At Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico.

I went to Yucatan state in Mexico over the New Year holiday. We engaged in all the usual touristic activities, from visiting the amazing Mayan ruins at Uxmal, Chichen Itza, and other lesser-known archeological sites to beaches, cenotes (sinkholes with clear turquoise waters), haciendas, and remarkable wildlife, especially birds. While we were seldom far from a car or modern life, the combination of entering 2012 and being amidst both centuries-old Spanish colonial towns and even more ancient Mayan cities, made it easier to feel the longer stream of history we too are floating in.

Here in Northern California the New Age hype is already at fever pitch for the Mayan calendar’s prediction of the “end of the world” in 2012. But as we drove along country roads to long-abandoned cities of elegant stone towers, massive edifices that were apparently “apartment complexes,” and sophisticated systems of water management and interurban roadways, we came upon a surprising text in the local tourist magazine “Yucatan Today.” Anabell Castañeda writes that the Mayan prophecies do not predict an end of the world at all, but rather a “change of time:”

Not for a single moment have the Mayas feared the arrival of this date; on the contrary: the ancient Mayas have always told us to wait patiently for a change in consciousness and the evolution which that change will bring… Human beings don’t exist by chance or a work of fate, they are part of a plan to carry out a mission in this part of the universe. Nor is the world totally complete in its creation and perfection; mankind has a job to do on this planet and must be a part of its conservation. It could be said that life on planet Earth depends on humans and what we do during our existence…  The Popol-Vuh is their book of advice and it tells us: “It is time for a new dawn and to finally complete the task.”

… within this long-awaited change, it is expected that there will be a reawakening of the Mayan world in all its complexity…  We have an opportunity to experience a change of conscience which will help us to evolve as a species, protecting the natural resources which we need for our survival, and bringing about the long-awaited urgent social equity, finally understanding the importance of the human being in the universal order.”

It was charming and serendipitous to find such a prosaic interpretation of the much-cited Popol Vuh. In a way, Castañeda is placing the prophesied changes into the context of the political movements already underway, from the global efforts to put the brakes on chaotic climate change to the sweep of occupations from North Africa through the Middle East, to southern Europe and across the U.S. in 2011. Imagining the “Mayan world re-emerging in all its complexity” wasn’t so far-fetched while standing on the top of the ruins of Uxmal or Ek-Balam. In fact, Mayan life is quite present throughout Yucatan, albeit a relatively modern and Mexicanized Mayan life. (My neighbor David Miller, a practicing witch, just finished a rather different look at the Popol Vuh in “The Cosmic Ballgame” where he reads the myths and stories in it as the point of origin for cultural obsessions with sports and ball-playing!)

The massive ballcourt at Chichen-Itza, Yucatan.

Yucatecans playing baseball in their own "field of dreams," in rural Yucatan.

I was reminded of an excellent book I read many years ago, “Stolen Continents: The ‘New World’ Through Indian Eyes” by the Canadian writer Ronald Wright. He traces five great civilizations (the Iroquois, the Cherokees, the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas), describing their first contact with Europeans, their centuries-long struggles to resist subjugation, and their remarkable re-emergence in the late 20^th century. In fact, since the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969-1971, Indians in the U.S. have regained cultural pride, political initiative, and with the indigenous from around the world, a global treaty on the rights of indigenous peoples passed at the United Nations. The descendents of the Incan empire, a vast and highly sophisticated urban culture that spanned much of western South America (from today’s southern Colombia through Ecuador and Peru to northern Chile), have been making themselves felt in all the countries of the Andes.

While travelling in Yucatan I was reading an interesting book recently published by AK Press in Oakland, a translated work by a Uruguayan writer Raúl Zibechi (and ably translated by Ramor Ryan) called “Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces”. It’s not a long book, only 140 pages, but as the double forewords from John Holloway and Benjamin Dangl emphasize, Zibechi’s look at the rebellions in Bolivia during the past decades is an incredibly important contribution to the wider political moment encompassed by everything from the Arab Spring to the Spanish Indignados to Occupy Oakland and the rest. Zibechi is well-versed in the broad shift to the left that has been unfolding across Latin America during the past two decades, and has been an important critic of that process—not from the right though, but from the point of view of the social movements that pushed the states across the continent to move leftward, and then found themselves isolated and marginalized as the old hierarchies and political parties institutionalized and defanged the movements themselves. Not in Bolivia though, and this is why this is such an important book.

The Aymara of the altiplano (the indigenous of Bolivia’s highlands) have managed to create social movements that remained active, creative, and resilient even after Evo Morales and his socialist party came to power in 2006. Moreover, the epicenter of their movement has been El Alto, a sprawling urban zone of several hundred thousand adjacent to the nation’s capital in La Paz. John Holloway (author of “Crack Capitalism” and “Change the World Without taking Power”) says it well in his foreword, juxtaposing the urban Bolivian movements to the rural, peasant-based Zapatista movement that inspired so many in the 1990s:

“The question for us who are not peasants is how we create an urban Zapatismo. How can we create autonomous, anti-capitalist, anti-state spaces or moments in the city? El Alto offers us many suggestions… The real forces for social change are not where they appear to be. They are not in the institutions or in the parties but in the daily contact between people, the daily weaving of social interactions that are not just necessary for survival but the basis of life.”

Zibechi traces the history of Bolivia back through earlier social upheavals based on the once-powerful tin miners, visiting the insurrections that arose in response to the privatization of water (by San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation) in the city of Cochabamba in 2000, and the natural gas war that gave birth to new community (self-)organization in 2003 to refuse the multinational appropriation of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon wealth. With great understanding of the nuances of the Bolivian context, Zibechi shows how the community itself became a “machine of dispersal,” refusing centralization, refusing to allow its new-found powers to disappear into political parties, state-based patronage machines, or even into the organizations they built themselves at earlier moments. Insisting on recallable and rotating delegates they have developed social mechanisms where individuals “lead by following,” ensuring that power keeps devolving back to the grassroots.

The Occupy movements that swept the U.S. in fall 2001 instituted the General Assembly as the main decision-making institution, with its often ponderous inefficiencies and frustrating problems with people learning an entirely new way to do politics in the heat of the moment. The form, while new to many Americans, is far from new in history, and community assemblies were and are the bedrock of the Bolivian social movements that have kept even Morales’ government in a state of constant reaction. Zibechi’s book is a fantastic in-depth look at how they’ve done it, without overly romanticizing or distorting the actual histories he describes. To be sure, the Bolivians have not unburdened themselves of the crushing weight of the state and the world market. Zibechi traces the interaction between the forces of dispersion and liberation and those tendencies that move toward forms of the state, new dynamics of centralization and cooptation through representation. In Bolivia, like in New York, Oakland, and elsewhere, the process is unfolding and is far from settled. For those who are looking for inspiration, new ways to think about self-organization in urban contexts, “Dispersing Power” is an important book.

The famous arch at Labna, Yucatan, as illustrated by Frederick Catherwood in the 1840s.

This iconic arch at Labna is used in a lot of tourist promotions. In a book called "The Lost Cities of the Mayans" the illustration above shows the same arch as it was just being dug out of deep jungle and soil.

By happy coincidence I was given for Xmas while in Mexico a beautiful big art book called “The Lost Cities of the Mayas,” which features the watercolors of Frederick Catherwood, an artist and lawyer who came to visit Yucatan and Central America in search of “lost cities” in the 1830s and 1840s. Published by Artes de Mexico in 1999 in a big 14”x10” hardbound format, the images Catherwood drew of Mayan ruins in the 1840s leap to life, most of the buildings in far worse shape than they are today, then still partially buried in dense jungle and beneath centuries of accumulated tropical soils. The Victorian romance of exploring and discovery obscures any self-awareness of empire, and was no antidote to the inevitable malaria that hit Catherwood and most of his contemporaries who arrived in those early days. Within a decade of his visit, the Mayans long descended from the builders of these incredible cities rose up against the colonizers and by the early 1880s had driven Spaniards and Mexican upper classes two walled cities at Campeche and Merida. The nearly unknown (to U.S. visitors) “Caste War” lasted for more than a half century and perhaps provides a foundation for future revolts of the Mayan peoples going forward.

Uxmal Pyramid by Frederick Catherwood, early 1840s.

Pyramid at Chichen-Itza by Frederick Catherwood, c. 1840s.

Iconic temple at Chichen-Itza.

Standing on ancient ruins in Yucatan reminded me of our temporality, the transience of civilizations, even ones which seem quite established and permanent. Perhaps someday someone will be standing on the flooded ruins of San Francisco’s Financial District ruminating in similar ways about the fleeting passage of our own strange claim to “civilization.”

Documentary proof that the Mayans invented Lego!

“Progress consists of the application of intelligence to the reduction of effort and dependency, and the expansion of a sphere of idleness and individual freedom.”

—Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After The Future

The Occupy movement is going through a pivotal moment right now, with various camps—notably Oakland, Portland, and New York City—being destroyed by police action during the past few days. The punditocracy and the politicians are all hoping this will bring it to an end, but that is not going to happen. It is likely that the focus on camping and holding public plazas may give way to new tactics, but the newly vocal populations all over the U.S. are not going to be silenced just as they’ve rediscovered their voices.

Arriving at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland on November 2, we were met with this amazing scene.

Walking around the area, the scenes of everyone together were endlessly inspiring. An historic day!

In particular, the Oakland General Strike of November 2 was an historic event. For the first time in the U.S. an urban General Strike emerged from the new working classes, the precarious, the unemployed, the unorganized, and the poor, brought together 2,000-strong in the Occupy Oakland General Assembly on October 26 and voting 96% in favor. One week later it happened, and it was an amazing day.

General Strikes are not so rare in other parts of the world, of course. Several cities in Syria have been out for almost two weeks as I write. Italy and France have had many one-day general strikes in the past decades. But those have been led by giant trade union confederations, and kept under pretty tight control.

The Oakland General Strike was an opening salvo from an unexpected quarter: the “precariat” (a neologism made by combing precarious and proletariat). Local unions could not formally endorse the call in such a short time, and are often bound by no-strike clauses in their contracts. Nevertheless, rank-and-file members of the Service workers (SEIU 1021), the Teamsters, the Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and others, enthusiastically joined in during the day-long festival that gripped the center of Oakland, culminating in the mass marches towards dusk that shut down the Port of Oakland, the nation’s fifth largest. But organized labor was following, not leading this General Strike. The people filled the city center with music, banners, marches, humor, performance, food, yoga, meditation, childcare, art-making, and more. Rappers, hip-hop spoken word artists, and folk musicians all performed in the streets. Urban farmers showed up with free vegetables grown in the city’s reclaimed lots. Free valet bike parking was provided by local bicycle advocates. Dozens of economic and environmental justice activists were in the mix. The Oakland General Strike not only halted business as usual in much of Oakland, but demonstrated practical everyday alternatives that are already well entrenched in the area.

Much to my surprise, the Teamsters showed up with a truck load of hamburgers and hot dogs from the Alameda County Labor Council which they fed to all comers for hours.

This table offered free veggies from the East Oakland schools farmers market.

This booth had already given away all its food by the time I took this photo.

Most hopefully, the Oakland General Strike excited everyone who turned out, leading to cascading feelings of solidarity and possibility, which in turn flows out of Oakland and across the networks of occupiers everywhere. Solidarity messages flowed in from as far away as Egypt, while Oakland suddenly found itself in the eyes of the world. The one-day strike was a powerful demonstration to local and national elites, but more importantly, it was a powerful demonstration to participants and allies, shifting imaginations about what is possible.

This boisterous Children's Brigade was amazing, hilarious, and wildly inspirational!

This Children's Village was an integral part of the Oakland Commune at the plaza in front of City Hall... hardly looks like a security or public health hazard does it?

The medical tent at the Occupy Oakland camp, November 2, 2011.

This IS what history looks like!

Mona and her great sign.

Music and dance erupted all over the area.

Habana Matanza played right along the route of the big anti-capitalism march during the afternoon.

The attempt to seize an empty, nearby building late that night, leading to a skirmish with police and some minor property damage in the area, gave rise to a counterspin that dominated the following days’ news coverage. In fact, a vigorous debate erupted among many participants about the limits of various tactics, the meaning of nonviolent mass action, democracy, accountability and more. All of this demoralized some, but were necessary steps in the evolution and maturation of the movement. With the state repression of the past days, occupiers will be seeking new ways to creatively advance the larger challenge to the status quo.

Several banks along the afternoon march got vandalized and windows broken.

Bank of America rebuked.

