Occupation and protest over thanksgiving break in SF

OWS

Seriously, fuck these guys.

http://the53.tumblr.com/

Beside being just plain ignorant, the idea of the "53%" is a privileged position.

Also, fuck Newt Gingrich.

28 Nov. General Strike

Resources for today!

1)national day of action alongside 58 campuses across country: ...updates, articles, links
http://occupycolleges.org/all-student-general-strike-november-28-2011-2/

2)UC regents board meeting:
schedule, agenda & live audio streams
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/regmeet/nov28.html

3)UCSC Day of Solidarity & Action w/UCD: on Occupy Santa Cruz's Facebook page
today's schedule, updates on actions

The following is a letter from the President of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) -Prof. Bob Meister's (UCSC Professor of Social Sciences and Political Thought @ History of Consciousness Dept.)- to Yudof against hiring William Bratton to investigate the police actions at UCD:

Letter to President Yudof objecting to hiring William Bratton to investigate UC Davis pepper-spray incident

November 27, 2011

President Mark G. Yudof
University of California
1111 Franklin St., 12th Floor
Oakland, CA 94607
Fax: (510) 987-9086

Dear President Yudof,

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) protests your decision to hire the Kroll Security Group, and its Chairman William Bratton, to conduct what you call an independent investigation of police violence at UC Davis. We take no position here on Mr. Bratton's personal qualifications; our objection is to the conflicts of interest of Kroll Security itself, which is already a major contractor with UC on security matters. According to its website, Kroll's services are not confined to securing databases and facilities from attacks by criminals and terrorists. It also protects many global financial institutions and other multinationals against threats to "operations" that may come from public criticism and direct political action.

By deepening UC's links to Kroll, you would be illustrating the kinds of connection between public higher education and Wall Street that the Occupy UC movement is protesting. Kroll's parent company, Altegrity, provides data-mining, intelligence and on-the-ground security to financial institutions and governments seeking to head off and defeat both private sabotage and public protest. In addition, Altegrity's parent company, Providence Private Equity, is a major global investor in for-profit higher education companies that benefit from the decline of publicly funded higher education.

We already know that Kroll has provided security services to at least three UC campuses for the past several years. This in itself would disqualify Mr. Bratton from participating in the investigation you propose, even if the role of Kroll and its affiliated companies in defending the financial sector against OWS did not raise further questions about its pro-Wall Street and pro-privatization bias.

A truly independent investigation that would allow UC to provide a credible response to the events at Davis (and the other campuses) needs to address several questions that would not be seriously considered if you hire Kroll.

• What was your role and that of UC General Counsel in the events at Davis? Did you, as a distinguished first amendment scholar, tell chancellors and campus police chiefs that protests (especially protests against UC's own policies) are "part of the DNA of this University" that should not be addressed using the same techniques that UC has developed (likely with the help of Kroll) to deal with terrorists, shooters, and cyber-saboteurs? (Even if you have been a zealous defender of the rising student movement to restore public higher education, such a conclusion would not be credible coming from an investigation tainted by Kroll's conflicts of interest outlined above.)
• What was and is the role of Kroll in helping banks and public institutions (including UC) investigate and defeat movements such as OWS and their campus counterparts? Is Kroll now acting as a liaison between universities, city governments and the Department of Homeland Security in defending the financial sector against protests occurring on what used to be considered public spaces? Are protests against Wall Street in such spaces now considered a threat to the security of the nation, the city and the public university? (The growing securitization of public space has been a major obstacle to first amendment activity since 9-11.)
• How much money has UC and its individual campuses paid to Kroll for security services? Were these contracts issued as sole source contracts or was there open bidding? Were Kroll's services confined to protecting, for example, the privacy and integrity of data systems and faculty and staff conducting animal research or did they extended to what Kroll's website calls "organizational threats" arising from "the dynamic and sometimes conflicting needs of the entire campus population?" (This could be a description of the student protests that you rightly regard as "central to our history" as a university.)
• What led to the issuance of false and misleading statements by University of California officials (Chancellors and their assistants, spokespeople, and police chiefs) in the aftermath of police violence at Berkeley and Davis? Did you encourage these efforts at spin control? (Dishonest statements seriously damage the university as an institution devoted to truth and protect only the individuals whose decisions are in question.)

The broader issue is how protest can be part of what you characterized as "our university's DNA" when the right to protest is not formally recognized within the university's own codes of student and faculty conduct. It could be and should be. The CSU student code states explicitly that "[n]othing in this Code may conflict with Education Code Section 66301 that prohibits disciplinary action against students based on behavior protected by the first amendment." If such language were included in the UC code of conduct, students would have a clear first amendment defense against disciplinary action arising from peaceful political protest-and there would be strong grounds for questioning the legality of a police order to disperse a peaceful protest from a public site on a public university campus. The explicit incorporation of constitutional limits on UC's power to break up demonstrations that threaten its march toward privatization would go a long way toward recovering UC as a public, rather than a private, space. We urge you to see that the UC codes of conduct are amended to parallel those in place at CSU.

Events at Davis and the other campuses have shown the University of California in a negative light, and we agree strongly with the need for an independent investigation. We believe, however, that your appointment of Kroll to investigate the university's response to last week's protest could itself become a basis for new protests, and that you should ask Speaker Perez (or someone unaffiliated with the University) to appoint a genuinely independent committee with representatives from student, faculty, staff and civil liberties groups. Such a committee should be given a specific charge to investigate and report on all of the questions set forth above.

Robert Meister,
President, Council of UC Faculty Associations
Professor History of Consciousness and Political and Social Thought, UC Santa Cruz

Man in Front of Tank

In 1989 there were protest throughout many cities in mainland China. The most well known scene from these protest was in Tiananmen Square; where a lone man stands in front of tanks to protest the Chinese government, and military. The protests were sparked by mass mourning over the death of former CPC General Secretary HU Yaobang; he was a Party offical who had been removed from his seat for his support of political liberalization. The day before his funeral, 100,000 people had gathered at Tiananmen Square. Beijing students began the demonstrations to encourage continued economic reform and liberalization. From Tiananmen Square they later expanded into the surrounding streets, and non-violent protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai and Wuhan. This youtube image depicts a man expressing beattitudes by standing up to, and going against the status quo of an oppressive government/regime.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV-tk8CrqCQ

-Adrian Kazay

Watermelon Sugar Salon

Driving around in San Francisco today, I passed by a small, modest hair salon by the name of Watermelon Sugar Salon. On the salon's website there is no mention of Richard Brautigan or his book In Watermelon Sugar, which I found rather curious. I feel that the name's significance, whether used for a salon or a book, produces many interpretative possibilities, but Brautigan's sardonic wit, coupled with the book's apocalyptic motifs however seem to be on a different part of the spectrum than a hair salon.

But the salon did redeem its choice of a post-beat title by informing its customers that the salon was established "on the principle of creating something small and personal in a time where everyone else seems to be going big and corporate." This seems more like Kerouace/Ginsberg/Ferlinghetti beattitude as opposed to Brautigan's post-beat, environmental focus. In Watermelon Sugar as a name defers any reader's suspicions that this book exhibits apocalyptic modes and discusses violence. The book also discusses the ways in which nature and technology are related, a mode that seems closer to the type of mantra a hair salon might flaunt - natural look with the newest technology. Still, the name of the book definitely does not imply sweetness, and its possible and likely that their name choice had nothing to do with Richard Brautigan. But maybe these hairdressers did know what they were doing in choosing a name, and maybe this rejection of all that is rigid and boxed off is exactly what Kerouac and Ginsberg had in mind.

