Wow. It’s been months since I got it together to blog… if you’ve been waiting, my apologies. Basically I’ve been working on a new book “Critical Mass at 20: SHIFT HAPPENS!” I’m glad to say it’ll be great, but it’s been a lot more work than any of us knew it was going to be… It will be out in time for the 20th anniversary in September 2012. Though I haven’t found time to blog, I had lots of ideas and many photos piling up during these past months so I thought I just throw a bunch of unrelated things up as a kind of “spring cleaning” to make way for more regular posts again. (I also did a huge spring cleaning on the mold in the bathroom, but that was already 7 weeks ago!)

Sunday Streets May 6, 2012, on Valencia looking south from 17th Street.

Sunday Streets last weekend was a huge success again, and it will be repeating on the first Sunday of each of the next three months here in the Mission (the neighborhood where it is most loved)…  Here’s a few more images, kids and musicians enjoying the respite from the omnipresence of automobiles… When will San Francisco finally start closing streets permanently to cars?

Cuban drummers getting down...

So many kids having so much fun!

Buye Pongo, they were really rockin' it!

Last week was May Day… A bunch of us got together back in 1998 to “Reclaim May Day” so I’m delighted to see it has taken on a major life of its own. That said, this past week’s “festivities” seemed rather anticlimactic. Partly because the union bureaucrats pulled the plug on the growing excitement that might have drawn several thousand to a morning blockade and closure of the Golden Gate Bridge. When the union leaders backed off, occupiers and other supporters dutifully followed suit. That led us in the Bike Cavalry to change our plans from riding out towards the Bridge at 7 a.m. and instead we headed downtown to support the Inland Boatman’s Union picket line behind the Ferry Building. When we got there we found our friends in the Brass Liberation Orchestra, and a fun and photogenic kayak picket line in the water.

Kayak picket line during morning IBU action on May Day 2012.

Not sure if they actually blocked this ferry, but it looked good from the dock!

One of the bike cavalry in conversation with the IBU pickets.

After the morning ride (in which we saw at least 500-800 cyclists heading in to work on their normal commute–wow! I remember what an effort was made 15 years ago to start morning “mini-masses” and now they’re just normal!), I went over to the East Bay to join the Occupy Oakland actions. Ended up standing around the 14th and Broadway for a while, watching the three streams of “insurrectionists” slowly converge in the middle of Broadway around midday. Later we rode down to see the occupied Gill Tract at the Albany border, and finally we went back south to the Fruitvale BART station to join the Immigrant Rights March (that drew around 3000 participants and was entirely blacked out in local media).

Good advice.

This is at the Gill Tract, and as of today (May 9) occupiers there are being sued by UC Berkeley, who has also cut off water and road access.

A more practical and constructive "Occupy" you could hardly find!

They even made room to co-exist with a wild turkey's family.

Awwwwww...

No illegals, no tacos--get used to it!

The 32-year-old Tied box is embraced by a new generation!

I wanted to plug a couple of great performances I saw in the last few months. First, my all time favorite spoken word artist/poet is Shaijla Patel and her astounding epic poem, “Migritude.” You have to check it out! Here’s a youtube of an excerpt of her work:

Another piece I saw was my neighbor Kirk Read’s “Computer Face” which will be coming to Tampa, Florida to torment the Republican National Convention in August… Kirk just keeps getting better. Here’s an excerpt from his show, which is never quite the same twice:

120323 Kirk Read Computer Face 2 from Mark McBeth | Projects on Vimeo.

.

Lastly, in this quick upload/download to cover the past few months, here’s some images from Sao Paulo’s Via Madalena, near where I stayed when I was there. I wrote about the bicycle situation there over on sfcriticalmass.org, but I also had the pleasure of revisiting this remarkable alley of great murals and public art. I was there the first time in 1988, so 24 years later it was wild to see it again, and see its connections to such local spots as Balmy Alley and Clarion Alley too.

Via Madalena is inundated with photographers all day long--this admonition doesn't seem to have much sway (as it didn't with me either!)

In progress!

This image, seen many times before, was in Via Madalena too... can't remember where I saw it first!

OK. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this going now, after this interregnum… Cheers!

It was a wonderful four days in Porto Alegre, February 24-27! I met hundreds of people, was wined and dined, interviewed nearly 20 times in local and national Brazilian media (including a bit for their equivalent of ESPN, SportTV!), and got to ride in two big rides including the largest ever Critical Mass in Porto Alegre.

The Gasometro, a former powerplant on the tip of Porto Alegre's coast, is now a cultural center and was host to the World Bike Forum. Very cool inside, 6 stories high and lots of open spaces to use for meetings and discussions, though we were mostly on the ground floor.

The view looking down at the ground floor from about 4 floors up inside the Gasometro.

One year ago, a madman (who is also a vice-president of a local bank) decided he wasn’t going to be delayed by a bunch of cyclists in the road. They had just departed from their customary starting point, turning onto an avenue adjacent to the plaza, and this guy accelerated his car through a block and a half dense with bicyclists. People went flying, bicycles were crushed, and dozens were injured. By some strange miracle no one was killed, but rarely could you find a more obvious case of attempted mass murder. For most of the year since, the local press and population felt sorry for the cyclists and saw them as victims. Meanwhile, hundreds of people started bicycling during that year, some in solidarity and others because it was just so outrageous that it was a way for them to respond directly. (On Critical Mass a young woman I spoke with explained how she started riding after that event, and now had become a daily cyclist. “Since I started bicycling, I’m just happy all the time!”)

About two months ago local cycle activists were worried that the tone in the local media had changed, with bicyclists being accused of being too aggressive, being out of line, being threatening and causing chaos. They decided to organize the first (as far as they knew) World Bike Forum (one might note that there has been a lot of other gatherings of cyclists over the past two decades, from the “Towards Car-Free Cities” conferences to the commercially-minded “VeloCity”; in the U.S. we’ve had the gathering of bicycle cooperatives called Bike!Bike! going on now for a few years). That’s how I came to join them, since they reached out to me to see if I would come and when I said yes, as long as they’d cover my costs, they organized a crowd-funding campaign and over 120 people contributed to my airfare and the costs of the conference.

What's a Bike Conference without a 19th century Boneshaker?!?

The many workshops brought together folks around different aspects of cycling culture, from tourism to teaching kids to women’s self-organized cycling, and more. Folks from Caracas Venezuela came, one guy from Chile, a woman from Holland, me from the U.S., and mostly the rest were from around Brazil, including Manaus in the Amazon, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Curitiba, and a fair number from small towns in Rio Grande do Sul, the state in which Porto Alegre sits. There was a bunch of films screened on the last day too, and they showed “We Are Traffic!” on the walls with Portuguese subtitles many times during the conference.

Critical Mass, February 24, 2012, Porto Alegre, Brazil, minutes after beginning... check out that wheelie!

The Critical Mass was truly epic. They had their biggest ever Critical Mass after a long day of workshops with hundreds in attendance. About 1700 riders, way over their hoped for 1000…. perfect weather, fantastic spirited participants, whenever we stopped people would clap their hands over their heads, a lot of chanting along the way: “Mais Adrenalina, Menos Gasolina” (more adrenaline, less gasoline) or someone would yell “Bicicleta” and the crowd would roar its answer “Um Carro Menos” (BICYCLE! … One Less Car!)… We rode for about 3 hours all over the city, including up and down main avenues, through the heart of downtown, up and down hills, overpasses and freeway-like ramps (there don’t seem to be any actual freeways here) and through two tunnels, which drove the riders crazy with excitement since they’d never been able to visit these spots by bike before.

Critical Mass, February 2012, Porto Alegre.

Critical Mass, February 2012, Porto Alegre.

As soon as we started we were on the street where the madman (still has not been tried though it was announced at the beginning of the Forum that he would face a public trial instead of a behind-the-scenes judicial process with predictably corrupt results) drove through the ride a year ago, so we got to that spot about 5 blocks from the starting plaza and staged a massive die-in, everyone laying down in the street with their bikes. It was eerie and moving and impressive.

Die-in where motorist drove through hundreds in a murderous rage a year ago.

We went up a residential street at a certain point near dusk with a sliver of a moon hanging perfectly at the very end of the street, and then made a turn into the richest neighborhood here, full of fancy folks sitting in lovely outdoor cafes, expensive cars parked along the street with upscale apartments and older big homes in the trees. They seemed duly puzzled by the streaming crowd of bikes, everyone in peak euphoria, most of the riders having their first ever CM experience. Not long after we made a few turns and suddenly we were riding into the worst poverty I saw here, broken glass everywhere, obvious housing projects, lots of poor people standing around, but happy to see us. Turns out there was a 6-year-old boy who was killed there two weeks ago when he was running across the street and his sandal fell off so he stopped automatically to get it and a bus slammed into him and killed him! The local bike crowd showed up the next day with a ghost bike which is installed there (I didn’t see the ghost bike but I was told the story by many people) so we were greeted as heroes and allies by the crowds in that area…

In general people along the way were either friendly and waving, or quiet and just watching, maybe a few sullen bus riders stuck waiting for their buses while we filled the streets. Didn’t see any aggro from any drivers but then there were police along the way who were pretty quick to intervene when a motorist tried to enter the bikes, as they were on the Thursday ride we made too… (that was only about 300-400 people, still significant, and a fun ride itself, but not the “official” CM)…

Clapping and chanting very common in Porto Alegre.

