The Altar Boy is Radicalized at Berkeley -- Mario Savio and More About "Subversives"

Mario Savio, Free Speech Movement, UC Berkeley, 1965

Now that I've gotten to the chapters about the student rebellion at UC Berkeley and more particularly about Mario Savio, I'm learning plenty of stuff I didn't know or didn't think about if I did know.

Images of the early Free Speech Movement protests at Berkeley and of those involved (particularly Mario, but not just of him) are burned into my brain. They form a huge part of what I considered positive in my adolescence. "Who" these people were and the underlying motivations for "why" they were doing what they were doing hardly mattered. What mattered was that they were doing it, fearlessly, determinedly, and at considerable risk to themselves and and their futures. Bravery was only the most obvious of their attributes.

While I was riveted by Mario Savio's eloquence and charisma -- and oh, yes, I had a sheepskin lined suede jacket like his, and I think in other ways I strongly identified with him -- I knew nothing, really, about him, except that he was considered "working class" among the students and administrators who came from money (I knew too many of those people), and thus he was subject to relentless denunciation and ridicule by those opposed to the FSM protests.

After the glare of the media spotlight faded from him and the student movement went on to other issues and other campuses, I didn't try to follow Mario's further adventures. I knew that he was a reluctant hero, if you will, and was deviled by doubt during the Free Speech Movement years, but beyond that, not much. It wasn't until much later that I learned he'd gone on to become part of the initial faculty at Sonoma State University in the 1980s, and died of heart failure in 1996. Resquiat in Pacem.

Until I got into the biographical chapters about him in "Subversives," I didn't know that he had been an altar boy in Queens, or that he was considered a "troubled genius" in school and had a terrible stammer when speaking -- unless he was on stage or in front of a crowd, at which time he could become extraordinarily eloquent and persuasive. I didn't know that his mother wanted him to become a priest -- and he seriously considered it -- but he chose physics and the sciences in his initial college days in New York, only to switch to philosophy studies when he transferred to UC Berkeley in 1963.

I didn't know that he was initially enthusiastic about the Kennedy presidency, but he became disillusioned as Kennedy seemed incapable of following through on his campaign rhetoric and promises. Where have we heard that before?

I didn't even know that he had gone South for the Freedom Summer, and that his experiences with the Freedom Riders and with CORE and SNCC at Berkeley had profoundly shaped his perspective about the absurd and arbitrary restrictions placed on student political advocacy and activity on the University campus.

While Mario's iconic speech about "the gears of the machine" he gave on the steps of Sproul Hall on December 2, 1964, will likely resonate forever, the issues he was speaking about are not really well known at all, and they're not particularly easy to explain or examine from the distance of almost 50 years.

I remember what I was feeling about it back then, but the issue of the prohibition of on-campus political activity -- which is what the Free Speech Movement was opposing -- seems somewhat arcane and even petty from a distance.

It was actually a pretty much universal rule to prohibit on-campus political activity throughout California's public education system at the time, especially so at the University. The premise was that California's students would receive a mandatory and "free" public education through high school, and qualified students would be eligible for tuition free higher education at any public institution of higher learning in the state -- any that they could get into, as access was highly competitive and restricted. But part of the bargain that made this possible was that the public education system, particularly the University, had to stay out of politics... thus the prohibition on political advocacy on the Berkeley campus that became the fuse that lit the fire of the Free Speech Movement.

Up to a point, this prohibition was tolerated because the University didn't interfere with tabling and political speechifying "outside the gate," Sather Gate. Well, that is they didn't until they discovered that the sidewalk outside the gate actually belonged to the University, not the City of Berkeley as they had assumed. The campus administration and police started enforcing the rule on the sidewalk as well on the campus proper, and this seemingly arbitrary act triggered the protest. Students moved their tables onto the campus in front of Sproul Hall, the administration building, and defied the administration and police orders to desist.

And when Jack Weinberg, a graduate student, refused to desist or identify himself to police, he was taken into custody and hustled into a waiting police car on Sproul Plaza. This arrest by campus police precipitated a sit-down action by hundreds and then thousands of students, and the Free Speech Movement was launched. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Mario quickly emerged as the spokesman for the Movement, though it was obvious even then that he was uncomfortable in the role that had been thrust upon him. Nevertheless, he was a passionate and very articulate spokesman.

His passion derived from his experience, an experience I knew very little about until I started reading "Subversives." I have a much greater regard for him now than I did nearly 50 years ago, and I hardly thought that was possible. But learning about his past, and what he believed in, and what he had done prior to the Free Speech Movement only makes me admire him the more.

I'm no hero-worshiper, as anyone who knows me knows. There are many individuals, however, for whom I maintain great admiration and respect. Mario Savio has always been one of them, but now my admiration and respect for him has increased substantially.

The more I learn... I'm grateful I can still learn...

More Insight and Ironies From "Subversives"

For example, I knew that Clark Kerr (UC President during the Free Speech Movement demonstrations in 1964 and 65) was responsible for coming up with the California Higher Education Master Plan -- which is usually attributed to Governor "Pat" Brown -- but I didn't know that he was affiliated with the Quakers or that he had been elevated to the presidency of the University specifically because of his abilities and reputation as a negotiator.

My memories of Kerr are somewhat mixed but overall they are negative, largely because he was demonized during and after the FSM, by student protesters and later by Reagan and his ilk, as part of the ongoing problem at Berkeley and other campuses, not part of the solution. I recognized him as someone who was trying to maintain control and exercise authority in a situation in which control and authority were being exercised for their own sake, and under the circumstances, it was wrong. I see from Rosenfeld's examination of the documents, however, that Kerr was trying to do something else -- not necessarily what it looked like at all -- and that despite his somewhat ham-handedness and bumbling, he may have been doing more good than harm.

It would be some time before I more or less clearly understood the often tense relationship between the Regents of the University, the University administration, and the Legislature, as well as with the Governor's Office, alumni, donors, faculty, students, and the communities in which the University campuses were placed.

Rosenfeld is saying the situation was even more complex than I came to understand it to be, and the complexity of the relationships between all the moving parts of the University was part of what made it relatively easy for interests like the FBI or, as happened with the FSM, student "radicals" to exert so much control -- at least temporarily.

Rosenfeld has also laid bare J. Edgar Hoover's personal interest and the FBI's general interest in the University of California, dating back essentially prior to World War II. Hoover saw it as a hotbed of Communists and Communism from very early on, particularly the Berkeley campus, and he kept his personal eye on what was going on there, and ordered his agents to conduct covert and often lawless surveillance of faculty and administration, students and staff and provide the Director with reports of their findings as well as disrupting any sign of opposition to the Established Order.

