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Sep 5, 2008
COMMENTS
so i can spread my seeds
June 21, 2008, 11:27 am - ladybeans
Robert McChesney: Media and Politics in the United States Today - 88 min (Feb 2005)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6850016691895332498&q=robert+mcchesney&ei=dZ9aSLruMJTqqgOn7PmyCQ&hl=en
Robert McChesney explores the changing relationship between media and politics and the effects of the growing globalization of mass media. Series: Center for Film, Television and New Media at UC Santa Barbara [Public Affairs] [Humanities]
-----------------------
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer on Media Matters w/ Bob McChesney
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080608.mp3
This week the guest is Noam Chomsky, the linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The originator of the Theory of Generative Grammar, which revolutionized the study of linguistics, Chomsky is equally - if not more - well known for his work as a social activist and critic. His work with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, provides an analysis of news media coverage of international affairs, resulting in a five-filter model to explain the deficienices and shortcomings of the US news media.
Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974, Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state."
------------------------------
The Ringing Of Revolution
By Michael Albert
Another excerpt in the serialization of Parts One and Two of the memoir 'Remembering Tomorrow' by Michael Albert, this time chapter 10 and 11, distributed in this 40th year since the New Left and May 68.
=====
PART 2
The Ringing Of Revolution
In the 1960s, we believed we were revolutionaries on the verge of a new society. There was evidence all around, from Berkeley to Boston, New York to Prague, and Washington, DC to Mexico City. It didn't happen that way. The chimes of freedom rang, but with steadily diminishing tone and timbre in subsequent years. Only the most attuned ears continued to hear revolution's message.
Great symphonies rise and fall in volume. When decibels are highest, symphonies are not always greatest. In fact, often, it is precisely when they are least audible that symphonies are laying their groundwork and gathering steam. Similarly, social projects sometimes hang on, reentrench, and get set to climax during calm passages. The low decibel times are often the hard part. They are often the critical part. Nonetheless, Part 2 of Remembering Tomorrow continues exploring high decibel times. Here is a poem, "Wheel of Law," from Ho Chi Minh that meant a lot to me in 1969 and still does.
The wheel of law turns without pause
After the rain, good weather
In the wink of an eye
The universe throws off its muddy clothes
For two thousand miles the landscape spreads out like a beautiful brocade
Light breezes, smiling flowers
High in the trees amongst the sparkling leaves all the men sing at once
Men and animals rise up reborn, what could be more natural
After sorrow comes happiness.
Chapter 10
Bean Town
The Old Mole Forever Surfacing
Revolution is not a onetime event.
—Audre Lorde
The "Old Mole" was Karl Marx's metaphor for revolution. It would burrow below ground, coming up to undermine capitalism's foundations. It would show up uninvited. It would sully the polite gardens of the ruling class. It would ring in a new world. The Old Mole in Boston, circa 1968, however, was an underground newspaper. So was the Berkeley Barb, The Great Speckled Bird from Atlanta, New York's East Village Other, and the Chicago Seed, for that matter, among many others.
Boston's Old Mole operated out of a storefront on Brookline Street running off Massachusetts Avenue, which, in turn, was Cambridge's main street, running from MIT through Central Square to Harvard University and beyond. Each week for a couple of years numerous folks helped produce the Old Mole. We didn't consciously work to create innovative divisions of labor, but Old Mole work was mostly volunteer and largely collective, and made at least some inroads against sexism, as well. Issues were sold or given away throughout Cambridge and Boston. Each time there was a crisis there would be a special issue of the Old Mole, so there was one for the Harvard strike, one for the November Action Coalition, and so on. Many people typed and laid out each issue. Many wrote content, and many more handed out issues or sold them.
There were two communities—one that worked on and distributed the Old Mole and one that "consumed it"—and the ties were close. The Old Mole served the local left and with the network of associated similar weekly papers around the country was a powerful part of our growing movement. These papers incorporated lots of people's labor, including people learning to work together in new ways. They generated a product that could be utilized for consciousness raising, morale boosting, agenda setting, and as an organizing tool providing information useful to undertaking actions including relevant timetables, addresses, etc.
The contemporary counterpart of the sixties underground press is partly local print papers, and partly the network that is called IndyMedia and Web sites more generally, including ZNet, the Web site I work on. Together, all this may well be larger than sixties alternative media. The internal clarity about values and social relations is often stronger now, too, due to lessons we have learned over the years.
The general political awareness of editorial policy may be greater now as well. But there is also unquestionably something missing. The Old Mole and other underground papers were a kind of cultural meeting ground. People identified with these projects and were excited about and personally involved with them. The office of an underground paper like the Old Mole was always alive and bustling. The announcements in the paper were grist for people's weekly agendas much like TV listings currently organize many people's evenings. The lifestyles and culture of people at the Old Mole and similar institutions weren't contrary to those of the public that the papers appealed to, but instead grew from that public. If you looked at the way Old Mole-ers dressed, ate, talked, played, celebrated, and thought, and then did the same for their immediate audience of readers, and then did the same for a much wider pool of people beyond that reading audience, differences would be minor. The sixties counterculture was much bigger than the Left. The counterculture recruited from mass society. The Left recruited from the counterculture. The Left, in that sense, swam in a congenial sea. Old Mole writers and readers had a very large community in which we looked, talked, and celebrated like everyone else, just having somewhat more radical politics. The problematic interface was between that substantial sea of folks—the whole counterculture, which was considerably bigger than the Left—and the rest of society.
