Alexander Cockburn liked pit barbeque. I know this, because, just prior to a planned road trip through Georgia and the Carolinas several years ago, he asked Counterpunch readers to recommend some good barbeque joints to visit. I e-mailed him the names of a couple, one in Ellijay, in north Georgia, the other in Jackson, just south of Atlanta. I explained that he would probably particularly enjoy the one in Ellijay, because the colorful owner, with a hill country gift for humorous self-promotion, enjoyed exaggerating his political association with people like Pat Buchanan with large photographs posted all around the restaurant. He thanked me for the referrals, saying that they were tempting, but that, unfortunately, his route was not taking him near them.

On Saturday, I was shocked to learn that Cockburn had died of cancer. Despite my disagreement with him on subjects like global warming and Occupy, I respected his intellectual independence. Cockburn rightly pilliored the emphasis that some on the the left place upon hostility towards religion, correctly observing that the US is one of the most Christian countries in the world. You aren't going to persuade many Americans to politically support you, he observed drily, by attacking Christianity. More importantly, he understood that both liberalism and the organized left had lost any political influence that they possessed long ago. Perhaps because of his close contact with direct action environmental protest movements on the West Coast, as personified through the efforts of people like Judi Bari, Darryl Cherney and Julia Butterfly, among others, he recognized the emergence of an anti-authoritarian left that integrated environmentalism with anti-capitalism. Living on the Lost Coast in Petrolia, he watched it happen right before his eyes.

Accordingly, Cockburn wasn't surprised at the eruption of confrontational protests against the WTO in Seattle on N30 in 1998, protests that he covered personally. And, because of his lack of surprise, he properly identified, in a compelling article entitled Seattle Diary, the flash points of contention that evolved out of it. He criticized the AFL-CIO for diverting a large march away from the downtown where locked down protesters were being tear gassed and pepper-sprayed by the Seattle police. Fearful of embarrassing President Clinton, who was scheduled to attend the meeting the following day, the AFL-CIO refused to come to the assistance of people in the streets who were fighting on its behalf against the neoliberal policies of the WTO. It was a classic instance of US labor unions serving in the role of mediating protest for the benefit of capital. In this, the AFL-CIO response to the street protests in Seattle prefigured the recent health care reform debacle where, after a similarly illusory campaign of opposition, it accepted a horrible program in return for a short-term carve out from a tax upon purported high cost health plans.

Cockburn also recognized the same tendency among NGOs that claim to oppose the reorganization of the global economy for the benefit of capital. He rightly criticized Global Exchange, and one of its founders, Medea Benjamin, for intervening on behalf of the police to protect Niketown, the Gap and McDonald's, from attack by angry crowds. Benjamin even went so far as to say that the people involved should have been arrested. Cockburn, upon being challenged by Benjamin's husband, Kevin Danaher, exposed them, like the leadership of the AFL-CIO, as being noteworthy for wanting a dialogue with the WTO while the protesters wanted to shut it down. Hence, Global Exchange was willing to assist the police in stopping the attacks because it impaired its prospects of serving as a self-selected intermediary between the anti-globalization movement, the WTO and the Clinton White House. It is one thing to argue that the left is not well served by instances of property destruction, as many in Occupy have done, and quite another to publicly state that those involved should be arrested. Just as the AFL-CIO was willing to serve in the role of ensuring that its members did not participate in unsanctioned protest that threatened its political and corporate relationships, Global Exchange attempted to fulfill a similar function in relation those involved in direct action.

For me, Cockburn's coverage of the N30 protests in Seattle was a seminal event, because it revealed a world of activism that I didn't know existed, or, if I did, seemed remote. At that time, I lived in a UC college town, Davis, California, where the boundaries of acceptable activism where dictated by the local Democratic Party apparatus, which was, of course, Clintonophile through and through. Cockburn intellectually legitimized the increasing centrality of anti-authoritarian activism, an activism that would be in the forefront of resistance to the so-called war on terror post-9/11, as most brutally manifested by the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, more recently, in the Occupy movement. Like Tariq Ali, he insisted, despite criticism, upon the urgency of the creation of a broad based anti-imperialist effort that included the libertarian right. For both, saving the lives of people in the Middle East and Central Asia took precedence over the primacy of ideological consistency. The libertarian site antiwar.com periodically reposted his articles, and Justin Raimondo, the founder of the site, posted a heartfelt obituary. Cockburn understood that while, in the long term, the interests of anti-authoritarians and libertarians were at odds, they were congruent on the essential, contemporary question of US imperialism. Not surprisingly, liberals have taken the opposite stance, with the result that the interminable war on terror proceeds with little restraint.

Curiously, in one of his last articles, Cockburn posted a valedictory for Occupy. In it, he seems to have implicitly undergone a last minute conversion to an orthodox Leninism. For this, and other reasons, Louis Proyect found it objectionable, and while many of his criticisms are legitimate, he fails to recognize that Cockburn was saying a lot of the same things that sympathetic Marxists like Pham Binh have already said, especially in relation to the distortions created by the primacy of 24/7 activists and its opaque decisionmaking processes. Cockburn was especially sharp in his critique of the fetishization of social networking technology among some in Occupy, something that I had already expressed ambivalence about this in a post on my blog several months ago. My sense is that Cockburn may have again said the unmentionable, that Occupy is dead as we know it. He will not, however, live to discover whether the social conditions that gave rise to it will persist, if not intensify, resulting in future variations of like-minded anti-capitalist resistance.

Labels: Activism, Alternative Media, American Empire, Anarchism, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Religion

Mel, known for the excellent Broadsnark blog, explained her evolution back in 2009. It remains well worth reading in its entirety today. Here's an excerpt that provides a provocative insight into the origins of Occupy:

. . . . . But, in the end, the nonprofit work wasn’t much better than the for profit work. We were helping people, but not as many as we should have been. We were government funded. When I calculated the percentage of tax dollars that actually went to direct services, it made me want to cry. Some of the grants went through so many agencies that, by the time each agency shaved their overhead costs off the top, there was virtually nothing left.

And even though the organization I worked for made a good pretense of listening to and caring about staff, much of it was for show. Additional funding we received went straight into raises for my boss and a fat consulting fee for a wealthy board member. Meanwhile, we were short-staffed and asking employees to start paying a portion of their rising health care costs.

Worse than the frustration, overwork, and disillusionment was how being a manager changed my relationship with all the people I worked with. Although I felt like I spent most of my day battling with my boss on behalf of the staff, in the end I was just one of the managers who was making decisions behind their backs – decisions they often did not like, decisions that were sometimes bad. It didn’t matter if I had fought the decision in those meetings. Once it was made I had to stand behind it.

I’ve worked for other nonprofits since that one. And while I have steadfastly avoided any more management positions, I have seen the same dynamic in every place I have worked. Larger nonprofits, especially here in DC, have the added issues of ivy league elitism and grotesque hierarchy (which they are in denial of). Yet somehow they think that they are going to make the world a more democratic, egalitarian, and just place from within an organization that is anything but.

It ain’t gonna happen.

In other compelling parts of this post, she relates her inability to attain fulfillment through her family and her subsequent work as a manager with a private law firm. In other words, she encountered, as many have, a world of social dead ends. Occupy is full of such individualistic, imaginative, independent minded people. And, as long as they continue to experience the hypocrisy and lack of opportunity experienced by people like Mel, social unrest in the US will intensify under a proliferation of banners.

Labels: Activism, American Culture, Anarchism, Liberals, Occupy Wall Street

A couple of weeks ago, Louis Proyect posted an excellent article to The North Star site, Party-Building in the 21st Century. Proyect, the unrepentent Marxist, writes from the perspective of someone who has survived the sectarian stuggles of the last 40 years. Accordingly, there is much in the article that merits praise.

For example, Proyect is scornful of those Marxist formations that have seemingly existed solely for the purpose of denigrating the efforts of others to organize broad based anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist coalitions. He emphasizes that it is essential for the left to engage people in terms of the difficulties that they experience in their daily lives. Hence, his positive references to Lenin's 1899 draft programme for the Russian Social-Democrats, the Black Panther breakfast program and the recent SYRIZA 40-point program, which, along with structural measures like cutting military spending, taxing the banks and reforming the electoral process, includes proposals such as housing the homeless in churches, government buildings and banks, opening dining rooms in public schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to children and free health benefits to the unemployed, homeless and those with low salaries. For someone like me, who lives in a city, Sacramento, that has been devastated by the bursting of the real estate bubble, with a proliferating homeless population that constituted one of the most prominent features of the local Occupy effort, such an approach has great appeal.