I knew about the anti-Communists witch hunts and purges throughout California's public education system (my 5th grade teacher, for example, was accused) but I was not fully aware of how deeply the purges went nor how destructive they were in particular cases. This is something I probably should have been more aware of, but I wasn't.

After all, even though everyone knew that surveillance and anonymous accusation of "Commies" was routine, we weren't necessarily able to recognize the general effects: curbing or crushing dissent and enforcing conformity of thought and action. Conformity being the key -- I've written about it many times as the fundamental social/political factor of the era, far more enthusiastically embraced and enforced than any of the OUTRAGES!!!!!™ we are privy to and are expected to run around denouncing these days.

Given the technology of the era, Hoover and the FBI were as thoroughgoing in their surveillance and interference in the University as it was possible to be at the time, far more directly and disruptively than we realized, and some ways more so than the pervasive surveillance we are under today.

There's much more, of course, and I'm still in the early chapters, but the way the background of the story of the student uprising at Berkeley is being laid out and the underlying issues, personalities, and events are being detailed is actually quite revelatory  to me. I knew a lot of it, but not so many of the details. In many ways, it was worse than we thought.

Much worse. Which makes the story more depressing than I would have thought.

Subversives

I just received a copy of Seth Rosenfeld's "Subversives" -- a book about the early days of the student rebellion of the 60s. I've written about that era quite a few times, for the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and the more or less general student rebellion it inspired were deeply influential to my own perspectives about American imperialism and authoritarianism. What I've written about it is almost all my personal perspective on events I witnessed (in person or on television) or was involved in (such as the Draft Moratorium protests in Oakland in 1967 -- I was there for my pre-induction physical.)

Rosenfeld got hundreds of thousands of documents that I understand revealed the deep, deep involvement of the then-existing Security State to infiltrate and disrupt the student rebellion, largely at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director since dirt was new. There was much more Security State involvement than we knew at the time, that's for sure. And yet the fall out from the events of those days -- including the apparent co-optation of such rebel lights as Todd Gitlin and Mark Rudd, both of whom I have had at least passing dealings with -- continues to resonate.

I'm sure I'll have more to write about those days once I've finished the book.

Mario Savio Explains It All For You

Thanks to Michael Cavlan RN over at FDL for posting this full version of Mario Savio's December 2, 1964 "Gears of the Machine" speech that he gave on the steps of Sproul Hall just before several thousand hundred students occupied the building thus catalyzing the student (and counterculture) rebellions of the 1960's.

I've posted many times that this was a radicalizing event in my life -- I was 16 at the time and in high school. Three years later, I would be involved in this:



Here's Todd Gitlin's narrative of those events:

Here, protestors wait to close down the Oakland Induction Center where young draftees arrive for their physicals and are taken into the Army. They hold wooden shields and wear helmets. It is an October Friday in 1967 and no one anticipates a peaceful outcome.

At some point in that year anti-war activists across the country agreed to turn protest into resistance. Fred Halstead says in Out Now!, his detailed history of the anti-war movement, “it was a time to move opposition to the war and the draft from moral protest to a show of power.” The draft of young men into the armed forces was a particularly odious feature of the Vietnam conflict. Beginning with the war’s expansion in 1965, President Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted each month from 17,000 to 35,000. Because college students still held draft deferments, the vast majority of hapless draftees were lower class males and much more likely to be black, Mexican-American or Puerto Rican. In 1965 there were 25,000 soldiers in Vietnam. By the end of 1967 there were more than 480,000 soldiers in Vietnam. And 15,000 of them had been killed.

In May of 1965 some 40 Berkeley students staged the first public burning of draft cards in front of the local draft board, at the time a handy half-block from the UC campus. A “liberal” Democratic Congress responded to the burning of draft cards by making the act a felony punishable by five years in prison. Draft card burnings continued, though, and by 1967 a group called The Resistance was organizing ever-larger protests against the draft. Leaders decided to mount a weeklong protest October 16-21 that would end with a march on the Pentagon. Ground zero for draft resistance was the Oakland Armed Forces Examining Station, aka, the Oakland Induction Center.

[snip]

What followed on Bloody Tuesday was a riot. Direct action collided with police brutality and the result was an hour of mayhem as members of the Resistance, who had expected to block Center entrances and be arrested, were instead beaten bloody. Organizers held a rally Thursday on the Berkeley campus and vowed to return to Oakland on Friday. “We’re going to give the cops one hell of a run for their money,” shouted Stop the Draft Week organizer Morgan Spector. And they did. More than 10,000 protestors showed up early Friday morning, prepared with shields and helmets to engage the police. As cops poured out again into the streets, activists ran a virtual Chinese fire drill around the city’s central core, occupying intersections until police arrived, then vanishing down alleys to return to the Center where they blocked entrances until police returned. Battles ensued as police officers fought hand-to-hand to arrest protestors who, aided by comrades that attacked police from behind, would break free and run. Barricades were built from parked cars, rolled into intersections and tipped over. A bus was seized, emptied of cheering passengers, and rolled into the street to block access by police.

Protest had become insurrection.

Yes, well. The rest, as they say, is history. And to clarify, this insurrection in Oakland lasted all week, and there were Stop the Draft events held all over the nation that week as well, culminating in the Levitation of the Pentagon on October 21, 1967.

In Oakland, the history of insurrection has a long and noble lineage, so every time I run into someone who wants to mindlessly denounce the current insurrection in Oakland -- which continues apace, despite all the hoo-and-haw over various tactical and strategic errors (to put it gently) -- even if it is Todd Gitlin -- my generally tolerant demeanor tends to get bent out of shape and I tend to respond with a bit of bite.

The point is not that I favor violent insurrection and resistance because I don't. The only ones who would actually engage in such a thing in this country are the rightists and fascists in any case. They've been doing so on a limited scale for decades. For some odd reason, though, the "anarchists" and what's pitifully left of the Left are blamed for whatever insurrectionist tendencies there are and are strictly advised by their Elders (of which I am now one, thankyouverymuch) to declare adherence and strictly follow passive nonviolence principles as outlined by "Gahndi" and King. Now isn't that interesting? It should be. It should be interesting and instructive about the true nature of Power and Control in this country.

What I find interesting is that the nonviolence advocate who had the greatest influence on me is never mentioned: Cesar Chavez. It's the strangest thing. It's as if he and the United Farm Workers he led never existed, and their struggle never happened at all. He and his work have been all but erased from the historical record, and I truly wonder why.

Every now and again, I get together with some of the abuelos from the farmworker huelga days, and they shake their heads sadly at how far we have come yet how very far there still is to go. The struggle continues, yet it has become so highly ritualized and enervated that measurable progress is almost impossible to find, while there is plenty of backsliding to be found in the fields everywhere throughout The Other California, where those many farm fields still are (well, at least the ones that haven't been buried under suburban sprawl.)

