Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine. Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why they need to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism. Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned. Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, this population is determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism. They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anticapitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community. Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people. Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle. With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality. He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements are proof of these movements success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

That video was the first time most Americans had heard about Wikileaks. Not long after, the name of Bradley Manning also entered the US consciousness. He would be accused of releasing that video and thousands of other documents relating to the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, along with thousands of diplomatic cables describing in oftentimes explicit detail the crimes and morally questionable actions and words of Washington officials. Soon, Mr. Manning would be charged with treason and aiding the enemy (among other charges) for his actions. He is currently on trial in a US military court located at Fort Meade, MD and faces life imprisonment. It is my belief that only an immense and broad popular movement could possibly change that fate.

Bradley Manning’s decision and the subsequent reaction is the subject of a newly published book by civil rights attorney and commentator Chase Madar. This book, titled The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, presents Manning’s decision in the context it was meant to be understood: as a political act by a man who saw his duty to humanity to be greater than his orders to protect the Pentagon and politicians that sent him and thousands of other GIs to war.

Madar attacks the very system of secrecy Manning is charged with violating. He details the overzealous use of secret and top secret classifications by government officials, calling it a “tragic, bloated farce.” He questions the use of the Espionage Act to charge Manning and other men whose actions are not about aiding the enemy, but about exposing the misdeeds of the US government. In discussing the frequent use of strategic leaks by government officials to get a piece of legislation approved, Madar surmises that Manning’s biggest mistake is that, unlike those government officials, he didn’t break the law properly.

What did the documents Manning sent to Wikileaks contain? While it is impossible to even begin to summarize the millions of words in those documents in the brief space of Madar’s text, he does list the basics of some of the content. The documents showed a brutal pacification campaign in Afghanistan where civilian deaths were all too common and sometimes intentional. They acknowledged massive civilian casualties from US fire in Iraq and detailed Washington’s retail diplomacy with the Vatican hoping to convince the Holy See to call the US wars just. In other areas, the diplomatic cables exposed the role of the US Embassy in Haiti in fighting attempts to raise the minimum wage there to 61 cents an hour and US complicity in covering up Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

Yet, despite the revelations they contained, the US government has been unable to prove that the leaks harmed any individual. Unfortunately, neither have they changed the essence of US policy. After acknowledging this, Madar writes about two leaks that probably did matter. One was a 1968 leak by Daniel Ellsberg to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy that detailed the Johnson administration’s plans to expand the US war to Laos and Cambodia. The leak and Kennedy’s revealing it probably prevented that expansion under LBJ. Of course, Nixon wasted little time in doing exactly what Johnson didn’t do. Another more recent example occurred in 2003 when the national intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability was leaked. This document stated clearly that Iran had no nuclear weapons and was not building any at the time. That leak probably prevented the US from attacking Iran.

Like it or not, since his arrest Manning’s treatment has been shameful. His imprisonment, which includes solitary confinement and forced nakedness is nothing short of torture. Indeed it has been condemned as such by the German Bundestag and several other individuals in European governments and even some high ranking US officials. Madar’s discussion of Manning’s treatment is revealing and likely to garner a number of denials by liberals and neocons in the halls of power. This is especially true when he argues against the view promulgated by US liberals that the treatment is an aberration. The fact is, writes Madar, the abuses experienced by Manning and by prisoners in US-run prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan are also commonplace in US prisons. Furthermore, torture is a common occurrence in US jails at all levels of the penal system.

In the early 1970s Kris Kristofferson recorded a song whose chorus includes the lines “The law is for protection of the people/Rules are rules as any fool can see….” The song proceeds to show the use of this maxim by the powers that be to lock up those that disrupt their rule. The sarcasm of the lyrics continues, pointing out how laws are not only applied unequally, but are often written only to protect the wealthy and powerful. If Kris Kristofferson were to add a verse to his tune in 2012, it could be about Bradley Manning. When pressed to explain the charges arrayed against Manning, the reason given most often is that he broke the rules regarding classified information and that is reason enough. As Madar points out over and over in his book, these rules are broken quite often by government officials in the pursuit of certain policies and those violations are rarely challenged. Furthermore, and considerably more appalling, is the reality that the atrocities and diplomatic maneuverings revealed in the documents Manning released are not illegal. Why? Simply put, because the laws are written by the warmakers and profiteers. So, those that reveal the machinations of the powerful are more likely to go to prison than those that kill, torture, bribe and steal in the name of empire.

Simultaneously an indictment of a government obsessed with secrecy and a nation addicted to war, The Passion of Bradley Manning is also a concise and clear explanation of who Bradley Manning is. It explains why he risked his life and future by committing the overtly political act of exposing his government’s crimes and lies. Perhaps most importantly, it is a call to us to act not only in defense of Manning, but in defense of our futures.

This brings up the question: what made them dangerous? The underlying answer is simple: the dead were black. This is the same assumption made by George Zimmerman when he followed Trayvon Martin. This fact illustrates the nature of racism in today’s United States (and probably in much of Europe and the rest of the world). I believe Mr. Zimmerman and his family’s claim that they do have black friends. This fact does not eliminate their racism. It does mean that they are not necessarily prejudiced against African-American individuals they actually know. This seeming contradiction illustrates the particularities of racism in a “post-racial” society. So does a criminal justice system that not only targets people of color (especially young black men) in its pursuit of arrest quotas, but also tends to imprison those arrestees at a much greater proportion to their actual numbers in the general population. So does an educational system that under-funds schools in neighborhoods that are predominantly African-American. This lack of funding results in a poorer education, which, in turn, results in a lower employment rate and, when combined with the aforementioned policing and sentencing practices, a higher incarceration rate for this demographic.

That is just one aspect of a societal construct that allows a relative few African-Americans and other non-white residents of the United States a pass into the better life assumed by most white-skinned Americans. I recently attended an anti-racism rally in Burlington, Vermont, a small city in the northeaster US with a small African-American population and a somewhat larger Somali and Sudanese refugee population. This rally, held in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder, featured a speech by a black high school student. This young man spoke about growing up as “the other” in a society that seemed to have it in for people like him. His talk wasn’t a lament, but a genuine attempt to express his fears, his frustration, and his refusal to play any role assigned to him that did not allow him to be who he wanted to be. He acknowledged that he lived among people who were afraid of him solely because he was dark-skinned; at the same time he acknowledged that the menace associated with that identity was part of what made being a young black man in the US “kind of cool”. He went on to state that entertainment like gangsta rap fed off this menace while also celebrating a lifestyle that limited too many of his friends’ambitions to a life that meant prison somewhere along the line. In other words, it could be argued that it perpetuated the racist system.

Discussing racism is always a tricky business. It seems even more difficult in today’s climate. While only a few far right fringe groups openly declare their racism in public, a common understanding exists that denies the historical effects of an economic and social system built on the systemic denial of a people’s basic humanity because of their skin color. This understanding continues to create clear lines of economic and social estrangement for a majority of the black residents of the United States.

The ripple effects of this phenomenon are also apparent in Latino and other communities composed of people not of European descent. Racism is something much deeper than individual prejudices; it is systemic and so pervasive it is just part of the general consciousness we exist in. Let’s get this straight, however. Racism in the US exists because of white people. Darker skinned people pay the most obvious price for this disease founded in ignorance and capital’s need to dominate, and white people benefit from the phenomenon even when they actively oppose it.

In 1970, a group of leftist organizations in the US held a Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia PA. The convention was primarily organized by the original Black Panther Party. Although the convention’s audacious hopes to create a revolutionary document foundered, the fact that 15,000 people gathered to try and create that document stand as a unique moment in history. There were some important statements that came out of the discussions held that weekend, including identifying that anti-racist organizing by whites should take place in white communities. After all, it’s that segment of the population where racism still festers and it’s the same segment that prospers from it. The consensus of the convention was that since racism is white people’s problem, then white people need to oppose it in those areas where it is at its worst, such as the US Congress, most police forces, and various media outlets, not to mention many of their neighborhoods. Unfortunately, ignoring its existence does not eliminate it.

More and more individuals in the United States ignore the false separation of skin color and ethnicity, finding friendship, love and marriage across former lines of division. Individual acts of racist prejudice are rare enough that when they do occur they often make the news. Yet, a system designed within a racist paradigm continues to deny most African-Americans (and many other non-whites) a life comparable to their white neighbors. This occurs despite the presence of a black man in the white house.

Simultaneously, the inherent racism of this dynamic pretends to be something else, imprisoning black and brown people at an unconscionable rate, preventing their access to quality education, and limiting their opportunities via the mechanisms of an economy originating in the enslavement of Africans and the exploitation and colonization of brown people. By manipulating the desires of most US residents for a post-racial society, the contradiction between personal experience and the greater economic and social reality makes the continued domination of an essentially racist system possible.

Shotwell’s writing is humorous, acerbic and to the point. As part of a democratic movement in the UAW, he was one of many that fought hard to prevent the tidal wave of layoffs, plant closings and destruction of benefits the union leadership not only allowed but seemed to encourage. The missives published in this book are the textual equivalent to the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Mr. Block cartoons. For those who aren’t aware of Mr. Block, let me quote IWW agitator Walker C. Smith:

Mr. Block is legion. He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw… [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him… the personification of all that a worker should not be.

In other words, Mr. Block was a satirical character created to call attention to workers and union bosses who identified with the owners and management at the expense of their fellow workers.

Autoworkers Under the Gun makes it very clear how the auto industry’s exorbitant payments to its executives and management, combined with a penchant for bankruptcy, destroyed it. Calling globalization a “four bit word for sweatshop,” Shotwell points out how CEOs and their co-conspirators control the discussion about the economy by blaming the workers for wanting to earn a living and pension. As most readers know, the other part of this scenario involves those executives purposely downsizing the corporation by moving jobs offshore. His biting commentary reminds the reader how intentional this entire process is.

Unlike most mainstream reporting on the demise of the auto industry, Shotwell gives the reader the view from the shop floor. It’s not just the harassment from management he describes, he also tells stories about workers using their power to fight back. After one particular attack on management’s machinations to undermine the workers and their union that drew a strong reaction from the bosses, Shotwell arrived for his shift to find his machine taken apart in a show of solidarity. Without that machine, the line was shut down for the entire shift.

Questioning the value of strikes that are not industry wide because of the International’s cowardice or because of the law, Shotwell urges workers to consider alternatives like occupations and working to rule. The point of the former is to prevent management from closing factories. After all, they can’t close a building if people are inside it. Working to rule, meanwhile, has multiple effects. It slows down the speedups imposed by management to increase production while also preventing shop closures. In addition, working to rule can create overtime or, even better, the necessity to hire more people. The underlying point of both tactics is to emphasize that it is the workers who run the factory, not the CEOs and their minions.

It was more than a year ago that thousands of Wisconsin workers and supporters occupied the Capitol building in the city of Madison. The reason for the occupation was to try and prevent the anti-worker governor and legislature from passing legislation that would end collective bargaining for all state employees except firefighters and state police, end dues check-off from paychecks, and force unions to re-certify every year. Under the guise of solving a budget crisis (that was created by giving mammoth tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy in Wisconsin), this bill was forced through the legislature despite the protests. Nonetheless, the protests were a welcome reaction to the never-ending attacks on working people in the United States.

Naturally, a few books have been published about this event, now known as the Wisconsin Uprising. Of those texts that wrote favorably, most have done a fairly decent job of describing the flow of the protests, the workers culture that was celebrated, and the intense feeling of solidarity felt by the participants. Not all have done as good of a job analyzing why the protests failed and what they mean for the future of workers’ movements in the United States.

There is one entry; however, that does broach both of these subjects with some depth. Titled Wisconsin Uprising, this book, edited by labor writer Michael Yates, provides a genuinely left analysis. The collection of essays is divided into two main sections, one discussing the protests, their background and their organization. The other discusses the future of workplace organizing in the wake of the legislation’s success and the concomitant attacks on working people around the world.

The first section takes its subject and looks at the international aspects of the protest (austerity protests in Greece, Britain, etc.), its roots in capitalist crisis, and the lack of resistance experience among protesters. It was this latter element that gave the protesters false hope regarding the role police play, as well as the role unions play. Indeed, much like the points made in Shotwell’s text, union leadership often concedes benefits, conditions and wages just to keep union dues structure intact and their paychecks coming in. This strategy eventually backfires because it weakens the unions in the eyes of the workers. Seeing this, corporations and governments attack unions, hoping to further weaken their standing in the eyes of members. Once the union has been defanged, as occurred in Wisconsin after the aforementioned legislation was rammed through in the middle of the night, the rank and file often stops paying dues out of fear or after drawing the conclusion that the union has no power.

