; 80% of the players drawn from less than 20% of the population. Racial quotas are a constant topic of debate amongst rugby players, officials and fans; they are applied at lower levels in the game, but not to the national team.
So, how should we think about the relationship between commerce and race in contemporary South African rugby, especially in relation to those north American professional sports in which members of the African-American and Latin American minorities are vastly over-represented on the field in front of crowds that at overwhelmingly wealthy and white? Perhaps this is the future of South African rugby. The high proportion of Maori men playing professional rugby in New Zealand teams would tend to support this prediction. But there are reasons for thinking that integration at the top level will be slow – in comparison to soccer, this is an elite sport played by small numbers of people, with a wealthy but finite market. In South Africa today, rugby for the most part cannot be viewed on the national broadcast TV channels, only on the pay television channels.
With a limited market size, it is not clear how far commercial interests will be willing to invest in transforming the sport at the point where great players are made. Before professionalization, rugby was a game organized through schools, universities, clubs and provincial representation; the elite rugby schools and clubs where reserved for whites. Commercial considerations do now reach down to the schools level, but they have been mapped onto the pre-existing hierarchies. It is no accident that Bryan Habana attended the formerly whites-only boys King Edward VII High School. That would be the same sporting powerhouse attended by golfer Gary Player and soccer-player Gary Bailey (Manchester United and England) amongst many other noted white sportsmen.
The high school I attended – also an elite rugby school – recently lost several games against its traditional rivals. One explanation is that with tighter age limits, the school had lost the ability to offer scholarships to post-matrics (matric being the name for the 12th grade in South Africa). These players had been bought into the school to win games and hone their skills before moving on to lucrative careers. The response: a notice was circulated to parents and alumni reassuring everyone that this situation would be addressed, and a series of newspaper advertisements for scholarships offered to 10th graders with great rugby skills. As long as just some formerly white elite schools are willing and able to act in this way, the South African rugby market will remain amply supplied.
So perhaps we can say this: with the ending of Apartheid, some white South Africans gained access to the personal, commercial and consumer opportunities afforded by professional international rugby. Not a bad deal, especially not for the corporate owners, but not a clear pathway to transformation either. The national team has taken only baby steps towards racial integration, and few black players are sharing in the riches of the game. And all players, regardless of race, now face the injuries, pain and improbable risk-reward ratios as do other sports professionals.
Peter Hall
August 2012
Two Cheers For Paternalism
By Hardy Green
It was known as “the Rockefeller Plan.” During the 1910s and ‘20s, it became America’s most widely embraced expression of corporate paternalism. Over one-and-a-half million workers at hundreds of U.S. companies—including General Electric, Westinghouse, DuPont, International Harvester, General Motors, Procter & Gamble, Standard Oil, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Goodyear Tire—were covered by management-imposed schemes providing for employee-elected representatives, a grievance procedure, and delegates assemblies that offered recommendations regarding safety, sanitation, health and housing, recreation, education, and “industrial cooperation and conciliation”—meaning wages and working conditions. In short, the Rockefeller Plan was built around what organized labor would call a company union.
There were previous expressions of corporate paternalism in America, often involving company towns. For example, beginning in the 1820s, Lowell, Mass., the first large company town in America, was home to numerous textile factories staffed by young women who were housed in boardinghouses and encouraged to write poetry and attend improving lectures. Late 19th century logging towns such as Scotia, Calif., and Port Gamble, Wash., became utopian settlements in the deep woods. Hershey, Penn., built by chocolate man Milton S. Hershey in the early 1900s, featured electrified, centrally heated worker homes, a free playground and zoo, and a model school for orphan boys. The Rockefeller Plan added worker representation to this paternalistic tradition.
The Rockefeller Plan had shortcomings, of course, from the workers’ point of view. Companies were under no obligation to accept representatives’ recommendations or even listen to grievances. Nor was every industry enthusiastic about even this weak form of employee representation: Steel men, in particular, resisted coddling employees and constructed company towns that resembled fortresses. In Gary, Ind., for instance, United States Steel’s plants stretched all along the Lake Michigan shore and were separated from the rest of the city by a river that could serve as a moat in the event of a work stoppage. Scabs and supplies might enter the plants directly via the lake, thereby avoiding worker confrontations and picket lines.
The severe attitudes of steel executives were shaped by two particularly vicious strikes: The 1894 events at the Pullman railroad-sleeping-car maker, which spiraled into a bloody nationwide railroad strike involving 50,000 men; and the 1892 face-off at the Carnegie works at Homestead, Pa., where hundreds of Pinkerton guards battled strikers armed with cannons and other weapons.
But the Rockefeller Plan was itself the result of a vicious bloodletting: the 1914 conflict at Ludlow, Colo. In the fall of the previous year, a vigorous United Mine Workers organizing effort at mines across Huerfano and Las Animas counties preceded the publication of a number of ambitious strike demands, including union recognition, an eight-hour day, and the right of employees to live wherever they pleased, not just in company-built settlements. The Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron and other coal companies rejected these demands, employing the notorious Baldwin-Felts union-busting firm to punish the wayward workers. CFI’s chief, John D. Rockefeller Jr., vowed to “see the thing out, not yielding an inch.”