One of the ways the Overclass got a handle on the farmworkers' movement and made it much less effective was to essentially buy off some of its leaders and younger workers by providing them with a way out of the fields and a comfortable living if they wanted it. Many farm labor activists wound up teaching on college campuses, others became civil servants, ironically in some cases charged with enforcing farm labor law but without the tools to do so. The less they felt trapped in the fields, the less the farmworkers felt they had little hope for improvement besides the UFW. The Overclass used many other tactics, including murder, to get their way, but from the public's perception, the farmworkers were the ones who got their way, not the growers. Little do they know.

Similar tactics were used to disarm and ultimately disable the anti-war movements of my day. As with the farmworkers, Power did concede the minimum it had to -- such as, for example, instituting a draft lottery, then ending the draft, then removing troops from the ground in Vietnam, and finally withdrawing from Indochina altogether. Many of those firebrands and movement leaders -- those who weren't murdered -- wound up teaching on college campuses where some of them still are. Others found civil servant positions which by now they have retired comfortably from, and we all know what happened with Jerry Rubin: he became a capitalist pig.

Mario Savio himself taught physics and philosophy at Sonoma State until his untimely death in 1996.

Who am I to talk, I went into The Theater and ultimately into government service myself.

What I began to understand about all this is that what appears to be radical and insurrectionary at any given time probably isn't. Mario's speech on the steps of Sproul Hall still resonates -- at least it does to me, but then I can (vaguely!) remember what he's going on about. Yes, the issues were critically important in those days, and yes, the insurrection at UC Berkeley in the fall and winter of 1964-65 made a huge difference and catalyzed movements and rebellions all over the country and parts of the world some of which were brutally and bloodily suppressed.

But underlying it all was a demand for dignity and respect, justice and community. And most of all for Peace.

While the issues Occupy is wrestling with are different, and the Occupy rebellion/revolution itself is very different -- the underlying demands aren't. We once again have an out of touch and wildly out of control power structure that ignores or dismisses the Public Interest in pursuit of private interest goals. Mario is complaining because the University is being run like a corporation and to serve corporate needs, not the Public Interest at all, and in his view and that of many students at Cal and elsewhere, that was simply wrong on principle. That was not what the University was for and that was not the purpose of higher education in California, but there it was: Cal served its government and corporate "sponsors" not the People.

And so it is today, even worse than it was in 1964. And now it is wildly more expensive for students at Cal and in the rest of the public higher education system in California than it was almost 50 years ago.

The abuses are far greater and the costs are far heavier. And sometimes the solutions seem farther away than ever.

Envisioning That Better Future -- Seven: Liberty and Equality for All

Yes. Well. That's the crux of the struggle, still, isn't it?

What does it mean, this call for liberty and equality that most of us hearing all our lives? What are we talking about here?

I've written before about the contrasting liberationist and communitarian impulses of the rebellions of the 1960's -- both of them asserting liberty and equality as fundamental values, but each having a distinctive vision of what they meant and how they would be applied in the real world.

The Movement Liberationists were not on the whole inclined toward Community. The Movement Communitarians were not, on the whole, inclined toward rampant individualism.

"Liberty" means something different in a Communitarian context than it does in a Liberationist one.

"Equality" means something different to a Liberationist than it does to a Communitarian.

The underlying spark for the rebellions of the 1960's was the Civil Rights Movement that began in the 1950's (which in turn was an outgrowth of earlier civil rights and justice movements). The Civil Rights movement combined Liberationist and Communitarian impulses rather successfully, but in the translation to the mostly urban white campus environment of the 1960s, the two were disentwined and separated into distinct threads.

The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley was a strongly Liberationist movement that utilized little or nothing of a Communitarian nature. Individuals did come together of course -- there were thousands of students involved -- and the "community" was the campus itself, already present.

The Free Speech Movement did not seek to create a community, in other words. It grew out of the pre-existing campus community. It sought to liberate individuals in the community from the egregious strictures of the authorities of that community against political speech and activity on campus.

In this it was partially successful -- after a good deal of struggle. There was no attempt to fundamentally transform the campus community. That would come later.

Commmunitarianism did not really arise among the 1960's rebels until the advent of the Hippies, something that was not a campus phenomenon at all. The Hippies, instead, were an intentional community of like-minded strangers brought together in San Francisco in the famous Haight-Ashbury District who chose to live partially communally in an urban setting. Numbers of early communitarians quickly split off into sub-communities who established more or less self-sustaining rural communes, some of which are still in existence (most failed, of course; yes, "of course." It's very difficult to do communes successfully over time in this country).

The liberation the communitarians sought was liberation from social conformity and from interference by outside authority. Equality was a value within the commune.

On the other hand, Liberationists sought the liberation of the individual from the arbitrary imposition of authority, and from that impulse, liberationism developed a "group liberation" vision somewhat akin to the Civil Rights Movement, focused almost entirely on liberating various groups from the strictures of law and authority, but often leaving the individuals to fend for themselves once "liberated."

Most of this liberation was won -- sometimes after intense struggle -- but always at a cost. We don't often discuss the costs involved in "liberation," and it is not my point to discuss it extensively in this post, but we should be aware that "liberation" has in many cases been an unfair trade off.

"Equality" among Liberationists tended to be -- and still is -- a matter of legal status. One is equal before the law, or is supposed to be, or is in theory. That's the extent of it.

If we truly want a successful vision of the future, we're going to have to find some way to fuse to two again, and that's been a big part of the process of the Occupy Movement, perhaps its most important aspect to date.

My own impression has been that the core of the Occupations is always found in the attempt at forming temporary intentional communities. Every one of them to my knowledge -- and I've followed several dozen of the hundreds and hundreds that have been started -- have had the same initial goals: to set up and operate temporary communities of like minded and dedicated people on behalf of "the 99%" -- in other words, on behalf of the community as a whole.

It hasn't been entirely successful, in that most Americans have no experience with and no conception of this kind of intentional community building based on anarchic and democratic principles. It's all new and very unfamiliar to most Americans. And this sort of community-building is what is most threatening to the powers that be. Destroying these spontaneous communities -- and preventing their re-emergence -- has been one of the primary objectives of the anti-Occupy crackdowns by police forces all over the country.

Many Americans cannot grasp and are quite frightened by the prospect of these communities, filled as they are with so many of the discards and rejects of America, a fear that our rulers like to encourage.

And yet I think it is through the continued development of these communities that we'll find our future -- if one is to be found at all.

Is it a future of Liberty and Equality? Honestly? Not in the sense most of us have become accustomed to over the last several generations, no.

That's part of the difficulty so many Occupations have encountered. "Liberty" and "equality" mean something different in the context of an Occupation camp than they do in the context of the every-day legal and social processes of our society.