The solution to this is simple. Like Shotwell emphasizes in his book, the best response to the attacks on workers and their unions is simple: more actions, more solidarity and less complacency. The most positive conclusion to be drawn from the Wisconsin uprising is that there is an understanding in the United States that workers not only are being screwed, but that they will fight back. The narrative here echoes the hope found in other books about the uprising in Wisconsin and the occupy movement that followed. However, it tempers that hope with an understanding of what labor is up against in this latest battle with capital. It is an understanding that comes from the years of experience between the collection of contributors and their leftist comprehension of how monopoly capitalism works.

Shotwell explains why Wisconsin happened in a piece discussing concessions when he writes:

The nation that kicked off the struggle for the eight hour day is logging more hours than any modern .industrialized nation on earth. Every household needs two wage slaves and every wage slave needs a vehicle to keep them on the treadmill. The turmoil is designed to foil collective action. The degradation of workers is not natural, accidental or unavoidable. It is a plan. Put the jigsaw pieces together and the picture is clear as glass and sharp as pain.

The complementary reason to Shotwell’s concise explanation of neoliberal capital’s plan for the world is that workers ignored the writing on the wall as long as it happened to someone else, while those that were unionized saw themselves as clients of the union when they needed to be fighters in solidarity with those that were the “someone else.” Check out these books for their analysis, their insight and their rabble rousing. Then go do some rabble-rousing of your own.

These were the days before Ipods or even boom boxes. Hell, 8-tracks had barely made an impression on our youthful culture back then. The only source of music that was portable was the transistor radio. In the Baltimore-Washington DC area, there were three or four stations that played the songs people were listening to. WPGC-FM and WCAO-AM played the Top 40 hits of the day while WOOK and WUST played soul and R&B. While radio was not as divided into niche markets then as it is today, the fact is that the very few performers were heard on both stations. For example, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were never heard on the soul stations, while Bobby Blue Bland and Joe Tex were rarely heard on the Top 40 stations.

There was one man, however, who was heard quite often on both formats back then. His name was James Brown. We would choose our teams and play pickup game after pickup game. Since there were usually more than ten kids hanging around, the odd guys out chose the music (unless we were convinced otherwise). Whenever the current hit by Brown came on the brothers would start vamping. Doing the slide step as they neared a basket or attempting a split at mid court. Then they would tell us lighter skinned guys to not even try. We knew we couldn’t dance like Mr. Brown That particular period of time was when James Brown truly was the king of soul, when he really was The One.

This was also a period when racism had very few shadows to hide it. Black men were subject to whatever wrath a white man felt like imposing on him. Black men with money and power like James Brown felt that wrath perhaps less often but in greater measure when they did feel it. When he released his single “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud), Brown was making it clear: he didn’t really give a shit about racists keeping him from his music, money and people. Never much of a militant, James Brown was always proud, even as a street urchin cum hustler in Augusta, GA. A new biography of Brown, titled The One: The Life and Music of James Brown places that pride in the context of the black freedom struggle in the United States. It opens with the story of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in colonial Georgia that saw slaves killing slave owners and increasing their ranks as they marched through the area just south of Charleston, SC beating their drums, singing and dancing in rebellion. Forty slaves and twenty whites were killed during that rebellion and never again did Georgia legally import slaves from the African continent.

With the story of the slave rebellion as his jumping off point, biographer RJ Smith writes a tale that evokes Mr. Brown’s insistence on freedom, his pride, innate musicality, and the high-energy life that helped earn him the title of the hardest working man in show business. Smith gives the reader a fantastic story: from Brown’s roots in Augusta, where he entertained soldiers on weekend passes with his dancing while hustling them down to the brothel where he lived with his aunt, to his casket’s tour of three cities after Brown’s death in 2006. The text details the complexities of a man who, with his bandmates, created a signature musical style that many have used as inspiration but none have successfully imitated. It also traces the political journey of a black man in the United States during a time when the world of Black America underwent a sea change. Never a militant, but always an individual proud of his racial and personal identity, Brown’s politics included Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon; Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond. His support for Nixon’s 1972 campaign led to a boycott attempt by several African-American organizations and individuals that had some success. Smith relates a tale of 10,000 seat arenas with less than 2,000 concertgoers. When I thought about seeing a concert of his in Frankfurt, Germany in 1972, my African-American comrades convinced me not to go because of Brown’s support of Nixon (it didn’t take much—I hated Nixon). They passed out leaflets in the parking lot discouraging attendance. At the same time, Brown’s singles were still being played on the radio and still selling.

At a recent anti-racism rally in Burlington, VT. held in the wake of the murder of Trayvor Martin, a black teen talked about his struggle to maintain a positive self-identity in a culture that insists on labeling he and other black males in as negative of a light as possible. I will paraphrase his statement here: I am going to be me.  Part of that is saying hi to my neighbors even if they won’t say hi to me. Part of that is dating who I want. Part of that is being black. I am going to be me. James Brown would have agreed with that young man. His political actions, his insistence on doing things his way musically and otherwise—all of these actions, writes Smith, stem from a combination of Brown’s ego, mistrust and determination.

To hear Smith tell it, James Brown definitely did not come from comfortable beginnings. He movingly describes just how tough it was. Anything that came easy made Brown suspicious. This didn’t seem to change as he grew older and developed into one of the world’s most well-known people—his fame in Africa rivaled that of boxer Muhammad Ali, while in the United States very few acts sold more records than Brown. Never one to rest on his laurels, Brown gave hundreds of shows every year, went through wives and mistresses almost as quickly as he did towns and cities when he was on tour, and spent money quicker than he could count it. The magic of Smith’s writing is that Brown’s life is told as captivatingly as it was lived. This is a classic rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story but with a twist: it’s Alger’s Ragged Dick as an African-American bootblack who rises above his station.

Smith, who is also the author of The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance, and a former music writer for the Village Voice and Spin magazine, has done a public service by writing this biography. His approach to the narrative does more than detail the life of James Brown. It captures the essence of a James Brown performance and manipulates that essence—its franticness, its passion and its sheer jubilation—into a story about one of the world’s greatest musicians and performers ever. In Smith’s telling, it becomes clear that James Brown’s myth was not only larger than life, so was James Brown himself.

When the Egyptian people began to gather in Tahrir Square in January 2011, the embers of the immolation that consumed Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi had already sparked the prairie fire that overthrew the dictatorial ruler Ben Ali. The protest in Tahrir Square was the first manifestation of that fire in Egypt but certainly not the last. As everyone must know by now, the fires of protest in Egypt tossed out their dictator less than two months after Mr. Ben Ali was deposed. The feat of that overthrow was not only momentous within the borders of Egypt itself; its repercussions were felt in the halls of Arabia, Asia, Africa and the Americas. In Washington, Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome and on Wall Street, there was plenty of catching up to do. Neither the eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency or the black ops mangers of the Central Intelligence Agency predicted the end of the Mubarak regime. Indeed, it wasn’t until the bitter end that the political powers in the aforementioned capitals began to side with (and subvert) the popular uprising in the streets of Egypt.

After Mubarak’s fall, the revolutionary fire spread like flames whipped by warm Santa Ana winds. Bahrain to Libya. Yemen to Syria. London and New York. Athens and Oakland. The insurrectionary wave was in motion and nowhere was it more powerful than in the Arab world. Also, nowhere was it met with more determined (and murderous) resistance from the powers that be, internally and externally. Underlying the insurrectionary tide were the economic facts of neoliberalism’s struggle to maintain its global dominance. When it became apparent that this goal could not always be accomplished by continuing to support the old regimes, the capitols of capitalism inserted their agents into the opposition and did their best to manipulate the rebellion into serving the agencies of those capitols. The IMF, World Bank and the rest of the usual suspects saw their moments in each instance and made their moves. As I write, the entire insurrectionary wave is at a stalemate between the forces of popular social justice and just another new face for western imperialism.

Naturally, very little has been written about this aspect of the revolutionary upsurge of 2011-2012 in the organs of neoliberalism. Instead, the fact of IMF arrangements with the post-Mubarak Egypt and the new Tunisia are interspersed with superficial analyses of the rebellions that would have the reader believe that it was social media that provoked them. Even more revealing of the mainstream media’s allegiance to the imperial regime in the insurrection is its lack of coverage of the continuing popular resistance in the Pentagon’s shipyard Bahrain. Instead, we are presented with an ongoing litany of unconfirmed atrocities committed by the Syrian military and a portrayal of the resistance there as essentially untainted by its affiliation with outside governments and militaries.

Fortunately, we have Vijay Prashad. His latest book, titled Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, attacks the western interpretation of the transitions in Egypt and Libya and explores the actual events from a perspective that explains the players in terms of their allegiances, holdings and politics. In Prashad’s work, the differences between the fighters on the ground and the suits on television are not only acknowledged, they are examined in terms of their meaning to the future. In discussing Egypt, Prashad describes the conflagration of Washington’s imperial needs, Tel Aviv’s paranoiac perception of its security, and the Mubarak clique’s desire to maintain power. He gives lie to the West’s claim that it was interested in democracy (a relatively simple task to be sure), explaining that in the western mindset democracy doesn’t mean democracy, it means a guarantee that the interests and holdings of capital will not be upset. The common term one hears, states Prashad, is stability.

Most of this book is about the battle for Libya. Prashad’s text provides the most detailed description of the events both on the ground and in the office suites. He exposes the humanitarian intervention by NATO for what it was. That is, a means for the western powers to regain unfettered access to Libyan oil and rid themselves of an at best erratic client—Muammar Gaddafi. Unlike many on the Left, Prashad does not take sides for or against the rebellion. Instead, he explains the uprising as a popular and positive thing that was manipulated by the forces of the G7 and NATO. Simultaneously, he discusses Gaddafi’s reign as one that began with many positive changes yet ultimately was a victim of its own excess and greed. If there are any good guys in his narrative, it would be the masses that risked their lives to overthrow the autocracy that had Gaddafi at its helm. Their opposite would be the men on both sides of the battle whose only real interest was in keeping their bank accounts plush while serving their masters in the stock exchanges of the neoliberal world.

Interesting, and as yet not very closely examined, is the role of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. Jordan and Morocco. Prashad makes note of the fact that the western capitals have said very little about the harsh repression visited on the Bahraini uprising or the Saudi intervention there. He also explores the military role played by Qatar in Libya, its current role in Syria, and the inclusion of some GCC states in a NATO adjunct. Perhaps, writes Prashad, this adjunct of NATO will be able to stand in for NATO in future operations in the Arab world, thereby creating another shadow in the workings of modern imperialism.

Despite the (probably) millions of words written about the Libyan uprising and the NATO intervention, nothing written in English has come near the truth. After reading Arab Spring, Libyan Winter, it seems that when all is said and done, Prashad’s work will come the closest.

However, the spark was lit. The eruption of popular protest against the neoliberal corporate agenda that most of the world had already experienced by the winter of 2011 had finally reached the nation most responsible for that agenda — the United States. The rest of the year would see the expansion of that protest across the United States grow in dimension and breadth. From further State Capitol occupations to the occupations of city parks, the masterminds and profiteers of the neoliberal economy were put on notice. Meanwhile, protest from like minded citizens of the rest of the world also continued to spread. Politicians scrambled as they figured out how to respond to what was clearly a left-oriented popular movement against those who had bought and sold them long ago.

Naturally, there have been millions of words written and published about this wave of people power. A very recent collection of some of those words edited by Wisconsinites Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, is titled It Started In Wisconsin. Essentially a collection of essays written by various participants and organizers of the Wisconsin protests, It Started In Wisconsin provides a reasonable and objective look at the movement. By discussing its structures and organizational strategies, the politics of the movement are also examined. Like the Wisconsin movement itself, the parameters of the discussion tend to remain limited to the parameters of the liberal-progressive spectrum.