Nowadays, the Left has no massive surrounding congenial counterculture. We are no longer swimming in a much larger sea that we communicate well with. We are today right smack dab in society. There is no buffer between us and them, and our engagements with them are uncongenial not least because the gap is so large between how we look, talk, celebrate, and think, and how everyone else looks, talks, celebrates, and thinks. In the heady days of the sixties, in other words, we leftists didn't have nearly as much need to deal with the mainstream. We could grow our movement without learning how to address people of wildly different style, manner, and commitment. We could venture into the nearby friendly and relatively massive counterculture to enlarge our size. Nowadays, to grow, the Left has to recruit among people very different not just in politics, but in tastes and preferences too.
CD Too
Imagine all the people sharing all the world.
—John Lennon
The People's Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ) was analogous, thirty years ago, to the coalition named United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) that is a key organizational locus of widespread U.S. dissent in 2006. There are people, indeed, who were involved then and are still involved now, for example, Leslie Cagan. She has been a key figure in holding UFPJ together and she was active, as well, in PCPJ. For that matter, Cagan, a friend for decades, has been in that position over and over, from coalition and project to coalition and project. PCPJ came together by way of an intersection of religious, secular, welfare, and campus-based organizing. It had New Left and Old Left components. The American Friends Service Committee was prominent. The National Welfare Rights Organization was prominent. I worked mostly in the Boston branch of PCPJ, as did Sid Peck, one of the organization's key conveners, and Dave Dellinger, one of its most prominent members. I attended national meetings as a youthful representative from our area.
PCPJ formed to oppose the war and also to try to broaden the then-surging antiwar opposition into fighting racism, poverty, sexism, and other foreign policy injustices, giving rise to the "J" in PCPJ. There was a second key coalition at the time also planning national events. It was a creation of the Socialist Workers Party, colloquially called the Trots. It had less local infrastructure and wasn't as multi-issue. This parallelism of old style and new style interestingly still exists thirty-five years later, with today's UFPJ paralleled by an outfit called ANSWER, which fronts for the Workers World Party. Whereas I think UFPJ is more politically sophisticated in diverse ways than PCPJ was, having progressed over the years, ANSWER is arguably worse than its counterpart from the past, having devolved politically.
At any rate, PCPJ meetings that I attended could be characterized as having three main dimensions. The first was for members to report the day-to-day achievements of local chapters and member organizations, including their staffs and affiliated organizers. Local venues were where the actual work got done: preparing materials, arranging for and sending out speakers to all manner of sites; welcoming and initiating new participants to ongoing activity in the local offices, at vigils and at places where materials were handed out, and so on; and holding smaller events that fed into larger regional or national ones. Second, we heard about finances, which were handled by committees I wasn't privy to. Financial reports would affect the budgets of national and local events and therefore what staffs and organizers could hope to spend. Third, we would decide matters such as dates of activities and their broad tactical definitions. PCPJ was a coalition of member organizations. Meetings were of representatives from those organizations.
I didn't change my actions much as a result of the birth and growth of PCPJ, other than attending meetings, offering opinions, voting, and so on. I was a kind of roving PCPJ speaker, mostly to student groups, but at times, also to labor gatherings or community groups, which is pretty much what I was doing before working with PCPJ, too. Lydia Sargent and I met through PCPJ, and became interested in each other while attending a national conference. She became a staff person for the organization, handling schedules, literature, timing, and pretty much everything that made PCPJ go. This was when Lydia was first becoming politically knowledgeable. Even before that had fully occurred, however, she was helping make the office more effective, often contributing more than those who'd been involved longer in political activism.
Perhaps the major achievement of the local Boston PCPJ chapter was the work involved in carrying out a key local action timed as a close follow-up to the May Day demonstrations in Washington, DC. May Day was wild in the streets. We went, we dispersed, and we tried to shut down the city. Because of the action's character, even though it was national, my guess would be that only three or four thousand people participated. We were young, highly mobile, and ready to rumble. The Boston follow-up was quite different.
Boston's event was to be a day of highly organized civil disobedience. The target was Boston's Federal Building. The proximate goal was to keep everyone out for the day. In that sense, it was like Seattle's later anticorporate globalization demonstration, though this was local and therefore not as large. About 5,000 Bostonians participated. We surrounded the Federal Building, packing ourselves in, sitting in the streets and on the sidewalks and paths right outside, to block all axis routes. We surrounded the building from well before nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. Periodically some intrepid government worker, or perhaps a police agent masquerading as a worker, would seek to enter the building. The person would have to wade through rows of demonstrators, packed like sardines, with aggressive aid from a phalanx of police. Sometimes there was pushing and shoving. Other times, people were clubbed aside.
The human barrier took different forms and was differently effective at different doors. In some places people blocking paths were older and less physical. At the more active main doors, younger and more militant elements blocked access. Students from different schools arrived early and had different rendezvous and gathering points, as did members of organizations. So, at each site, all around the Federal Building, there were well-prepared contingents who knew how to handle whatever might arise, and how to help others who were less prepared.
There were also people to educate and agitate, and to try to enlist new participants into ongoing involvement. We also brought medics and lawyers, well organized and carefully situated. All this was courtesy of the groundwork done by PCPJ staff and main volunteers. Of course, the real measure of the day was not how many times the government could talk a civil servant into being escorted through our ranks by club-wielding cops. It was, instead, what changes occurred in people's minds and in our organizational infrastructure by virtue of all the work leading to, involved in, and following upon, the events.
