From the mouths of children

One of my daily routines is to tell a story at bedtime to my child. I decided to tell her about Che Guevara, the man in Latin America, who wanted to help the poor by throwing out the rich and cruel landlords, and the evil dictators. “You have got it all muddled up pop,” my child protested. “That is Robin Hood you were talking about, and he and his men no longer exist.”

I then picked up one of her books to begin to read. The story we were reading was about a young man, called Jeff, who when not at work, was sought after by kids and adults in the neighborhood for his infectious sense of humor, his innumerable anecdotes, and his uncanny ability to take a dig at himself.

Jeff, it turns out, was a favorite because he was always around to help kids fix their broken toys, and thought them how to cycle and play ball. He also helped the elder in the neighborhood with their chores, when he could.

My child, interrupted me midway to ask, “These days, where do we find a person like this ?”. “Read me something about people we know”, she demanded.

Vowing to be as close to reality as possible, I began:

There was a man called Kirk who was the head of a company. He wore swanky suits, and was driven to work every morning in a luxury car. He was a man of many words, usually about his company, and its products, and how well they sold. In fact, he never passed up an opportunity to talk about these things.

His duty was to make money for the people who owned the company – they call them shareholders - and he did that very well.

He must have been an important man, because he had lots of people working for him. Everybody laughed when he said something funny. There were a lot of newspaper reporters and TV camera men running behind him. He was a “thought leader” and what he said was considered very important. He was always dressed right, always with a smile for the cameras.

He had people – they call them a public relations firm - that reminded newspapers all the time about his company, his work, and yes, his thought leadership. He traveled a lot, worked a lot, his company organized functions where he gave speeches a lot, he was away from home a lot. His company rewarded him with vacations in exotic locations, lots of money....

My child was snoring before I could finish the story. She never asked me again to read to her at bedtime.

Instant Happiness

Che Guevara: from revolutionary to commercial icon

Commercial interest and advertising companies have systematically appropriated and transformed symbols of protest, while robbing them of their original content and meaning.

The most glaring instance is a snap of Ernesto "Che" Guevara taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda, which inspired Jim Fitzpatrick, an Irish artist, to make pictures of the revolutionary, based on that photograph.

The iconic snap and the pictures have Che Guevara in his long hair and beard, sporting his beret with a single star on it - a picture not many would have missed.

Guevara was executed by the Bolivian Army on October 9, 1967. A number of Latin American countries plan memorials this week in his honour.

In the west the pictures have been used as a decoration for products from tissues to underwear, reports the BBC. With time Che Guevara the image and Che the revolutionary got separated.

Ironically, the widespread commercial use of the pictures is partly due to a decision by Fitzpatrick not to take a copyright on his poster.

The poster, produced by Fitzpatrick under his own imprint in 1968, achieved worldwide circulation and he was quite famous as a result. But because he made the image copyright-free, he earned nothing from it personally, nor did he wish to, Fitzpatrick is quoted as saying on his web site.

As for the original photo by Korda, he allowed it to be used without charging for royalties because he thought that the more the picture spread, the more would Che Guevara’s ideals.

But in 2000, 40 years after he took the picture, he sued an advertising agency, and the company that supplied the photograph for use in an advertisment for a vodka brand, according to Famous Pictures: The Magazine.

To use the image of Che Guevara to sell vodka was a slur on his name and memory, as he never drank himself, he was not a drunk, and drink should not be associated with his immortal memory, Korda told the media according to this report. He was able to affirm his ownership of the photo and won an out-of-court settlement of US$50,000, which he donated to the Cuban medical system, according to Famous Pictures: The Magazine.


Related articles:

Thoughts on Che Guevara and the cruelty of capitalism

Thoughts on Che Guevara and the cruelty of capitalism

The pain and cruelty generated by the free market and capitalism is no single person’s fault. As most people will tell you, it is the “invisible hand” more efficiently balancing supply and demand, including the demand and supply of factors of production, even if one of those factors - human beings - can often feel pain, joblessness, insecurity, and powerlessness.

The capitalist world at large absolves itself from the pain and cruelty by blaming it on “the system”. It is the way things are, and sorry you just lucked out. Sorry you lucked out and lost your job when some US companies decided to send your job to India or China, because they were only following capitalist principles of finding the lowest cost factor of production.

You could take some cold comfort in the theory that this is just a structural adjustment, and that progressively the American economy will move to higher value-added jobs, for which incidentally you were never skilled. Tell that to your hungry kids when they are whining for the food you can no longer put on the table.

The Indians and the Chinese are now on a spending spree, yes on acquired tastes like Cabernet and caviar, and all things branded. The American worker should not crib, apologists say, because they are these days buying all things American, and helping boost the US economy. Unfortunately all things American are not longer manufactured in the US, but in China.

Take ten years from now, Indian workers, including software engineers may also find their jobs on the block, as companies move to lower cost locations, or expand to other markets. Once again the theorists of capitalism will tell them that their pain, their powerlessness are only temporary effects of a structural change.

Have you ever wondered why the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara inspires many people in a vague sort of a way, even 40 years after his death ? It is not that these people support Marxism, or for that matter some of Che Guevara’s controversial actions, including his summary executions of supporters of General Fulgencio Batista in Cuba after the Marxists seized power in 1959.

Che Guevara and revolutionaries like him strike a mild sympathetic chord in many of us, because despite the odds, they did what we may never do.