The black bloc during the anti-capitalist march, a while after the attack on Whole Foods and moments before an attack on the Bank of America near Lake Merritt.

Postcards from the revolution? The theater of the black bloc is unmistakeable, as is the petty vandalism some of them engage in. One protester was dogging them saying "this is how the Nazi Party started!"... I do wonder how anarchists and left communists can feel comfortable adopting a black uniform, masking their identities, and engaging in macho actions that depend on the safety provided by thousands who have no say about their choices.

Just after this banner we came upon an unusual sight...

... a small group of marchers had already broken off to clean paint bombs from the bank walls!

How long before this strange political theater is added to promotional advertising for the cleaning products?

Let’s take a deeper look at the social context that the Occupy movement has emerged from.

For the past few decades American politics has shifted steadily rightward. Neoliberalism swept the world and in the U.S. it was anchored in the “Washington consensus” that promoted privatization, reduced government spending, shredded social safety nets, all backed up by police and military. The 9/11 attacks were the pretext for restriction of civil liberties and expansion of police state powers, as well as a decade of wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia. Ten years later the U.S. is still bogged down there and is now murdering its own citizens in Arabian deserts (ostensibly at peace) without trial, conviction, or sentence. Obama was elected by a population ready to restore civility, honesty, and social solidarity but like every politician from our One-Party (two-faction) system, his exercise of power has served the 1% at everyone else’s expense.

The siren song of democracy dies hard though. People have streamed into the Occupy camps, often to visit and talk rather than to stay and camp. In the General Assemblies countless people are discovering a nascent direct democracy that slakes their long unquenched thirst for genuine politics. The 99% meme has been enormously helpful in opening a space that invites everyone in. Obviously the actual campers are not 99% of the population. But by holding to that claim, everyone from the unemployed white middle-aged factory worker and the laid-off middle manager, to the unemployed Ph.D.s and newly minted college students, to the millions of foreclosed and laid off, to the permanently unemployed underclass living on the streets of the U.S., have been welcomed into the process.

In the Occupy camps people from different economic situations have met face to face again after three decades of stigmatizing and ostracizing the people labeled “homeless.” To be sure, there are many people with severe mental health issues living on the streets, victims of a callous dismantling of social services during the rise of neoliberalism. The Occupy camps have been an obvious beacon to people who are hungry, cold, and alone in the harsh life of the streets. The camps have been feeding thousands of people, providing basic medical services, and reconnecting participants to a genuine social solidarity. The daily interactions and shared life of the camps have helped reduce the walls that poverty, race, and class animosities have built. Too many folks living paycheck to paycheck have been able to believe the myth that “I’m not like THEM!” That false bravado has reinforced the moralistic judgment that people living on the streets have somehow brought it on themselves. Now that most of the 99% realize they too are being robbed, and their precious lifestyles are in jeopardy, the fissures cultivated between middle-working class people and the very poor are starting to shrink.

The people of North America have watched their wealth diminish while the super-rich have grown immensely richer (often overlooked in this saga is how most of the Global South has been kept in desperate poverty during the looting of their economic resources by the same super-rich). While this shift in wealth has gone unchecked, the work that most of us do to reproduce life has changed too. Manufacturing work has plunged while digital “infolabor” has grown enormously, along with a huge expansion in low-wage jobs at Walmart, McDonalds, and other “service sector” businesses. The rapidly rising cost of health care has also fueled the vast growth of hospitals and drugstores but especially the insurance bureaucracies, with the legions of employees needed to keep it all going.

The well-documented deindustrialization of North America has also led to the destruction of many once-thriving neighborhoods and even whole cities like Detroit, and led to the hollowing out of many others, including San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the wake of these jarring economic dislocations, people have been on the move. Not only do we have millions of recent immigrants from Asia and South America, but Americans have been on the move too. This has led to a breakdown in established neighborhoods and communities, and a further fragmentation of daily life at the residential level. Who knows their neighbors anymore? Who knows the people they work with very well? Everyone is constantly changing jobs, changing homes.

These changes in work—in how we make our lives—have changed our social conditions too. The most obvious change is how many hours every day many of us spend on the internet, looking for jobs, looking for love, reading emails, following friends on Facebook, uploading and linking images and ideas, etc., trying to stay “connected.” But no matter how long we’re online, we are always falling behind the rush of information, the mounting pile of messages, the articles we’ve bookmarked or downloaded but not returned yet to read. All of this individualized hyperproductivity is at the root of the fragmented, atomized lives we’ve been living. No matter how much we “connect” online, we find ourselves quite isolated at home in front of our computers or TVs.

The Occupy movement, by returning life to public spaces, is a passionate rebuke to that isolation.

A smart book called “After The Future” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi provides insights into these deeper changes. He connects the increased digitization of work with the rise in anxiety, depression, and suicide in the recent past.

“I don’t think this wave of suicides can be explained in terms of morality, family values, and the weak discourse conservative thought uses to account for the ethical drift produced by capitalism. To understand our contemporary form of ethical shipwreck, we need to reflect on the transformations of activity and labor, the subsumption of mental time under the competitive realm of productivity; we have to understand the mutation of the cognitive and psychosocial system… This … produces painful effects in the conscious organism and we read them through the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic, depression, and a sort of suicidal epidemic … Cybertime (the time of attention, memory, and imagination) cannot speed beyond a limit. If it does, it cracks. And it is actually cracking, collapsing under the stress of hyperproductivity. An epidemic of panic is spreading throughout the circuits of the social brain. An epidemic of depression is following the outbreak of panic. The crisis of the new economy at the beginning of the zero zero decade has to be seen as a consequences of this nervous breakdown…. In the sphere of net-production, it is the social brain that is assaulted by the overwhelming supply of attention-demanding goods. This is why the social factory has become the factory of unhappiness: the assembly line of net-production is directly exploiting the emotional energy of the virtual class. We have to become aware of it; we have to recognize ourselves as cognitarians. Flesh, body, desire, in permanent electrostimulation.”

Not everyone is embedded within the realm of digital labor. But the vast majority of the population is increasingly precarious. Full-time permanent jobs are a thing of the past and only a tiny few will ever have them. I’ve written about this in Nowtopia, and often on this blog too. Berardi does a fine job of summarizing this new social situation:

Full employment is over. The world does not need so much labor and so much exploitation. A radical reduction of labor time is necessary. Basic income has to be affirmed as a right to life, independent of employment and disjoined from the lending of labor time. Competence, knowledge, and skills have to be separated from the economic context of exchange value and rethought in terms of free social activity.

“The word “precariat” generally stands for work that no longer has fixed rules about labor relations, salary, or the length of the work day. However, if we analyze the past, we see that these rules functioned only for a short period at the heart of the twentieth century, under the political pressures of unions and workers, in conditions of (almost) full employment. Thanks to a generally strong regulatory role played by the state in the economy, some limits to the natural violence of capitalist dynamics could be legally established. The legal obligations that in certain periods have protected society from the violence of capital were always founded on political and material relations of force (workers’ violence against the violence of capital). Thanks to political force, it became possible to affirm rights, establish laws, and protect them as personal rights. With the decline in the political force of the workers’ movement, the natural precariousness and brutality of labor relations in capitalism have re-emerged.

If we analyze the technical transformations introduced by the digitalization of the productive cycle, we see that the essential point is not that the labor relation has become precarious (which, after all, it has always been), but the dissolution of the person as active productive agent, as labor power. The cyberspace of global production can be described as an immense expanse of depersonalized human time… Capital no longer recruits people but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers… The mobile phone is the tool that makes possible the connection between the needs of semiocapital and the mobilization of the living labor of cyberspace. The ringtone of the mobile phone calls the workers to reconnect their abstract time to the reticular flux.

As we go about our daily lives in the U.S., we are bombarded by endless rhetoric about freedom. Politicians constantly brag about how free we are, how this is the greatest country in the world, ad nauseum. We know better. The Occupy movement has brought us into public together to repudiate the lies that dominate this society. Among the biggest lies is the notion that we are free as individuals when we are at work. On top of that illusion, we are also repeatedly admonished that we need a lot of education to be capable of holding the high-skilled jobs of the 21^st century. In both cases, these claims are false. We are far from free, and most jobs can be learned in a very short time. Now that we have an insecure relationship to work, too many people bury themselves in endless rounds of skill development, trying to remain desirable for at least the occasional contract job.

Here’s Berardi again, describing the real world we find ourselves confronted with:

[The person’s] liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds. If we consider the conditions in which the work of the majority of human, proletariat and cognitariat, is actually carried out in our time, if we examine the conditions of the average wage globally, if we consider the current cancellation of previous labor rights, we can say with no rhetorical exaggeration that we live in a regime of slavery… From the point of view of the valorization of capital, flow is continuous, but from the point of view of the existence and time of cognitive workers, productive activity has the character of recombinant fragmentation in cellular form. Pulsating cells of work are lit and extinguished in the large control room of global production. Infolabor is innately precarious, not because of the contingent viciousness of employers but for the simple reason that the allocation of work time can be disconnected from the individual and legal person of the worker, an ocean of valorizing cells convened in a cellular way and recombined by the subjectivity of capital.

The Occupy movement is a sudden sea change in how we respond to this fragmented world. Instead of accepting our individual predicament, thousands of people have rediscovered public space, and in it a public, shared life. The implications of the Oakland General Strike in this context are huge. Sure, a portion of the working population of one city of less than a half million took a day off during an unusually summer-like November week. But having stopped our participation in the planetary work machine, even for a day, beckons us to consider what we might do instead, what we might do if we stop working for the 1% not just for a day, but forever. The possibilities that emerge from a collective strike are infinite: the beautiful world we COULD make together is suddenly almost within grasp.

It’s difficult to imagine redesigning the basic activities by which we produce our shared lives. Science and technology seem to be independent forces, outside of social or democratic control. Clearly the thrust of technological development for more than a hundred years has been to remove skill and decision-making from workers and embed it in technical systems. One outcome of this is to leave us all feeling that there’s nothing we can do about the overarching stupidity of modern life—“that’s just the way it is,” we tell ourselves. Berardi describes how this shapes democracy itself: “Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism… No room for political choice is left, as corporate principles have become embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.”

Berardi wrote the chapters in After The Future as separate essays over the years 2000-2009, and he did not imagine something like the Occupy movement being possible any longer. His diagnosis of an epidemic of depression can easily be directed at himself, but he amusingly reminds us that he could be wrong. In fact, he has a number of suggestions for the future of social revolt that dovetail closely with what I’ve written previously, especially the way I described the Critical Mass bike rides as an act of collective “assertive desertion.” (Interesting too to note Portland’s Elly Blue’s essay noting the presence of CM cyclists in many Occupations.) At this important juncture in the Occupy movement, maybe these ideas should be in the mix, especially as the tired polarization between theatrical vandalism and moralistic pacifism has again emerged to try everyone’s patience.

Berardi rejects the macho posturing of the young militants who, dressed in black masks engage in bursts of targeted vandalism and occasionally skirmish with police lines. “Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater, Haliburton, secret services, mafia?” Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House” takes the argument a major step forward:

The state would like us to be violent. Violence as cooptation tries to make us more like them, and if we’re like them they win twice—once because being unlike them is our goal and again because we’re then easier to imprison, brutalize, marginalize, etc. We have another kind of power, though the term nonviolence only defines what it is not; some call our power people power. It works. It’s powerful. It’s changed and it’s changing the world.

But it’s likely that this movement for deep change and deep renewal of society will take longer than a few months. Thousands and millions of people filling the streets, occupying plazas, blocking highways, and stopping their stupid jobs through General Strikes may happen, but it won’t be sudden and overnight. In the meantime, to rebuild the social solidarity that has been so damaged by the last decades’ shattering of communities, we need a strategy that begins to build the new world in the crumbling shell of this one.

Reclaiming our time and technological know-how from the market, and directing our own work ourselves can start anywhere, and has already started in countless efforts across the world. Here’s how Berardi describes assertive desertion in his own terms:

Only withdrawal, passivity, abandonment of the labor market, of the illusions of full employment and a fair relation between labor and capital, can open a new way. Only self-reliant communities leaving the field of social competition can open a way to a new hope. … In this context, passivity does not mean ethical resignation, but refusal of participation. Capitalism is demanding participation, collaboration, active intervention in the economy, competition and entrepreneurship, critical consumption, constructive critique. All this is fake. Activism is fake, when no horizon can be seen. Radical passivity means active withdrawal, and withdrawal means creation of spaces of autonomy where solidarity can be rebuilt, and where self-relying communities can start a process of proliferation, contagion, and eventually, a reversal of the trend.

