Charles Tilly May 20, 1929 – April 29, 2008
For those of you who are familiar with him or his work, Charles Tilly died yesterday morning following a long battle with lymphoma. I never had the pleasure of meeting Chuck, but like many in Sociology, particularly those of us who study social movements, revolution, and state formation, there is perhaps no individual who has had a more profound impact on the field. He was a prolific scholar, and died with several unfinished projects and a couple manuscripts ready to publish; as one of his students said, he always had something to say, and tried to get as much done while he still could. He was an amazing individual, full of patience and understanding, a rare exception who would criticize work for not attacking his own frameworks and assumptions. He was the type of researcher and teacher, and even person, many of us strive to be, and as I head into graduate school (I originally applied to Columbia precisely to work with Chuck and learn from him) and begin my own career as a researcher and teacher, his life and work will serve as an considerable inspiration. There is no replacement for Chuck, both in life and academia; but he will continue to live on through his pupils and his work, and I hope that even today he affects the next generation of students as much as he has affected me.
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The Columbia University community mourns the loss of one of its beloved members, Charles Tilly, the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, who passed away on April 29 after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.
Tilly, who had a joint appointment with the University’s Departments of Sociology and Political Science, is widely considered the leading scholar of his generation on contentious politics and its relationship with military, economic, urban and demographic social change.
President of the Social Sciences Research Council Craig Calhoun called Tilly “one of the most distinguished of all contemporary social scientists,“ adding: “He is the most influential analyst of social movements and contentious politics, a path-breaker in the historical sociology of the state, a pivotal theorist of social inequality.”
“His intellectual range and level of productivity are virtually unrivaled in the social sciences,” said Columbia sociology Professor and Chair Thomas DiPrete. Adam Ashforth, professor of anthropology and political science at Northwestern University, described Tilly as “the founding father of twenty-first century sociology.”
During the course of his 50-year career, Tilly’s academic expertise covered urbanization, industrialization, collective action and state-making, and his most recent work explored social relations, identity and culture. His primary interest concerned Europe from 1500 to the present, but his work extended to North America and other parts of the world as well.
Tilly is well known for his generosity to students. Many recall thanking Tilly for his mentorship, only to receive the response: “Don’t thank me, just do the same for your students.”
One important training ground he offered to students was a succession of informal seminars, co-launched with his former wife Louise in their living room 40 years ago when he was a younger professor at the University of Michigan. Once titled the “Think, Then Drink” workshop, the name changed to the “Workshop on Contentious Politics” and was held regularly at Columbia for more than a decade. Many students continued to participate well past graduation and into their own professorship tenures.
“Much as his own scholarship transcended traditional disciplinary boundaries, these vibrant discussions brought a diverse array of professors and students together in an ongoing conversation that represented the best of historical social science,” said former student and close friend Wayne Te Brake, now a professor of history at Purchase College. Participants enjoyed Tilly’s “egalitarian rules for presentation, critique and intervention,” he added.
Tilly was born May 27, 1929, in Lombard, Ill., and studied at Harvard University, earning the bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in 1950 and the Ph.D. in sociology in 1958. He also studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and the Catholic University of Angers, France, and served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. Before arriving at Columbia in 1996, Tilly taught at the University of Delaware, Harvard, the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan and The New School for Social Research. In addition, he held several short-term research and teaching appointments at universities throughout Europe and North America during the course of his career.
Tilly was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Sociological Research Association and the Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
In addition to his theoretical and substantive interests, Tilly wrote extensively on the subject of research methodology. His writings touched on epistemology, the nature of causality, process analysis, the use of narrative as a method for historical explanation, mechanism-based explanations, contextual analysis, political ethnography, and quantitative methods in historical analysis, among many topics.
During his lifetime Tilly received several prominent awards, including: the Common Wealth Award in sociology (1982); the Amalfi Prize for Sociology and Social Sciences (1994); the Eastern Sociological Society’s Merit Award for Distinguished Scholarship (1996); the American Sociological Association’s Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (2005); the International Political Science Association’s Karl Deutsch Award in Comparative Politics (2006); the Phi Beta Kappa Sidney Hook Memorial Award (2006); and the Social Science Research Council’s Albert O. Hirschman Award (2008).