Interestingly, as acknowledged by Proyect and Pham Binh, anti-authoritarians grasped this concept while Marxists did not, working upon issues within Occupy that were seemingly at odds with their vision of society. As a result, we have observed the peculiarity of anarchists participating in the defense of people threatened with foreclosure, protests against university fee increases and resistance to the closure of public schools. Of course, it only appears peculiar if one is unaware of the anti-authoritarian emphasis upon the need to provide support for those victimized by the deprivation and violence of the capitalist system. It remains an open question as to whether they can continue to do so, but they should be credited for the right response at a critical moment.

With Occupy currently out of public view as a consequence of police repression, there is much discussion how to proceed. Proyect, not surprisingly, along with other Marxists, sees the way forward through through a humanitarian program that forms the basis of a new socialist party, evoking the tangled history of such efforts going back to the 19th Century. Given that he knows his history well, his presentation, on its own terms, is flawless. But what does it mean to engage in party-building in the 21st Century by reference to examples that, in some instances, are over 100 years old? Of course, there is much to learn from them, but one must also account for the social evolution that have occurred during this period, with one of the most significant aspects of it being the disintegration of collective social institutions that engaged the working class. When anarchists and Marxists competed for the support of workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these workers, whether Marxist or anarchist, had networks of housing, schools, social centers, gymnasiums and newspapers. They created such networks because the governmental and non-profit programs that provide such services today either didn't exist, or were grossly inadequate. One of the paradoxes of the creation of the liberal social welfare state is that it substituted the governmental and non-profit provision of assistance for earlier efforts created by workers, providing, at least until recently, higher levels of support while simultaneously disempowering them. In parts of the world that experienced industrialization after the United States and northern Europe, like Italy and South America, this process was not concluded until the 1970s. Contemporary neoliberalism is distinctive because it extracts the value of these governmental forms of social assistance for the benefit of private investors.

For purposes of this discussion, however, it is essential to understand that the socialist parties described by Proyect emerged, in most instances, as part of the vibrant, independent institutional universe created by workers prior to the creation of the welfare state. In other words, party-builders had fertile ground in which to construct them, with workers readily accessible to them and thereby responsive to an attempt to assert their interests through a collectively organized party structure. Along these lines, even Proyect's reference to the Black Panthers is consistent with this, as many African Americans, in places like Oakland, Los Angeles, Detroit and Newark, had been excluded from the benefits of the welfare state through discriminatory practices (consider, for example, that there was a housing shortage in Watts just prior to the 1965 riots while thousands upon thousands of homes were being constructed for whites in the Los Angeles suburbs nearby). Accordingly, it was still necessary for them to rely upon informal networks of social support that were no longer necessary for others, especially the white working class. Even anarchists, while hostile to the electoral process, did, in many instances, as anarcho-syndicalists, participate in unions that served a similar purpose.

In this, the great socialist parties of the 20th Century, the Labor Party in the United Kingdom, the Parti Comunista Italiano in Italy, the Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Socialist and Communist parties in France, among others, were all dependent upon a collective ethos that facilitated the emergence of the mass based, modern political party. The repudiation of this collective ethos is one of the most salient features of our time, and presents a challenge that must be confronted by anyone, like Proyect and, to a lesser extent, Binh, who proposes a socialist party-building enterprise for the left. We need not linger long over the evidence of this repudiation, it is all around us, the abandonment of the political parties by larger and larger segments of the population, the atomization of people within their communities and the prominence of a virtual culture that increasingly manipulates people through simulation and stimulation, as anticipated by intellectual figures like Bifo and Baudrillard. Constructing a party in such circumstances requires more than a willingness to participate in coalitions and the creation of a platform that speaks directly to needs of people.

Put bluntly, it additionally requires a traumatic delegitimization of the existing structures of political, social and cultural authority. We can identify three places where it has occurred: Venezuela, Bolivia and Greece. In Venezuela, the 1989 caracazo ignited a process that lead to the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez and the implementation of measures designed to alleviate the extreme inequality within the country. In Bolivia, Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism took power through the generational efforts of indigenous social movements in opposition to neoliberal policies and drug eradication measures dictated by the United States. Meanwhile, in Greece, the imposition of extreme austerity measures since 2009 has resulted in the success of SYRIZA, a coalition of leftist parties, in recent elections. Greece, and, perhaps, Bolivia as well, presents the prospect of a possible socialist formation contemplated by Proyect, while Venezuela remains a country where power is still exercised through elites, with the mobilization of the populace through participatory political structures being tentative at best.

Proyect has periodically said that he expects conditions in the United States to continue to decline because of the rapaciousness of global capitalist elites. It is a rational assessment with a high probability of being accurate. He therefore insists that there is a great urgency towards the undertaking of the party-building effort that he advocates. Perhaps so, but if it proceeds, it is likely to move forward absent the vanguardism that he mentions in relation to the Nicaraguan revolution. SYRIZA relies upon a consensus decisionmaking process that preserves unity around a coherent statement of policy objectives in opposition to austerity. By doing so, it highlights the fact that future socialist formations, to the extent that they can be considered parties at all, will not administer themselves in accordance with the Leninist practices of the past. Instead, they will operate more horizontally, exposing the irrelevancy of anti-authoritarian critiques centered around the pernicious hierarchies within them. Accordingly, we may be moving towards a squaring of the circle whereby anti-authoritarians concede the necessity of participation within the electoral processes of the state, while Marxists acknowledge that it must be done through a formation that is horizontal to the greatest degree possible.

But can this be done in the United States as proposed by Proyect? I tend to believe that the country is too large, too fragmented, too much in the thrall of capital and militaristic nationalism for it to happen anytime soon. Instead, there will be a prolonged period of direct action and mutual aid efforts to expose the deprivation of the system and ameliorate its effects. In doing so, the participants must necessarily engage the populace in terms of their daily needs. But building the new in the shell of the old is not just an aphorism, it is considered a realistic, immediate strategy for dealing with the loss of jobs, housing, educational opportunities and medical care required to survive in this society. Hence, the parents of children in the Oakland Unified School District, faced with the closure of 5 elementary schools, didn't decide to organize a local socialist coalition, instead, they seized one of the schools planned for closure, Lakeview Elementary, and reopened it to continue to educate their children. Through the proliferation of such actions over time, the left may accumulate sufficient power to accelerate the collapse of American capitalism. But I doubt that it will happen peaceably through participation in the electoral process. At most, such participation, if it happens, will merely be one instrument among many that the left pragmatically utilizes to bring about this outcome.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Bay Area, Marxism, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

UPDATE: From an article written by Ryan Phillips of Oakland North:

The entrance to Lakeview on Grand Avenue was guarded by Occupy Oakland protesters on Thursday, who tried to limit who came and went from the school to only parents and students. Inside the campus, elementary-school aged children worked in the garden and then inside the classroom of longtime Lakeview teacher Pamela Chinn-Scoffern on art projects, including designing a logo for the People’s School.

Nirali Jani, who lives near Lakeview, sat behind her 3-year-old son at the art table on Thursday afternoon. Jani said she was hoping to send her son to Lakeview when he got old enough because this is our neighborhood school. When Jani heard about the protest this week, she decided to pull her son out of preschool in the afternoon and bring him to the People’s School. Thursday was his first day.

The activities here are really beautiful, and hands-on, and I felt like since it’s summertime I wanted to get our hands dirty, Jani said as she watched her son draw at the table. I think it’s important to be around parents and teachers who are building together.

As she was leaving campus when classes ended at 3 pm, Jani spoke with Velasquez about returning to the school next week to help teach a social justice course. Still, she knows police could move in at any time and evict the protesters. I see it as an inevitability, Jani said.

INITIAL POST:

On June 14th, parents, teachers, students and other members of the community announced their intention to enter Lakeview Elementary and conduct a sit-in after it had been ordered closed by the Oakland Unified School District:

At the end of this school year, the Oakland Unified School District plans to close 5 public elementary schools and hand children’s school buildings over to private charter schools and district administration offices. Hundreds of the displaced students have been placed by the district in elementary schools that are 10 miles away, and the school district has offered no guarantee that transportation will be provided for families. In response . . .

Oakland Parents and Teachers Are Sitting-in to Keep Neighborhood Schools Open!

We Need Your Support!!

On June 15th, after the last day of school, Oakland parents and teachers will sit-in at Lakeview Elementary demanding that the district keep all neighborhood schools open. The district has not listened to lawsuits, pleas from parents and teachers, or protests. We know the money exists, but still they insist on closing flatland schools serving predominantly black and brown children. We say no more excuses! We’re keeping the schools open the last way left to us, by sitting-in. But we cannot do this alone. We need your support! Demand the district and the politicians give us full funding for quality education in neighborhood public schools. Join the fight for our kids’ futures.