How many previously pro war people were shook up a bit? How many new people were, for the first time, willing to talk about issues with others? How many people became dissenters? How many people had their commitment increased (or decreased) and their understanding enhanced (or diminished)? What was the residual gain or loss in ties and organizational infrastructure that would facilitate organizing new talks, rallies, and confrontations leading in turn to a larger and more effective activism? When I went home from the demonstration, thinking through these questions was how I evaluated what had gone on. Many others went home tallying tactical trends, as in "how many people got in" or "did the war end." As a result, I saw events as victories that they saw as defeats. I maintained morale where they felt shattered.
Regarding major decisions in PCPJ, there were always a few prominent fault lines. First was the issue of militancy and tactics. Some favored more aggressive or violent options. Others favored avoiding anything aggressive or violent. Obeying or disobeying the law was another divide. Sometimes an advocate, on either side, felt allegiance to a tactic, per se. Such a person might say le's kick ass, because they liked kicking ass or at least they liked talking about kicking ass. Someone else might say, no, we can't obstruct or maybe we can't even march because obstructing or marching could lead to confrontations in which people might engage in violent acts—because they liked nonviolence, per se. Others of us weren't always for passive nonviolence, active nonviolence, aggressive confrontations, or all-out ass-kicking, but were, instead, intent on choosing tactics that led to desirable outcomes case-by-case.
Other issues that were also nearly always debated included geography, as in doing things locally or centrally. For some people this, too, was a case-by-case matter. Would a greater local or national emphasis yield better results? Was a mix best? For other people, one position or the other was deemed always right. Likewise, small is beautiful meant for some PCPJers that you didn't have to evaluate the actual situation, you just always knew you wanted local and smaller, not national and larger. Other PCPJers always felt the opposite. They always wanted more people centrally together, period. Neither side needed to think through each specific case. Their allegiances were for them a priori true. For me, tactical allegiances about locale, scale, or tone that considered themselves immune to context were incredibly frustrating.
I remember, for example, being in way too many excessively long meetings listening to people argue for big demonstrations in Washington, DC, on the one hand, or for never going to Washington, DC and always having only local demonstrations all over the country, on the other hand. The problem was that people often acted as if opting for one or the other choice was a matter of principle. They thought favoring one or the other option marked a moral divide. In fact, of course, the matter was contextual. We should have always asked what choice, given where we were at, would best propel us forward.
In these engagements, I came to realize that reasonable people could certainly disagree about all these matters, but that it was not reasonable to think tactics were anything other than a contextual matter. To me, then as now, whether we want to have sexism in a better world is a matter of principle. Whether we want popular control over social life is a matter of principle. Whether we want wage slavery is a matter of principle. The decision as to whether movements should embody these dreaded features, or even celebrate them, could by extension also be called principled. But choices of what to do in a particular context, for a particular demonstration, I considered contextual and tactical, not principled. Of course, my not being a pacifist, or much worse, law abiding, was a factor. If I felt that to ever lift my hand, or even my voice, against some target, was simply and irretrievably wrong, then, yes, some tactical decisions might have seemed to me principled. But that was never my situation.
To me, it became clear that whether a movement should be very passive or very militant, abide all laws or go out of its way to break some, seek only to construct or also to destroy, and, finally, whether it should wage violent assaults, even—or war—were all a matter of careful case-by-case judgment. There was a higher burden of proof for some behaviors than for others, certainly, but it was precisely because those approaches risked undermining lasting change.
In the sixties, sometimes I was dead set against aggressive marching, much less civil disobedience. Mostly, though, I favored such things, and even at times favored great militancy and disruption, including rioting. It depended on context. I thought ripping up a legal injunction might help us in one place and be disastrous in another. We had to weigh off implications. I thought moving from peaceful legal marches to civil disobedience might enrich our internal growth and spread our appeal, or maybe not, depending on the time and place. For me, the same held for sitting in, striking, occupying a building, trashing a building, or rioting. The principle was to enlarge, deepen, broaden, and intensify movement opposition to injustice and, in time, movement advocacy of positive goals. The tactic was to accomplish those ends rather than, hands waving and voices soaring, to do something that felt or looked good, but obstructed gains.
Another key fault line in the sixties was activists having various attitudes to the question of representation. There were meetings in which someone would talk or vote who responsibly represented a large organization's members. Then someone else would talk or vote representing no one. Obviously, these should not have been treated alike, yet often they were. This was unsolvable, I think, short of having a much more participatory structure than was typical in the sixties.
Regarding discussion and work, there were fault lines about political differences that existed beyond coalition agreements. How would we deal with the fact that one PCPJ member organization thought x, and another thought y, where x and y were contradictory? Should we just not allow either position in the coalition and not talk about it? Should we recognize and try to address the divide? This was a conundrum, over and over. Later, I came to feel that solving this problem of solidarity along with autonomy was central to making practical progress and that we had never even properly taken up the matter in the sixties.
Another issue was race and gender. Everyone claimed, at least once the women's movement and the Black Power movement had been around awhile, to understand the need for organizational congeniality to and empowerment of women and minorities. But accomplishing this aim wasn't straightforward.
Likewise, many times in PCPJ the face-off was between those who were young and those who were older, and between those aligned to old politics and those aligned to new politics. It seemed to me, then, that the young and the new were more often right. We brought a multi-issue tone into the movement, as well as militancy, dynamism, and civil disobedience. We rejected old-style Leninist organizational hierarchy and sectarianism, even sectarianism toward sectarians. We rejected timid movement legalisms and primness. We asserted self-management, popular participation, militancy, and daily-life innovation. By and large, this made the young better than the old as sources of movement policy. But, there were also serious exceptions.