In addition, he was awarded honorary doctorates in social sciences from Erasmus University, Rotterdam (1983); the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, University of Paris (1993); the University of Toronto (1995); the University of Strasbourg (1996); the University of Geneva (1999); the University of Crete (2002); the University of Québec at Montréal (2004); and the University of Michigan (2007).
In 2001, Columbia’s sociology graduate students named Tilly the Professor of the Year.
He authored, co-authored, edited or co-edited 51 published books and monographs and over 600 scholarly articles. His major works include “The Vendée: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-Revolution of 1793” (1964); “As Sociology Meets History” (1981); “Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons” (1984); “The Contentious French” (1983); “European Revolutions 1492-1992” (1993); “Cities and the Rise of States in Europe: A.D. 1000 to 1800” (1994); “Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834” (1995); “Durable Inequality” (1998); “Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies” (1998); “Dynamics of Contention” (2001); “Social Movements 1768-2004” (2004); “Trust and Rule” (2005); “Why?” (2006); and “Democracy” (2007).
“Professor Tilly will be remembered as an extraordinarily generous and innovative scholar and teacher by a vast network of colleagues, students and friends around the country and across the globe,” said Te Brake.
Tilly is survived by his former wife (and sometimes collaborator), Louise; his brothers, Richard and Stephen, and sister Carolyn; his children, Chris, Kit, Laura and Sarah; their spouses Marie, Steve, Derek, and David; his grandchildren, Amanda, Charlotte, Chris, Abby, Ben, Jon and Becky; and his great-grandchildren, Jamie and Julian.
Professor Tilly’s family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations may be sent to the Charles Tilly Memorial Scholarship Fund in care of the Department of Sociology, Columbia University, or to the American Civil Liberties Union.
On the food riots
If you didn’t already know, there have been riots over rising food costs and shortages of staple foods over the past few weeks. If this is a shock to you, it is probably because it has been largely ignored in the media. I am by no means an expert on what is going on, so I’ll include excerpts of two articles, one in AlterNet by Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute, and an interview on Democracy Now! of Raj Patal, author of Stuffed and Starved.
Mittal:
World food prices rose by 39 percent in the last year. Rice alone rose to a 19-year high in March — an increase of 50 per cent in two weeks alone — while the real price of wheat has hit a 28-year high.
As a result, food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. For the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, the leap in food prices is a killer. They spend a majority of their income on food, and when the price goes up, they can’t afford to feed themselves or their families.
Analysts have pointed to some obvious causes, such as increased demand from China and India, whose economies are booming. Rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased use of bio-fuels and climate change have all played a part.
But less obvious causes have also had a profound effect on food prices.
Over the last few decades, the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have used their leverage to impose devastating policies on developing countries. By requiring countries to open up their agriculture market to giant multinational companies, by insisting that countries dismantle their marketing boards and by persuading them to specialize in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton and even flowers, they have driven the poorest countries into a downward spiral.
In the last thirty years, developing countries that used to be self-sufficient in food have turned into large food importers. Dismantling of marketing boards that kept commodities in a rolling stock to be released in event of a bad harvest, thus protecting both producers and consumers against sharp rises or drops in prices, has further worsened the situation.
Patal:
For a start, there were just bad harvests last year. Some people say that this is a sign that climate change is biting in agricultural economies. And it’s certainly the case that there was some very bad weather, particularly in Australia, last year. So there’s a low level of crops available.
But on top of that, there are a few other factors. One of them, one of the issues, is that governments, particularly the US government, is very keen on biofuels. Biofuels are fuels that are derived from corn, from sugar cane, and they’re being presented as a way of achieving energy independence. The trouble is, of course, that the biofuels drive up the price of these commodities, which means that poor people can’t afford them anymore.
On top of that, you’ve got an increasing demand for meat in developing countries. And as people get richer in those countries and they shift to something that looks more like an American diet, you have a situation where the grains are being diverted away from poor people and into livestock. So, again, that’s driving up the price of grains.
And finally, I think one of the major issues is, of course, the price of oil. I mean, one of the problems with the way our food reaches us today is that it is industrial, it is very fossil fuel-intensive, not just to the distance the food travels, but also in the fertilizer. You know, fossil fuel is required to produce fertilizer, pesticide, these sorts of things. And so, when the price of oil is over $100 a barrel, that combines with all the other factors to make a perfect storm where food prices are absolutely beyond the means of the poorest people.