–Edan Sberlo

The End of the Western World

"San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth." - William Saroyan

di prima and ihotel lecture notes

DIANE DI PRIMA

the ultimate claustrophobia is the syllogism
the ultimate claustrophobia is "it all adds up"
nothing adds up & nothing stands in for
anything else

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION

THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS THE WAR AGAINST
THE IMAGINATION
ALL OTHER WARS ARE SUBSUMED IN IT
-- Diane di Prima, “Revolutionary Letter #75”


LTEL 155B SYLLABUS (CONT.):
Week 8:
Mon. Nov. 14: Midterm taken in class.
Wed. Nov. 16: Read the poems (letters # 1-70) in Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (pp. 1-94).

Week 9:
Mon. Nov. 21: Finish reading di Prima, Revolutionary Letters (pp. 95-160).
Wed. Nov. 23: Start reading Karen Tei Yamashita, I-Hotel (any one-three “floors”/ or chapters of the overall 10). ( KTY to visit our lecture...this class or the next one.)

Week 10:
Mon, Nov., 28: finish I-Hotel. (KTY to visit?)
Wed. Nov 30: Last class session: show some Waldman/Dylan: Students read their post-beat works/sites/projects etc....

Week 11:
NOTE: Final Projects will be due by 4-7PM on Tuesday, December 6, which is the final-exam time slot (bring to Baskin Lecture Hall our classroom).
------------------
Diane di Prima (1934- ):

“You Say You Want a Revolution”: Spreading Utopian Anarchism across San Francisco, “Turtle Island” America, and the Post-Beat World.



1934: Born in Brooklyn, New York and has strong ties to Greenwich Village Bohemian culture; started writing at seven, influenced by grandfather from whom she took abiding ties to Italian utopic anarchism;

1951, studied physics at Swarthmore College for two years and dropped out;

1958 first book of poems published, This Bird Flies Backwards, full of wry love poems.

1961, started the literary mimeograph The Floating Bear with Leroi Jones, with whom she also started New York Poets Theater of one-act plays;

1964, with her husband Alan Marlowe she founded the Poets Press and published first books by Audre Lorde, David Henderson et al;

1968 ff.: moved to SF and became part of the Diggers & SF writing scene; she starts to study zen with Roshi Suzuki; world tribalisms and socialist quests from Cuba and China to the Diggers in the Haight Ashbury of SF. Always quests to align revolutionary visions of altered world practices and arts with First peoples of Turtle island and polytheistic magic practices; “raising rebellion into an art.”

1969, Memoirs of a Beatnik published by Olympia Press and later by Penguin.

1971, City Lights publishes the serial poem, Revolutionary Letters [“something you could understand at one hearing, something like Guerilla Theater” she first read out by a bullhorn from a flatbed truck in NYC] distributed widely by underground press before it is published by City Lights;

1974, teaches poetry in opening sessions of Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO.

1978, starts to publish feminist muse poems called Loba, which she keeps adding poems to over the years.

1980, helps to establish Masters Program in Poetics at New College of California in SF.

1981, begins work at psychic and healer, which leads to her writing and teaching in the San Francisco Institute of Magic and the Healing Arts.

1990, Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems published by City Lights.

2001, Recollections of My Life as a Woman published.

2010, she is appointed by Mayor Newsome as Poet Laureate of San Francisco. ...


“I think the poet is the last person who is still speaking truth when no one else dares to. I think the poet is the first person to begin the shaping and visioning of the new forms and the new consciousness when no one else has begun to sense it; I think these are two of the most essential human functions.”
-- Diane di Prima, in Brenda Knight, ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (1996).

“Don’t forget, however great your visioning and your inspiration, you need the techniques of your craft and there’s nowhere, really to go get them because these are not passed out in schools. They are passed on person to person, and back then [in earlier days of the Beat Generation] the male naturally passed them on to the male. I think maybe I was one of the first women to break through that in having deep conversations with Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara [as well as mentorship relations with Ezra Pound, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at SF & Tassajara zendo, and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at Naropa].
-- Diane di Prima to Anne Waldman.

“It is some essential clarity I value [in di Prima’s poetry]—which in these initial occasions of her writing is already moving to declare itself: food, places, friends, nights, streets, dreams, the way. She is an adept and flexible provider of the real, which we eat daily or else we starve…She is true.”
-- Robert Creeley, “Foreword: for Diane” to Pieces of a Song.

“… a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated, and twentieth- century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes.”
-- Allen Ginsberg on di Prima’s body of work.

“Diane di Prima is the original outlaw poet; she wrote herself a wild, authentic life without regard for the rules during an era when being such a female creature was truly transgressive. Her writing is crucial as history; as literature it is enduring and bewitching.”
-- Michelle Tea, blurb for extended edition of Revolutionary Letters (2007).



SOME GOOD LINKS (there are many others online if you look around):

Diane di Prima reads “April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa” at Naropa Institute:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVN9lamJyoQ&playnext=1&list=PL1667173FD5DDB050


Diane di Prima reading in the “Lunch Poems series” at UC Berkeley in 2008 (introduction by Robert Hass):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk629z7REWY


Diane di Prima reads from Revolutionary Letters (#7 ,#13, #16, #49)

in 1969 in NYC on the radio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PvEaSLY5L0


-----
Some possible “blog”-- or even “final project” topics!-- for writings on Revolutionary Letters (but follow your TA’s section mandates and suggestions):

1) Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters is an historically evolving “serial” work, as she adds new letters in response to new events and configurations of herself, the city, the country, the world. Write your own version of a “revolutionary letter” in a poem or in a brief essay, working in some aspects of the contemporary situation you face.

-- see “Twelve For/From Diane di Prima” based on twelve cut-up, collaged, and repurposed phrases from Revolutionary Letters putting some links between Psyche and Geography as phrased into the urban space of the contemporary City [here, San Francisco]. Others?

2) Discuss one of the Revolutionary Letters in which a woman’s point of view and values adds something different or new to the beat perspective on the world, and its beatitude quest.

-- poems of revolutionary love (p.5; p. 11 on love emerging from “people left to themselves”; Memorial Day 2003 (Letter #93, p. 143)
-- healing tips for action and health (p. 12).
--defensive weaponry cum Buddhist compassion and yogic tactics (pp. 15, 21, 26, 44);
-- forges a new diet for the revolutionary body (pp. 56, 70, 73);
-- “women’s alchemy” of blood, labor, birth (#44, p, 57).
-- “my body a weapon as yours is” (#66, p. 83); “Dee’s Song” (p. 155).
-- learn “magic” as an alternative knowledge (#46, p. 59, #59, p. 76; p. 87, Tibetan healing chant); alchemy by Inward Fire (#74, p.101).
-- women protest against bulldozer to protect olive groves (#90, p. 139).
-- woman warrior figure portrayed in “Canticle of St. Joan” (p. 157).

3) What other worlds, other cultures, other ways of connecting to an alternative to American dominant culture are enacted in The Revolutionary Letters?

-- appeals to Turtle Island, Native American way of life as a more balanced ecology of planetary belonging (pp. 34, 37, 46, 49, 53, 59 72, 78; “New Mexico Poem,” p. 150).
-- embracing the “we” solidarity of world revolution across different urban and national sites(pp. 42, 38, 40, 43, 51 [“PEOPLE’S PLANET”).
-- invokes “Arab song” to project another world view against US going to war (Letters # 77 #78, #79, #80, #81, #82; 9/11 poem of global feedback, Letter # 88).
-- uses imagination of poetics to create an alternative cosmology (Letter #75, p. 103, “Rant”)

4) Discuss one of more of the “revolutionary letter” poems that can be connected to Occupy Wall Street-like tactics of revolutionary urbanism or urban-space repurposing that is now taking place in the Bay Area as around the world.