"Liberty" carries with it the burden of responsibility; one is not simply free to do as one pleases, in other words, and one is not able to do or be what one wants without consideration of the interests of everyone else in the community. This is the essence of the process of community-building from the ground up. It is not easy to do this; for some people, it is not even possible.

I was discussing some of these concepts with a fellow who has been active in intentional community development field for twenty years or more, and his initial statement was, "You people are trying to do something that's almost impossible." Yes, that's so, I acknowledged, now how do we do it?

"You're going to make a lot of mistakes," he said, "but that's the way you're going to learn." And so it has been.

The principles of horizontal organization and democratic authority seem to be more and more solidly established within the Occupy Movement as time goes on; these are the fundamentals of the Movement, and as people become more familiar with them, and more at ease with them, they seem more and more natural. The problem initially was the absence of any easily accessible guidelines to work from. Unfamiliarity with the processes involved and real discomfort with the results of some of the attempts led to lots and lots of mistakes, but that's how you learn.

"Be not afraid" became the motto flashed on the Verizon Building in Manhattan. ("Do not be afraid.")

"We are winning."

That's becoming more and more true every day. At least it seems to me, even though I have stepped back from day-to-day active participation in the Movement.

"Liberty" is tied directly with responsibility; "equality" is tied with interest and ability.

And all of it, in my view, is wrapped within conceptions of Dignity and Justice, Community and Peace that have been percolating for many long years.

It is the zeitgeist of the era.

The current ruling class is shuddering and facing irrelevancy in the midst of an unfamiliar yet oddly compelling global populist (not so much "popular") movement that can neither be suppressed nor absorbed. This is the Future, there's no way around it.

We will see a new era of Liberty and Equality for All. It won't be quite what we had in mind back in the Old Days, but that's probably for the best.

The Matter of Trust

Now hold on.

This is the Open Letter from Occupy Portland expressing dismay at their treatment by the police and the mayor:

15 November 2011

An Open Letter to Mayor Sam Adams:

We, as members of the Occupy Portland Liaison Team, are officially resigning from our roles as city and police liaisons for the Occupy Portland movement. This is in direct response to the deplorable police actions of this past weekend and your refusal to communicate clearly with us during that time.

We were specifically asked by City Hall to create this Liaison Team, for the purpose of facilitating clear communication between city government, police and the Occupy Portland movement. We worked hard to assemble a capable team of activists to act as a conduit of information as agreed upon by our General Assembly.

Initial meetings were amiable and seemingly productive, as your staff was able to express concerns, some of which we shared, about conditions within the encampment. We facilitated communication and followed up by working closely with city employees and our own volunteers to address issues relevant to camp safety.

Despite our efforts, over the weekend, you decided to cave to pressure from your friends at the Portland Business Alliance, the Police Association and other groups interested in maintaining the status quo of economic injustice and issued us an eviction notice. Instead of allowing us to address conditions within our encampment in a transparent and democratic way you chose to enlist the full apparatus of police repression to destroy our encampment.

There's more. A great deal more. But you get the idea.

I'm concerned that our friends in Portland don't have The Idea, and this may be a reason why there has been such despondence in Portland after The Raid, while there is such jubilation and even celebration elsewhere (New York and Oakland come to mind) after their camps were raided.

Our friends in Portland say they "trusted" the Mayor and the police.

My question is simply, "Why?"

Why does anyone involved with the Occupy Movement-Becoming-Revolution "trust" or "want to work with" or in any other way express unity or a desire for unity with the Powers That Be, whoever they may be?

Listen to Mario again:



That was the whole December 2, 1964, speech on the steps of Sproul Hall that led directly to the "Occupation" of Sproul Hall -- which in turn triggered all sorts of student rebellion and response through the remainder of the 1960's.

A couple of things must be noted: the protesters were IN active negotiations with the University administration when this Occupation took place. The Occupation of Sproul Hall was due to the betrayal by the administration and the University regents of the basic principles of fairness and good will with which the student protesters had approached the problem of Free Speech on and near the campus.

Note what Mario says about "liberals."

Today, we would refer to them as "progressives." '

In other words, in 1964, the progressive administration of the University was actively negotiating with and betraying the good will and trust of the students; this was quite a revelation at the time. People -- not just students -- who had been brought up in a "liberal" or what is now known as "progressive" environment all their lives were discovering a horrible truth: these people lie, they're violent, and they serve the interests of the corporatist war machine first and foremost. Their mission is to provide endless fodder for the machine they serve, forever, world without end, amen.

THIS WAS IN 1964.

It hasn't changed.

After numerous protests and sit-in/occupations and a good deal of violence by police toward the student protesters -- violence that would escalate, not just on campuses but in many cities and their segregated ghettos -- negotiations continued and a sort of ad hoc agreement was reached that more or less defused some of the immediate rationale for protest over "Free Speech" for a time.

In other words, Authority Pretended to Yield, students got some of what they wanted, things calmed down. Somewhat. For a while.

But we've seen -- haven't we? -- that the argument over Free Speech that began at Berkeley in September of 1964, when the University decided to enforce a prohibition on political action and speech on and near the campus (actually, there were precursors, but I won't get into those here, though I have posted on some of it previously), has by no means ended.

Nor did it end at Berkeley when the administration was forced to make some concessions back in 1964 and 1965.

"Power concedes nothing" and all of that, but there is more to it than that. "Power" can be "liberal" or "conservative" or something else, it doesn't matter. You cannot trust Power under any circumstances. Except to trust that Power will be abused and that abuse will be directed at you.

That's it. Period. The Ideology of Power is always the same. It is in favor of itself and opposed to you. It doesn't matter -- at all -- what the political party designation of Power is, and it doesn't matter at all what superficial "agreements" are made. It is always the same: if you insist on being in the way, you will be crushed. Your only options are to stifle yourself or become absorbed by the Borg.

When you take that insight to heart -- and I've never been sure Mario ever did, or if he did, then I guess he was comfortable being "absorbed" -- it doesn't matter what Power does; everything Power does merely reinforces the point of the protest.

Power does not negotiate in good faith.

Ever.

You cannot trust Power. Ever.

The point of a Revolution is to replace Power -- not to become part of it and not to negotiate with it.

And this is the tough part, the hardest part of all. It's been done many times in the past, but how to do it is never known in advance.

Whether to do it at all is still part of the internal struggle of the Movement.

David Graeber may have some useful insights.

But it's tough. Mario ultimately couldn't do what was really necessary, nor were most of the Revolutionary Upstarts of My Day really up to the challenge they set for themselves. Most were either absorbed -- or paid for their fervor with their lives.

I don't know how far the current Revolutionaries are prepared to go, and I don't think the answer will be found in this country. Americans are the followers in this Revolutionary Era not the leaders.

