Last week, the Boston Globe had an interesting piece about how the research of Boston College sociology professor Lisa Dodson led to her new book, “The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy.” As she was interviewing managers at stores that employed low-wage workers, she began hearing their discomfort with making enough to live well, while their workers were seriously struggling to make ends meet.

In response to this unjust situation, Dodson found that many managers participated in acts of what she calls “economic disobedience,” such as slipping “their workers extra money, food, or time needed to care for sick children,” in an effort to undermine the system. One story she tells is of Andrew, a manager at a large Midwest food business, who:

…said he put extra money in the paychecks of those earning a “poverty wage,” punched out their time cards at the usual quitting time when they had to leave early for a doctor’s appointment, and gave them food.

Andrew had decided that by supervising workers who were treated unfairly – paid too little and subjected to inflexible schedules that prevented them from taking care of their families – he was playing a direct role in the unfair system, and so he was morally obligated to act.

Not surprisingly, her book has sparked controversy for portraying such acts in a positive light. Some argue that she is essentially glorifying stealing from companies, rather than working through legal channels to try to rectify the situation.

I personally would tend to agree with Dodson, that these acts are moral. Corporations are not designed to care for the well-being of their workers. Their primary focus by law is on the bottom line and the interests of their shareholders, which are generally at odds with what would be best for the workers. (If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend watching The Corporation. It’s a documentary that came out a few years back that explores these issues and many more.)

I’d be interested to hear what you think. Are these acts of “economic disobedience” something to be lauded or is this theft by another name?

I hate to be tooting The New Yorker’s horn so much lately, but today they have a really nice blog post asking (rhetorically), “Are archivists today’s real peacemakers?” Meredith Blake reports on the “Archivist of the Year” awards last year at CUNY:

David Myers, the director of U.C.L.A.’s Center for Jewish Studies, spoke gracefully on the evening’s subject, saying that “the potential of the archive is not merely to preserve, but to liberate.” His belief is that through the dedicated work of archivists, it may be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to “craft a shared history that honors, with self-critical honesty, both traditions.” As possible inspiration, he cited “Histoire-Geschichte,” a history textbook about post-war Europe co-authored by French and German experts.

Columbia’s Rashid Khalidi, though a shade or two more skeptical than Myers, was nevertheless insistent that preserving the records of the Palestinian people was a critical step in the peace process, particularly in the ongoing absence of a Palestinian state or even a centralized archive. Vital as it may be, preservation often takes a back seat to more dire needs, said Khalidi. “There always seem to be more pressing needs elsewhere.”

We don’t have an “Archiving” category here at Waging Nonviolence, and certainly not one under “Actions.” But something like this is an important reminder that not all nonviolent, self-sacrificing acts for the sake of justice come in the form of direct protest. Take, for example, the dangers of archival work in post-invasion Iraq:

Previous “Archivist of the Year” honoree Saad Eskander proves just how dangerous—and how urgent—the work of an archivist can be. The former Kurdish fighter returned to his native Iraq in 2003 to work as director of the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad. In a captivating online diary, Eskander chronicled his brave efforts at reclaiming his nation’s history from a variety of threats: mold, car bombs, Baath loyalists, Muslim fundamentalists. The blog provided a window into the bipolar demands of his job, from mundane administrative questions, like where to install new air conditioners, to the virtually unthinkable—snipers, death threats, and even the kidnapping and murder of two staff librarians.

Though, for now, we do so under less mortal danger, this act of archiving is a form of activism that all of us who read, comment, and contribute at Waging Nonviolence undertake. We document, we remember; we insist, against the distraction of violence, that nonviolent struggle is at work in our world too, and more powerfully than the alternative.

In the October-November issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, Tom Cornell has a nice review of a new biography by Richard Deats on Hildegard Goss-Mayr, and her late husband Jean. While not known to the wider public, Hildegard and Jean are perhaps two of the most influential peacemakers of the last century. As leaders of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, they travelled around the world for decades teaching and training people in nonviolence.

Cornell’s reflection on Hildegard is great, and – although I haven’t read it yet – I imagine the book would be a fascinating read for anyone interested in nonviolence, especially from a faith perspective. Here are few nice stories from the review:

Richard Deats recounts the story that Hildegard told that morning to a religion class at that New Jersey high school. The students were all male, working class, polite but skeptical as Hildegard described the nonviolence of the gentle Jesus and his call to nonviolent discipleship. During the question and answer period, a burly student raised his hand. “That’s all fine and good,” he said, “but what do you do when the Russians come marching down your main street? What do you do then?” It was the time of the Red Scare when the government, with media complicity, terrified the American citizenry with this image even though anyone who gave it a moment’s thought would realize that the Soviets could never manage the US Postal Service.

I paraphrase from memory now forty-six years old. “We were deeply afraid as the Red Army approached Vienna, in April 1945,” she said. “The Nazi army in retreat from Russia had burned everything in its path to the ground, everything that they couldn’t eat. It was a path of murder and rape! We had good reason to fear retaliation.” She described the scene as her father described it to her later. She wasn’t there but in another family home in Bavaria. A soldier slammed a rifle butt against their front door several times. Her father, Kaspar Mayr, opened the door and invited the Russians in. The dining room table was set. He invited them to sit and eat. Perplexed, the Russian soldier sat down and ate. Kaspar Mayr surmised from their gestures that they did not expect this reception and wondered what was going on. Then one of the soldiers pointed to a crucifix on the wall and said, “Ah, Christos!” Ah, Christos, that was it! The Russians had their fill and left the house undisturbed and maybe with the inkling of an idea, an idea that Jean and Hildegard spent their lives developing and putting into practice, the radical Christian notion of love of enemies. They introduced nonviolence to Latin America when they brought the late Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife-Olinda in the impoverished northeast of Brazil the works of Martin Luther King translated into Spanish. Later, with Adolfo Perez Esquivel, they helped establish Servicio Paz y Justicia in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