As in the best Critical Mass's around the world, this one drew all kinds of people, including small children and older folks.

Ubiquitous thumbs-up in Brazil!

Gotta bring the dog too!

No hands!

We finally ended at the big park here, Redençao, where I was scheduled to give a “workshop” on Nowtopia! They brought a big amplified sound system and we eventually did it, me giving a very shortened version of my old book talk, having it translated so doubling the length, but many here understand some or a lot of English, more than usual in Brazil. I felt it was too abbreviated and incoherent, of course, but it went over very well, and we had a loooongg Q&A til 11:30 or midnight, in the park under starry skies and 75 degrees!… There was a crazy level of happiness and euphoria, everything having gone so well.

I gave out a hundred of the small "Use in Case of Climate Change" placards (translated to Portuguese). You can see on on the front of the bike in the middle.

Sleeping on the job? nah, but yes I was quite jet-lagged...

I had more of a celebrity experience in Porto Alegre than ever, two days full of interviews, people asking me to take my picture, sign their books (all sold out), giving me things, looking at me from the distance, pointing, etc. etc. As many people kept telling me, it was important that I was in Porto Alegre, it gave folks there confidence and legitimacy in a way that might have been hard to get otherwise. I tried to be as gracious as I could through my inevitable embarrassment, trying not to get too weirded out by all the attention. It seems wildly disproportionate but for everyone here it seems obvious and wonderful that I was here and that made their whole event legitimate, putting the world in to their “Forum Bicicleta Mundial”…

A new experience: having photographers chase me for my photo!

Riding in the Thursday ride, here with Carlos and behind is Thiago.

Carlos took great care of me during my time in Porto Alegre, along with many others, and Thiago is of course a great friend and host for my Talks in Sao Paulo, too.

I had a great meal of fresh Taina, a big ocean fish, at the Public Market, a tasty white fish smothered in a shrimp sauce, so a bit of local fare…

Dining on Taina, a delicious south Atlantic white fish... smothered in shrimp sauce! yum!

I spoke at a panel on Saturday also, with my good friend Thiago Bennichio, and Henrique Hessel from Curitiba, the Brazilian city made famous by its former Mayor Jaime Lerner for being so “green and sustainable”, but as he pointed out, the city has been frozen since Lerner left office some years ago and no further ecologically sustainable projects have been pursued. Hessel was speaking in favor of working through existing governmental channels, but not through the typical Brazilian process of focusing on personalities, but instead he advocated a program of “Voting for ideas, not for candidates”. He also presented a good argument based on the experience of Bogota, Colombia about how urban problems like violence, isolation, pollution, and community fragmentation can be overcome by the simple expansion of daily bicycling. Thiago gave a strong talk about Critical Mass’s role in Brazil as a “big bang” for the politics of urban mobility which is tangibly expanding across the huge country, in city after city. And flattering to me, he argued in favor of “radical patience” which I’ve been pumping for a while now (though lately with a lot more depth and nuance in the context of Nowtopia, than in that linked piece written in 1993)… For my part, I argued that all of our cycling activism stood on the shoulders (especially in San Francisco) of earlier generations, notably those who stopped the freeways from being built in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From those epic battles, our efforts to expand bicycling, and to reclaim public space for other uses than those dominated by private cars, were able to flourish.

Just before we started our Saturday panel discussion....

Andre gave great translations for me during my two public presentations in Porto Alegre. Thanks Andre!

I met Jona from Chile here too, renewing our acquaintance after our first meeting in Guadalajara last September.

The Thursday ride leaving the Gasometro for a 14 kilometer loop around the city... a great ride!

A hilly town, not quite as steep or tall as San Francisco, but here was a stimulating downhill plunge!

I watched this interview for a few minutes... he's an old Italian immigrant who has been bicycling here for a long time. She had multiple cameras going, on her head and in her hand...

Having a little 420 break outside on the shoreline...

Did an enjoyable live in-studio interview at Radio Ipanema, 94.9 FM, with Marcello and Mariana... She and I met first at TedxAmazonia in 2010, and then she came on one of my bike tours in SF last fall...

We used this corner of the park to do the post-Critical Mass Talk, which at the time was jammed with about 150 people... took this photo the morning after.

So thanks to all the new friends in Porto Alegre for a fantastic visit, and congratulations to everyone there for an inspiring and history-making four days. I am sure the politics of urban mobility and urban design are going to change permanently now in Brazil, but of course everyone will have to keep pushing in the weeks, months, and years to come. I hope to keep helping from afar!

Here is a gallery of more images from Porto Alegre and my days there:

A huge gas station that calls itself an "EcoPosto" and assures us it is "thinking about the future"!!

View from the roof of the Gasometro... one of the funny ironies was that just across the street in the park is an old failed monorail system, partially built but never finished, slowly falling apart after decades of incompletion.

Makes for a nice graffiti gallery though!

Still a fair number of beautiful old buildings in Porto Alegre but they are mostly being displaced by big high-rise apartments. This one has some graffiti on the side, including the following sign.

Stop. Look. Listen. Don't Disintegrate!

Many beautiful old facades are fronting parking lots now, awaiting their eventual replacement by soaring highrises.

Old and new, side by side, a common sight in Porto Alegre.

I was surprised to see these indigenous "heads" holding up the main Catholic cathedral... but of course much of Catholicism is built on previous cultures.

There's an Occupy POA here too... in the central plaza. Many signs denouncing political parties, corruption, and particular attention to water and the big dam project just approved on the Xingu River.

Everyone Against Belo Monte (the dam just approved after 24 years for the Xingu River in the Amazon basin... an ecological disaster of huge proportions).

Sunset over Porto Alegre from our tourist boat tour of the adjacent estuary.

These sunny dispositions captured the energy and enjoyment here in Porto Alegre... let's keep it all going!

A wide coalition of housing activists, clergy, leftists, unionists, anarchists, and others in San Francisco staged an “Occupy Wall Street West” day of action in downtown San Francisco on Friday, January 20. (The Committee for Full Enjoyment was out too, including yours truly.) It was a cold and soggy day, but a couple of thousand people blockaded, sat in, and protested in front of more than a dozen corporate and government offices, notably Wells Fargo Bank headquarters, Bank of America’s west coast main office, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Then on Saturday, January 28, Occupy Oakland staged their “Move-In Day” and marched on the long-empty, publicly-owned Kaiser Auditorium, intending to make it their new social center. Famously now, the Oakland police used teargas and flashbang grenades to repel and disperse the Oakland occupiers. By the time the long day was over, over 400 people had been arrested, many of them in a blatantly illegal round-up of 200 people when police trapped them on Telegraph Avenue in front of the YMCA.

On both sides of the Bay the political confrontations sought to break the ice on the new year by reaching new stages for the local Occupy movement. A day of horizontal direct action and disruption in San Francisco; a dramatic attempt to claim an empty public building in Oakland, followed by a day of police violence. In local circles, while some participants are publicly confident that both efforts in SF and Oakland were “successful” in basic ways, many private conversations I’ve been in have wondered whether or not the local movements are losing broad support. Some people accept the mass media framing of the violence in Oakland as caused by the demonstrators, or at least blame protesters for answering police brutality with anything other passivity or evasion. Others find the tried-and-true sit-ins and blockades staged in San Francisco as ineffective symbolism or even as boring theater, and question the preponderance of left organizations, nonprofits, and unions.

Since the eviction of the Occupy camps late last year, thousands of people have been talking, planning, and wondering what would 2012 bring? How could the best of the past months’ experiences be carried forward and even expanded upon? How could we top the November 2 “General Strike” and Port protest that drew tens of thousands of people into a daylong festival that occupied a good part of Oakland’s downtown before heading over to the Port and stopping shipping for several shifts? Fewer people turned out for the December 12 Port Shutdown in Oakland, though it was still effective for part of the day, along with allied actions in a half dozen other cities. Still fewer came out in the January 20th rain in San Francisco, or a week later to “move in” to the Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland. Signs of trouble? or just to be expected, given the time of year, the nature of the events, etc.?

Maybe, maybe not, only time will tell for sure. But it’s possible that a concerted media campaign to amplify the militant self-defense actions of Oakland protesters has scared away some people and dismayed others. I saw a defender of militant action quoted on a Facebook post that said it was probably a good thing if it scared some people away, since “he couldn’t trust a lot of people politically anyway.” I wonder how prevalent this kind of vanguardist delusion is? What’s been interesting up until now is just how many people have been ready enthusiastically to embrace overtly anti-capitalist rhetoric, albeit amidst a great deal of traditional populism too.

The horizontalist San Francisco Day of Action found itself trapped in what one friend recently dubbed “Big Government Anarchism.” Dozens of self-organized affinity groups, committees, nonprofit activists, and some trade unionists staged their own interventions all over town. In seeking to “crack the corporate piggybank” the Wall Street West occupiers demanded an end to bank evictions and foreclosures, and to put an end to corporate personhood. Targeting threatened homes is practical and as real as it gets. But in the clamor for justice and fairness, there lurks an unspoken faith that social priorities can be changed by a change in government policy. If the government would radically reduce its spending on wars, overseas military bases, corrupt weapons systems, an ever-expanding spook bureaucracy, and a growing prison system, we’d be safer and we’d have money to spend on all kinds of social needs, from housing to health care and food security for all. Take away corporate personhood and an electoral democracy of over 300 million people can become genuinely representative. Really?