My general ideological, academic, and personal understanding of these events is really no more than that something big is in the works. The present is a product of the past, and a number of ill-considered policies in the past may be starting to catch up to us. I see basically three things going on:
1) Good food is being wasted or diverted into other projects. This is obvious; as Americans we probably waste nearly as much food as we actually consume. Policies are in place to protect us from disease, but they also have the unintended effect of keeping consumable and safe food from those who need it. The experience of Food Not Bombs underscores the paradox of these policies. Even “socially responsible” stores like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and most restaurants often throw out fresh foods at the end of the day–this is day-old, perfectly eatable bread or bagels–and on top of that, lock their dumpsters. Police also scope out dumpsters and make sure no one is “stealing” food. Imagine that! Society is so protective of its own waste that it cannot permit others in need to use it for sustenance. Food Not Bombs and other groups seek to reclaim wasted food and use that to feed the hungry, but they still face constant harassment from police and governments who strangely enough would rather see good food rot in a landfill than feed humans. Yet our obsession with waste and cleanliness reaches a point of hypocrisy when you consider just how terrible the conditions actually are in which food is processed and prepared–the cockroach and mice problem at UW’s Memorial Union is enough evidence of that, or the “quota” of cigarette butts and rat feces that is allowed into some foodstuffs.
Additionally, a lot of food now is being diverted from the hungry and poor and towards more profitable endeavors: mainly the production of biofuels and the production of meat. Both of these are renowned for their inefficiency; basically, the amount of energy put into their production is greater than the actual payoff. In the case of biofuels, the amount of gasoline and power used to convert grains and sugars into ethanol is considerably more than the actual gasoline and electricity saved by using ethanol. The only reason it is even considered is the political pandering of politicians to rural votes and to agricorps. But this diversion creates demand, which raises the price of foodstuffs, mainly grain and sugarcane, and additionally raises fuel costs, further raising the cost of food (by raising the cost of transporting food).
Meat is seen as an important part of diets outside of the United States and Europe, where synthetic food production isn’t an advanced, and meat becomes the main source of protein for many. But to produce beef in the commercial market requires intensive use of grains in the raising of cattle: the amount of food consumed in the production of beef is far greater than the volume of food obtained from slaughtered cattle.
2) Thus far, economic and food aid problems have contributed more to poverty and hunger than they have helped. Paternalistic policies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and imperialistic, opportunistic organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO), have reduced the access that the poor have to the land. Subsistence farming is being stomped out in favor of large commercial agriculture. USAID and the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) have resulted in crop dumping, where Western governments subsidize domestic agricultural production destined for export; using economic and political pressure, they force down tariffs and trade barriers; and then, using the economic might of the large GNP countries, undersell subsistence and small farmers.
Additionally, the economic power of agricorps like Monsanto, local corruption, and trade pacts like the WTO’s Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement have–amazingly enough–copyrighted ancient seed varieties. This has forced small farmers to stop the sustainable and responsible agricultural practices they are used to, instead leaving no other option but to use non-reproducing, un-saveable “terminator” seeds and extensive amounts of fertilizers. Very recently, this has led to deep debts for farmers, especially in India and Southeast Asia, where farmers have taken to committing suicide with those same fertilizers.
Other trade pacts have served to force farmers off their land. NAFTA required that Mexico revise Article 27 of their Constitution, which previously granted agrarian rights. The use of ejidos, or communal land holdings, was eliminated in many parts of the country. And the Drug War is often used as justification to further remove peasants and small farmers from their land. The IMF and World Bank’s predatory loaning practices has advanced this in other parts of the world, through conditions for loans, through incurred debts, and then, finally, through austerity measures intended to alleviate and repay those debts. The greatest irony is that, after small tracts of land are taken from peasants and small farmers and agglomerated into large estates, much of the land goes unused; but attempts at reoccupying the land are thwarted with violence from paramilitaries, police, and army units.
Just like with the example of dumpsters mentioned above, the rich and full-of-stomach use their economic, political, and sometimes military might to prevent and further hamper the ability of the poor and hungry to access food and grow their own food. After leaving the land, often the only choice left, the only alternative to starvation, is work in sweatshops–this also seeks to drive global wages further down, further prohibiting cheap access to food.
