Doorstep to Revolution

I trade in food, helpfully, not harmfully like Monsanto.

Down the hall in our building live a single mother, 32, and her daughter, 11.

The mother, delivered in Clearwater by a doctor I know, now a retired University

of British Columbia medical professor, had a hard life.  She grew up in many places and

moved to this building three years ago.  She was a heroin addict, but her daughter shows

no ill effects, although she sometimes stays with relatives when her mother is not

dependable.  They're on welfare; the mother is on methodone.  Budgeting is a challenge,

although the best budgeters are the poor, because they have the least room for error.

Sometimes they're low on food and other household necessities.   Mom asks and we give.

They rely on the food bank, for whose initials FB they have a whimscal name.

Lately, she has given us food, usually what she gets from the food bank but doesn't like.

The five-pound bag of enriched flour that she gave us a couple weeks ago will be part of the

oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that I plan to make to bring to library events this week:  a

local science fiction author's reading on Wednesday, the film The Fruitpickers on Thursday.

The chocolate chips came from Surplus Herbie's, which operates in Williams Lake and Kamloops.  Their stock comes from bankrupt stores.   I feed off chocolate chips that came from a store that

feeds off other stores.  Hamlet talked about a fish eating a worm, a king eating

the fish, and worms later eating the dead king.  I found a similar story this month in the Ancient

Greek writer Herodotus's history of the wars between the Greeks and Persians.  A king throws his ring in the water, a fish eats the ring, and a fisher catches the fish and gives it to the king, who gets
his ring back.   Surplus Herbie's sells fishing gear, but no rings for kings. 

The library will get my cookies because last week I found a great book on the new books shelf: 

Paul d'Amato's The Meaning of Marxism.  I hope that book isn't why the local employment

office has a job posting for a new librarian.  The York University graduate whom the library hired

a couple years ago started the film series, and might have brought the book.  If she's still there

this week, then I'll commend her.   The USian d'Amato, who writes for the Socialist Worker,

gave me refreshing Trotskyism after my years of enduring Vancouver Stalinists,

New Democratic Party heartbreakers, and Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper, hot air versus hot oil.

Trotskyism:  the pause that refreshes, available at a revolution near you.

That trading background painted, in glowing red, I now write of food trading.  This differs from the  English trading away Irish corn and grain while Irish people starved in the 1840s, trading away rice to starve India during World War Two, from India now trading its land and water to corporate agriculture and thereby causing farmer suicides, and from the US trading subsidized corn to Mexico, impoverishing its farmers off the land and into wage slavery or drug trading.   I write of fair trade in food.

 Today was the first time that this single mother and I traded food on the doorstep.  Weeks ago, my daughter received the flour but I don't recall what she gave.  I'm sure she traded fairly.  I'm no mercantilist, monopolizing trade. 

We're free traders, but more like the Zapatistas than like the corporate free traders who

drove the Zapatistas toward revolution. 

Gunfire set aside for later, this single mother, not the Zapatistas, knocked on my door today.  She had an empty margarine container in one had and some food items in the other hand.  She asked

for butter and juice, not The Last Tango in Paris, nor did I offer it.  I gave her two 1/2-cup margarine chunks, leaving myself enough to make the cookies.  I shun margarine and only have this margarine

because months ago my daughter asked for it.  It has languished in the freezer.  I also gave a can of

concentrated frozen iced tea and one of grape punch, thawed. 

In her other hand, she held, not an Kalashnikov rifle, happily, but a vegetable Mr. Noodles, a 284 mL can of sweet peas, and a 398 mL can of baked beans in tomato sauce.  She offered them to me and I accepted.  I think the AK47 takes different ammunition. 

The Kalashnikov's inventor recently died, his Russian rifle still the best.  Look for it the next time you find yourself revolting.  Some find you revolting already.  Many find me revolting, but as the English singer Billy Bragg says, "If you've got a blacklist, I wanna be on it." 

As I finish typing this, I remember d'Amato's argument that communal kitchens, laundry, and child care would reduce women's double burden, of work outside and work inside the home. 

The "coincidence of wants," about which I learned in university economics, also crosses my mind. These economics aren't d'Amato's, but I learned his economics at university, too, from of a Marxist professor from Pittsburgh.  Pittsburgh, where 90 000 worked in the steel industry at its postwar peak, has given away that industry, but the city re-invented itself as a cultural mecca, CBC Radio "Ideas" recently said.  The host hoped that Canada's former steel city, Hamilton, would reinvent itself, education and medical industries prime candidates for the job.      

The "coincidence of wants" means having what another wants when she has what you want.  This

is so unlikely that a means of exchange, that is, money, arose.  More likely, such coincidences would

be like the Bible story about asking someone for a loaf of bread and getting a serpent. 

What if  she came to my door with something I don't want and wanted something I didn't have?

If she came to my door with an AK-47 and a serpent, then I would know that she was either in an undependable phase, or that she had risen from her lumpenproletarian ennui to foment revolution, or that she was joining a herptologist group, or a wacky religion.  I'd make cookies for that. 

My crockpot is full of broccoli stalks, cabbage,  and potatoes now.  It wouldn't hold a serpent.

Some religious people hold serpents, but that's another sermon.  I'd rather hold a serpent than

heed most sermons, including those from conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists, and more overt religious folks, each group itching to patent the truth.

I used to know everything.  I don't anymore.  Now I'm easier to get along with. 

When we speak of trade, we approach one of many inefficiencies of capitalism, that is,

advertising, which pressures us to buy what we don't want and pay what we can't spare. 

d'Amato's socialism doesn't need advertising.   In that vein, Thorsten Veblen, the early-1900s

Norwegian economist, called advertising wasteful when it did anything more than provide information.

Ah, if only socialism itself needed only a little advertising to supplant our exploitative system.

Use value, exchange value, iced tea, beans, dreams and schemes, eh?