The book begins with the first essayist attempting to place the protests firmly in the tradition of the great Progressive Robert LaFollette. However, the very fact that the movement ended up being confined to the traditional Democrat-Republican contest made even the more left elements of the Progressive philosophy irrelevant in the final outcome. It Started In Wisconsin tends to examine the uprising and its politics from a generally anti-corporate perspective but, like the movement itself, never truly challenges capitalism at its roots as an essentially unequal system that by its nature requires growing levels of inequality.

There is one essay that stands out from the rest of those that analyze the movement in that it does look beyond the façade of neoliberalism. That essay, titled “The Role of Corporations” by Roger Bybee, is the most radical in the book. Radical, that is, in the fundamental definition of the word: “of or going to the root or origin.” The essay is a clear and straightforward description of how neoliberal capitalism works, who it benefits and, to put it bluntly, who it screws. No other analytical piece between these covers quite approaches the clarity and depth of analysis like Bybee’s.

Yet, this book is not really about analysis. It is a collection of stories from those that participated in one of the most inspiring movements to erupt in the US heartland in decades. Those stories provide the observer from afar with a fairly universal and nuanced look at the daily lives of those involved in organizing, occupying, reporting and otherwise participating in those weeks of popular democracy. Interspersed between the tales of the workers, students, farmers and other protesters are a number of photographs and comics. The inclusion of these graphics truly enhances the overall effect.

One of the last two essays in It Started In Wisconsin discusses the position of the Wisconsin uprising in the global insurrections of the past eighteen months. The authors of this short essay, Ashok Kumar and Simon Hardy, briefly discuss the possibilities and take a quick look at the lessons they see to be learned. In addition, and most importantly, they broach the subject of the differences between the radical grassroots and the more conservative entrenched union and political leadership. It is here, they hint, that the real direction of this global movement will be determined. In Wisconsin that outcome has already taken one turn with the shifting of the uprising’s momentum into the recall efforts against Governor Scott Walker. The outcome of this turn to electoral politics is still being hotly debated by many of the uprising’s organizers, with some of them refusing to endorse the Democratic candidate opposing Walker because they see him as just more of the same.

Moving from the local to the global, let us consider another recently published text that takes a look at the international manifestations of this movement. This book, titled Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is authored by journalist Paul Mason. Like the Buhle’s effort, Mason’s book describes the movements against neoliberal intolerance and authoritarianism that have become part of the collective imagination this past year. Likewise, Mason’s text examines the politics of the movement from what can only be termed a new left viewpoint. What this means is that he places the emphasis on the cry for freedom implicit in these protests while under-emphasizing the economic nature of the oppression the protesters are rebelling against.

Given the broader scope of Mason’s text, there is also a broader discussion. Several different manifestations of the movement — from Greece to London to Cairo to Spain and other points in between — are reported on. These reports are good journalism. One feels as if they are present at the rallies, occupations and riots that Mason describes. The anecdotal tales he provides should remind anyone who participated in any kind of popular resistance in the past decades of the energy and hope one finds and feels at such events. These are the stuff that makes one join such movements.

When it comes to analysis, Mason’s text provides some interesting possibilities. He spends a fair number of words discussing the desire for freedom this global movement represents. The Egyptian opposed to the harshness of the Mubarak authoritarian regime and the British student fearing the limitations a life without affordable education will create are examined through what Mason calls the social laboratory of the self. He emphasizes the role of social networking and the existence of a new dimension in organizing directly related to the existence of networking technology. He rightly questions the validity of the Left, but does not really examine what he means by the Left, choosing instead to adopt the mainstream media’s definition that the Left is composed of political parties like Labour in Britain, various elements of the Democratic Party in the United States, and numerous sects espousing various versions of Leninism.

By dismissing the Left, even in its current splintered formation, Mason is also dismissing a more radical analysis of the true culprit in the global economic catastrophe. It is true, as Mason makes clear, that neoliberal policies are responsible for the numerous maladies the global uprising sprang from. However, what is unexplored in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is why neoliberal capitalism is the dominant economic regime on the planet. That explanation can only come from an understanding of the economic works of Marx and his theoretical successors like Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg and even Lenin. It was these thinkers and revolutionaries, after all, that studied and explained the stages of capitalism in the industrial world and how they would come about. So far, they have been pretty damn accurate.

Mason has it right when he places the search for freedom against the authoritarianism of a Mubarak or of neoliberalism in the context of Marx’s discussion of the alienation of the human spirit under capitalism. However, by not taking a similar look at the analysis Marxist economics provides regarding the trajectory of capitalism, the analysis he provides falls short. It would be useful for Mason and the protesters he writes about if they knew that a Marxist anti-imperialist analysis does not mean that a Leninist solution is the necessary result.

Yet, Mason is not much different from the movements he describes. Rightly opposed to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism (which is merely another phase of monopoly capitalism as described by Luxembourg, et al), the current movement runs the risk of merely removing the worst of those excesses. If this is the result, it will only be a few decades before an even harsher manifestation of capitalist greed subordinates the world. Unless, that is, the current movement undertakes a truly radical analysis that places the existence of capitalism itself at the core of the problem.

I don’t expect that capitalism will be removed from the planet. However, without an understanding that it is capitalism that is the root of the problems of inequality and sustainability we are currently facing, there can be no substantive change in the future we face. Then, again, the very fact that many elements of the movement don’t seem too concerned about the Left’s role is a call to those on the Left to get active and make it clear that what passes for the Left in today’s world is for the most part nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is a rejection of the Left’s important and earth-changing history.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, these two publications are worthwhile and provocative reads. The authors and editors present the primary actors in the global uprising — students, workers and the marginalized — and describe their passion, joy and fears. They also begin to explain where the global movement against neoliberalism came from and where it is now. Reading them in this context will certainly help guide us through that movement’s next metamorphosis.

There are some of us who  plan to protest when Mr. Obama hits town. We aren’t birthers and we aren’t Tea Partiers. Some of us even voted for Mr. Obama. All of us are pissed off. Having a Democrat in the White House has not made much of a difference, even for those that thought it would. Obama has not fulfilled hardly any of the promises he made to his progressive supporters. There are multiple reasons to protest.

Because the reason for his visit is to raise cash for a politics that leaves most people out.

Because Guantanamo Bay prison is not closed.

Because 91,000 US troops and even more US mercenaries are still killing and dying in Afghanistan.

Because the US is still spending $3 billion a year in Iraq.

Because Bradley Manniing is in jail for exposing the truth about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while the liars who started the wars walk free.

Because thousands of Iraq and Afghan War vets are without work.

Because thousands of those vets suffer from PTSD and other combat-related illnesses.

Because millions of people are homeless, including thousands of veterans, women and children.

Because millions of houses sit empty after banks foreclosed on them and kicked out the residents.

Because the banks that engaged in illegal foreclosure actions are not being prosecuted.

Because Washington continues to support Israel’s expansionist policies in the Middle East and against the Palestinian people.

Because Washington seems more willing to go to war against Iran instead of agreeing to unconditional negotiations.

Because sanctions are an act of war that harms civilians.

Because the Defense budget (not including VA) is over a trillion dollars

Because Washington has 450 overseas military bases.

Because the Pentagon wants to send Special Forces death squads anywhere at any time to kill whomever they want.

Because Empire is unsustainable, unwanted and wrong.

Because Barack Obama refuses to stand up to the right wing women haters in the Congress.

Because the homophobic Defense of Marriage Act is still on the books.

Because Barack Obama bailed out the banks instead of the workers.

Because Barack Obama pays lip service to workers’ right to unionize while his policies do nothing to help workers to unionize.

Because student debt should be forgiven.

Because the post office is being destroyed and sold off.

Because schools and libraries are being closed.

Because 44 million Americans don’t have health care and many of those won’t be able to afford that offered via Obama’s “health care” plan.

Because immigrant families are being shattered by ICE.

Because the underemployment rate stands at around 16%, with more than half of that number being people with no job at all. The unemployment rate for black Americans is even higher. This is also the case for youth.

Because the DEA continues to arrest medicinal marijuana providers.

Because CEOs average paycheck increased 24% since 2008 despite a failing economy.

Because business as usual is the business of exploitation and greed.

Because Obama represents business as usual.

Because Obama talks some of the talk of the 99%, but his actions benefit the one percent 99% of the time.

There are many more reasons, some that go beyond Mr. Obama and get closer to the heart of the problem in the United States—the fact that it is ruled by the corporate and financial elite. However, Mr. Obama’s staunch defense of that elite and his continued acceptance of their millions only underlines his complicity. To those who agree that Barack Obama has audaciously failed to not only deliver on most of his promises, but has failed to generate much hope at all, yet want to give him another chance, let me say this:

Democracy is not merely at the ballot box. When the choice is between two people whose means are well beyond most of those voting, then how representative of your needs and desires can the winner be? Democracy does not end the day after elections. That’s when it begins. The corporations and the banks don’t stop pressuring and sending money to politicians once they get elected. Indeed, they step up the pressure. It’s time the people do the same.

Anyone following the Occupy protests since last fall is well aware of the response of the authorities. It can best be characterized as brutal and with little regard for civil liberties. This is the case even though many of the protesters were/are white-skinned and from middle class backgrounds. It is fair to say that this demographic fact gave the protesters more press coverage while it also prevented the police from carrying out even more brutal attacks. Young black and Latino men going about their daily lives generally have more to fear from the police than the Occupy protesters. That being said, it is useful to take a look at some recent comments regarding Occupy Oakland, the police attacks on the group and the response of officials and others.

In short, the response to the Oakland protesters commitment to defend themselves against police attacks has caused some potential rifts in the Occupy movement. Those rifts have been covered well on this site and across the media universe. It is not my intent to continue those discussions here. Instead, I would like to paste a quote from a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice that goes a long way towards explaining law enforcement’s perception of the Occupy movements tactics. This quote first appeared in a San Francisco Chronicle article on February 11, 2012 discussing the police tactic of kettling. For those unfamiliar with the tactic, it essentially involves surrounding a group of protesters in an area where they have no escape, then arresting them all. Sometimes the arrests are preceded by a series of gas attacks and various physical attacks by the police.

The professor quoted is named Maria Haberfeld. Ms. Haberfeld’s career path is not one that suggests a strong belief that police should protect protesters’ civil rights and liberties. She was born in Poland and immigrated to Israel as a teenager. According to her profile on the John Jay website, Haberfeld served in a special counter-terrorist unit of the IDF that was created to prevent terrorist attacks in Israel. After that, she served in the Israel National Police and then the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. None of these agencies are known for their commitment to civil liberties. Indeed, most of their work is undertaken in what can be best termed as a murky legal and moral environment. When asked to comment on the recent police tactics against Occupy protesters intent on squatting an abandoned building in Oakland–tactics that provoked a melee between well-armed police and unarmed protesters–Haberfeld was quoted when describing the protesters’ intent: “It almost falls into the description of a terrorist threat.” Suffice it to say that, with a perception of protesters as terrorists, the police would certainly feel free to prevent such a protest from succeeding. In fact, there are probably some in law enforcement that feel they should be able to use live ammunition in such cases.

Recently, a young African-American man was shot and killed by the police in the bathroom of his apartment in the Bronx. The young man, Ramarley Graham, was eighteen years old. The police involved in the incident explained their actions by claiming Graham had a gun and that he ran from the police because he was selling marijuana. The NYPD’s own investigators did not find a gun and video footage of Graham walking into his apartment building show an 18 year-old kid walking calmly up the sidewalk and to the building’s entrance. Then, a group of police with guns drawn are shown kicking down the door and entering the building. Within minutes, Graham was killed while his grandmother was in another room in the same apartment. Graham’s murder was the third fatal shooting of a black man in New York City in a week. A week! New York is not alone in this epidemic of murder. Police shot over forty people in Chicago in 2011, with at least 16 fatalities among the shooting victims. This evidence, while anecdotal, is representative of the role police play in the police state. The fact that most of the killings are considered justifiable lends further evidence to the argument that the police state is growing. If there was not a campaign directed from the highest political offices in Manhattan against marijuana smokers and providers in New York City, the likelihood of Graham’s death diminishes greatly. As it has for decades, the “war on drugs” continues to provide authorities with an excuse to surveil, arrest, imprison and sometimes kill poor and working-class residents of the United States.

Chicago is also the site of a number of police state exercises. Foremost among them is the continuing investigation of antiwar and solidarity activists by the US Department of Justice. For those who might not remember, on September 24, 2010 the FBI raided several houses and a couple offices in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago and North Carolina under the guise of looking for proof that the people living in those houses were involved with organizations that “lent material support to terrorists.”