After taking over the school property, they reopened the school on Monday and began to conduct classes and organize activities for children, and continue to do so. As one person in the video says . . . we start to build the world we want to see in the shell of the old.

Tomorrow, if you live in the Bay Area, there will be a rally and march in defense of this action. You can also show your support by signing a petition and donating funds. By visiting saveoaklandschools.org and the Twitter hashtag @LakeviewSitIn, you can stay informed in regard to breaking news, as the police have already posted a stay away order. Not surprisingly, it appears that the school district is losing money by shutting down Lakeview and 4 other elementary schools in lower income areas, but, then, I guess money is no object when it comes to subsidizing the expansion of charter schools. Yesterday, California legislature leaders reached an agreement with the governor for a revised budget that decreases funding for the public schools by 3 billion dollars while increasing the block grant for charter schools.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Education, Neoliberalism

Pham Binh of the The North Star asked me, along with several others, to submit a post about the significance of the success of SYRIZA in Greece. Please go here to read all of the offerings, which should be posted by early next week. Here's what I sent to him:

What Can American Leftists Learn from the Success of SYRIZA?

Even now, the significance of SYRIZA’s success in the recent Greek parliamentary election is not well understood. While leftists bicker over whether SYRIZA is reformist (ones senses the ghosts of the German SPD Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Italian PCI Communist Party (PCI) lingering in the background), Greek workers are beginning to sever past political relationships under the pressure of the brutal austerity being imposed upon them. They are gravitating towards radical left parties, with SYRIZA in the forefront. In May, these parties received a combined vote unprecedented in post-war Greek history. On June 17th, these parties are likely to receive even more votes, perhaps so many that SYRIZA will have the opportunity to form a leftist, anti-austerity government.

While we await the election result, SYRIZA has already accomplished something that years of anti-authoritarian confrontation on the streets of Athens has failed to do: it has terrified the neoliberal elites of Europe. Along with the contemporaneous election of Socialist Party candidate Hollande in France, SYRIZA is forcing these elites to confront the prospect of a reinvigorated left if the European Union and the International Monetary Fund continue to insist upon austerity. President Obama perceives the peril as well, as he is trying to persuade German Chancellor Merkel to relent in her opposition to measures that could marginally ameliorate the crisis.

SYRIZA, more accurately described as the “Coalition of the Radical Left”, first emerged as a national electoral participant in 2004 after various components of the Greek left acknowledged that they could work together against neoliberalism despite other differences. It is arguably the most successful organization to emerge out of the anti-globalization efforts of the late 1990s, if one measures success by its survival and expanding base within the Greek electorate. Starting in 2004 with over 3.3% of the vote, it has consistently increased its share of the electorate in subsequent elections, garnering a second-place finish with nearly 17% of the vote and 52 members of the Greek parliament in the May 6 elections. With this most recent breakthrough, it now has a European, if not global, voice, as most recently demonstrated by media coverage of SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras’ trip to Paris where he condemned austerity as a catastrophe for Europe.

It is easy for anti-authoritarians of both the Marxist and anarchist kind to dismiss SYRIZA. We all know the arguments: the electoral process is a sham, SYRIZA will get co-opted, capitalists will exploit SYRIZA to legitimize this ongoing reorganization of the global economy to the detriment of the working class. I know them because I have developed a similar perspective about the U.S. political system, especially after the brazen embrace of finance capital by Barack Obama after running for president as a progressive, reformist candidate. Upon hearing these objections, one imagines Tsipras attending Davos, participating in a forum with George Soros and Gerhard Schroeder, with Bill Clinton praising him for his intelligence and pragmatism.

Perhaps, this will happen, perhaps not. But this perspective about SYRIZA is narrow and misguided.

Regardless of the future of SYRIZA, there is much to be learned from its experience. SYRIZA has been able to attract the support of working class and some middle class Greeks, and continues to do so. It is an example of a relatively inclusive political organization that, because of its focus upon the intensifying economic distress of Greeks, has become more and more influential. It speaks to the reality of daily life in a society where people are struggling to survive, with a program consciously designed to alleviate their suffering. Not surprisingly, there are those on the left who malign this program as “reformist.”.

If only I, and millions of other Americans, could be “victimized” by such reforms! We would be living in something akin to a Scandinavian Scandinavian-style social democracy, which, while beset with its own contradictions, would constitute a substantial improvement in living conditions. But this is a digression that accepts the boundaries of this cramped debate about SYRIZA in relation to participation in the electoral process. Instead, the lack of any political formation in the U.S. comparable to SYRIZA is the much more pressing problem. If Americans are confronted with an economic collapse comparable to what has transpired in Greece, how will they respond? A cursory examination of recent American history suggests that many will accept populist, right-wing explanations for their predicament, as they have often done since the late 1970s. U.S. radicals should therefore look to SYRIZA for guidance as to how to achieve unanimity around a program that engages millions of Americans already impoverished by austerity. Such an effort is not necessarily in conflict with anti-authoritarian practice.

For example, the late Colin Ward advocated an inclusive form of anarchism that could assist in this endeavor. Ward believed that there was a perpetual struggle between the centralization of power and its dispersal through people and organizations capable of fulfilling the needs of society non-hierarchically. He identified strongly with the lived experience of people within their communities, and proposed policies that prioritized their ability to address their problems themselves. He refused to wait for revolutionary conditions for the creation of anarchist institutions, and conceded that a world dominated solely by anarchist practice might be a sterile one.

One of the most striking aspects of Ward’s vision was his refusal to stereotypically dismiss large parts of the population as being inherently hostile to anarchist principles of social organization. Where others saw weeds, he found hidden flowers. It is an attitude that is lacking among leftists in the U.S. While many in Occupy have made efforts in this direction, there is still much to be done. There is an urgent need to find points of agreement within a pluralistic world of participation. If SYRIZA had not done so, it would be moribund today.

This is the essential concept that we must grasp from SYRIZA’s success.

Such an effort requires a willingness to communicate directly with people that is now almost absent in the U.S., a willingness to speak with them candidly and without preconditions about their social experiences. This is the promise that still remains within Occupy, even after its suppression. If fulfilled, we could develop support for a program of economic intervention and demilitarization that empowers people to govern their own communities, and thereby take a small step towards the implementation of Ward’s utopian vision.

Given the rigidity of the U.S. electoral process, it is likely that such a movement will invariably grow outside the electoral process. SYRIZA is a coalition in a country with somewhere around 11 million people. In other words, Greece has about twice the number of people as the San Francisco Bay Area. Hence, any effort to replicate SYRIZA in the U.S. would require a daunting organizational effort, one that would require incomprehensible amounts of money and volunteer time. But SYRIZA remains an example of what is possible if people organize within a reasonably sized community. Any effort of this kind should be measured by a simple standard: the extent to which it expands participation with a recognition of the inherent violence and inequality of American society.

Labels: Activism, American Empire, Anarchism, Elections, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street

UPDATE 2 (9:07PM Central Standard Time): For an easily accessible link to numerous livestreams and ustreams, go here.

UPDATE 1 (8:50PM Central Standard Time): Arrests, police clubbing protesters, chaotic scenes on both ustreams.

INITIAL POST: Occupy is making the connection between austerity at home and perpetual war abroad. This is the fourth day of marches in Chicago, marches conducted in the face of a suffocating police presence. At this time, 8:25 p.m. Central Standard Time, about 2000 to 3000 people are moving through the downtown, with protesters closing off the sidewalks so that the bike police cannot assist in their encirclement:

Live video by Ustream

Here is another ustream:

Live video by Ustream

There are reports that the march is within a block or two of the NATO state dinner where delegates are present. Obama, Obama, we've got some shit to talk about.

Meanwhile, there was also a sympathy march in New York City:

As usual, the kids are taking the lead. Of course, Twitter is the best source of current information, including active ustreams and livestreams, use the hashtags #NoNATO and #OccupyChicago, among others.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, NATO, Police, Ustream, War on Terror

I posted my thoughts about her and this song, I'm a Rainbow, here on October 23, 2010.

Labels: African Americans, American Culture, Anarchism, Obituaries, YouTube

I'm the guy in the blue shirt and charcoal pants, holding my tea from the family operated Fluid on N Street. The introduction states that the liberals and the passives drifted away from the march after awhile, which is sort of true, but in my experience, the number of people involved in most marches tends to dwindle unless there is pre-determined destination for a rally, which was not the case in this instance. Furthermore, I'm not sure whether many of the participants would have called themselves liberals, and I doubt whether the term explains very much anymore. For example, in addition to the apparent union activists I observed, I spoke to one woman who was canvassing for the Peace and Freedom Party, while another one was trying to generate interest in a new, fledgingly International Socialist Organization chapter in Sacramento. So, it may have been the result of march fatigue as much as it was displeasure with the confrontational behavior of the Bloc.