We young folks often made huge errors and took our insights distressingly too far. We disparaged many people for ignorant reasons. We celebrated ourselves too much, often mistaking bravado for serious achievement. There were older folks we could have learned from, had we listened more closely and had they managed to convey their lessons more adroitly. Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden, for example, were very impressive young people, and were right about a great many things. But Dave Dellinger, old in age though young at heart, would have been a far better role model. The point is, I only later realized, the issue in these disputes isn't age. The issue isn't duration. Among those with a lot of age and duration there will be fools as well as wise and effective activists, just as there will be fools and wise and effective activists among the young. The trick is to find insight and wisdom, whatever package it comes in.
That said, there is no doubt that in the sixties the lifeblood of left enthusiasm, innovation, and membership was youth. At a big meeting, if someone over thirty entered the room, it was reason to look up and smile, maybe even applaud. Nowadays, in 2006, almost the reverse imbalance obtains. For example, at an April 2005 conference in NYC called the Left Forum, opening night had a big panel discussion and a large proportion of the weekend's attendees were there. I looked around and felt the average age might have been fifty, or perhaps older. This is a huge difference between forty years ago and now. It isn't that there are too many old people now—it is that there are too few young people.
White Rioting
Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do.
—Bob Dylan
One demonstration during the years of siege in Boston and Cambridge was aimed at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA). It was a three-pronged event. First there was to be a large antiwar rally at the Boston Common. This would be entirely peaceful, with no confrontation and no laws broken. It would have speakers, fanfare, and the usual rally protocol. Then there would be a march down Commonwealth Avenue through Boston, over the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge past MIT, and on toward Harvard. This would arrive at a target for a militant demonstration.
It was not pre-announced where we were going or what we were going to do there. The idea was to not let the authorities know in advance. There was what we called, in those days, a tactical leadership committee. The same thing had existed for NAC and other events that required secrecy. Usually our movement operated entirely openly, ratifying and carrying out details of broadly agreed plans in public. In this case, though, the tactical leadership was given leeway. And leeway it took. We picked a real target, Harvard's CFIA, but we discretely leaked through various channels that the target was, instead, Cambridge City Hall, about two-thirds of the way from MIT to where the CFIA sat on the outskirts of Harvard Square. The ploy worked. The Cambridge police were squeezed into City Hall waiting for our arrival. They expected to surprise us and quickly squelch our efforts.
I remember the large march crossing the Harvard Bridge. Few of us knew exactly where we were going. About half roughly knew what kind of mayhem was coming. The rest knew only vaguely that something was afoot. There were people rolling baby carriages. There were older folks who would be quite out of place. Some of us circulated in the jolly crowd telling people they should peel off just after Central Square. The message was received. We got about a block from City Hall and the remaining march, now just a few hundred strong, broke into a run right past City Hall and on to the CFIA, our real target.
When the running crowd got to the CFIA, entry was gained after Lydia went around back, found an open door, came to the front, and opened the doors for us all. One group then ran right into the building and trashed it from within, tossing stuff out. The other contingent ran around the building and started trashing it from without, tossing stuff in. It was amazing that there were no serious accidents due to those outside hitting those within or vice versa. There was bedlam and much damage quickly done, but the cops, though initially outwitted, were not resigned to utter failure. They trucked on up from City Hall even as we left the CFIA to avoid a fight with them.
A somewhat similar prior demonstration occurred in 1970, a day after a national Free Bobby Seale demo (he was the head of the Black Panthers and incarcerated at the time). First we held an antiwar rally at Boston Common. Then, as in the CFIA case, a march went to Cambridge, thinning along the way, leading into Harvard Square. At the Square there ensued one of the few organized, rather than spontaneous, sessions of mayhem and destruction that we had in those days.
Mostly the attacks were against large chain stores, luxury designer-type stores, and every bank and office that anyone could find. Bookstores and small restaurants and newsstands, and even small clothing or specialty stores, were spared. Everything else in range was a target for hundreds of stones and bricks. At night, street fighting continued, and considerable looting as well. But this was the sixties and the other side wasn't comatose. I remember not only running around dodging police, but also standing and watching people trying without the slightest success to break massive windows in banks and in one particularly hated upscale clothing store. The owners of these establishments were not fools. They saw the sixties like some Floridians see hurricanes, and they had prepared with seriously shatterproof windowpanes.
The festivities—and these types of events did have a festival atmosphere— went on late into the night. I had an apartment at the time above some stores in Harvard Square and my friends and I were in and out for hours. Was there any point to rioting? Did it matter? Was there a downside? I felt at the time that the rally had the virtues of displaying our numbers, incorporating new people, and developing our capacities. The same was true of the march. The same held, also, for the later CFIA event, though, of course, it had its problematic aspects. But what about the riot itself?
My criteria then, as now, for judging this weren't much different than my criteria for judging anything else. Did it help those involved to arrive at a higher level of comprehension and commitment? (I doubt it.) Did it convey an image to people not involved that prodded them to think about society in ways that increased their likelihood of moving left? (For some yes, for others no.) Were those involved made more likely to stay active due to their involvement? (For some probably yes, for others no.) Were those who viewed the events or heard about them given reason to turn away from the Left rather than toward it? (Again, some yes, some no.) You have to remember, this was an action on top of lots of other actions, leading in turn to more, with recurring opportunity to convey counterimages to the worst that the media presented.