3) It should be painfully obvious to all by now the poverty of the “free market” and capitalism as a whole. It simply is incapable of distributing goods efficiently and equally. What we are studying today is the result of neoliberal policies designed to redistribute wealth and resources upward. We have reached the breaking point where the global poor have nothing more to hand to the wealthy. Now it is their turn. At risk of being ideological, this is the time when the people of the world will take back what is theirs, if it is not willingly given to them.
Activists, academics, opportunists, and politicians will surely use the food riots as justification for their own platforms, linking genuine outrage and spontaneous rebellion to their own objectives. There will be articles in newspapers using this to make the case for state socialism. Others will use these inconvenient riots to promote their fight against global warming. Still others will use it to promote their anarchist and ecological agendas. I of course am guilty of seeing food scarcity as support for my own ideas. But I would also recommend that we treat it only as it is, and nothing more. It is part of something greater, to be sure, but we cannot run the risk of placing ourselves in the vanguard of global uprising, attempting to use this widespread suffering to advance our own goals. It is part of something larger, as of yet still misunderstood, which I hope will be clear in time. There is a transformation taking place in the South which the North will be incapable of harnessing. We should not challenge it, but seek to understand the causes in our own lives in the US and look for ways to act in solidarity.
Recommended additional reading
Raj Patal, “Stuffed and Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System”
Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”
Ha-Joon Chang, “Reclaiming Development: An Economic Policy Handbook for Activists and Policymakers”
¡Pedro Machuca vive!
“A cause worth fighting for is a cause worth dying for.”
Taking a class on Latin American history is a daily reminder: it is a reminder of what it is we’re fighting for and against. But more importantly, it serves as a reminder of who we, as anarchists and anti-authoritarians, are. We are the constant thorn in the ass of oppression and exploitation. However, because of this, we are not the vanguard any movement or struggle. But, as history has shown us, we are often in the vanguard of the firing squads. There is ample evidence of this: the Bolsheviks killed the anarchists before they confronted the capitalists; the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico City in 1968; Brad Will in Oaxaca; and the inspiration for this article, the coup led by Pinochet, where thousands were murdered. As we bend over backwards to blindly mourn our own 9-11, we forget the 9-11 that our comrades and compañeros suffered.
A problem within the comforts of the University is that we do not take seriously ourselves as activists and agitators. With all the privilege we have, we do little to take advantage of it–instead, we are worried more about protecting that privilege than doing what is right. Activism for us is not vocation, something we come home to, but a hobby, an after-school club we go to when we aren’t occupied with more important things. Our destinies are laid out for us: moderate and live, or fight and die. This is not a choice many of us are comfortable making, but it is destiny, it is reality.
As Americans we are pathologically uncomfortable with reality. We suffocate ourselves with tabloids, fiction, and façades. We choose to whitewash our world rather than deal with what truly is. We paint over graffiti; we accept without a second thought the greenwashing of corporations; we categorically believe the lies of our leaders. We refuse to accept that anything worth fighting for could possibly be achieved, at risk of undermining our own complacency within this fake Hollywood set we try to live on. We look at other challenges to this global system through paternalistic binoculars: we emphasize the oppression suffered by others in the South alongside the color of their skin, without listening to what they are fighting for–we assign a different struggle to them to avoid comprehending the poverty of our world.
As I sit in a lecture hall in Madison after watching Machuca, there is a barrage of comments pitying the protagonist of the story, justifying his betrayal of his friend, otherizing and externalizing the story away from their own life. At the end of the discussion section, we abandon Pedro Machuca, and we abandon the tragedy of Chile.
Or at least we try. Can we really escape the legacy of fascism, just as Gonzalo Infante escaped the población? As much as we try to avoid it and deny it, we are just as capable of repeating 1973. We pattern ourselves a better bourgeoisie, we are less devisive. But do we not treat the poor with the same disdain? Do us “good” liberals not look down upon the rural poor of Northern Wisconsin and the urban poor of Milwaukee from atop Bascom Hill? We are capable of committing such atrocity. And that ability should be a reminder to those of us who fight out of convenience: if we do not fight like hell now, we won’t be able to fight when they come for us later.
Belachao
Una mañana, de sol radiante
oh Belachao, belachao
belachao, chao chao
una mañana, de sol radiante
tendré en mis manos al opresor.
belachao, chao chao
con el martillo y con la hoz.
