Getting Caught Up

While I've been spending so much time a) packing; b) transcribing and posting excerpts from "The Peril of Fascism," the world continues to turn.

The Occupy National Gathering concluded in Philadelphia on July 4th and a Vision Statement of Sorts was produced. It's basically a list of ideas and ideals to work toward; some might call it a list of "demands" but I would say there is no one, really, to make demands of in that Our Rulers long ago declared their divorce from the rest of us commoners. Our Rulers are on another plane, it would seem, unapproachable, unaccountable, distant, and indifferent to the pleadings of the People -- whether in the streets or not.

This is the first 20 items on the Vision Statement as it is being circulated now:

203 clean water, air, and food
186 free education for all
158 no war
116 sustainable human society
110 a culture of direct democracy
108 free universal healthcare
106 local food production, community gardens, & permaculture agriculture
104 economic equality
95 localized economies
93 a world where basic needs are met
92 military-industrial complex destroyed; military spending slashed
85 economic system based not on profits, but mutual aid and meeting all
human needs
85 housing for all
82 workplace democracy and worker-owned co-ops
79 freedom to live anywhere: no borders, no nations
77 a collective, horizontal, non-hierarchical society
73 corporate power and influence rejected
72 all cultures respected equally

The numbers refer to the number of instances these items were listed by participants in the "Visioning Process" on July 4.

This being Occupy, there's some criticism because it's "not really a Vision Statement," and because it is not tied to any course of action. Nevertheless, it is a step toward defining and clarifying the mutual vision of the many tens and hundreds of thousands of Americans who have been part of the Occupy Movement.

One person, I noted, complained that the "vision" wasn't, erm, revolutionary enough for her. Yes, well, that's a fact. Occupy is the strangest sort of revolutionary movement, organic rather than impulsive, based -- as can clearly be seen above -- in a biological conception of society rather than... well, even finding the right word for what we have now is daunting. It's not exactly civilization...

Occupy is unlike any revolution that has gone before, and in many fundamental ways -- though not necessarily obvious ways -- it's already a stunning success. The authoritarian display the Po-Po (I'm growing fond of that term for the police) put on in New York to welcome the 99 Mile Marchers -- which resulted in a handful of bizarre and brutal arrests (including a livestreamer, who got it all on video) and the terrorizing of a couple of (literally) old ladies was taken in stride. As Nate said over and over again as he was recording the events at Zuccotti/Liberty Plaza, "It's what the NYPD does; it's what the police do all over the country." It's who they are, an identity thing. Sorry to say. There were confrontations, but they have become so highly ritualized they are almost meaningless. People are learning to regard the police as a screwed up nuisance. In fact, all civic authority is falling into that category. How many thousands of Occupiers have been arrested? How many injured? How many banksters? There you are, then, the perfect image of completely screwed civil priorities.

So long as that's the case, "authority" will continue to be delegitimized. And the Revolution will continue, essentially on a parallel track rather than a confrontational one. It's a matter of replacement rather than reform.

I've been dealing with the resurgence of fascism and the eerie comparison of what's going on now with what was going on during the 1930's. But there's nothing comparable to the Leftist/labor/Socialist/Communist opposition to fascism now that was so very strong then. There's something else, something deeper that a political ideology. It's not even the kind of anarchism that I find myself attracted to; it's deeper than that.

This is a highly moral effort, and that, I think, is its chief strength. It's moral rather than material. People are not so much concerned with having stuff or necessarily improving their standard of living or holding on to something of the past. They are looking forward to a better future that they create themselves, sustainable, beautiful, filled with life and love and sunshine and music to be sure, but most of all, morally righteous. Doing what's right for one another; doing what's right for the planet; peace, love and harmony.

Dignity, Justice, Community, Peace.

In some sense, the point of the Visioning process is to cause this better world that possible to spontaneously arise.

It may not work, but then again...