Hat tip to Pham Binh at The North Star.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Occupy Wall Street, Sacramento

Yesterday, I resisted my temptation to engage in activist tourism, and decided to stay in Sacramento for May Day, instead of traveling to Oakland. Oakland is a fine place, no doubt, one that fuses memories of my childhood in Georgia and my junior high and high school years in midtown Sacramento, but I thought it best to participate in a public May Day protest at home. I tend to believe that my presence means more politically at a small scale event than a large one.

Over the weekend, I had checked the indybay calendar for a Sacramento May Day activity, and discovered this one: Anti-Capitalist Contingent for Sacramento May Day . . . This a call out for all in the central valley who are: Anarchists, Socialists, Communists& Anti-Capitalists, radical Queers, Dikes, feminists etc to converge on Sacramento this May Day and take to the streets in a anti-Capitalist Bloc during the May day Rally and March . . . Now, that got my attention. There must have been previous Sacramento May Day actions of this kind, but I don't recall them. In any event, I was pleased that something was happening to the left of the local trade unions, something that centered May Day around an express condemnation of capitalism.

Crocker Park, across from the Crocker Museum, near the I Street Bridge, was the gathering place for people interested in going on the march. I arrived at about 11:30am, about 30 minutes before the scheduled beginning of the march. As I approached one corner of the park at 4th and O Street, I saw a masked Black Bloc contingent of about 8 or 9 people. I became apprehensive as I could not initially see anyone else around, and pondered the surrealism of a 51 year old, unmasked man, marching down the Capitol Mall with them. On the one hand, I wondered whether they would consider me an undercover police officer, while, on the other, I considered the probability of arrest by the uniformed ones across the street on their bikes. I remembered a 2003 protest against the Iraq War along L Street nearby, just south of the K Street Mall, where officers immediately seized a young man wearing a bandanna when he stepped off the sidewalk and chalked the universal anarchy symbol in the street. But, as I got closer to the intersection, I could see another 30 or 40 people in the small park itself, and my apprehension dissipated. Upon entering the park, I noticed that some apparent union activists were there, with one woman wearing a Justice for Janitors T-shirt, another one wearing a Union Summer/AFL-CIO T-shirt and a third one wearing the distinctive purple of the Service Employees International Union. I proceeded to talk to some people for awhile until the Bloc on the corner gathered their signs and flags, including one with a CNT epigram on it, and called for the march to begin.

Interestingly, as I broke off my conversation with a couple of people, a couple of women, and started walking towards the corner to leave, I noticed that they had stayed behind. I asked if they were going on the march, and they said "no". Only about half of the people in the park had come forward to go on the march. A couple of people in the Bloc noticed, and went over to induce the others to come along. They succeeded. Perhaps, it was necessary for someone in the Bloc to speak to them to make them comfortable enough to participate by establishing a human connection severed by the masks. Our first destination were the banks and white collar office buildings along the Capital Mall a block away.

As the light at the intersection turned from green to red, there was an immediate clash of protest cultures. The Bloc at the front of the march continued to move forward after crossing the street, while the rest of us, with that Swiss sort of conformity that so characterizes many of us in Sacramento, stopped for the red light. A minute or two later, when the march had come back together on the other side of the street, some of the Bloc gently chastised us, insisting that we stay together. Of course, they were right, as separation increases the prospects of arrest, with disregard for the commands of the state, even if communicated by a traffic light, being an essential, non-negotiable feature of Bloc protest.

We then proceeded down the Mall, protesting at one bank after another, Wells Fargo, Bank of the West, US Bank, Bank of America. As we approached each bank, we chanted No Borders, No Nations, No Private Corporations! Oddly, I had not heard this one before, and it strikes me as the most concise crystalization of what Occupy, or, for that matter, any social movement should express as an ideological vision. And, indeed, May Day events, especially those in New York City, Oakland and Los Angeles, emphasized the interrelationship between immigration, trade union struggle and our economic distress. The chant identifies the global coalition of the precarious, whether documented or not, that is emerging to challenge capital and placed our small protest squarely within this effort. I am, as most readers of this blog are aware, insistent that any left movement in the US embrace an internationalist, as opposed to a nationalist, perspective.

At each bank, we chanted the slogans that have become the signatures of Occupy, such as Banks Got Bailed Out, We Got Sold Out. We also chanted Strike! Strike! Strike! at every place where people were working. It is easy to ridicule this, about 40 to 50 people trying to encourage hundreds of people in buildings and along the streets to strike as they go about their business. But, I thought, people have to get the idea to resist somewhere, even if it appears implausible at the time. I recalled Clarence Thomas of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union saying before the November 2nd general strike in Oakland that it was a practice effort. In Sacramento, we are not even at the level of practice, but people did appear to be surprised, and maybe a few thought about what we did.

One of the most striking features of the march was the pragmatism displayed by the Bloc. We walked through red lights, and took over part of the street at times, but, when challenged by the police, we complied with their orders. My impression was that the Bloc had decided prior to the march that confrontation with the police was counterproductive. Bloc members would push boundaries, but not risk having anyone arrested. The cops were most insistent that we stay out of streets with light rail lines. It was evident that the police had been instructed to allow the march to proceed unimpeded if possible. There was little tension in the air. The Bloc contented itself with some hostile chants directed towards the cops, like the one that is now iconic, Fuck the Police, From Oakland to Greece! There were also a few encounters with private security, but here as well, the hostile comments towards them from some of the Bloc lacked the edge that one experiences in the Bay Area.

Surprisingly, we were even allowed to march through the open air shopping mall at the west end of the K Street Mall, Downtown Plaza. The police kept their distance as we shouted that the employees should strike. A private security guard gently ushered us along, with perfunctory exhortations that we needed to keep moving and not touch anything. There was little urgency to his effort because, as he kept telling us, the mall was half empty. Rumor has it that the owner, the Westfield Group, is desperately trying to sell it. Downtown Plaza has become a symbol of the malaise that has affected Sacramento since 2007. Shortly afterwards, the march, after a stop in front of the jail, concluded at the small daytime Occupy encampment by City Hall between 9th and 10th and I Streets. There are two or three tents there, and one of the members of the Bloc, now unmasked, said that he had been staying there since the occupation began. While others may be fairweather friends, the Sacramento manifestation of the Bloc is committed to the preservation of Occupy.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bailout of Finance Capitalists, Occupy Wall Street, Sacramento

A couple of months ago, I discussed one of the most difficult challenges facing Occupy, the willingness of middle class progressives to rationalize the abuses of the police because they place a greater priority upon the preservation of social order by law enforcement. Such progressives want to square the political circle by seeking a transformation of American society without conflict. They are most perfectly represented by Chris Hedges, a man who seems to find the verbal abuse of the police at protests more disturbing than police assaults and finds himself incapable of deciding whether protesters should throw tear gas canisters back at the cops who fired them.

But what is it that these progressives believe requires the protection of the police, even at the cost of the violent suppression of Occupy protesters? Upon reflection, the answer is obvious: private property and the hierarchical social relations inscribed by it. Of course, Occupy participants are not all anarchists or communists, far from it, but they have adopted direct action tactics that have frightened progressives with the ghost of expropriation. Initially, occupiers set up encampments in public spaces as a means of highlighting enormous income inequality and corruption. They sought to prefigure an alternative, much more egalitarian, social order that stood in marked contrast to the existing one. If we were living back in the 1960s or 1970s, the government would have responded with a program of increased public assistance, a program that would have drained away support for Occupy by providing housing, jobs, student aid and medical care, but that would have threatened to reverse the neoliberal process of the marketization of all aspects of our lives, and, hence, was never seriously considered.

Instead, with the federal government guiding them behind the scenes, cities, starting with Oakland in October of last year, cleared out the encampments with force. There was an initial broad based criticism of these police attacks, but, as it became apparent that Occupy had evolved into a loose coalition of anti-authoritarians, people of color, the homeless and other marginalized people, such criticism dissipated. Meanwhile, particularly on the West Coast, occupiers organized more confrontational actions in response, such as the November 2nd general strike in Oakland, the December 12th port shutdown, the January 20th Occupy Wall Street West protests and the attempted seizure of the Kaiser Auditorium on January 28th. The failure of Occupy to extract any meaningful political response to the distress of millions of impoverished Americans and the interrelated corruption of the financial and political systems was pushing its participants towards more and more radical approaches. Within occupations, this resulted in increasingly acrimonious personal conflicts, as most publicly displayed in Oakland, while the progressives that should have been allies became hostile.