For me, the issue, then as now, wasn't how many windows were broken, how many laws were violated, how many knees were bruised, or how many heads were busted. It was the impact our acts had on the internal and outreach attributes of the movement and on the audience it sought to organize. I don't know the answer. My guess is we could have done better.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6850016691895332498&q=robert+mcchesney&ei=dZ9aSLruMJTqqgOn7PmyCQ&hl=en
Robert McChesney explores the changing relationship between media and politics and the effects of the growing globalization of mass media. Series: Center for Film, Television and New Media at UC Santa Barbara [Public Affairs] [Humanities]
-----------------------
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Noam Chomsky, linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer on Media Matters w/ Bob McChesney
http://will.uiuc.edu/media/mediamatters080608.mp3
This week the guest is Noam Chomsky, the linguist, philosopher, political activist, author and lecturer. Chomsky is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The originator of the Theory of Generative Grammar, which revolutionized the study of linguistics, Chomsky is equally - if not more - well known for his work as a social activist and critic. His work with Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent, provides an analysis of news media coverage of international affairs, resulting in a five-filter model to explain the deficienices and shortcomings of the US news media.
Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974, Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state."
------------------------------
The Ringing Of Revolution
By Michael Albert
Another excerpt in the serialization of Parts One and Two of the memoir 'Remembering Tomorrow' by Michael Albert, this time chapter 10 and 11, distributed in this 40th year since the New Left and May 68.
=====
PART 2
The Ringing Of Revolution
In the 1960s, we believed we were revolutionaries on the verge of a new society. There was evidence all around, from Berkeley to Boston, New York to Prague, and Washington, DC to Mexico City. It didn't happen that way. The chimes of freedom rang, but with steadily diminishing tone and timbre in subsequent years. Only the most attuned ears continued to hear revolution's message.
Great symphonies rise and fall in volume. When decibels are highest, symphonies are not always greatest. In fact, often, it is precisely when they are least audible that symphonies are laying their groundwork and gathering steam. Similarly, social projects sometimes hang on, reentrench, and get set to climax during calm passages. The low decibel times are often the hard part. They are often the critical part. Nonetheless, Part 2 of Remembering Tomorrow continues exploring high decibel times. Here is a poem, "Wheel of Law," from Ho Chi Minh that meant a lot to me in 1969 and still does.
The wheel of law turns without pause
After the rain, good weather
In the wink of an eye
The universe throws off its muddy clothes
For two thousand miles the landscape spreads out like a beautiful brocade
Light breezes, smiling flowers
High in the trees amongst the sparkling leaves all the men sing at once
Men and animals rise up reborn, what could be more natural
After sorrow comes happiness.
Chapter 10
Bean Town
The Old Mole Forever Surfacing
Revolution is not a onetime event.
—Audre Lorde
The "Old Mole" was Karl Marx's metaphor for revolution. It would burrow below ground, coming up to undermine capitalism's foundations. It would show up uninvited. It would sully the polite gardens of the ruling class. It would ring in a new world. The Old Mole in Boston, circa 1968, however, was an underground newspaper. So was the Berkeley Barb, The Great Speckled Bird from Atlanta, New York's East Village Other, and the Chicago Seed, for that matter, among many others.
Boston's Old Mole operated out of a storefront on Brookline Street running off Massachusetts Avenue, which, in turn, was Cambridge's main street, running from MIT through Central Square to Harvard University and beyond. Each week for a couple of years numerous folks helped produce the Old Mole. We didn't consciously work to create innovative divisions of labor, but Old Mole work was mostly volunteer and largely collective, and made at least some inroads against sexism, as well. Issues were sold or given away throughout Cambridge and Boston. Each time there was a crisis there would be a special issue of the Old Mole, so there was one for the Harvard strike, one for the November Action Coalition, and so on. Many people typed and laid out each issue. Many wrote content, and many more handed out issues or sold them.
There were two communities—one that worked on and distributed the Old Mole and one that "consumed it"—and the ties were close. The Old Mole served the local left and with the network of associated similar weekly papers around the country was a powerful part of our growing movement. These papers incorporated lots of people's labor, including people learning to work together in new ways. They generated a product that could be utilized for consciousness raising, morale boosting, agenda setting, and as an organizing tool providing information useful to undertaking actions including relevant timetables, addresses, etc.
The contemporary counterpart of the sixties underground press is partly local print papers, and partly the network that is called IndyMedia and Web sites more generally, including ZNet, the Web site I work on. Together, all this may well be larger than sixties alternative media. The internal clarity about values and social relations is often stronger now, too, due to lessons we have learned over the years.
The general political awareness of editorial policy may be greater now as well. But there is also unquestionably something missing. The Old Mole and other underground papers were a kind of cultural meeting ground. People identified with these projects and were excited about and personally involved with them. The office of an underground paper like the Old Mole was always alive and bustling. The announcements in the paper were grist for people's weekly agendas much like TV listings currently organize many people's evenings. The lifestyles and culture of people at the Old Mole and similar institutions weren't contrary to those of the public that the papers appealed to, but instead grew from that public. If you looked at the way Old Mole-ers dressed, ate, talked, played, celebrated, and thought, and then did the same for their immediate audience of readers, and then did the same for a much wider pool of people beyond that reading audience, differences would be minor. The sixties counterculture was much bigger than the Left. The counterculture recruited from mass society. The Left recruited from the counterculture. The Left, in that sense, swam in a congenial sea. Old Mole writers and readers had a very large community in which we looked, talked, and celebrated like everyone else, just having somewhat more radical politics. The problematic interface was between that substantial sea of folks—the whole counterculture, which was considerably bigger than the Left—and the rest of society.