Instead of being powerless victims of a cruel system, they chose to question and to overthrow the feudalism coupled with neo-capitalism in parts of South America. And they were not alone. In other countries around the world too there have been people who have stood out to fight systems that are unjust and oppressive.

Today it may be the turn of people in capitalist societies, aiming to restore their power and autonomy. As citizens, people have the right to influence the political process so that the wealth that is generated is distributed more equitably, and people are empowered.

This is not about overthrowing the capitalist system. It is not about “economic populism” which Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, says has caused many an economic disaster in Latin America. This is about moderating the system – getting governments to spend more on the welfare of their people, getting capitalism to get less rapaciously greedy, and protecting vulnerable sections of society who have neither the skills nor the capital to compete.

Take the plight of workers in capitalist economies. Currently in most of these economies, if the CEO of a company cuts staff, the company’s shares spike on the stock market, and later the CEO’s salary also jumps. The CEO can now keep fewer staff and make them work longer, many of them driven by the fear that their jobs could be lost. The CEO and his top management have benefited, and so have the shareholder, and you as the consumer. But you as a worker are out of a job, no longer able to participate in the orgy of consumption.

Do companies have to maximize profit at the expense of workers, or are they doing so mainly because a lot of industries are not unionized ? The pet argument is that if CEOs are not given the freedom to do as they please, they will lose out to competing companies. Lost in this dogma is the possibility that you can still pay and treat your people better, without making your products costlier, and still winning in the market. You can do that by shooting for reasonable profits, rather than exorbitant profits !

If the stock market would put less pressure on CEOs to generate profits, CEOs could continue to please the consumer, and yes, even the worker. CEOs may even allow trade unions and higher worker empowerment.

The cult of equity, and the celebrity status accorded to CEOs who help drive that stock up, has also translated into wide disparities between the salaries and perks of the CEO and his top management and the rest of the organization. Can’t that gap be perhaps reduced, so that the rest of the organization also benefits from capitalism ?

Apologists for capitalism will say that the key strength of capitalism is that you too can strive to be CEO. That line is cold comfort to the unemployed guy on the dole. Others will say that the outrageous salaries earned by CEOs and top management are an incentive to perform. Pray do only CEOs need an incentive to work ? What about the stiff who catches a bus or train to work each day, with nothing to look forward to except his daily routine ?

Nothing about what has been outlined so far is fool-proof. It may not work, or there may be people who don’t want it to work. But it is only by thinking of empowerment, thinking of humanizing the system, and organizing around these principles, that the process of change can begin.

Che Guevara is more than a handsome face on a T-shirt. His example dares us to dream of empowerment, of taking control of our lives.

Marxism may be dead as an ideology, but revolutionaries like Che Guevara can inspire us to think about ways of countering our powerlessness in a capitalist system.

Related article:

Free markets do not necessarily mean democracy or quality of life

Orkut as theatre

Orkut, the social networking site hosted by Google Inc., is surely and quickly emerging more as a well-choreographed spectacle, than as a genuine and spontaneous forum for social interaction.

A caveat at the outset: this is not a critique of Orkut alone, but of all similar networking sites, that were set up with the promise of helping the youth to socialize and make friends.

The way Orkut has shaped out, nay its new raison d'être, is about making members look good to their friends and peers on the site. It is less about spontaneity and more about theatre.

Members upload their best snaps, chronicle their travels with well-selected snaps clicked in exotic locations, update peers on their wonderful new jobs, and generally convey through their sites that everything is hunky-dory and on the upswing at their end.

Social status on Orkut is predicated largely on the number of persons in your friends listing, even if you barely know some of the persons, or didn't exchange a call or a scrap with some of them for months.

Another measure of Orkut status is the number of scraps in your scrapbook, which most folks on Orkut treasure and accumulate, even though Orkut provides a facility to delete scraps.

The best way to increase the number of scraps is to scrap others as frequently as possible, even if they have nothing much to say, or if what had to be said could have been better said on phone. Hence you have husbands scrapping their wives to say they will be late for dinner, or as banal a comment as “Hey nice to c u here”.

The upshot is that nothing serious actually gets discussed on Orkut. If social networking in the physical world is about the sharing of common themes and ideas, bouncing out of new and unusual ideas, and generally trying to build community, Orkut has become by and large about mechanical scrapping and collection of friends.

There aren’t many new, original ideas of singular importance discussed on Orkut. There is nothing online like the “fiercely agonal spirit” described by the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In contrast, Orkut and other social networking is about conformity, being one with the crowd online, and doing your best to get accepted.

There have been frequent attempts to bring in political debate into Orkut, with communities like “I Hate Pakistan” or “Bush Sucks”(login required). But don’t expect a cerebral, well-informed debate on these communities.

On “Bush Sucks”, for example, besides referring to George Bush as responsible for killing thousands of people, members of Orkut said they hated Bush because “he was born”. Another “Orkuter” hates Bush because “he wants the abstinence of sex...before marrieg (sic)”, while still another dislikes the US President because “i don't know... just hate bush”.

The lack of depth in political commentary largely reflects the psyche of the generation that is currently on Orkut –-- they are primarily in their teens or early and mid 20s. This is the MTV generation that grew up with one credo – hedonism even if most of them can’t spell the word. For them Che Guevara is a picture on a T-Shirt to impress your girl with.

Related Articles:

Internet reflects, nay amplifies social problems
Instant Happiness