-- poems that seem “anti-urban” in their stance but actually de-create and negate urban forms under capital in order to forge and create new forms (pp. 28, 45, 47, 77, 53).
-- picking “be-in” sites and demo sites (Letter # 8, p. 17).
-- campus & city seizure tactics of the commons (Letter #15, p. 27).
-- construct “hiding places” inside your home & neighborhood p. 38)
-- altered geography maps (pp. 34, 50, 20).
-- tips for urban occupation in revolutionary times of urban action (p. 9)
-- “the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction” (Letter # 12, p. 23).
-- embraces San Francisco and its “woods” (#53, p. 68; #70, p. 93).
-- towards an anti-productivist driven planet, refusing over-consumption (p. 28); refusing the global assembly line of exploited women (p. 44; Letter # 67, 84).




Rob Wilson

TWELVE FOR/FROM DIANE di PRIMA: A POST-BEAT LETTER

It’s a good idea, Psyche, you turn away from the conditioning
hauling in the galaxy like some used geography from the Interzone
eyes & hands, knives & guns, psychological remnants of tools
this dark a song full of bargaining is getting old on the mass media
notebooks by the dozen carved up into winter scarves for the homeless
the undead are homeless too and walk back-streets of San Francisco

this war against the imagination needs some televising online
to become a new prosody of pithy characters, do you see?
Psyche split from Geography, in cities around the world, our bombs are dropping, bags of rice burst open so we can give them to Mars for free

tired of it so am I bald eagle on this f lying flag where a
porcelain city glitters & splits into a million shards revolving into slums


(RW poem in homage to Diane Di Prima as Political/Poetic “Muse” of the Future)




KAREN YAMASHITA


Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita: “Thank you. I’m very honored [to be nominated for National Book Award in 2010].
I think the work of the previous books made the I Hotel possible; that is to say that I learned while writing how to research, to create form, structure, and narrative voice, and to follow a writing practice intuitive to my own process. The research for Brazil-Maru, based on the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, was similarly extensive, and I employed practices of interviewing learned from those years. In writing Tropic of Orange, I continued to experiment with voice and narrative perspectives. While researching Circle K Cycles in Japan, I became more confident about moving within a community as recorder and participant while building a contemporary archive. The archival research for I Hotel, however, was far more extensive than in the previous projects. I spent endless hours reviewing old underground newspapers, flyers, graphic art, literature, audio speeches, documentary radio and video, books, and music of the time.

PBAJ: I Hotel is dedicated to Asako and her grandchildren. Do you have a reader in mind as you write?
KTY: My mother, Asako Yamashita, is 93 years old. I suppose she won’t mind her age broadcast at this late date as she, though hard of hearing, has been an avid reader, her mind still very much engaged in current events, the state of the economy, and politics. She reads the New York Times every morning, and she’s the reader who cut out the notice about the National Book Awards. I think it became a reality for her when she read it there. My mother and father and their generation of Nisei Americans lived through the war having to be removed from the San Francisco bay area and sites all along the Pacific Coast to concentration camps. It’s probably not Asako as a particular reader that I have in mind but perhaps that legacy of struggle that extends to a continuing movement for civil and human rights that may be a guiding spirit.
….KTY: The International Hotel or I-Hotel was/is a real place. It was a hotel built around the turn of the century, 1900, on Kearny and Jackson streets between Chinatown and North Beach in San Francisco. In the pre-war era, Kearny Street was known as Filipino- or Manilatown, lined by restaurants, bars, and storefronts that serviced the Filipino community and was mostly populated by Filipino migrant laborers. By the 1960s, the I-Hotel was rundown but cheap housing for a bachelor community of elderly Filipino and Chinese, men who had lived out their lives as agricultural field labor, cannery workers, merchant mariners, longshoremen, union activists, busboys, and cooks. As tenants, these men made their last stand to prevent the destruction of the hotel to be replaced, under the guise of redevelopment, by a parking lot. From 1968 to 1977, community and student activists and eventually thousands of supporters in the San Francisco and East Bay areas congregated at the I-Hotel to prevent the eviction and destruction of the hotel.
This narrative technique has been, for me, an ongoing question from the first novel on. I suppose it began in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest in experimenting with a narrator who is a ball, and it continues in all of my work. It’s become an obsession, but maybe this last book has flushed it out of me. As a creative writing teacher, for many years I used Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler as a teaching tool, to encourage students to find and experiment with narrative voice. I think once a writer discovers the construction, limitations, and pleasures of a voice, the writing often takes care of itself. As for the I Hotel, embedded in the assumptions of the ten novellas and their narrative voices is also a literary project that has to do with Asian American literature.”

Some Book Review comments on I-Hotel:
Weighing in at slightly over 600 pages, author Karen Tei Yamashita’s National Book Award-nominated I Hotel is an encyclopedic compilation of facts, personages, and allusions both common and obscure that could very well represent a turning point in Asian-American literature. A novel that took its author 10 years to write, I Hotel actually consists of ten “hotels”: loosely-associated novellas that detail the variegated strands of activism within San Francisco’s Asian-American community, circa 1968-1977…
Concurrent with the protests of both San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, students and social activists rallied to protest what was clearly a case of the city’s marginalizing a long-established community of color solely for reasons of gentrification. The I-Hotel quickly became the locus of Asian-American political activity for nearly a decade. Yamashita takes great care to make this point explicit, such as when she has a collective “we” succinctly state: “By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup—... On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed.”
As in her previous works, Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful, in a wildly multicultural landscape. The novel reveals how the civil rights movement intertwines the Black Panthers, Yellow Power, the Indian takeover of Alcatraz, the formation of the United Farm Workers, protests against nuclear proliferation, and the rights of the disabled – and the fascinating contributions of Asian Americans in each.
You may find yourself putting down the book and going online to find out more about this compelling history, and guessing whom the fictional characters are based on. Mo Akagi appears to be Richard Aoki, field marshal for the Black Panthers. Edmund Yat Min Lee bears a resemblance to Ling-chi Wang, activist and retired UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies. Arthur Hama might be Takeo “Edward” Terada, a Japanese immigrant who painted Coit Tower murals.

….In the final pages, Yamashita assumes the voice of the community – the “we” who ask, “But why save an old hotel?” In lyrical, elegant prose, she explains how the hotel became a symbol, a rallying cry for people putting aside their differences to unite for a cause.
“Each room was a tiny home, a place of final refuge for a lifetime of work … when we saw the elderly tenants thrown out on the streets, maybe we saw ourselves, our own stories of struggle and sacrifice connected to their stories, and we knew that whatever our kids had been trying to do, we could agree on this one thing – the honor due to those who’ve gone before.”

Diane di Prima and Sandi Thom

In Revolutionary Letter #11, Diane di Prima talks about a road trip she took with a friend and their encounter with a man at a gas station who didn't seem to like them both. She says to her friend that it's not the two them he didn't like, it was the idea of them that media had created. And all the confusion and misguided hostility could be taken away if only they could just sit down with the guy and talk to him over a beer. Then he would be able to see past their hair, dress and the connotation the media had created for people who dressed like them. A simple idea, a  simple solution yet so difficult to actually create such a situation. I find it frustrating how little people listen to one another and neglect to give time to one another to explain each others point of view.