One might call this the operational explanation for the evolution of Occupy. Such an explanation elides, however, a more engaged one for why this evolution occurred, and necessitates an investigation as to the perspectives about private property held by those within Occupy and those outside of it. Within Occupy, the creation and manipulation of scarcity, particularly in relation to the lack of housing and social services, is associated with the conscious decision to allow properties to remain vacant instead of using them to address human needs. Such a stance is not, paradoxically, necessarily in opposition to capitalism, as mercantilists like John Locke justified the seizure of the lands of indigenous peoples for the reason that it had not been efficiently utilized. Governments in South America still possess the authority to seize vacant land and facilities upon the payment of compensation on the basis of that such lack of use constitutes waste, as the Chavez government has done on occasion in Venezuela. Of course, there is a distinction to be made between seizures to generate economic activity and seizures to address social needs, but the essential point is that even previous capitalist and pre-capitalist, mercantile societies did not consider private property to be so sacrosanct. In today's postmodern world, however, the dead weight of empty residential and commercial buildings serves the essential purpose of preemptively suppressing any resistance by intensifying poverty, while retaining the illusory promise of future, lucrative development opportunities directed towards the upper middle class. So, those involved in Occupy find themselves pulled by gravity into a confrontation with the legitimacy of private property itself.

Conversely, middle class progressives perceive the situation very differently. Beyond being a measure of their personal economic well-being, private property makes them feel more secure because it, by its very nature, excludes. Hence, they respond with dismay if the construction of a low income housing project is proposed near where they live. For them, Occupy threatens to level social differences to an exponentially greater degree bordering on nihilism. Participants within Occupy may be focusing upon empty lots and empty buildings, sometimes in the possession of churches and universities, as with the 888 Turk Street takeover and the UC farm plot in the Albany, but the progressive middle class perceives the peril. It is not just that they frequently identify with the institutions involved and their administrative practices, such as the University of California in the case of the seizure of the farm plot, but that they understand that, if not stopped, the trickle could become a flood that approaches the steps of their homes. Incapable of forcing the government and transnational financial insitutions to adopt Keynesian social welfare measures that would alleviate the distress experienced by those associated with Occupy, they find themselves caught between hammer and anvil, between a rapacious neoliberal regime that puts their livelihoods, and those of their children, at risk, and an increasingly radicalized, anti-authoritarian social movement that threatens to dismantle what limited defenses against such impoverishment that remain.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Liberals, Occupy Wall Street, Police

From occupywallst.org:

•5:40PM EST: via @F29PDX: "Here's what's happening now: March in Las Vegas; direct action in Rockland, MA; march in Norfolk, VA; Rally in Gainesville, FL, rally and march in Phoenix, AZ; Rally in Minneapolis, MN; protest against Fletcher-Daniels in Kansas City, MO; and march in Portland! Follow Shut Down the Corporations for more updates tonight.

•5:10PM EST: Two arrested at huge march in Portland. Occupy Las Vegas shuts down Walmart.

•4:20PM EST: UC-Davis protesters shut down a U.S. Bank. Heavy police presence in Portland as police on motorcycles and bicycles try to cut off march and force protesters onto sidewalks. Some Occupiers have broken through police lines. Crowd estimated in 1000s. (Portland livestream). Oakland is off to shut down some banks. (Oakland livestream). Occupy DC has returned to Walmart construction site to continue protest.

•3:50PM EST: General Assembly underway at occupied university in Barcelona. Anti-ALEC demos getting started in more cities and towns across the US. Occupiers in New Hampshire will target Koch brother-funded Americans for Prosperity. Numbers grow in Portland despite rain. Occupy Boston heading to City Hall to demand: "No HIKES! No CUTS! No Layoffs" in public transit at 6pm.

•3:10PM EST: Police attack retreating Walmart protesters in SoCal, who had already declared victory by shutting down all targets. Some arrested while falling back as police rush forward with pepper guns loaded. Some Occupiers injured and seen limping away from police line. Others being treated by medics for bruises from baton strikes. Crowd dwindling as most protesters leave, some running to their cars.

•2:50PM EST: Police move in on SoCal protesters with batons drawn, push back and begin kettling protesters. Police seen on livestream cutting off escape routes, using unnecessary force against protesters who are trying to follow dispersal orders, and aiming pepper-ball guns at nonviolent protesters. Crowds also assembling in Portland.

•2:10PM EST: Standoff continues at Walmart warehouse in SoCal. via Occupy The Hood LA: ‏ @OTH_LosAngeles Keep in mind Riot Gear police came in while Occupy protesters were having a block party with music and discussion #PoliceState #FTP.

•2:00PM EST: Occupy Oakland will rally at noon PST ar Snow Park to shut down the banks, and 6pm PST at Oscar Grant Park for a Funeral for Capitalism. OWS NYC continues to occupy Bryant Park in front of BoA tower. Eight arrests were made outside Pfizer R&D facility in Connecticut after multiple CT Occupations protest. Actions have also begun across Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico targeting ALEC's connection to racist anti-immigrant legislation and for-profit prisons. (Phoenix livestream)

•1:30PM EST: Peaceful SoCal demo has been declared "unlawful" by riot cops who have kettled protesters and given dispersal orders despite being surrounded on all sides. In NYC, protesters run up to AT&T to decry anti-union policies.

•1:10PM EST: Banner drop at Grand Central overpass in NYC (photo)

•1:04PM EST: Protesters put bed in middle of intersection (photo) at 43rd st. and Madison Ave in NYC. Who are you in bed with? (Twitter) (Facebook)

•1:00PM EST: Riot police have surrounded anti-Wal Mart demo in SoCal, where protesters have been celebrating and listening to music in the intersection after shutting down all targeted warehouses.

•12:30PM EST: Actions starting in dozens more US cities, including Huntsville, Dayton, New Brunswick, Nashville, Buffalo, Albany, Richmond, Eugene, Louisville, Pensacola, Albuquerque, New Orleans, Charlotte, and more. Reports of arrests at BoA HQ in NYC as police aggressively push back protesters.

•12:00PM EST: Large crowd in Pittsburgh protesting drastic cuts in public transit system, including potential shut-down of 35% of services, half of all routes, and 500 jobs. (Pittsburgh livestream). Orlando begins march on BoA. (Orlando livestream).

•11:30AM EST: In Spain, massive protests still underway in Valencia and other cities. (Barcelona livestream). Teach-in underway in Bryant Park in front of Citibank discussing toxic loans, foreclosure, & bank crimes as Wells Fargo gets eviction notices in NYC. Anti-Walmart protesters continue to hold intersections in SoCal.

For breaking news throughout the rest of the day, return to occupywallst.org, go to shutdownthecorporations.org, use appropriate hashtags on Twitter, #occupywallstreet, #opdx, #occupythehood and #occupyoakland, among others, and watch livestreams and ustreams, such as the one at occupywallst.org and others linked there and elsewhere.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Ustream

Last night, I took my son to a movie, The Secret World of Arrietty. To see it, we had to go to a multiplex at the Arden Fair Mall. Now, I rarely go to a mall at anytime of year other than just before Christmas, so it is always a small culture shock for me. I was surprised to be among so many people at night, even though, by mall standards, it was semi-deserted, because I am invariably home with my son during weeknight evenings unless we go to a small pizza place or yogurt shop. The people use communications technologies with which I am unaware, listen to music with which I am unfamiliar and talk about things I haven't heard about before.

Prior to the start of the movie, there was a video admonition that no texting is allowed during the feature presentation. The specific theatre for our film was nearly empty, which could be a reflection of the fact that we went on Thursday evening, or that the movie isn't very popular, but I had the disquieting feeling that it was indicative of the fact that movie theatres are now an endangered species, about to become extinct. The previews went on interminably, especially for someone like me used to watching films at the Pacific Film Archive (amazingly, you sit down, the light dims, and the film starts!) and arthouses, so much so, that, after about the sixth one, my impatient son gently asked, are they going to end soon? Fortunately, the film itself was a delight.

Upon coming to work this morning, I went to a nearby cafe and got some tea. The man at the register was talking to his friend about Arkham City, a recently released Batman game. As with my trip to the mall, I experienced a sense of being a foreigner, capable of speaking the language but otherwise isolated. Gaming is a phenomenon that is mystery to me. Millions of people buy them and play them on their playstations at home, and I have the most minimal understanding of the experience, except that they appear to be very good at keeping kids occupied, frighteningly so. Surely, there are significant social and political implications to this phenomenon, but, if so, I have no idea what might be, other than an observation that it appears to be yet another way for people to isolate themselves with technology.