[…]

Richard Deats describes Jean and Hildegard’s part in the preparation for the events that drove the Marcos family from the Philippines and the installation of a democratic government. The Goss-Mayrs had gained the confidence of Cardinal Jaime Sin, Archbishop of Manila. His support cooperation were crucial. The bishops together called for support of the freedom movement and opposition to the Marcos government. Richard Deats, having been a member of the faculty of the Protestant seminary there, had an intimate knowledge of the country. He joined Jean and Hildegard to establish dozens of nonviolent training programs across the country to give the people, whose frustrations had heated to the boiling point, the knowledge and the means to achieve change through nonviolent direct action.

A couple of interesting political graphic novels drew attention in the New York Times this week. One is a reworked online version of the 2003 award-winning graphic novel Persepolis, while the other is an updated reincarnation of the old DC Comics superhero Unknown Soldier. Both raise some serious questions in regards to nonviolence.

Persepolis 2.0, as it’s called, reshuffles the black and white drawings of the original book (which is about the 1979 Iranian Revolution) to tell the story of the mass protests that took place in Iran this year, following the disputed presidential elections. It’s an interesting concept given that the new authors (who have taken on pseudonyms) were able take images meant to depict events from 30 years ago and apply them to current events.

While it seems that much of the storyline focuses on the very legitimate protests against the repressive Ahmadinejad regime, there is also a major focus on the elections being rigged, despite there being no concrete evidence of this. Futhermore, Persepolis 2.0, does a good deal of propagandizing to make Moussavi out as the hero, when, as discussed on this blog, his corporate/upper class interests need to be challenged as well. Finally, Twitter and Facebook are referred to as providers of the “real info,” when in fact, though undeniably valuable, they have led to a great deal of misreporting and confusion.

All of this is not surprising, considering the authors, like most of us, “experienced the election and its aftermath from afar.” Much like Western media coverage of these events, which lacked on the ground reporting, their authority is rather suspect. While we all sympathize with and commend the bravery of the protesters fighting repression, there are still many questions about this so-called “Green Revolution” that need to be answered. Read the rest of this article »

Three-quarters of the way through his masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee takes a pause in his account of a summer spent living among Depression-era, cotton-picking tenant farmers for an “Intermission,” subtitled “Conversation in the Lobby.” The overall thrust of this portion, phrased as a furious response to questions posed to writers by the Partisan Review in May, 1939, is to defend the radicalism of the artist’s vocation.

A good artist is a deadly enemy of society; and the most dangerous thing that can happen to an enemy, no matter how cynical, is to become a beneficiary. No society, no matter how good, could be mature enough to support a real artist without mortal danger to that artist.

The Partisan Review’s final question concerned the “the next world war.” It asked, “What do you think the responsibilities of writers in general are when and if war comes?” Of all his answers, here Agee replies the most directly, the most earnestly, and the least aggressively toward the askers. He says he has thought much about the matter—“first glibly … later with more and more perplexity, distress, and immediate interest, fascination, and fear”—and several possibilities have come to him.

1. Enlist in that part of the war which seemed most dangerous, least glamorous, least relevant to any choice I might have through “education,” “class,” “connections,” or personal craftiness. This either for personal-“religious” reasons or out of an “artist’s” curiosity, or more likely both.
2. Join the stalinist party and do as I was told or Bore from Within it. [A page earlier he writes, “‘I find, in retrospect,’ that I have felt forms of allegiance or part-allegiance to catholicism and to the communist party. I felt less and less at ease with them and am done with them.”]
3. Stay wherever I happened to be, mind my own business, refuse every order, and take the consequences.
4. Stay wherever I happened to be, and write what I thought of the War, the Pacifists, etc., wherever I could get it printed.
5. Escape from it by whatever means possible and by the same means continue to do my own work.

For those of us hoping to plant Agee in a particular position or camp, either for or against this war or war in the abstract, he is evasive. Even the pacifist crowd, so radical in its way, he considers also a “society” into which an artist cannot afford to blend. Answer 1 offers a very Christ-like self-sacrifice, venturing among the least to reveal the truth for all. But, unlike number 3, and possibly numbers 2 and 4, it seems a perfectly anti-political position to take. So also is number 5. Taken together, though, the options offer little assurance to the partisan.

A footnote appended later seems to be some encouragement for radical nonviolence:

I would now (fall of 1940) have to add to this belief in non-resistence to evil as the only possible means of conquering evil.

Only to equivocate in the very next sentence:

I am in serious uncertainty about this belief; still more so, of my ability to stand by it.

If you’re tempted to dismiss Agee as simply a political weakling, a dilettante making games out of serious business, the last sentences of this section are worth hearing out. They spell out a cosmic reversal, an insistence that The War everyone talks about is in fact a game, an absurdity when viewed from the truly serious business of making art and meaning for the human race.

Or, in other words, I consider myself to have been continuously at war for some years, and can imagine no form of armistice. In that war I feel “responsible.” I doubt any other form of war could make me more so.

This artist, he insists, cannot be the partisan that the Review wants to drum out concerning the coming war. He refuses to accept the war being declared by politicians and generals—and all manner of those who consider themselves informed—as the real war most worthy of his attention. Especially when no one else does, the artist can look past her or his society’s present means of mass suicide and murder, into the deathless questions that, by being ignored, so provoke the rest of us.

During World War II, Agee devoted himself to reviewing films for Time and The Nation. The draft board passed him over. He had a son who died soon after being born, and he married his third wife.