On another note, I remembered a song I had heard a while ago called "I Wish I was Punk Rocker" by Sandi Thom and remembered a line from it. "When mom and dad were in their teens, and anarchy was still a dream and the only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail." We forget because we live in such a fast-paced and connected world that in the olden days, you had to send a letter to keep in touch. So we may take the title Revolutionary Letters too lightly when really a letter in the mail was one of the strongest forms of communication for the working class. Just a thought.

Ginsberg at Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, East 10th Street between Ave B & Ave C, New York City, June 1966. According to Bill Morgan, the bookstore became a kind of second office for Allen in 1964, and by the end of 1964 he and Ed Sanders held the first LeMar (Legalize Marijuana) meetings there.

The Fugs were a band founded in early 1965 who tried to spread a "Non-Violent Revolution" and were long active in the anti-war movement. The band also made many appearances with Allen Ginsberg during Woodstock Festivals in the past. Their album art released on February 23, 2010 featured a snail reading Ginsberg's poem "Howl". Ed Sanders, who was a longtime member of the band The Fugs (also known as the bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations) founded Peace Eye Bookstore in 1962 at the Lower East Side which quickly became a gathering place for bohemians, radicals, and writers.

-Gina Kim

My Experience and Feelings About Feminism

I don't have much experience with feminism! But as Matt said today in section it is a pertinent issue, for sure. I remember when I was working at a grocery store I was on register one day, and I had a somewhat feminist woman supervising that day. My friend walked up to me while I was on register and told me that a job I had applied for in janitorial at a local school had been filled. And he emphasized "By a girrrl." And i mimicked back "by a girl?!" I didn't realize the sexism in this statement until my supervisor flashed an upset look at me. My friend went on to explain that the school had to hire a certain number of men and women for the job and even though I was more qualified for the position because I had lots of heavy manual labor experience in the past, she was hired to fill quotas. Later my supervisor called me over and said, "What do you mean 'by a girl'?!?" She was upset that I was surprised that a girl has been hired over a man. Looking back I see that my natural reaction was in fact sexist. And from that point on I always made sure to be more aware of these tense subjects such as male and female job placement. I didn't mean to offend her but my natural reaction was not "ethically sound."

Matt talked about ethics today in class and how when we wake up in the morning we have to make choices. As i ponder (in a quite uneducated way) about feminism I realize that it comes down to more than just intellectually elite arguments and armchair philosophizing. Feminism in a practical sense is ethical, it comes down to how you treat the people around you, in time, in the moment, so as to shape a collective memory of love and not abjection or hatred.

Now, Professor Wilson said, in class, something along the lines of "You people" are in a post-beat, post-hippy, post-punk, post-feminist state. He said "You people" are "Post-everything."

"Now you need to find SOMETHING to stand for and DO SOMETHING with IT"

I think that "SOMETHING" is the beats, the hippies, the punks, the feminists, ect..And what we need to "DO" is SYNTHESIZE. We need to take the feminist movement as a reaction to a very real misogyny and synthesize it into a responsible ethos. Again, I am not caught up on contemporary feminism, so maybe it's already been synthesized and i'm sure it has been. Maybe contemporary feminism IS a set of ethics.

WIll The Real Allen Ginsberg Please Stand Up?

I was a big fan of Howl, and really liked the ideas behind each poem. From a literary standpoint, the metaphors and overarching themes were great. As such, I was also a fan of the movie. My only question about this one though, is, how hard is it to portray Allen Ginsberg? Probably pretty hard, the guy seemed like quite a character.

Occupy Everything

This caught my eye the other day... We are not only occupying street corners, county buildings, UC lawns, but also labels on alcohol bottles.

As many Occupy movements are getting shut down by local governments, people are finding new ways to "Occupy" and take a stand against inequality. While the protests are being stopped by law enforcement, the right to free speech is still intact. Hundreds of bloggers, including many of our own SF Literature students are writing about the Occupy movements. With this bottle of Absolut SF, the people who don't read the news, blogs, or travel by the courthouse to see the tent city are encouraged to take a stand and speak up.

We are living in a momentous time-- the Occupy movements have set forth many other protests as well, like the protest of the UC regents and European countries' protests against budget cuts.

Brautigan and a little Gilespie

I was reading up on Brautigan a little bit, specifically in regards to his suicide, and found out that he left a suicide note that simply read, "Messy, isn't it?"
That threw me for a loop.
He'd been dead for around a month before anyone found him. Apparently he had shot himself in the head with a pistol while standing in his house, facing his window that overlooked the ocean.
The last person who claims to have talked to him was an ex-girlfriend.
Here is what brautigan.net has to say about it:
"Brautigan reportedly last seen alive when he left San Francisco for his home in Bolinas, California. While in San Francisco he accidentally met his former wife Akiko. They had divorced four years earlier. Brautigan seemed shocked to see her and in some accounts, ran away. He also met Marcia Clay, a former girlfriend with whom he had broken off from also four years earlier when she sided with Akiko in the divorce. Several accounts say Brautigan then went to Cho-Cho Tempura Bar, 1020 Kearny Street, a popular San Francisco Japanese restaurant, where he allegedly borrowed a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum handgun from owner Jimmy Sakata. Brautigan often visited the restaurant, talking with owner Sakata about anything from Japanese writers to firearms. Brautigan drank heavily in the afternoon and evening and returned to his house in Bolinas. Clay called Brautigan later that night, shortly after 11:00 pm, in Bolinas. Brautigan said he wanted to read something to her. She hung up so he could find the piece of writing he wanted to read. When she called back Brautigan did not answer. She called repeatedly, each time getting only the answering machine. As she and other concerned friends called over the next days the batteries in the answering machine ran down. Brautigan's recorded voice took on a surreal quality (Lawrence Wright 59-60). It is possible that Brautigan killed himself just after Clay's initial telephone call, sometime after 11:00 pm."

Here is also one of the few videos I could find on youtube of Brautigan in the flesh



I loved Trout Fishing in America and really related to his sense of humor.
He seemed like a cool cat.
The picture at the top is of a funny man, that's for sure.
It's always tragic to find out when authors take their own lives. There seems to be a long standing tradition of such authors, and it's a shame that Brautigan was amongst them.
Rest in Peace Trout Fisherman.

But on a much lighter note, here's a song by Dizzy Gilespie that I enjoy very much (notice the RCA victor label on the record):



-Tyler Watson

Defining the Beat Movement

Of course, this could be an entire essay, so I'll have to abridge it into a few points:

Here are aspects of a definition according to Allen Ginsberg:

• Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.
• Liberation of the word from censorship.
• Demystification and/or decriminalization of some laws against marijuana and other drugs.
• The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets' and writers' works.
• The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early on by Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet."
• Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.
• Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization.
• Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy as against state regimentation.
• Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road 'The Earth is an Indian thing.'

It is interesting how many o

f these apply to different movements around the United States, especially "radical" movements such as Occupy Wall Street.

I guess it emphasizes how the Beats inspired the Hippies, the anti-war movements (to follow), and even the environmental and political activist groups wishing for equality and/or continuity of our environment.

-Adam J.

Ginsberg Cited from http://www.heureka.clara.net/art/beat-generation.htm

“Where they burn books, they will also burn people.”--Heinrich Heine So, where they throw books in dumpsters...

Former SF City Librarian Ken Dowlin veiled his “weeding” of the SF Public Library by appointing red herrings everywhere—in the architectural plans, in the want of a high tech facility, in the chaos of natural disasters—before impounding the old card catalogue to cover his tracks of hauling roughly a fifth of the Library’s books away to the landfill.

NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently stepped up the progress of “cleaning” up public spaces—with sanitation teams, militarized riot-geared police, at 1:00am with a media blackout that included beatings of journalists—throwing roughly 5000 volumes of the People’s Library into dumpster trucks at Zuccotti Park.

…and I’m thinking of di Prima (Revolutionary Letter #47)

TO BE FREE we’ve got to be free of

any idea of freedom.

Today the State Dept lifted the ban on

travel to China: and closed

Merritt College.

Aside from an article discussing the terrain of a people’s library in the present democracy movement throughout the cities of this nation and the world, there’s also a couple of new poems by Anne Waldman and Alice Walker posted by the writers themselves on the OccupyWriters.com site.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Haiku from Zuccotti Park

Moloch’s motor got stuck

on the roof of Casino Wall Street

look up! moon, a ghost chip in the sky…

10/ 10/11 “Columbus” Day/Liberty Plaza
--Anne Waldman

the joyful news of your arrest

this sunday morning everything

is bringing tears.

in church this morning

not a church anyone from my childhood

would

recognize

as church

a brother singing

ecstatic

about the bigness of love

and then this moment

news of your arrest

on the steps of the supreme court

a place of intrigue and distrust;

news of the illegal sign you carried

that you probably made yourself:

Poverty Is The Greatest Violence Of All.

brother cornel. brother west.

what a joy it is

to hear this news of you.

that you have not forgotten

what our best people taught us

as they rose to meet their day:

not to be silent

not to fade into the shadows

not to live and die in vain.

But to glorify

the love that demands

we stand

in danger

shaking off

our chains.

--Alice Walker

The People's Library and the future of OWS

The massive library carted away by authorities at Zuccotti Park is a formidable weapon in Occupy Wall Street's arsenal. Mark LeVine Last Modified: 16 Nov 2011 13:51

The free flow of information that the so-called People's Library provided was a particularly potent weapon in the Occupy movement's arsenal - until it was removed by police when they evicted protesters at Zuccotti Park [EPA]

Midnight is not a time I expect my mobile phone to ring, and certainly not with a call from the programme director of KPFK, the progressive public radio station of Los Angeles. But so flummoxed was Alan Minsky, an old friend and producer of the Axis of Justice radio show, that he dialled me by mistake.

"My bad. But they've just raided Zuccotti Park ... Cops have already dismantled the encampment at OWS," he explained, before moving on to contact anyone he could reach who might have first-hand information about what was going on there.

My first thought was immediately the 5,000 book library that has come to define the OWS site at Zuccotti Park. Tents can be replaced, even most personal effects. But destroying books is like destroying the soul of the movement; for more than any protest movement in at least two generations, the OWS movement is the product of well-planned, thoughtful action guided by a constant engagement with theory.

As Minsky explained to me when we spoke early the next morning, compared with the anti-corporate globalisation and then anti-war movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the libraries reflect the "maturity of a movement" that had "been shell-shocked by the whole Bush era".

The power of a 'people's library'

The "People's Library" was at the heart of the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, and has played a similar role in other large occupations, such as Los Angeles. It is the necessary complement to the actual physical occupation of urban space represented by the OWS movement. Many people might wonder why it's so important for protesters permanently to camp when the reality, especially as the weather turns bad, is that few people are actually doing anything at night besides sleeping.

In-depth coverage of the global movement

But the point of the occupation is precisely to reconquer space that has been taken over, either by the state or by private interests - a kind of "eminent domain" of, by and for the people - and create a permanent presence that can engender and nourish the kind of community and solidarity that have so disappeared in the United States in the last forty years. By permanently occupying Zuccottii and other parks, the OWS movement created a space where people could gather, create libraries, share books and ideas, and even meals. Where they could plan for another world that isn't merely possible anymore, but the only hope for the survival of humanity as a civilisation.

The library, which took weeks to establish, reflected the uniqueness and power of the still young 99 per cent movement. "From the very beginning, the OWS encampments were not just gestures of protest thinly focused on making statements about the ills of society, but were efforts to build community where people were knowledgeable and participated in informed dialogue. The libraries, at least in Zuccotti and in Los Angeles, have been central. Here in LA a graduate student made her entire personal library available to occupiers. These libraries have contemporary theory, classical literature, incisive analyses, and all sorts of books that have been marginalised from the mainstream media and culture. But when the history of this period will be written, these are the books that will be remembered."

So much did the "people's library" idea resonate that the OWS library couldn't keep up with all the donations they've received and encouraging people to take books out. The website lists some of the newest arrivals in the days before the raid: Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia, by Savo Heleta, Nuclear Nebraska, by Susan Cragin, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, From the Heat of the Day, by Roy A.K. Heath, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, and innumerable other books that were opening the minds of all who passed through OWS and the many peoples' libraries it has fostered across the country.

Minsky continued, "This open philosophy stands in stark opposition to the world of corporate culture. Trashing the library was symbolic of what the combined forces of Bloomberg and the NYPD feel about learning and the society in which we live." (Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg, who claimed full responsibility for the raid's execution, had to know about the library. Yet his "minutely planned raid" - as the New York Times described it - shovelled thousands of books into garbage trucks to be carted away to the nearest sanitation facility).

It also stands in stark contrast to the earlier iterations of the anti-corporate globalisation and anti-war movements, especially when it came to recognising the role of the Middle East in the larger processes of globalisation that were at the heart of the struggles of both movements.

New forms of culture jamming

In fact, I wrote the book I donated to the People's Library, Why They Don't Hate Us, specifically in response the abject failure of the emerging anti-corporate globalisation movement of the late 1990s, and then the anti-war movement that coalesced after September 11, to engage with the Middle East and larger Muslim world's role in the development of globalisation, or with the many scholars of the region who had the expertise and experience to help develop a more effective counter-discourse to both Clintonian neoliberalism and Bush's full metal jacket neoconservatism.

Ironically, Adbusters magazine and the culture jamming movement it helped spawn were at the centre of both the pre-9/11 alter-globalisation movement and the OWS movement today. The problem with the first iteration of culture jamming imagined by the movement was that it was mostly negative, focusing on critiquing or subverting political or advertising messages by "jamming" symbols into them that expose the usually ugly realities beneath the sexy, cool or comfortable veneers (painting a skull and cross bones over the face of a Marlboro Man billboard is a seminal example of this practice).

As I travelled around the Middle East and Muslim world in the years following September 11, it became clear that young people across the region - the very ones that would play a leading role in the revolutionary protests of the last year - were engaged in a much more open, positive, and therefore far more powerful kind of culture jamming than the mostly critical style of culture jamming associated with the movement. Musicians, artists, activists, scholars; all were coming together to create new forms of cultural production that transcended rather than merely criticise the status quo.

The fruits of this process, which gestated in cafes in the midst of war-torn Baghdad, the rubble of southern Beirut and Nablus, conference rooms in Doha and Washington, DC, and face-to-face meetings of Facebook friends in Cairo and Casablanca, were reflected in the amazing hybridity of Arab hiphop and Pakistani rock. They could be seen in the powerful forms of civil resistance deployed - the bit of Gene Sharp here, a dash of Gandhi there, a tablespoon of Leninist labour organising mixed with a dollop of cyberactivism and a hint of soccer hooliganism that came together in places like Sidi Bouzid and Meidan Tahrir - leaving once vaunted mukhabarat and the long-ruling dictators they served, not to mention their Western patrons, utterly flummoxed.

