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Inhalt
| XII PLJ Kongreso įspūdžiai, 2: Accomplishments |
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| Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira | |
| 2006.07.16 10.11 | |
       Culture feeds on the sap of economics, and a material surplus is necessary, so that culture may grow, develop, and become subtle. [...] Art needs comfort, even abundance. Furnaces have to be hotter, wheels have to move faster, looms have to turn more quickly, schools have to work better.  In part 1, I argued that the "apolitiškumas" of organizations like PLB, PLJS, and the Akademikai are outright contradictory with the organizations' own bylaws, which agitate for the support and defense of an independent Lithuanian state. Not only, then, are these "apolitical" positions paradoxical, but they also contribute, via political silence, to the continued economic exploitation of Lithuanians living abroad. I closed by asserting that this was an offensive position to take.What I hope to accomplish in this second part is a description of what, actually, happened at the 12th PLJK, at least in terms of this myth of "apolitiškumas." Before I continue, I have to make the appropriate disclaimers. I am a member of the current board of PLJS. The views expressed below I hope to frame in such a way that would not cause strong disagreement or disgrace among members of the current board. Furthermore, since PLJS has not yet published their own version of the Kongresas (only since the board is still settling in), this may end up being among the first textual "įspūdžiai" one will get a chance to read. I feel very sorry about this, but I want my views to be available published here while they are still fresh in my mind. As such, I want to underscore as clearly and as many times as possible: below are merely my views and my perspective leading to my decision to stand for election to the board. Furthermore, they are necessarily limited because I am making a very specific point about specific accomplishments of the 12th PLJK. My not mentioning banquets or speeches or something is not proof that they didn't happen or that they were unimportant. This is not a general, expository piece, but rather a narrow, critical piece. It is only because no exposition of Kongresas yet exists that I'm forced to do some to provide context. I can only beg that the reader remember that limited scope as she reads on. To start, I would like to quote a part of II.2 of the PLJS bylaws. Section II covers the organization's "Apimtis, tikslai ir uždaviniai." The choice quote is: PLJS aukščiausias tikslas — rūpintis lietuvių jaunimu gyvenančiu už Lietuvos Respublikos ribų.Later in the section, this concern is narrowed down to "kultūrines, švietimo ir kitas pagalbines priemones." This emphasis on the cultural and educational aspects of the lives of the members of PLJS fits back with what I railed against at the end of yesterday's post. As the Trotsky quote above demonstrates, it is impossible to concern oneself with cultural affairs if people are poor and starving. If a person spends every hour trying to get dinner together, then this person will have no time for cultural expression. As Trotsky writes elsewhere in Literature and Revolution, culture only appears at the end of an epoch, being as it is a response to the economic and political realities of its time.  At the 12th PLJK, the presidium voted for a the creation of a new commission: the vision commission. At first, I thought this was going to be a silly bit of busywork, much like our intensely useless discussions about a PLJS "mission statement" were back at the 10th PLJK in Australia. Yet one of the commission's members, Liepa from the US, approached me and asked what I thought PLJS's main concerns would be in ten years.In writing for the new, "serious" Lithchat over the past few months, I've taken to reading the BBC and other news coming out of England about Lithuanians living there. There are at least 150,000 Lithuanians living in London, and thousands more scattered around the nation, taking up whatever jobs they can get (Žas's line about "Londone įkursime greitai Laisvės alėją" has already come true). I'm not an expert, but I would guess that this is a function of accession—and that the number will only continue to rise. In one lecture during Kongresas, it was suggested that this massive emmigration is hurting Lithuania—that the young Lithuanian intelligentsia is leaving to be replaced by "Ukrainian laborers." That could be. But I also know that the 150k Lithuanians in London are not all college graduates. Or if they are, many are still working the most menial jobs. Perhaps the most menial, most frightening and dehumanizing job being worked by Lithuanians in the UK is that of prostitute. Most of the stories I've seen in the Beeb about Lithuanians have been related to white slavery. And this is an extra disastrous form of white slavery, where the women are locked in their rooms with hardly no access to the outside world. Without sentimentalizing the plight of these women, my more general discussion with Liepa (which now included the delegates from Great Britain) brought this social and political situation in direct confrontation with the goals of PLJS. PLJS, theoretically, as the line from the bylaws I quoted shows, cares for the fate of all Lithuanian youth living beyond the borders of Lithuania. But what is PLJS doing to help them? To care for their well-being? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not only that, but PLJS, as an "apolitical" organization, can argue that it cannot get involved in the mucky political battles that surround human rights issues. These issues are the jurisdiction of the government, not an NGO, even though these workers, if undocumented, may be frightened about seeking help from governmental offices, fearing deportation or worse. As I continued the discussion, I started imagining waves upon waves of youths fleeing from Lithuania for whatever reason. I saw country bumpkins from tiny farm villages lost in the big city of London, totally ignorant of their rights as citizens of the EU, conned into various life-harming forms of employment. The literature of the US of the early 20th century features is awash in examples of the country-bumpkin-exploited-by-the-city-slicker trope, and every one that I know flashed back. "The reality of Lithuania in the EU," I told Liepa, "would be the absolutely most important issue facing PLJS in the next decade." The EU, for all the transnational good it brings, also carries the dark edge of globalism. Bodies move through space more freely now, and, as a result, these same bodies are more able to be exploited, to fall in between cracks, to disappear, to drift off of unemployment rolls. Lithuania, in an era of porous borders, ceases to be the patch of land on the Baltic. Lithuania is now that population as well as the diaspora population (this was Liepa's idea that we started building on). As Bishop Baltakis used to have "Lithuanians around the world" as his diocese, so now must all Lithuanian organizations imagine their scope. There is an administrative apparatus called "The State of Lithuania," but there is a "Lithuanian Nation" that now, unlike at any point in its time, is scattered like grains of sand, around the whole world, or, well, at least Europe. This image led me to the second part of my prediction regarding the PLJS vision: in ten years, PLJS will be voting to limit the number of delegates from Europe to 60. PLJS was designed with a built in concern over North American dominance. Hence, of 120 maximum delegates, no more than 60, could come from North America. Additionally, every nation with an LJS is allowed to have at least one delegate. So now that Europe has splintered into so many nations—nations that are filling up with Lithuanians emigrating and taking advantage of the mobility offered by accession—it is sprouting myriad LJSes. UEFA has 52 FAs in it, so imagine an LJS appearing in every locale where there is a UEFA national team. That means that Europe could conceivably send, in the future, a bare minimum of 52 delegates to PLJKs. Suddenly the stranglehold on those 60 delegates held by the US and Canada becomes rather untenable. What was meant as a gesture to limit North American power has become, instead, a threat to the expansion of the Lithuanian diaspora in Europe. As such, on Wednesday of Kongresas, the delegates from Great Britain were already passing around a petition to change the bylaws to either allow the PLJS board to set the number of delegates from every LJS or to limit North American representation to merely 50 delegates. But before we could discuss that, we had the first major, Kongresas-wide discussion of the PLJS vision. By this point, and after being approached by several members of previous PLJS boards, I had decided to stand for candidacy in the board. That vision mentioned above made me feel that PLJS was at a historical crossroads. They were in desperate need of a new vision, a new perspective on the world. They needed to show that they understood that the world had changed so radically that it could no longer be directed according to the first principles set down in 1949 in the Lietuvių charta. During the lectures, I felt like there were a lot of people who simply missed the point. They were clinging to visions of the nation, of the state, that could be termed outmoded at best—and unhelpfully reactionary at worst. Some lecturers did show a sense of the transnational era, but they insisted on framing it within the neoliberal notion of globalization, using capitalism's inexorable march toward convincing the world of its own inevitability to (perhaps unintentionally) stifle debate about different models of the world. One lecturer even spoke fondly of globalization's High Hagiographer, Thomas Friedman. I got more and more frustrated. Not that I have the answers and these people don't, but that these lecturers showed so little humility when it came to discuss issues which are far from settled in stone. They took as axiomatic the inevitability of late capitalism, the nation-state as the highest organizing form of a population, and the divorce of cultural needs (exercising one's "Lithuanianness") from political and economic needs. Imagining, again at the risk of sentimentalizing, a young woman locked in a closet in London, I would see this all as pissing in the wind, if not a tacit approval of the market structures that allow the woman to be locked up in the first place.  