Nowadays, the Left has no massive surrounding congenial counterculture. We are no longer swimming in a much larger sea that we communicate well with. We are today right smack dab in society. There is no buffer between us and them, and our engagements with them are uncongenial not least because the gap is so large between how we look, talk, celebrate, and think, and how everyone else looks, talks, celebrates, and thinks. In the heady days of the sixties, in other words, we leftists didn't have nearly as much need to deal with the mainstream. We could grow our movement without learning how to address people of wildly different style, manner, and commitment. We could venture into the nearby friendly and relatively massive counterculture to enlarge our size. Nowadays, to grow, the Left has to recruit among people very different not just in politics, but in tastes and preferences too.
CD Too
Imagine all the people sharing all the world.
—John Lennon
The People's Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ) was analogous, thirty years ago, to the coalition named United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) that is a key organizational locus of widespread U.S. dissent in 2006. There are people, indeed, who were involved then and are still involved now, for example, Leslie Cagan. She has been a key figure in holding UFPJ together and she was active, as well, in PCPJ. For that matter, Cagan, a friend for decades, has been in that position over and over, from coalition and project to coalition and project. PCPJ came together by way of an intersection of religious, secular, welfare, and campus-based organizing. It had New Left and Old Left components. The American Friends Service Committee was prominent. The National Welfare Rights Organization was prominent. I worked mostly in the Boston branch of PCPJ, as did Sid Peck, one of the organization's key conveners, and Dave Dellinger, one of its most prominent members. I attended national meetings as a youthful representative from our area.
PCPJ formed to oppose the war and also to try to broaden the then-surging antiwar opposition into fighting racism, poverty, sexism, and other foreign policy injustices, giving rise to the "J" in PCPJ. There was a second key coalition at the time also planning national events. It was a creation of the Socialist Workers Party, colloquially called the Trots. It had less local infrastructure and wasn't as multi-issue. This parallelism of old style and new style interestingly still exists thirty-five years later, with today's UFPJ paralleled by an outfit called ANSWER, which fronts for the Workers World Party. Whereas I think UFPJ is more politically sophisticated in diverse ways than PCPJ was, having progressed over the years, ANSWER is arguably worse than its counterpart from the past, having devolved politically.
At any rate, PCPJ meetings that I attended could be characterized as having three main dimensions. The first was for members to report the day-to-day achievements of local chapters and member organizations, including their staffs and affiliated organizers. Local venues were where the actual work got done: preparing materials, arranging for and sending out speakers to all manner of sites; welcoming and initiating new participants to ongoing activity in the local offices, at vigils and at places where materials were handed out, and so on; and holding smaller events that fed into larger regional or national ones. Second, we heard about finances, which were handled by committees I wasn't privy to. Financial reports would affect the budgets of national and local events and therefore what staffs and organizers could hope to spend. Third, we would decide matters such as dates of activities and their broad tactical definitions. PCPJ was a coalition of member organizations. Meetings were of representatives from those organizations.
I didn't change my actions much as a result of the birth and growth of PCPJ, other than attending meetings, offering opinions, voting, and so on. I was a kind of roving PCPJ speaker, mostly to student groups, but at times, also to labor gatherings or community groups, which is pretty much what I was doing before working with PCPJ, too. Lydia Sargent and I met through PCPJ, and became interested in each other while attending a national conference. She became a staff person for the organization, handling schedules, literature, timing, and pretty much everything that made PCPJ go. This was when Lydia was first becoming politically knowledgeable. Even before that had fully occurred, however, she was helping make the office more effective, often contributing more than those who'd been involved longer in political activism.
Perhaps the major achievement of the local Boston PCPJ chapter was the work involved in carrying out a key local action timed as a close follow-up to the May Day demonstrations in Washington, DC. May Day was wild in the streets. We went, we dispersed, and we tried to shut down the city. Because of the action's character, even though it was national, my guess would be that only three or four thousand people participated. We were young, highly mobile, and ready to rumble. The Boston follow-up was quite different.
Boston's event was to be a day of highly organized civil disobedience. The target was Boston's Federal Building. The proximate goal was to keep everyone out for the day. In that sense, it was like Seattle's later anticorporate globalization demonstration, though this was local and therefore not as large. About 5,000 Bostonians participated. We surrounded the Federal Building, packing ourselves in, sitting in the streets and on the sidewalks and paths right outside, to block all axis routes. We surrounded the building from well before nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. Periodically some intrepid government worker, or perhaps a police agent masquerading as a worker, would seek to enter the building. The person would have to wade through rows of demonstrators, packed like sardines, with aggressive aid from a phalanx of police. Sometimes there was pushing and shoving. Other times, people were clubbed aside.
The human barrier took different forms and was differently effective at different doors. In some places people blocking paths were older and less physical. At the more active main doors, younger and more militant elements blocked access. Students from different schools arrived early and had different rendezvous and gathering points, as did members of organizations. So, at each site, all around the Federal Building, there were well-prepared contingents who knew how to handle whatever might arise, and how to help others who were less prepared.
There were also people to educate and agitate, and to try to enlist new participants into ongoing involvement. We also brought medics and lawyers, well organized and carefully situated. All this was courtesy of the groundwork done by PCPJ staff and main volunteers. Of course, the real measure of the day was not how many times the government could talk a civil servant into being escorted through our ranks by club-wielding cops. It was, instead, what changes occurred in people's minds and in our organizational infrastructure by virtue of all the work leading to, involved in, and following upon, the events.
