What I found 'creepy' (and I'll stick to that word) about the DIA "movement" was that a purely personal, even anti-social, activity was being called a _movement_ and was being defended for the "objective" superiority in quality of products someone makes for him/herself. That reeks of an attempt to escape the impact of capitalism without changing capitalist production relations. That is what appealed to intellectuals who were attracted to fascism, and even characterized the motives of some of the 'early' leaders of fascist movements (such as those killed in the Night of the Long Knives." The Green Lantern Club as described here and the baby-sitting pool I described were _potentially_ political as long as they did not pretend to be political.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Gar Lipow Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:12 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Baby sitting coops?
A friend of mine told me about the Green Lantern Dinner club umm somewhere in Mass? (speaking from unreliable memory) No longer in existence. They rented a cheap building. You could get two meals a day. The no money cost option was to work umm one day a week? Two days a week? Something like that. Or you could pay and work less. (Paying members were important cause they covered cost of food, renting the building, power and so on.) Also people could walk in off the street and pay for a meal, treating it as a diner. Not particularly cheap, but some people enjoyed the atmosphere and "meal at a time" customers provided revenue that helped keep everyone else's costs low. It served two groups simultaneously: really was cheaper than buying groceries for very poor people willing to pay in labor. Also was an inexpensive way to get reasonably healthy meals for people (mostly but not only men) who either did not know how to cook or hated to cook. Many of these were not poor, but just wanted to eat all their meals out without spending a fortune and still getting something both healthy and tasty. The vast majority of those at the Green Lantern were subscribers who ate two meals a day there every day for either of those reasons.
On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> We had in the student apartments at Michigan what we called a baby-sitting
> pool. You called the secretary, she got a parent who was available, &
booked
> the hours. It worked fine. There was always someone.
>
> Is this what Krugman calls a co-op. That seems a bit pretentious.
>
> A Tenants Committee did come out of acquaintances made through the pool.
It
> was just getting underway as I left, so I don't know what happened later.
>
> Carrol
>
>
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