Y sí yo muero en el combate
Oh belachao, belachao
belachao, chao chao
y si yo muero en el combate
toma en tus manos mi fusil.
Soy anarquista toda la vida
Oh belachao, belachao
Belachao, chao chao.
soy anarquista toda la vida
y anarquista he de morir.
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE – September 1-4
This weekend was the Midwest Regional RNC Consulta. I won’t go into a lot of detail (partly because a lot is internal discussion, in the planning stages, or somewhat secret), but many good things came out of the discussions. In someways, large projects like the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and the upcoming RNC convention protests in Minneapolis are more about creating the structures necessary to protest these things, than to actually protest them.
QUEERS BASH BACK!
Possibly the most promising and exciting thing emerging is Bash Back! Bash Back! has taken many forms the past few years, but only just recently was it formally organized. The first consulta was last weekend, April 5, in Chicago. The main goal is to create an organizing structure for radical queer- and transfolk (and their allies) to resist and work towards shutting down the DNC and RNC this summer. From the conversations we had this weekend, it sounds like a lot of awesome things are being planned, from subversive work at the corporate Pride Fests in Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago (mainly the commodification by sexist and heterosexist corporations and organizations–mainly Stonewall Democrats and Log Cabin Republicans and the financial exclusion of poorer queer, trans, lgbt and “- of color” communities), to large-scale, radical direct action at the RNC.
The first show of the strength and potential of Bash Back! since the Chicago convergence can be seen in the Take Back the Night Rally. Participants in the Midwest Regional Consulta formed a pink bloc to join the planned Take Back the Night events. Unfortunately, we missed the group at the Capitol, but caught up with them on Langdon. The TBTN people did a fabulous job organizing, and my comments should in no way be seen as a criticism of what they did. The TBTN organizers obtained a permit to march on the sidewalks, and when we met up with them, that’s where they were. However, the pink bloc members thought that to assert and stand up for our rights as LGBTQQetc, and oppose heteronormality, we would take the streets without permission or permit. After all, it only makes sense to chant “WHOSE STREETS? OUR STREETS!” when you take complete control of traffic lanes, on your own terms. We finally joined the TBTN march, and all of us together marched down the middle of Langdon. I can’t speak for the others, and only have heard comments from other RNC participants, but for me at least it was incredibly empowering. We took over the street, and there was nothing police or anyone else could do about it!
That isn’t to say that there weren’t problems with it. We made some mistakes, we did some things which made others feel uncomfortable, and we didn’t organize or educate as well as we could have. Those things have been brought up internally, and I won’t waste much more space here with an itemization of problems.
RNC
The upcoming Republican National Convention is really exciting for us. First, we’ve been planning this for some time, and it’s really, really tight. The Welcoming Committee has done a terrific job, and deserve all the credit in the world for their work so far. Much care has been taken to separate actions by time OR location, to minimize spill-over effects from actions (mainly, police using direct actions to repress peaceful protest). So, actions are divided into red, yellow, and green zones (or fluffy, furry and funky), and there are three tiers of action allotted, depending on how each progresses. The intent is to completely shut down the RNC, and prevent the corronation of McCain as King of the Republican Party. It would force the Party to select McCain without the theatrical participation of the delegates.
Most importantly, though, are the institutions that will be created. Seattle gave us IndyMedia and other projects and tools, like affinity organization, and history will tell us what the RNC’s contribution to anti-authoritarian work will be. But looking ahead 4 1/2 months, the future is so promising, so hopeful, that we cannot lose.
Another world is possible, and that world begins September 1.
See you in the streets of Minneapolis!
Reply to “Claims won’t keep Adidas off my feet”
Reply to “Claims won’t keep Adidas off my feet,” by Sean Kittridge
Published in Badger Herald, 4/10/08
http://badgerherald.com/oped/2008/04/10/claims_wont_keep_adi.php
Sean,
I understand that you are merely trying to be entertaining in your writing, but as a member of the LLPC, I feel I need to correct the serious flaws in your argument. And in the future, I would encourage you to contact myself or another committee member beforehand to get all the facts of the case.