Isn’t this the kind of wishful thinking that leftism has crashed on for the past few decades? We already know how uninspiring existing left-wing politics has been for a long time, with repetitive demands for “Jobs” and “Peace” inevitably falling on deaf ears and dwindling turnouts. The Occupy Wall Street West effort took place alongside the remnants of Occupy SF and had some cross-participation, but broke no new ground. January 20 repeated a combination of techniques that stretch back to the Hall of Shame and Warchest Tours of the early 1980s combined with some of the blockading and protest styles from that same era that have traveled through history by way of the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999 and the shutdown of San Francisco at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003. These anarchistic interventions can effectively paralyze business as usual for some hours or even days, but fail to connect with a transformative politics. The direct action tactics are used to voice moral disapproval of speculation, profiting, war-mongering, ecological damage, now adding corporate personhood to the list.  But taken as a whole, the tone of these protests combine to suggest that in a different government we might find the answers, hence “big government anarchism.”

Occupy Oakland, by contrast, is populated with the self-proclaimed radical wing of the Occupy movement, and consists of many anarchists and small-c communists who avoid making demands that would reinforce the government/nonprofit paradigm of social change. They set out to get a building to have a new home for the Oakland occupation. Organizers hoped that they’d be able to gain entry to the Kaiser Auditorium and hold it for at least a few days to show what they could do with such a space. The authorities and especially the Oakland Police had no intention of allowing any autonomous space to get started. Occupiers had prepared for the now expected police violence by bringing shields and developing a high degree of internal solidarity among themselves. This served them well throughout the day, pulling people back from arrest from time to time, and managing several mass escapes from police encirclement. A lot of teargas and flashbang grenades were thrown by police that day, and hundreds of constitution-busting, pre-emptive mass arrests were made, most of which will never lead to any criminal charges being filed.

Earlier this week pundit Chris Hedges published an essay called “The Cancer in Occupy” that has rocketed around the internet and is generating a huge backlash. The best response I saw so far is at the AK Press blog, written by Don Gato, which he wrote for his own blog.

Chris Hedges launches into a frontal attack on the “Black Bloc movement” and its supposed chief theoretician John Zerzan of Eugene, Oregon. Hedges apparently thinks that the violence in Oakland last week, and in various occupy evictions during the past months is deliberately provoked by “Black Bloc” demonstrators. There is no doubt that the Occupy movement is struggling now with tactics and strategy after its brutal evictions late last year, and has not yet found a winning formula to begin thriving and growing again.

I’d have to say that Zerzan and the “Black bloc” are pretty irrelevant to Occupy Oakland. I personally know many people who have been deeply involved the whole time and on the front lines in many of these police attacks, and Hedges’ weird editorial is nonsense. The diverse people behind masks and shields are far from homogenous or hegemonic, but they are trying to push beyond the acceptable tactical limits of the past.

Don Gato makes the intelligent points that “black bloc” is a tactic not a movement, and that hardly anyone—anarchist, communist, or otherwise inclined—is a follower of John Zerzan. (Zerzan and I go way back, to the early days of Processed World when he was getting ready to decamp San Francisco for Oregon and was still obsessively posting flyers in the neighborhood glorifying lone gunmen (who went berserk and shot dozens of people on campuses, malls, or wherever it was happening) as exemplars of an unmediated revolt against the unfolding collapse of industrial society.) Zerzan is one of the main people who have pushed neo-primitivist politics, arguing against the category of “technology” in its entirety, objecting to any use of tools in a future free society as an inevitable reinforcement of capitalism. His thinking has been absolutist and absurd for decades and while he’s had a few moments of influence and fame (notably by inspiring the Unabomber’s rantings), he’s never aspired to be anyone’s leader, and never has been.

Hedges, who invoked Zerzan in a narrative where he really doesn’t belong, had developed a certain credibility over the past months, in part because of his bashing of Obama and the pusillanimous Democrats, and his unbridled enthusiasm for the riots in Greece against austerity and the financial dictators there. Don Gato does away with most of his worst stupidities, but there’s a good “postcolonial reading” of him too.

It’s not like there hasn’t been a lot of thoughtful analysis from many participants in local movements. Josh Healey writes in “Occupy Oakland at a Crossroads: Rebirth or Self-Destruction?”:

The problem on January 28 was not the general principles, but the very real issues of goals, strategy, and tactics. Given OPD’s aggressive history, I was skeptical of our ability to take and hold any building for any serious length of time. I was angry at the pre-action press conference where the event spokesperson made empty, impossible threats to “shut down the airport” if the city did not give in to our demands. And I was worried that most people in Oakland would see this as yet another Occupy action whose message was nothing more than “Fuck the Police.” Despite these fears, I made my way to the protest, hoping against hope to be proven wrong.

I joined the crowd of over 1,000 people around noon at Occupy Oakland’s regular meeting place, Oscar Grant/Frank Ogawa Plaza in front of city hall. We soon began marching, and thus began the first problem of the day — 99% of the people in the crowd (yes, our 99%) had no idea where we marching to. The organizers for the action had kept the exact building they planned to take over a secret in hopes of outsmarting the cops. What that meant, of course, was that the cops knew exactly where we were heading. (Undercover agents are a cop’s best friend.) So when we finally arrived at the intended target, the massive Kaiser Auditorium, it was surrounded on all sides by cops in riot gear. As many of us expected, it was clear that we had no hope of taking the actual building.

In another thoughtful essay, “Santa Rita, I Hate Every Inch of You”, Jeb Purucker writes about the experience of being in the nearby county jail with hundreds of others later that night:

Twenty-four hours into my incarceration in Santa Rita Jail, I found myself in yet another tactical conversation, dissecting the numerous failures that had led to the kettling and mass arrests of about 400 Occupy Oakland demonstrators. This is one of the few upsides of a mass arrest. After getting the rowdy activists off the streets, the police find themselves hosting a three-day strategy conference inside the jail. Whenever a conversation begins to get stale, the guards show up and shuffle people into new discussion groups, and the debate begins afresh.

For the most part, the atmosphere in my cell was not one of defeat, but rather of rigorous self-criticism. This is a necessary moment in the growth of any movement – coming up against the limits of the premises that underlie a practice – and it seemed to be getting underway just hours after that practice had collapsed on the streets of Oakland. This was decidedly not the unreflecting group of militants that Chris Hedges has recently accused of a pathological aversion to strategic thought.

Later he gets into his real point:

I don’t want to normalize or apologize for the brutality of the system, nor do I want to lapse into a debate over what constitutes an “authentic” experience of this brutality. Nevertheless, we as a movement have to stop and ask ourselves what conversations are being displaced by this exclusive focus on police brutality. More than that, we have to look at this focus as itself a symptom of deep contradictions in our practice, which we have been unable to come to terms with.

… Saturday’s action marked an advance insofar as there was clearly a tremendous amount of work that had gone into “planning for success.” A schedule of events was made, materials were gathered, and it seemed like there were the numbers to sustain an indefinite occupation. But at a more fundamental level, success was not the point. It was more or less a contingency plan for what to do in case we accidentally succeeded. The romanticized confrontation was still the unconscious premise of our actions, no matter how many people outwardly believed we would win the day.

In the holding tanks of Santa Rita, we discussed these questions. Many of us were coming to grips with the recognition that we went into Saturday thinking that there was a crew of radicals in Oakland who had it all figured out. All we had to do was show up at their event and things would go off without a hitch, which is how it had worked at the general strike and the port shutdown.

This logic broke down on Oak Street. Saturday clearly demonstrated the limits of a mode of organizing that has thus far been successful. Up until now, Occupy has involved a contradictory and unstable mixture of liberal and more radical elements held together by a thin tissue of stories of injustice and violated “rights.” This fact has led to endless unproductive disputes about the role of “violence” in our movement, of which Chris Hedges is just the most recent and banal example.

Sure, there are some hotheads who like fighting cops. We have the same problem in Critical Mass, going on for years now. But they are extremely few. The framing in the mass media is always to blame those few and to discredit the whole movement and all its myriad perspectives because somehow the violent few are given the power to represent all others. We just have to push back against that misframing and insist that there is a whole other narrative that looks at the same events very differently, and primarily in terms of the mindboggling waste of public resources by Oakland officials (who have been laying off thousands of city employees, closing public schools, etc., while spending $2-3 million on policing Occupy Oak). Now they got their money’s worth by using hundreds of police in an all-day assault on peaceful demonstrators whose primary goal at the outset was to occupy an empty public building and use it for something tangible during the next weeks and months.

Everyone knows that if Occupy gets a foothold in a publicly-owned building it will indeed be a launching pad for a whole series of aggressive demonstrations and further assertions of public rights, public commons, etc. More or less what we hope for, eh? And that’s the primary reason why Oakland will spend any amount to stop them from re-establishing a permanent or semi-permanent base. Scattered and dispersed, Occupiers are much easier to control and keep on the defensive. Moreover, they have to work five times as hard just to converse with each other, let alone do anything beyond that. Much of the community of homeless and protesters that grew together during those heady autumn days is dispersed. Without a place to meet, eat, get basic medical attention, sleep, etc., it’s really hard to create the synergies that helped Occupy escape the boundaries of typical leftist protest. Now it’s kind of stuck replicating old forms, like marches, protests, cat-and-mouse evasion of police efforts, or in San Francisco on Jan 20, a panoply of decentralized “direct action” blockades and sit-ins in front of banks and other corporations and government offices.