Happy Fourth, Brief Note on Events in Philadelphia, Travel Day

Yes, I'm headed back to California this morning; should arrive tomorrow evening. May catch the parade in town before I leave, but I've missed it (by "that much") in the past, and that may happen today as well. If my memory hasn't failed me, this is the second year in a row that I've traveled on the Fourth; what I recall of the journey is that there are a lot of motorcycles and hot rods on the highways, and that's always cool, daddy-o. (Note to youngsters, yes, we really did say that in the 1950s, though when we did, it was usually with a wink....)

A brief note on yesterday's extended march in Philadelphia: a couple of chants got things into a muddle. The "A-Anti-Anticapitalista!" chant has become very popular because it is so energizing and fun, but it appears that many people don't understand it and as they try to repeat it, or even start the chant, they garble it. This happened several times in Philadelphia. The first time I heard it, a woman started the chant with something like this: "Ah-a-tea-a-tea-a-lee-a-lees-ta!" Well, the rhythm was right anyway. It took a while, but eventually some people who knew the correct chant joined in and cleaned it up.

The second time I heard the "A-anti..." chant in Philly,  I laughed out loud. It went something like this: "Ah, I need, I need a slice of pizza!" That was great, but few joined in, sorry to say.

Then I heard the "A-anti" chant again, done very dramatically, at the Comcast or Verizon headquarters, starting out very soft and low, with the crowd crouched down. It built to a crescendo, as everybody jumped up and down and shouted lustily in an echo-y canyon of tall buildings. If the people in the offices above could hear the plebes below at all, I'm sure they were perplexed if not stunned.

Finally, near the tail end of the march yesterday, someone tried to start the chant again and mangled it, much as happened the first time I heard it in Philadelphia. I was watching Nate's livestream, and he became impatient with the woman who was trying to start the chant. He said, "You know, it's 'A-anti-anticapitalista!" She tried it and mangled it again. Nate again tried to demonstrate the correct chant, and several people nearby picked it up. The first woman still couldn't get it quite right. Nate tried again, and then, exasperated, said, "Anticapiltalista! It's 'anticapitalist' in Spanish."

"Ohhhh," said the woman, and from then on, she got it right. This tells me that somebody needs to explain what this chant means...

Then there was the "Shit's fucked up, shit's fucked up and bull shit!" chant, which I've heard several times during the Philadelphia festivities. It is often joined in quite lustily by the crowd, other times not so much. During yesterday's march, the chant was started and joined in by the crowd as they marched along, and I saw a bicycle cop grab onto a guy in the crowd and say something to him. The guy seemed stunned and said something to the people nearby but I couldn't hear what he was saying. The chant got quieter and then stopped as the guy ran ahead to the front of the march. Eventually Nate caught up to him and asked what was going on. The guy said, "We were passing by a daycare..." Oh. Heh heh. Maybe not the most appropriate chant then... (actually, I imagine kids would love it.)

Despite occasional intense encounters with the "Po-Po" in Philadelphia, the Occupy National Gathering seems to me to be for the most part a very festive event, one that celebrates the success of a Movement Becoming Revolution (or Revoluja, as the Reverend Billy would put it) that came out of nowhere and is blazing the trail to the future.
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The Fourth always puts me in mind of my father's birthday. He would be 111 years old tomorrow -- if he were alive. Born on the Fifth as it were, and yes, he made jokes about it. He was both a patriot and a rebel, something Americans still have trouble reconciling. He gladly served in both world wars (though let it be said, not in combat) yet he was eager to denounce injustice in America. He rebelled against convention and institutional corruption, defied the Church and at least part of his community, lived his own life and died his own way.

Tip o' the hat, Dad.
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When I heard the rotors in the distance yesterday evening, at first I thought it was some kind of strange thunder. It's Monsoon season after all, and there was heavy cloud cover in the east and south. But thunder doesn't keep on and get louder, and I could tell at some point this wasn't thunder, there were Chinooks in the sky, though what they were doing in my neck of the woods was anybody's guess.