First, adidas holds a contract (actually two, sponsorship and licensing) with the University of Wisconsin which requires all apparel and other licensed goods bearing the UW’s logo to be produced under certain conditions. It is very clear to all of the members of the committee, students, faculty, and academic staff alike, that adidas was in material breach of contract: adidas pulled out production from the factory when its workers began to organize; and the workers only began to organize in response to sexual harassment, forced 15-hour shifts, and unsafe working conditions (for example, several workers have developed cancers from the machines). Instead of respecting freedom of association–which is a basic human right, according to the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights–adidas cut its own contract with the factory, and the factory closed. These workers are now blacklisted: they are virtually unhireable in El Salvador because they are recognized as “troublemakers.” This isn’t simply a matter of Christmas bonuses; according to the Workers Rights Consortium (of which the UW is a member), “the workers are owed $2,612.33 each, with individual totals ranging from $1,568.20 to $6,045.70,” in back wages, severance, health care, and social security, which Salvadoran courts have maintained are legally owed to the workers. This is a lot of money for American workers to be shorted, imagine for Salvadoran workers, where the minimum wage in the maquila sector is less than $175 a month.
I’m sure you will agree that these conditions are shameful, and that the UW should do everything in its power to disassociate itself. Adidas is in breach of contract, and has adamantly made it clear that it will do nothing to bring its standards into compliance with the contract. To NOT cut the contract sends the message to all apparel producers associated with the UW that we do not care about the Codes of Conduct, and will tolerate sweatshop contracting.
Second, as Chancellor Wiley has made clear, the UW cannot field a naked football team. There are many ways to field a football team besides a sponsorship agreement with adidas. To be honest, there is not one “good” brand; but any brand could theoretically produce any good under satisfactory working conditions, without significantly raising the price. University Bookstore recently began selling fair trade tshirts, and they have become some of their most popular items, surpassing even the managers’ sales expectations. In addition, these shirts cost much less than even sweatshop-made shirts of poorer quality. It is painfully obvious that exploitation is not necessary to keep prices down, and that there is a significant demand for fair trade apparel. Knights Apparel, the UW’s second-largest licensee, will soon be switching some production to fair trade to meet the demand. Surely, if adidas were to value its relationship with the UW, adidas could make the Badgers the first major sports team in the country, if not in the world, to wear exclusively fair trade uniforms. Wouldn’t that be an even better honor for the university that to get to the Sweet Sixteen, or the Outback Bowl? And it wouldn’t be “hippie-hemp” either–the quality would be totally indistinguishable from what the athletes currently wear, except for the conditions under which they were made.
In regards to your comment about “rearranging the seats on a prison bus,” you are partially correct, however, the UW has the power to choose the brand, and more importantly, to set the terms of the contract. The UW is a powerhouse school: few other schools are so good across the board. In terms of sheer apparel volume, it’s one of the top schools in the country; and it’s also THE fastest growing licensing school, due to tremendous work by Bo Ryan and Bret Bielema.
Now, there is one problem with everything I have just said. While brands have the ability to produce clothes and uniforms under good conditions, even profitably, they choose not to, even selectively. Why is that? Let’s say we cut adidas and bring on Nike, and ask Nike to produce all UW uniforms and apparel under fair trade conditions. It would be profitable for Nike, to be sure. But they will likely balk. Why? Because it sets a “bad” example for them. Soon, other universities would request the same. And consumer groups and NGOs. They will of course still be profiting. Instead of returning half the cost of a tshirt to millionaire shareholders, it may instead be only one third. It’s all about money. It’s about doing everything they can to force out that extra penny of profits, even if it means locking workers in the factory, killing union leaders, forcing women to get abortions, or forcing 24 hour shifts without bathroom breaks (all of these are documented cases in textile factories). However, the UW has played a historic role in improving labor standards in factories producing Bucky shirts, and we have the power to condinue doing so.
As a public university, and one that takes such pride in its progressive history and “sifting and winnowing,” it is unacceptable to be willfully complicit in such conditions. The committee will likely be recommending to Chancellor Wiley to terminate the contract with adidas. It remains to be seen whether he will listen to his advisers or listen to money, but the committee hopes that Wiley will do everything in his power to help push the industry, and the UW’s reputation, forward.
Mutual Aid among species: a case for Anarchism in practice
There is no government or authority forcing this cooperation and mutual respect between these two beings. Instead they have joined to form a meaningful relationship based on self-management and fraternity, acknowledging that they are both neighbors of the same world and same existence and have a stake in each other’s success and prosperity and those of the world as a whole.
From Behind the Orange Curtain 