The beauty of this is that it is already underway. It’s not what most people are doing yet, but enough are that we can see in such initiatives the seeds of a new life sprouting. In Nowtopia I talked about the Marxist concept of “general intellect” as finally becoming a terrain of open contestation. Withdrawal and repurposing of our technological know-how is a good example of that in practice. I like this last excerpt from Berardi as a guidepost to the coming era:

The task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting with autonomous forms of production using high-tech-low-energy methods—while avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population.

The confrontations have been at the heart of the Occupy movement. No doubt they will continue to be for some time. But if they begin to wane, or even just take a winter break, it’s good to think of the many things we can do that get us ready for the next wave of refusal and reinvention.

Here, to conclude, are some last images from the march to the Port of Oakland and its successful closure during the November 2, 2011 General Strike in Oakland.

I was with about 80+ bicyclists who rode ahead of the 4 pm march to reach the Port in time to stop the evening shift from arriving to work. We felt like a cavalry arriving as we approached on this overpass.

Other early arrivals and the bicyclists stopped the major port access area.

The 4 pm march left downtown across the freeway, heading to the Port.

At Maritime and 7th, a cluster of cyclists stopped traffic in all directions for more than an hour, preventing longshore workers from getting to their piers to work (most local workers, including the folks in the blocked cars and trucks here, expressed support for the action).

Thousands of marchers filled the Port and shut it down for the evening.

Banner hanging near 14th and Broadway in front of Oscar Grant Plaza across from Oakland's City Hall.

We’re living in the midst of a fantastically exciting historic moment. I don’t know about you, but I have spent years thinking about these kinds of social ruptures, wishing for that sudden lurch in history when things change so fast. I spoke about this at the conclusion of many of the Nowtopia talks I gave around the world during the past 3 years, the palpable frustration that many attendees had with the snail’s pace of history. I reminded that history can suddenly accelerate, make a dramatic lurch… forward? Sideways? Backwards? You never know ahead of time, and you can’t predict what will catalyze it (for sure, the planned actions of a vanguardist minority cannot will it into being). Right now, clearly, we’re surging into exciting directions.

Like a sudden rain covering a desert landscape with incredible wildflowers after years of drought, the Occupy Wall Street movement has connected us across the world, but just as importantly has connected folks in the U.S. to our own histories from past decades. The triumphalist domination of the ultra-right in U.S. media and politics has done its utmost to deny, ridicule, and obscure the vital social movements and histories that entered the historic narrative loudly in the 1960s and 1970s, and never went away. Of course, the parties and organizations of the New Left and its aftermath crumbled, and most trade unions in the U.S have gone through massive shrinkage while accepting a junior role at the heel of the Democratic Party. But the social revolution that helped subvert the military and end the Vietnam War, that demanded equal rights for women, that advanced ethnic studies and racial diversity, that put pleasure and cooperation ahead of sacrifice and competition, and that began the reconfiguration of our material lives under the guiding sensibility of ecological sanity, deeply changed U.S. life. The Culture War still being fought so viciously by Faux News and its acolytes speaks to the ongoing power of these social transformations.

But many of us have lacked a political voice for more than a generation. We are not represented in our “representative democracy,” and many of us have long stopped expecting to be. There are very few politicians who speak for the values that we are already living by. Even if a “progressive” voice gets into office, they are drowned by the monied interests that surround them in a corrupted political system. In the larger scheme of things, these past decades have also seen the seizure of economic and political power by an increasingly brazen class of white-collar criminals who have done their best to subvert the rule of law, and will engage in any kind of fraud, even mass murder, to keep their power and this system intact. Obama has proven to be a very helpful servant to this gang, what with his refusal to prosecute the countless crimes of his predecessors, not to mention the impunity that financial criminals have enjoyed.

The system itself is broken, and that’s what the Occupy movement speaks to, loudly and clearly. The emergence of General Assemblies as the embodiment of a true direct democracy has been breathtaking, especially in its wide adoption across the middle of the country where we’ve all come to expect only reactionary conservatism. But these ideas haven’t fallen in from the sky, or emerged from a vacuum. They are the product of nearly a half century of organizing, of transforming how we live on a personal basis day to day, in addition to creating a panoply of new projects and cultural efforts. Formal political organizations withered away, perhaps deservedly, and it is only in the Occupy Movement that we are finding a collective political voice for the millions who have been left out, economically, culturally, and politically.

The Oakland Commune, or “¡Que Se Vayan Todos!”*

Around the Bay Area, Oakland has been the core of the Occupy movement. There are occupations in San Jose, Berkeley, Santa Rosa, and of course San Francisco, but none have had the size, coherence, and political savvy that Oakland’s has had. From its inception on Indigenous People’s Day, the occupation of Oscar Grant Plaza (formerly known as Frank Ogawa Plaza) in front of Oakland’s City Hall has been built on long-standing principles of horizontality, inclusiveness, and a frank refusal to collaborate with existing politicians, police, or institutions. Even still, they found support among local unions, notably ILWU Local 10, a Teamsters local that sent a semi- over full of supplies, the Oakland Teachers and Librarians, California Nurses, and others. The brutal military operation that dislodged the occupation for 24 hours only strengthened and broadened its support. Having a so-called “progressive” Mayor in Oakland proved the point that so many of us have made for so long: you can’t work within the system and expect to successfully change how it behaves.

Banner on tent in Occupy Oakland camp.

Mellow afternoon at Occupy Oakland, Oct. 15, ten days before military assault.

Much like the camps that popped up when people gathered to oppose the G8 in Germany, or at the Climate conference in Copenhagen, a festive, well-organized camp took shape, seen here Oct. 15, 2011.

Free food 24/7, free information, places to discuss and plan...

... even places for kids to be.

Ye Olde Supply Tent!

But a deeper problem is unmasked in this assault, and the following evening’s confrontation between protesters and police. Local police departments have been fully militarized. The disgustingly named Dept. of Homeland Security has spent the past decade pouring billions into preparing to handle domestic unrest. This is not entirely unprecedented either, since the federalization of local policing goes back to Nixon and his founding of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which gave us such paragons of domestic tranquility as SWAT teams. But the global war unleashed during the Bush years is going strong, with U.S. citizens assassinated in far-off lands without indictment, trial, or conviction, just the OK of the president and the spooks he commands. How long before Ninja Turtle cops start snatching people off the streets and “renditioning” them to some dark secret prison for interrogation? So far, there are no limits in a society dedicated to “fighting terror,” which actually means a society dedicated to “living in terror” by categorizing dissent as “terroristic”.

What did Oakland spend over a million dollars trying to destroy? A camp of 150 or so tents, with a fully functioning public kitchen distributing free, healthy food 24 hours a day, a thriving childcare zone, a free speech “constant caucus” tent, a bulging supply center with stores of basic necessities free to those who needed them, a beautiful amphitheater reinhabited for direct democracy all day every day, a free library and info-zone. Mostly they tried to destroy an autonomous, open community of people determined to reinvent the basics of our shared life. The heavy-handed, pre-dawn military attack, ostensibly to “protect public safety and hygiene,” can’t be understood without understanding how much this genuine form of democracy threatens the status quo. They had to blatantly lie about their motivations to justify it—there were no problems with Emergency Medical people getting in to the camp, and the porta-potties were adequate for the camp’s needs (perhaps they could have been maintained more regularly, but that would be a cheap problem to fix, if that were really the issue). Public safety was well-maintained within the camp by the campers themselves. When police tried to enter the camp they would be surrounded and escorted out as quickly as possible. The riot cops guarding the perimeter of the plaza on Tuesday night were barraged with chants of “Who Are You Defending?” and they responded with tear-gas and stun grenades. One cop called in with his troop from the Hayward police glibly refused to accept responsibility for his participation when queried by a friend of mine. “Hey, I’ve got my pension, and I just don’t think about it!”

Sheriffs defending the plaza they overran in pre-dawn hours, late afternoon, Oct. 25. They would relinquish it the next day.

Far from intimidated, thousands turned out to repudiate the attack that morning. This is on Broadway near 13th.

Over-equipped militarized police defend the Oakland jail, Oct. 25.

Echoes of the Paris Commune?...

So the fear and loathing of local police, well established after BART police murdered Oscar Grant and Charles Hill, finds its further justification in the military attack unleashed on Occupy Oakland. Remarkably, popular outrage has been so strong and so widely shared that Oscar Grant Plaza is already reclaimed for the Occupation, and the police have had to stand down. Mayor Quan is finished, her credibility and authority has been shredded by events. But what is so exciting is that the social movement is intact and stronger than ever.

This is not to say that it’s clear sailing ahead. Far from it. The “oogles” (the anti-social, largely dysfunctional street kids who have been all too present in the OccupySF camp) are an ongoing problem, as are the genuinely psychotic people who live on the streets all over the country, and are understandably attracted to the vibrancy and material support available in the occupations. The influx of liberals underway also represents a huge challenge. To wit, the self-appointed Occupy Wall Street financial committee in New York has already begun to act like bankers, unilaterally withholding the $20,000 pledged to Occupy Oakland by OWS while attaching various conditions to the money.

The urge to fold this movement into the moribund political structures of the U.S. is still there too, with unionists, Democrats, and various leftists all bent on creating an acceptable list of reformist demands, or pushing occupiers into supporting or opposing various politicians on the grounds of “realism.” So far, most local movements have resisted this, and in the General Assemblies and attendant working groups, new ground is being opened on a daily basis.

History is still unfolding, we’re soaking in it every day! Don’t miss this! Occupy Everywhere!

* “Out with All of Them!” the slogan of the Argentineans during their upheaval in 2000-2001 wherein they deposed 4 presidents in a few months…

October 25 marchers in downtown Oakland.

On October 22, Occupy Oakland took to the streets and marched across the city.

Banned books in the lead!

Humorous home-made signs are everywhere these days.

Mainstream support is surprisingly widespread too...

Many of us watched the financial meltdown that happened in 2008 and continues its repercussions to the present idiotic debate on deficits and debt (as though it were all the public workers and poor people of the country who had massively looted the public treasury, rather than Halliburton and Goldman Sachs!) with various reactions from amusement, horror, schadenfreude, to excited anticipation. The future stretching ahead of us bodes ill, though, and while we should work towards a revolt that challenges/rejects the austerity agenda, until such a rebellion starts, life is going to keep getting harder for more and more people. Unemployment is soaring (which would be fine if it didn’t mean an abject lack of resources as a result) and the frontal assault by the ultra-rich on the social safety net is going strong. Tepid Democratic defenses that involve pre-emptively agreeing to entirely wrong-headed frames of reference only accelerate social disintegration.

I have been reading a lot lately, finally finding time to finish a few books that have been beckoning me. I read David McNally’s brilliant “Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance”, a book that I can’t recommend highly enough. I also managed to plow through all 517 pages of “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America” by Richard White, also a fantastic history that I highly recommend. Taken together they reinforce each other across time and space. Both look at periods of about a quarter century in which capitalism radically reorganized economies and enclosed vast geographies and human cultures into new market relations simultaneously—one in the latter part of the 19th century, the other about a century later.

Railroaded covers the rise of the railroads from what I’d like to say is a “Processed World” perspective. That is to say, rather than the triumphalist, Darwinist narrative of the rise of the corporation as a victory of efficiency and intelligence, and the railroads as the most compelling example of the corporate form in the 19th century, Richard White looks at the venality, stupidity, and corruption that were the deep foundation of the expansion of railroads across North America (including Mexico and Canada, which as he shows, was driven by the same logic and even many of the same men and investment syndicates). Rather than presenting the Union Pacific or Southern Pacific as these all-powerful organizations that earned the nickname “Octopus” (in SP’s case) these were inefficient, badly built, poorly maintained, largely unnecessary, and extremely destructive industrial companies. White unmasks the internal workings of these railroad corporations in all their glorious ineptitude, showing how the owners were back-biting, small-minded men (including especially Leland Stanford, the namesake of White’s university employer!) who knew nothing about railroads, and probably even less about managing businesses, but in many cases (Collis Huntington, Jay Gould, William Villard) were extremely good at buying and bullying the politicians they needed to get the public monies their grand schemes required.