On February 1, 2012, Northern Illinois Assistant U.S. Attorney Barry Jonas told the press that the “investigation is continuing” into the case. The assignment of Jonas to the case is telling, primarily because of his earlier role in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation defendants. This prosecution, which focused on five officials of what was once the largest Muslim charity in the U.S. The foundation’s mission was to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Palestine and other countries. In 2001 its offices were raided and five people associated with the charity were indicted in 2004. The first trial ended with a hung jury. The second trial ended with convictions and the defendants were sentenced up to 65 years in prison. One of the individuals who is being investigated, Jess Sundin, told the press: “That Barry Jonas is now involved in our case is an ominous development. He is famous for one of the most appalling attacks on civil and democratic rights in the past decade–the prosecution of the Holy Land Five.”

According to Mick Kelly of FightBack News, the Holy Land Five prosecution “included secret witnesses–the defense never got to find out who the witnesses were–the use of hearsay evidence and the introduction of evidence that had nothing to do with the defendants in the case, such as showing a video from Palestine of protesters burning an American flag, as a means to prejudice the jury.” One assumes that this is permissible in the post-911 PATRIOT Act world we now live in. The fear of terrorism trumps all and the State is not afraid to stoke that fear in order to maintain its power.

The other instance of the police state assault on civil rights and liberties can also be found in Chicago. This May, the city is hosting the NATO/G8 summit meetings. This meeting of the capitalist rulers of the world and their biggest armed force will make Chicago the site of what will hopefully be some of the largest protests against the imperial intentions of Washington since earlier in this century. The stated intention of protest organizers to protest is being met with a concerted attack on the protesters and their motives from the establishment media and politicians, while the city of Chicago is changing its laws to prevent the protests from attracting the thousands they can potentially draw. Like Charlotte, NC and Tampa, FL.–the sites of the 2012 major US party political conventions–the city of Chicago has put a series of ordinances into place that will make it easier for the police and other law enforcement agencies to attack the protests and limit their effectiveness. Furthermore, these ordinances will not disappear after the so-called “state of emergency” brought on by the events in these cities is over. Instead, they will become permanent, essentially restricting the right to protest forever.

Having politically come of age in the Nixon era, I naturally compare the current situation with the assault on civil rights and liberties in the United States that occurred then. An incomplete list from that time includes the indictment of dozens of organizers on conspiracy (most notably the Chicago 8, Panther 21, and Harrisburg 7) and other charges; the brutal attacks on protesters in demonstrations large and small; the assassinations of Black Panthers, Latinos and American Indian Movement members; the murders by law enforcement at People’s Park, Kent and Jackson State, Attica and in African-American and Latino urban areas across the nation; the prosecution of Angela Davis, Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins; etc. You get the point. The repression was clear and it was everywhere. Yet, it was not always successful. Why? Primarily because there was a mass movement that fought it. The highlights of this movement were it successes: the acquittals of Angela Davis, Bobby and Ericka and the Panther 21 and the failure of the prosecution in the case of the Harrisburg 7. The failures of the moment against repression were unfortunately too frequent, but those successes remain important, both for the very fact of their success and as examples of the potential of a mass movement against repression. Repression can be fought and defeated. The place to begin lies in front of us.

Meanwhile, in the economic and military sphere, the drum beat continues essentially the same as it ever did. There is no doubt who won the battles of the Sixties in those arenas: big business and the Pentagon. Even though union membership is down drastically from its heyday years of the 1960s, a concerted drive to destroy the unions that remain has kicked into high gear. While governments and big business work together to disempower the remaining unions, the demagogues among them work overtime in their attempts to tie every problem the common man and woman has to those workers that dare to fight for their union. Instead of talking honestly about the failures of neoliberalism, right wing corporate shills denounce school teachers and nurses for demanding a decent wage while simultaneously privatizing whatever services they can. Unemployment remains high, especially among black men, who have only known full employment when they were forced to work as slaves. Indeed, the only place where most African-American men are working is in the network of prisons across the USA, where they work for minimal wages while reaping profits for Wall Street corporations that have the taxpayers pay the bills those prisons rack up. It can be reasonably argued that US prisons are the historical successors to those plantations where many of today’s prisoners’ ancestors worked.

September 13, 1971 is a day I will never forget. It was my sixteenth birthday, but that fact serves only as a marker for the unforgettable events of that historical moment. On September 8, 1971 several hundred men at Attica State prison in New York took over a part of the prison. This act was the direct result of a scuffle that occurred in what was known as D Yard. In truth, though, it was the culmination of a months-long campaign for prison reforms in Attica and other prisons in the New York system. It can actually be argued that the campaign in New York was part of a larger campaign that was occurring across the United States. This upsurge in the prison struggle had been fueled by other movements in the US and also by a growing awareness of the role prisons play in the oppression of disenfranchised groups in a society. The assassination of Black Panther George Jackson barely a month before the uprising at Attica served as a vicious reminder of how far the State would go to maintain that oppression.

Back to the story of September 13, 1971. As I sat at the dinner table that evening I simmered with anger. That morning Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York had ordered an assault on Attica which resulted in the deaths of 39 men, mostly prisoners but also including nine hostages. This massacre took place after four days of negotiations orchestrated by the prisoners and conducted by a group of outside observers selected by the prisoners. Suffice it to say, the birthday celebration was muted, a cloud of death hanging over the dining room. I could only imagine how the families of the dead men felt. The primary official representing the state of New York was Correctional Services Commissioner Russell G. Oswald, a liberal within the prison administration. The group of observers was composed of almost two dozen men and included radical attorney William Kunstler, New York State Senator John Dunne, New York City councilman Herman Badillo, members of the Young Lords, Louis Farrakhan, and New York Times writer Tom Wicker.

Almost four years later Wicker would publish an account of the uprising titled A Time to Die. This account is a testament of the times. Wicker was an unabashed liberal when that word defined a certain political and cultural mindset that included support for civil rights, civil liberties, and the consideration that radical and revolutionary leftists not only made some valid points but that they were often right when it came to analyzing the nature of race and class in the United States. His book on Attica stands as one of the best pieces of journalism to come out of the period known as the Sixties. Fortunately, it was recently republished in a paperback edition by Haymarket Books of Chicago. Written in the third person — like much of Norman Mailer’s best journalism — Wicker describes the events that took place in Attica after he arrived there sometime during the night of September 8, 1971. His chronicle reflects the genuine concern for the lives of the prisoners and the hostages and is witness to his growing disbelief that there can ever be a peaceful resolution to the situation. That awareness is accompanied by his acknowledgement that the blame for this does not fall on the prisoners but on those in the New York government apparatus that cannot or will not see the men of Attica as human beings. The tension inside the prison and between and within the various groups involved forces Wicker to reflect on his life growing up in a union anti-segregationist family in the apartheid US South. This personal history and the contrast between the prisoners desire to be treated like humans and the bureaucrats’ determination to deny that desire causes Wicker to forsake his journalistic objectivity in favor of the inmates. In what is certainly one of his finest journalistic moments, after hearing Rockefeller tell him that granting amnesty to the prisoners would undermine the basic tenets of our society, Wicker writes:

Wicker had to stop himself from laughing–not with amusement– at this astounding irony. In a country where so many wealthy or well-represented lawbreakers could go free, where the killers at Kent State and Jackson State were not even prosecuted, where minorities (blacks and Mexican-Americans, for two good examples) suffered from openly prejudiced law in whole regions, where the poor and disadvantaged of all races usually felt the whole weight of the police, the courts, the prisons–in that country, the “equal application of the laws” was to be upheld in the case of the Attica Brothers!

If the Sixties were about freedom, and I believe that they were, then the men in Attica were ready to die for theirs. And many did. There were others in associated milieus that fought for theirs and for men like the Attica Brothers. Poet, writer, counterculture mischief-maker and rock musician Ed Sanders was one of those. His recently released biography Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side is a look at that battle. Sanders could be described as a member of the group of ramblers, mystics, poets, and plain old lunatics that formed a bridge between the Beatnik and hippie/freak culture. Like Neal Cassady, his age and refusal to go along with the dominant culture of the grey-flannel suit led him to places that existed on the fringes of US society, especially white US society. In the search to disengage from the mainstream culture, the men and women involved often went out of their way to offend. Given the Puritan confusion and hypocrisy about all things sexual, it was in that arena that artists and poets often played in when they wished to push the limits outward. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg — two men who make occasional appearances in Sanders’ jerry-built memoir — knew this territory well. Indeed, by the very fact of their homosexuality, they were already outside of society (like Patti Smith sings in her tune “Rock and Roll Nigger”).

Sanders is the author of one of the best true crime books ever written in the United States. That book, titled The Family, is about Charles Manson and his group of twisted souls. Fug You is primarily about the decade before Sanders published that book. It was a decade that was full of activity for Sanders. He published one of the best known mimeographed poetry and art journals of the period. Like the photocopied zines of the 1980s and 1990s, mimeo journals were the samizdat of the art and poetry countercultures of the period. Sanders journal, known as Fuck You, published Burroughs, Ginsberg and the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, among others. His magazine gained him invites to parties with the burgeoning literary and artistic elite of 1960s New York. This access in turn gave him access to patrons and a ready set of defenders whenever the obscenity police came down on his magazine, as they did somewhat frequently.

All of this, however, was but a prelude to Sanders best known (and most popular) endeavor: the creation of the rock and roll band The Fugs. I gave their first album a few listens while reading this book and am still amazed not only by the fact that they got a recording contract but that they actually broke the Billboard Top 100 a couple times. On top of that, The Fugs played on bills featuring some of the biggest bands of the period. The music The Fugs created was a mixture of straight blues, some rock and roll, a little Indian influence and just plain freakin’ noise. The lyrics were a combination of beat poetry, antiwar visions, visionary hopes, sexist nonsense and just plain babble. Like I said, it’s hard to remember that The Fugs were actually somewhat popular. That fact alone is testament itself to how much the cultural boundaries were being stretched and redefined. As for that sexism, let me clarify.

Sexism was an unfortunate part of the freedom defined by the Sixties. Not because many men were more sexist than many men are now, but because their sexism had never been challenged. The sexual repression that had ruled US popular culture to that point was being broken down. Given the generally sexist nature of the culture, that sexual freedom may have opened up minds, bodies and souls, but it did little to end the objectification of the female person. That task would fall on the feminist movement that rose from the cultural revolution of which Ed Sanders writes about in Fug You.

One could argue that, unlike the sexism of today’s media, which bases itself on the complete commodification of the body while also putting a price tag on the emotion of love, it can be argued that the sexism of the Beats and hippies was a genuine attempt to create a world of Eros referred to in Herbert Marcuse’s classic text Eros and Civilization which visualized a society “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”

There was a genuine joy in that revolution. It would soon be tempered by the repression from the State, various religious figures and institutions and the military. Sanders memoir captures all of that. He writes snippets of remembrances that together tell a good part of the story. The Living Theatre putting on their play The Brig; the authorities shutting them down. The Human Be-Ins and the attempt to bust Allen Ginsberg for marijuana. The Yippies desire to host a festival of life and the police riot that was Chicago 1968. Sanders book covers the late fifties to 1970. Wicker’s covers four days in 1971. The men in Attica, however, were there for crimes that happened during the same period that Sanders book takes place. Their denouement was a violent end to the Sixties in a much more cataclysmic way than the Altamont concert portrayed in the film Gimme Shelter, or the police murders at Kent and Jackson State. These two books represent elements of the zeitgeist of the Sixties. They also hold both possibilities and warnings for our future.

Why now? Part of the reason is because the majority of US troops are out of Iraq, thereby leaving a minimal number of American soldiers available for Iranian retaliation. A related reason could be the loss of prestige to Washington with the withdrawal of those troops. It’s not like Washington won its war in Iraq; it’s more like it was a stalemate with Tehran still holding on to a couple key cards. Israel, with an element of its ruling elites always ready to attack any perceived enemy, is of course a constant element in the drive to destroy Iran, as are the ruling families of certain Arab Gulf states that compete with Tehran in the oil market. Iran’s alleged support for various resistance movements in the Middle East and Asia provides Israel with but one more reason to call for war, especially since those resistance movements are primarily opposed to Israel’s expansionist anti-Palestinian policies.