They Come By Night

One of the characteristics of the repression of the current spate of uprisings known as "Occupy" is that the repression typically occurs in the dead of night. For some reason, our rulers prefer to do their business out of public view.

Last night and into this morning, the Center of Repression was on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, the home place of the Free Speech Movement that got under way in the same location (not just on the same campus, but in exactly the same location in Sproul Plaza) some 47 years ago. Mario gave his stirring speech -- from which this excerpt is taken



on December 2, 1964, but the protest began in September of 1964, when the University administration decided that "free speech" (specifically to talk about and/or raise money for civil rights campaigns and to engage in critical dialogue about the Vietnam War) was verboten on or near the campus. It was actually quite a complicated ruling that in retrospect seems ridiculously bureaucratic and confused, and the student response to it was almost as baroque.

What Mario was going on about in his December 2 speech on the steps of Sproul Hall was the take over of the Administration offices located inside Sproul Hall through a sit in (what we now call an "Occupy"), an action that commenced immediately after the speech.

All day -- and all night -- there have been ongoing #OccupyCal protests, administration "negotiations," and police crackdowns. The video above shows police action yesterday afternoon. It's fairly rare to see these kinds of operations in the daytime, but UC police have been training in the open in the day time for just this kind of thing.

The festive day of protest at Berkeley started out like this:



Turned into this back on campus:



The action got much more intense after dark:

On the steps of Sproul Hall:



On the lawn:



Cowards:



Precursors: I yabber a lot about the Free Speech Movement of almost 50 years ago because it was so meaningful to me as a rebellious youth at the time. There have been many precursors to the current uprisings, though, some of them much more recent. This Revolt and Revolution did not emerge from a vacuum. The ground for it has been prepared for years. The video below depicts a protest over UC system tuition hikes that took place at Wheeler Hall on the UC Berkeley campus two years ago. Note the evocative nature of what was going on then; note how much of it has been incorporated into the Occupy Movement of today:



And this is what it ultimately came from:

Too Soon for Analysis -- Still in Dialectic Mode

Hippies show you how it's done.

If all one knows about the Occupy Movement is what's in the major mass media, that's a problem right there. What's so ironic about the continuing media puzzlement regarding the aims and goals of the Movement is that pretty much everything is open source, right out in public, most of it in the great outdoors no less, or easily accessible online. There would be no excuse for the media's bafflement if it weren't for the well-known fact that the media in this country is a strategic tool of the Overclass. Observing what the media says about the Movement-Becoming-Revolution is a clue to what the Overclass is thinking about it. What we can say of it so far is that the Overclass is baffled on the one hand and indifferent on the other. Kind of the way they are about most everything that isn't Them.

Our Overclass and the government which serves Them is so barricaded and divorced from The People that any action outside its narrow interest simply doesn't register; it's really worse than the Bourbons.
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A couple of interesting efforts of analyzing the Occupy Movement have been brought up in comments here, and I thought I'd take some time to discuss them.

I liked Danny Goldberg's "In Defense of Hippies" in Dissent (h/t Cuchulain).

Hippies and their grandkids (not so much their own offspring, though) are found everywhere in the Movement, and their presence makes perfect sense. It's not because this is a Hippie movement -- it isn't, not even close -- but more because Hippies and their descendants are like so many other marginalized and excluded sectors of the population who have no more say in the course of national and international events than any other sector of the "99%". They're an integral part of the Movement by the very fact of their ongoing Marginalization.

It's not too analytical to say that the Movement is ultimately based on the fact that all sorts of excluded groups have discovered (not entirely spontaneously) that they have more in common with one another than they thought. And guess what? Drum circles are not bad things. Peace, love and harmony are positive goals (if you need goals; otherwise, they are just positive). The fact that the more rigidly programmed liberals have a tough time of it when they smell pot or patchouli in the air is more their problem -- that can be overcome -- than it is a problem of the remnant Hippie/Commune community.

Ponder for a moment how many groups are rigidly excluded from policy influence in this country and around the world. It's practically everyone except the 1% and their running dogs and handmaidens.

Goldberg, approaches this issue from the perspective of Mainstream Democratic/Progressive contempt of the Hippies and all their appurtenances. Yes, well. Part of the role of the Overclass and the Insiders is to be contemptuous -- or condescending -- toward those on the Outside. It's always been so.

The Occupy Movement turns that contemptuous attitude inside out: in this Movement, those on the Outside are generally more condescending and contemptuous toward those on the Inside. Most of us instinctively defer to Authority. We recognize Power when we see it, even if it is not in the form of tear gas and rubber bullets, and we generally yield. But in the case of the Occupy Movement, the yielding -- say to arrest for Occupying -- is a highly formalized and ritualized form of contempt and condescension for the truly petty laws that require so much overwhelming force for implementation. "The whole world's watching" the Overclass make fools of themselves over and over and over again. And when it turns violent -- as it has in several cities, most prominently Oakland in the USA (we'll leave aside some of the international violence against The People for the moment) -- the shame brought on by the police state tactics used against peaceful demonstrations stings. It merely builds a more contemptuous attitude toward the Overclass.

When that police state violence is turned against Hippies and their descendants, it is generally met with outrage. How dare you hurt these loving people? How. Dare. You? The Hippies are at the spiritual center of the Movement.

As Goldberg puts it:

Yet it is precisely the mystical utopian energy that most professional progressives so smugly dismiss that has aroused a salient, mass political consciousness on economic issues—something that had eluded even the most lucid progressives in the Obama era.

I've heard and read many calls by otherwise progressives to "ditch the utopia talk" -- since we can't get anything like that done, we shouldn't even consider it. Yet one of the chants that's making the rounds is: "A Better World is Possible." It's part of the internal dialectic of the Movement. Should it focus on "what can be done," much as Chomsky argues, or should it be focused on what should be done? Of course the answer is "both," but we haven't quite got there yet.

In the interim, many of the Occupations -- though not all of them -- have become demonstrations of what that Better World might look like. Sketches and outlines, to be sure, but still, the point is to demonstrate the Change You Want to See by Being the Change yourself.

That can't happen without enormous amounts of what I'd call "Hippie Spirit," for it was the Hippies -- during a time of intense pressure to Conform -- who demonstrated that there was another way to live, and who showed how to do it.

Goldberg recognizes that aspect of the Hippie Movement, but I wonder if he understands the nuances of the demonstration. The Hippie Spirit never went away, and it never entirely went underground, either. It is apparent in all kinds of "alternative lifestyle" movements, and especially in environmental activism today.

Whole communities and subcommunities all over the country, but especially in parts of the West, and in California in particular, are culturally "Hippie." Once the culture was adopted it became a permanent fact of life. Just because these communities are ignored -- except when they are raided by the Marijuana Police, when they are ritually despised -- doesn't mean they otherwise don't exist. They certainly do exist, and their humanist/spiritual ethic and culture is deeply rooted by now.