The railroads were laughably unprofitable for the thousands of British and German and New England investors who were fleeced again and again by the slick salesmen of western railroads, who pointed to the federal guarantees and long-term bonds they issued as proof of their solvency. But the owners of railroads made their fortunes by building elaborate interlocking corporate structures, full of holding companies, junk bonds, insecure securities, and the whole panoply of chimerical financial instruments we’ve come to know so well in the last decade of derivatives, collateralized debt swaps, etc. When their business empires began to totter, they’d run to their bought-and-paid-for senators and congressman in Washington D.C. to get new appropriations, rollovers of old debts, new authorizations for long-term bonds guaranteed by the U.S. government, and for a time, they’d continue the shell game that made them personally rich while bankrupting dozens of railroads by the early 1890s. As White puts it, “Railroads caromed across the continent, creating systems that in toto made no rational sense but that could yield vast personal fortunes through construction, speculation, and financial manipulation.”

One of the more interesting tidbits I gleaned from his well-documented and thoughtful work has to do with the argument he makes that the railroads were fundamentally unnecessary at the time they were built. He grants that regional railroads were useful, and that in California for example, the primary function of bringing manufactured goods to the rural areas served by the railroad, and the agricultural surpluses grown there back to San Francisco for processing and export, was a real market and generated real profits. But the railroads that crossed the far west had no real purpose, and couldn’t compete with the more efficient and less expensive steamship service that connected San Francisco with the East by way of the Panamanian Isthmus. Here is an extended excerpt describing how the railroads had to buy off the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to keep it from driving them out of business:

By the late 1880s little had changed. Charles Francis Adams [president of the Union Pacific Railroad] testified before the Pacific Railway Commission that the Pacific Mail Steamship Company “could reduce the rate… until it would make the business worthless to us, and yet make something itself” on traffic to the East Coast. This was an amazing statement, one worth lingering over, for it meant that the railroads really were not necessary for much of the freight traffic between the East and the Far West. If the Pacific Mail wished to do so, it could dominate the traffic. The question then becomes why it did not do so?

 

The first part of the answer is that the Pacific Mail was a lazy and corrupt corporation. It had, as its name indicated, a federal subsidy to carry the mail. It carried coffee and fruit from Central America to San Francisco and sent rice, lumber, flour, and goods from San Francisco wholesalers in return. It also carried manufactured goods from New York and sent wine, lead, rags, and perhaps rice back. It did not carry wheat. That went by sailing ship. The second part of the answer is that the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, recognizing their vulnerability to rate cutting by the Pacific Mail, offered to pay what amounted to a subsidy for the company to raise its rates. The Pacific Mail consented. It could make more money by doing less.

 

The subsidy that the railroads paid Pacific Mail remained in operation for most of the period from 1870 into the 1890s; it took the form of an agreement to buy space in its steamers at above-market prices first by the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific and later, by the Transcontinental Association. The railroads acted as a freight agent, either reselling this space at the prevailing transcontinental railroad rates to shippers, leaving it empty, or, as the Southern Pacific did, shipping the equipment it needed to build in Mexico by sea rather than by rail. In return the Pacific Mail charged rates identical to those of the railroads, did not add new ships, and refused to solicit traffic to compete with the railroads.

The notion that transcontinental railroads made life better for Americans is boosterish pap, unjustified by any rational cost-benefit analysis, and especially if one takes into account factors that don’t often enter ledger sheets. They wasted incredible amounts of money, had to be completely rebuilt not long after their original construction, took huge amounts of resources to maintain, and left a swath of environmental and social devastation wherever they went.

Transcontinental railroads were a Gilded Age extravagance that rent holes in the political, social, and environmental fabric of the nation, creating railroads as mismanaged and corrupt as they were long, but this argument does not meet the central contention of their defenders: life for American was better because of them… Lloyd Mercer… has calculated that both the first transcontinentals—the UP and CP—and the last of the 19th-century roads, the Great Northern… would have made adequate returns on their investments over a twenty-year time frame without a subsidy… His is the classic social benefits calculator with only plus signs and no minus signs. It has no subtracting of the possible social costs of land grants, the endless disputes over taxes and loss of local revenues from taxes, and much more. There is no consideration of environmental costs or losses to Indians. Indian economies might bleed profusely, but they are treated as so many economic blood donors: their losses are counted as benefits to non-Indians.

 

In assessing the social utility of the railroads, I want to include social costs harder for economists to measure. I want to be conscious of the price—not necessarily calculated in losses that markets measure—and to consider who benefited and who lost. The issue facing the transcontinental railroads was a simple one. Having built ahead of demand, they had to create traffic in places where there was precious little to sell. Given their high fixed costs, the railroads could not simply wait for profitable traffic to appear. Hauling something, even at a loss, was better than hauling nothing. In attempting to cut economic losses, the railroads helped create both what might be called dumb growth and environmental catastrophes. Bison became the first victims of dumb growth.

But there would be many more victims of dumb growth, going well beyond the story of western railroads, right up to the present. As we contemplate the rising tides, spreading droughts and floods, deforestation and factory farming, food surpluses and widespread famine, dumb growth is the underlying logic that keeps modern society, lemming-like, rushing towards the abyss. Suburbia alone, spreading across the best farm lands of North America and inspiring people around the world to seek an unachievable lifestyle, is maybe the biggest example of dumb growth. Nevertheless, the high priests of our society still solemnly invoke “growth” as the all-purpose solution for all human ills. The holy grail of politicians and economists is the strange combination of inputs and mysterious measurements that create the illusion of “growth” as a demonstration of social health. Meanwhile, things keep getting worse, especially when we’re “growing!” But during the past three years, the economic collapse and public bailout of private capital has been at the center of our unfolding global history.

Dave McNally’s Global Slump is a thorough, critical analysis of the neoliberal capitalist counterattack and global economic restructuring that overcame the crisis of the 1970s, and its ending in the Asian crisis of 1997. Part of his snappy book’s mission is to debunk the platitudes repeated ad nauseum by liberals, blaming evil bankers or the failure of regulation for the current crisis. His critique is rooted in a solid Marxism in which crisis starts with a fall in profitability. That in turn leads to a shrinking of investment as the possibility for profits dries up. Once there is a shortage of investment capital due to prior overproduction and excessive investment and the fall in profits, speculative pyramids that depended on free-flowing money suddenly face the abyss and soon collapse. But to understand how this happens (and it’s fascinating how similar the process was in the collapses centered on railroads in the 1870s and 1890s), he carefully reconstructs the steps that brought U.S. capitalism from its last crisis in the early 1970s to the new century’s drama.

He goes back to the delinking of the dollar from gold by Nixon in 1971 as the key moment that opened the process of financialization that has gone through several booms and busts since then. Unlike many Marxist analysts, he doesn’t agree that the current crisis is just the most recent phase of an ongoing long crisis that started in the profit crash of the early 1970s. He does think there was a “great boom” from 1948-1971, but then it ended. He argues that the neoliberal restructuring started under Carter in the late 1970s when he appointed Paul Volcker to head the Fed and engineer a sharp economic contraction. This restructuring was fully embraced and extended by Reagan in the U.S., Thatcher in the UK (both centrally concerned with breaking unions, disciplining labor, and shrinking relative wages), and throughout much of the rest of the world by the IMF’s structural adjustment programs. This economic reorganization re-established the basis for profitability, mostly by pushing down wages while reining in inflation and solidifying the unique role of the U.S. dollar as the international currency.

So from 1982-1997 there was a real period of capitalist growth and profitability, but since 1997 there has been a crash in business investment because there’s been a collapse of profits in production, more or less corresponding to a classic crisis in Marxist terms. The system has pushed itself onward with the speculative booms in internet stocks, real estate, and other assets, but the wild expansion of credit and future claims on profits have finally come unraveled. Interestingly, McNally shows how typical economic growth rates from the 19th century to the present were much closer to the sluggish pace we’ve seen in the industrialized world since 1973, and that the rapid growth and prosperity of the 1948-71 period were the anomaly. “In short, during the neoliberal expansion, the periodicity of the business cycle returned to something approximating its ‘classic’ form, with recessions every seven to ten years, rather than every three to four.”

He has three main theses about the 25-year neoliberal period:

Thesis one: Following the recessions of 1974-75 and 1980-82 and the launch of an offensive by the ruling classes in the North against unions and peoples of the Global South, severe capitalist restructuring generated a new wave of capitalist growth, albeit a much more uneven and volatile one than occurred during the Great Boom.

 

Thesis two: The upward trend in profit rates from the early 1980s underpinned a wave of capitalist expansion that began to falter in 1997 with the crisis in East Asia.

 

Thesis three: Alongside and interacting with these changes, a wholesale reorganization of capitalist finance occurred, stimulated by a metamorphosis in forms of world money. The end of the Great Boom was punctuated by a collapse of the gold-dollar standard, the emergence of floating exchange rates, heightened financial volatility and uncertainty, and a proliferation of new financial instruments designed to hedge risk in a context of unstable monetary relations. These risk-hedging instruments opened up enormous new fields for financial services and profits, while also creating an inordinately larger sphere for speculation.

McNally ends his book with a chapter called “Toward a Great Resistance?” and you have to give him credit for putting a question mark on that rather than treating it as a typical leftist exhortation (not that he isn’t partial to a bit of that too, in the chapter itself). I like a lot of his thinking (I had the pleasure of meeting him and hearing him present his argument at a Retort gathering in Berkeley earlier this year).

“In most of the Global North, of course, we are in the early stages of rebuilding infrastructures of dissent, not usually of leading mass struggles…” After detailing a bit of the dynamic within some recent upheavals (like the student movement in California, or the much larger mass strikes in Greece) he identifies the need for a sustained, long-term effort towards a new kind of revolutionary politics, consisting of

“workers’ centers, solidarity coalitions, radical community groups, alternative media, union organizing drives, campaigns against racism and in support of non-status people, the creation of artistic and cultural co-ops, and much more. It will mean building the democratic spaces and practices that develop organizers who are in the struggle for the long haul. All of this is essential to overcoming the damage of the neoliberal period—the dispossession of memory, social fragmentation, and the destruction of solidarities, the political and cultural effects of a long period without sustained mass oppositional politics. Here a rich dialectic will come into play in which a New Left learns from the rich resources of struggle from the past without mimicry—by understanding that real mass movements for revolutionary change are strengthened by remembering the compelling legacies of those who struggled before us while not being confined by their horizons and experiences. While honoring past struggles, revolutionary movements also write a new poetry for the future. And that poetry—joined to the hard-nosed work of organizing—can only develop from the soil of real social struggle, not the concoctions of small groups.” (p. 178-79)

I think McNally gets at some vital aspects of the path ahead here. He also falls back on some ideas that border the tired clichés of the 20th century Left. Lately I’m a bit leery of many calls I’ve heard to engage in “organizing” without much more specificity than that. I know we’re living through a period of extreme atomization and part of the antidote to that is to find ways to engage in public, social, assertive (and hopefully intrinsically enjoyable) politics. That only happens by organizing people to come together in public and make themselves heard.

But the issues that I consider at the top of an agenda that *might* begin to address our predicament don’t usually enter the discourse. What work do we do? Why? Why shouldn’t we have democratic control over our shared labor, over the dispensation of the products of our efforts? How would such a profound democracy work, let alone how might it emerge in the first place in a world based on buying and selling human time? Going further, how would a democratic science look? How would technologies be evaluated democratically, chosen or rejected based on reason and informed debate? How in a world of Faux News and CNN (See Nothing News) could a genuinely democratic culture emerge, one that had a foundation of shared values and a shared language for understanding the problems we’re facing and how they might be addressed?

The 21st century presents us with its own set of problems. They’re not the same ones that faced radicals in past generations, not the relatively recent New Left of 40 years ago, and not the older Left dating back to earlier in the 20th century and even earlier, in the 19th century. Richard White does more in Railroaded than just detail the cronyism and mind-numbing corruption of the Gilded Era. He also traces the radical movements that emerged to combat the newly powerful corporations, the “antimonopoly” forces, the organized farmers, and of course, the organized working class, first in the form of the Knights of Labor, and later, the highly charged story of the American Railway Union and its firebrand leader, Eugene Debs. Debs is often remembered as a socialist candidate for President who garnered more than a million votes in 1920 while he sat in a jail cell convicted of “espionage” for speaking out against World War I. But during his early days he led the American Railway Union when the federal government sent out troops to break the strike in 1894. During that time he was fully a part of the radical labor movement of the time, in other words, a patriarchical racist! Here’s some of what Richard White wrote:

Since for Debs “the government will rest upon the intelligence and virtue of the people,” a republican economy had, above all, to produce republican citizens. He embraced a nation where a worker “owns himself, is a man, a citizen, and independent.” This was quintessential nineteenth-century liberalism: society as a collection of autonomous individuals, each with a moral right to control his own labor. His whole career was an attempt to reconcile liberal ideals of a society constructed through freely negotiated contracts with the world of large corporations and dependent workers…

During the huge 1894 railway strike,

“[Debs] invoked the language of manhood and proposed tapping antimonopoly sentiment all along the line. If the workers stood up and were men, they would ‘not want for the support of courageous, manly men.’ … The American Railway Union (ARU) resonated with the antimonopoly language of improvement, manhood, equity, honor, and citizenship. It marked all these qualities as the attributes of white men. It did not accept African American members.”