The theater of protest is beginning to take its toll. Quite deliberately framed as a spectacle of violence, it plays in mass media and suburban living rooms as proof that the police are needed, even when they are the prime instigators of violence. For those far from the immediate scene, it’s easy to blame protesters for “causing” violence, since the police aren’t riotously shooting off teargas and grenades on a daily basis… something must be triggering them. And voila! Masked anarchists are tearing down fences, running through streets, sometimes hurling teargas canisters or bottles at lines of approaching riot police, proving a postieriori the need for riot police! It’s all very frustrating for people who set out with the intention to nonviolently occupy a wasted public resource and use it for genuine community needs, who are now spending a lot of time backpedaling and trying to clarify that it was a police riot against legitimate dissent, as opposed to the widely disseminated lies.

Another note rising from the cacophony of post-event analysis and criticism is the oddly macho pride emanating from some of the Oakland comrades. The words “ferocity” and “ferocious” are used to proudly describe the demonstrators on January 28 who withstood the police assaults. Echoing the romanticized portraits of the Durruti Column in Spain’s Civil War, or any of a number of other glorified revolutionary moments in the past, this kind of pride is understandable, inevitable, and part of the problem because it starts to promote street fighting as an arena in which to achieve standing in the community, to earn one’s stripes, so to speak.

I think the problem is, how to derail this whole trajectory? What tactics can we use that are based on a strategy of outflanking and eroding police and state violence? Marc Salomon’s piece “Occupy Reality” makes a number of interest points too, but I was especially glad he quoted Sun Tzu, “So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.” Salomon offers a strong critique of both San Francisco’s J20 actions and Oakland’s J28:

So when the J20 day of action rolls around, the nonprofit corporate activists and organized labor jump on it, rebrand OSF as Occupy Wall Street West (OWSW) and proceed to graft their failed agendas and narrow pet priorities onto OSF with the intent to shut down the financial district. There were some creative actions during the rainy day, but there was no strategic plan to crimp profit accumulation and cause real pain to the 1%. At best it served as a placeholder to signal that Occupy is still here. … As on J20, J28 was not aimed to grow the movement, it was aimed to privilege tactics over strategy in a way that ended up like the Monty Python peasant sketch: “come see the violence inherent in the system, help, help I’m being repressed.”

I’m not a pacifist, and I don’t advocate sticking to legal behaviors necessarily. But to walk into frontal confrontations with the heavily armed and highly motivated authorities, who can then count on a tidal wave of press mischaracterizations to back them up, is just strategically flawed, and tactically hopeless. I think many people are coming to grips with this, but the lingering euphoria of a well-placed rock, or a mass breakout, or a dearrested comrade, feeds militaristic fantasies that ultimately will be suicidal.

Hit-and-run, high mobility, surprise—all of these are strong weapons for the current movement, and hard for the police to handle, since they are large, lumbering bureaucracies. Trying to take and hold space, though a surprisingly effective tactic during the early months of Occupy, is going to be very difficult now. Instead of fixating on that, why not start thinking about other ways to meet people’s needs? Robin Hood comes to mind, the self-reduction movement of Italian women in the 1970s comes to mind (where they’d go in and take what they needed at local supermarkets en masse, leaving what they felt they could pay, or nothing at all), even something as simple as pelting politicians and corporate heads with rotten vegetables when they appear in public!

Perhaps more important is to refocus our efforts on the original impetus for this moment: the system is broken. Democracy is a complete sham (and shame) at national and state levels, and is barely alive at the local level. “Representation” is a hollow claim and the surge towards General Assemblies and other forms of consultative, consensual directly democratic processes is palpable. Economic life is increasingly precarious, and most work is a waste of time if not actually making the world worse! The ecology of the planet is being wrecked in large and small ways EVERY DAY, and the work we do collectively is the main cause of it! We have to change what we do, and how we do it, and it’s urgent that we get on with that transformation. And of course, we’re all atomized and divided in ways that make it hard to build social solidarity and engage in mutual aid. The beauty of the Occupy camps was the space they made for those kinds of new relationships to flourish.

So we need to create space where everyone is invited in, yes all 99%, and everyone is expected and encouraged to contribute to figuring out how to get out of this mess. The November 2 “General Strike” in Oakland was a space that invited tens of thousands to be part of the conversation, and that’s the only way this potentially revolutionary movement can really grow. If the movement becomes a weird urban chess match between motivated protesters and heavily armed police, it will increasingly be reduced to a spectacle with an all-too-predictable outcome.

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!

We went to see the flamingos in the wild at the northern edge of Yucatan...

This vast structure is in Sayil, south of Uxmal, a lesser known/visited Mayan ruin.

There’s a lot of funny hype about how the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012, so we found ourselves going to Yucatan state in Mexico for New Year’s, and laughed that we were getting a head start on the end of the world!. What a beautiful place! And once upon a time, densely populated by urbanized Mayans, who lived in cities dependent on complicated water capture and storage schemes, with stunning temples and massive stone buildings covered in ornate sculpted hieroglyphs that tell stories of battles, kings, and conflicts of various types. We visited five different archeological sites, including world famous Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, and the lesser known Labna, Sayil, and Ek-Balam (the latter is also the name of a large undersea oil deposit in the Gulf of Mexico). We learned about Sac-Bé, the name given extensive “white roads” that connected the many Mayan towns and cities from the Yucatan down into Central America, rivaling the roads of the Incas in Peru/Ecuador/Bolivia, and the Roman roads across Europe.

One of the Mayan roads that cut across the Labna ruins, south of Uxmal.

This iconic arch at Labna is used in a lot of tourist promotions. In a book called "The Lost Cities of the Mayans" I saw an image drawn in the 1840s of the same arch as it was just being dug out of deep jungle and soil.

The North palace at Labna.

We landed in Merida, the state capitol, a smallish city of about 800,000, where we took a quick tour of the historic center on our first night. We walked through the city founder’s elegant mansion with soaring ceilings, antique furniture, and huge paintings and sculptures. The colonial architecture is quite charming, and much of the city center has been restored to enhance its appeal to tourism. A local chocolate cooperative has a small shop where they sell outstanding chocolate (our hosts explained that a Belgian chocolate maker had teamed up some years ago with local cocoa farmers to establish the excellent product line).

Of course no visit is complete without an accidental encounter with local bicyclists! We were driving home from the center of Merida on the first night in town and went by a guy on his bike with a bullhorn over his shoulder. Moments later as we approached the big central monument in the middle of a major traffic circle we saw a couple of dozen cyclists waiting on the steps and voila! We knew there was a night ride assembling, maybe a Critical Mass? They called it and their group “Cicloturixes,” which means cycling dragonflies in the neologism of Spanish and Mayan. We weren’t able to hang out, but we did meet with them a few days later, and had a fun time telling stories, and thinking about the politics of bicycling in Yucatan with them.

Meeting with Cicloturixes in Merida, December 31, 2011.

Helpfully for the Cicloturixes is the fact that in most of the small towns in Yucatan the bicycle is still a major form of transportation. We were driving around to see ruins and other sights, and couldn’t help but notice how common the freight bikes are everywhere, on main roads as well as in small villages. Kids were on bikes, adults rode with machetes hanging off their hips while cycling, and freight bikes were ubiquitous, used for everything from pedicabs to hauling goods. In various places there were ciclopistas being built, too, and very occasionally they already has separate bikeways along major highways. The heat in Yucatan is really extreme for much of the year (not bad at all during our New Year’s visit) so canopies are essential. Here’s a small gallery of various bikes we saw in Oxkutzkab, Izamal, and other Yucatan places.

Pedicab in Izamal, Yucatan.

Cycle taxis in Oxkutzkab, Yucatan.

A group of kids hanging out near a touristic hacienda an hour south of Merida...

Nice custom job on this vendor's bike, particularly the canopy, in Izamal.

Check out the homemade child seat!

Sturdy freight bikes in Izamal.

Adriana’s uncle Lorenzo and family generously loaned us a car (after the rental car reservation we made through Expedia turned out to be useless, being refused by EuropCar as invalid; and then we found out there were NO cars to be rented in the whole city for the rest of the week!) and gave us their beach house to stay in in Chicxulub (pronounced “cheek-shu-loob”). We began a series of day trips exploring the layered histories of the region.

View from our terrace in Chicxulub, Yucatan, looking at the Gulf of Mexico.

History is everywhere in the Yucatan, the Mayans being an obvious one. The Spanish conquest was completed in the mid-1500s, but the local indigenous resisted continuously. For a period after Mexican Independence in 1810, the Yucatan was an independent republic with the former Spanish colonialists holding power over the highly segregated population beneath them, at the bottom being the Mayan Indians who outnumbered the colonizers by three to one in the west of the peninsula and more than 5 to 1 in the east. In the 1840s various factions disputed power in the area, with two separate capitals being established in Campeche and Merida, and Indians being incorporated into the opposing armies. At one point some of the Yucatecan aristocracy tried to gain international support from the U.S. but eventually the region was reincorporated into the Mexican Republic. The Mayans, now armed, began to fight against the interlopers and by the 1880s had the two walled, capital cities under siege, and the rest of the peninsula under Mayan control. The Caste War, as this conflict is known, lasted from the 1840s until the early 1900s, and the last known military operation in the Yucatan against Mayan Indians wasn’t until 1933!