How many previously pro war people were shook up a bit? How many new people were, for the first time, willing to talk about issues with others? How many people became dissenters? How many people had their commitment increased (or decreased) and their understanding enhanced (or diminished)? What was the residual gain or loss in ties and organizational infrastructure that would facilitate organizing new talks, rallies, and confrontations leading in turn to a larger and more effective activism? When I went home from the demonstration, thinking through these questions was how I evaluated what had gone on. Many others went home tallying tactical trends, as in "how many people got in" or "did the war end." As a result, I saw events as victories that they saw as defeats. I maintained morale where they felt shattered.
Regarding major decisions in PCPJ, there were always a few prominent fault lines. First was the issue of militancy and tactics. Some favored more aggressive or violent options. Others favored avoiding anything aggressive or violent. Obeying or disobeying the law was another divide. Sometimes an advocate, on either side, felt allegiance to a tactic, per se. Such a person might say le's kick ass, because they liked kicking ass or at least they liked talking about kicking ass. Someone else might say, no, we can't obstruct or maybe we can't even march because obstructing or marching could lead to confrontations in which people might engage in violent acts—because they liked nonviolence, per se. Others of us weren't always for passive nonviolence, active nonviolence, aggressive confrontations, or all-out ass-kicking, but were, instead, intent on choosing tactics that led to desirable outcomes case-by-case.
Other issues that were also nearly always debated included geography, as in doing things locally or centrally. For some people this, too, was a case-by-case matter. Would a greater local or national emphasis yield better results? Was a mix best? For other people, one position or the other was deemed always right. Likewise, small is beautiful meant for some PCPJers that you didn't have to evaluate the actual situation, you just always knew you wanted local and smaller, not national and larger. Other PCPJers always felt the opposite. They always wanted more people centrally together, period. Neither side needed to think through each specific case. Their allegiances were for them a priori true. For me, tactical allegiances about locale, scale, or tone that considered themselves immune to context were incredibly frustrating.
I remember, for example, being in way too many excessively long meetings listening to people argue for big demonstrations in Washington, DC, on the one hand, or for never going to Washington, DC and always having only local demonstrations all over the country, on the other hand. The problem was that people often acted as if opting for one or the other choice was a matter of principle. They thought favoring one or the other option marked a moral divide. In fact, of course, the matter was contextual. We should have always asked what choice, given where we were at, would best propel us forward.
In these engagements, I came to realize that reasonable people could certainly disagree about all these matters, but that it was not reasonable to think tactics were anything other than a contextual matter. To me, then as now, whether we want to have sexism in a better world is a matter of principle. Whether we want popular control over social life is a matter of principle. Whether we want wage slavery is a matter of principle. The decision as to whether movements should embody these dreaded features, or even celebrate them, could by extension also be called principled. But choices of what to do in a particular context, for a particular demonstration, I considered contextual and tactical, not principled. Of course, my not being a pacifist, or much worse, law abiding, was a factor. If I felt that to ever lift my hand, or even my voice, against some target, was simply and irretrievably wrong, then, yes, some tactical decisions might have seemed to me principled. But that was never my situation.
To me, it became clear that whether a movement should be very passive or very militant, abide all laws or go out of its way to break some, seek only to construct or also to destroy, and, finally, whether it should wage violent assaults, even—or war—were all a matter of careful case-by-case judgment. There was a higher burden of proof for some behaviors than for others, certainly, but it was precisely because those approaches risked undermining lasting change.
In the sixties, sometimes I was dead set against aggressive marching, much less civil disobedience. Mostly, though, I favored such things, and even at times favored great militancy and disruption, including rioting. It depended on context. I thought ripping up a legal injunction might help us in one place and be disastrous in another. We had to weigh off implications. I thought moving from peaceful legal marches to civil disobedience might enrich our internal growth and spread our appeal, or maybe not, depending on the time and place. For me, the same held for sitting in, striking, occupying a building, trashing a building, or rioting. The principle was to enlarge, deepen, broaden, and intensify movement opposition to injustice and, in time, movement advocacy of positive goals. The tactic was to accomplish those ends rather than, hands waving and voices soaring, to do something that felt or looked good, but obstructed gains.
Another key fault line in the sixties was activists having various attitudes to the question of representation. There were meetings in which someone would talk or vote who responsibly represented a large organization's members. Then someone else would talk or vote representing no one. Obviously, these should not have been treated alike, yet often they were. This was unsolvable, I think, short of having a much more participatory structure than was typical in the sixties.
Regarding discussion and work, there were fault lines about political differences that existed beyond coalition agreements. How would we deal with the fact that one PCPJ member organization thought x, and another thought y, where x and y were contradictory? Should we just not allow either position in the coalition and not talk about it? Should we recognize and try to address the divide? This was a conundrum, over and over. Later, I came to feel that solving this problem of solidarity along with autonomy was central to making practical progress and that we had never even properly taken up the matter in the sixties.
Another issue was race and gender. Everyone claimed, at least once the women's movement and the Black Power movement had been around awhile, to understand the need for organizational congeniality to and empowerment of women and minorities. But accomplishing this aim wasn't straightforward.
Likewise, many times in PCPJ the face-off was between those who were young and those who were older, and between those aligned to old politics and those aligned to new politics. It seemed to me, then, that the young and the new were more often right. We brought a multi-issue tone into the movement, as well as militancy, dynamism, and civil disobedience. We rejected old-style Leninist organizational hierarchy and sectarianism, even sectarianism toward sectarians. We rejected timid movement legalisms and primness. We asserted self-management, popular participation, militancy, and daily-life innovation. By and large, this made the young better than the old as sources of movement policy. But, there were also serious exceptions.