Tave parduos kaip lėlę. A globalized Lithuanian. On Thursday, the big argument was the return of the question of the 60 delegates. The lowering of the 60 to 50 was defeated outright. The second proposal, to allow the PLJS board to set the delegate number for all the nations (as it already does for all nations but the US and Canada, which get the 60 guaranteed) also fell. Then a sort of compromise was established: PLJS would separate the world into continents, and each continent would be allowed to send no more than 60 delegates. The first part sailed through with no trouble at all. The second part led to extended discussions in three languages (Lithuanian, English, and Spanish). Finally, exactly on the nose, the suggested bylaw change passed. North America would no longer have a stranglehold on half of the delegates of the Kongresas. This was, I felt, the first step to modernizing PLJS. PLJS showed an awareness that the Lithuanian diaspora is flooding Europe, not the US. And though the math of geometrical increase has benefitted the US and Canada in sheer numbers of Lithuanians because of five (or more) generations of immigration, the future center of PLJS remains in Europe, not North America. On Friday morning, the debate over the vision statement returned. This time, there was a concerted effort to add into our vision a sense of concern over the social well-being of Lithuanian youth in addition to concern over their cultural well-being. This addition was strongly opposed by some, worried that it would turn PLJS into a charity organization or an organization doing the work of the government. Seeing that the Lithuanian embassy in London can't even handle the number of calls it gets, it seems like precisely the space where an organization like PLJS could step in. Also, as mentioned above, PLJS, as an NGO, might be a more attractive source of support for undocumented migrants, fearful of deportation. PLJS certainly isn't going to deport anyone. As for financial charity, PLJS has no money, and having seen JAVLJS emails in the past, I know that people already hit LJSes up for money, anyway. Making social well-being part of PLJS's vision would not, I argued, increase the number of financial requests. But it's not just the locked up prostitutes that is mobilizing this concern. As I mentioned in Part 1, my concerns grew out of a more general concern in worker's rights in diaspora. Undocumented workers are thrown into shadows where their rights fall into a murky space. It's unclear what rights they do have. Even documented workers, of course, are often unaware of their rights regarding sick time, breaks, and the like. PLJS, I think, should take these sorts of concerns seriously. In fact, our transnational world, I believe, will only heighten the importance of social and economic issues ("human rights issues") at the cost of cultural ones. Lithuanians living in diaspora won't be asking, in the future, for the Lithuanian government to arrange book drops or to send teachers for their Lithuanian schools (or priests for their Lithuanian churches). Instead, they will be asking the government to fight for their rights as migrant laborers. And where the government will fail them, they will organize and form organizations devoted to economic well-being. It is, I feel, PLJS's once in a lifetime opportunity to be a part of that shift. The vision discussions were hurried and rushed, but the clause about social well-being remained. And it is now officially part of PLJS's 10 year plan to concern itself with the political and economic lives of Lithuanian youth, not just their cultural lives. I think this is great news. So those were, in my opinion, the two major events that got decided at the 12th Kongresas.: The 800-lb. gorilla that is North America was disintegrated, thrown into the trash bin; and PLJS demonstrated the openness to expand its concern for Lithuanians to beyond merely their cultural needs. The Kongresas didn't pass any specific resolutions regarding this new, expanded concern, and I don't even know specifically what PLJS could do, but it's something I'll certainly be considering (on my own time) during the next few years leading up to the 13th PLJK. Maybe then it will be possible to even try to turn our vision into more of a reality. I ask, then, everyone who has reached this end of the article to consider the question for themselves, too. What use is money for a new Lithuanian cultural center if people are unable to attend it because they are locked up in brothels, earning some unscrupulous pimp pound after pound? It's unclear to me why these issues never played as large a role before. It could be since, in diaspora during the Cold War, generally Lithuanians were able to integrate themselves politically and economically into the middle class of their adopted nations. As such, they had the leisure to focus exclusively on culture—a leisure not available to the swarm of migrant labor fleeing Lithuania now. Furthermore, the Lithuanians in diaspora were convinced of the eventual cultural destruction of the Lithuanian identity at the hands of the communists, to the point of (arrogantly) anointing themselves the keepers of the Lithuanian flame, hoping to return it to an independent Lithuania, where the old hearths could be relit. Of course, no such cultural death happened. But for those who feel that I'm massively overreaching with these new hopes for PLJS, I ask you to reread the eighth point of the Charta, which is where I've decided to ground my ideas of a new Lithuanianness: 8. Draugija yra tautinės kultūros veiksminga talkininkė. Lietuvis kuria ir palaiko religines, kultūrines, jaunimo, savišalpos, profesines ir kitas lietuvių draugijas.The Lithuanian organizes. Hopefully PLJS will be able to help the masses of voiceless Lithuanians around the world in their quest to achieve their own dreams of organization. |
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| Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2006.08.08 11.46 ) |