Somehow no matter what we did, we arrived at the best known ruins near the end of the day, and had beautiful golden light, but also dusk-like light to deal with. This is Uxmal from the top of one large ruin looking back at the iconic pyramid and the so-called "monastery".

This remarkable wall is mostly restored, as it was in a bad state when first rediscovered in the 1840s.

This wall stands alone in the jungle to the side of one of the major Uxmal pyramids.

You were allowed to climb this one, and as you can see, it is quite steep!

Coming down is harder than going up!

One day we went with Lorenzo to find cenotes (sinkholes) to swim in, and also to visit one of the old restored haciendas that dominated the local economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Yucatan was responsible for 90% of world trade in henequen from 1880 to 1920, though it lost its pre-eminence long ago (today Brazil is the world’s biggest producer). Henequen, or Sisal, is a great source of rope and twine, and can be used in burlap bags and floor mats and many other industrial uses. These days they are beginning to find it useful as an ecological alternative to petrochemical-based fibers. You can see how rich they were once upon a time when you come upon abandoned haciendas like the one we found in Uayacel. Some of the haciendas have been rediscovered by international investors determined to kickstart a local tourist business staying and eating at these once-again luxurious places.

Lorenzo and Adriana amidst drying sisal, or henequen.

Henequen turns out to look a lot like agave, and is a close cousin, but rather than being used to make tequila like agave, it is a great source of the sisal fiber.

The hacienda we were headed to was closed on January 1, so we kept going and found ourselves wandering through the ruins of an impressive hacienda in the small town of Uayalceh.

The abandoned hacienda at Uayacel, as we entered.

The inner courtyard at the hacienda at Uayacel, very European-influenced.

Reverse view of same courtyard.

Rusty remnants of old industrial equipment, most of the place had been completely stripped of anything useful.

Gorgeous tiled outer corridor still being maintained by some locals who live in the dorm next to the adjacent chapel.

Further meandering led us to a fantastic meal at Hacienda Ochil, where we enjoyed local specialties like Poc Chuc (grilled pork marinated in sour orange and pickled onions), Sopa de Lima (Chicken soup with limejuice),Papadzules (tacos with hard-boiled eggs, covered in pumpkin-seed salsa) and Cochinita Pibil (a stewed, marinated pork or chicken dish). Yucatecan cuisine is everything it’s said to be, and more!

The cenotes are a famous feature of the Yucatan’s weird geological history. 65 million years ago a meteor landed near the town we were staying in (centered in the Gulf of Mexico, just north of the peninsula) and along the crater rim you find dense clusters of cenotes. They are a bit like oases, beautiful turquoise fresh water in clear pools either in partial or total caves, or in the open air, surrounded by steep walls covered in tropical vegetation. Of course I assumed there’d be strange and dangerous things in the water, or crawling around, but actually there’s only very tiny fish and nothing dangerous at all. And the water was delicious! I could only imagine how refreshing jumping into a cenote would be when the normal summer temperatures way over 100 are prevailing. We had very temperate weather, barely into the 80s at most, and dropping into the low-60s on our last day when a northern weather front blew down from Texas. Hilariously, local headlines warned in screaming 100 pt type “Here Comes the Cold!”

The open-air cenote we visited near Cacao.

To all my skeptical friends: See, I did go in!

We went off for an overnight journey to top off our time in Yucatan, stopping first for lunch in Izamal, a beautiful colonial city where a huge convent is built on the ruins of an old Mayan temple.

Ascending the ramp to the Convent in Izamal, built on the ruins of a massive Mayan pyramid.

Three friars are entering the beautiful courtyard at the Izamal convent. The whole town is painted in this pretty yellow.

The vast courtyard gives a hint of how large the pyramid beneath must've been...

After another great Yucatecan lunch, we made our way to Chichen-Itza, a “wonder of the world,” and unbelievably overrun with tourists and vendors of tschotskes. We arrived to wait in line to buy entry tickets for over a half hour, and then when we got in, after running a gauntlet of vendors we popped into the vast central plaza in which the iconic temple sits. Thousands of tourists milled about the plaza, it was like being in St. Marks Square in Venice!

Iconic temple at Chichen-Itza.

Dense crowds made it seem a bit like Disneyland, like we were seeing a replica of the real thing.

We made our way to the further reaches, trying to escape the crowds.

There is no restriction on the vendors, so they are at your elbow throughout your visit, hawking their mawkish wares. In spite of the crowds and the vendors, which we could only laugh about, we had to admit it was still worth it to see Chichen in person. The Temple of the Warriors was particularly impressive, as were the ballcourts and the observatory. Everything is quite huge there, the ballcourt much larger than any one we’d seen before at Uxmal or anywhere else.

The temple of the warriors, each column has its carvings representing warriors and their battles.

One of the columns.

Profile shot of the Warrior Temple.

The famous observatory at Chichen-Itza.

Incredibly, they allow hundreds of vendors of tourist schlock to line the paths throughout the archeological zone.

By far the largest ballcourts we saw at any Mayan site were here at Chichen-Itza, where they must have had their Super Bowl once upon a time.

We spent the night in Valladolid, one of the larger cities in Yucatan, at a pleasant if pricey bed-and-breakfast owned by an American ex-pat, originally from North Dakota by way of New Jersey. The next morning we went north to see the ruins at Ek-Balam, which had been highly recommended. Indeed, they are quite impressive. Massive structures, many still buried in the jungle, and a lot of restoration going on.

Here I am at Ek-Balam, looking back at the amazingly huge pyramid, which is undergoing a lot of restoration, hence the fresh thatched coverings.

Another big climb up and down at the main pyramid at Ek-Balam. Great that you can still scale it!

Those trees behind me hide an as-yet-unexcavated pyramid.

From there we headed to the north coast at Ria Lagartos, which was an important destination for Adriana, because her grandfather had filmed movies there in the 1940s, shooting beautiful early kodachrome of the flamingos in the wild. Now the sleepy fishing village at the north edge of the Yucatan is trying to attract an ecotourist crowd, but given the complete absence of tourist shops or souvenirs, I’m guessing that they’re not too successful. Mostly because it’s a very long drive to get there, some 50 km north of Tizimin, the last big town in the area, which is already a long way from everywhere else. It was a great experience! We got a launch for $75 for about 2.5 hours, and off we went. Our guide was quite knowledgeable and showed us crocodiles and countless birds. Over 350 species have been observed in this area, a major wintering roost for migratory birds, as well as year-round home to many charismatic shore birds, most especially including the flamingos!

On our boat ride into the wetlands at Ria Lagartos we came upon this studly crocodile. A second after this photo was taken it whirled around and lunged into the water, just beneath our launch!

Black eagles were in great abundance, apparently all paired up in specific areas.

Great Blue Heron.

This heron, not sure which particular variety, was quite a bit more shy, and moved away from us as we floated nearer to get a good view.

These pelicans swooped in for some free fish...

The flamingos are amazing!

They can even fly!

They would walk through the shallow water in perfect step.

And feed simultaneously too!

Big white stork behind on the shore...

Finally it was time to go, and we headed back to Ria Lagartos.

Approaching Ria Lagartos in late afternoon...

After a great fish dinner, sunset over the harbor, fishermen putting their nets away.

It was a great visit! We felt we could have stayed another month and not seen all there is to see in Yucatan, so we’ll be going back for sure. Mexico is endlessly intriguing. Every part of the country has its own history, cultures, architecture, foods, and more. Visiting the Yucatan was a revelation!

“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...

This is a shortened version of an article I wrote in the wake of the 2003 Mayoral campaign in San Francisco, and published in The Political Edge. With all the excitement and promise of the occupation movements around the world, I still find myself balking at the slogans and framing, whether the “corporate greed” idea I critiqued in the previous entry, or the incessant clamor for “jobs”… if you want to pursue a radical reformist strategy in the here and now, i.e. in capitalism, please, AT LEAST demand a basic minimum income for all (say $1,500/mo for all residents of the planet) rather than asking to be put to work on agendas over which we have no control… anyway, here’s the piece, with an old graphic Jim Swanson drew in the early 1990s (can that really be 20 years ago?) when we were blasting demands for “jobs” at Processed World.

“Jobs” Don’t Work!

?With mind-numbing regularity, we are expected to trudge to the polls and cast votes for politicians who promise to pursue policies that will “fix the economy” and “create jobs.” Predictably, nothing much changes. Why do we expect politicians and their policies to affect “the Economy,” when the rest of the time we treat it more like the weather, something that gets “better” or “worse” according to events beyond anyone’s control? The label “economy” is used to cloud in abstraction specific choices made by specific people that shape the rest of our lives for better or more usually, for worse. By framing our own daily lives of work within the abstract framework of “the Economy” we disconnect ourselves from a deciding, subjective role in determining our own activity and instead leave ourselves as unaware and relatively helpless pawns of forces beyond our knowledge or control. “The Economy” becomes a mystifying category, full of nonsensical and inexplicable categories that only experts can decipher; it is our era’s religion, an explanatory framework that offers fictional and strangely “natural” explanations for what are simple (albeit confusing), observable relations between human beings. Politicians and economists who claim they will fix “the Economy” are playing the role of contemporary priests in the Church—they and they alone are competent to communicate with the higher power that ultimately controls our lives.