First the books, then the people

Israeli filmmaker, theorist and activist Udi Aloni, whom I interviewed in a recent column, moves regularly between Tel Aviv and Brooklyn, and spent countless hours both at the protest encampment on Rothschild Boulevard and in Zuccotti Park. It was Aloni who brought my book to the People's Library, along with his own new book, What Does a Jew Want?, which captures the spirit of culture jamming as not merely transgressive, but as transformative theory and practice.

As soon as he heard about the library, his thoughts turned to Heinrich Heine, the great 19th century German poet and critic, who exclaimed in his Almansor the famous words: "Where they burn books, they'll ultimately burn people too".

Of course, New York City isn't burning books, but for Aloni, carting them away in garbage trucks is not that far removed. "When they disrespect books, they disrespect humankind, and when they destroy books, they destroy the spirit of humanity. The library was great because people gave more than they took. OWS was not just a place for activism, but also a place for education and rethinking; not for just blathering on when you don't know, but being humble and willing to learn. By taking out the library, they've tried to stop that crucial process."

Even at Occupy-OC - my own city's much smaller occupation encampment - the sharing of knowledge is crucial. One of the most powerful spots in our 20 by 20 metre camp is the "the think-tank", where small groups of people gather and attempt to think through the myriad problems the movement, and the country, face. According to one of our main facilitators, the dismantling and carting away of the library signifies them "going after all the symbols that allow us to have a conversation".

And this is precisely why, despite arguments by some that it's time for OWS to "declare victory and go inside" for the winter, it is crucial that the movement has identifiable permanent locations where people can publicly meet, read, discuss and debate the crucial issues raised by activists.

Seizing and holding territory is key

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt only became possible once activist groups got moved from Facebook to the streets, adapting with incredible speed and alacrity to the various attempts by the governments to slow them down. So it's not surprising that Egyptian revolutionaries like Asmaa Mahfouz and Ahmed Maher feel so at home when visiting OWS.

Even if the thousands of books carted away by sanitation workers are ultimately recovered by their owners or the People's Librarians or replaced, without a highly visible public space where they can be accessed any time, members of the movement and the less powerful public they will lose much if not most of the animating power they gave to the OWS movement.

It turns out that in the 21st century, seizing and holding territory - both the public square and the public sphere - are inextricably bound together. As Wall Street and Occupy Wall Street continue their battle for the soul of American society into the winter and then an election year, the flood of knowledge represented by the OWS People's Library is one of the best weapons protesters have to hold their ground against their much better financed, and armed, adversaries. If municipalities and their corporate sponsors are able to push OWS out of public sight, it will be a lot harder to ensure it doesn't fall out of mind for the millions of Americans who have just begun to feel safe imagining that through direct action, they too can change a system that has never seemed more stacked against them.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011111681642279467.html

"This has always been a poet's town."

An interesting piece glorifying the beat days of old on Grant street and elsewhere in San Francisco's cultural hotspots:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/13/MNLL1LQDI1.DTL

Also, a police raid at occupy sf camp:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/16/BADF1LVU6R.DTL

-Edan Sberlo

Occupy demands: Let's radicalise our analysis

The Diggers embodied their ideas for a better society by living and "acting out" their beliefs (Reclaiming SF, "Call Any Vegetable: The Politics of Food in SF"), including an important tenet to "erase the boundary between life and art" (Drew 324). The following article offers some critical insights for bringing down the barriers of many other over-determinations in our material-discursives...beginning with a "lack" of a list of demands by the Occupy movement.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The crisis we face is caused by failed systems - replacing leaders while keeping the old system intact will not help.

Robert Jensen Last Modified: 09 Nov 2011 14:57

There's one question that pundits and politicians keep posing to the Occupy gatherings around the country: What are your demands?

I have a suggestion for a response: We demand that you stop demanding a list of demands.

The demand for demands is an attempt to shoehorn the Occupy gatherings into conventional politics, to force the energy of these gatherings into a form that people in power recognise, so that they can roll out strategies to divert, co-opt, buy off, or - if those tactics fail - squash any challenge to business as usual.

Rather than listing demands, we critics of concentrated wealth and power in the US can dig in and deepen our analysis of the systems that produce that unjust distribution of wealth and power. This is a time for action, but there also is a need for analysis.

Rallying around a common concern about economic injustice is a beginning; understanding the structures and institutions of illegitimate authority is the next step.

We need to recognise that the crises we face are not simply the result of greedy corporate executives or corrupt politicians, but rather of failed systems. The problem is not the specific people who control most of the wealth of the country, or those in government who serve them, but the systems that create those roles.

Most chart the beginning of the external US empire-building phase with the 1898 Spanish-American War and the conquest of the Philippines that continued for some years after. That project went forward in the early 20th century, most notably in Central America, where regular US military incursions made countries safe for investment. If we could get rid of the current gang of thieves and thugs but left the systems in place, we will find that the new boss is going to be the same as the old boss.

My contribution to this process of sharpening analysis comes in lists of three, with lots of alliteration. Whether or not you find my analysis of the key questions compelling, at least it will be easy to remember: Empire, economics, ecology.

Empire: Immoral, illegal, ineffective

The United States is the current (though fading) imperial power in the world, and empires are bad things. We have to let go of self-indulgent notions of American exceptionalism - the idea that the US is a unique engine of freedom and democracy in the world and therefore is a responsible and benevolent empire. Empires throughout history have used coercion and violence to acquire a disproportionate share of the world's resources, and the US empire is no different.

In depth coverage of the global movement

Although the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are particularly grotesque examples of US imperial destruction, none of this is new; the US was founded by men with imperial visions who conquered the continent and then turned to the world.

The empire emerged in full force after World War II, as the United States assumed the role of the dominant power in the world and intensified the project of subordinating the developing world to the US system. Those efforts went forward under the banner of "anti-communism" until the early 1990s, but continued after the demise of the Soviet Union under various other guises, most notably the so-called "war on terrorism".

Whether it was Latin America, southern Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia, the central goal of US foreign policy has been consistent: to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere. The "virus" of independent development could not be allowed to take root in any country out of a fear that it might infect the rest of the developing world.

The victims of this policy - the vast majority of them non-white - can be counted in the millions. In the Western Hemisphere, US policy was carried out mostly through proxy armies, such as the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or support for dictatorships and military regimes that brutally repressed their own people, such as El Salvador. The result throughout the region was hundreds of thousands of dead - millions across Latin America over the course of the 20th century - and whole countries ruined.

"The central goal of US foreign policy ... [is] to make sure that an independent course of development did not succeed anywhere."

Direct US military intervention was another tool of US policymakers, with the most grotesque example being the attack on Southeast Asia.

After supporting the failed French effort to recolonise Vietnam after World War II, the US invaded South Vietnam and also intervened in Laos and Cambodia, at a cost of three to four million Southeast Asians dead and a region destabilised.

To prevent the spread of the "virus" there, we dropped 6.5 million tonnes of bombs and 400,000 tonnes of napalm on the people of Southeast Asia. Saturation bombing of civilian areas, counterterrorism programs and political assassination, routine killings of civilians, and 11.2 million gallons of Agent Orange to destroy crops and ground cover - all were part of the US terror war.

On 9/11, the vague terrorism justification became tangible for everyone. With the US economy no longer the source of dominance, policymakers used the terrorist attacks to justify an expansion of military operations in Central Asia and the Middle East. Though non-military approaches to terrorism were more viable, the rationale for ever-larger defence spending was set.