Goldberg concentrates on Hippies as a "spiritual movement", in the sense of Alternative Religious Belief, and I'm somewhat taken aback by it. Yes, there was a strong spiritual element to the Hippie movement of the past, and present-day descendants of Hippies of Yore (such as in Sedona, for example) are still promoting an alternative spirituality, but for the most part, spiritual matters (beyond regard for the Earth and for one another) are a private thing best left to the individual and like-minded others to sort out as they see fit. There is little need to cultify.

If there are cultic elements in some of the Occupations, they are not Hippie-cultic.

Goldberg further observes:

The anti-hippie ethos on the left runs deep. Many 1960s radicals claimed that the hippies had squandered a chance to mainstream left-wing political ideas. In Black Panther leader Bobby Seale’s book Seize the Time he quotes white radical Jerry Rubin as saying that he and others had formed the “Yippies” because hippies had not “necessarily become political yet. They mostly prefer to be stoned.” In the real world, the Yippies never got a mass following, but the Grateful Dead did.

Talk about a mash-up! Well, he's got a good underlying point: the contempt of the mainlined political movements for a movement that was as conscientiously a-political as the Hippies were is as strong now as it ever was. If you believe in the System and the possibility of reforming the System, then those who want to -- or are -- standing outside it and are demonstrating another way altogether can only be met with contempt and arrogant condescension. Jerry would wind up as a corporate man, let's not fool ourselves. Bobby Seale has been fully integrated into the standard non-profit realm. It wasn't so much that they were co-opted as it was that they were natural reformers. They may have denounced the System in their Radical days, but they came to believe, if they didn't already believe it, that the System could be made better by their activism and the activism of others. They were reformers, not Revolutionaries.

Part of the ethical grounding of Utopian communities of all kinds in this country is that they don't as a rule participate in the politics of the nation. They keep it at a distance for all kinds of reasons, primarily ones of survival. The political show is a distraction from what really matters. So the alternative Utopians mostly don't play.

Hippies quite consciously had very little political influence then, and most see little point in pursuing it now. It's an Insider's game.

This is why Goldberg's statement here is confused at best:

Conservatives have effectively peddled the notion that all politics are corrupt. The resulting apathy, and opposition to government, conveniently leaves big business more in charge than ever. The price that Democrats and progressives pay for belittling or ignoring contemporary devotees of the hippie idea, who share the opinion that politics are corrupt, is to reinforce the impulse to “drop out” in a cohort that would otherwise be, for the most part, natural allies.

Hippies are not the natural allies of any politician, on the left or the right (as the duopoly in our country conceives itself.) The politics is irrelevant.

Whenever an analyst tries to shoehorn the OWS Movement into a political framework, the attempt fails. And if they try to define or direct it into an institutional framework of any kind, be it party politics or standard-model organization, I am reminded of my man Mario Savio's deeply felt manifesto on the steps of Sproul Hall in the Winter of 1964:

Embiggen by clicken image

That's not Hippie -- there were none at that time. But the sense that things have gone so wrong that you have to either withdraw from the Machine, or stop it altogether, is as strong now, if not stronger, than it was then.

And until somebody says it and presents an alternative, nobody knows it openly.

Mario opened the door to radical consciousness in 1964. Now many doors are being opened. Not just to radical thought, but to alternatives of all kinds.

Was Mario a leftist? Does anybody actually know? Were Bobby or Jerry political leftists? Were the Hippies leftists? Were they Democrats? And OWS, is it leftist? A tool of the Democratic Party?

The questions themselves expose the absurdity of left/right dualism in the context of Movements like this.

And that's where I think Goldberg and many analysts of the OWS Movement go wrong. They keep trying to figure out how the Movement (that is made up of all these excluded elements of society) can be integrated into the insider political system without actually following through on any of their still forming objectives.

It won't work.
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Later, I hope to take on Morris Berman's analysis from October 12 (h/t teri49). It seems kind of quaint now, but it makes an important point: there's more than one phase of a Revolution, and the second phase (and subsequent ones) may be made impossible by the overreliance on technology and social media by the OWS Movement.

The problem with this analysis I think has to do with the perception that this Movement is sui generis, and that's hardly correct. As I've pointed out in other fora, the elements and the arguments for Revolution have long been "there." This Movement puts them together...

This video was made in 2007, and it gives an interesting overview of some of the pre-Revolutionary context that the current Movement-Becoming-Revolution draws from:



It didn't spring from the Vacuum.

The Speech

I've never been much into State of the Union speeches for the simple reason that they tend to be ritualistic and formulistic and rarely provide more than the roughest outline of Events to Come. They exist in the realm of noise.

Last night, His Serenity presented his first State of the Union speech, and by all accounts in the media -- and so far in most of the blogosphere -- it met or even slightly exceeded expectations. There. That's done.

The "controversy" was over Justice Alito mouthing "not true" when Obama criticized the Court for overturning a century of campaign finance law and "opening the floodgates" of corporate financing of campaigns. It was an interesting visual, too. The Court was sitting there in its Majesty, looking stunned and bewildered, surrounded by standing, clapping Democrats who clearly despise what the Court has done.

On that note, I mentioned to somebody the other day who said that she thought the decision would strongly affect elections over time that it was my impression it was intended to have a strong effect on elections this year, and it will.

The Originalists, Federalists, and Constitutional Absolutists will tell us that if the unions and non-profits who are also liberated from campaign funding restrictions by this legislation from the bench cannot compete with corporate interest in the Marketplace of Ideas, then they've lost, too bad so sad, and it is not the role of the Constitution and the Law to pick losers and winners.

That would be Outcome Based, and that would be wrong.

The glaring hypocrisy of their stance would be unbelievable, except for the fact that we have seen so much of it over the long years of Radical Reactionary ascendancy, not simply on the Court, but everywhere.

And of course, these same Originalists, Federalists, and Constitutional Absolutists will opine that the Constitution does not prohibit rule by Private Corporations, and what is not specifically prohibited is allowed. Some, like Scalia and his butt-boy Thomas, will go further and say that Corporate Rule is better than Stupid Democracy because it is more efficient and it allows Government to be minimized in line with the Founders' Intent, as stated on the Golden Plates on which the Constitution is Graven, and translated and interpreted with the Urim and Thummim provided to each and every Originalist, Federalist, and Constitutional Absolutist upon passing the bar. Oyez, oyez, oyez.

On that note, I'd like to mention that as I've wandered through the really very gloomy post Citizens United ruling firmament, I've thought long and hard about why someone like Glenn, for example (but there are quite a few others), would be so rigidly supportive of this ruling on First Amendment grounds despite any other interest and specifically despite any untoward consequence or outcome at all. No matter what, in other words, the ruling reaffirms the First Amendment on prohibiting laws restricting Free Speech, and therefore the ruling is sound, Constitutional, and worthy.