This underlies the emptiness of our democracy. Clearly there is little democracy in our lives when it comes to “the Economy.” Our much-vaunted “freedom of choice” supposedly allows us to “choose” any jobs we want. By this “free choice” we exercise our tiny influence over the giant “invisible hand” of the market. But as we all know, most of us are only “free” to take one shitty job or another (or several!). In taking a job, no one asks for our ideas about what kind of work the enterprise should do, how the company impacts the environment locally and beyond, or what quality standards our work should meet. We have no say over who works there or how hiring is decided. In fact, on the job we lose most of the basic rights we take for granted as citizens in a democracy, including freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom from search and seizure, freedom from random drug testing, right to due process, trial by peers, and so forth. On the job we are wage-slaves—if we depend on our wage, our condition can easily be construed as a version of slavery “with a human face.”

Curious, then, that people across the political spectrum, especially “progressives,” are so ready to demand “jobs” without a murmur of qualification or criticism (at best, the demand is qualified as being for “good jobs”). Most jobs today are a waste of time at best, if they aren’t actually pernicious. As a social mechanism for allocating tasks that keep us all alive, “the Economy” and its foundation on “jobs” could hardly be less efficient, less fair, or a bigger waste of time and resources. One of the most glaring failures of the so-called free market is the well-paid elevation of patently useless and/or dangerous activities and the unpaid denigration of vital human tasks. Juxtapose bankers and weapons designers to child care workers and nursing home employees, for example. Even within ostensibly useful human work, for example, doctors and nurses, at least half of their work time is spent fulfilling the parasitic, useless demands of insurers and the bureaucracies of business, instead of providing the medical care that so many can no longer afford.

Graphic by JR Swanson, c. 1991, for the Committee for Full Enjoyment.

San Francisco’s current economy is awash in the inflated equity of a housing market unmoored from historic values. This has greatly rewarded the lucky fraction that owns at the expense of the majority of renters. Meanwhile people work in offices, restaurants, stores, and hotels where real wages are stagnant or actually falling. In a city with a dozen major hospitals and tens of thousands of medical workers, at least a quarter of the residents are uninsured and prone to destitution through catastrophic illness or injury. A construction boom fueled by the dot.com frenzy, sustained after the frenzy’s collapse by the spiraling inflation in real estate and long-term infrastructure programs of the city (San Francisco airport, BART, and MUNI expansions, Bay Bridge retrofit, Moscone Convention Center expansion, Transbay Terminal) is also helping to keep economic collapse at bay for the moment.

But all the signs for a major reckoning are before us: Unsustainable debts (government, corporate, and individual); absurd investment in useless office towers and unneeded hotels and shopping centers; stagnant or falling incomes and savings; soaring rates of illness and unmeasured workplace injuries; radically increasing homeless population; food programs serving more meals than ever—the list goes on.

Newspapers regularly report “outsourcing,” the increasing transfer of even high-tech and service sector expertise to India, China, and other low-wage, high-skilled areas. These new boom zones have been knit together precisely by the globalization spearheaded by San Francisco–based multinationals (Standard Oil of California, now Chevron-Texaco, Pacific Bell, now AT&T (again), Southern Pacific Railroad, now merged into Union Pacific, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have all fled, though Bechtel, Levi’s, The Gap, and PG&E are still homegrown, world-spanning engines of economic exploitation and environmental devastation). “Competing” in the twenty-first century means lowering wages and giving tax breaks, creating conditions for the maximum profitability of business. If lower costs and bigger tax “incentives” are offered somewhere else, most jobs these days are pretty easily moved.

Primary education in San Francisco, not to mention the rest of the U.S., is abysmal. The destruction of public education corresponds to a destruction of skilled work and a reduced need for intelligence at work. (To say nothing of the problems created by thoughtful, critical citizens!) Beyond some thousands of programmers and the skilled trades, most jobs are easily learned in a day or two, and most workers are easily replaced—skills are much less important these days than attitude. And even if you have great skills and a Mormonesque enthusiasm for your job, chances are the company will move or restructure or change its focus to increase profitability—leaving you out of work and wondering what to do next. In those increasingly rare examples of stable companies that provide decent, steady wages, and benefits, there’s still a total absence of self-management or worker participation in determining what the company does, what its ecological impact is, how it connects to subcontractors and suppliers and their practices, and so on.

In 1991, former police chief Frank Jordan was elected mayor. As soon as he took office, he began trumpeting the northeast Mission district as a new “industrial zone” (Northeast Mission Industrial Zone, or NEMIZ) for the emerging biotech sector. This chimerical planning never really took hold due to neighborhood objections and an indifferent business community. The NEMIZ eventually filled up with the short-lived “Audio Alley” and other dot.com startups, only to empty out again after the dot.com bubble burst. In this new era of “vaporware” the Mission’s warehouses and garages are again brimming with hi-tech peasants. Meanwhile, a mile eastward a whole “new neighborhood” (anchored by a forty-two-acre parcel for the biomedical campus of the University of California) called Mission Bay was started during Willie Brown’s regime. Again, the assumption is that by investing public money in a fancy new campus and giving incentives to the developer (Catellus Corporation, a spinoff of the former Southern Pacific Railroad real estate division—“owners” of a real estate empire spanning the west, gained through corrupt land grants provided by the federal government in the nineteenth century as an “incentive” to build the railroads!), jobs and housing will be created. For over a decade, San Francisco has been waiting for the biotech ship to come in.

But that ship is just another in a long line of Potemkin-village promises of so-called “good jobs”:

On bad days Toby said he worked as a “pipette bitch.” With no interests other than computers, a few select hormones, and science fiction novels, Toby was perfectly poised to work as a low-level researcher in yet another lab where the muckety-mucks studied genetic tagging. And so that’s where he found himself most days, holding his trusty pipette over a box of clear gel attached to some electrodes . . . Usually he thought about nothing at all. He didn’t achieve a Zen-like state of pipette-mediated calm. There was no enlightenment. He simply immersed his entire consciousness in the tiny movements of his body, the precise measurements and procedures . . . After almost a year of unbroken routine . . . Toby realized he could spend an entire 24-hour period without ever having a single, extended thought . . . he didn’t have the kinds of multilayered or complex ideas he used to have back when he was hacking hormone pathways in graduate school.

Here he was, a hypereducated twentysomething, his whole life before him, and his supposedly professional middle-class job had turned his brain into nothing more than basal ganglia . . . according to all the usual news sources, his job was hot. Supposedly Toby was at the center of an economic revolution in biotech. The most-wanted jobs of the new millennium were in genomics; cities like San Francisco were developing vast office parks full of proto-wet lab spaces and special cold rooms for all the code-crunching clusters . . . Toby [felt] like he worked at McDonald’s: The plastic gloves were practically the same. But more important, there was an almost unbridgeable gulf between what he actually did for a living and the hype about it. Reading the papers was like looking at one of those glossy ads suggesting that women kicked off welfare would have great futures if they just took jobs at fast-food restaurants. Look at our shiny kitchens! Full of happy people in hair nets and gloves making toasty burgers and crispy fries! Fast food is at the center of the restaurant economy! Just like biotech. (* Annalee Newitz, “Techsploitation: Pipette Bitch Blues,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, February 18, 2004.)

This pattern of exaggerated expectations attached to what are quickly discovered to be boring, routine, mind-numbing jobs is all too common, and yet rarely reported with such clarity and wit. Another place to find compelling accounts is among the “Tales of Toil” featured from 1981–1994 in San Francisco’s Processed World magazine (full disclosure: I was a participating collective member). From word processing to desktop publishing and web design, jobs in new technologies paid relatively well until the field filled with thousands of people following the false promise of “good jobs,” only to find that high pay rates had disappeared. Irrespective of the pay, the crucial issue of content—of what we do, why, for whom or what, and usually how—is never confronted. And with almost no exceptions, the creative component of any job is what disappears soonest, replaced by management-controlled pacing, productivity demands, routinization, and bureaucratization.

This year’s Mayoral candidates are all promising to create “jobs.”  But if public monies are invested in training citizens to become so skilled and desirable as workers, we would still have to question which world economy we are getting prepared for. And just how this training would make San Francisco workers so well-paid (that is, expensive for their employers) that they could afford to live here! Everything going on in economic development—locally, nationally, or internationally—indicates the key trends continue to be lower wages and higher productivity (that is, longer hours, harder work).

A real alternative is called for. Tens of thousands are occupying public plazas across the U.S. and the world.  While participants have reported frustration at the absence of concrete alternatives, many people around the world are confronting the same problems. And clearly the answers require a break with the dynamics of a world economy that pits city against city, country against country, human against human. The role of government, so diminished as the power of corporations has grown unchecked during the past quarter century, requires revision. Limiting local government to public spending on infrastructure and training for the benefit of private business is clearly self-defeating. Limiting local economics to a system in which private capital employs people as wage-laborers is to guarantee that the logic that imprisons us in a suicidal and degrading system will only grow stronger.

With my tongue only partly in cheek, I propose that San Francisco take the lead in visionary urban transformation. “Jobs” as we know them are an obsolete way of organizing life. I propose a complete rethinking of what municipal government does, no longer “governing” so much as facilitating, allowing us to grow together, to begin building a life outside and against the Economy. If we are nearing a collapse in housing and other asset bubbles fueled by the insane expansion of credit, as it seems we are, then visionary citizens need to start redesigning the role of local government now, while we still have time and resources and before the coming depression and collapse begins. Not entirely seriously, but not altogether frivolously either, I propose the following New Department of Public Commons for a New Municipality, all of which can and should be integrated into our public education system for children and the continuing education of adults. A casual examination will reveal that there is a lot of work to do! But not the kind that generates private profits and sales.