A decade later, the failures of this imperial policy are clearer than ever. US foreign and military policy has always been immoral, based not on principle but on power. That policy has routinely been illegal, violating the basic tenets of international law and the constitutional system. Now, more than ever, we can see that this approach to world affairs is ineffective, no matter what criteria for effectiveness we use. An immoral and criminal policy has lost even its craven justification: It will not guarantee American dominance.

That failure is the light at the end of the tunnel. As the elite bipartisan commitment to US dominance fails, we the people have a chance to demand that the US shift to policies designed not to allow us to run the world but to help us become part of the world.

Anti-democratic economics

The economic system underlying empire-building today has a name: capitalism. Or, more precisely, a predatory corporate capitalism that is inconsistent with basic human values. This description sounds odd in the US, where so many assume that capitalism is not simply the best among competing economic systems but the only sane and rational way to organise an economy in the contemporary world.

Although the financial crisis that began in 2008 has scared many people, it has not always led to questioning the nature of the system.

"Although the financial crisis ... scared many people, it has not always led to questioning the nature of the system."

That means that the first task is to define capitalism. It is an economic system in which:

• Property, including capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons;
• Most people must rent their labour power for money wages to survive; and
• The prices of most goods and services are allocated by markets.

"Industrial capitalism", made possible by sweeping technological changes and imperial concentrations of capital, was marked by the development of the factory system and greater labour specialisation. The term "finance capitalism" is often used to mark a shift to a system in which the accumulation of profits in a financial system becomes dominant over the production processes.

Today in the United States, most people understand capitalism in the context of mass consumption - access to unprecedented levels of goods and services. In such a world, everything and everyone is a commodity in the market.

In the dominant ideology of market fundamentalism, it's assumed that the most extensive use of markets possible, along with privatisation of many publicly owned assets and the shrinking of public services, will unleash maximal competition and result in the greatest good - and all this is inherently just, no matter what the results.

If such a system creates a world in which most people live in poverty, that is taken not as evidence of a problem with market fundamentalism but evidence that fundamentalist principles have not been imposed with sufficient vigour; it is an article of faith that the "invisible hand" of the market always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may be for real people.

How to critique capitalism in such a society? We can start by pointing out that capitalism is fundamentally inhuman, anti-democratic and unsustainable:

Inhuman: The theory behind contemporary capitalism explains that because we are greedy, self-interested animals, a viable economic system must reward greedy, self-interested behaviour.

That's certainly part of human nature, but we are also just as obviously capable of compassion and selflessness. We can act competitively and aggressively, but we also have the capacity to act out of solidarity and cooperation. In short, human nature is wide-ranging. In situations where compassion and solidarity are the norm, we tend to act that way. In situations where competitiveness and aggression are rewarded, most people tend towards such behaviour.

Why is it that we must accept an economic system that undermines the most decent aspects of our nature and strengthens the cruelest?

"Capitalism has always been, and will always be, a wealth-concentrating system."

Because, we're told, that's just the way people are. What evidence is there of that? Look around, we're told, at how people behave. Everywhere we look, we see greed and the pursuit of self-interest.

So the proof that these greedy, self-interested aspects of our nature are dominant is that, when forced into a system that rewards greed and self-interested behaviour, people often act that way.

Doesn't that seem just a bit circular? A bit perverse?

Anti-democratic: In the real world - not in the textbooks or fantasies of economics professors - capitalism has always been, and will always be, a wealth-concentrating system. If you concentrate wealth in a society, you concentrate power. I know of no historical example to the contrary.

For all the trappings of formal democracy in the contemporary US, everyone understands that for the most part, the wealthy dictate the basic outlines of the public policies that are put into practice by elected officials. This is cogently explained by political scientist Thomas Ferguson's "investment theory of political parties", which identifies powerful investors rather than unorganised voters as the dominant force in campaigns and elections.

Ferguson describes political parties in the US as "blocs of major investors who coalesce to advance candidates representing their interests" and that "political parties dominated by large investors try to assemble the votes they need by making very limited appeals to particular segments of the potential electorate".

There can be competition between these blocs, but "on all issues affecting the vital interests that major investors have in common, no party competition will take place". Whatever we might call such a system, it's not democracy in any meaningful sense of the term.

People can and do resist the system's attempt to sideline them, and an occasional politician joins the fight, but such resistance takes extraordinary effort. Those who resist sometimes win victories, some of them inspiring, but to date concentrated wealth continues to dominate. If we define democracy as a system that gives ordinary people a meaningful way to participate in the formation of public policy, rather than just a role in ratifying decisions made by the powerful, then it's clear that capitalism and democracy are mutually exclusive.

Unsustainable: Capitalism is a system based on an assumption of continuing, unlimited growth - on a finite planet. There are only two ways out of this problem. We can hold out hope that we might hop to a new planet soon, or we can embrace technological fundamentalism and believe that ever-more-complex technologies will allow us to transcend those physical limits here.

Both those positions are equally delusional. Delusions may bring temporary comfort, but they don't solve problems; in fact, they tend to cause more problems, and in this world those problems keep piling up.

After the Fall: Episode 4

Critics now compare capitalism to cancer. The inhuman and antidemocratic features of capitalism mean that, like a cancer, the death system will eventually destroy the living host.

Both the human communities and non-human living world that play host to capitalism eventually will be destroyed by capitalism. Capitalism is not, of course, the only unsustainable system that humans have devised, but it is the most obviously unsustainable system, and it's the one in which we are stuck. It's the one that we are told is inevitable and natural, like the air we breathe. But the air that we are breathing is choking the most vulnerable in the world, choking us, choking the planet.

Ecology: Out of gas, derailed, over the waterfall

In addition to inequality within the human family, we face even greater threats in the human assault on the living world that come with industrial society. High-energy/high-technology societies pose a serious threat to the ability of the ecosphere to sustain human life as we know it. Grasping that reality is a challenge, and coping with the implications is an even greater challenge. We likely have a chance to stave off the most catastrophic consequences if we act dramatically and quickly. If we continue to drag our feet, it's "game over".

While public awareness of the depth of the ecological crisis is growing, our knowledge of the basics of the problem is hardly new.

"World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" - issued by 1,700 of the planet's leading scientists:

"Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about."

That statement was issued in 1992, and since then we have fallen further behind in the struggle for sustainability. Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live - groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of "dead zones" in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of bio-diversity - and the news is bad.

Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is fast running out of easily accessible oil, which means we face a huge reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds our lives. And, of course, there is the undeniable trajectory of climate disruption.

Add all that up, and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Pick a metaphor. Are we a car running out of gas? A train about to derail? A raft going over the waterfall? Whatever the choice, it's not a pretty picture. It's crucial we realise that there are no technological fixes that will rescue us. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves.

Hope amid a harsh future

The people who run this world are eager to contain the Occupy energy not because they believe that the critics of concentrated wealth and power are wrong, but because somewhere deep down in their souls (or what is left of a soul), the powerful know we are right.

"The industrial system is incompatible with life."

People in power are insulated by wealth and privilege, but they can see the systems falling apart. US military power can no longer guarantee world domination. Financial corporations can no longer pretend to provide order in the economy.

The industrial system is incompatible with life.

We face new threats today, but we are not the first humans to live in dangerous times. In 1957 the Nobel writer Albert Camus described the world in ways that resonate:

"Tomorrow the world may burst into fragments. In that threat hanging over our heads there is a lesson of truth. As we face such a future, hierarchies, titles, honors are reduced to what they are in reality: a passing puff of smoke. And the only certainty left to us is that of naked suffering, common to all, intermingling its roots with those of a stubborn hope."