This haunted them quite starkly in this epic strike, since it was in Montana, then a key center of strike activity outside California, that federal troops came in and quickly broke the strike. Which troops came in? The black Tenth Cavalry and their white officers!

Self-defeating dynamics rooted in historic racism and sexism still haunt social organizing as we go forward. But the work ahead goes well beyond these historic blights. We’ll have to raise our efforts to face the epic challenges of our times, and go well beyond the old barriers that have sunk working-class liberation movements in times past.

The plum blossoms outside my window are stunning in the faux summer of early February, but a nice complement to the springtime emerging in Egypt, Tunisia, across North Africa and the Middle East.

The Egyptian Revolution is continuing. Today on Democracy Now‘s ongoing fantastic coverage from the ground in Tahrir Square, they interviewed a man who with an almost devilish look on his face, smiling while he acknowledged that the slowness of the government’s response was greatly helping the movement to become deeper and more creative. It was just the latest in a long list of incredible moments sparkling out of the uprising. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the two-hour special Democracy Now had on Saturday. In the midst of it is the incredible video that went viral all over Egypt in the week before January 25, showing Asmaa Mahfouz’s Jan. 18th message which some are calling “the video that started the revolution.” We were brought to tears by the intensity of her appeal, the urgency and dignity of her address. Don’t miss it!

The Springtime of Peoples originally was applied as a label to the rapidly spreading revolutionary tide across Europe in 1848. I was reading up on it to contextualize the origins of San Francisco, a city which has only been a city in any sense of the word since 1849-1850. I came upon this passage about the sudden collapse of the Hapsburg Imperial center in Vienna, March 15 1848, quoted in Mike Rapport’s “1848: Year of Revolution” which I thought remarkable for how closely it resembled the events in Cairo:

In Vienna, the whole aspect of things seemed changed, as it were, by a magician’s wand… The secret police had entirely disappeared from the streets; the windows of book-stores were now crowded with forbidden works, which, like condemned criminals, had long been withdrawn from the light of day; boys hawked throughout the city addresses, poems, and engravings, illustrative of the Revolution—the first issues of an unshackled press; while the newly-armed citizens formed into a National Guard, marched shoulder to shoulder with the regular military, and maintained in unison with them, the public tranquillity.

Similar stories are pouring in from many sources now. A fantastic essay appeared in The Asia-Pacific Journal by Mohammed A. Bamyeh, which he datelined Al-Qahira, The City Victorious, February 6, 2011.

…in every sense the revolution maintained throughout a character of spontaneity, in the sense that it had no permanent organization. Rather, organizational needs—for example governing how to communicate, what to do the next day, what to call that day, how to evacuate the injured, how to repulse baltagiyya assaults, and even how to formulate demands—emerged in the field directly and continued to develop in response to new situations. Further, the revolution lacked recognized leadership from beginning to end, a fact that seemed to matter greatly to observers but not to participants. I saw several debates in which participants strongly resisted being represented by any existing group or leader, just as they resisted demands that they produce “representatives” that someone, such as al-Azhar or the government, could talk to. When the government asked that someone be designated as a spokesperson for this revolt, many participants flippantly designated one of the disappeared, in the hope that being so designated might hasten his reappearance. A common statement I heard was that it was “the people” who decide. It appeared that the idea of peoplehood was now assumed to be either too grand to be representable by any concrete authority or leadership, or that such representation would dilute the profound, almost spiritual, implication of the notion of “the people” as a whole being on the move.

I was watching Aljazeera on Friday and at one point there was the anchor querying a guy in Tahrir Square. “Isn’t it a problem that you don’t have a leader? Someone who can speak for the movement?’ or something like that. The guy in the square was beautiful, totally eloquent, and said without hesitation. “No, absolutely not! We don’t need any leaders. We speak for ourselves. We’re very well organized and we don’t need anyone to represent us!”… wow!

Bamyeh has a book called “Anarchy as Order” which I haven’t read but after seeing his essay, I’m very interested in it. Elsewhere he continues:

Spontaneity also appeared as a way by which the carnivalesque character of social life was brought to the theater of the revolution as a way of expressing freedom and initiative; for example, among the thousands of signs I saw in demonstrations, there were hardly any standard ones (as one would see in pro-government demonstration). Rather, the vast majority of signs were individual and hand-made, written or drawn on all kinds of materials and objects, and were proudly displayed by their authors who wished to have them photographed by others. Spontaneity, further, proved highly useful for networking, since the Revolution became essentially an extension of the spontaneous character of everyday life, where little detailed planning was needed or possible, and in which most people were already used to spontaneous networking amidst common everyday unpredictability that prevailed in ordinary times.

Something really big is happening in Egypt. The man who was so proud of the developments and hoping that the authorities would continue to drag their feet so the profound changes in every day life would continue to deepen was one of the best indicators of what an unprecedented moment this is in world history. Tom Englehart gets it, too, from his perch in DC analyzing the U.S. empire. His essay today intelligently puts the Egyptian Revolution in the context of 1989 and the collapse of one half of the Cold War duopoly, and now, finally, two decades later the U.S. empire is in steep decline, perhaps tipping into the dustbin of history not so long after the Soviet Union did.

Clearly the autocratic Mubarak regime, and others like it propped up by the U.S. in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, and elsewhere, are more like the absolute monarchies overthrown by the revolutions of 1848 than they are like the one-party states of the old Soviet Union. But the big similarity is in the lack of space for civil society to develop, for the panoply of social actors, contending economic and political powers to hash out their conflicting interests in a public sphere, preferably democratic.

Bamyeh again:

That on February 2 some of Mubarak’s supporters found nothing better to do than send thugs on camels and horses to disperse the crowd at Tahrir, seemed to reflect the regime’s antiquated character: a regime from a bygone era, with no grasp of the moment at hand. It was as if a rupture in time had happened, and we were witnessing a battle from the 12th century. From my perspective in the crowd, it was as if they rode through and were swallowed right back into the fold that returned them to the past. By contrast, popular committees in the neighborhood, with their rudimentary weapons and total absence of illusions, represented what society had already become with this revolution: a real body, controlling its present with its own hands, and learning that it could likewise make a future itself, in the present and from below. At this moment, out of the dead weight of decades of inwardness and self-contempt, there emerged spontaneous order out of chaos. That fact, rather than detached patriarchal condescension, appeared to represent the very best hope for the dawn of a new civic order.

The same process has been underway in Tunisia too, though a bit obscured by the excitement and scale of the Egyptian revolt. Writing in The Black Commentator, Dr. Horace Campbell makes a number of astute points.

We must remember that revolutions are made by ordinary people and that there are millions who want a new form of existence where they can live like decent human beings. In another era of capitalist depression and war it was C. L. R. James who commented that, “That is the way a revolution often comes, like a thief in the night, and those who have prepared for it and are waiting for it do not see it, and often only realise that their chance has come when it has passed.”

And so it is for so many self-identified “revolutionaries” with their eyes stuck firmly in the rear-view mirror. When people begin to move, they really don’t need the political parties and their hacks who have spent so many years churning out empty ideological platforms, barking at people in demonstrations, etc.

The full expression of a worker-student alliance [in Tunisia] was beginning to take shape as workers occupied workplaces while setting up committees to run their workplaces. It is this advanced consciousness of worker control that is slowly taking shape as the revolution of Tunisia experiment with networks of networks beyond the old standards of democratic centralism and other worn ideas of revolutionary organization and the vanguard party. Social media and social networking may represent one of the forms of this revolutionary process, but the character is still embedded in the self-organization and self-emancipation of the oppressed. It is this powerful force of self-emancipation that is acting as an inspiration and beating back vanguardists, whether secular or religious.

This repeats itself in the Egyptian uprising. While the Muslim Brotherhood has plenty of people in the streets and were among those at the front lines of the fighting against the Mubarak Interior Ministry’s hired goons, the story is not of a religious movement but one of civil society. More than that, the missing background is that over the past few years Egyptian workers have engaged in thousands of strikes in the export-processing zones created mostly by Russian and Chinese capitalists, and thanks to the perils of foreign direct investment, consumer politics, and dictatorship, their strike actions established that they could fight and win against the police state.

So it’s an incredibly exciting time in world history. The story is far from over and of course, there’s no certainty that our best hopes will be fulfilled. But the new circuits of communication, solidarity, and mutual aid/trust that have been established in just a few short weeks will be very hard to undo. Perhaps from the wreckage of these police states and the long-term death of statist nationalism will emerge a transnational liberatory movement that unites people across whole swaths of the planet in a new way of living, working, and loving… why not? We know the old models are broken!

Wow! I’ve been brought nearly to tears over and over again during these past days. It’s so inspiring! It’s such a relief! Finally, the ossified world is cracking up, the old order is crumbling. It’s hard to believe the resilience and beauty of the Egyptian revolution. Everyone knows Mubarak is going to go, either on a plane within a few more days, or maybe he’ll be dragged out and hung in Tahrir Square like Mussolini was in Italy in 1945. The role of the “street” is particularly exciting. In this era of numb isolation, clicking and petitioning and online voting, the Egyptian “Internet generation” has turned that isolation on its head, provoking a mass uprising in the streets. By retaking public space and thereby opening a much larger public sphere, long suppressed by the Egyptian police state, they’ve made an incredible breakthrough for the whole world!

But the most inspiring reports are about the direct democracy that has emerged on the barricades all over Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. When the government facilitated prison breaks and sent their police and secret service in to loot and terrorize people, they inadvertantly inspired an intense, block-by-block self-organization that was so natural that it took only a few hours or a day to spread throughout the city. In today’s New York Times an unusually clear report corroborated the incredible footage showing on Aljazeera in which people from all walks of life are fully engaged in defending their revolution from the attacks of the paid thugs and coerced employees of the Egyptian state. So moving!

In Tahrir Square, Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Democracy Now! has been providing fantastic on-the-spot reports. Today he showed how the self-organization of the people in the Square has even led to a massive garbage recycling system, something very unusual in Egypt (or many countries of the global South), but indicating a level of self-regard, a commitment to a new kind of self-care. We might scoff at recycling as a bourgeois distraction (sure, it’s probably quite inefficient in terms of energy usage), but as a symbol of a transformed public life, it’s pretty compelling. It points to a different way of life that has the potential to go much further than any prior revolution.

Could this be the beginning of the 21st century at last? Could it be the beginning of a truly new path out of the cul-de-sacs of bourgeois democracy, brutal dictatorship, and ossified state capitalism masquerading as socialism? Probably too much to hope for, since “socialism in one country” is as impossible now as it ever was. But that’s the beauty of Egypt’s location in the heart of the transnational Arab world. Imagine if this bottom-up grassroots revolution erects new democratic forms of networked power, based on self-management and rigorous respect for individual and social rights? They’ve practically put it in motion already! And from Tunisia to Yemen, Jordan to Saudi Arabia, the people are rising. How far can it go… on Fox News they’re freaking out that it could make it to the United States! Well, of course it could! It’s the new world struggling to emerge from the dying old world… Yeah, I’m excited! Let’s go!

It’s been a while since I had the inspiration to blog. I’ve been home through the holidays, and since I was in Mexico at the beginning of December, I’ve been reading a ton. In particular I wanted to ruminate in this entry on three books that, taken together, are a fantastic primer on the current state of working class politics. Why think about that, you might wonder?

We’re living through the most excessive, blatant, overwhelming mass looting of public wealth by the plutocracy that has ever happened in this House of Mirrors that calls itself the United States. Obama, a guy I never felt any enthusiasm for, has lived down to my expectations again and again, or really, he’s plunged many fathoms lower than I could even imagine him going. The casual abandonment of rule-of-law promises (forget about Guantanamo, forget about habeas corpus—Executive Power is increasingly monarchical and the Dems are pushing it as much as the Bushies ever did) is bad enough. And handing the keys to the public treasury to the banks during the bailout, and to the defense industry the rest of the time, all pretty bad too… In the past week Obama has appointed old-style fixer Bill Daley (direct from his job at JPMorganChase) and Gene Sperling from Goldman Sachs to run his economic policy. Can it be any more blatant? There is a tiny cabal of self-serving plutocrats who are determined to take every last granule of public wealth for themselves before it all collapses in a pile of debt and empty malls, rusting ports and abandoned skyscrapers. Obama is just their smiling front man, and he’s not even trying to hide it anymore!