Someone asked Glenn in comments if he would say the same thing if it could be demonstrated to his satisfaction that the ruling had an even chance of destroying representative democracy in this country, however flawed that representative democracy might be today, and his answer was "yes".

His justification:

We don't have a "representative democracy" if we empower the Government to violate the Constitution because we decide that doing so has a chance to avert really bad things from happening.

If you don't like the results or the potential results, change the Constitution, don't authorize the violation of the Constitution to prevent a bad outcome.

Which, from 30,000 feet seems rational, but on the ground it never has been. Constitutional amendments are froughtful things on the one hand, achieving them is very difficult on the other. And in the matter at question, the threat of subsuming representative Government entirely into Corporate Interest, due to, let's say, an inherent flaw in the Constitution itself, a flaw that can be dealt with or even corrected through statute rather than amendment, allowing that threat to play out is more important than correction because it is "Constitutional."

While the Constitution may not be a suicide pact like the Declaration of Independence, it is not graven on Golden Plates and no Urim and Thummim are distributed to Originalists and Federalists and their Absolutist companions to correctly interpret it.

If statute can correct a flaw or present danger that a Reactionary Court may reveal in their wisdom and reversals, then statute should be employed, as it has been routinely over the centuries. While Glenn and others acknowledge there may be statutory remedies to this danger that don't involve violations of the Sacred Constitution -- such as public funding of campaigns -- their actual position is that the danger isn't all that great in any case, since we've been under de facto Corporate rule for a long time as it is and the world hasn't ended, so why get all riled up when the Court says that it's OK? Maybe it is OK, hunh?

Sure, maybe it is. But I go back to Mario's impassioned speech from the steps of Sproul Hall, in which he declares the opposite, that it's not OK for corporate interest to supercede the public interest, and it's not OK for public institutions like the University to yield to corporate demands for product, in this case, students conditioned and trained to serve Corporate masters. We are human beings. We are not products.

It was electrifying 45 years ago because nobody had quite crystalized the issue in quite that way in connection with a public institution which was founded and ostensibly operated in the public interest on behalf of all the people.

And yet it was functionally operating as a conditioning and training academy to provide product (graduates) not to advance the human condition, but to advance the Corporate Interest above all. A case could be made it still operates that way; perhaps more so now than ever before. Even though the Free Speech Movement achieved most of its stated objectives by forcing the University to remove its restrictions on (unauthorized) political speech on and near the campus.

There was a huge irony during the 45th Anniversary commemoration of the Free Speech Movement last December when a parade of speakers on the steps of Sproul Hall was interrupted by shouting students claiming it was their campus and their speech and everyone else could STFU. It was especially ironic given that the speaker who was temporarily shouted down was pointing out that despite the success of the Free Speech Movement, speech on campus is even more restricted now than it was 45 years ago, in that there would be no way to host a Nazi on campus or Condoleezza Rice and hear them out and argue the errors of their ways because they would be shouted down, or not allowed to speak at all because their views aren't popular or politically correct. He said that 45 years ago, those people or people like them would have been allowed to speak, and well informed argument would have demonstrated their errors.

I think he was missing the point just as Glenn and those like him are missing the point in the current context. Indeed, unpopular and political speech was allowed on the Berkeley campus 45 years ago under strictly controlled conditions. In a controlled forum or a classroom, there was ordinarily no problem (well, that's a stretch; communists were in a limbo and probably would not have been invited, though if they were, they would probably have been allowed to speak, though there would have been an outcry, especially among polititicans.) Prohibited was political speech and advocacy in uncontrolled and public areas like Sproul Plaza and Bancroft Avenue. The rationale, say what you will about it, being that a public institution could not sponsor -- by permitting -- public advocacy of partisan political positions on its property. In the classroom or a forum, fine, but not publicly. The public institution had to remain strictly nonpartisan in public. The students said, no. That political speech and advocacy in public on and near the campus was not sponsorship by the University in and of itself, it was an exercise of Free Speech as guaranteed by the Constitution which the University should not be prohibiting.

Yet interestingly 45 years later some of those who participated in the Free Speech Movement believe -- sincerely -- that political speech was actually more free on campus before the Free Speech Movement than afterwards, that in point of fact the prohibitions of public advocacy of political positions on campus helped enable and encourage a fuller debate on the issues "behind the gates."

It's a fair opinion, and in fact, that was the position of the University in 1964 in opposing the student demands for Liberation. They were already free. According to the University. Within bounds.

And this gets us back to what the Court was doing in "Liberating" corporations from a century of "oppression" of their political speech. Of course there hasn't really been any such thing -- Corporations are perfectly free to "speak" as they choose and when they choose. The restrictions were on what they could spend on speech and advocacy and when, ostensibly to level the playing field so as not to completely drown out others who might wish to speak on issues of importance to them.

The effect of "liberating" corporations (and unions and nonprofits) from the "oppression" they've been so horribly suffering under all these years, will be to enable those with the most money and access to the megaphone of the media to shout down and drown out any and all counter speech. So it was a hundred years ago when the first campaign finance reform legislation was enacted, so it will be again.

I learned a long time ago that he or she with the loudest voice in ordinary situations tends to rule. It was axiomatic in situations like board meetings and task forces and so forth that he or she who made the most ruckus in the loudest voice got their way.

The obvious intent of the Court in "liberating" Corporate speech was to give them their way. Again.

The speaker at the 45th Anniversary commemoration of the Free Speech Movement decried what had happened with the liberation of student political speech and advocacy -- it meant that unpopular views were not being heard or debated any more like they used to be. And to prove the point, he was shouted down. At least for a while. In fact, he was able to complete his thought eventually.

Liberating the students from prohibitions on their free speech on campus does not have the same effect as liberating corporations from their "oppression", however, despite what may appear to be superficial similarities. While it is rude to shout down unpopular speakers/points of view in a campus setting (and many, many have made the point about how rude it is), those speakers and views have numerous alternative means to get their message out; students are by no means hermetically sealed off from hearing "unpopular" or "politically incorrect" views -- they are culturally speaking immersed in them -- and they will always face challenges for being rude to other speakers when they are rude.

Corporate liberation has the almost opposite effect. They operate in the context of national political debate, and their liberation means that they can fully control that debate. What they do not want said or heard they can effectively prohibit. It's not a matter of being rude or of people having alternatives if they don't like the Corporate Message. The only practical alternative for a public that doesn't want to hear the Corporate Message is to turn it off. By their control of access to the Podium if you will, they determine what will be said and heard and what won't.