Such experiences cause me to wonder, what is the purpose of trying to engage people politically, either through this blog or over the radio, two increasingly antiquated forms of communication? How it is possible to reach people who have socially organized themselves in ways that I don't understand? Even if I can, does what I say have relevance to them, or do I sound like some hill country Baptist preacher, speaking in a dialect long since abandoned? And, if I have these problems, imagine what it must be like for people trained in the baroque rhetoric flourishes of 20th Century Marxism and feminism.

Ultimately, I can only take refuge, paradoxically enough, in the avant garde individualism of people like Donald Ritchie, the American who decided to stay in Japan permanently after his arrival in 1946, and indulge his obsession with the unfolding modernity and postmodernity of Japan within the context of his classical cultural referents. His courage lies in his simple, persistent refusal to allow the market and the mercurial trends of pop culture to dictate his interests and his intellectual relation to the world. It is a paradoxical refuge, because I, unlike Ritchie, believe in the possibility, indeed, the necessity, of a utopian, liberatory collective human enterprise. Without one, how can the human race survive? Even if we survive, how can we avoid the increasing probability of a truly genocidal extermination of billions of people who no longer have a place as either a producer, a consumer or a debtor in a world transformed into one of mechanical and virtual manufacture, communication and distribution?

For me, Occupy represents a gossamer thread of hope, a possibility, however slight, that people can organize themselves, from the bottom up, and avoid these dystopian outcomes. Many of the participants are young, tech savvy people, racially diverse (in California, at least), with a recognition of the hierarchical institutions of social control that oppress them. Occupy Oakland, for all of it problems, is the most inspiring, an occupation that has sought to engage young people, poor people, people of color and the working class more broadly. Perhaps, it's time has already come and gone, but, if true, which I doubt, it will still serve as an inspiring experience for those who come after it, inspiring not just because of its successes, but also because of its failures, failures which have resulted from its ambitious effort to confrontationally challenge the inherent violence and brutality of this society.

Hence, I put forward my perspective about Occupy with care, because I'm not on the front line, and, beyond that, as a cultural outsider, lack the insight to confidently make recommentations. Are the Fuck the Police marches in Oakland on Saturday evenings a bad idea? An activity that alienates people that might otherwise support Occupy Oakland? Probably. But I haven't lived in Oakland and been subjected to the predations of the police for years, or been attacked with tear gas and flash grenades during occupations, marches and direct actions, as many in Oakland have been. I can't dismiss the possibility that these marches may, in fact, anticipate a greater public willingness to challenge the power of the police in the future. In other words, the repressive power of the police over their lives may turn out to be a seminal issue for young people who are also being impoverished by austerity. Leftists, especially older ones, need to recognize the interrelationship between police repression and poverty instead of talking about them in implicitly mutually exclusive terms.

I am, however, confident enough to insist upon one thing: Occupy must be centered around the principle of the most radically inclusive democratic perspective, otherwise it will degenerate into yet another manipulative, liberal representational effort, or fragment into small, sectarian groups, some violent, some not, groups that spend more time fighting one another over the purity of their vision than engaging the people that purportedly justify their activity. There is a path that runs between them, one that requires understanding the day to day lives of distressed people and creating a place for them within the movement. Through this, Occupy can become a truly mass movement that threatens the existing social order. The repressive measures directed against Occupy to date reveal the potential for such an effort.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Marxism, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Sacramento

UPDATE: On Twitter, laurenriot engages in an ongoing debate, tweet by tweet, with the signatories of the statement. Here is a sample of them, expect more to come at the hashtag #laurenriot:

58m lauren riot @laurenriot
I wonder if these folks actually spent any time in the days we laid down roots at Oscar Grant Plaza. I remember ferocity! Militance!

59m lauren riot @laurenriot
Do they mean taking a building after 10s of 1000s took to the streets only 4 weeks in?

59m lauren riot @laurenriot
Do they mean the roots of masked folx building barricades 2 weeks in to protect from cops?

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
Which roots exactly? OO was never an OWS satellite.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
As the Oakland Commune evolves and finds its legs, these folks want to return to its roots.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
And yet this group is most concerned about a handful of people who organized a *single* *action* they didn't like.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
An aside, the "radical inclusivity" of OO has us organizing w/ holocaust deniers, unapologetic racists, rapists, misogynists and homophobes.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
and seriously, just LOL at the reference to riot porn, an expression they no doubt learned from a sarcastic insurrectionary anarchist.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
The link to the Bay of Rage article (& other language) says to me that one organizer in specific is being targeted, and that's fucked up.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
The GA voted 2 keep many parts of the organizing of #J28 closed, while allowing the majority of the work to be done openly. Quite democratic

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
The critique of undemocratic processes seems to be another complaint about the organizing format agreed on my consensus at the GA. Ironic.

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
When you consider downtown residents opening their homes to strangers for teargas/OC decontamination on #J28-again, I see massive support!

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
When you consider 1000s on #J28 willing to commit trespassing, at least hundreds willing to commit burglary - speaks to massive support

1h lauren riot @laurenriot
What I see in the community is that the support for #OO is still very strong, if not stronger than it's been.!

Hat tip to Richard Crary of The Existence Machine.

INITIAL POST: An excerpt from a statement by four people involved in Occupy Oakland from the inception:

In our individualistic culture, it is rare when radical activists are able to pitch a big tent and draw in masses of people to the cause. The early days of the Occupy movement provided one of those rare opportunities. Occupy was the spark for the emergence of a broad wave of anti-corporate, anti-repression sentiment in our society. We are concerned that the inclusivity that began this movement and contributed to its rapid growth is dying in OO as a result of the dominant insurrectionist tendencies and the vanguardist maneuvering and manipulations of some of its proponents. Dramatically shrinking numbers reveal that this ideology and organizing style either misreads the real political situation in Oakland, or else underestimates the importance of consolidating and advancing a broad, united and popular front. We all collectively must take responsibility for this hardening and shrinking of the OO ranks, and we must recognize that in trying to re-make OO in an ideologically purist vision, we are destroying our ability to garner the wide base of support and goodwill that will be necessary to successfully resist corporate and state domination.

Occupiers who have begun to question the decision-making processes involved in recent actions like J28 are being asked, in the name of unity, to maintain silence. We have been told that our concerns will be dealt with, that there’s nothing to worry about, and that we shouldn’t speak publicly about them. Yet we feel that without transparency and open dialogue, the problems will only get worse. We are speaking to everyone who still believes in Occupy Oakland, but especially to those most active in the GA and various committees who have the ability to help us make the kinds of changes that would reassure the larger Bay Area community that Occupy Oakland is still a wise place to invest its energy.

The four of us decided to speak out because we have each been pushed to the margins of OO by ugly, ideological purification behavior that often now takes place at the GAs and in groups like the Move-In Committee, where dissenting voices are booed and jeered and group speak and in-group relationships now dominate. Please do not mistake our concerns as yet another attack on anarchism or Black Bloc; it’s not about that at all. It’s about the exclusionary strategies and tactics that alienate those of us who are interested in a slower, more solid, more inclusive approach of mass movement building.

Please consider reading the statement in its entirety, as well as the comments in response to it. They provide insight into the urgency of adopting inclusive practices that will expand the reach of Occupy.

As Cheryl Kohler, one of the signatories to the statement, says:

We are arguing against a strategy of full-blown insurrection and asking those who seem to be pushing in that direction to reconsider the strategy.

Let's hope that the participants in Occupy Oakland do so. As Bifo more generally observed in After the Future:

The identification of desire with energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 1980s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, but desire has to be saved. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Halliburton, secret services, mafias?

For those committed to the creation of alternative forms of collective organization and resistance, the answer to this rhetorical question is obvious. As I said on Thursday, socially and economically vulnerable people, and, for that matter, most people, whatever their background, are not going to commit themselves to a movement centered around high profile direct actions that present a higher probability of confrontation with the police. They are not going to participate in actions where, through the unilateral decisions of others, they suddenly find themselves subject to police assault. Such an experience is not going to result in a mass movement directed towards the dismantlement of governmental authority and police power in Oakland. If anything, it is more likely to lead to the imposition of a state of emergency.