So where are the angry citizens? The demonstrations, pickets, strikes? (Oh yeah, they’re all signing up for Facebook groups and clicking “angry” petitions and “urgent” appeals online! Maybe they’re reading—or writing—blogs!) Where are the workers who are getting screwed in this Great Theft? What about a collective response to the destruction of the economy, the nearly one in five who are unemployed? There’s not a simple explanation, but at this point we have to wonder who exactly are we expecting to “take action”? There is not a shared sense of class among the vast majority of the population that exchanges their daily lives for wages. There is more confusion, cynical bitterness, and racial animosity than any common idea of a class enemy. The very concept of “class” is largely rejected by most people, or grossly misinterpreted to mean a wide range of strata that include such bizarre convolutions as “lower-upper-middle-class.” Most people think they’re middle class, whether they’re making $88,000 a year or $17,000. The fact that nearly all of us have to sell ourselves to an employer in exchange for money (some much better paid than others, obviously) is the real key to the picture. Nearly everyone in modern America is some kind of a wage-slave, regardless of the fantasies they harbor about their status based on their temporary ability to engage in debt spending.

Looking back at post-WWII history we can see how we got to this point. The three books I’ve been reading are a great place to start. First, “Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class” by Jefferson Cowie, then “Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s” (edited by Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow), and finally “Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global” by Paul Mason. I give all three of these books high marks.

I started with Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive” which attracted me because I have been speaking publicly as part of my Nowtopia touring for the past two years on this topic of the fragmentation and decomposition of the working class during the 1970s. But to be honest, I have been doing it without the benefit of a thoroughly in-depth examination of how it actually happened. Cowie’s book fills in a lot of gaps and expanded the foundations for the point of view I started with, greatly enriching my sense of the political, economic, and social history of that decade. I came of age in the 1970s, sitting in my high school classroom in Oakland watching cars queue up across the street for gas in the first big energy crisis in 1973-74. I remember watching with fascination and shadenfreude the Watergate hearings and finally seeing Tricky Dick Nixon resign in disgrace. When the helicopters lifted the last soldiers from the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975, a whole sequence of historical injustices seemed to be reaching resolution.

I stood in Safeway parking lots in 1974 encouraging consumers to boycott non-union lettuce and grapes, in support of the United Farm Workers union. In 1977 I was fired from a job in a bookstore for supposedly trying to start a union (actually my attempts to contact the Retail Clerks Union in the mall where I worked in Santa Rosa were never answered). By fall of 1978 I was volunteering with the J.P. Stevens boycott (in support of a North Carolina textile workers union campaign) and experiencing first-hand the odd drama of boycott organizers reprimanding me and my friends for effectively carrying out an informational picket in front of a department store near Union Square. We were supposed to stand to the side and not disturb patrons, and not actually make our presence felt to shoppers! Who knew? Within another year I had fallen in with an extended community of ultra-left radicals who were sharply critical of trade unions and the Leninist left as being the handmaidens of capital, and from then on I had an unblinkered view of the role of trade unions in the U.S. We all piled into Mabuhay Gardens in North Beach for a big benefit for the striking coal miners in 1978 and some of went briefly to support an oil workers strike in Contra Costa county. In the very first issue of Processed World we analyzed the self-defeating tactics of the Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 3 in their big strike against Blue Shield in San Francisco in 1980-81.

Coal Miner's Benefit 1978, Dirksen-Miller Productions, Design: Rico, borrowed from "Streetart: The Punk Poster in San Francisco 1977-1981"

The world that shaped my sense of politics, of power and historical agency, was definitely a world in which the working class was a major player. The century and a half of conflict between the rising bourgeois owning class and the ever-expanding millions of exploited wage workers was (and surely, still is) the major cleavage and tension in the modern world. More narrowly, the social upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s had as a major component a huge revolt of workers against their companies and quite often, their unions too. The new anthology “Rebel Rank and File” offers the best in-depth look at that wave of workers’ strikes and insurgencies. In the essay “Understanding the Rank-and-File Rebellion in the Long 1970s” by Kim Moody the basic statistics of 1970 top an era of generalized discontent and resistance.

“… in 1970, 66 million work days were lost during 5,716 walkouts (the most ever at the time), and more than 17 percent of union members (one in six) went on strike. The strikes of 1970 turned out to represent the crest of a decade-long strike wave and a culmination of the mounting rank-and-file militancy in the late 1960s. Thirty-four major work stoppages involving 10,000 or more workers took place, the most in eighteen years. Included among these were a 197-day strike by 27,000 construction workers in Kansas City, two strikes by 13,000 teachers in Philadelphia, a wildcat of 25,000 coal miners, a sixty-four-day walkout of 23,000 rubber workers, a stoppage by 13,000 longshoremen in New Jersey, a one-day walkout of 35,000 airline workers, and a strike by 42,000 New York taxi drivers. Five of the biggest and most dramatic national strikes were those by 133,000 electrical workers against General Electric in January, 152,000 postal workers wildcatting against the U.S. government in March, 110,000 Teamsters in an unauthorized walkout against the nation’s interstate trucking companies in May, 355,000 auto workers versus General Motors in September, and 360,000 railroad workers against the country’s railroads in December.” p. 133

Though this impressive revolt didn’t produce much in terms of increased wages (averaging about 1% over inflation), it did shape the political response of the president, Richard Nixon. The economic pressure on the United States caused Nixon to take the Dollar off the gold standard in 1971, setting in motion the debt expansion that has sustained a decades-long boom. We can also see with the benefit of hindsight the role of credit (card) expansion in helping to keep wages essentially flat since the early 1970s, making it possible for people with stagnant income to expand consumption with debt instead of increased wages. The 1973-74 oil shock, similarly, was used as a catalyst for economic restructuring that hollowed out the industrial U.S., destroying the economic and social heart of many major cities. The loss of employment and widespread migration were key components to the decomposition of the working class during the 1970s and 80s.

Jefferson Cowie does a great job of tracing the evolution of Nixon’s presidency including some of the internal debates among his advisors with regard to the relationship with “labor.” It is widely known that Nixon orchestrated the “southern strategy” that turned Republican attention to the conservative (but up until that time, mostly Democratic) South. After construction workers attacked anti-war protesters on Wall Street shortly after Kent State in 1970, Nixon directed his administration to embrace and welcome the blue-collar workers who, out of patriotism, were angry with hippies, students, and anti-war radicals. Cowie analyzes Nixon’s strategy:

“Richard Nixon was simultaneously the last president to work within the logic of the New Deal political framework of material politics, the first postwar president to try to recast the ways in which workers appeared in American presidential strategy, and the last to court labor seriously. While ‘struggling to change the political fortunes of the presidential Republican party by dressing it up as the congeries of the silent rather than the rich or propertied,’ in David Farber’s formulation, Nixon helped to push the concept of ‘worker’ out of the realm of production and helped drive a long process of deconstructing the postwar worker as a liberal, materially based concept. Knowing as he did that there was not a single working-class identity or a pure working-class consciousness, he sought to build political power on new forms of discontent… Nixon sought to recast the definition of ‘working class’ from economics to culture, from workplace and community to national pride. En route to his hoped-for New Majority, he paved the way for a reconsideration of labor that, in its long-term effects, helped to erode the political force, meaning, and certainly economic identity, of ‘workers’ in American political discourse.” (p. 164-165)

By now some of this seems commonplace, though the credit is usually given to Reagan more than Nixon. But the great Culture War of the past generation is firmly rooted in the deeply challenging revolts of the 1960s-70s and the ongoing effort by authorities of right (especially) and left to undo the achievements as well as the expectations of people shaped by that era. The successful political appeal to patriotism and conformity against experimentation, anti-authoritarian radicalism and slovenly, prolifigate hedonism reached much of Middle America and continues to resonate up to the present. The decomposition of the working class after this remarkable upsurge cannot be explained with politics alone of course. Still, the role of politics (both right and left) in shifting attention to identity and away from class and economic injustice, cannot be ignored.

During the epic landslide re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972, the message and language we’ve seen dominate the political landscape since that time are already fully in play. With the most pro-labor Democrat, also an avowed opponent of the Vietnam War, George McGovern, as a presidential nominee, the Party warred with itself right up to the election, paving the way for the Nixonian conservative working man to become the new norm:

“In the public imagination, semi-mythical places of country attitude like Muskogee, Oklahoma, evolved into a political and geographic counterpoint to Woodstock, New York, site of the famous 1969 music festival. One was southern, western, gritty, masculine, working class, white, and soaked in the reality of putting food on the table; the other was northern, eastern, radical, effete, leisurely, affluent, multi-cultural, and full of pipe dreams. One was real, the other surreal; one worked, the other played; one did the labor, the other did the criticism; one drank whiskey, the other smoked dope; one built, the other destroyed; one was for survival, the other was for the revolution; one died in wars, the other protested wars; and one was for Richard Nixon, the other was for George McGovern.” (p. 178)

What’s harder to see, even just reading Jefferson Cowie’s book, is how the upsurge of worker and citizen revolt was the culmination of a post-WWII process in which the trade unions and the Democratic Party mutually undercut their own base. (As we watch Obama reproduce it yet again, as he fails to push for any legislative remedies for the historic impasse of organized labor.) This is where the more political-economically grounded work in “Rebel Rank and File” provides some helpful insight. This is Robert Brenner writing in the “Political Economy of Rebellion”:

“The [labor] dependence on the Democratic Party set in motion analogously self-defeating processes, not only for the unions but also for the party itself, especially as a vehicle of liberal aspirations. To the extent that they sought to substitute the electoral struggle, in which workers as individual citizens ostensibly fought the class war in the relative safety of the voting booth, for the much more perilous processes of collectively confronting employers in industry and on the shop floor, the trade unions eroded their power independent of the Democratic Party. The unavoidable result was to forfeit their ability to exert leverage over the Democrats and to become increasingly reliant upon them for their members. The Democratic leadership could therefore count ever more securely on the unions’ services and support for ever less in return, especially in the area most vital to the labor movement (and the employers), that of union rights, where the Party was, throughout the postwar epoch, conspicuous for its indifference to union interests. The Democrats were thus left ever freer to move, in accordance with purely party-political calculus, to broaden their legislative, electoral, and financial base by consolidating the support of forces on the right, notably their traditional supporters in the South and, of course, business. But in so doing, the Democrats, like the union officials, furthered the disintegration and political dispersal of their own most powerful and most reliable social base.” (p. 44)

Why would the unions behave so stupidly? What was it about trade unionism that made it so misguided, so myopic about its own strength and capabilities? Anti-communist, anti-radical, pro-Cold War unionism dominated the U.S. after World War II and it contained the seeds of its own demise, nearly a half century ago. By the early 1960s union leaders had largely crushed any independent rank-and-file power. Here’s Kim Moody again in “Rebel Rank and File”:

“The underlying raison d’etre of bureaucratic business unionism was of course to deliver regular improvements in living standards for the membership by insuring, to the extent possible, rising profits by way of rising productivity by delivering a disciplined labor force to the corporations. It had accomplished this, on the one hand, by facilitating technical advances and the transformation of the labor process in aid of rising output per person, and, on the other, by undermining, over the longer run, the capacity of the rank and file to battle management at the point of production. But the combination of productivity decline and unaffordable benefits that suddenly gripped industry [in the late 1950s] left the labor leaderships disarmed. Having long accepted the priority of profits and having corroded, over the long term, the capacity of their memberships to fight back, they appeared to lack either the will or the capacity to launch a counterattack. As one close observer concluded, ‘Unions have lost much of their vitality and forward motion; they are playing an essentially conservative role in the plant community, seeking to preserve what they have rather than make gains.’ (p. 122)

The upsurge documented in this volume came in direct response to what happened as business unionism dominated the U.S. industrial economy. Workers organized hundreds of rank-and-file organizations, shop stewards committees, Leagues of Revolutionary Workers, and published hundreds of newsletters and newspapers too. The stories in “Rebel Rank and File” include histories of the United Farm Workers (a brilliant piece by Frank Bardacke), the United Mine Workers, Telephone workers, auto workers, clericals and other pink-collar jobs. A fascinating piece on Teachers strikes and Urban Insurrection offers a brief look at how the rise of teachers unions in the midst of the black rebellions of inner city New York, Newark, Detroit, etc. ran into unexpected and ultimately unsolved contradictions.