Department of Public Commons

Overall, the city must focus its efforts on an economic strategy that grows the commonwealth and steadily shrinks the private sector. This is a program of decommodification, reframing work as a shared adventure in shaping and extending the quality of our lives.

A.    Division of Public Space In charge of plazas, parks, and common lands, and their expansion, maintenance, and programming, this division would administer public libraries, tool and technology libraries, and public workshops, amply stocked with materials recycled from existing stocks. It would also begin the process of converting many streets into gardens and parklands (see “H” below).

B.    Division of Agriculture With the goal of San Francisco feeding itself as much as possible, it will expand community gardens, urban farming, and aquaculture projects, working with the Division of Public Space to reappropriate the vast acreage dedicated to moving and parking cars. Relationships will be cultivated between existing slow-food restaurants, local farmers, and local markets to create an unprecedented abundance of outstanding, healthy, tasty food, eliminating hunger and radically reducing dependence on fast-food outlets.

C.    Division of Aquifer and Liquefaction Management (and Deconstruction) Irresponsible building patterns on historic mudflats and landfill should be removed before the next big quake; plans will be made for how to manage collapsing streets and buildings and how to reuse areas prone to liquefaction. Expanded use of existing aquifer will promote local self-reliance and reduce current dependence on quake-vulnerable aqueducts.

D.    Division of Creeks and Wetlands Working with the three previous divisions to open streets to make creeks visible, restore wetlands, and establish areas for aquaculture, farming, fishing, and recreation.

E.    Division of Highest-Ever Tides and Seawall Construction Preparation is needed for rising sea levels and catastrophic high tides from global warming. Technologies to protect the city from inevitable flooding should be explored now. Also, San Francisco’s strong technology-savvy population can take the lead in developing techniques for adapting existing transportation and structures to widespread flooding.

F.    Division of Work Reduction Most work done in this culture is a waste of time, if it’s not actually dangerous and counterproductive. This division will facilitate the creative reappropriation of our time and talents, redirecting our work (which is inherently social after all) toward socially determined needs and desires (see “I” below).

G.    Division of Co-ops and Collectives Businesses will be encouraged to convert themselves from private ownership to worker-owned and -run co-ops and collectives. As much as possible, such enterprises should be encouraged to contribute to the commonwealth without measurement or pay . . . from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs and desires.

H.    Division of Recycling and Reuse This important division will be responsible for innovation in more than just recycling garbage, but also in spawning whole industries to rehabilitate and reuse the discarded junk of the twentieth century. Long-term goal: Stop importing new junk!

I.    Division of Crackpot Realism Thousands of techies, artists, and tinkerers live in San Francisco. Already this city has served as world HQ for rapacious exploitation of huge swaths of the planet. It’s time to make it up. Technology transfer of global-warming-reducing technologies: energy efficient transit, shelter, appliances, and communications. Reengineering technologies to last at least twenty-five years with minimum maintenance and energy use (see “J” following). (Bechtel engineers, for example, should be encouraged to direct their own time and creativity towards projects of social importance—something useful for a change!)

J.    Division of No Home Is a Castle Housing is one of the most intractable problems facing any social transformation toward equality. A focused effort will be made to raise everyone’s dwellings to a shared standard of space, safety, comfort, and beauty. Land trusts will be established to remove all land from the market, and housing will be owned and controlled by those who live in it. Reengineering every dwelling to be as self-sufficient as possible in water, power, and waste management (fertilizer manufacturing for “B” above).

K.    Division of Free Mobility
•    First on the agenda will be the creation of a Bicycle Library with a fleet of 5,000 yellow bicycles. A municipal contest will be held annually for bike design and local manufacture with local materials.
•    To support the Bike Library—a network of 100 bike huts and repair shacks will maintain the publicly owned fleet of bikes.
•    The Panhandle will be expanded and extended on converted streets in dozens of directions to crisscross the city with greenways. The DFM, with the Division of Creeks and Wetlands and the Division of Public Space, will build green corridors along the natural terrain of creeks and shorelines, with meandering bike and multiuse paths.
•    Public transit will be free, with radical expansion of routes for full city coverage. Rapid development and adoption of new transit technologies based on wind, solar, biofuels, and magnetic, “frictionless” tracks will revolutionize energy use.

L.    Division of Public Memory
•    Publicly owned and produced media will be expanded, and multiple daily newssheets and Web sites advanced, with independent editorial boards elected by districts.
•    There will be oral history collection booths, and the Living Archive of San Francisco history will be available online and at a new city museum. Satellite museums in every neighborhood, where techniques of oral history collection and digitizing of archival materials is shared and learned, will reduce social amnesia.
•    Public history forums will be held regularly throughout the city, debating various points of view on how life has changed over the years in San Francisco.

M.    The James Brown Memorial Division of Feeling (Good)
•    Everyone will have free comprehensive health care—state-of-the-art preventive care covering medical, dental and mental for all. San Francisco is a town overrun with care practitioners of widely differing quality and philosophy. A clearinghouse and licensing system will help residents get what they need.
•    We will encourage the public declaration of desires, whatever they may be.
•    Fear abatement will get top priority with programs to help people overcome fear of others, fear of disapproval, fear of speaking out, fear of not owning enough, fear of losing possessions.
•    There will be a vigorous program of shame and guilt reduction.

N.    Division of Public Art This division will involve itself in all urban projects, ensuring a high level of artistic participation in urban design, food preparation, historical presentation, and transportation design. Sculptures, paintings, multimedia installations, soundscapes, and new art experiments will fill the city, eliminating the visual blight of advertising in favor of art.

Photo taken in New York by Evan O'Brien

Corporations ARE the problem as the common institutional form of late capitalism, the social system that is the real root of poverty and inequality. Corporations are (temporarily) immortal, often unaccountable to national laws, brazenly criminal, murderous, and have only one purpose: to accumulate capital. They are not, and cannot be, moral actors in society. Even if the most pious, ascetic monks were put in charge of large corporations, the fiduciary responsibility of corporate leaders is to ensure the growth of profits and wealth for the stockholders or private owners. Corporations are not formed to do anything useful or beneficial to humans (except as an accidental byproduct), nor other species, nor the planet as a whole, unless (and only if) the activity produces profits. Corporate leaders can be personally very greedy or completely indifferent to personal wealth. It does not matter. If they don’t show steadily increasing “growth” (accumulating capital) they will be replaced by the next interchangeable “captain of industry.”

Occupy Wall Street and related demonstrations around the country are a welcome breath of fresh contestation. The space opened up in the occupations is prefigurative of new ways of doing politics, and has an incalculable value in radically reconfiguring popular imagination. We should all be grateful to the hardy souls who embarked on this quixotic effort, and do what we can to support them.

Demonstrating in downtown San Francisco, September 29, 2011.

Of course there is an gaping ethics deficit in our culture. But this open-ended, exciting political moment will slip away quickly if we frame it in terms of populist moralism. This is not about good and evil. To blame executives or the Frankenstein monster we call corporations for their supposed “greed” is to reduce a systemic critique into easy political demands that confirm the basic rules of the game. Clamoring for corporations to pay a “fair share” concedes far too much from the beginning. Why should corporations and their owners be allowed to control such an overwhelming share of the wealth we’ve all produced together over generations? Their very existence is the problem. And let’s not forget that their power at home and across the planet is enforced at gunpoint whenever “necessary.” Protests focused on banks and bankers overlook the vast wealth spent on the U.S. military empire. Our new movement should keep its sights on ending the wars, withdrawing U.S. troops from the 120-odd countries where they are garrisoned, and dramatically reducing the military and secret police budgets to 10% or less of their current levels, too.

If the Occupy Wall Street movements embody something more than the most tepid liberal demands for mean people to be nice, and untrammeled power to “play fair,” we’ll have to keep our focus on the deeper logic we’re up against. We 99% could get up tomorrow and decide to make a very different daily life than the impoverished mess we’re living now. In fact, OUR cooperation is the key to THEIR power. We work and shop in this society, the basic activities by which we reproduce THIS daily life together. Instead of democratically shaping our shared lives, deciding together how best to produce and make available a good life for EVERYONE, we are like old-fashioned cart-pulling horses, lashed by the 1% to pull who knows what, to who knows where, and who knows why? Clamoring for “jobs” leaves us weakly agreeing in advance to do what the 1% (those with capital) tell us to do.

Make Banks Pay demo, San Francisco, Sept. 29, 2011.

Lots of original art appears in these marches.

Why shouldn’t the 99% democratically decide what work we do and how we do it? Let’s evaluate publicly and transparently how our work affects planetary ecology. And finally, let’s abolish the system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of everyone else. How shall we share the fruits of all our work? The most hopeful outcome of the prefigurative democracy finding its voice in the occupations is a revolutionary transformation of how we make life together everyday. Why accept anything less?

This sign was originally made in the 1980s... still useful after all these years!

After strolling into the city center during a break we came back on a Calandria, a charming horse-drawn carriage still used in Guadalajara but mostly for tourism.

I just finished several days of networking and discussing in Guadalajara at the 10th annual “Towards Car-Free Cities” Conference. It’s not clear where the next one will be, or when, though my great friend Thiago Benicchio of Ciclo Cidade in Sao Paulo, Brazil, is planning one for 2013. I had a great time, as I always do at these kinds of confabulations. This is my second one, after my 2008 experience in Portland where I first met some of my Guadalajara friends.