This is even worse than the situation on campus before the Free Speech Movement, because at least the University had a public interest in providing opportunities for a wide ranging debate to occur; Corporate interest has no public interest, and has no interest in a wide ranging debate. They want their view presented and none other. Corporate "liberation" means -- almost by definition -- that everyone else's liberty to speak and be heard is restricted or absent altogether. In other words, Corporate "liberation" means "suppression" for everyone else.

That seems to be the Court's desired outcome. The abstract adherence to the First Amendment results in its practical cancellation. Well, how about that! How nice!

And I would go farther and suggest that is not just the Court's desired outcome, it is also Glenn's and the Absolutists he gravitates toward.

We can speculate about why that might be the case. What is it about Corporate domination and rule that is ultimately so attractive? Why is a broken down and halting representative democracy so... unattractive?

We can see ideological reasons for the Radical 5 to want this outcome. They are corporatists, and as far as they are concerned, Corporate Rule is best. Corporate Rule enables "government" (as in representative democracy) to shrink, because it is no longer needed, except, perhaps for its defense and adjudication functions. It becomes an accessory, the way the Founders (supposedly) meant it to be. And the masses no longer have any governmental outlet or mechanism for their interests to be realized. Government serves the Corporations just like the masses are meant to do. I get that ideological point.

On the other hand, why would someone like Glenn support essentially the same thing?

Could it be because he doesn't trust the masses to do the right thing if they have the power, he doesn't respect the broken down representative democracy that is being trampled under the Corporate boot anyway, and he sees in the potential simplicity and efficiency of Corporate Rule a way to achieve desirable personal and political objectives? In other words, depending on what you want and who you are, Corporate Rule may be just the ticket, whereas a rough and crumbling representative democracy may be just the opposite? It's the Future™ brought to you by our Corporate Sponsors, and it's better than anything Stupid Democracy can come up with.

I don't know that that's the case among those who celebrate the ruling, including Glenn, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Free Speech Movement

As far as I can tell, I have never done a post here on the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio at UC Berkeley, though I know I have posted extensively on the topic elsewhere, including at Glenn's Place.

William Timberman, who used to hang out frequently over at Glenn's, took his leave from there some time back after a particularly ugly and unfortunate series of insults from some of the other posters that were both uncalled for and offensive on their face. WT was at Berkeley when the Free Speech Movement was roiling and shutting down the campus, and he had many insights about what was going on to share, and while not there, I wasn't that far away when it was happening and I could not simply ignore the student uprising.

The events of the fall and winter of 1964 in and around Sproul Hall and elsewhere on campus were electrifying, and they were, I believe, the trigger for the student revolts all through the remainder of the 1960's.

The Free Speech Movement was a Liberationist movement, modeled in some ways on the Civil Rights Movement, and it would become the nucleus of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. At issue was the University's prohibition of (unauthorized) 'political activity' on or near campus. It was a patent infringement of First Amendment rights, one of many that were commonplace at the time (to put it mildly), and the spontaneous student uprising caused by the University Administration's decision to enforce its ban on (unauthorized) 'political activity' on Bancroft Avenue outside Sather Gate (students marching through pictured above) led to nationwide student protest and turmoil climaxing -- but not ending -- with the Kent State (Ohio) shootings in 1970.

The First Amendment and Free Speech was of course central to the protests at Berkeley, but the firebrand speeches of Mario Savio caught the attention of the crowds at the campus and the media and were a sensation then as they still are. The First Amendment dispute was merely one of many Liberationist issues that would eventually be raised during the Berkeley protests. Mario's most famous speech, the one given to the crowd on the steps of Sproul Hall just before they occupied the building on December 2, 1964, is a masterpiece of Liberationist polemic.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part.

"And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.

"And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all."

It's still an inspiration for many who fight for Liberation.

After much tumult, many arrests, and the periodic shut down of the University, the University yielded to many of the demands of the students, though not all. Not that, by that point, the Genie of student protest could be put back in the bottle.

Liberationist protest became a central focus of the 1960's times of troubles. The Free Speech Movement was a model of how to do it.

Communitarianism, characterized and characatured by the Hippies, soon became another thread in the protest movements of the era. But while the Liberationists tended to be confrontational with Authority, the Communitarians tended to withdraw from confrontation or to try to mediate confrontation with Peace, Love, and Flowers.





Not to forget substances. As the old song goes:

Hashish
Cocaine
Marijuana
Opium
LSD
DMT
STP, BLT
A&P, IRT
APC, Alcohol
Cigarettes, shoe polish, cough syrup, peyote
Equinol, dexamil, camposine, Chemadrine,
Thorazine, trilophon, dexadrine, benzedrine, methedrine
S-E-X and Y-O-U, Wow!

From the American Tribal Love Rock Musical, HAIR, 1967.

An iconic event that combined Liberationist and Communitarian approaches to protest was the "Levitate the Pentagon" March on October 21, 1967.

But it was all a very long time ago.

Nevertheless, the twin currents of liberation activism and communal withdrawal continue to move through American society and politics. The current effort to expand marriage rights to same sex couples is a Liberationist case in point.

Communitarian efforts are by no means absent, but they are far lower key than current Liberationist activism. And there is, I believe, a reason for it, quite apart from the inherent modesty of Communitarianism itself.

It goes back to the Free Speech Movement and the campus upheavals it inspired. Liberationism was deeply threatening to the entire power structure of the mid- and later-1960's, and that power structure fought back hard. Ultimately, however, success in curbing Liberationism would be found in controlling it through co-option, which was the genius of early and later Reaganism. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated governor of California in January 1967, something that is largely forgotten. He came into office on a vow to bring the student rebellion to a halt, and to ensure it never happened again. His initial approach to the rebellion was to release the hounds in a manner of speaking, but soon enough, he was adopting a lot of Liberationist rhetoric, but using it to press for liberation from nasty government regulation of economic interests, and freedom for his particular brand of Conservative politics. It was brilliant. Americans are still under the spell of that kind of Liberation.

On the other hand, Communitarianism largely vanished from widespread public view with the commercialization and subsequent fading away of the Hippies and after some really terrible incidents that seemed to come out of the communes and the community movements that once were proliferating. The Tate-La Bianca murders, for example. Yet the spirit of Communitarianism is strongly bonded with much of what passes for Liberal and Progressive politics -- in the Environmental movement especially, but by no means limited to it.

There is a very strong irony in that the Free Speech Movement originated as a protest of the suppression of students' political speech by the University; last week, the Supreme Court passed a law by essentially declaring that Corporate political speech had been suppressed for lo, these many years (over a century), and their Liberation from this unconscionable suppression was the highest good the court could conceive. It required no Movement, no masses protesting. All it required was a simple majority of Radical ideologues on the Supreme Court, five Men In Black. And the Liberation was done.