The new Republican Congress, along with some prominent new Republican governors, are publicly targeting public sector and especially teacher unions. 2011’s first issue of The Economist put organized public sector workers on their cover as a target for attack. So the last remnant of organized labor in the so-called “advanced” economies is now going to be under assault. The great advantage for public sector workers has always been that their workplace cannot move overseas. Often, too, the service work they provide is not easily automated. So their relative strength has held out longer than private sector and industrial unions who have fallen to under 8 percent of the workforce.

I’ve always taken the position that I’m in favor of workers being organized, but I’m usually against doing it in the form of the highly bureaucratic and legalistic trade union as we know them in the U.S. They are intermediaries in a business transaction and behave just as you would expect a self-interested business to behave. In the past three decades, I’ve seen far fewer moments of honorable and well-organized union work by and for workers than I have a whole raft of stupid, empty, and self-defeating behaviors. The latest nightmare of self-defeating union behavior has come from the SEIU and its thuggish approach to the independently minded health care workers of California. No surprise that former SEIU leader Andy Stern is now cooperating with the Obama Administration in its plans to privatize and reduce Social Security.

Just as the facts pile up too high and there really seems no way out of the dark hole that is the U.S. labor “movement,” Paul Mason’s book “Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global” comes along to shake up the narrowness of a U.S.-centric view of labor history. Mason’s a great writer, so reading his book is more like reading a great series of short stories than anything like a dry labor history book. His trick is to juxtapose some of the most important (and often most forgotten) episodes of labor history in the 19th and 20th centuries, to gripping journalistic tales of worker organizing going on right now in various parts of the world. In nine separate chapters he manages to cover an incredible amount of history and current events. A few of his juxtapositions are: The Peterloo Massacre, 1819 and Shenzhen, China, 2003; The silk weavers revolt, Lyon, 1831 and Varanasi, India, 2005; The Paris Commune, 1871 and Amukoko, Nigeria, 2005; Shanghai 1920s, and New Delhi, India, 2005; The Bund, 1920s-30s and El Alto, Bolivia, 2006; Turin, Italy 1920 and Neuquén, Argentina, 2006. This book rips you out of your despair and reminds you of the long history, with its many setbacks and outright defeats in addition to some of its glowing bright spots. And while the working class in the U.S. is by any reckoning pretty quiescent these days, fragmented, frightened, and unable to mount an independent challenge to the organization of life, the story is completely different in other parts of the world. And given our near One-Party State with its near One-Party Media, it’s not too surprising that it’s hard to get news of these revolts in other parts of the world.

After reading these three books, I find myself looking at the twentieth century rather differently. The common liberal American framework that the fascists were defeated in WWII and there’s been a steady expansion of democracy, inclusiveness, openness, progress, prosperity, etc., since then is clearly a farce. The long twentieth century looks more like a major, potentially revolutionary breakdown in capitalism resulted from the first decades’ World War and nationalist, imperialist system. The Depression and accompanying working-class revolts and widespread social tensions produced a series of structural changes that led to the post-WWII welfare state in the U.S. and social democracy in Europe. That began eroding almost as soon as it was established, and by 2011 we can see that the “deal” made has proven untenable. The capitalists figured it out way back in the 1970s and have been on the attack ever since. Unfortunately the global working class has been so thoroughly, reorganized while work itself has become much more closely controlled than ever before, that a comparably global working-class upheaval is still ahead of us. Meanwhile, the work we do, globally, is destroying the planet. How much longer can any of this go on? Luckily it’s not only up to us here in the befuddled U.S. Perhaps initiatives arising elsewhere will enliven our own responses as we rediscover how to make history.

Lastly I leave you with another quote from Jefferson Cowie’s “Stayin’ Alive”. One of my favorite things about the book was his ability to go from politics to economics to culture in his analysis of the demise of the working class during the 1970s. He has his blind spots to be sure. For example, I don’t think he mentions ecology at all! (I suppose by his “blue-collar” definition of working class, ecology was only of interest to “middle class” people, a common misunderstanding even today.) Anyway, among his ruminations on music (including a great section on Devo!), he does an extended riff on Bruce Springsteen, a musician that I liked a lot in 1976-78, but lost interest in later. His writing made me go out and get several CDs to catch up, and especially to listen closely to “Born in the U.S.A.” which I had always dismissed as the anthem of mindlessly patriotic suburban white boys and girls… Here’s Cowie on that song:

“Lost to listeners on the Right and the Left was the fact that “Born in the U.S.A.” was consciously crafted as a conflicted, but ultimately indivisible, whole. Its internal conflicts gave musical form to contradictions that grew from fissures to deep chasms in the heart of working-class life during the ‘70s and their aftermath. The song was first written and recorded with a single acoustic guitar during the recordings for Nebraska (1982)—a critically acclaimed collection of some Springsteen’s starkest and most haunting explorations of blue-collar despair, faith, and betrayal during the economic trauma of the early Reagan era. ‘That whole Nebraska album was just that isolation thing and what it does to you,’ Springsteen explained. ‘The record was basically about people being isolated from their jobs, from their friends, from their families, their fathers, their mothers—just not feeling connected to anything that’s going on—your government. And when that happens, there’s just a whole breakdown. When you lose that sense of community, there’s some spiritual breakdown that occurs. And when that occurs, you just get shot off somewhere where nothing seems to matter.’… ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ was actually more about silence—both existential and political. (p. 359-360)

Existential and political silence seems to be what we get (and what we choose) these days, even when the enormity of the crimes pile up in plain view and the overwhelming inequity of it all grows worse by the day. Until we choose something else…

Another guest editorial, this one from my pal Iain Boal… a timely rumination on today’s sell-off of the internet by the Obama appointees on the Federal Communications Commission…

“Internet service giants like Comcast and Verizon want to offer premium and privileged access to the Internet for corporations who can afford to pay for it…For many Americans – particularly those who live in rural areas – the future of the Internet lies in mobile services. But the draft Order would effectively permit Internet providers to block lawful content, applications, and devices on mobile Internet connections. Mobile networks like AT&T and Verizon Wireless would be able to shut off your access to content or applications for any reason. For instance, Verizon could prevent you from accessing Google Maps on your phone, forcing you to use their own mapping program, Verizon Navigator, even if it costs money to use and isn’t nearly as good. Or a mobile provider with a political agenda could prevent you from downloading an app that connects you with the Obama campaign (or, for that matter, a Tea Party group in your area).

It gets worse. The FCC has never before explicitly allowed discrimination on the Internet – but the draft Order takes a step backwards, merely stating that so-called “paid prioritization” (the creation of a “fast lane” for big corporations who can afford to pay for it) is cause for concern. It sure is – but that’s exactly why the FCC should ban it. Instead, the draft Order would have the effect of actually relaxing restrictions on this kind of discrimination.

But grassroots supporters of net neutrality are beginning to wonder if we’ve been had. Instead of proposing regulations that would truly protect net neutrality, reports indicate that Chairman Genachowski has been calling the CEOs of major Internet corporations seeking their public endorsement of this draft proposal, which would destroy it. No chairman should be soliciting sign-off from the corporations that his agency is supposed to regulate – and no true advocate of a free and open Internet should be seeking the permission of large media conglomerates before issuing new rules.

After all, just look at Comcast – this Internet monolith has reportedly imposed a new, recurring fee on Level 3 Communications, the company slated to be the primary online delivery provider for Netflix. That’s the same Netflix that represents Comcast’s biggest competition in video services. Imagine if Comcast customers couldn’t watch Netflix, but were limited only to Comcast’s Video On Demand service. Imagine if a cable news network could get its website to load faster on your computer than your favorite local political blog. Imagine if big corporations with their own agenda could decide who wins or loses online.”

The tireless tribunus populi, Alexander Cockburn, as editor of a dissenting online newsletter, knows what is at stake, and in the fortnight since he sounded the following clarion call in CounterPunch the stakes have become even clearer as the first full-blown popular cyberwar unfolds, with its unlikely epicenter at Ellingham Hall, the ancient seat of Norfolk gentry in the Waveney Valley of East Anglia, where Julian Assange is under “manor-house arrest”, the guest of Vaughan Smith, a ex-Grenadier Guardsman, crack shot and organic farmer. In honor of two fallen photojournalist colleagues – in Iraq and the Balkans – Smith founded the Frontline Club in London as a hub for unembedded journalism. It is a converted Victorian plumbing factory with a restaurant sourced from the Norfolk estate, a suite of members’ rooms upstairs, and a event space on the third floor hosting over 200 talks and screenings a year. While he was staying in one of the flats for visiting independent journalists, Julian Assange could feel the noose tightening. Cockburn understands the connection between l’affaire Assange and the meeting today of the FCC in Washington D.C.:

“The WikiLeaks sites have vanished” though more than 1,400 mirror sites still carry the disclosures. Amazon, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal and the organization’s Swiss bank have shut it down, either on their own initiative or after a threat from the US government or its poodles in London and Geneva. Attorney General Eric Holder is cooking up a stew of new gag stipulations and fierce statutory penalties against any site carrying material the government deems compromising to state security. Commercial outfits like Amazon are falling over themselves to connive at the shutdowns, actual or threatened.

As I outline at greater length in my Beat the Devil column in the current Nation, one of the biggest lessons for us all  comes in the form of a wake-up call on the enormous vulnerability of our prime means of communication to swift government-instigated, summary shutdown.

So here we have a public “commons”” the Internet” subject to arbitrary onslaught by the state and powerful commercial interests, and not even the shadow of constitutional protections. The situation is getting worse. The net itself is going private. As I write, Google and Facebook are locked in a struggle over which company will control the bulk of the world’s Internet traffic. Millions could find that the e-mail addresses they try to communicate with, the sites they want to visit, the ads they may want to run are all under Google’s or Facebook’s supervision and can be closed off without explanation or redress at any time.

Here in the US certainly, we need a big push on First Amendment protections for the Internet: one more battlefield where the left and the libertarians can join forces. But we must do more than buttress the First Amendment. We must also challenge the corporations’ power to determine the structure of the Internet and decide who is permitted to use it.“

This is a guest post from my good friend Eddie Yuen, who was in Cancun for the COP-16 Climate Conference… it follows on my extensive coverage a year ago from Copenhagen, so I wanted to keep it going, even if I wasn’t there and didn’t follow it so closely this year… thanks Eddie!

Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid crashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico and rendered extinct 70% of all life on Earth. In December of 2010 in Cancun, a mere geological stone’s throw from the Chicxulub crater that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, a conclave of political and corporate leaders presided over a conference that failed to slow down the next great extinction event on this planet.

But for this geographic coincidence it’s unlikely that this conference will be remembered as anything more than another tedious and predictable step towards a future of managed climate chaos and accelerated global enclosures. Cancun is most significant, though, not as the scene of a crime but as a laboratory of climate apartheid.  Whatever fearsome predation the Yucatan of the late Cretaceous may have harbored, the Cancun of the early Anthropocene is the model of a
naturalized social order even redder in tooth and claw.

Even to use the language of “climate talks” is like speaking of the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. As linguist Noam Chomsky said years ago, the mere utterance of this phrase validates the discourse that there is such a process. This particular conference, rightfully overshadowed by the Wikileaks saga, was both anti-climactic and anti-climatic, in the words of Laura Carlson, director of the American Policy Program in Mexico City. The Indigenous Environmental Network summed it up nicely:  “The Cancun Agreements are not the result of an informed and open consensus process, but the consequence of an ongoing US diplomatic offensive of backroom deals, arm-twisting and bribery that targeted nations in opposition to the Copenhagen Accord during the months leading up to the COP-16 talks”.

Hidden in the dismal wonkery of the summit, however, an important shift has taken place. The Economist of Nov 25th, 2010 pronounced the end of any effort by states to seriously seek to lower emissions. We are in a post mitigation world now, and elite effort will focus on adaptation. Some analysts estimate that the current ratio of prevention to adaptation in terms of funds spent is about 80 to 20, and this will likely be reversed.  But what kind of adaptation to climate change are we talking about?  Cancun in this regard is the perfect site for this conference, as it presents a vision of the future that elites are very comfortable with. Exclusion zones of concrete walled leisure, ringed by layered barricades and social apartheid. Like Dubai or Beverly Hills, its obvious who is a worker and who a consumer, and enough of the workers are security guards to ensure that “safety” and property will always be respected. Outside kilometer zero, in the city of 700,000, the highest suicide rates in Mexico. Inside the Hotel Zone, debt ridden Americans lounging on eroding beaches are convincing themselves that they’re having a good time.