Company guards evicted miners from their company-owned housing. The strikers in turn set up numerous tent cities.
After hiring dozens of thugs from across the country, Baldwin-Felts men murdered a striker on the streets of Trinidad, Colo., and engaged in numerous shoot-outs with miners. A Baldwin-Felts armored car equipped with a Gatling gun attacked a tent city, killing two men and wounding a nine-year-old boy.
And then things got really ugly. The governor sent in the National Guard, which in April attacked the tent city of Ludlow with machine gun fire. In the late afternoon, they set fire to the tents. Two women and eleven children perished.
Workers did not take the attack lying down. The UMWA, the Colorado Federation of Labor, and the militant Western Federation of Miners called their members to arms. Subsequently, unionists killed more than 30 strikebreakers, mine guards, and National Guard troops. There was widespread destruction of mine buildings and bridges.
None of which was good for the bottom line or Rockefeller public relations, of course. In what would become an iconic labor image, the socialist periodical The Masses ran a cover illustration showing a miner standing over his murdered wife and children and firing back at attackers. The accompanying article, by Max Eastman, was entitled “Class War in Colorado.” Activist/author Upton Sinclair organized demonstrations outside the Rockefellers’ New York offices at 26 Broadway and the family’s private Hudson Valley compound, Kykuit. Helen Keller, famous as a writer and spokesperson for the handicapped, told reporters: “Mr. Rockefeller is a monster of capitalism.”
Junior, as the younger John D. was known, decided that he should perhaps moderate his anti-labor stance. As luck would have it, he came to meet William Lyon Mackenzie King, a former Canadian deputy labor minister who believed in labor-capital accommodation in the spirit of Christian brotherhood. Rockefeller appointed King to head the Rockefeller Foundation’s new industrial relations department, and it was from that position that King devised the employee-representation plan. By the fall of 1915, John D. himself was touring Colorado, lecturing various meetings about the plan’s details.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
Rockefeller was on the leading edge of what would shortly become known as “welfare capitalism.” Another leading advocate of the trend was retail magnate Edward Filene, who made his downtown Boston department store into a laboratory for capitalist social experimentation. Like Rockefeller’s initiative, the Filene’s Cooperative Association gave workers a role in determining wages and allowed arbitration of disputes. To attract what Filene called “a better class of workers,” his company provided a clinic, a library, a credit union, help with rents, pensions, and profit-sharing.
The last of these became a particularly popular way of building employee loyalty and productivity. By 1927, almost 400 companies engaged in employee profit-sharing plans. Even steel companies joined in: At Bethlehem Steel, workers owned $40 million of company stock, and U.S. Steel’s plan became a model for many corporations. At Firestone Tire, every one of 14,000 employees was a shareholder.
By the 1940s, though, the fad for welfare capitalism had subsided—a victim of renewed labor conflict in the 1930s and ‘40s and of the conflict model enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act. Under that law, labor and capital were intended to engage in “economic warfare,” with the state acting as a neutral able to moderate the most severe clashes and bring things to a sensible conclusion.
Since the 1980s, that model, too, has seemed broken: Unions have seemed overmatched by hostile corporations, extreme-right pols and pundits, and anything-but-impartial government.
Meanwhile, even though they are sometimes hard to spot, a few outposts of welfare capitalism remain. Reminiscent of the Rockefeller Plan, a growing number of companies have developed in-house, non-union grievance procedures. Somewhere between 15% and 25% of private-sector employers now require binding arbitration of employment disputes. That means that two to three times as many workers are covered by such “company union”-like provisions as by union grievance procedures.
Then there are the “nanny corporations.” Kaiser Permanente, a pioneer in offering medical care to its employees, remains active in promoting health across the globe. Corning Inc. has proved a mainstay of its upstate New York hometown, spiriting downtown renewal and spending millions each year on local education and child-care efforts. Famously, such Silicon Valley stars as Google and Microsoft provide all-but-enveloping employee perks, from high pay to nap rooms and free meals. More than 70 Chicago-area employers now offer housing aid to their workers, facilitating thousands of home purchases. And although benefits are reduced every year, company-paid health plans are a key part of Americans’ social safety net, frayed as it is.
Is corporate welfarism simply a con, a thinly veiled form of exploitation—or something more? To be sure, such efforts will never be comprehensive—obviously, the unemployed get nothing—and companies cannot be counted upon to stick with such measures through good times and bad. Employment-dispute arbitration procedures probably benefit companies more than they do employees. The various perks listed above are surely intended to help companies retain skilled and necessary employees. Still, answer this: Would you rather work at Bloomberg, where a writer’s every keystroke and work break is monitored, or at Google, where management seems to feel that workers’ creative juices are stimulated by an atmosphere of play and freedom? At Wal-Mart, where benefits are bare-bones, or at Kaiser, where, for whatever self-interested reasons, management seems to take employee health seriously? In such dark times as these—and with no better alternative in sight–a little bit of extra can count for a lot.