As noted in my replies to Richard Crary's comments about my post yesterday, there are other ways of carrying out direct actions that incorporate the concerns of the community and reduce the prospect of a violent confrontation. For example, consider Jan Gilbrecht's explanation of how the seizure of the Kaiser Center, otherwise known as J28, could have been carried out:

Some of the proponents and proposers kept adding anything goes to the list of what would happen in the building, like for example child care, without consulting the childcare committee or having that be part of the initial proposal, or housing without addressing the serious issues with violence at the old encampment. I pointed out that it was hubris for the Move-In committee to decide on behalf of the community what would happen in the building. My proposal was to build for a very large Move-In action and community festival for the weekend, with a mass GA to be held each night, where members of the community could make proposals for the future of the building and then make decisions and commitments together. Rather than a distraction, many many people agreed with or also proposed this type of an approach, and a committee actually came up with a list of proposed housing guidelines to present to the GAs. Someone was identified to facilitate these mass GAs. Actually, it was one of the central proposers and planners of the action who told me personally that he didn’t care what we said would happen in the building, because it wasn’t about holding the building anyway, that would never happen. He thought we should say whatever people wanted to hear to get them out that day. That is exactly the kind of dishonest approach that caused me to withdraw from the Move-In action.

Interestingly, even Gilbrecht did not perceive the peril in a public mass action to seize the Kaiser Center, but, at least, she did recognize the need to place the facility at the service of the community. If this approach had been adopted and communicated to the people of Oakland prior to the action, it may well have generated a larger turnout of support, deterring the police from responding with such extreme force. If not, Occupy Oakland might have received more broad based community support after the subsequently kettles and arrests. Her claim that she was told by someone that Occupy Oakland never expected to hold the building points towards another serious issue, one beyond mendacity. If true, it highlights the arguable assumption that people can be best organized through theatrical protest spectacles, where the activists and the police all play their assigned roles.

Unfortunately, in this instance, the police didn't, a fact echoed in subsequent statements by some organizers to the effect that they expected the police to allow marchers to enter the Kaiser Center and arrest them later, as with past encampments. They expected to be allowed to, in effect, briefly squat the Center, conduct a couple of GAs and have a dance party before being evicted. There is nothing wrong with that, other than the failure to inform everyone of this purpose, except that, once the police stepped outside of their assigned role, and refused entry, a few protesters did so as well, responding with bottles, rocks and firecrackers. In other words, it was on. On J28, the Oakland Police Department displayed its ability to evolve and more effectively respond to the tactics of Occupy Oakland, catching it flat-footed. Furthermore, had something like the Gilbrecht approach been adopted, Occupy Oakland might have discovered that people in the community were not very enthusiastic about it, while suggesting modifications, such as, say, a more initially covert seizure, or something else entirely instead in the spirit of democratic discourse.

Beyond this, there is the troubling possibility that such violence facilitates the current harsh transformation of global capitalism, one centered around the accumulation of surplus by means of the provision of surveillance and security services, as explained by Stephen Graham during this Democracy Now! interview:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Stephen Graham, what’s the market? You’re talking about a growth industry. What are we talking about here in terms of investment of dollars by—because there are so many, obviously, municipalities in the United States with their own police forces?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, I mean, globally speaking, the so-called homeland security market is a real—is in real boom town—boom time, excuse me. I mean, in a world where actual defense contracts are often being reduced, a lot of the big companies are moving into civilian applications. They’re moving into these non-lethal weapons, moving into all of the technologies of crowd control and civilian disturbance control. And that has to be added to, of course, the much bigger markets that are growing in terms of broader questions of surveillance and security for buildings, for cities, for special events, as we see these systems established more and more in terms of everyday spaces and everyday bits of cities. So, I haven’t got figures at hand, I’m afraid, but it’s multibillion-dollar markets that are projected to grow globally at very, very high rates over the next 15 years, according to some of the recent market research reports.

For more about Stephen Graham, and his pathbreaking work about the militarization of the city, go here and here.

Hat tip to Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Political Violence

t at Pink Scare demonstrates, yet again, that he is one of the most incisive critics of Chris Hedges' condemnation of the Black Bloc, and the evasion of the true challenges facing Occupy:

So, the question of Black Bloc: Pro or Con? is not one that can be answered abstractly. It should only be answered by direct participants in a mass movement who collectively debate and deliberate together in an open, democratic spirit. To think that a few self-appointed experts could answer this question for everyone in a couple of widely-publicized internet debates misses this crucial point.

As I responded in the comments to his post:

Curiously, both Hedges and those who practice violent Bloc tactics want to impose their approach on everyone else. In this, they are reverse sides of the same coin.

In each instance, the people are absent. Both approaches will shrink the movement instead of expanding it, because, even though Hedges has the right result for current conditions, non-violence, it is being dictated from above with no opportunity for discussion.

As I posted yesterday, there are many people living in distressed conditions that should be gravitating to Occupy. One reason is that they are not doing so is because they are legitimately frightened of the terrible things that can happen if they are subjected to police violence. But there is a bigger problem, they are also hesitant because the movement is not sufficiently open enough to them, not yet able to devise ways of incorporating their experience into it.

Neither Hedges nor the defenders of Bloc tactics have anything to say about this, about the need to focus our attention on the people who are not already part of Occupy.

Only through an emphasis upon the most rigorously inclusive, anti-authoritarian practice can the participants within Occupy induce the victims of the existing social order to collectively resist it. For leftists and progressives who come from privileged backgrounds, like Hedges, this is a disconcerting prospect, one that requires them to relinquish the exercise of hierarchical authority to which they have become accustomed if they are going to continue to remain a positive influence within the movement.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Marxism, Occupy Wall Street, Political Violence

The police have raided many of the encampments across the country. Protests and actions called by Occupy are declining in number, with reduced participation. Workers and marginalized people, like the homeless, who were initially drawn to Occupy have, in many instances, departed. It is discouraging, and someone or some people must be responsible.

Chris Hedges has the answer: Occupy has a cancer known as the Black Bloc that must be aggressively treated before it becomes terminal. According to Hedges, the Bloc, its violence, its contempt for collective social organization and its hypermasculinity are turning the public against Occupy. If Occupy is to survive, the Bloc must be expelled. His answer has a superficial allure especially given his skillful elaboration of it. As a consequence, his article has been posted all over the Internet. For those with a legitimate grudge against the Bloc, like Louis Proyect and other Marxists, it is a golden opportunity to drive a stake through the heart of it. Perhaps, that would be a good thing, as I've never been very enthusiastic about people who knowingly put others at risk by precipatating violent confrontations with the police. Anyone who does that, Bloc or not, has no place in Occupy or any other movement for social justice.

But it's all just a little too convenient. Preliminarily, there's a conceptual problem. Contrary to what Hedges, and even Proyect, would have you believe, the Bloc isn't nearly as monolithic as they suggest, as this perceptive comment by Black Bloc at Pink Scare demonstrates:

There is no the Black Bloc. A black bloc is a tactic, not an organisation, engaged in by anarchists (yes, even us boring old neo-Platformist anarchocommunists, not just Insurrectionists) in which anarchists show up en masse at a protest, take steps to preserve their anonymity (as defense against state profiling), band together, ignore demands from illegitimate authority (i.e. the cops) and act together to defend participants' bodies and autonomy against state violence. It does not necessarily include sabotage-style direct action nor confrontation with cops (except for the fact that cops in general *seek* that very confrontation with any black bloc that forms on the ground). In fact there have been numerous black blocs on the east coast that I have been a participant in and that did not result in any property damage nor violent confrontation with cops whatsoever.

If you require a more detailed, even more convincing explanation of Black Bloc practice, consider reading David Graeber's response to Hedges at n+1. Given the decentralized, transitory nature of what anarchists describe as the Bloc, periodic Bloc groups come into existence around the country, sometimes for violent purposes, sometimes not. Graeber even states that participation in these blocs is not limited to anarchists. Accordingly, the question becomes less about the Bloc, and more about why some people gravitate towards violent forms of political activity, and the consequences of such activity for Occupy. As such, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to treat Occupy consistent with Hedges' diagnosis. There are few readily identifiable people that can be characterized as Bloc (for example, consider this photo of the Occupy Oakland Tactical Action Committee, promoters of the weekly Fuck the Police marches, who's Bloc and who's not?), and, even if there are, they may or may not be involved with the violent police confrontations associated with some occupations, like Occupy Oakland. One can read the comment of Black Bloc as an implicit approval of Bloc violence in self-defense, but, if so, it is hard to rely upon it to justify a characterization of such Bloc behavior as cancerous, although such an interpretation does raise thorny, but less polarizing, issues of personal responsibility within a collective movement. Possibly, for this reason, Hedges prefers to expound upon Zerzan and Bloc ideology to avoid engagement with them.

Indeed, Occupy Oakland, an occupation that appears to be the target of Hedges' polemic, illustrates the lack of factual support for his theory. On November 2nd, I participated in one of the several marches during the general strike. Some masked people broke windows at a couple of bank branches, a Wells Fargo one and a Chase one. Interestingly, the media gave little attention to these incidents, perhaps because the vandalism was so trivial in nature. Instead, the media was much more engrossed in the attempted takeover of the Traveler's Aid Society Building near Oscar Grant Plaza later that night, as the police responded to ineffectual efforts to take the building and defend it with tear gas and flash grenades. A large crowd of young people, still out in the streets, participated, and, as the situation with the police escalated, some of them looted a Tully's Coffee Shop. Hedges describes them as Groups of Black Bloc protesters.