The rotor-noise got louder and louder, shaking the windows. There must be four of them at least, I thought. And my God, are they going to land? What the holy fuck! As the rotor-thunder got louder, I knew they were directly overhead, and I peered out the side door to see just how low they were. Sure enough, through the drought ravaged tree branches, four, then five Chinooks, painted non-reflecting black, made their stately way across the sky, maybe 1000 ft above the ground, shaking everything below, an unfathomable convoy in the air, headed west, perhaps back to Kirtland. Or... somewhere. I've seen these black helicopters (and they are painted black, if anybody is wondering) in this area before, flying in low formations over the fields and houses for reasons that are never clear. They always feel like a threat.

The Philadelphia Scene

I've been following what I can of the #Occupy National Gathering events in Philadelphia on Nate's livestream -- and catching up with his archives. Some of what's been going on has been surprisingly moving, some of it not so much. But that's how these things go.

What was striking yesterday was the huge turnout for a march through downtown Philadelphia in support of labor and human rights in the face of implacable indifference. What I saw reminded me not of marches from "my day" (anti-Vietnam War era) but of solidarity marches of long before that. This was a good thing.

I was briefly involved in some of the planning discussions for the National Gathering through InterOccupy this spring, and it is gratifying to see how it has come together. It's largely amorphous and informal seeming -- at least from the narrow view I get through Nate's lens -- and yet it seems to be very well organized and attended.

There was a funny incident last night -- well, sort of -- at Independence Mall when a woman from Brooklyn got up to mic check and announce a global peace treaty or truce project through the United Nations; as she was beginning to explain how it would work, another woman mic checked the crowd some distance away saying that she wanted everybody to "sit down." The first woman said nothing, but the crowd was perplexed to say the least. Finally, one spoke up and said, "Who are you to be ordering us around?"

Shortly, someone else mic checked the crowd saying "the Veterans" requested that people leave the enclosed area of the park and assemble outside the barricades where "the Veterans" requested that people sit down on the sidewalk in solidarity with the Veterans (whose tent in the park was under threat by the police due to an expired or conflicting permit, though that wasn't explained by the mic-checkers). After people said, "Oh, I get it," the mic checking continued with several updates and details of what was wanted by "the Veterans" and why. What seemed odd to me was that so far as I could tell, "the Veterans" (meaning Veterans for Peace, who had had a tent and information tables onsite since the beginning of the Gathering) never spoke for themselves about what they wanted or needed from the crowd or about what was going on.

What I gathered from Nate's commentary and his interviews with some of the participants, including veterans, was that the police were assembling in riot gear to evict the Veterans for Peace because their permit expired at 9:00pm. A crowd assembled with the intention of thwarting any such eviction and there was a tense standoff for a few minutes as police and park rangers, with shields and helmets, formed a skirmish line facing the crowd, some of whom were quite rude about the whole thing. Others were not so rude. In fact, some were expressing their love for the police and their understanding of how difficult their job was, etc. etc. For their part, the police seemed either indifferent or embarrassed about what was going on, and Nate reported on one he saw leaving the skirmish line who he overheard saying "I have ethics."

Well.

Ultimately, there was negotiation between legal observers, possibly members of Veterans for Peace (though they didn't appear on camera) and the atmosphere of tension changed: the police skirmish line seemed to evaporate, shields and helmets disappeared, most of the police officers and park rangers left, and the report was that the Veterans for Peace tent would be allowed to stay until 9:00am this morning (about 4 hours from now) when "another permit holder" would be given access to the park and the Veterans would be allowed to assemble at another park nearby. Who this "other permit holder" was was never clarified, but I recall other reports that indicated the Tea Partiers were having a gathering at Independence Mall, on or about the Fourth of July, and I wondered... could it be? Well, maybe.

The crowd largely dispersed, but there were rumors that the police would raid the park anyway, despite their assurances that they wouldn't, at 12 midnight, and though Nate shut down his stream, he said he would be available to cover any developments and he had a network of people who would alert him if anything "happened."

I haven't checked yet this morning to see if there have been any developments since last night, but I thought the whole sequence was interesting.