They produced a number of charming promos like the one above, but we learned after the fact how close the whole thing came to being cancelled. Just three months before the Sept. 5 opening, there was no money, no publicity, and a barely functioning group producing the event. Two of the main organizers had dropped out for personal reasons, and a whole new team had to step into their absence and make it happen. Probably this was for the best, since now there are a number of women occupying key roles in the much more horizontal organizing group, and frankly, they did a fantastic job of producing the conference. Dozens of workshops with simultaneous translation, a good deal of media coverage, thousands of attendees during the week, and a real buzz around Guadalajara and even nationally across Mexico, all arose from their fine efforts.

A mural at the Iteso University to support the conference.

The future is the target of this ongoing international effort to move us “towards car-free cities.” How do we consciously redesign cities to move away from the seemingly inevitable domination of the private automobile? What are the alternatives? What are the mechanisms to move us? Do we engage with government and policy-making, or do we build grassroots, direct-action movements, or both? And if both, how do they reinforce each other or not? And can we really talk about mobility and transport in the absence of a more comprehensive critique of how we reproduce life in all its facets?

We emerged from the light rail system to a closed amusement park with this tell-tale children's ride, cars going round a gas pump! Perhaps this will be a relic someday!

My organizer friends gave me the great honor of giving my presentation in a most unusual location: in a pseudo-plaza amidst intersecting underground car tunnels! Somehow the organizers convinced a deputy mayor to sign off on closing one of the tunnels to cars, since the only access to the plaza is to walk or bicycle down one of the tunnel entrances on the roadway. About 300-400 people came, and the police diverted thousands of cars onto surface detours for the three hours of closure. Not surprisingly, this generated a fair amount of antagonism in the media, with journalists badgering the organizers (and me too, a little) about the inconvenience we “unjustly” created. But as I answered in various interviews, this kind of tension is actually quite productive. No one was really put out that far (Guadalajara is a big traffic jam, routinely), so another couple of hours of bad traffic can hardly be seen as a great tragedy. It’s actually perfectly “normal” here, as in most major cities. But because there was an identifiable “cause” of this road closure, the tension was productive, it generated questions, “who did this? what do they want? what is it to talk about ‘car-free cities’?” and so on. In fact, the media swarmed the conference organizers with questions and paid much more attention to the whole conference thanks to the unusual use of the subterranean plaza, and the consequent road closure. In other words, it worked like a charm!

Getting ready for my "muscular" presentation!

If you were in the back you probably couldn't see very well... projecting onto the big sheet didn't work in the bright evening light, so we moved a smaller screen into place.

Traffic diverted from tunnel to subterranean plaza.

The view from street level down into the plaza, two hours before the presentation.

Milling about in the traffic tunnel after the Talk.

The Conference demographics were skewed towards youth, with a surprising number of teens and folks in their 20s. I really enjoyed meeting a crowd of teenagers and learning that they had invented at their high school a “bike train” wherein they ride to school, going from house to house picking up their classmates until some 60-80 are riding together to school. Quite impressive! Most of the conference was held at Iteso University on the southern edge of Guadalajara, and that brought in hundreds of curious students to various workshops and lectures. Notably missing from the week’s events were the bike commuting construction workers and laborers, panaderos (bread deliverers) and other bike couriers, and the vast population of poor working class who depend on the widely disrespected public transit system.

Another view of the deserted tunnel and the traffic jam above.

The underground light rail system worked fine for us, but we heard it is pretty horrible at rush hour.

Of all the policy wonks, transit geeks, and bicycle activists who were in attendance, my favorite speaker was Miguel Valencia. He’s a chemical engineer who has been working at the Autonomous University of Mexico and he has an extremely articulate critique which goes well beyond the typical clichés of transit wonkdom. He built a much broader and deeper edifice on his rejection of the principles of modernism and industrialism. He went on to say that life has to slow down and the very notion of “the job” is part of the problem. Rather than belabor the obvious problems of cars and cities tied up in traffic, he emphasized the deeper assumptions about economic growth and urban design that are rooted in pre-WWII modernist thinking. He clearly advocated a “relocalization” agenda, putting transport into a larger agenda of social transformation and transition. I listened to him in Spanish (foregoing the translation headphones) so my understanding of him was well short of 100%, but later he mentioned that he had been in communication with Jan Lundberg (of Culture Change) and Richard Register (Berkeley) for at least a couple of decades. Clearly his thinking is rooted in a green city, post-petroleum, sensibility. His critique was as much of the capitalist organization of life as it was the obvious depradations of automobiles and the infrastructure that supports them.

Roxana Kreimer of Argentina is the author of a book “The Tyranny of the Automobile,” and she gave the final keynote talk. I was not impressed, in spite of attending with relatively high expectations. Regrettably she lost me early, with bad use of statistics (comparing the number of deaths in autos to those in trains to make a case that cars are worse), and a repetitive and all-too-familiar critique of cars based on the death, disease, and societal mayhem they are directly responsible for. We left before she was finished, shaking our heads at the “sky-is-falling” Helen Calidicott approach that pounded the audience with arguments about cars causing fatalities and injuries, as though we all didn’t already know it.

Which highlights the biggest problem of these gatherings—too many people preaching to the converted, repeating the same tired points that have been said so many times previously. As Thiago wrote me in an email a couple of days before I got here, after he’d arrived and had been quickly swept up in local activities in Guadalajara:

“It’s really global and people are really starting to talk [about] the same things all over the world, at different levels of perception. I just don’t know how much it can reach the “outer world” and how much we’re talking [to] ourselves [about] things that we already know. At least, it’s a great exercise to spread the words and thoughts.”

It is heartening to see the surge of visionary activism here in Guadalajara, and to realize it is happening in fits and starts in places as diverse as Sao Paulo and Oslo, Norway, San Francisco and Quito, Ecuador. We got reacquainted with Anna Nygard here too, whom we’d first met in Oslo (she’s actually a Swede), where she’s helped launch the Planka.nu project there. I wrote about planka during my Scandinavian trip in 2009, a group that is committed to free transit for all (they favor having taxes pay for all public transit) and supportive of fare evasion (they offer an insurance policy against fare evasion tickets!). Unfortunately we missed her Talk but everyone said it was excellent.

We saw this odd religious flyer posted to the wall... Guadalajara's congested streets might "drive" a bicyclist to religion I guess!

Old friend Jason Meggs was here too. Imagine my surprise to walk in on his workshop to find him showing a series of impenetrable powerpoint slides and advocating for more on-the-ground statistical research about how people get around! Here’s one of the stalwarts of Bay Area activism, who was a crucial character in getting the bike/ped lane added to the new Bay Bridge east span with his incessant pressure and rides across the bridge a decade ago. Now he’s living in Bologna, Italy, where the University is supporting him while he studies eastern European cities and their relationship to bicycling. But Jason has long been a guy seeking that balance between wonky advocacy work and the soaring passions that sent him to jail dozens of times in the 1990s, so it was lovely to see him still going.

Eric Britton, founder of Carfree Day, gave a week’s worth of daily workshops to local bureaucrats, which somehow managed to cover most of the Conference costs. He made a splash in the Saturday newspaper, denouncing local politicians for failing to take advantage of all the free, high quality “transportation consultants” on hand during the conference. And he insisted that he could turn Guadalajara into the most bike and ped-friendly city in Latin America in a month, with the funds being squandered on another of a series of pointless bridges being built over big intersections around the city.

There is no question that a new vision of modernity and the future is taking shape globally, and one of the arenas of this emergence is the movement for bicycles and car-free cities. Miguel Valencia’s critique of modernism was on point, but he didn’t try to reclaim or reinvent the concept, perhaps because our confidence in a better future is at low ebb. It is hard to believe the future will be better in light of the collapse of social democracies in the face of relentless neoliberal redistribution of wealth to the rich, and the rising tide of climate chaos to boot. But it is precisely in the transition towns idea, for relocalization and resilience, reduced consumption/waste of energy and other resources, an extension of social rights to everyone regardless of nationality or race, etc., that we CAN imagine a world much better than the one we’re in now. No doubt the “Car-Free Cities” movement will have to break out of its dependence on a narrow slice of the population to contribute to this broader social transformation. And after ten years of meeting, this latest iteration of the Conference held many clues as to the directions that such a break-out might take.

My sweetheart Adriana Camarena brought a great idea forward that emerged from a conversation with her mother: the young people who attend could be encouraged to speak to the maids and gardeners who work at their parents’ homes, and insist that they be paid a regular day’s wages to come to such a future Conference, rather than working. Who better to describe the failures of existing transit options and to envision their radical improvement than those people who depend on buses and other options every day? They spend up to 2 or 3 hours a day moving across vast cities to get to low-wage jobs in rich people’s homes. Imagine allying with them and inviting them into the process of social transformation, of which the transit component is just one (vital) part? Clearly the car-free agenda needs to integrate more aggressively a class component, and this might be a good beginning…

Adriana enjoying the ride in the horse-drawn Calandria....

Jason Meggs, me, Gloria, and another friend during our drunken carousing around Guadalajara on a tour of Cantinas organized as part of the conference... a great evening!

An old bike sits on a type of altar in one of the cantinas.

My concluding slide from my presentation in the tunnel...