But were they? I have looked in vain for pictures of the people who did it, but I did find this article about the episode, which questions the utility of describing it within the confines of Bloc theory and practice accessed over the Internet by Hedges:

At the Oakland encampment, Hale Nicholson, who described himself and others as pacifists, said he participated in Wednesday's demonstration and march to the port and then went to sleep at the camp around 9:30 p.m. Around 1 a.m., he said, he was awakened by the sound of flash-bang grenades.

A group of protesters broke into the former Travelers Aid building in order to, as some shouting protesters put it, reclaim the building for the people. They voiced anger over budget cuts that forced the closure of a homeless aid program.

They blocked off a street with wood, metal Dumpsters and other large trash bins, sparking bonfires that leapt as high as 15 feet in the air. Several businesses were heavily vandalized. Dozens of protesters wielding shields were surrounded and arrested.

They voiced anger over budget cuts that that forced the closure of a homeless aid program. Think about that for a moment. Doesn't sound very Bloc like, does it? Instead, it sounds like a group of people influenced by a variegated mixture of direct action principles, motivated to do something spontaneous by their involvement in the strike. Of course, such behavior can be damaging to a social movement, but it is not something that can be so easily addressed by subsuming their behavior within the repository of a Black Bloc, specifically designed for this purpose.

Susie Cagle, in an article posted at Truthout, refutes Hedges even more categorically:

Hedges condemns property destruction in political protest by condemning black bloc tactics, regardless of the facts. The local coffee shop vandalism Hedges contends was committed by black bloc was in fact one window of a corporate coffee chain smashed in that post-strike fog of war - and by someone not wearing a mask, not wearing black. The people who broke into City Hall on January 28, and many of those who destroyed property there, were also largely unmasked. And both of these acts came immediately after, as in within minutes of, violent mass kettling and arrest actions.

As Cagle relates elsewhere in the article, the challenge presented by some involved in Occupy Oakland is their willingness to embrace more and more confrontational forms of protest, forms that make people like Hedges uncomfortable, at least when they aren't happening in Greece:

Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.

My, my, Hedges comes across here, does one dare say it, as very much like his characterization of the Bloc, or close to it, certainly more so than the people who attempted to take over the Traveler's Aid Society building. Here, it seems, we have on old activist stereotype, one who exoticizes political violence in other places, usually lesser developed ones, but finds himself alarmed when it emerges close to home. Proyect, in a post otherwise sympathetic to Hedges, perceptively observes that, to date, the riots, general strikes and attacks upon businesses celebrated by Hedges have failed to stall the ruthless imposition of austerity measures upon the Greek populace.

Consistent with this, while Hedges confined his condemnation to the Bloc, I suspect that the popularity of the piece, the reason why it went viral, is because liberals and progressives, non-socialists, in other words, have become fatigued with the direct action ethos of Occupy. For example, read through the comments to this post, written by someone who participated in the January 28th attempt by Occupy Oakland to seize the vacant Kaiser Center Auditorium and convert it into a community center. Numerous people, who, because of their local knowledge, appear to be Bay Area progressives, posted hostile comments, showing no sympathy for the people who were attacked and arrested by the police, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority were not among the few who threw rocks, bottles and firecrackers at the cops. Confronted with an excessive police response, especially at the end of the day, when officers kettled protesters, subjected them to a barrage of tear gas and flash grenades, and then arrested over 400 in front of the YWCA building, the commenters were either silent, or dismissed it as predictable. Clearly, they objected to the attempt to seize the building just as much as they did the people who threw objects at the police.

The reason for this hostility is simple: they, like Hedges, are alarmed at the increasing intensity of the confrontations with the police. Hence, liberals and progressives will be critical of any action, even non-violent ones, like property seizures, if they degenerate into street violence between protesters and cops, while conversely, ones that actually involve property destruction, without a violent police response, like the windows broken during the day of the general strike, or, more recently, the windows broken at an upscale car dealership on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco during the evening of the Occupy Wall Street West action, generate much less comment, except by those who learn of them during the real time livestreams and Twitter feeds or subsequent YouTube videos.

Such a response exposes the fault line that runs between older progressives and the young militants of Occupy. Older progressives live within existing institutional structures, unions, universities, schools and the public sector, and have become, in many instances, middle and upper class. Overall, they have a positive opinion of the police, even as they believe that officers should stop treating poor people and peole of color so badly. In other words, they believe that the police are necessary to preserve social order, and that they can be reformed. Conversely, many of the young militants of Occupy now consider the police to be an implacable enemy, a bulwark of the existing system of social oppression. And, in Oakland, they knew about the predations of the police prior to Occupy, which explains the intensity of the conflict there.

Here, finally, we begin to recognize some of the challenges currently confronting Occupy. On the one hand, we have people who purportedly want to support it, and may have even done so in the initial period of occupations, but cannot do so now because of the violence they perceive associated with it. On the other, we have others, rightly outraged over the conduct of the police, who risk substituting confrontations with law enforcement over direct challenges to crony capitalists responsible for the economic distress experienced by so many. Occupy also initially attracted marginalized people, but they seem to have departed.

Is there a path out of this dark forest? If so, it may lie within the processes of Occupy itself. As Pham Binh and others have observed, Occupy is a direct action social movement where those who dedicate the most time and energy disproportionately influence the outcomes. There is nothing unique about this, it is true of most institutions in this society. But such an approach will not work for a movement that seeks to represent the 99%. As Tiny, also known as Lisa Garcia-Gray, wrote about her experience during a march and bank occupation in San Francisco:

POOR Magazine was in the march on this day, sadly with only three members, we did have four family members but several of our poor parents are houseless and jobless and so our fourth member had his phone cut off the night before and so we couldn’t find each other in the masses of people, and all of our other family members were working one of several jobs and hustles and so they didn’t even have the privilege to be there at all.

At first I was taken by the almost flawless organizing by Bay Area non-profit organizations. From the emcee to the turn-out from group after group, the whole event was wound tightly as a rope on a drum. Each act of civil disobedience, set-off at the mouths of Wells Fargo bank branches, were beautifully orchestrated stages of theatre and action. It was obvious that funded organizations with time and paid staff had organized this event down to the last balloon, slightly like a party we at POOR Magazine had never received an invitation to.

As we left the protest to get our young kids to school on time, Tony and I spoke about the power of the resistance that we had just been part of. I brought up how although I am excited and about all of the issues peoples were speaking and acting on I remain vexed by the fact that as poor peoples of color and indigenous peoples we are constantly in battle, in protest about the genocide and violence perpetrated on us and yet it is a struggle for us to get 50 people to show up for protests, so what is the difference? and what really is our role in all of these resistance occupations as poor peoples of color in struggle who are also in struggle with the occupation of our time due to no-wage and low-wage work, system abuse and ongoing criminalization and why do our resistance movements stay at the margins of what is important to show up for?

At last, Tiny, not Chris Hedges, has revealed what ails Occupy, the difficulty of reaching and empowering the people most victimized in this capitalist society. By targeting the ephemeral Bloc as the source of the illness, Hedges evades this much more challenging social and political dilemma. Accordingly, Occupy should evaluate its internal processes and future actions by the extent to which they bring these people into the movement, and not by simplistic bright line rules about violence and non-violence.

For now, and, perhaps permanently, that means trying to avoid violent confrontations with the police as much as possible, not because the conduct of the police should be considered acceptable, far from it, but, rather, because many of the people that might embrace Occupy most enthusiastically are terrified, and for good reason, of being beaten, arrested, and, if undocumented, deported. I actually accidentally had the opportunity of seeing Tiny request Occupy Oakland support for an immigrants rights march during a general assembly in mid to late November, and someone asked, because of the attempted Traveler's Aid Society takeover, whether there would be any violence. She emphatically said something like . . No . . No . . absolutely not . . we are going to have families with children with us on the march. In relation to the attempt to take over the Kaiser Center, such considerations might suggest an initially more covert effort to seize it, with a subsequent display of public support, as occurred at Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley in November 2010, instead of a mass attempt to storm police lines at mid-day. Similarly, the manner by which Occupy Oakland organized in advance of the port shutdown, and provided picket line support for striking workers might serve as good examples as well. All three constituted effective efforts to support workers at the base.

Labels: Activism, Anarchism, Bay Area, California, Liberals, Occupy Wall Street, Political Violence