For those warmongering pundits who haven’t yet quite jumped on the bandwagon for either an Israeli or joint US-Israeli attack comes an article in the January/February 2012 Foreign Affairs, a policy journal written by and for the US elites. The piece, written by Council of Foreign Relations member and Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig, is titled “Time to Attack Iran.” While the title of the article leaves nothing to the imagination, Kroenig’s long-winded piece utilizes an almost Jesuitical argument as to why the United States should attack Iran now.

Briefly put, the argument goes like this. Since it is clear that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons and Israel is intent on preventing that, it would be best if the United States military launched a limited attack on Iran’s nuclear-related facilities before Israel does and starts a war with much greater consequences. After all, continues Kroenig, Washington’s forces are sophisticated enough to limit civilian casualties and take out the necessary targets. Furthermore, any retaliation would be limited, suggests Kroenig, because most of what Tehran says regarding retaliation is bluster. If some US troops die, that risk is worth it. After all, for men like Kroenig a nuclear Iran is too great of a threat to US national security, human lives be damned.

Let me briefly address this piece of idiocy. First, Kroenig does not provide any proof for his supposition that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons. Instead, he accepts the common presentation of IAEA reports made in the Western press, a presentation that has been shown time and time again to be a misrepresentation of the facts in those reports. Naturally, that misrepresentation suggests that Iran is ready to go live at any time with a nuclear weapon and wants to do so. Second, Kroenig easily dismisses the possibility of Iranian retaliation. From the comfort of his office at Georgetown University he makes the statement that Washington could tell Iran certain acts would be subject to massive retaliation, while others like “token missile strikes against U.S. bases and ships in the region” would be acceptable. It’s as if Mr. Kroenig was talking about a game of World of Warcraft instead of an action that might start World War Three.

It is not time to attack Iran. It is time to back away from the insanity expressed in the recent GOP debates about the need to attack Iran. It is also time to end the nonsense put forth by men and women like Mr. Kroenig. Their use of neutral and technical language to demand an attack on Iran or any other nation is more reprehensible than the demagoguery of Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich. When I read the ramblings of technocrats like Mr. Kroenig, I can not help but be reminded of Adolf Eichmann and his office as they sent memos back and forth discussing the destruction of the European Jews. The language those men used was bureaucratic and neutral. The results were anything but.

Washington does not like the government in Tehran. The reasons for this are many, but the primary one is simple. Tehran opposes Washington’s designs for the region. It also opposes Tel Aviv’s. Washington aligns itself with Tel Aviv no matter what it does. Until Washington alters its “special relationship” with Tel Aviv so that other interests in the region are considered in a fair manner, Iran’s presence will always be a threat to Washington’s interests. As has been written many times over, Tehran has good reason not to trust the words and motivations of the United States. The last sixty years of history between the two nations is one that includes a CIA coup against a popular government; years of support to an autocratic and despotic regime whose secret police tortured and killed unknown numbers of opposition members; a secret deal between some of the most reactionary elements of the post-1979 Iranian revolutionary government and the Reagan administration that helped destroy the democratic socialist and secular elements of the revolution; and a series of attacks on Iranian ships, civilian aircraft and, most recently, its scientists.

Once again, it is not time to attack Iran. Opposing war and sanctions on that country is not equivalent to supporting the Tehran government. However, it does mean demanding that Washington to stop edging towards war on Iran, end the sanctions and do everything in its power (including suspending ALL aid and loans to Tel Aviv) to prevent Israel from launching an attack. If nuclear weapons really are the issue, then it would seem that it is time for all parties in the Mideast to begin unconditional talks establishing a nuclear free zone. It is certainly not the time to begin a war that will only convince more nations that nuclear arms are the only way they can ensure their continued existence. We must step back from the precipice.

The DC march was also politically similar to previous marches. The January 27 date had been originally reserved by the left-liberal antiwar network calling itself United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ). ANSWER, the other group organizing against the US wars, then had agreed to working with UFPJ in order to make the largest possible showing on that date. This was despite some very sharp political disagreements between the two organizations.

I took a bus from Asheville, NC to that protest. It was one of seven very full coaches from that small city in the mountains. When we arrived at the New Carrolton Metro stop around 7:30 in the morning the parking lot was already full of buses from cities and towns up and down the US East Coast and from as far away as Cleveland and other points west. The Metro system was running extra trains, and it seemed like everyone riding those trains was going to the protest.

After disembarking and imbibing a couple cups of coffee, I headed to the Mall. On the way I ran into several friends from various places and exchanged greetings and conversation. The ultra-right group Free Republic had a couple dozen folks hanging out on the grass in one of DC’s traffic circles harassing protesters and questioning everything from their manhood to their politics. I joked to a friend I was with that being called a communist never bothered me since I pretty much considered myself one anyhow.

I couldn’t tell you what the speakers said that day. I wasn’t really listening that closely. Most of the signs that people were carrying were provided by UFPJ and ANSWER. Most of them simply called for the troops to be brought home immediately. Most of the speakers didn’t mention Washington’s adjunct war in Afghanistan and neither did the pre-printed signs. Some protesters did carry signs demanding an immediate end to that war, too. I asked a friend of mine whose organization had been involved in planning the protest why the war in Afghanistan was not being mentioned. His answer was that the leadership of UFPJ could not agree as to whether or not they opposed that war. His organization had argued to include a demand for immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan as a key demand but had been voted down. The reason given by the leadership was that such a demand might diminish the size and message of the protest. His take was that the leadership of UFPJ was too interested in maintaining good relations with the Democratic Party, especially with the presidential elections coming up.

Since that January day there has not been another large antiwar protest. Several smaller ones took place in the following years, but even the larger ones that took place at the Pentagon and in New York City had little or no effect. UFPJ fell apart and many of its members, including elements of the leadership, allowed themselves to be hoodwinked into campaigning for Barack Obama, preferring to believe that campaigning for his presidential hopes would be a more effective way to end the imperial wars of Washington than actually organizing against those wars. We all know how that idea turned out.

But wait, they say, the war in Iraq is over. My response is that this is partially true. Very few US GIs are dying there any more and most of them have indeed been removed from that country. Some of them have been sent to Afghanistan and some have been sent to one of the other 737 military bases the Empire maintains around the globe. Many more have been sent back to the streets and hometowns of the United States to work out the demons they are now possessed with, thanks to their war experiences.

Meanwhile, in Iraq the number of bombings is increasing as various groups fight over turf and control while the democracy and freedom promised by George Bush and heralded by Barack Obama continues to be a figment of some DC speechwriter’s pen. The world’s largest CIA station outside of Langley, VA. operates at will from Baghdad, stirring up trouble in Iraq, Iran, Palestine and other nations in the region while the US client state in Tel Aviv continues to ramp up the war rhetoric against Iran while tightening its grip on the people of the West Bank and Gaza (and the political system of the United States).

Let’s not forget Saudi Arabia, whose autocratic monarchy just purchased 84 F-15s at the cool price of approximately $25 billion.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the guerrilla war waged by the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces continues, as does the close-to-$200-million-per-day US effort to destroy that resistance. Over the Afghan mountains the people of Pakistan wonder if they will be the next targets of US ground troops while US-armed drones fly and kill almost daily into some areas of that country.

There is no group of protesters in the United States currently addressing this. The Occupy Wall Street movement, for all of its positives, has yet to loudly and clearly make the connection between the war industry’s role in the plights they protest against. This is partly due to the organizational structure of Occupy (in fact, unlike many other Occupy camps the DC and Oakland Occupy groupings have worked hard to make this connection), but another reason for this failure is the lack of antiwar organizing in the Occupy movement. The sole remaining national antiwar network–the United National Antiwar Coalition–has been holding the torch in the years since its inception in 2008 and is currently organizing protests against the May meetings of global capital and its army (the G8 and NATO) in Chicago. Indeed, this coalition of political, religious and labor organizations is holding an organizing conference the weekend of March 23rd in Stamford, CT that will focus on these protests.

Despite recent pronouncements by the Obama administration and the Pentagon that the US military is going to shrink, the occupations and wars of the Empire will not just disappear. neither will its aspirations for full-spectrum-dominance. The new Pentagon Plan, titled “Sustaining US Global Leadership:Priorities for 21st Century Defense” has as its goal “protect(ing) the broad range of U.S. national security interests… (maintaining) the free flow of commerce… preventing Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon capability… standing up for Israel’s security… (and) continu(ing) to place a premium on U.S. and allied military presence in – and support of – partner nations in and around this (the Middle East) region.”

Despite its claim that the US military will no longer be depended on to occupy and “build” nations, a key element of this plan is “to assure access to and use of the global commons….” In other words, to go wherever capital demands the military goes, then the military will go there and stay there until capital’s work is done. A close reading of this document will tell the reader that nothing has changed and the military remains ready and happy to do Wall Street’s bidding. All of which balances out to the continued domination of the war-based economy.

This month PM Press, the Oakland, CA. publisher founded by AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan and others, is publishing Gilbert’s memoirs. The book, titled Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, is certain to be included in the top tier of books having to do with the period of US history known as the Sixties. There is no self-pity within these pages, but lots of self-reflection. In what can only be considered a refreshing approach, Gilbert takes full responsibility for the path he has chosen and explains that path in an intelligently political manner and with a decidedly leftist understanding. Love and Struggle combines objective history, personal memory, and a critical perspective into a narrative that is at once an adventuresome tale and a political guide through the past fifty years.

Gilbert begins his story by describing his youth and his developing awareness that the United States was not what he had been led to believe it was. An Eagle Scout who believed the myths inherent in American exceptionalism, he was unprepared for the cognitive dissonance he underwent while watching the attacks by law enforcement on civil rights marchers in the US South. That sense of conflict deepened when he headed off to Columbia University. By 1965, angered by the US war on the Vietnamese and armed with a well-researched understanding of why the US was really involved there, Gilbert was organizing Columbia students to join antiwar protests. Like many of his contemporaries, by 1968 he was an anti-imperialist and working full-time against the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States. By 1969, he was one of the original members of Weatherman and by April 1970 he was underground.

Gilbert tells his story with a hard-learned humility. Occasionally interjecting his personal life–his loves and failures, his relationship with his family–with his political journey, it is the politics which are foremost in this memoir. A true revolutionary, every other aspect of Gilbert’s life is subsumed to the revolution. This kind of life is not an easy one. Indeed, it arguably makes the life of an ascetic monk look easy by comparison. After all, the monk is only trying to change himself, while the committed revolutionary wants to change the world into one where justice prevails; a world that by its very structure resists such change.

Love and Struggle carefully examines the history of the periods Gilbert has lived in. From the early days of the antiwar movement and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the public street-fighting arrogance of early Weatherman; from Weatherman’s transition to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and its growing isolation from the New Left it was a part of; and from the post-Vietnam war US left to the Brink robbery and its aftermath, Gilbert keeps the politics front and center in his text. In his discussion of the period between Weather’s publication of its essential work Prairie Fire and its immediate aftermath, Gilbert provides an insight into the debates inside WUO and among its supporters in the years after the peace treaty was signed with northern Vietnam. His portrayal of the differences around theory being debated in the WUO serve as a broader description of the debates raging throughout the new left as the US intervention in Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle neared its end. For those of us who were politically involved at the time, the debates ring with familiarity: national liberation over class; the interaction between race and class in the US; the oppression of women and white male privilege. In a testimony to his writing abilities, Gilbert’s discussion of the issues makes them as alive in this book as those arguments actually were in the mid-1970s. His keen political sense reveals the interplay between different political perspectives, understandings of history, and the always present contests of ego. The political arguments outlined by Gilbert (especially when describing the battle inside WUO) are still relevant today. Their echoes are present in the General Assemblies of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in forums more specific and less specific across the nation. Gilbert’s presentation of the essential WUO arguments that challenges the overriding role of class in the nature of oppression is not only reasoned and impassioned, it is worth studying and makes points useful to the future of anti-imperialist struggle in the United States Furthermore, the book includes an ongoing and excellent discussion of the nature of white supremacy and white skin privilege. For anyone who has spent time involved in the Occupy movement the past few months, the relevance of this latter discussion is all too familiar.