A stubborn hope is more necessary than ever. As political, economic, and ecological systems spiral down, it's likely we will see levels of human suffering that dwarf even the horrors of the 20th century. Even more challenging is the harsh realisation that we don't have at hand simple solutions - and maybe no solutions at all - to some of the most vexing problems. We may be past the point of no return in ecological damage, and the question is not how to prevent crises but how to mitigate the worst effects. No one can predict the rate of collapse if we stay on this trajectory, and we don't know if we can change the trajectory in time.

There is much we don't know, but everything I see suggests that the world in which we will pursue political goals will change dramatically in the next decade or two, almost certainly for the worse. Organising has to adapt not only to changes in societies but to these fundamental changes in the ecosphere.

In short: We are organising in a period of contraction, not expansion. We have to acknowledge that human attempts to dominate the non-human world have failed. We are destroying the planet and in the process destroying ourselves. Here, just as in human relationships, we either abandon the dominance/subordination dynamic or we don't survive.

In 1948, Camus urged people to "give up empty quarrels" and "pay attention to what unites rather than to what separates us" in the struggle to recover from the horrors of Europe's barbarism. I take from Camus a sense of how to live the tension between facing honestly the horror and yet remaining engaged. In that same talk, he spoke of "the forces of terror" (forces which exist on "our" side as much as on "theirs") and the "forces of dialogue" (which also exist everywhere in the world). Where do we place our hopes?

"Between the forces of terror and the forces of dialogue, a great unequal battle has begun," he wrote. "I have nothing but reasonable illusions as to the outcome of that battle. But I believe it must be fought."

The Occupy gatherings do not yet constitute a coherent movement with demands, but they are wellsprings of reasonable illusions. Rejecting the political babble around us in election campaigns and on mass media, these gatherings are an experiment in a different kind of public dialogue about our common life, one that can reject the forces of terror deployed by concentrated wealth and power.

With that understanding, the central task is to keep the experiment going, to remember the latent power in people who do not accept the legitimacy of a system. Singer/songwriter John Gorka, writing about what appears to be impossible, offers the perfect reminder:

"They think they can tame you, name you and frame you,
aim you where you don't belong.
They know where you've been but not where you're going,
that is the source of the songs."

Robert Jensen is a professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/201111191022862285.html

Fear: American style

Along with what we've discussed in class with regard to how power veils itself, here's an article providing an overview of how the general public is getting its information--or rather, isn't as the following indicates. While state coercion and police violence are more visible, the internalized panoptic governance of fear within civil society is equally (if not more) caustic.

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Several Fridays ago, I attended an excellent panel discussion on Occupy Wall Street sponsored by Jacobin Magazine. It featured Doug Henwood and Jodi Dean - representing a more state-centered, socialist-style left - and Malcolm Harris and Natasha Lennard, representing a more anarchist-inflected left.

Natasha Lennard is a freelance writer who's been covering the OWS story for the New York Times. After a video of the panel was brought to the Times' attention, the paper reviewed it as well as Lennard's reporting and decided to take her off the OWS beat. Despite the fact, according to a spokeswoman for the Times, that "we have reviewed the past stories to which she contributed and have not found any reasons for concern over that reporting".

Even more troubling, Lennard may not be hired by the Times again at all. Says the spokeswoman: "This freelancer, Natasha Lennard, has not been involved in our coverage of Occupy Wall Street in recent days, and we have no plans to use her for future coverage."

This is hardly the first time that the mainstream media has fired reporters for their political activities, even when there's no hint of evidence that those activities have led to biased or skewed coverage. Even so, it's worrisome, and ought to be protested and resisted.

Such political motivated firings fit into a much broader pattern in US history that - in my first book Fear: The History of a Political Idea - I call "Fear, American Style". While people on the left and the right often focus on state repression - coercion and intimidation that comes from and is wielded by the government (politically driven prosecution and punishment, police violence, and the like) - the fact is that a great deal of political repression happens in civil society, outside the state. More specifically, in the workplace.

Think about McCarthyism. We all remember (or remember learning about) the McCarthy hearings in the Senate, the Rosenbergs, HUAC, and so on. All of these incidents involve the state. But guess how many people ever went to prison for their political beliefs during the McCarthy era? Fewer than 200 people. In the grand scheme of things, not a lot. Guess how many workers were investigated or subjected to surveillance for their beliefs? One to two out of every five. And while we don't have exact statistics on how many of those workers were fired, it was somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.

There's a reason so much of US repression is executed not by the state but by the private sector: the government is subject to constitutional and legal restraints, however imperfect and patchy they may be. But an employer often is not. The Bill of Rights, as any union organiser will tell you, does not apply to the workplace. The federal government can't convict and imprison you simply and transparently for your political speech; if it does, it has to paint that speech as something other than speech (incitement, say) or as somehow involved in or contributing to a crime (material support for terrorism, say). A newspaper - like any private employer in a non-union workplace - can fire you, simply and transparently, for your political speech, without any due process.

On this blog, I've talked a lot about what I call in The Reactionary Mind "the private life of power": the domination and control we experience in our personal lives at the hands of employers, spouses, and so on. But we should always recall that that the private life of power is often wielded for overtly political purposes: not simply for the benefit of an employer but also for the sake of maintaining larger political orthodoxies and suppressing political heresies. That was true during McCarthyism, in the 1960s, and today as well.

It was also true in the 19th century. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed it while he was travelling here in the 1830s. Stopping off in Baltimore, he had a chat with a physician there. Tocqueville asked him why so many Americans pretended they were religious when they obviously had "numerous doubts on the subject of dogma". The doctor replied that the clergy had a lot of power in America, as in Europe. But where the European clergy often acted through or with the help of the state, their American counterparts worked through the making and breaking of private careers.

If a minister, known for his piety, should declare that in his opinion a certain man was an unbeliever, the man's career would almost certainly be broken. Another example: A doctor is skillful, but has no faith in the Christian religion. However, thanks to his abilities, he obtains a fine practice. No sooner is he introduced into the house than a zealous Christian, a minister or someone else, comes to see the father of the house and says: look out for this man. He will perhaps cure your children, but he will seduce your daughters, or your wife, he is an unbeliever. There, on the other hand, is Mr So-and-So. As good a doctor as this man, he is at the same time religious. Believe me, trust the health of your family to him. Such counsel is almost always followed.

After the Civil War, black Americans in the South became active political agents, mobilising and agitating for education, political power, economic opportunity, and more. From the very beginning, they were attacked by white supremacists and unreconstructed former slaveholders. Often with the most terrible means of violence. But as WEB DuBois pointed out in his magisterial Black Reconstruction, one of the most effective means of suppressing black citizens was through the workplace.

The decisive influence was the systematic and overwhelming economic pressure. Negroes who wanted work must not dabble in politics. Negroes who wanted to increase their income must not agitate the Negro problem. Positions of influence were only open to those Negroes who were certified as being 'safe and sane,' and their careers were closely scrutinised and passed upon. From 1880 onward, in order to earn a living, the American Negro was compelled to give up his political power.

In the past few months, I've had a fair number of arguments with both libertarians and anarchists about the state. What neither crew seems to get is what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields - and it's considerable - it's not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.

Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin and Fear: The History of a Political Idea. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. He received his PhD from Yale and his A.B. from Princeton.

The article came from AlJazeera's online Monday edition (14 Nov, 2011)
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/2011111013422670424.html