The elites like this model, but it’s fragility is evident. Cancun itself can only take so many more category 5 hurricanes before it will be retired like Mazatlan or Atlantic City. When this happens, new frontiers of commodified leisure, whether in Colombia, Sri Lanka or Myanmar, will be developed, but even so the economic and political costs of the 2 degree Celsius average temperature rise that the world leaders have deemed acceptable are staggering.

How can we understand the utter failure of the leaders of the world’s nation states, with the sole exception of Bolivia, to make even a perfunctory effort to assuage the crisis? It’s certainly not climate denialism, as few if any countries are host to a political entity such as the US Republican Party. On the contrary, global elites know full well what is happening. China and many other Asian countries, where 9 of the 10 most at-risk cities are located, are run by engineers and
technocrats. Can it be attributed primarily to a lack of vision – a systemic inability to look beyond electoral cycles and quarterly profit reports, something that liberal, communist and even fascist elites all seemed able to do not so many decades ago? Is it due primarily to a lack of cohesion amongst global elites resulting from the vacuum caused by the US’s precipitous fall from hegemonic status? Or is it the failure of the boosters of green capitalism to pitch a plausible new bubble opportunity to global finance capital? Whatever the combination of these factors, there is a “growing acceptance”, as The Economist says, “that the effort to avert serious climate change has run out of steam”.

As insane as this is, it’s not hard to see why Northern elites are warming to the idea of managed climate change. After all, they know that in this game of “lifeboat ethics”, we’re not all in the same boat. As Mike Davis has eloquently described, the existing inequalities between North and South will be exacerbated by temperature rise – and ideologically “naturalized” in the process.

The consolidation of this approach is perfectly symbolized by the city of Cancun. A concrete blight on the “Mayan Riviera”, chosen by computer under the Echeverria regime that presided over the massacre of Tlatelolco plaza in 1968, Cancun boasts the most anti-democratic geography for a global summit since the WTO meeting in Qatar. From their orbit in the Moon Palace, state delegates, corporate lobbyists and credulous journalists were free to discuss the  finer points of carbon markets and neo-liberal nature without even a mention of the alternative solutions proposed in the Cochabamba Accord from earlier in the year.

The “acceptable” level of sacrifice allowed for by the Cancun agreement is breathtaking even by the standards of global capitalism. These include the predictable starvation and displacement of millions, the obliteration of entire eco-systems such as coral reefs from the planet, the desertification of the Amazon, the disappearance of the glacial fed rivers of Asia and South America, the extinction of up to 35% of global species, and the advent of the “sea of slime”, to name a few. We are enjoined, however, by governments, media and many environmental groups, to hail the signs of progress at Cancun, and to engage in the conceit that these summits are where serious people must come to hammer out policy. But is it really better that climate talks are now on “lifeline” rather than “zombie” mode if questions of climate debt are off the table and the collapse of biodiveristy is seen only as an “accounting” problem?

In what may ultimately be a positive sign, however, the dedicated social movement participants who did make the journey to the gates of Cancun were not discouraged either by the tedium inside or the barricades outside. The spectacle of the expulsion from the Moon Palace of dissenting and indigenous voices, as documented by Democracy Now!, says all we need to know about the legitimacy of the conference.

Many activists were disappointed with the street level climate movement after Copenhagen, but there were no expectations for a major mobilization this time around. Instead, campaigners, many from the vibrant social movements of Mexico, understood that life, and politics, is elsewhere. Issues such as the commodification of nature, new rounds of enclosures justified by REDD, and climate apartheid are crucial, but will only truly be challenged and acted upon outside of the framework of “climate talks”. The facts on the ground, and in the atmosphere and oceans, will ensure that there will be climate movements in the next century. These may not take the form that many expected before Copenhagen, but the coming century of global defrosting will be nothing if not surprising.
Eddie Yuen teaches in the Urban Studies Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is the co-editor, with George Katsiaficas and Daniel Burton-Rose, of Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement (Soft Skull Press).

References:

The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/node/17575027?story_id=17575027

Indigenous Environmental Network
http://redroadcancun.com/?p=1700

three good articles:

http://www.counterpunch.org/carlsen12092010.html

http://ecosocialismcanada.blogspot.com/2010/12/dispatch-from-cancun-de veloping.html

http://www.counterpunch.org/bond12132010.html

and a great one from last year:

http://www.countercurrents.org/davis290110.htm

Video from Center for Biological Diversity:

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/mammals/polar_bear/starving _bears_video.html

Interview on Global Defrosting with Colin Duncan on Against the Grain

http://ia700104.us.archive.org/12/items/ES080523/ES_080523_Show_LoFi.m p3

Typical scene in Bologna, cyclists rolling by an outdoor restaurant seating zone where there might have been parking... very civilized!

I had my first visit to Bologna, staying with Gaia Guiliani, a charming post-colonialist, feminist, radical academic and activist. She and her friend Ghiada, along with some assistance from my Irish friend Alan Toner, provided the simultaneous translation for a Nowtopia reading at the Modo Infoshop in the city center on Monday night. A big crowd of 40+ jammed into a small space, more suitable for about 10-15, and we did a version of my usual presentation, but given the time it takes to translate everything, by the time we were done, it had been 2.5 hours! So even though I’d cut down the main parts of the Talk by half, it still was way too long. Now I’m going to Milan to do another bookshop tonight, Utopia Bookstore, and I’m planning to forego all reading and just do an improvised presentation. Having done the other one so many times, it will be easy enough, but of course I always worry about losing coherence.

Good graffiti in various parts of Bologna's center.

Anyway, there was a good discussion after the Talk, and as often happens, I don’t remember well all the points raised. (Might have something to do with all the wine and grappa we downed until the wee hours following the presentation!) Alan questioned me on two important points: where did I stand on the critique neo-Malthusianism, since the common attitude growing among enviros and others in the U.S. and parts of Europe is to say that China, India and other newly modernizing countries must be restrained from the over-exploitation of resources and the hyper-production of CO2 and a wide range of pollutants. The other issue he brought up dovetailed with comments I received in Stockholm last December, and from some friends and family at home, wondering how the Nowtopian initiatives contribute to a sharper level of political contestation (if they do at all), or if they aren’t a new paradigm of cooptation and integration?

On the first one, I found myself quoting that line from the Bolivians, “there’s enough of everything for everybody, but not enough for some people to have a lot more.” Of course we have to avoid falling into the trap of neo-colonialist thinking, that people in other parts of the world must be restrained from trying to raise their standard of living because of its inevitable ecological price. It’s true that everyone can’t live like Americans and Europeans, but neither can Americans and Europeans really. I was asked at the outset to describe how I was different from Tito Boeri, the economist with whom I shared the stage in Siena (the guy asking had been there and wanted to bring out more of our debate about growth). So I went from this question of neo-Malthusian resource scarcity to talk about the necessity of degrowth, or as the Italians call it descrescita. I’m visiting the folks who call themselves “Descrescita Feliz” (Happy Degrowth) later in the trip. I really believe we can have a great standard of living, globally, if we can radically reengineer our use of water, electricity, and all resources so we’re using a lot less to produce a good life. Living well is improperly defined in our society with measurements of resource consumption, money changing hands, etc. So I know it’s still only a few voices on the margins, but I do hope to contribute to the popularization of this larger discussion of transitioning to a new material approach to reproducing a good life on this stressed planet.

On the second point, Alan offered the example of the banks. After the G8 protest in Genoa in 2001 30 banks had been sacked and burned. But now, after the blatant theft (transfer) of trillions of dollars and euros directly to the banks and their managers and shareholders, there’s been barely a peep. Point taken: the kinds of political protest and expression that we have been accustomed to associating with radicality are in abeyance, or maybe they’re being left behind. I pointed out the obvious: two days after those 30 banks had been sacked they were repaired and open for business. After every riot and uprising, things go back to normal remarkably fast”¦ unless they don’t! But that rupture that we all yearn for is elusive at best, and I really believe that most of what I’m describing as Nowtopian illustrate a lot of people who are doing their best to make deep, lasting changes in their daily lives. Changes in how they relate to one another” more cooperation, more skill sharing, more creative appropriation of technologies as well as the waste stream of capitalist consumerism” and also a change in their relationship to work, to the reproduction of life itself. To be sure, they are not in a state of open revolt and contestation with the powers that be, politically or economically, but they are eroding the foundations of an obviously obsolete organization of life. Or they can be, and sometimes are. Certainly it’s also true that sometimes they’re not, and they are busily founding new small businesses with a preponderant concern for the preservation and expansion of their new business activity in this context of markets and money, not the sustenance of a new kind of enterprise that aspires to exist beyond and outside that logic. That’s why we need more conversation, more discussion about the meaning of our work, the choices we’re making, etc. But it’s certainly not a requirement that to be politically meaningful, or even to prove that we’re not passively accepting things the way they are, that we go out and sack banks, break cars, or any of those kinds of activities. Those spectacular moments of property destruction are very satisfying for the protagonists, but don’t have much staying power, nor do they reliably extend themselves, or grow a larger constituency of radical opposition. Sometimes, sure, but much more often, no.

Neptune in the Piazza Maggiore where Critical Mass starts in the heart of Bologna.

So that’s the fun of doing these tours, getting to dig into these kinds of questions in public. The other fun side is a kind of urban traveler experience, getting to see other cities, learn a bit about their histories, taste the special foods, discover some of their secrets both old and new. Leonardo Artami and Rachele Lapponi wanted to interview me for a video project, which we did in the local Ciclofficine, Ampio Raggio which in turn is inside a typical Italian social center, XM24, in an abandoned and converted factory. As usual it was decorated with some impressive murals, in this case by the artist Blue, who has a great online video well worth checking out. He had murals near where I was staying too”¦ here’s a few shots of them:

This was a short distance from where I was staying.

This is the left side of a 3-panel sequence (as I shot them).

This is on the side wall of xm24, the Social Center that houses the Cicclofficine Ampio Raggio.

Sign for Cicclofficine Ampio Raggio

Leonardo demonstrating some of the up-to-date equipment.

Painted on the door frame outside the cicclofficine.

I had a nice Tallbike ride there too...

After the interview and the visit to the Cicclofficine, and with rain clouds approaching, we took off on a tour of the old city center. Bologna is very old, and one of the churches we went by drew me in, Santo Stefano. It’s made up of four or five different structures built over several centuries, starting in the 5th century CE and continuing into the 1400s. The brick work is stunningly beautiful, and the inner courtyards create such inviting and cozy spaces. In front of St. Stefano is a triangular piazza that had beautifully arched facades all around, and seemed again to be such a harmonious and gorgeous public spaces.

Santa Stefano from the piazza.

Fantastic brickwork in Santa Stefano...

Santa Stefano is circled in this view from the local tower.

Close-up photo taken from Tower.

This is the triangular piazza in front of Santa Stefano, which you can also see in the photo just above.

This building is visible in the previous one in the back left... it has amazing heads peering down at you as you walk by.

Leonardo and Rachele explained to me how this particular piazza was heavily policed, and if we were to come in the evening we would find 3 or 4 police vehicles and not much else. Apparently the local rich residents fear the large student population in Bologna taking over their piazza for hanging out, drinking, playing guitars, and generally carousing into the night. I got a quick insight into the sharp tension between long-time Bolognese and the ever fluctuating but large population of students. I assume this tension is itself centuries old!

After a great lunch at a small popular restaurant (I had my obligatory Bolognese, which was great, followed by a fine Tiramasu) we rode around some more. Later we climbed the big tower in the center which gives an incredible panorama over the whole city.

This sign caught my attention, just an elegant feature just beneath the central Tower.

There were a lot of beautiful worn wooden stairs to climb to get to the top.

We made it! Rachele, me and Leonardo.

More invisible city beauty looking down from the tower.

Another view straight down from the biggest tower in Bologna.

The stone towers in this image once covered the city. And I'm standing on the tallest one still standing to take this photo.

Dim blurry photo of a drawing of what Bologna might have looked like in the 1400s. The tower I was on was built between 1109 and 1119.

Quite a blatantly phallic architectural phenomenon, apparently it was the norm for all families to build their own towers, the taller the more the important the family was!

One of Bologna's secrets: a small stretch where an ancient canal is still visible through this portal.

We ended our lovely day of touring and chatting by heading over to a weekly Farmer’s Market specializing in organic produce and fresh cheeses. The goat cheese was amazing! So fresh and delicious!

The sign describing the market.

Looks like most farmers' markets, albeit a bit small...

The cheese! The cheese!... mmmm...