For those looking for a sensationalist account of life as a revolutionary or a confession, they should look elsewhere. David Gilbert’s memoir is a political account of a political life. Every action undertaken, every decision made is examined via the eye of a leftist revolutionary. This does not mean there are no page-turning moments in the book, however. Indeed, the sections describing Weather’s move underground and Gilbert’s daily life off the grid are interesting and revealing, as are those describing the attempts by WUO members to evade capture. The descriptions of Gilbert’s clandestine life and his subsequent moving back aboveground and then back under are also riveting.

Underlying the entire narrative is a current of what is best described as self-criticism; of Weather, the New Left, armed struggle and, ultimately, of Gilbert himself. As anyone who has experienced something akin to a self-criticism session can attest, such sessions can be emotionally wrenching episodes of retribution and petty anger. They can also be tremendously useful when conducted humanely. Gilbert’s written attempts at this exercise in Love and Struggle lean toward the latter expression while also providing interesting and useful considerations to the aforementioned issues (along with issues related to those criticisms). Gilbert’s realization that his ego occasionally caused him to make decisions that weren’t based on politically sound rationales is something any radical leader should take into account. In fact, Gilbert’s continuing struggle with his ego and it’s place in the decisions he made while free reminded me of a maxim relayed to me a couple times in my life; once by an organizer for the Revolutionary Union in Maryland and once by a friend from the Hog Farm commune. That maxim is simply: if you start believing that the revolution can’t exist without you, then it’s time to leave center stage and go back to doing grunt work where nobody knows (or cares) who you are. In other words, you are not the revolution so take your ego out of it.

In the well-considered catalog of books dealing honestly with the period of history known as the Sixties in the United States, Love and Struggle is an important addition. Borrowing his technique from memoir, confession, and objective history-telling, David Gilbert has provided the reader of history with the tale of a person and a time. Simultaneously, he has given the reader inclined to political activism a useful, interesting, and well-told example of one human’s revolutionary commitment to social change no matter what the cost.

The 1989 novel, titled The Third Reich, is the diary of a German office worker named Udo Bergen and his vacation in Spain. There is a girlfriend, a couple they meet, the hotel owner Frau Else, a man named Quernado who rents paddle boats to tourists and has grotesque burn scars on his body. The girlfriend leaves after a fright; the man in the couple drowns and the hotel owner’s husband is taken away to hospice with terminal cancer. The presence of a board game based on the second world war and also called The Third Reich hangs over the story like a surreal presence. Udo is an expert in board games based on World War Two and even makes extra money writing about strategies for different gaming magazines. For most of the book he and Quernado are engaged in a the Third Reich game. Udo is hoping that he can win as Germany while Quernado’s pieces represent the allies. It is as if the game is as real as life and life is only a game. Bergen even says to his game-playing friend Conrad upon his return from Spain: “We (are) all essentially ghosts on a ghostly General Staff.”

It seems that Quernado identifies Bergen as not only an opponent in the game, but as a potential embodiment of Nazi Germany itself. This is despite Bergen stating specifically to Quernado that he is much more of an anti-Nazi than any Nazi at all. Quernado ignores Bergen and plays the game as if he were fighting the war. Like much of Europe and certainly Germany, the fact of World War Two’s horrors defines everything, albeit in a rather murky manner. The game is nothing but a game except when it becomes more, as it does in the mind of Quernado. History has a similar trajectory. As long as it remains in books and museums (or games) it has little threat. It is when history becomes real that it constitutes something potentially more dangerous.

Like most of Bolano’s novels, The Third Reich comes across as if it were written in a detached fog. Although the narrator Bergen is part of every scene that occurs, his narration of the life he is in the middle of is simultaneously distant and intimate. Like fog, the closer one gets to the situation or person being described, the clearer Bergen’s tale become. Observations about the other characters in the novel are provided with an omniscience that, once considered, are mostly Bergen’s selfish perceptions. As one follows the interactions of the various characters in Bergen’s beach vacation, the egocentric nature of modern individuated society becomes apparent. Every single person portrayed lives alone amongst the crowd in the Spanish resort town. Relationships easily formed are just as easily dismissed. Friendships seem to be anything but that and love is barely more meaningful than renting a room.

Bolano is a master of style and story. The seemingly innocuous life of Udo Bergen the office worker and gamer is on second glance not what it appears. Death, sex, intrigue and the threat of violence simmer beneath the thin flesh of Bolano’s tale. After all is said and done little has changed. That is our curse. I am reminded of the line from Eliot’s The Waste Land: “Oed’ und leer das Meer.” Post industrial equals post-meaningful. Nothing plus nothing is still nothing. The charm is in the telling, not necessarily in the living. Bolano comprehends this fact and tells his story well.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

There have been a number of books written about this underground press. The granddaddy of them all is most certainly Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press by retired Northwestern University professor Abe Peck, who began his journalism career as a member of Chicago’s groundbreaking Seed. More recent endeavors include John McMillan’s Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America and the just-released On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. Edited by Sean Stewart, On the Ground is essentially an oral history that features the recollections of several people that were involved with underground papers from around the United States. Unlike McMillan’s work which runs toward the academic side of things, Stewart’s text has a populist feel to it. The recollections are straight from the speakers’ mouths; sometimes angry, sometimes humorous and always honest.

The best part of the book are the graphics. As I read through the memories of the folks Stewart spoke with for On the Ground I was repeatedly surprised at how well I remembered various illustrations and photographs Stewart reprinted throughout the text. Like the papers his interviewees are remembering, the most striking thing about On the Ground is the layout. Even though I know the book was composed on a computer screen, the book looks as if it were laid out via the old cut and paste method by folks possibly stoned on weed and a day or two with minimal sleep–just like many issues of almost every paper Stewart discusses.

Being in the Movement and the counterculture was generally an upbeat experience. So was being in the Sixties underground media. Most folks were young and full of hope and those that were not necessarily young in years were where it counted–in their approach to life. Reporters did not cover stories as much as they took part in them and then wrote about it afterward. As Abe Peck says about working at The Seed: “We were very determined and unless something terrible happened–like [the murder of] Fred Hampton–up, just pretty upbeat.” Politics was omnipresent, whether it was at a very political paper like The Black Panther or a paper that had a more countercultural bent like The LA Free Press. This was because, as far as the authorities were concerned, everyone involved with the underground press–writers, printers, cartoonists, sellers and readers–were on the wrong side of the law and had to be watched. Sometimes, they were dealt with by methods legal and otherwise. This meant things like the stores selling papers being harassed by police and vigilantes; the withdrawal of advertising because of pressure from the FBI and other agencies; and assaults against persons involved by cops and others.

When Richard Nixon took over the White House in 1969 the repression of the Movement and counterculture intensified. Naturally, this meant that the media that represented these phenomena would be under greater attack. Black Panther papers were destroyed enroute to cities across the country and even to military bases overseas. Storefronts that newspapers worked out of were firebombed by vigilantes and shot at by police. Obscenity charges were brought against newspapers that then tied up the papers’ funds in court costs. High school underground press writers were thrown out of school and administrators suspended students selling and reading those papers. Although the reasons given for the expulsions usually had to do with attendance and other disciplinary infractions, the reality was that high school disciplinarians resented the threat to their authority and power. A friend of mine in Montgomery County, Maryland was suspended from the progressive John F. Kennedy High School for selling The Washington Free Press on campus. The issue in question featured a cartoon of a judge that had been involved in efforts to shut down the paper. The drawing showed the judge masturbating. Underneath the drawing was the phrase (made popular by the TV show Laugh-In) “here com da judge.” The cartoon was a response to a series of rulings made by the judge forbidding the distribution of the Free Press on high school grounds. These rulings and the school board decisions that preceded them were being challenged by the ACLU.

As the 1960s turned over into the 1970s, many folks that had been on the front lines began to retreat for the sake of their sanity. Others just fell into the trap of individualism and self-satisfaction–an easy trap to fall into in the US of A. By 1974 or thereabouts, the curse of identity politics had taken over much of the political discourse on the left and effectively limited the reach of the Movement as people separated according to their gender, sexuality, and ethnic origins. Intentionally or not, this trend hastened the demise of the underground press and the movements it was a part of. However, its legacy remains. There are many websites and even some print journals that are more than observers of the protests and movements they report on. Journalist Alice Embree notes that “The underground press was the connective tissue; it spread the news …” When the papers began to fail, the connectiveness was lessened. The underground press was a vital part of what happened in the sixties. Sean Stewart’s wonderfully edited text On the Ground lets the reader know how and why that remains true. The striking graphics and compelling recollections in this text are at once a popular history and an inspiration.

The German philosopher and sociologist Max Weber wrote in his book Politics As Vocation that one condition of a legitimate government depended on how “its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in the enforcement of its order.” When that government feels it is under attack and believes that nothing but force will work to end those attacks, then it brings out the police and gives them free rein. In the United States in 2011, that means tear gas, pepper spray and truncheons; in Egypt of 2011 it means that and much more. Nor does it matter if one government is an elected nominally liberal civilian government, a dictator, or a military regime.

As far as the US and the wave of protest occurring there goes, the State has a firm monopoly on violence. Indeed, the increasingly violent police attacks on Occupy protests have been met with an even greater chorus of civilians calling for nonviolent witness. Any protester that challenges this insistence on nonviolence is quickly challenged as a potential police provocateur, a selfish jerk, thug or some other variant of deviant. While the fact exists that nonviolent witness is an incredibly powerful tactic of protest, it is a moral protest. Therefore, it assumes that those whose actions one is protesting actually have morals similar to the protesters and can be convinced to change policies by the moral power of the protesters’ arguments.

Unfortunately, such is often not the case. For example, the chancellor of University of California (UC) Davis, whose actions created the situation last week where several students were pepper-sprayed at point blank range by campus police, seems to be truly shaken by the police actions her orders unleashed. However, given the history of UC policing, I doubt very much that there will be a sea change in how UC police use force on campus. Furthermore, one has to wonder if that chancellor would be having the moral misgivings she seems to be having if the pepper-spraying incident had not received the coverage it has.

Do I think the recent police violence against protesters in the US means that it’s time for protesters to move to armed struggle or even throw rocks at cops? No, of course not. My only intention in pointing out the limits of nonviolent resistance is that those limits are something that the authorities don’t necessarily recognize or care about.

Like many folks that have been involved in opposing the state, I have had my share of physical run-ins with the police. Truncheons, tear gas, pepper spray, all of it. Yet, the worst beating I ever received from the police was not at a protest. It happened when the police answered a noise complaint at an apartment I was at one night. After an argument between the cop and one of the apartment residents, the cop kicked in the door, tearing it off its hinges. He called for backup. I went outside through a back door. As I tried to leave one of the six policeman standing around saw me and attacked. Within minutes I was on the ground with three officers on me. One was twisting my arms around to cuff me and the other two were pushing my face into the concrete of the sidewalk. Another was beating my legs with his nightstick. I was thrown into the car of the cop who began the whole episode and as we drove to the station he told me that my friends and I were dead meat if he ever saw me when he was not in uniform. I said nothing. When we got to the jail he placed me in a holding cell and began to beat me with his fists and club. If it weren’t for the jailer arriving, he probably would have beat me unconscious. This experience is not that uncommon, especially in poorer neighborhoods (and especially in neighborhoods populated by people of color.)

Police handled the attacks on the Occupy camps, which in the authorities’ minds were nothing but magnets for those without houses, much as they do any attempts to roust the homeless. The fact that these attacks were played out in the media occurred because the camps were protest camps instead of non-political camps of the homeless.

Furthermore, the presence of college students, labor activists and other “middle-class” residents not only brought cameras to the camp roustings, but people with some connections capable of speaking the language of the authorities and the media. This presence made what is a common occurrence to the people living on the streets into a national news story. In other words, the police violence visited on the homeless every day was exposed, if only briefly, to the world.

Historically, police violence is a fact of life in every society. In a society based on a capitalist economy, the police serve those that have the most money and property. When the authorities and their policies are under attack, the police will always be called in to protect the former. No official should be shocked when the police act brutally. There is a reason the most thuggish of the uniforms are often the ones called to disperse angry crowds. If there are officials shocked or upset at the brutality unleashed by the police under their command, they can resign like two members of the Oakland mayor’s staff did in the wake of the police raids on Occupy Oakland or they can defend their thugs like Mayor Bloomberg. As for the chancellor of UC Davis? Only time will tell if those tears she recently shed at a speakout on campus are genuine. Meanwhile, hardly any one but their friends and family weep for those the police brutalize off campus.