While police mindlessly continue their essentially futile effort to suppress Occupy, the point of doing so has been largely lost. The violent evictions and suppression of Occupy since last fall demonstrated clearly that the nonviolent nature of the Occupy Movement is not any sort of physical threat to the Powers That Be, and that despite an abundance of Revolutionary rhetoric and frequent episodes of marching in the streets without a permit, Occupy does not represent the kind of armed insurrection or civil disturbance that would call for the kinds of militarized violence and intimidation that we have seen used against encampments and demonstrations again and again. Consequently, though the police still assemble en masse and continually threaten violence against Occupy -- and as in Philadelphia the night before last, they continue to make impressive numbers of arrests of demonstrators -- they are fighting an image of their own creation. Occupy is something else again. The more the police mindlessly overreact -- as they continue to do -- to the presence of Occupy, the more they delegitimize themselves and their owners and sponsors.

In Philadelphia, there seems to be the glimmerings of comprehension that the continued efforts at suppression are ridiculous. Especially around the Fourth of July. Consequently, while there are periodic shows of force and intimidation as well as arrests, there is no clear police strategy involved. Anti-Occupy efforts appear to be ad hoc, uncoordinated, chaotic and frequently futile.

From my perspective, this is an important development that will be largely ignored within the Occupy firmament. Delegitimizing authority is a fundamental part of any uprising. When it is successful, however, those engaged in uprisings (such as the Oakland Commune and Occupy Movement) seem to be unable to accept the victory and to consolidate their gains. I saw Oakland's Occupy and commune almost immediately dissipate its clear victory at delegitimizing OPD on Move In Day (Jan 28), just as students and faculty at UC Berkeley and Davis almost immediately gave back their victory against UC Police and administration oppression last November.

This phenomenon has happened more or less routinely, and I attribute it to the fact that no one engaged in Uprising or Revolution at this point knows what to do should they achieve "victory" over the forces of darkness and oppression. That other world that's possible is not ready to go into operation.

That's fairly normal, but it becomes problematic -- severely so -- when some other enterprising uprising and/or Revolutionary movement recognizes (indeed, enhances) the systemic instabilities of the situation and takes advantage of it for their own purposes.

If there is a fly in the Occupy ointment, that's it in a nutshell. While all sorts of Visioning and experimentation is going on to create Another World of the Possible, there are other forces at work taking advantage of the destabilization and delegitimazation that is occurring.

Will anyone pay attention before it is too late?

Meanwhile, I'll go check Nate's stream for any updates.

Your Police State in Action

Philly Police Strike Force arrest marchers and threaten media (apparently livestreamers were arrested as well) to demonstrate their Authority.



Video streaming by Ustream
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/23713169

Meanwhile, the Frazier Report, issued last month regarding the October 24-25 police assault on the Occupy Oakland encampment and injuries to demonstrators such as Scott Olsen adopts a novel definition of "lynching." They regard the attempts by members of the crowd to rescue arrestees from the custody of police (known as "de-arresting" to most normal people) to be acts of "lynching." How very drôle.

The Long Hot Summer is well under way.

Still the Most Dangerous Object In Amercia

I was watching a bit of Nate's coverage of the Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia yesterday, and sure enough, there were a series of extraordinarily ridiculous confrontations -- violent on the part of the police --over the erection of pup tents in the park being used for assembly by what looked like a couple of thousand Occupy enthusiasts and participants.

This was proof, if any was needed, that the Occupy tent remains the most dangerous object in America. You would think, after all the violent police raids on tents and tent encampments last year and into this one, all the tens of thousands of arrests, all the police violence against dissent, all the violation of basic rights, the authorities would be a little more circumspect in Philadelphia during Independence Week. But no.

Here we go again. The sight of a tent -- even if only symbolic -- enrages the authorities still, and scrums between clearly befuddled police and Occupy  National Gathering people occurred again and again, resulting in a few violent arrests (the universal tactic seems to be to throw the target to the ground, pile several officers on top of the nonresisting suspect -- who quite likely is a random member of the crowd -- wrench his or her arms, while screaming at the suspect to "stop resisting!", and truss him/her up like a roasting chicken).