We young folks often made huge errors and took our insights distressingly too far. We disparaged many people for ignorant reasons. We celebrated ourselves too much, often mistaking bravado for serious achievement. There were older folks we could have learned from, had we listened more closely and had they managed to convey their lessons more adroitly. Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden, for example, were very impressive young people, and were right about a great many things. But Dave Dellinger, old in age though young at heart, would have been a far better role model. The point is, I only later realized, the issue in these disputes isn't age. The issue isn't duration. Among those with a lot of age and duration there will be fools as well as wise and effective activists, just as there will be fools and wise and effective activists among the young. The trick is to find insight and wisdom, whatever package it comes in.
That said, there is no doubt that in the sixties the lifeblood of left enthusiasm, innovation, and membership was youth. At a big meeting, if someone over thirty entered the room, it was reason to look up and smile, maybe even applaud. Nowadays, in 2006, almost the reverse imbalance obtains. For example, at an April 2005 conference in NYC called the Left Forum, opening night had a big panel discussion and a large proportion of the weekend's attendees were there. I looked around and felt the average age might have been fifty, or perhaps older. This is a huge difference between forty years ago and now. It isn't that there are too many old people now—it is that there are too few young people.
White Rioting
Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do.
—Bob Dylan
One demonstration during the years of siege in Boston and Cambridge was aimed at Harvard's Center for International Affairs (CFIA). It was a three-pronged event. First there was to be a large antiwar rally at the Boston Common. This would be entirely peaceful, with no confrontation and no laws broken. It would have speakers, fanfare, and the usual rally protocol. Then there would be a march down Commonwealth Avenue through Boston, over the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge past MIT, and on toward Harvard. This would arrive at a target for a militant demonstration.
It was not pre-announced where we were going or what we were going to do there. The idea was to not let the authorities know in advance. There was what we called, in those days, a tactical leadership committee. The same thing had existed for NAC and other events that required secrecy. Usually our movement operated entirely openly, ratifying and carrying out details of broadly agreed plans in public. In this case, though, the tactical leadership was given leeway. And leeway it took. We picked a real target, Harvard's CFIA, but we discretely leaked through various channels that the target was, instead, Cambridge City Hall, about two-thirds of the way from MIT to where the CFIA sat on the outskirts of Harvard Square. The ploy worked. The Cambridge police were squeezed into City Hall waiting for our arrival. They expected to surprise us and quickly squelch our efforts.
I remember the large march crossing the Harvard Bridge. Few of us knew exactly where we were going. About half roughly knew what kind of mayhem was coming. The rest knew only vaguely that something was afoot. There were people rolling baby carriages. There were older folks who would be quite out of place. Some of us circulated in the jolly crowd telling people they should peel off just after Central Square. The message was received. We got about a block from City Hall and the remaining march, now just a few hundred strong, broke into a run right past City Hall and on to the CFIA, our real target.
When the running crowd got to the CFIA, entry was gained after Lydia went around back, found an open door, came to the front, and opened the doors for us all. One group then ran right into the building and trashed it from within, tossing stuff out. The other contingent ran around the building and started trashing it from without, tossing stuff in. It was amazing that there were no serious accidents due to those outside hitting those within or vice versa. There was bedlam and much damage quickly done, but the cops, though initially outwitted, were not resigned to utter failure. They trucked on up from City Hall even as we left the CFIA to avoid a fight with them.
A somewhat similar prior demonstration occurred in 1970, a day after a national Free Bobby Seale demo (he was the head of the Black Panthers and incarcerated at the time). First we held an antiwar rally at Boston Common. Then, as in the CFIA case, a march went to Cambridge, thinning along the way, leading into Harvard Square. At the Square there ensued one of the few organized, rather than spontaneous, sessions of mayhem and destruction that we had in those days.
Mostly the attacks were against large chain stores, luxury designer-type stores, and every bank and office that anyone could find. Bookstores and small restaurants and newsstands, and even small clothing or specialty stores, were spared. Everything else in range was a target for hundreds of stones and bricks. At night, street fighting continued, and considerable looting as well. But this was the sixties and the other side wasn't comatose. I remember not only running around dodging police, but also standing and watching people trying without the slightest success to break massive windows in banks and in one particularly hated upscale clothing store. The owners of these establishments were not fools. They saw the sixties like some Floridians see hurricanes, and they had prepared with seriously shatterproof windowpanes.
The festivities—and these types of events did have a festival atmosphere— went on late into the night. I had an apartment at the time above some stores in Harvard Square and my friends and I were in and out for hours. Was there any point to rioting? Did it matter? Was there a downside? I felt at the time that the rally had the virtues of displaying our numbers, incorporating new people, and developing our capacities. The same was true of the march. The same held, also, for the later CFIA event, though, of course, it had its problematic aspects. But what about the riot itself?
My criteria then, as now, for judging this weren't much different than my criteria for judging anything else. Did it help those involved to arrive at a higher level of comprehension and commitment? (I doubt it.) Did it convey an image to people not involved that prodded them to think about society in ways that increased their likelihood of moving left? (For some yes, for others no.) Were those involved made more likely to stay active due to their involvement? (For some probably yes, for others no.) Were those who viewed the events or heard about them given reason to turn away from the Left rather than toward it? (Again, some yes, some no.) You have to remember, this was an action on top of lots of other actions, leading in turn to more, with recurring opportunity to convey counterimages to the worst that the media presented.
For me, the issue, then as now, wasn't how many windows were broken, how many laws were violated, how many knees were bruised, or how many heads were busted. It was the impact our acts had on the internal and outreach attributes of the movement and on the audience it sought to organize. I don't know the answer. My guess is we could have done better.