Peter Bohmer has been an organizer and participant in the struggle for social and economic justice since the 1960s. In recent years, his political activities have taken him to Venezuela, Cuba, Greece and a number of US cities. He teaches political economy and has been a faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA since 1987.

Peter and I go back over twenty years. The conversation that follows is but one of many we have had since we met. We share it as a springboard for thought and discussion. At the same time, we do not claim any special knowledge and pretend to no higher wisdom. We hope that the dialogue is received in the spirit of revolutionary camaraderie.

Ron Jacobs: Do you remember last spring you said in an email (during the Arab Spring stuff before NATO and Libya) that this could have the same impact as 1968? Can you briefly explain that perception?

Peter Bohmer: I was very inspired by the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt beginning at the end of last year and early this year, 2011. The growing numbers in the face of murderous repression, the courage, the participatory democratic process of the occupiers, and the call in their statements and in the actual occupation for democracy and economic and social justice really resonated with me and captivated me.

Movements and uprisings tend to spread within and between nations as people begin to feel that there are alternatives to resignation to the status quo and the sense of powerlessness that so many people feel. When I said that I hoped 2011 would also be a world historic year, I thought it was somewhat likely these movements and upsurges would burst forth first in countries where there was growing economic inequality and poverty, where austerity programs were in place and where the majority of the population had no power over the direction and policies of their country. I thought of places as ripe for major rebellion such as Greece which I had visited in September 2010 where the IMF and the European Union was increasingly calling the shots and particularly in other nations in North Africa and the Middle East where the people were following what was happening in the region’s largest country.

Although the resistance to budget cuts in Washington Stare where I live was somewhat limited, I also thought it possible that the examples of the occupation in Egypt and the labor led protests in Madison against their Tea Party Governor, Scott Walker’s frontal attack on State workers and their unions would spread throughout the U.S.

RJ: And now we have the occupy movement, which seems to be inspired by the events in Tahrir Square. Despite it’s indecisiveness in its agenda, it has captured the hopes of many and the wrath of most of the corporate right wing. I have concerns about what I consider a lack of focus but at the same time there is a part of me that understands that the current political understanding of people in the US would reject something more directed. In fact there are those in the occupy movement that lump unions right up there with corporations. What this says to me is that they are confusing union leadership with the rank and file and misunderstanding the role of unions in a capitalist economy, not to mention an unawareness of that history. Nonetheless these types of political misconceptions exist. Is the movement a step forward?

PB: As a result of observation and participation in the still-growing “Occupy Movement”, an alternative to the pervasive feelings of powerlessness and resignation are emerging. There has been for quite some time in the United States widespread opposition to the growing inequality of income and wealth, to total corporate control over all parts of our life, to global warming, to a government that tortures and is totally beholden to Wall Street, to homelessness and losing our homes, to unemployment and underemployment, to growing debt and poverty, to the imprisonment of over two million people, to militarism and endless wars, and this list is incomplete. At the same time, resistance although greater than reported in the mainstream media has been somewhat limited and ineffective. The importance of this movement is that active resistance is increasingly being seen as valid and the right thing to do. There is a growing feeling beyond the occupiers that hopelessness and escape or maybe voting for the lesser of two evils are not the only options.

Common to the growth of powerful social movements have been people who are willing to resist the status quo and take a stand who by their bold actions strike a chord with much larger numbers of people. This causes them to then change for at least a period of time the organization and activities of their lives and also change their values and ideology towards a less self-centered and me first system of belief and towards solidarity and cooperation, and towards a commitment to economic and social justice. This is happening right now, something is in the air.

Having a physical space which people occupy makes this movement visible and also possible for new people to join it. In Olympia, Washington, it is creating dialog and community between homeless people, young people, anarchists and other activists, retired people, etc (many people belong to more than one category). Although in Olympia and in many other places there are no visible demands and somewhat limited discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there or what we want in the short and medium run, occupiers needs for food, shelter and increasingly health care are being addressed and increasingly met as is the question of self-government. So to say, this occupation is not political is a very narrow definition of political.

RJ: If the occupy movement is at the forefront of left-oriented popular struggle, how do we move forward? What might forward look like?

I’ve been in a few occupation/liberation actions over the years, as have you. In fact, I think we were involved in two or three together. Anyhow, whether it was Peoples Park in 1979, a campus building sometime in the past few decades or the Occupy encampments in our respective towns, the fact is these actions usually end. Many of the ones I was involved with ended with some kind of compromise agreement between the bureaucrats involved and the occupiers. Peoples Park ended with a temporary truce and the park still a park. As I involve myself and observe the Occupy movement, I am also doing what I can to make it into something beyond the occupations. However, I am not sure what. We saw one possibility at the end of the Oakland Strike day when folks took over the foreclosed Travelers Aid building in Oakland’s downtown. Although the timing was obviously wrong (it’s not a good idea to occupy a building while the cops are down the street ready to kick ass), the impetus behind the action makes a lot of sense. In fact, I have been a part of discussions about squatting foreclosed buildings here in Vermont and also with folks online in other parts of the world.

A sidebar to this is how long can the occupations remain meaningful before they become like so much graffiti in the minds of the supportive observer?

PB: As of today, November 7, 2011, most of the occupations are maintaining their momentum. This is a very positive accomplishment. For example, in Olympia, many people in Occupy Olympia are looking ahead to November 28, 2011, to confront the Washington State Legislature when it is being called back into a special session by the Governor Gregoire, a Democrat, in order to make further cuts in a State budget that has already severely reduced needed spending for health care, for education at all levels and for poor people. Occupy Olympia is committed to maintaining the occupation of a downtown park at least until the legislative session and possibly beyond.

Nonetheless, as Michael Albert pointed out in his ZNet article, “Occupy to Self-Manage,” occupations and the related general assemblies, the decision-making group for most occupations, tend to decline over time in numbers and enthusiasm. So it is key to bring in new people and create an atmosphere that is welcoming of new people so that we do not wither away. Let us not unconsciously exclude people who have not been part of the left or activist communities. It is also important that we use our occupied sites as a base to for actions and education outside of our sites.

We need to consciously make movement building one of our goals of this phase of the Occupy Movement. This means developing organizations, institutions, and people who have a deepening analysis and critique of capitalism, with growing capacity and skills to confront this system, and to put forward and win non-reformist reforms. Hopefully this will last beyond these set of occupations. By non-reformist reforms, I mean reforms that meet people’s expressed needs, that build our understanding of the limits of capitalist reform, and that also build our capacity to struggle for and win more fundamental and radical transformation of this oppressive and unsustainable society.

For example, Occupy Olympia is trying to develop a set of tents where there would be free medical care, traditional and non-traditional, on-site. This would meet an important need and also point towards a system of free and universal health care as a basic human right. A next step could be to demand and/or occupy indoor and permanent space that could be used a free health clinic, to provide quality health care and also does popular education in the broader community that healthcare should not be a commodity.

I like the idea of creating housing by squatting in unoccupied buildings as you suggested in Oakland. Whatever we do must be done in a way that large numbers of people beyond the occupation understand and support our actions. That will increase the likelihood that if there is police and government repression our movement will grow rather than become isolated.

Overcoming defeatism and resignation and furthering community and beliefs in the importance of collective action is happening, that is a great start. We do not have the power during this period of the “Occupy Movement” to create a participatory socialist society nor even to seriously reduce the obscene inequality of income and wealth in this country. Hopefully some limited short-term goals will be won.

It is a long struggle. Building healthy networks, institutions, organizations within and between communities and cities; that create the basis for a more conscious, powerful and visionary and radical occupy movement in the not too distant future is a goal. It will make this current movement worth the time and effort and commitment of so many people throughout this country and beyond. Most of the specific occupations of space may come to a close in the not so distant future but the movement can and should continue.

RJ: There are those that say part of the reason the movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was able to be as effective as it was is because the establishment media covered it. Most the time, the coverage was negative, but the coverage itself spread the word and highlighted injustice. Since then, most of the movements against capitalism and its symptoms (war, poverty, environmental degradation, etc.) have been mostly ignored by that press. Occupy seems to be changing that. Perhaps it is because there are so many young middle class people involved, but nonetheless, the coverage is there. Consequently, the numbers may not be as big, but the message is reaching further, at least for now. Meanwhile, there are the new Internet social media. What’s your take on the role that these various media play today?

PB: Certainly in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the mass media coverage of the protests, Black Freedom, anti-Vietnam war and the TV images of the U.S. war against Vietnam, and of the women’s liberation movement contributed to the growth of these movements. Probably even more important was a vibrant “underground” and radical press such as the Black Panther Party newspaper which was national, the Guardian which was also a national weekly newspaper and papers in many, many cities such as the Berkeley Tribe, the Old Mole (Cambridge, MA), the San Diego Street Journal and OB Rag (San Diego), and the Fifth Estate (Detroit). There were also important papers by the women’s liberation movement such as Off Our Backs, and the GI movement and a news service that provided news and graphics for these papers, Liberation News Service. These papers had significant circulation. They were an integral part of the new left and other movements of that period. Today these types of movement papers are few and far between although for example in Olympia, Works in Progress, plays that role to some extent. On the other hand, social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, play an important role in spreading the word about actions although providing less context and analysis than the “underground” papers of the 60’s and early 70’s. Democracy Now today plays a very important and positive role in providing an alternative analysis to the mainstream media and in covering social movements such as the Occupy movement. So do websites such as Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, ZNet, and Alternews (among others). They lack some of the boldness and creativity of that earlier “underground press” but are very valuable. We need to tell our own stories.

The mainstream media has given a lot of coverage to Occupy Wall Street and the growing national movement. Although much of it is negative, it does as you say spread the word and has helped publicize the obscene economic inequality in the United States. I am not sure why it has gotten so much coverage. Its novelty may be a factor.

RJ: These last several months of worldwide anger organized against the neoliberal capitalist economy reminds me of a number of historical events. 1968 is but one. The Occupy movement is somewhat reminiscent of the IWW’s free speech crusade when their insistence on exercising their free speech rights by setting up soapboxes on street corners throughout the US West and the subsequent arrests and harassment by police exposed the myth of free speech in the US. Could this be that spectre that Karl Marx wrote about? Immanuel Wallerstein wrote in his book Antisystemic Movements about the years 1848 and 1968 as failed revolutions that ultimately changed the world’s consciousness in greater ways than the revolutions that preceded them (France 1789 and Russia 1917). “The fact that they were both unplanned and therefore in a profound sense spontaneous explains both facts,” he writes. “The fact that they failed and the fact that they transformed the world.” Perhaps the events of the past year and a half–from Greece to Egypt to Tunisia to Britain to Europe and North and South America–will be perceived similarly. I think it is much too early to tell. In the meantime, there is a growing surge of calls to converge for a number of actions in the spring.

PB: I think we are at the beginning of a huge upsurge, the beginning of a transformative social movement not just a movement that made a big splash for two months and then fades quickly. There will be setbacks. From what I saw and read, the demonstration in New York, today November 17th, was huge and powerful. The occupation of land may be winding down because of repression, the weather and fatigue but hopefully the Occupy movement will find new forms and really blossom in this coming spring. The high unemployment and poverty rates in the United States are not going to improve and may get worse. They are going to worsen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and many other countries. The causes for action are not going to go way nor is the anger nor is the growing understanding of the need for collective action. We are part of a global movement. That capitalism is being named as the problem by many of the participants, not just the banks, is very exciting. Also necessary and beginning to happen although clearly a lot more needs to is a slowly growing awareness that anti-racism and the need for all forms of equality, economic, gender, racial, LGBT, is central both inside the movement and in the greater society.

The coordinated repression of many of the occupations, e.g., NY, Portland, Oakland, is clearly connected to the fear that much of the economic and political elites have of the potential power of this movement. Because of the widespread anger and the resonance this movement has with growing numbers of people, police brutality has rather than scared people increased participation. Bold and creative actions need to continue and grow. So does popular education of participants in these occupations and of the rest of the 99% in the causes of the economic and social crisis and of all forms of oppression. Equally important is further discussion of what kind of society we want and how to get there in the short, medium and long run. We need to consciously build organizations and institutions that can improve people’s lives now, particularly those suffering the most, while also building the capacity to revolutionize this society.