This is not to say that the Occupy participants were filled with grace, or that their assembly in the park was particularly well organized or that Nate's live stream connection was adequate to the scenes before him.  It was quite a mess, really. But the point -- so far as I could tell -- was that there was no harm being done by the Occupy participants, and the tents were erected as symbols of The Resistance, perhaps provocative to be sure, but hardly threats to the Republic. Maybe threats to the nascent Empire, but that's another topic altogether.

How Authority responds to such things is an indication of how seriously the Powers That Be regard the "threat" before them. The violent response in Philadelphia, against unarmed, rather disorganized, and clearly nonviolent resistance, tents, and protest tells us pretty much all we need to know. Given that there are calls for violent insurrection by armed and demonstrably dangerous rightists (some assembling at the Independence Mall under the TeaBag banner) over the ACA (and the nigra in the White House)  which apparently the police pay no attention to, the confrontations in Philadelphia yesterday take on quite a sinister aspect.

Fascist in a word.

(And can someone teach the "Anticapitalista" chant, please? When I heard the pathetic rendering of it at the Philadelphia gathering, I was initially convinced it was the work of a provocateur. Oh wait. Maybe it was...)

In between all the other things I'm trying to get done while in New Mexico this trip, I'm reading "The Peril of Fascism," by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, International Publishers, 1938. It is horrifyingly evocative, regardless of the fact that it is straightforward AntiFa agitprop from the CPUSA. The insights of the authors are spot on, something the mainstream media at the time -- much of which was openly enamoured of fascism and even Nazi-ism -- simply couldn't accept. Fascism was on the march, it had nearly complete control of Europe, and it was coming to America. Truthfully, it was already here.

Occupy is not strictly speaking ideological, unlike CPUSA or the 'Baggers for that matter. But it is forthrightly and often quite eloquently anti-fascist. It is not necessarily anti-capitalist, despite the mangled chants. But it is very definitely anti-fascist. (At one of the Occupy meetings I attended in the spring, a debate arose over whether "fascists" should be allowed to participate; many, of course, said "NO!" but there was a large contingent who insisted that Occupy's open door accommodated everyone, even "fascists", and it was a simple enough thing to counter their ideas, so why not let them participate if they wanted to? Maybe they'd be convinced to change their evil ways. The matter was tabled for lack of consensus. But I thought it was interesting...)

Magil and Stevens argue that among all its other faults, fascism is forthrightly anti-democratic, and it is that aspect, perhaps most of all, that constituted the "peril" of which they spoke. Fascists act to silence the People's democratic voice. This has nothing to do with CPUSA practice and policy; it has to do with what the fascists do, and why they do it.

Silencing the democratic voice of the People -- or rather, making it irrelevant -- has been the priority of both Government and its witting and unwitting handmaidens in this country at least since the 2000 Judicial Coup. Sometimes it's done with finesse, by pretending that some obnoxious policy is the "real" voice of the People, but often it is done brutally and violently with the intention of frightening and intimidating open dissent against obnoxious policies.

Fascism, though, isn't exactly the correct description for the radical global reorganization, destruction and reconstruction that's been going on since the demise of the Soviet Union and the International Communist Conspiracy. The Neo-Liberal economics, the Neo-Conservative ideology, and the Neo-Colonial foreign policy all resemble classic fascism, especially in the union of Government and Corporate interests and the dismissal of the public interest. But it's something else, something in some ways worse, as if we could wrap our minds around something worse than fascism.

The fight is engaged. The Revolution is under way. But in fact, there are two Revolutions occurring simultaneously, and the Neo-Fascist Revolution is winning easily at this point (much as the fascists were rolling roughshod over Europe prior to WWII and initially after starting the War.)

There's no Communist counterweight this time. There is only the People themselves.

And their tents.