The movement is much bigger than those who have been occupying various sparks and sites. It includes those who have in ways big and small contributed to it, e.g., bringing food down to the occupiers, discussed and supported it at union meeting. One challenge here in Olympia and the Pacific Northwest more generally is to be more inclusive, to welcome and listen to and reach out and include more people who identify with the goals of the Occupy Movement but do not feel comfortable at the sites or the marches or direct actions.

It is a very exciting time to be alive. There is something in the air that I haven’t felt for a long time. In spring, 2013 I intend to co-teach a full time program at the Evergreen State College comparing and contrasting the liberation and social movements of 1968 to 2011 in the U.S. and globally. There will be a lot to examine for 2011 and we still have six weeks to go. I am confident 2012 will be hotter than 2011.

Power to the People!

RJ: I myself think it’s a bit early to tell if this is the spectre that Karl wrote about or if Wallerstein is correct. The underlying politics of the movement are too muddy right now. As far as I have seen, the relationship between the US wars and occupations and the 1% has only begun to become part of the conversation. This relationship needs to be addressed and brought to the forefront of the movement.

There are those in the movement who are anti-leftist (and I don’t mean the various non-left anarchists) and many more that haven’t consciously considered left politics. However, I can’t help but agree with you when you say it is an exciting time to be alive. This is especially the case after the events of N17 in New York, Portland, Oregon, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Indeed, although the numbers were smaller here in Burlington, VT., the spirit of resistance and hope present across the nation and in Greece and Italy on N17 permeated the march and teach-in here, as well. I concur: Power to the People!

The location of the camp in Burlington is in a small city park adjacent to the City Hall building. This park has been a traditional gathering spot for some of the homeless, transient and out-of-work population of the city for decades. After Occupy moved in, some police and city officials attempted to blame the long-term situation of the homeless in the park on the presence of the Occupy tents. Years of alcohol abuse by a few individuals and accompanying crude remarks, arguments and the occasional fight were suddenly blamed on the Occupy camp. Police told the local Gannett media outlet that these folks and the incidents they created were only occurring because the occupiers had set up their camp. Of course, this was nonsense and was quickly rejected by the bulk of Burlington’s residents. However, the issues associated with a few of the park’s more-or-less permanent denizens remain for the Occupy encampment to deal with.

In economic terms, the homeless represent the ultimate failing of the capitalist model, especially its neoliberal form. Those that lost their homes in the housing/credit default crash of 2008 are but the most recent examples of what’s wrong with this model of finance capital. However, even those that social service agencies label as hard core homeless are homeless because monopoly capitalism has failed them. Perhaps they lost their job when the corporation moved overseas. Perhaps they served in the military fighting some war for capital that destroyed their ability to function without drugs and alcohol. Perhaps they are mentally ill and have no support system beyond the SSI check they get (if they get one at all). This latter can be seen as an exaggerated form of what Marx termed social alienation. In other words, that process exacerbated by the emphasis that capitalism places on individualism as the agent that drives history and society, whereby people become foreign to the world they are living in.

The presence of the homeless in the camps is eye-opening for many of the occupiers that have a place indoors to return to. For many, it is an exercise in reversing the “otherness” of the homeless. No longer are they men and women one might have crossed the street to avoid or dropped a coin in their cup. Nor are they mere demographic statistics or anecdotal people that shore up one’s theories of government policy and its shortcomings. In the camps, the homeless become people with whom one must figure out a way to get along with. For those very few that just don’t want to get along, other avenues of dealing with them must be made apparent. Key to this process is forgetting the label and seeing the persons.

Other media reports about the Occupy movement seem to work overly hard at separating the long term homeless from the occupiers. These “real” homeless, state these articles, resent the presence of the occupation while acknowledging that the tents in the park make it easier for them to exist without police harassment. In other words, this type of press represents an attempt to create class divisions between those whom the neoliberal economy has already discarded with those that are fighting to prevent that economy from destroying more lives. This reportage is nothing new. In fact, the mainstream media has long represented those without homes in the capitalist world as creatures whose existence deserves at best pity and the occasional meal. For those with less compassion than your average member of the church social justice committee, the homeless deserve nothing. Not even dignity. Then again, handouts that demand access to one’s soul (like those provided by Salvation Army and many other faith-based organizations) don’t leave one with much dignity either. My anecdotal evidence suggests that most of the homeless involved with Occupy are glad for the camp not only because it makes it easier for them to survive on the streets, but because it gives them something meaningful to do beyond mere survival.

In occupations I was involved with in the past–most notably at Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1979–it was the homeless that protected the space from police and other ne’er-do-wells. Unafraid of the violence they knew the police and their unofficial allies (usually right wing frat boys in the case of Berkeley) to be capable of, these men and women stayed in the camp for weeks. They excised threats of physical violence with words, intimidation and the occasional fist. When fellow campers stepped out of line regarding women or fighting, the occupiers chosen by the rest of us to enforce certain levels of respect did so.

It seems rougher on the streets now then back in 1979. Times have changed and issues are somewhat different. Generally speaking, the men and women without homes who are with the Occupy movement are not symbols to be romanticized nor individuals to be ostracized. Besides being witness to the harm capitalism can do to a person’s livelihood, they are allies and, like the rest of us, come with their own suppositions, hopes and problems. While we try to effect change in the world we can also effect change in ourselves and those we occupy with.

The success of the strike action in Oakland has led to a very predictable situation. Debates around tactics and attempts to exclude various elements from the group because of their use of tactics unacceptable to others seem to be the causes of this situation. In short, there were a few dozen (from most reports) protesters that broke from the peaceful marches and broke stuff. Some of the attacks made sense from a political point of view, although not from a tactical one. For example Whole Foods is not a simple health foods store. Like most of the organic foods industry, it is a big grocery chain that acts a lot like Safeway that would like to have a monopoly on the health foods retail business. The reason for the attacks on the Oakland store was a rumor that the store manager did not honor the strike and refused to let his workers take the day off. This rumor apparently was false. Would I have joined in the trashing of the store? No! Do I think those that did were cops or should be ostracized from the movement. No!

As for most of the the other targets–banks, etc–I have no problem with trashing them at the appropriate time. Was November 2, 2011 the appropriate time? I don’t think so. The focus of that day was shutting down the port and that could only be achieved by amassing large numbers of people at the port’s entrances. To Occupy Oakland’s credit this action was a success.

On to the evening. From what I can garner from news reports and conversations, email interchanges and other exchanges with friends and acquaintances who hung in the November 2 actions all day and into the early morning of November 3rd, the action ended with an attempt to take over the empty and foreclosed Traveler’s Aid building in downtown Oakland. Great idea and one that was approved by the Oakland General Assembly in principle. According to a friend who was at this action, the initial building takeover went okay. The trouble began when the police gathered into formation and began to move down Telegraph to retake the building. The crowd was rather frenzied and the ensuing attack and reaction by the crowd only served to exacerbate the situation. Unfortunately, several people were injured on both sides and the building was lost to the defenders of the bank’s property. In press releases immediately following the clashes, the police said they moved in because they assumed that there were some in the crowd of civilians that were starting fires to burn down the building. While this was not apparently the case (why would you burn down a building you wanted to occupy?), the excuse flew until it was dropped for a better one. The underlying lesson here is that if people are serious about squatting foreclosed buildings and turning them into living spaces, then they shouldn’t try and occupy them at 3 in the morning while the cops are watching, tired and ready to kick some ass. Were the occupiers right to fight back against the police? It seems to me that if they hadn’t even more protesters might have been hurt by the cops. Should they have provoked the cops by occupying the building and allowing fires to be built in trashcans and so on? See my remark above where I question the idea of occupying buildings while a bunch of angry cops are watching.

Okay. That is the situation as I understand it. A very successful strike/direct action took place in Oakland on November 2nd. It was primarily peaceful, militant and moved the struggle against the excesses of monopoly capitalism forward. No matter how hard the capitalist media tries, it can not change this objective fact. This is where the overwrought focus on the actions of a few comes in. As far back as I can remember (and that’s at least back to 1968), the mainstream media has always focused on the more histrionic actions that take place at almost every protest worth its salt. My dad used to say that that’s what sells papers. He’s right of course, but there is also something more sinister going on. The intentions of those editors who encourage their reporters to highlight the instances of violence against property and clashes with cops is to discredit the movement that organized the protest. It’s not necessarily even a conscious effort by the editors. It’s just how they are “educated” to think. In fact, it’s how most of us are “educated” to think. Many of the people that actually participated in the protest read this media too. They then began to accept that media’s framing of the protest, forgetting what they know form their own experience: that the protest was not very violent and was very successful. This acceptance then too often turns into a moral rejection not only of the scattered violence that occurred, but a rejection of those the “peaceful” protesters think carried it out. Simultaneously, the police are let off the hook for the violence they provoke and create all on their own. After all, says the capitalist press, they were only doing their job. This may be true, but begs the very real question: what exactly is their job? A simple and honest answer is that for the most part their job is to protect and serve those that own the means of production. In other words, the wealthy among us. This doesn’t deny their humanity. It just makes it clear that their jobs proscribe a certain mindset. It is important to remember that police are not nonviolent any more than any other military force.

The discussions reverberating online and in Occupy camps around the country over the trashing and clashes with police that took place in Oakland are instructive for a multitude of reasons. The primary debate is around the question of trashing. The opposition to this action that essentially involves breaking stuff runs from those who see it as a tactical error at this point of the movement to those that have a moral repugnance to it. Among those in the latter camp are those whose repugnance has led them to label the “trashers” as everything from moral cowards to provocateurs to punks and scum. This type of reaction is not only as juvenile as the name-callers consider the trashing actions to be, it misses the point. The fact is, there will always be an element in every movement worth its salt that sees trashing as a legitimate act. Some in that element may well be cops, but most are just impatient, often frustrated, and individualistic at least in terms of the longer view. They should not be ostracized (unless they are cops) but informed about the need for thoughtful actions appropriate to the time and place. Those that say they will divorce themselves from the movement unless the movement disowns the “trashers” are being every bit as selfish as those they want removed.

Another criticism from the people opposed to trashing and fighting back against the police is that those who are doing this must be outsiders and not from the “good” protesters’ Oakland. This kind of comment is mostly silly. We aren’t fans at a sporting event. This isn’t about Oakland or New York or Asheville, NC or Berlin. It is an international struggle. There is no home team. The opposition is organized internationally. The Occupy movement and those that support it must do the same. Your Oakland is my Oakland just as much as the planet Earth belongs to us all. There are no geographical outsiders, only ones defined by their class. I am in solidarity with Oakland and Berlin and every other place where, like the song says: working men (and women) defend their rights.

The issue about trashing is first and foremost, like Boots Riley continues to insist in his Facebook posts, a question of tactics. It will not be solved by dividing the movement into those who support one tactic and those that don’t. It is a serious question that should be discussed, but the stance that those who are not pacifist or nonviolent do not belong in the Occupy movement is a bullshit stance encouraged by those that wish to see the movement fail. The true violence that goes on every freaking day is precipitated by those that the movement calls the 1%. That is the thought we need to keep at the front of every conversation about violence. Not as a justification for violence by protesters, but as a reminder of the real purveyor of violence on this planet.

I want to borrow a line or two from an old leaflet I have hanging around. It was distributed back in 1984 after San Francisco police attacked a protest against Henry Kissinger (talk about purveyors of violence) and beat dozens of them. After the protest, mainstream media attempted to divide the protesters into good protesters and bad ones. The good ones were the ones that obeyed the police when they told people to move away from the hotel where Kissinger was speaking. The bad ones were those who didn’t and remained to resist the police charges and attacks.

“The media works with the government to red-bait and attack militant demonstrations. We need to reject such charges. They are attempts to force us to give up our militancy and independence and to accept the state’s terms for protests.”

The protest on November2nd, 2011 in Oakland was militant. The trashing that occurred during the day did not add to that militancy and was tactically inappropriate. The most militant action was achieved by thousands of people closing down the Port of Oakland in a nonviolent direct action. The clashes with police early the next morning were the result of the tactically poor decision to try and occupy the foreclosed Traveler’s Aid building while a bunch of angry, tired and ready-to-rumble police and protesters faced off on Telegraph Avenue. The idea to squat empty buildings is a great one. Sometimes it is appropriate to break bank windows. From my perspective, November 2nd in Oakland was not the right time for either of these actions. At the same time, the fact remains, the day of action/general strike was an outstanding success for the movement.